The Road to Coronavirus Hell Was Paved by Evangelicals

Trump and evangelical "faith leaders" charlatans.

A piece in the New York Times follows on the theme of this morning's post that looks at the toxic influence evangelicals Christians have on the Trump/Pence regime and the danger that the evangelical driven embrace of ignorance and science denial poses to the larger public. In addition to pandering to his Christofascist base through statements and policies, Trump has filled many high level positions with individuals who are utterly unfit simply because they embrace the evangelicals anti-knowledge, anti-government agenda.  This unqualified appointments range from the current head of the Department of Health and human Services, to the Secretary of Education, to Housing and Urban Development. Add to this cuts in funding to agencies that evangelicals view as hostile to the Bronze Age belief system and it adds up to a disaster as we now see unfolding in the form of America's lack of preparedness to the COVID-19 pandemic.  Here are highlights from the Times piece:

Donald Trump rose to power with the determined assistance of a movement that denies science, bashes government and prioritized loyalty over professional expertise. In the current crisis, we are all reaping what that movement has sown.

At least since the 19th century, when the proslavery theologian Robert Lewis Dabney attacked the physical sciences as “theories of unbelief,” hostility to science has characterized the more extreme forms of religious nationalism in the United States. Today, the hard core of climate deniers is concentrated among people who identify as religiously conservative Republicans. And some leaders of the Christian nationalist movement, like those allied with the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, which has denounced environmental science as a “Cult of the Green Dragon,” cast environmentalism as an alternative — and false — theology.

This denial of science and critical thinking among religious ultraconservatives now haunts the American response to the coronavirus crisis. On March 15, Guillermo Maldonado, who calls himself an “apostle” and hosted Mr. Trump earlier this year at a campaign event at his Miami megachurch, urged his congregants to show up for worship services in person. “Do you believe God would bring his people to his house to be contagious with the virus? Of course not,” he said.

Rodney Howard-Browne of The River at Tampa Bay Church in Florida mocked people concerned about the disease as “pansies” and insisted he would only shutter the doors to his packed church “when the rapture is taking place.” In a sermon that was live-streamed on Facebook, Tony Spell, a pastor in Louisiana, said, “We’re also going to pass out anointed handkerchiefs to people who may have a fear, who may have a sickness and we believe that when those anointed handkerchiefs go, that healing virtue is going to go on them as well.”

Trump’s tendency to trust his gut over the experts on issues like vaccines and climate change does not come from any deep-seated religious conviction. But he is perfectly in tune with the religious nationalists who form the core of his base. In his daily briefings from the White House, Mr. Trump actively disdains and contradicts the messages coming from his own experts and touts as yet unproven cures.

Not every pastor is behaving recklessly, of course, and not every churchgoer in these uncertain times is showing up for services out of disregard for the scientific evidence. . . . . But Mr. Trump did not invoke Easter by accident, and many of his evangelical allies were pleased by his vision of “packed churches all over our country.”

Religious nationalism has brought to American politics the conviction that our political differences are a battle between absolute evil and absolute good. . . . Only a heroic leader, free from the scruples of political correctness, can save the righteous from the damned. Fealty to the cause is everything; fidelity to the facts means nothing. Perhaps this is why many Christian nationalist leaders greeted the news of the coronavirus as an insult to their chosen leader.

In an interview on March 13 on “Fox & Friends,” Jerry Falwell Jr., the president of Liberty University, called the response to Coronavirus “hype” and “overreacting.” “You know, impeachment didn’t work, and the Mueller report didn’t work, and Article 25 didn’t work, and so maybe now this is their next, ah, their next attempt to get Trump,” he said.

When Rev. Spell in Louisiana defied an order from Gov. John Bel Edwards and hosted in-person services for over 1,000 congregants, he asserted the ban was “politically motivated.” Figures like the anti-L.G.B.T. activist Steve Hotze added to the chorus, denouncing the concern as — you guessed it — “fake news.”

One of the first casualties of fact-free hyper-partisanship is competence in government. The incompetence of the Trump administration in grappling with this crisis is by now well known, at least among those who receive actual news. . . . Less well known is the contribution of the Christian nationalist movement in ensuring that our government is in the hands of people who appear to be incapable of running it well.

Consider the case of Alex Azar, who as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services has had a prominent role in mismanaging the crisis. It seems likely at this point that Mr. Azar’s signature achievement will have been to rebrand his department as the “Department of Life.” Or maybe he will be remembered for establishing a division of Conscience and Religious Freedom, designed to permit health care providers to deny legal and often medically indicated health care services to certain patients as a matter of religious conscience.

Mr. Azar, a “cabinet sponsor” of Capitol Ministries, the Bible study group attended by multiple members of Mr. Trump’s cabinet, brought with him to Health and Human Services an immovable conviction in the righteousness of the pharmaceutical industry (presumably formed during his five-year stint as an executive and lobbyist in the business), a willingness to speak in the most servile way about “the courage” and “openness to change” of Mr. Trump, and a commitment to anti-abortion politics, abstinence education and other causes of the religious right. What he did not bring, evidently, was any notable ability to manage a pandemic.

It is fair to point out that the failings of the Trump administration in the current pandemic are at least as attributable to its economic ideology as they are to its religious inclinations. When the so-called private sector is supposed to have the answer to every problem, it’s hard to deal effectively with the very public problem of a pandemic and its economic consequences. But if you examine the political roots of the life-threatening belief in the privatization of everything, you’ll see that Christian nationalism played a major role in creating and promoting the economic foundations of America’s incompetent response to the pandemic.

For decades, Christian nationalist leaders have lined up with the anti-government, anti-tax agenda not just as a matter of politics but also as a matter of theology. Ken Blackwell of the Family Research Council, one of the Christian right’s major activist groups, has gone so far as to cast food stamps and other forms of government assistance for essential services as contrary to the “biblical model.”

