Not-a-Lemming : Religion

The Religious Wrong and The Republican Retreat

FutbolGuru — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 16:31:00 GMT

Limbaugh was calling it, “…the end of the Democratic Party.” And so it might have seemed in 1994 to a party awash in victory and full of the hubris that comes with it. President Clinton had overreached with his gun control measures and secret health care meetings. His past was catching up with him – the affairs, the secret trysts, the not-so-secret trysts. He was lifting the ban on homosexuals in the military, giving the go-ahead on state-funded abortions, and had placed a number of far-left liberals in cabinet positions. The knee-jerk was swift with the Senate and the House of Representatives swinging to Republican control in an unprecedented single election.

And what was the overriding campaign message of the Republicans who swept to power? Family values. Almost to a person they claimed strong Christian values and a need to return to honesty and temperance in politics. And they were right. The flood was vast and nationwide at all levels of government, religious conservatives took offices from dog catcher all the way to Speaker of the House.

For a few years it seemed the nation had made a good choice. Certainly honest politicians are better than dishonest ones. And the old guard Democrats, in power for forty years, had lowered the bar of corruption to new depths. But in the end it was all an illusion. The Democrats who’d become so corrupt weren’t corrupt because they were Democrats, they were corrupt because their party had been in power for forty years and that’s what happens to any party in power for forty years. The Chinese have a saying, whom the gods wish to destroy they give forty years of success. Except in the case of the Religious Right it only took about fifteen.

So what happened? How did the Religious Right turn out to be the Religious Wrong? Within a few short years the new conservatives had become every bit as corrupt as their Democratic counterparts with affairs, lies, and scandals, even to the point of invading the wrong country! That’s a pretty big mistake. For a party with God on its side the fall was precipitous and catastrophic.

The answer is really quite simple and is based on the difference between religion and spirituality. While it is unfashionable to discuss politics and Bible in the same breath in this country, it is impossible to understand either without doing so. Religion is a system of rites and practices which dictate the practices of a group. Spirituality is a deep-seated, philosophical viewpoint that defines the worldview of an individual. Religion is a group activity. Spirituality is individual. The Religious Right was religious but not spiritual, a fact that is easily proven by their habits.

There was a time in this nation when the term Christianity went hand in hand with moderation. Not moderate in the political sense, but moderate as an approach to life, which is the basis of the message given by the founder of Christianity, none other than Jesus. Whether or not one believes Jesus was the son of God, it is very difficult to deny his historicity and his message of love and moderation. Indeed, one of his more well-known statements is that it is harder for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to go to heaven. He went on to say that this didn’t forbid wealth, but that wealth made the Christian walk very precarious.

In my experience with Christians over the last few decades however, very few of them practice moderation at any level in their lives. Indeed, they consider wealth – the very thing that Jesus said would keep them out of Heaven – as a blessing from God. From their houses, to their lifestyles, to their cars, to their kids, there are no practical differences between Christians and non-Christians. There is a lower incidence of sexual promiscuity among Christians and a mandatory Sunday morning club meeting, but that’s about it. And since they are every bit as fixated on wealth as their non-Christian counterparts, they also lack the one thing that Jesus said would set them apart from others; love.

The Religious Right that took over Congress in 1994 brought very little of the L-word to Washington. They did bring a lot of ideas about how a person should live their life, but other than their mandatory Sunday morning meeting and a strong outward revulsion to homosexuality, there was very little difference between them and their Democratic counterparts, many of whom also went to Church regularly.

I’ll go back to the Bible again. And this is important because whether or not you believe the Bible, it describes the lifestyle and philosophy that the Religious Right claim to embrace. Love, the Bible says, is essential to everything a Christian does. Indeed, without love, the scriptures go on to say, everything else a Christian might do will sound like a clanging cymbal. Now my son plays the cymbals in band, and I can tell you right now there is nothing more jarring and cacophonous than him walking through the house bashing those things together. The only thing you want is for him to STOP. And that was the reaction to the Religious Right when they came to town with their seemingly chaste lives yet were just as hooked on riches as anyone else and entirely devoid of love. They were a clanging cymbal. And it got old.

To make matters worse, they also brought a healthy dose of self-righteousness. While the Bible clearly states that it is those who are poor in spirit who will receive the Kingdom of Heaven, our new leaders and their ardent supporters across the hinterland were utterly convinced that God was on their side. And nowhere was this more apparent than in the actions of George II and many of his supporters who, I believe, felt he was ordained by the Almighty to smite the Arabs. It was on this basis that, even when it was glaringly obvious that he had invaded a nation unjustly and hundreds of thousands died, he remained convinced he had done the right thing. It wasn’t his decision, it was God’s, so how could it be wrong. After all, he prayed about it.

