Why People Hate Religion

Some of the faces of "Christian" hypocrisy. 

I am often accused of hating religion.   That accusation is true when it comes to the "professional Christians" like Jerry Falwell, Jr., Franklin Graham, and Tony Perkins who spread a constant message of hate, as well as the scamvangelists (a term a blogger friend coined some years back) who use religion to line their own pockets and live lives of the tremendously wealthy - Joel Osteen and Pat Robertson among others springs to mind. Then, of course, there are the evangelicals who support the Trump/Pence regime.  And one certainly cannot exclude the Catholic Church hierarchy that has protected sexual predators for decades, if not centuries. The common theme among all of these individuals is rank hypocrisy along with a heavy dose of greed.  Nowhere do you see these individuals practicing Christ's gospel message of feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, giving shelter to the homeless, or welcoming refugees. Other than their loud protestations of their religiosity, one would never know these people are Christian.  Meanwhile, those who actually practice Christ's ideals tend to be invisible and most certainly fail to loudly and publicly challenge those giving religion a bad name.  The result is 40% of the under 30 generations leaving organized religion and others "hating" religion.  A column in the New York Times looks at the phenomenon.  Here are excerpts:

You don’t hear much about Sister Norma Pimentel in the secular press. She’s not a wacko, a hypocrite, a sexual predator or a political operative. Her life’s work, she says, is guided by seeing “the presence of God” in migrant children in the shelter she oversees in the Rio Grande Valley — vulnerable souls that her president would otherwise put in cages.

What you hear about is the phonies, the charlatans who wave Bibles, the theatrically pious, and they are legion. Vice President Mike Pence wears his faith like a fluorescent orange vest. But when he visited the border this summer and saw human beings crammed like cordwood in the Texas heat, that faith was invisible.

Pence is the chief bootlicker to a president who now sees himself in messianic terms, a president who tweets a description of himself as “the second coming of God.” As hard as it is to see God Part II boasting about grabbing a woman’s genitals, paying hush money to a porn actress, or calling neo-Nazis “very fine people,” millions of overtly religious Americans believe in some version of Jesus Trump, Superstar.

In Indiana this summer, Archbishop Charles C. Thompson stripped a Jesuit prep school of its Catholic identity for refusing to fire a gay, married teacher. The same threat loomed over another Indianapolis school, until it ousted a beloved teacher with 13 years of service. He was fired for getting married to another man — a legal, civil action.

The archbishop claimed he was upholding Catholic teaching, an example of the kind of selective moral policing that infuriates good people of faith.

Catholic teaching also frowns on divorce. But when a divorced teacher, at the same school where the gay teacher was fired, remarried without a church-sanctioned annulment and posted her status on Facebook as a dare, the archbishop did nothing. For this is a road that leads to thrice-married, politically connected Catholics like Newt Gingrich, whose wife Callista (with whom Gingrich carried on an adulterous affair before getting married) is now Donald Trump’s ambassador to the Vatican.

Archbishop Thompson says he tries to be “Christ-centered” in his decisions. If so, he should cite words from Christ condemning homosexuality, any words; there are none.

Religious hypocrites are an easy and eternal mark. The French Revolution was driven in part by the revulsion of starving peasants toward the overfed clerics who had taken vows of poverty. The Protestant Reformation took flight on disgust at a church in Rome that sold passages to heaven, enriching men who had multiple mistresses after taking vows of chastity. White evangelical Christians, the rotting core of Trump’s base, profess to be guided by biblical imperatives. They’re not. Their religion is Play-Doh. They have become more like Trump, not the other way around. It’s a devil’s pact, to use words they would understand. 

In one of the most explicit passages of the New Testament, Christ says people will be judged by how they treat the hungry, the poor, the least among us. And yet, only 25 percent of white evangelicals say their country has some responsibility to take in refugees.

[W]hat really thrills them is when Trump bullies and belittles their opponents, as counterintuitive as that may seem. Evangelicals “love the meanest parts” of Trump, the Christian writer Ben Howe argues in his new book, “The Immoral Majority.” Older white Christians rouse to Trump’s toxicity because he’s taking their side. It’s tribal, primal and vindictive.

So, yes, people hate religion when the loudest proponents of religion are shown to be mercenaries for a leader who debases everything he touches. And yes, young people are leaving the pews in droves because too often the person facing them in those pews is a fraud.

They hate religion because, at a moment to stand up and be counted on the right side of history, religion is used as moral cover for despicable behavior. This is not new to our age. Hitler got a pass from the Vatican until very late in the war.

And if you’re looking for hope in the midnight of the American soul, look no further than Sister Pimentel’s shelter for hundreds of desperate children in McAllen, Texas.  Growing up, Sister Pimentel was going to be an artist, she says, until she felt a strong tug on her soul; it compelled her to a lifetime of selfless service. Faith is not that complicated. Religion always is.