When a strong centralized response is needed from the federal government, it doesn’t help to have an administration that has never believed in a federal government serving the public good. Ordinarily, the consequences of this kind of behavior don’t show up for some time. In the case of a pandemic, the consequences are too obvious to ignore.

 Evangelicals pose a clear and present danger not only to constitutional government, but also to the health and safety of the majority of Americans.  Their influence needs to be defeated and they need to be cast out into the political wilderness.

The Trump/Pence Regime Continues Its War on Science

Science is the way of the future.  It also has the ability to show the falsity and/or wrongness of past ways of doing things, including the manner in which humans - especially large greed driven corporations - have ravaged the environment.  For Trump's far right Christian base, it also has shown more and more the falsity of their world view and shown aspects of their faith to be false.  The Trump/Pence solution?  Gut environmental laws and drive scientists from government agencies.  Meanwhile, of course, the rest of the world presses on with scientific research and China may soon pull ahead of the United States in the realm of science - and the future. Gutting wetlands protections and clean air and water regulations will not make for a better future - not that Trump and his sycophants care. Its a mindset reminiscent of post WWI Britain which failed to adapt to the changing world and ultimately lost its empire as a consequence. A piece in the Washington Post looks at this war on science and the potential long term consequences for America's future.  Here are excerpts:

Dozens of government computers sit in a nondescript building here, able to connect to a data model that could help farmers manage the impact of a changing climate on their crops.

But no one in this federal agency would know how to access the model, or, if they did, what to do with the data.  That’s because the ambitious federal researcher who created it in Washington quit rather than move when the Agriculture Department relocated his agency to an office park here last fall.

He is one of hundreds of scientists across the federal government who have been forced out, sidelined or muted since President Trump took office.

The exodus has been fueled broadly by administration policies that have diminished the role of science as well as more specific steps, such as the relocation of agencies away from the nation’s capital.

While the administration has come under fire for prioritizing the concerns of industry at the expense of science in government decisions, the cumulative effects are just beginning to appear after three years of Trump in the White House.

Some farmers said the USDA staff upheaval has made it harder to access information they need.

Torrential rains last spring dashed the plans of Liz Brownlee, who runs a livestock farm with her husband, to expand her pasture in Crothersville, Ind. Then an unseasonably dry autumn brought 90-degree days that baked the farmers’ seeds. “With all this uncertainty from climate change, I need the best data possible” to know when to plant, she said. “I’m worried I’m not going to have it.”

In the first two years of the Trump administration, more than 1,600 federal scientists left government, according to Office of Personnel Management employment data analyzed by The Washington Post. That represents a 1.5 percent drop, compared with the 8 percent increase during the same period in the Obama administration.

One-fifth of the high-level appointee positions in science are vacant — normally filled by experts who shape policy and ensure research integrity.

Of those who departed, the numbers were greatest among social scientists, soil conservationists, hydrologists and experts in the physical sciences — chemistry, geology, astronomy and physics.

At the Environmental Protection Agency, nearly 700 scientists have left in the past three years, according to The Post analysis. . . . . the loss of expertise weakens the government’s ability to make sound decisions.

As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump called climate change a “hoax.” Once in office, he began dismantling much of President Barack Obama’s climate plan. He has installed industry figures in regulatory roles and rolled back scores of rules and policies that he considers harmful to the fossil-fuel industry. Trump’s actions spurred scientists into the streets, joining protesters for a March for Science rally on the Mall in 2017 and again in 2018.

After historic rainfall last spring swept away livestock and grain in the Midwest, crop planting was delayed by weeks. Andrew Crane-Droesch, 38, a researcher at the Agriculture Department’s Economic Research Service, started work on a data tool that could predict months in advance the impact of, say, heavy rainfall on crop prices or planted fields. He hoped that knowledge could help farmers, commodity traders and government disaster planners prepare.

But when Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue moved forward with his controversial plan to relocate the Economic Research Service and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture — two key research agencies — to Kansas City, Crane-Droesch headed for the exit.

He joined two-thirds of affected employees in his division who either retired or found other jobs rather than move to the greater Kansas City region. At the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, which oversees $1.7 billion in scientific funding for researchers, nearly 8 of every 10 employees have left.

The move to Kansas City has also meant dozens of reports and millions in research funding have been delayed or scuttled as the Agriculture Department scrambled to keep up with departures.

Current and former employees interviewed said they felt the move to Kansas City was intended to diminish research areas such as trade policy, farm income and climate change; Perdue is a climate skeptic who recently described the problem as “weather patterns, frankly.”

Some federal researchers said they left the Trump administration after concluding their work was being undermined.

The study found that long-term exposure to levels of soot and smog lower than current national standards can cause premature death among older Americans. Such a finding suggests that current standards don’t adequately protect public health, which would have implications for industries that pollute. An unidentified EPA spokesman attacked the study in an interview with the Washington Times, an act Costa called “scientifically unethical.”

Elsewhere in the government, political appointees have delayed grants for scientific work.

Across the government, the administration is scaling back advisory committees that offer input to policymakers from scientists and other experts. Last year, Trump required agencies to eliminate one-third of their advisory panels, with a few exceptions.

Much of the impact of the federal government's shrinking science capacity will not be felt for years, observers said.

"If we're gone, is the world going to be a worse place?" he mused. "I like to think so. But it's not going to be immediate."