There are those who believe in a God and those who don’t. Those who profess Christianity and those who don’t. But for any of these groups it can’t be debated that true Christian behavior – social habits which are often practiced by other religions too – results in more efficient government, more honest business practices, and more peaceful interaction between people. Honesty, kindness, and mercy go a long way. But love and moderation are central to Christianity, and when you leave these out the philosophy becomes nothing more than a way to control groups of people and gain an advantage over them, which various governments the world over have been doing for over 2,000 years now.

That is why the Religious Right became the Religious Wrong. And why they failed not only themselves but the entire nation. It is why they are no longer in power and indeed, why so many in the country and the world look at the Religious Right and turn their eyes from Christianity in general. Are they Christians? That’s not really up to me to decide, I’m not in charge of Christianity. But the next time you see some guy quoting from the Bible while trying to get himself elected just remember what Jesus had to say about politics: “ ”

-Futbol Guru, http://mises.org/community/blogs/not-a-lemming

The Religious Right and the Republican Revolution

FutbolGuru — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 14:48:00 GMT

Since the election of Ronald Reagan as President in 1980 the United States has seen a monumental shift of political power.

Prior to this the South had been a Democratic stronghold as a result of the Civil War. Even a hundred years after, it had not been forgotten that Lincoln, a Republican, had invaded and decimated the South over what is still claimed by Southerners as primarily an issue of states rights.

Following the Civil War, reconstruction policy, shaped by the victorious Republicans and enacted by unscrupulous carpetbaggers, stymied economic recovery of the south for generations. Mistrust of Republicans was widespread by the Democratic white population even as the Party of Lincoln was embraced by emancipated Republican-voting blacks.

This general separation of race and party affiliation held until the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 when his New Deal provided social programs to which the black population had access. While blacks did not leave the Republican Party en masse immediately, this was the beginning of the exodus. And even though it was the Republican Eisenhower administration that formally began the civil rights movement, it was Kennedy and particularly Johnson who parlayed it into a full-fledged welfare program complete with public housing and direct monetary disbursements. Seen by many blacks as directly benefiting them, the migration to the Democratic Party accelerated greatly.

What resulted, especially in the south, was a tense mix of politics that persisted throughout the sixties and seventies, with local Democratic Parties run exclusively by white men but supported by the vast majority of the Black population. This took time to correct and today we see these parties having become well integrated with a mix of leadership all the way to the top. For this reason it is generally believed that the rise of the religious right was in response to racial pressures when in fact, it was not.

As Blacks were leaving the Republican Party and flocking to the Democrats for economic reasons there were other very important social changes taking place. Most notably the counter-culture of the sixties that embraced faux-peace, tolerance, and came to symbolize the anti-war movement. Because the Democratic Party consisted primarily of liberals, who are less resistant to change, these counter-culture individuals found a much more comfortable home with than with the more traditional, conservative, Republicans irrespective of the changing racial makeup of the party.

But not only did these hippies, as they were called, bring their faux-peace-and-love agenda to the Democratic Party, they also brought high-profile drug use, widespread promiscuity, homosexuality, and other radical notions. Even a cursory examination of the Bible, however, shows that these thoughts and ideas are highly counter to Christian doctrine. Moreover, pro-welfare policies were seen by traditionalists as 'communist' leaning, and part of the tradition of the traditionalists is to reject anything that resembled policies of our sworn enemy, the Soviet Union. Over time these new arrivals to the Democratic Party, with their free-love, drug use, and social rebellion came into conflict with the old guard who still went to church and espoused capitalism. And as they began to infiltrate the leadership of the Party, their ideas started showing up on the platform, first in the North and steadily moving Southward.

This movement progressed and by the late seventies the Democratic Party had, among other liberal changes, become aligned with homosexuality, abortion, and socialism. It was becoming difficult to be a conscientious Christian and retain a Democratic affiliation. That is when the shift occurred. As the Democrat party moved more and more to the left, the Christian constituency of the Democrat Party rebelled and began leaving in droves. So many in fact that the majority of Southern Whites are now Republicans and the majority of Southern Blacks are now Democrats. A reversal of the situation less than 100 years ago.

While this was most pronounced in the south it happened across the nation and the result was what came to be known as “The Religious Right,” a class of religiously affiliated people who were literally forced out of the Democratic Party for ideological reasons. Its peak was probably during the Clinton Administration when numerous government figures changed party affiliation in response to well-known behavior of the then Commander in Chief. The result for the country was a huge displacement of Democrats in the 1994 election with both houses of Congress coming under Republican control.

In recent years it has become convenient for socio-political figures such as Jessie Jackson, Al Sharpton, Jerry Falwell, and George II to solidify their party base (and prolong their personal income engine) by playing race cards only adding to the myth of racially-motivated separation. And since this myth favors the Democratic Party, the Democrats have been more than willing to let it persist. The media, which also leans to the left, has completed the revision of history until it has come to be ‘fact.’ And like lemmings, the majority of the American public has dutifully joined their march towards the sea and the long drop that precedes it.

NEXT: The Religious Wrong and the Republican Retreat

Futbol Guru, http://mises.org/Community/blogs/not-a-lemming