Catholic Church Hypocrisy on Church Sponsored Anti-LGBT Animus

One hears over and over about the supposed anti-Christian discrimination fostered by LGBT rights organizations and laws enacted to prevent anti-LGBT discrimination.  Anything that limits the ability of Christofascists and Catholic extremists to discriminate against gays - or other targets of hatred such as divorced Catholics, cohabitating unmarried couples, women using contraception, and, of course, non-Christians - is shrilly denounced as anti-Christian or anti-Catholic persecution.  Lost in the equation is that due to (in my view, improper) the tax-exempt status of churches, in reality all members of society are being forced to indirectly financially underwrite denominations that target them for hatred and discrimination.  This is NOT what the Founding Fathers contemplated when they drafted the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.  Indeed, it is precisely what they sought to avoid.  A piece in the Louisville Courier Journal takes to task  Archbishop Joseph E. Kurtz for his blindness and hypocrisy on this issue.  Here are column excerpts:

I would like to point out in response to Archbishop Joseph E. Kurtz in his recent essay published in Courier Journal that his institution and his faith do not need a “First Amendment Defense Act” to protect his ability or the ability of the Catholic Church in America to pass down their beliefs to the children. 

Not a single law in this country blocks them from doing so. And not a single person in this country can do that either. Within the Church institution, gay marriage can be forbidden and women’s reproductive choices curtailed. The Church can even work to protect pedophile priests from prosecution by moving them out of the country, as was reported in USA Today in February of 2016.

However, the Catholic Church uses government grants and tax dollars to do all of this, which means that my tax dollars are funding the Catholic Church’s internal theological prohibitions and practices. My right not to pay taxes to prop up religious beliefs, practices and opinions is violated every day. Now we see the lobbying hand is out for tax credits (vouchers) to help fund religious schools.

No, Kurtz, it is not your rights or your Church’s that are in jeopardy. The danger is that my and every taxpayer in this nation’s rights are being eroded, and this has been going on for a long time.

The major problem we all face is that the Church is not satisfied with just blocking civil rights within its walls. The Catholic Church funneled millions of tax-free dollars from dioceses, the Council of Bishops and offshoot Catholic groups like the Knights of Columbus to block gay marriage laws in various areas of the country before the Supreme Court finally ruled gay marriage as civil right. Catholic-owned hospitals, which receive millions in tax dollars, block non-Catholic women and men from receiving legal reproductive health care every day.

More than 60 percent of the budget of Catholic Charities comes from government grants. But the federal and state governments are not allowed to oversee how that money is spent. There are more than 200 tax exemption laws on the books that cover religious institutions. I’d say the Church in America is certainly experiencing government favoritism rather than discrimination.

Freedom to practice religion, to hold religious beliefs, and to pass them down to the next generation is alive and safe in this county. But "freedom of religion” does not mean that religious opinions are protected from scrutiny, doubt and even condemnation when offered in the public arena. It does not mean that bullying gays should be protected by some ridiculous “amendment’. 

It does not mean that legal medical procedures, treatments and medications should be withheld from people who do not share the same religious beliefs. It does not mean that the civil right to participate in marriage should be blocked. It does not mean that public businesses can discriminate against anyone who seeks their services or products. There is discrimination going on here, but Kurtz is not recognizing the source of it.

We should talk about the “dignity of every human being.” We should also talk about what that actually means. And, we should talk about the rampant religiously sponsored and government funded discrimination that takes place in this country every day. Is Kurtz ready for that dialogue?

 How do we fix the problem?  Tax churches and all church properties not directly and exclusively used for true charitable purposes.  If churches cannot survive without the forced subsidization from non-members, then they deserve to die.  As for the Catholic Church - which owns untold fortunes in art treasures and properties - if parishioners will not pay the bills, then sell of assets.  Just like everyone else.

Question of the Day: Why Do Bad Things Happen to the Good While the Horrible Live On

Trump surrounded by evangelical "Christian" leaders

The past seven days have been emotional and bring to mind the perennial question of why, if the Christian god exists, do bad things befall good people while foul and reprehensible people  (yes, I am talking about the current occupant of the White House) seemingly live on unscathed. A week ago, our nephew was badly injured in a freak accident that took the live of one of his employees who we knew from when our nephew's company did tile work in our master bathroom - they had also done the marble floors throughout the entire first floor of our home after it flooded in the 2009 Nor'Ida storm. Tuesday, one of my sons-in-law lost his father unexpectedly at a far too early an age.  All three of these men are/were devoted family men, honest in their dealings with others.  My son-in-law's father made a career out of protecting and helping others. All three are honest, decent men.  The contrast with Der Trumpenführer could not be more stark.  

Adding to the quandary of the question posed above is the reality that those who most loudly claim to represent and revere the message of Christ are the ones most supportive of the most foul and toxic individual to ever occupy the White House.  Endless lies, serial adultery, the rescission of regulations that protect citizens from rapacious and greed driven corporations, corruption on an unprecedented scale are all either cheered on or dismissed as unimportant even as these same "Christians" judge and condemn others who overall lead far more exemplary lives than they themselves. Worse yet, they reject knowledge and bear hatred towards the majority of the world's population.  If they represent the Christian god, who would want to be a follower?  Indeed, 1/3 of Millennials have demonstrated that they want no part of it at all and have walked away from religion.  