Virginia Study: Increased School Bullying In Areas That Voted For Trump

2016 Virginia presidential vote by county.

A new survey of Virginia school students that correlates bulling with areas that voted for Donald Trump has yielded results that, personally, I do not find surprising whatsoever: Bullying is higher in areas of Virginia that voted for Trump in contrast to areas that voted for Hillary Clinton.  The results parallel the findings of past studies cited on this blog hat found that children raised in "conservative Christian" homes showed lee empathy toward others and were more inclined towards bullying of others. Given that evangelical "Christians" are Trump's strongest support group, it should be little surprise, therefore, that bully levels are higher in pro-Trump areas.   A piece at NPR looks at the study findings.  Here are excerpts:

After the 2016 presidential election, teachers across the country reported they were seeing increased name-calling and bullying in their classrooms. Now, research shows that those stories — at least in one state — are confirmed by student surveys.

Francis Huang of the University of Missouri and Dewey Cornell of the University of Virginia used data from a school climate survey taken by over 150,000 students across Virginia. They looked at student responses to questions about bullying and teasing from 2015 and 2017. Their findings were published Wednesday in Educational Researcher, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association.

In the 2017 responses, Huang and Cornell found higher rates of bullying and certain types of teasing in areas where voters favored Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.

Seventh- and eighth-graders in areas that favored Trump reported bullying rates in spring 2017 that were 18 percent higher than students living in areas that went for Clinton. They were also 9 percent more likely to report that kids at their schools were teased because of their race or ethnicity.

In the 2015 data, there were "no meaningful differences" in those findings across communities, the researchers wrote.

While bullying rates in areas of Virginia that voted Republican went up in 2017, rates went down in places that favored Clinton.

Their findings could lend credence to the anecdotal reports from teachers around the country after the election, says Dorothy Espelage, a psychology professor at the University of Florida who researches bullying and school safety in middle and high schools.

"Anybody that's in the schools is picking up on this," she says. "You don't have to be a psychologist or a sociologist to understand that if these conversations are happening on the TV and at the dinner table that these kids will take this perspective and they're going to play out in the schools."

"Parents should be mindful of how their reactions to the presidential election, or the reactions of others, could influence their children," Cornell, a psychologist and professor of education at UVA, said in a statement. "And politicians should be mindful of the potential impact of their campaign rhetoric and behavior on their supporters and indirectly on youth."

Regardless of where and how it happens, adds Francis Huang, "bullying is something that can still be addressed and brought down in schools."

Again, to me the findings are not surprising.  Trump's base represents some of the foulest, most racist and most cruel elements of America's population. While they parade around sanctimoniously pretending they are pious - at least while not carrying their AK-47's - they simply are not nice people.  Indeed, the biblical Pharisees look like nice and amazing people compared to Trump supporters and evangelical Christians.

In terms of Virginia itself, the red areas on the map above should be avoided if one values progressive values and decent treatment of others.

Trump Unveils More Anti-LGBTQ 'License to Discriminate' Plans

The Trump/Pence regime is continuing its attacks on the LGBT community and moving to grant a license to discriminate to religious - mostly conservative "Christian" - organizations that receive taxpayer funded support.  The goal is to (i) solidify evangelical support in advance of the 2020 presidential election, and (ii) prop up religious organizations that cannot survive financially without government funding, their respective denominations no longer being able to support their operations.  The Trump/Pence rule making is targeted to allow discrimination against not only LGBT individuals, but also those of other religions or no religion.  Stated another way, it is an effort to have a stated supported religion - conservative Christianity - in violation of the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution.  A piece in The Advocate looks at this very dangerous and discriminatory agenda.  Here are excerpts:

Donald Trump’s administration has made yet another move to enable discrimination, including anti-LGBTQ discrimination, in the name of “religious freedom.”

On Thursday, National Religious Freedom Day, Trump announced his administration is issuing nine proposed rules that govern how faith-based nonprofits with government contracts interact with their clients, reversing regulations put in place under President Barack Obama.

Under the Obama-era regulations, these contractors “need to give beneficiaries notice of the providers’ religious character and the right to get services elsewhere,” The Washington Post reports. “The providers also have to make reasonable efforts to refer beneficiaries to another provider if the person receiving services is uncomfortable.” The Trump administration says these rules are unfair to faith-based providers because they don’t apply to secular organizations.

The newly proposed rules, which are subject to public comment before becoming final, would apply to organizations that provide a wide range of services through contracts with the departments of Veterans Affairs, Health and Human Services, Labor, Agriculture, Education, Justice, Homeland Security, and International Development. Services offered by these contractors include substance abuse treatment, adoption and foster care placements, refugee resettlement, and much more.

[W]e are talking about government grants to the tune of millions and millions of dollars,” she explained. “And increasingly, they are excluding members of the public from receiving services based on who they are.”

The rules would indeed enable faith-based contractors to turn away people who are LGBTQ or follow a different religion, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. “We will keep saying this as long as we have to: Religious freedom is a fundamental right, but it does not confer a license to discriminate,” said Heather Weaver, senior staff attorney with the ACLU Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief, in a press release. “Government-funded programs, including those operated by faith-based organizations, should not be able to discriminate against vulnerable people seeking help.

“The right to believe and to exercise one’s faith is a core American value. The right to discriminate with taxpayer dollars is not. These regulations would dismantle meaningful protections for beneficiaries of these federally funded programs and strip away basic notice requirements designed to ensure that beneficiaries know their rights to be free from discrimination and their right to an alternative, nonreligious provider. Taxpayer funds should not be used to allow discrimination.”

Today’s announcement comes on top of many other efforts by the Trump administration to establish a right to discriminate in the name of religion. In November, for National Adoption Month, HHS announced a new rule that would allow adoption agencies and other programs that receive HHS grants to reject same-sex couples and rainbow families on the basis of religious freedom. Other programs that stand to be affected include elder services, Head Start, refugee resettlement, HIV services, and programs for runaway and homeless youth.

The administration has finalized a so-called conscience protection rule allowing health care providers to opt out of procedures that offend their religious beliefs, but court challenges have kept the rule from going into effect. It also wants to eliminate provisions of the Affordable Care Act that ban anti-transgender discrimination and even allow homeless shelters to discriminate against trans clients.

