Very little in the actual teaching put forward by Jesus would support the political philosophy of the Christian right in 21st-century America.
By Jay Parini
By Jay Parini
Since the early seventies, with the Supreme Court legalized abortion in Roe v. Wade,
the Christian right has been on the prowl, adding grievance to
grievance, aligning themselves with the Republican Party and its Teapot
wing.
The Christian right had long, of course, been gathering
steam in the South in response to the Civil Rights movement—there is a
dark story there, with prejudice rooting in distorted Biblical
arguments—but the mass turn of evangelical and fundamentalist Christians
into the realm of politics has been at full strength only in the past
four decades. Their influence on the 2016 election of Donald Trump was
noteworthy, signaling a high point of hypocrisy on their part. It
didn’t matter that Trump was an unhinged philanderer, a braggart whose
own life and example was a mockery of Christian values—as long as he
delivered a reliably anti-abortion and anti-gay rights judge to replace Antonin Scalia. Neil Gorsuch was their man, and Trump delivered.
The
narrowness and hypocrisy of the Christian right upsets me, as I’m
myself a Christian. That my faith has been miserably sideswiped by this
particular eighteen-wheeler is disconcerting; but I sense that their
movement has begun to burn out. Certainly the statistics bear this out.
The religious right is waning, and fewer and fewer young people belong
to any religion at all. The vast majority of my parent’s generation,
the so-called Silent Generation, identified as Christians: 85 percent.
Just over half of Millennials do.
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Source: The Daily Beast
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