But evangelicals do not have a monopoly on hypocrisy and ugliness.  The Roman Catholic Church remains racked with sex abuse scandals literally around the globe yet no bishops and cardinals who allowed these horror to happen - and continue to happen - have been punished.  Indeed Pope Francis attended the funeral of one of the most reprehensible protectors of child rapist, Cardinal Bernard Law. Meanwhile the Catholic Church demeans women, condemns gays, and puts protecting its wealth ahead of all else.  Again, if these are what it means to be "Christian," why should anyone decent want any part of it?

I ceased calling myself a Catholic close to two decades ago.  Several years back, I joined author Anne Rice in ceasing to call myself a Christian because I wanted no association with those horrible, hate and bigotry-filled individuals who claim that moniker.  Like Jefferson, by default I am a deist.  I believe there is a creator, just not the one depicted in the Bible - or the Koran for that matter.  I will never know the answer to my question, but I do know that the answer is not found in Christianity as practiced by far too many of its adherents. 

PS.  Yes, I am in a negative mood.  As icing on the cake for a horrible week, we lost one of our dogs yesterday. It's 7:05 am and I feel like I could use a drink!

Blue States Practice the Family Values Red States Pretend to Preach

One of the ironies - and signs of the sick hypocrisy of the evangelical and fundamentalist Christians who dominate politics in so-called  red states - is that red states have some of the highest levels of societal dysfunction in the country: highest teen pregnancies, the most child marriages, highest divorce rate, highest poverty levels, etc.  Meanwhile, red states also have the highest Internet porn usage and levels of prostitution.  In contrast, the blue states - godless states controlled by Satan if one believes the rants of Christofascist - have nowhere near the levels of societal dysfunction.  Stated another way, the majority of residents of blue states practice the family values the evangelicals claim to support while it is the evangelicals and fundamentalist Christians who most frequently trash true family values.  A column in the New York Times looks at the role reversal of who actually puts so-called family values into practice.  Here are excerpts:

As we watch Roy Moore thumping his Bible to defend himself from accusations of child molestation, let me toss out a verbal hand grenade: To some degree, liberals practice the values that conservatives preach.

This is complicated terrain with lots of exceptions, and the recent scandals involving Harvey Weinstein, Louis C.K. and Al Franken underscore that liberals can be skunks as much as anyone else. Yet if one looks at blue and red state populations as a whole, it’s striking that conservatives champion “family values” even as red states have high rates of teenage births, divorce and prostitution. In contrast, people in blue states don’t trumpet these family values but often seem to do a better job living them.

[O]f 32 states, those with the highest percentage of high school students who say they have had sex are Mississippi, Delaware, West Virginia, Alabama and Arkansas. All but Delaware voted Republican in the last presidential election.

Meanwhile, the five states with the lowest proportion of high school students who have had sex were New York, California, Maryland, Nebraska and Connecticut. All but Nebraska voted Democratic.

When evangelical kids have sex, they’re less likely to use birth control — and that may be a reason (along with lower abortion rates) that red states have high teen birthrates. Nine of the 10 states with the highest teen birthrates voted Republican in 2016. And nine of the 10 states with the lowest teen birthrates voted Democratic.

“Red regions of the country have higher teen pregnancy rates, more shotgun marriages and lower average ages at marriage and first birth,” Naomi Cahn and June Carbone wrote in their important 2010 book, “Red Families v. Blue Families.”

“Blue family values bristle at restrictions on sexuality, insistence on marriage or the stigmatization of single parents. Their secret, however, is that they encourage their children to simultaneously combine public tolerance with private discipline, and their children then overwhelmingly choose to raise their own children within two-parent families.”

Liberals, in other words, may be wary of strict moral codes, but they want to make damn sure that their own kids don’t have babies while in high school. It helps that they believe in comprehensive sex education and reliable birth control.

[T]he dozen states with the highest rates of child marriage, all voted Republican in 2016.  “Child marriage is happening at an alarming rate across the U.S., but available marriage-license data show more parents, judges and clerks in red states than in blue states seem comfortable with this human-rights abuse,” said Fraidy Reiss, founder of Unchained at Last, a nonprofit that fights child marriage.

Divorce rates show a similar pattern: They tend to be higher in red states than in blue states, with Arkansas highest of all. “Individual religious conservatism is positively related to individual divorce risk,” according to a 50-state study reported in the American Journal of Sociology.

Then there’s adultery and prostitution. One large international survey found that the largest group of customers on Ashley Madison, the dating website for married people, were evangelical Christians. And a major 2013 study found that men in the Houston and Kansas City metro areas were the most likely to call sex ads, while men in San Francisco and Baltimore were the least likely to.

[S]tatistical analysis suggests that religious conservatives end up divorcing partly because they marry early, are less likely to go to college and are disproportionately poor.

So the deeper problem seems to be the political choices that conservatives make, underinvesting in public education and social services (including contraception). This underinvestment leaves red states poorer and less educated — and thus prone to a fraying of the social fabric.

Liberals and conservatives alike don’t want kids pregnant at 16, and we almost all seek committed marriages that last. It’s worth noting that Bible-thumping blowhards like Roy Moore don’t help achieve those values, while investments in education and family planning do.

Here in Virginia, if one contrasts the conservative Christian/Republican areas of Southwest Virginia with the much more liberal so-called urban crescent, similar finds result.  The areas whining about family values practice them the least and are the most socially dysfunction.  Pretend piety in the pews does not translate into practice in everyday life.