Anyone who is not an evangelical "Christian" extremist should be very, very worried.  Yes, I have the word Christian in quotation marks because, in my view, the members of Trump's base are Christian in name only.  Look at Christ's social gospel message, and these people are the antithesis to that message.  Indeed, the make the Biblical Pharisees seem like good, upstanding people.

"Conservative" Religion Is Fueling Hate and the Partisan Divide

As regular readers know, I view religion as one of the most poisonous forces throughout human history that has fueled hatred, violence, and mass murder over and over again over the centuries with any beneficial side effects some argue religion provides being far out weighed by the negatives. Religion has time and time again been used to label others as "other" and/or worthy of death, be it in India and Pakistan, the Middle East, 17th century France, or Northern Ireland.  In the age of Trump, religion - in this case "conservative" Christianity is repeating religion's toxic impact on society and fueling political partisanship and a willingness on the part of Republicans to destroy America's democracy in order to cling to power. In my view, no true follower of Christ can be a Trump supporter or Republican nowadays and those who do so put their hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy on open display as they support the caging of children, white supremacy and a man who is the personification of the seven deadly sins.  A lengthy piece at CNN looks at religion's toxic role in dividing American society.  The good news is that over the long term, conservative Christianity is dying in America.  It's death cannot come soon enough in my opinion.  Here are article excerpts:

The religious and cultural divide between Democratic and Republican voters is widening, pointing toward even greater partisan polarization and social tension as the nation careens into a possible impeachment vote against President Donald Trump and potential record turnout in the 2020 presidential election.

An extensive national study released Monday by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute showed that voters in each party now hold antithetical views not only on issues that dominate the immediate political debate -- such as health care and impeachment -- but also on deeper changes in the nation's demography, culture, race relations and gender roles, according to detailed results the institute provided to CNN. While whites who identify as Christians still represent about two-thirds of all Republicans, they now compose only one-fourth of Democrats, according to results provided by the Pew Research Center from a new study it released last week. Americans unaffiliated with any religion, and racial minorities who identify as Christians, now each make up a bigger share of the Democratic coalition than white Christians do, Pew found. Both groups remain only relatively minor components of the GOP coalition.

On the religious front, just as in those other arenas, the groups that favor Democrats are clearly growing. Not only have the religiously unaffiliated expanded since 2009 from about 1 in 6 to 1 in 4 adults, but the share of Americans who ascribe to non-Christian faiths, a group that also leans strongly Democratic, has edged up from 5% to 7% of the population over that time, Pew found. Simultaneously, white Christians have fallen as a share of all American adults -- from just over half in 2009, according to Pew and other data, to around two-fifths today.

The challenge for Democrats is that their potential gains from the growing groups are being muted by an increasing tilt toward the GOP among the groups that are shrinking, in this case whites who identify as Christian. (The same dynamic is evident among other contracting groups such as whites without college degrees.)

Trump has accelerated the trends on both sides of that equation, consolidating the GOP's position among blue-collar, older, non-urban and evangelical whites at the price of sparking intense resistance among younger, white-collar, nonwhite and metropolitan voters.

[E]ven as white Christians have declined as a share of the population, more of that shrinking group is aligning with Republicans. In 2009, Pew found 51% of white Christians identified as Republicans, while 37% considered themselves Democrats (the rest were independents). Today that 14-point partisan gap has more than doubled: In the latest Pew results, 63% of white Christians identify as Republicans, compared with 30% who identify as Democrats. The movement has been even sharper among white evangelical Protestants. Their share of the overall population is also shrinking: It fell to 16% in the latest Pew results, down from 19% in 2009. In 2009, they were about twice as likely to identify as Republicans (61%) as Democrats (30%), according to figures provided by Gregory Smith, Pew's associate director of research. Today 75% of white evangelicals call themselves Republicans, while just 19% identify as Democrats, a ratio of nearly 4 to 1.

Democrats rely on voters who reflect the nation's growing racial and religious diversity, while the contracting population of white Christians -- especially white evangelical Protestants -- tilt more toward the GOP as a vehicle to protect values and a vision of America that they believe is under siege from the forces of change. Across the key changes reshaping American culture, the two groups rendered almost inverse verdicts. On gender, roughly three-fifths of adults who approve of Trump agreed that "these days society seems to punish men just for acting like men." Three-fourths of adults who disapprove of Trump disagreed. The divide between the two sides was even more pronounced on issues relating to race. Fully 68% of those who approve of Trump agreed that "Today, discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities." Three-fourths of those who disapprove of Trump disagreed with that sentiment. At the heart of these contrasts are the inimical views of white evangelical Protestants and religiously unaffiliated Americans (of all races), which now arguably represent the core of each party's coalition. While two-thirds of white evangelicals, for instance, say discrimination against whites is as big a problem as discrimination against minorities, more than 7 in 10 among the religiously unaffiliated disagree. Two-thirds of white evangelicals say immigrants are "invading" America; three-fourths of the religiously unaffiliated disagree. Three-fourths of white evangelicals say socialists have taken over the Democratic Party; two-thirds of the unaffiliated say racists now control the Republican Party. [T]he long-run threat to Republicans clearly emerges from these new studies: The party, especially as defined by Trump, faces huge resistance among the groups that are growing in society, while the groups most drawn to his racial nationalism -- such as white evangelicals -- are shrinking. Given that pace of change, it's an open question how long Republicans can rely on the Trump strategy of squeezing bigger margins from shrinking groups. On most key measures, from racial diversity to the shift away from Christian faiths, the changes reshaping America are more pronounced among the youngest generations. Among adults younger than 30, only 1 in 4 are white Christians, the Public Religion Research Institute found, with the religiously unaffiliated and those who practice non-Christian faiths accounting for nearly half and non-white Christians making up the remaining fourth.