Why “Christian” Has Become Synonymous with Hate and Hypocrisy

As I have lamented many times, there are many "good Christians" in America, but sadly, they are very much like the "good Germans" of 1930's Germany.  While they do not support the hatred of others and lies that are now the hallmarks of fundamentalist Christians and evangelical Christians that increasingly define to base of the Republican Party, they sit silently most of the time and allow their foul co-religionists by default to define the entire faith.  Silence and lack of confrontation ultimately equate to complicity whether these "good Christians" like it or not.  Indeed, the foulness of the "conservative" Christians and the spinelessness of the "liberal" Christians leave me with no desire to be labeled by the term Christian whatsoever.  When I hear that someone is a "devout Christian" nowadays, my reflex reaction is to assume that they are not a nice and decent person and prefer to have nothing to do with them given the hate. hypocrisy and lies that dominate the "Christians" most often depicted in the news media.  An op-ed column in the New York Times looks at the phenomenon and, in my view, remains to positive towards those who need to be shunned by decent people.  Here are column highlights:

Here it is nearly Easter, and for the first time in my life I don’t want anyone to know I’m a believer. To many, “Christian” has become synonymous with angry white voters in red hats, personally responsible for handcuffing all those undocumented mothers and wrenching them out of their sobbing children’s arms.

[A]s with a lot of people, including secular liberals, the way Christians behave as human beings can be completely at odds with the way they vote. Decades ago, when I was still a teenager in Alabama, I heard my grandmother refer to some new neighbors as the Tallyho Boys. Turns out a gay couple had bought or inherited a farm just down the road from her. The good ladies of that rural community welcomed the couple with poundcakes and homemade jelly, but would they have voted for a political candidate who supported marriage equality? Not a chance.

Tribal bonds have always been a challenge for our species. What’s new is how baldly the 2016 election exposed the collision between basic Christian values and Republican Party loyalty. By any conceivable definition, the sitting president of the United States is the utter antithesis of Christian values — a misogynist who disdains refugees, persecutes immigrants, condones torture and is energetically working to dismantle the safety net that protects our most vulnerable neighbors. Watching Christians put him in the White House has completely broken my heart.

Belonging to a community, feeling at home in the liturgy, carrying on a long family tradition — all these intangibles made it easy enough, before the election, to ignore much of what the church gets wrong and concentrate on what it gets right: supporting open immigration, welcoming refugees, opposing capital punishment, housing the homeless, feeding the hungry, caring for the sick and the aged and the lonely. Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” All the rest is window dressing.

But this is the part of Christ’s message that most conservative Christians ignore when they step into the voting booth. In part that’s because abortion has become the ultimate border wall for Southern believers. I can’t count the number of Christians I know who are one-plank voters: They’d put Vladimir Putin in the White House if he promised to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Republicans now have what they’ve long wanted: the chance to turn this into a Christian nation. But what’s being planned in Washington will hit my fellow Southerners harder than almost anyone else. Where are the immigrants? Mostly in the South. Which states execute more prisoners? The Southern states. Which region has the highest poverty rates? The South. Where are you most likely to drink poisoned water? Right here in the South. Where is affordable health care hardest to find? You guessed it. My people are among the least prepared to survive a Trump presidency, but the “Christian” president they elected is about to demonstrate exactly what betrayal really looks like — and for a lot more than 30 pieces of silver.

I have never felt lonelier than I feel in Donald Trump’s America.

But I also believe in resurrection. Every day brings word of a new Trump-inflicted human-rights calamity, and every day a resistance is growing that I would not have imagined possible, a coalition of people on the left and the right who have never before seen themselves as allies. In working together, I hope we’ll end up with something that looks a lot like a Christian nation — not in doctrine but in practice, caring for the least among us and loving our neighbors as ourselves.

I hope the author's hope is realized.  If it is, it will not be due to anything done by the "conservative" Christians who put this train wreck inn motion by placing hatred of others, racism, and misogyny ahead of the Gospel message.  The myth that Christians are good people or a net good for society needs to be recognized as a lie. The sooner, the better. 

American 'Christianity' Has Failed

Despite my upbringing as a Roman Catholic which included daily mass, serving as an altar boy for ten years and raising to the 4th Degree in the Knights of Columbus, I now consider myself to be a "None."  Some ask why.  The answer is actually pretty simple.  Between the continued moral bankruptcy of the Catholic Church hierarchy and the continued aiding, abetting and protection of predator priests and the behavior of most likely a majority of those who call themselves "Christian" while supporting everything that is the antithesis of the Gospel message, I have come to see Christianity, especially American Christianity, as a toxic evil.  Yes, there are church soup kitchens and some charitable works, but those positives pale in comparison to the hate, fear, selfishness and hypocrisy that are now the hallmarks of Christianity.  The support of Donald Trump in the last election by 81% of evangelicals and reportedly a majority of Catholics underscores this reality.  Most of the truly decent and moral people that I know are not active churchgoers.  Most, like myself could be better described as Nones.  A piece in Sojourner looks at the failure and ugliness of American Christianity.  Read the whole piece.  Here are excerpts:

American Christians — particularly white evangelicals — continue to sing the words: “Spirit lead me where my trust is without borders …” but fail to realize the shameful irony that they’re largely responsible for refusing shelter and opportunity to some of the world’s most helpless and oppressed people.  This represents a predominant theme of Westernized Christendom: proclaiming Christian rhetoric while actively — or passively — practicing the opposite in reality.

Because while the gospels instruct followers of Christ to help the poor, oppressed, maligned, mistreated, sick, and those most in need of help, Christians in America have largely supported measures that have rejected refugees, refused aid to immigrants, cut social services to the poor, diminished help for the sick, fueled xenophobia, reinforced misogyny, ignored racism, stoked hatred, reinforced corruption, and largely increased inequality, prejudice, and fear.

If Christians refuse to help and actually use their political advocacy and opinions to further hurt refugees, immigrants, women, foreigners, minorities, the poor, the oppressed, the persecuted, the sick, the LGBTQ community — and aren’t abiding by the golden rule of loving their neighbors as themselves, then who exactly are Christians supposedly loving?

What benefit are Christians providing their communities, and what good are they contributing to the world around them? Because in America, it appears that the sole purpose of Christianity is to selfishly protect people’s own self-interests instead of sacrificially serving others.

The election of President Donald Trump has proven that numerous Christians are more worried about power, influence, and control than the gospel messages of humility, generosity, ministering to others, and love. . . . . it should be sobering for Christians to realize that that many who claim to follow the Prince of Peace, the Healer, the Light of the World, supported policies that are bringing darkness and pain to so many people.

These presidential orders, which will refuse help to many of the world’s most vulnerable individuals, are what many Christians voted for. . . . . love, joy, peace, happiness, and self-control are notably absent from the current administration. . . . The gospel of Jesus has been traded in for a narrative of fear. 

[W]hile there might be political, economic, financial, and safety reasons for implementing policies that harm people and refuse them help, there are certainly no gospel reasons.

Why white Christian America Voted for Trump

In contrast to the New York Times apology piece/op-ed yesterday I noted in a prior post today, the Washington Post has a piece that looks at what really drove white Christians to vote for Trump, especially in rural America.  The answer is not pretty and largely boils down to exactly what the Times op-ed tried to argue was not the case.  Hate, bigotry, a sense of rage at lost white privilege and extremist religious beliefs were the main motivators and it is clear that to these folks "Make America Great Again" translated to "Make America White and Christian Again."  And be assured that LGBT individuals have no place in their white Christian America.  The only good new is that towns like the one in the article are dying precisely because of the white "godly: Christians who have made such locales toxic to progressive and forward looking businesses that have not desire to turn back time to the 1950's. Here are some article highlights:

MOUNT AIRY, N.C. — From a perch on Main Street, the home town of actor Andy Griffith looks this day like it was plucked right out of the television show that bears his name. And it was.

And yet even as this city of about 10,000 nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains fills its coffers by selling nostalgia, many of its residents would agree with the now-popular saying “We’re not in Mayberry anymore.”

If only the real Mount Airy, which has experienced decades of economic and social decline, were like the Mayberry facade, muses Mayor David Rowe. If only his city and the rest of America could return to the 1950s again.

“Now it’s about secular progressivism, not the values you get out of this book,” such as honesty and hard work, said Rowe, 72, jabbing his finger at the leather Bible on his office desk.

But as Donald Trump prepares to move into the White House, Rowe and many of his constituents are hoping for a return to the past.

Visitors to Surry County spent $116.62 million in 2015, compared with $66 million 12 years ago, according to Jessica Icenhour Roberts, who heads tourism partnerships for the county, whose largest city is Mount Airy.  But Mount Airy cannot live on tourism alone, the mayor said.

“We try to live the good old days, but it’s hard,” Rowe said. Just down the street from a bronze statue of Griffith and a museum dedicated to his memory, out of sight of the boutiques selling Norman Rockwell and Thomas Kinkade artwork, sit many dilapidated textile mills that have closed in the past decade. From early 2000 to about 2010, about 9,000 private-sector jobs were lost when factories that made clothes went overseas.

Despite the steady stream of tourists, business owners are still struggling to create new jobs that will attract a younger generation, said Lizzie Morrison, 30, who runs an art studio and is the Main Street coordinator with Mount Airy Downtown.

Morrison said the city’s younger residents tend to be socially liberal, while most in the older generations look to the past. That tension makes it harder for someone like her to push for new ideas, she said.

A group of developers has been working on a project to redevelop an old mill, Morrison said, but the proposal has moved slowly because of resistance from residents. 

Many Mount Airy residents applauded the president-elect’s promise to revoke the Johnson Amendment, which effectively bars pastors from endorsing a candidate from the pulpit, Rowe said. They were heartened by his suggestion that Christians will be able to once again see “Merry Christmas” signs in department stores.

But the mayor acknowledges that the 1950s and ’60s were not idyllic for all Americans. He wouldn’t, for example, want to go back to the days when there were separate water fountains at the local Sears for whites and blacks. At the same time, he said, African Americans often bring hardship on themselves. . . . He noted that the Hispanics he has hired to work at his construction company are hard workers. He doesn’t encounter people who aren’t white in social settings much because folks tend to self-segregate, he said. Mount Airy is 84 percent white, 8.2 percent black and 6.7 percent Hispanic, according to 2010 census data.