This wave of new data on religion and partisan allegiance underscores the broader conclusion that American politics in 2020, and likely for years beyond, promises an epic collision between what America has been and what it is becoming.

The Link Between Bullying, Social Rejection and LGBT Suicide

The sad reality is that suicides among the LGBT community are higher than in the general population.  This is not due to anything inherently wrong with being LGBT or a higher level of mental illness among those who are LGBT.  Instead, the problem stems from how society treats people in sexual minority groups.  Bullying, of course springs to mind, but also involved is family and societal rejection, all typically fanned by the constant anti-LGBT drumbeat of right wing Christian denominations and, now, a White House regime that is arguing that mistreatment of LGBT individuals in the workplace is perfectly legal. Anyone who thinks that LGBT youth aren't watching and listening to this potentially deadly message is deluding them-self. That supposed "Christians" are in the lead in projecting this message of hatred also directly ties to the growing exodus of the younger generations from religion, a trend that I for one view as positive. A recent piece reviews the linkage between unnecessary suicide deaths and bullying and societal abuse.  Here are highlights: 

Chloe was 12 or 13 years old when she began to question her sexual identity. She felt attracted to girls. She knew she was different from most of her classmates. So she didn’t talk about her feelings at school in the United Kingdom. She didn’t share them with her family, either. She knew they would not approve. “It wasn’t something that would be okay,” she said. A feeling of isolation built up inside her, and Chloe felt more and more like she didn’t fit in. Eventually, she tried to kill herself. Data for 2017 show that 17 percent of all high school students — about one in six — seriously considered killing themselves. That figure was nearly one in every two teens (almost 48 percent) for those who are lesbian, gay or bisexual. And 23 percent of these teens made attempts. Nearly one in three teens (32 percent) who were unsure about their sexuality also thought about ending their lives; 14 percent tried.

Scientists have begun to dig into why suicide risks are higher for LGBTQ+ people, especially teens. . . . The problem, researchers say, seems to stem from how society treats members of these minorities. Changing attitudes toward these teens can help more of them live and thrive. There’s no reason why being a sexual minority means a person must face a higher risk for suicide or other mental-health problems, Mueller says. “What does put kids at risk of suicide is when they feel rejected by families or friends or communities and when they feel ashamed of themselves.” Dealing with all of those stresses, she says, “can be really hard.” Those feelings often emerge when society views those who are different through a lens of stigma. “Stigma is about not valuing people who are different,” explains Ian Rivers. It is about “viewing them as less worthy or less important.” Rivers is a psychologist at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland. When society treats people who are in a minority group as if they have less value, those individuals can feel serious stress. In some cases, stigma leads to bullying. “I was isolated from the boys and they started calling me sissy and things like that,” said Sirus, a study participant. The teasing turned into violence. And, he added, “the teachers did not pick it up.” So they did nothing about it.

In 2015, Mueller and her colleagues found a link between bullying and suicides of lesbian, gay and bisexual youths. As bullying increased, so did the rates for young people’s thoughts of ending their lives, the researchers reported in the American Journal of Public Health. But bullying didn’t fully explain why the rates for LGB youth were so much higher than for other young people. . . . “It’s about a lot of other factors — like rejection from peers or families or shame.”

Young people also can internalize other people’s bad attitudes. In other words, they come to believe what others say. So even though it’s not true, they might come to believe that they’re “not good” simply because they are experiencing a same-sex attraction, Mueller says. To make things harder, society typically assumes “that everyone is heterosexual.” That, she says, “automatically puts everyone who isn’t at a disadvantage.” Burdens created by a hostile social environment “fall hardest on the youngest people” in LGBTQ+ groups, says Geoffrey Ream. He’s a professor of social work at Adelphi University in Garden City, N.Y. Ream recently dug into data from the U.S. National Violent Death Reporting System. . . . LGBT youth were 24 percent of the 49 victims ages 12 to 14. LGBT teens also made up 16 percent of the 15- to 17-year olds. Younger people “don’t have the same level of psychological resources” to cope with challenges that older people do, Ream explains. So children and teens are less ready to deal with the abuse that society may heap on them if they are part of a sexual minority. Youths also have fewer options to get out of the house and find resources to help. Family rejection is a big concern, agrees David Huebner. He’s a psychologist at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He and others have found that parents’ rejection ups the risk of health problems, including suicide, among young adult LGB people. Name calling, physical violence and being kicked out of home are obvious examples of rejection. But rejection can also be more subtle. For example, parents might criticize a young person’s dress or behavior for not conforming to gender stereotypes.

“Immoral Majority: Why Evangelicals Chose Political Power Over Christian Values.”

A new book by a writer and filmmaker with the title used for the heading of this post looks at the growing moral bankruptcy of evangelical Christians in the age of Trump.  The author argues that as long as evangelicals prioritize political power over true Christian behavior and persuasion by charitable actions, their pews will be continue to lose occupants and their national influence will dwindle in the long term. The author perhaps unrealistically argues given the lust for power of those like Franklin Graham, Jerry Falwell, Jr., and Tony Perkins, that if evangelicals hope to avoid cultural irrelevance in the years to come, they will have to value humility over ego, and resist the seduction of political power, no matter the cost. Nowhere does the hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy of evangelicals reveal itself more than in their cheering support of the Trump/Pence regime's brutality towards children of undocumented immigrants.  

Frighteningly, I suspect that many evangelicals would look at the image of the crying child above and not feel any remorse for the simple reason that the child is not white. The further irony, of course, is that while these evangelicals want to "take back their country," those against whom they target their hate are the descendants of the the original indigenous populations of the Americas  and who had their lands stolen from them by white European conquest.  Here are highlights from a column in the Washington Post by the author of “Immoral Majority: Why Evangelicals Chose Political Power Over Christian Values”:

As the debate about how to handle applicants for refugee status at the U.S. southern border gained urgency in recent months, Pew Research Religion waded into the social-media fray on July 7 with a tweet about the results of a poll the organization conducted last year. Pew reported, and online commentators quickly noted, that white evangelical Protestants were the least likely group — amid results sorted by age, race, education and religion — to say that the United States “has a responsibility to accept refugees into the country.” 