Not everyone is nostalgic for the 1950s.  Ron Jessup, 68, who grew up in Mount Airy during that era, found the place generally friendly then, he said — as long as he and other blacks obeyed the racist laws and social mores of the time.

If African Americans went to the theater, they sat upstairs, he said. If they went to the restaurants, they avoided the counter. “We understood what was considered our place,” said Jessup, who is retired from his job as a high school principal in nearby Winston-Salem. Even now, all five Surry County commissioners are white.

As for Trump, Jessup believes his “Make America Great Again” slogan was code for “take America back again,” and a reaction to President Obama’s election.

“Sometimes we use Christianity when it’s convenient for what we want,” Jessup said. “You can’t allow someone to have racist remarks and then go to church and talk about Jesus as the center of your life.”

When she travels with her pastor husband, Thresa Tucker hands out an evangelistic tract that uses “The Andy Griffith Show” as an entry point for talking about Jesus. . . . . Tucker and her husband, David, said they voted for Trump because they want a more limited federal government. They mentioned social issues such as abortion, same-sex marriage and school prayer.

The Tuckers were also dismayed when their health insurance bill skyrocketed. Before Obamacare, they had no health insurance and paid out of pocket. Their monthly bill will rise from $115 a month now to $435 next year, Thresa Tucker said.

Many of those who have lost jobs seek help at White Plains Baptist Church, where her husband is preacher. But not all who seek help are worthy of it, she said. The church has to be a good steward of its money, so there are criteria for assistance, and she asks whether people attend church regularly. African Americans who have voiced concerns over what Trump will do for the poor would have a different perspective if they tried harder to help themselves, she said.

People just aren’t committed to church, anymore, he said. The church he attends used to attract up to 600 people on a Sunday in the 1960s, but is lucky to get a third of that now. Young people leave for college and come back with more progressive, secular values, he said.

If Trump does manage to “make America great again,” Rowe said it will involve preventing the government from encroaching on religion.  Christianity has come under attack in America, he said. “It’s subtle, not in your face, but that’s the way Satan works,” he said.

 I suspect that Mount Airy will continue on the road to further economic decline and obscurity. Sadly, its residents will not look in the mirror and realize that they, not modernity or secularism is the root of their problems.   

Russell Moore and Exposing Evangelical Christian Hypocrisy

For the record, I am no fan of Russell Moore or the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission ("ERLC") of the Southern Baptist Convention ("SBC") which Moore heads.  Moore and the SBC peddle a toxic form of Christianity which is built largely on hatred and condemnation of others, fear, and feigned piety even as SBC members daily betray the gospel message.  That said, Moore was among the handful of leading fundamentalist and evangelical Christians who opposed Donald Trump, noting the mans many moral failings and lack of any redeeming character.  In return, Moore received a great deal of blow back from morally bankrupt evangelicals who seemingly had no qualm voting for a serial adulterer, con-artist and general moral low life.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the morally bankrupt state of evangelical Christians.  Here are excerpts:

Since 2013, Rev. Russell Moore has been president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, this country’s biggest Protestant denomination. While deeply conservative on traditionally religious issues such as abortion, gay marriage and religious freedom, Moore was one of the few prominent evangelicals this election season to remain an outspoken critic of Donald Trump throughout the presidential campaign. He challenged the candidate on issues that seemed fairly obvious to any practicing Christian (the serial lying, immoral business practices, questionable sexual ethics, etc.) in surprising contrast to many others on the religious right who ignored or even made excuses for the candidate’s behavior.

Trump won 81 percent of the white evangelical vote. And for his trouble, Moore is now under fire from prominent voices within his own church. According to reporting from the Wall Street Journal, a number of Baptist pastors are considering cutting funding to the organization he heads “in a potentially dramatic rebuke” for his behavior. “Since Dr. Moore has taken over [the ERLC], there are a lot of things that are being said on various issues that the Southern Baptist people at large don’t agree with,” one pastor told NPR.

The criticism being leveled at Moore by his religious counterparts says more about what the evangelical establishment mistakenly values today than it does about anything that Moore has done wrong. And it misunderstands the true role that Christians could — and should — play in the public square under a president who is likely to be dismissive of their cause.

So what is it that Moore said that these ostensible moral leaders don’t agree with? The statement that “if character matters, character matters”? His argument that if social conservatives were willing to argue against Bill Clinton in the 1990s, evangelical voters today should ask hard questions about a potential president’s personal morality and fitness for office?

Perhaps it was that he pointed out how it was “a scandal and a disgrace” that when the sexually predatory “Access Hollywood” tapes were released, virtually all of the reaffirmations of support for Trump came from religious conservative leaders.

Or maybe it was Moore’s writing that “what affects black and Hispanic and Asian Christians ought to affect white Christians.” As one conservative Christian friend of mine observed, nothing says “white identity comes before Christian identity” quite like a prominent evangelical organization trying to oust an otherwise-orthodox pastor for daring to promote racial reconciliation.

Really, what the majority of Moore’s statements have in common (apart from being, well, correct — at least according to traditional, values-first Christian teaching) is that they might offend those being criticized, the president-elect included. That, in turn, might result in — gasp — a loss of political power.