Sixty-eight percent of white evangelical Protestants said the country has no responsibility for refugees. No other demographic group came within 10 points of that result.

[S]ome evangelical leaders had been taken aback when the Pew results were originally released in May 2018, and urged their flocks toward change. But back then, the main question about refugees concerned those fleeing the brutal civil war in Syria. “When faced with a potential conflict between prominent evangelicals’ biblical pro-refugee arguments and [President] Trump’s opposition,” Brian Newman of Pepperdine University noted in The Post, “the vast majority of white evangelicals choose Trump.”

A year later, with the focal point on refugees from Central America, in much greater numbers and more likely to be vilified by the president, evangelical leaders are largely as one with their congregations.

Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the public-policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, ventured this observation on Twitter: “The reports of the conditions for migrant children at the border should shock all of our consciences. Those created in the image of God should be treated with dignity and compassion, especially those seeking refuge from violence back home. We can do better than this.”

Moore’s comments didn’t sit well with Jerry Falwell Jr., inheritor of his father’s Christian empire, president of Liberty University and a prominent evangelical figure.

Some were dismayed by Falwell’s response, but you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone paying attention the past few years who was surprised by it. 

Falwell is one of several leaders in the modern evangelical movement who have helped solidify Christian principles as synonymous with the Republican agenda, and specifically with the [Trump’s] president’s agenda.  Trump, of course, welcomes this way of thinking.

Yet the idea that without Republicans, Christianity is lost, is not unique to the Trump era. The merging of evangelicalism and Republicanism has been underway for decades. It is simply more visible and pronounced under this president — primarily because evangelical support for Trump requires a much higher degree of cognitive dissonance.

That is, fighting for conservative Christian values by unquestioningly supporting someone who not only doesn’t share them but has lived most of his life actively, and unapologetically, in opposition to them. 

Stomaching Trump’s behavior and rhetoric — which could generously be described as not characteristic of a Christian — has been rewarded with much-improved prospects for stricter abortion laws and achieving other long-sought goals in what conservative Christians regard as a desperate and escalating culture war.

The evangelical embrace of Trump has been an electoral positive for the Republican Party, but for those who would evangelize, the new reality is tragic.

[True Christians are] meant to speak the truth in a way that invites strangers in, welcomes them, makes them feel loved.  To care for the least of these is a Christian value. Expressing and demonstrating it is spreading the Word.

That’s called evangelizing. A movement that based itself on the term but now embraces its antithesis is becoming difficult to recognize.

Yes, there are good Christians, but until they loudly and continually condemn evangelicals on a daily basis, they are allowing evangelicals to be the face of Christianity and the result is the exodus of people, especially among younger generations, from religion entirely.  Meanwhile, being a Trump supporter and a true Christian are mutually exclusive.

Right-Wing Evangelicals are Driving Americans to Atheism

"Christian" hate group leader Tony Perkins.

This blog frequently looks at the hypocrisy of evangelical Christians - and far right Catholics - and the manner in which they are driving younger generations in particular away from religion entirely. But hypocrisy is only part of the behavior of these self-anointed "godly folk" and their professional Christian leaders engage in that increasingly makes the case that religion is a net evil in the world (my own personal view) and that "godly Christians" are actually not very nice people. Evangelicals' support of Donald Trump has merely served to underscore these attributes of "conservative Christians."  A piece in Raw Story looks at the exodus from religion and the ways evangelicals are driving more and more Americans to atheism or agnosticism.  Here are excerpts (Note the reference to The Black Collar Crime Blotter which is a must read):

If the Catholic Bishops, their Evangelical Protestant allies, and other Right-wing fundamentalists had the sole objective of decimating religious belief, they couldn’t be doing a better job of it.

Testimonials at sites like ExChristian.net show that people leave religion for a number of reasons, many of which religious leaders have very little control over. Sometimes, for example, people take one too many science classes. Sometimes they find their faith shattered by the suffering in the world – either because of a devastating injury or loss in their own lives or because they experience the realities of another person’s pain in a new way. Sometimes a believer gets intrigued by archaeology or symbology or the study of religion itself. Sometimes a believer simply picks up a copy of the Bible or Koran and discovers faith-shaking contradictions or immoralities there.

But if you read ExChristian testimonials you will notice that quite often church leaders or members do things that either trigger the deconversion process or help it along. They may turn a doubter into a skeptic or a quiet skeptic into an outspoken anti-theist, or as one former Christian calls himself, a de-vangelist.

Here are some top ways Christians push people out the Church door or shove secret skeptics out of the closet. Looking at the list, you can’t help but wonder if the Catholic Bishops and their Evangelical allies are working for the devil.

Gay Baiting. Because of sheer demographics, most gay people are born into religious families. In this country almost half are born into Bible-believing families, many of whom see homosexuality as an abomination.  The condemnation (and self-condemnation) can be excruciating, as we all know from the suicide rate.  Some emotionally battered gays spend their lives fighting or denying who they are, but many eventually find their way to open and affirming congregations or non-religious communities.

Ignorant and mean-spirited attitudes about homosexuality don’t drive just gays out of the Church, they are a huge deconversion issue for straight friends and family members. . . . . Since most people Gen X and younger recognize equal rights for gays as a matter of common humanity, gay baiting is a wedge issue that wedges young people right out of the church. 

Prooftexting.   People who think of the Bible as the literally perfect word of God love to quote excerpts to argue their points.  . . . They then proceed to quote whatever authoritarian, anti-gay, or anti-woman verse makes their point . . .Suppose such a Christian gets confronted with a verse that says, for example, Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man (Numbers 31:17-18), or No man who has any defect may come near [to God in the temple]: no man who is blind or lame, disfigured or deformed;  no man with a crippled foot or hand,  or who is a hunchback or a dwarf, or who has any eye defect, . . . (Leviticus 21:17-23).  . . . Biblical literalists, on the other hand give someone like me an excuse to talk about sexual slavery or bias against handicapped people in the Bible – in front of an audience who have been taught that the good book is uniformly good.  For a wavering believer, the dissonance can be too much. 

Misogyny. For psychological and social reasons females are more inclined toward religious belief than males.  They are more likely to attend church services and to insist on raising their children in a faith community.

Women are the Church’s base constituency, but fortunately for atheists, this fact hasn’t caused conservative Christians to back off of sexism that is justified by – you got it – prooftexting from the Old and New Testaments. . . . . Between 1991 and 2011 the percent of women attending church in a typical week dropped by eleven points, from 55 to 44 percent. 

Hypocrisy.  . . . High profile hypocrites like Ted Haggard or Rush Limbaugh may be loved by their acolytes, but for people who are teetering, they help to build a gut aversion to whatever they espouse.   But often as not, the hypocrisies that pose a threat to faith are small and internal to a single Bible-study or youth group.   Backbiting and social shunning are part of the church-lady stereotype for a reason.   They also leave a bitter taste that makes some church members stop drinking the Kool-aid.

Disgusting and Immoral Behavior.   The priest abuse scandal did more for the New Atheist movement than outspoken anti-theists like Christopher Hitchens (God is Not Great), Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Sam Harris (The End of Faith) or Bill Maher (Religulous) ever could. To make matters worse—or better, depending on your point of view– Bill Donohue of the Catholic League seems to be doing everything possible to fan those flames:  On top of the abuse itself, followed by cover-ups, he is now insisting that the best defense of Church property is a good offense against the victims, and has vowed to fight them “one by one.”  The Freedom from Religion Foundation publishes a bi-monthly newspaper that includes a regular feature:  The Black Collar Crime Blotter.  It features fraud, drug abuse, sex crimes and more by Protestant as well as Catholic clergy.  The obvious purpose is to move readers from Religion isn’t true to Religion isn’t benign to Religion is abhorrent and needs fighting.  Moral outrage is a powerful emotion.

Science denial. . . . . science denial doesn’t just move believers to nonbelief.  It also rallies opposition ranging from cantankerous bloggers to legal advocates.   It provides fodder for comedians and critics: “If the world was created 6000 years ago, what’s fueling your car?” It may produce some of the most far reaching opposition to religious belief, because science advocates argue that faith, even socially benign faith, is a fundamentally flawed way of knowing.  The Catholic Church, perhaps still licking wounds about Galileo (they apologized finally in the 20^th Century), has managed to avoid embarrassing and easily disproven positions on evolutionary biology.  But one could argue that their atheism-fostering positions on conception and contraception similarly rely on ignorance about or denial of biological science –in this case embryology and the basic fact that most embryos never become persons.

Political meddling. . . . The Religious Right, and now the Catholic Bishops, have brought religion into politics in the ugliest possible way short of holy war, and people who care about the greater good have taken notice.  Lists of ugly Bible verses, articles about the psychology of religion, investigative exposes about Christian machinations in D.C. or rampant proselytizing in the military and public schools –all of these are popular among political progressives because it is impossible to drive progressive change without confronting religious fundamentalism.

Intrusion.  . . . Catholic and Evangelical conservatives have made a high stakes gamble that they can regain authoritarian control over their flocks and hold onto the next generation of believers (and tithers) by asserting orthodox dogmas, making Christian belief an all or nothing proposition.. . . .  the more they resort to strict authoritarianism, insularity and strict interpretation of Iron Age texts, the more people are wounded in the name of God and the more people are outraged.  By making Christian belief an all-or-nothing proposition – they force at least some would-be believers to choose “nothing.”  Anti-theists are all too glad to help.

Liberty University’s "Culture of Fear"

Evangelical Christians - and far right Catholics - talk about "Christian love" and a supposedly loving god, yet the entire premise of their faith construct is one based on fear: fear of eternal damnation and fear of ostracism if one does not conform to medieval dogma.  Knowledge, science and freedom of thought are evil and to be rejected.  And as for loving others, it's the opposite of what one sees in reality where hatred of others is the most defining attribute of "conservative Christians."  In Virginia, two of the leading purveyors of this toxic form of Christianity are CBN/Regent University based in Virginia Beach and Liberty University in Lynchburg. Of the two, perhaps the more toxic and bigger blight on Virginia is Liberty where the reality is the opposite of what the name suggests.  As a lengthy piece in the Washington Post lays out, a climate of fear and censorship reigns under the rule of Jerry Falwell, Jr., a Trump supporter embroiled with his own possible dirty linen involving a young pool boy. Read the entire piece.  Here are highlights which suggest Liberty is the last place one should consider sending their child:

In my first week as editor in chief of the Champion, Liberty University’s student-run weekly, our faculty adviser, Deborah Huff, ordered me to apologize. I’d noticed that our evangelical school’s police department didn’t publish its daily crime log online, as many other private university forces do, so I searched elsewhere for crime information I might use in an article. I called the Virginia Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators to find out what the law required Liberty to disclose. But the public affairs worker there told the Liberty University Police Department, which complained to Huff. She called to upbraid me: Apparently, I had endangered our newspaper’s relationship with the LUPD. Huff and Chief Richard Hinkley convened a meeting inside a police department conference room, and Huff sat next to me while I proffered the forced apology to Hinkley — for asking questions. Huff, too, was contrite, assuring the police chief that it wouldn’t happen again, because she’d keep a better eye on me.