Evangelical Christians still make up a healthy swath of the U.S. population, but they’re firmly in the minority and shrinking fast. Some scholars argue that the rising number of people who have decided against affiliating with any religion is due to a rejection of how Christianity especially often finds itself amorally entangled with conservative politics.

 

Many Christian leaders have made the bet that, as their numbers dwindle, their best hope for promoting the ethically sound policies on topics such as abortion, marriage and gender is maintaining access and influence where it counts — the White House and the Supreme Court.

But where Christian leaders should be seeking influence, especially in a rapidly secularizing society in which their views seem ever more countercultural, is in trying to remain a respected moral voice worth engaging with — not by setting aside their most distinctive values in a grab for shifting political power. . . .  Attacking the most principled among themselves is an attack on Christians’ best chance for survival in the public square.

Hypocrisy Alert: Anti-LGBT "Christian" Activists Stick with Trump

Other than rapist, murderers and other violent criminals, there are few individuals in America who I hold in lower regard than right wing Christians - the Christofascists - who are a study in hatred of others and stark hypocrisy.  As a group, these people deserve no respect and absolutely no deference for "deeply held religious belief."  They can believe what they want and worship in their ignorance embracing churches, but the rest of us are free - and, in my view, should - view them with contempt and call out their lies and hypocrisy.  A piece in the Washington Blade looks at this hypocrisy in the wake of Christofascists' continued embrace of Donald Trump:

After months of stoking fears about sexual assault in the bathrooms as a result of transgender non-discrimination protections, social conservatives are sticking with Donald Trump despite a recent unearthed recording in which he brags about making aggressive sexual advances on women.

The fears over assault and violation of privacy in the bathroom were invented and stoked by conservative activists opposed to transgender protections, but actual claims of sexual assault from the Republican nominee aren’t enough to register the same level of concern with these anti-LGBT activists.

Tony Perkins, president of the anti-LGBT Family Research Council, conceded in a statement he finds the behavior exhibited in the video “deeply offensive and degrading,” but nonetheless still supports Trump.

Just two months ago, Perkins commended U.S. Judge Reed O’Connor for issuing a court order blocking guidance from the Obama administration barring discrimination against transgender students in accessing the restroom consistent with their gender identity.

At the time, Perkins called the decision “a win for parental rights and the privacy of schoolchildren nationwide,” insisting issues of privacy and safety are of paramount importance.

Ralph Reed, an anti-LGBT activist and chair of the Faith & Freedom Coalition, was even less bothered by the 2005 recording of Trump in a statement to media outlets.

“I’ve listened to the tape, my view is that people of faith are voting on issues like who will protect unborn life, defend religious freedom, create jobs and oppose the Iran nuclear deal,” Reed said. “I think a 10-year-old tape of a private conversation with a TV talk show host ranks pretty low on their hierarchy of concerns.”

Social conservatives have been fear-mongering over transgender people using the restroom at least since a non-discrimination ordinance was on the ballot last year in Houston. At the time, opponents aired TV ads in which a man follows a young girl into a public restroom stall and slams the door behind him before the video ends. The ordinance ended up being defeated at the ballot.

The image in that video isn’t far from the actions about Trump boasts about in the 2005 video made public Friday by the Washington Post. Trump talks about hitting on a married woman and being able to grab women — sometimes by their genitals — to kiss them, saying they allow him to do that without reprisal because he’s famous. At the time the video was made, Trump was recently married to current wife, Melania Trump.

These people are monsters.

Why Conservative Christians Are Backing Trump

As regular readers know, I hold few people in lower regard that far right conservative Christians whose most pronounced traits are incessant lying, hypocrisy, racism, and a desire to impose their religious beliefs on all citizens.  They talk constantly about their own supposed faith and religiosity even as they hate nearly everyone and back Republican policies that are the antithesis of the Gospel message.  Some pundits and others are shocked that so many conservative Christians are backing Donald Trump, whereas I see it as a match made in heaven, if you will: foul, self-centered hypocrisy filled pathological liars bonding to one another.  A piece in Salon puts forth an explanation for Christofascist support of Trump in less direct terms, but nonetheless shows the underlying hypocrisy of these people and their always self-enriching "leaders."   Here are excerpts:  

In theory, the religious right should hate Donald Trump. He’s a libertine, he clearly worships Mammon and not Jesus, he has been married three times, he has a long history of bragging about his sex life . . . . But the ugly truth is that the supposed guardians of American morality, religious conservatives, are lining up behind Trump. I spoke with Peter Montgomery of People for the American Way about why.
 Your piece is called “‘God’s Guy’: 25 Religious Right Justifications For Supporting Donald Trump.” What kinds of religious authorities did you look at for this piece?Well, there’s a range of people. There are religious right political figures like Tony Perkins and David Barton and David Lane, who are people that we cover pretty extensively, and then there are some folks who don’t show up on [our] website as much [as those] who are sort of in the “prophet and apostle” category of that wing of Pentecostal Christianity [who tend] to see things in terms of spiritual warfare and demons and the Antichrist. So it’s a mix. Since the primaries, most of the religious right leaders who were in Cruz’s camp are rallying around Trump, and it’s true that some of them are doing so kind of reluctantly. Some based on the Supreme Court, some based on the fact that they just really hate Hillary Clinton. And some have offered this range of religious rationales. 

Some of the folks that you’ve covered seem to believe that Trump is God’s emissary or that he’s here to do God’s will. What’s that about?The religious right hates Barack Obama. They really did everything they could and prayed very hard for him not to get elected or reelected. And some of them actually saw his reelection as a sign of God’s judgment on the country. That hatred also applies to Hillary Clinton.Some of the religious right leaders also distrust the Republican establishment and they think that God is using this sort of bulldozer strongman person like Trump to come in and knock down the establishment of both parties and really clean house. They’ve found examples in the Bible. One of the ones that people reference is King Cyrus, who was not one of God’s chosen people and was not a believer but God had his purposes and used King Cyrus in a way that advanced his wishes. So that’s one of the rationales that has come up for Trump. . . So when Trump destroys everything, why is that considered a good thing in their view?I’ll talk about David Lane in answering that. David Lane is a political operative who organized the event that Trump just spoke at this past week in Orlando and, in fact, Marco Rubio also spoke at. David Lane is a Christian nationalist who believes that America was founded by and for Christians and that it has a covenant with God and a mission to advance the Christian faith. He believes that we have gone far from that mission. And his goal is to use the political process to bring America back to his idea of a Christian nation. . . . for someone like him, the establishment Republican Party has been a disappointment because they haven’t aggressively pursued this idea of a Christian nation. He hopes that somehow kicking down all the walls is going to make that more possible. Somebody else like James Robison believes that God is going to give Trump some kind of high-profile conversion moment like the biblical story of Saul, who used to persecute Christians, having this vision of Jesus and then becoming Paul the Apostle.  Do you often see religious right figures grapple with the fact that the Democrat in the race, Hillary Clinton, is clearly more religious than the Republican?They do not want to grapple with that at all, no. You don’t see a lot of religious right leaders acknowledging her lifelong commitment as a Christian, as a member of the United Methodist Church, even though it’s very much out there. A lot of the religious right leaders, when they say “Christian,” they don’t really mean all Christians. They’re talking about a subset of Christians that share both their theological worldview and their right-wing politics. . . . It’s why we have people on this list talking about Hillary Clinton as channeling the spirit of the Antichrist. How much do you think this rallying around Trump has to do with his statements about Muslims?There are a number of reasons they’re rallying around him, and one is that he’s been a very outspoken critic of radical Islam with his call to keep Muslims from coming into the country. Some of these religious right leaders, as much as they like to posture as champions of religious liberty, they really don’t feel the same way about Islam. They try to make these convoluted arguments that the First Amendment doesn’t really apply to Muslims in the same way because Islam is not a religion but a totalitarian political ideology. I think they like his attacks on Muslims because they think this is a country by and for Christians. The question of religious freedom comes up here, and you see some of these pastors and religious right leaders claiming that Trump is for religious freedom. What do they mean by that?When the religious right talks about religious freedom these days, they’re mostly talking about the right of people to discriminate against LGBT individuals and couples and families. For them, religious liberty is not the kind of shield for everyone to exercise their religion [that] we think of when we think of the First Amendment.  . . . It’s about being able to use religious beliefs as a cudgel against people and policies that they don’t like.

Anti-Gay Alabama Judge Suspended for Texting Nude Selfies

One can almost predict that a week will not go by without some homophobic Republican or anti-LGBT "godly Christian" somewhere in America being exposed as a hypocrisy filled closeted gay or porn addict or sexual pervert (if not a child molester).  The latest to join the ranks of these hypocrites is Tallapoosa County, Alabama Probate Judge Leon Archer who refused to marry same sex couples because of his "sincere religious beliefs."  Those beliefs seemingly did nothing to dissuade Archer from sending nude selfies via Facebook messenger to woman he met when she went to his office to get married to another man.  LGBTQ Nation has details:

An Alabama probate judge accused of sending sexually charged messages and nude photos to a woman he met when she went to his office to wed another man has agreed to a six-month unpaid suspension, his lawyer said Thursday.

Tallapoosa County Probate Judge Leon Archer regrets his actions and cooperated fully with a probe that resulted in charges filed Wednesday by the Alabama Judicial Inquiry Commission, said Randy Haynes, an attorney for Archer.

The complaint said Archer met a woman in 2013 when she was 34 and went to the probate office to wed a 68-year-old man. Archer performed the ceremony and noted the large age difference between the two, the complaint said.

The wedding was soon annulled, according to the complaint. In January, Archer began sending the woman sexually explicit messages and nude photos on Facebook, investigators alleged.

The messages ended after an east Alabama newspaper, The Alexander City Outlook, reported on them. The newspaper reported that Archer had admitted his actions at the time and apologized.

The judge, who is not a lawyer, reached a settlement with judicial investigators in which he agreed to a six-month suspension without pay, Haynes said. The suspension will begin Monday provided the Alabama Court of the Judiciary, which hears administrative cases against judges, approves the settlement during a hearing, Haynes said.  “He will go back on full status in February,” said Haynes.

Alabama has elected judges and Archer is hardly the first judge to face issues over conduct.  Virginia's system of appointed judges has its problems, but it is a hell of a lot better than what Alabama ends up with on the bench.