This wasn’t exactly a rude awakening. I’d spent the previous three years watching the university administration, led by President Jerry Falwell Jr. (who took a very micromanaging interest), meddle in our coverage, revise controversial op-eds and protect its image by stripping damning facts from our stories. Still, I stuck around. I thought that if I wrote with discretion and kept my head down, I could one day win enough trust from the university to protect the integrity of our journalism.

Instead, when my team took over that fall of 2017, we encountered an “oversight” system — read: a censorship regime — that required us to send every story to Falwell’s assistant for review. Any administrator or professor who appeared in an article had editing authority over any part of the article; they added and deleted whatever they wanted. Falwell called our newsroom on multiple occasions to direct our coverage personally.

Eventually I quit, and the School of Communication decided not to replace me, turning the paper into a faculty-run, student-written organ and seizing complete control of its content. Student journalists must now sign a nondisclosure agreement that forbids them from talking publicly about “editorial or managerial direction, oversight decisions or information designated as privileged or confidential.” The form also states that the students understand they are “privileged” to receive “thoughts, opinions, and other statements” from university administrators.

It was one example of an infrastructure of thought-control that Falwell and his lieutenants have introduced into every aspect of Liberty University life. Faculty, staff and students on the Lynchburg, Va., campus have learned that it’s a sin to challenge the sacrosanct status of the school or its leaders, who mete out punishments for dissenting opinions (from stripping people of their positions to banning them from the school). This “culture of fear,” as it was described by several of the dozen Liberty denizens who talked to me for this story — most of them anonymously, to protect their jobs or their standing — worsened during my four years on campus because of the 2016 presidential election.

[T]he school’s methods became even more aggressive after Falwell endorsed Donald Trump early that year, according to multiple current and former faculty members. “The closer you get to the president’s office,” says former history professor Brian Melton, discussing a chilling effect on campus, “the worse it becomes.” Falwell’s staff now operates masterfully to squash challenges to his views and his rise in national political influence.

The dissent that did exist — from off-message campus speakers, insufficiently sycophantic board members, student activists and our newspaper staff — was ruthlessly neutralized. Liberty, founded on principles of fundamental Christianity, is now a place that has zero tolerance for new questions and ideas. Those who harbor them must remain silent, or leave.

One cause of perpetual insecurity at Liberty is the school’s militant refusal to award tenure to any faculty member (outside the law school, which must offer it for accreditation). Instructors are instead hired on year-to-year contracts; during the spring semester, they find out whether they will be coming back the next fall.

The result is constant, erratic faculty turnover. One recently fired teacher describes the spring as a cycle of stressed-out, fearful professors wandering into each other’s offices to ask if they had their contracts renewed yet. “If you’re a conservative Christian in the academic world, the chances of you getting a job are nil in many areas,” says Melton, who worked at Liberty as an associate professor for 15 years before resigning because of what he described as the school’s surveillance and fear tactics. “The administration knows that, and . . . they wield that very effectively, keeping people quiet.”

Late-notice faculty removals have also become more commonplace, according to Melton, stemming in part from Falwell’s stated desire to tame the teaching corps. . . . This June, a dozen faculty members at Liberty’s School of Divinity were notified that their contracts would not be renewed. By that late in the year, it is too late to find another job in higher education for the fall.

For former faculty members, Liberty’s culture of fear can live on. The school often requires terminated professors to sign a nondisclosure agreement if they want their severance packages, several told me — a practice that is extremely uncommon in higher education, according to Robert Bezemek, a California lawyer who represents labor unions at universities. (As Melton puts it, “They force this NDA on you by leveraging the ability to feed your family against you.”) Even former teachers who hadn’t signed NDAs told me they feared that talking to me on the record would somehow get them blacklisted from jobs elsewhere or imperil their friends who still work at Liberty.

Another onetime instructor declined to use his university-issued laptop because he thought Liberty had equipped it with spyware.

There is no evidence of Liberty firing a faculty member explicitly for his or her political beliefs, but everyone I spoke to believed that the school could easily manufacture some other pretense. “There is zero trust between the administration and faculty,” Melton says. FIRE, a nonprofit that fights for free speech on campus, put Liberty on its 2019 list of the 10 worst colleges for freedom of speech.

Things aren’t much better for the 15,000 students on campus. In 2009, Liberty withdrew funding and recognition for its College Democrats chapter because, as Mark Hine, the senior vice president of student affairs, put it, the national party defends abortion, opposed the Defense of Marriage Act, supported “the ‘LGBT’ agenda, hate crimes, which include sexual orientation and gender identity, socialism, etc.”

Student leaders have consistently helped administrators enforce the culture. After the Charlottesville rally in August 2017, members of Liberty’s Student Government Association drafted a statement expressing solidarity with Heather Heyer, the protester murdered by a neo-Nazi, and all people demonstrating against white nationalism. Then-SGA President Caleb Johnson refused to release the message and send it to university administrators for fear of what Falwell might think. . . . “There’s 100 percent an atmosphere of fear at Liberty,” says Caleb Fitzpatrick, who was then the student government’s speaker of the House and helped draft the statement. “There was a need to avoid being seen as a liberal or progressive, or even being different.”

Guests at the school who deviate from the prescribed philosophy can be targeted, too. . . . . The end finally came for the Champion when a left-leaning faith group, the Red Letter Christians, organized a “Lynchburg Revival” in April 2018 to protest Falwell’s support of Trump and what the group called “toxic evangelicalism.” Two days beforehand, Liberty’s police department notified RLC leader Shane Claiborne that he would be arrested if he set foot on campus.

I graduated last year. Since then, I’ve tried to put Liberty — and the stress and self-doubt that officials there saddled me with — behind me.