This could be just as wrong as the next explanation, but this one's mine and I'm stickin' with it:
Religion. Superstition. Nonfalsifiable Hypothesis. Folk wisdom. SWAG.
Whatever you call it, religion is an exercise in explaining the currently unexplainable, and always has been. It provides a framework for making value judgments of all kinds, extrapolating from what is known to the lay experience of the society or part of society trying to parse out what the Cosmos has in store for them.
Religion is by its very nature an anthropocentric, even egocentric, attempt to evaluate one's self, fate, place, role in the universe, and that of other people and creatures and ideas about values after that.
And despite exertions to the contrary, religion most certainly is subject to empirical testing, validation and rejection -- because human beings have been test-driving, modifying and trading in belief systems for as long as there have been human beings...and perhaps for some time before that, too.
So, what are the tests? What are the challenges facing a given religion or belief system that must be overcome, if it is to persist?
1. Contact with Reality. - A religion cannot successfully challenge what believers and unbelievers alike understand to be the actual mechanics of the cosmos, and how it got to be the way it is. As I like to say in arguments on the topic: God did not create a deliberately misleading universe. If the cosmos looks 13.7 billion years old, it probably is. If there is massively redundant evidence that there dinosaurs once ruled the Earth, but they were finished off by an asteroid impact, as opposed to a flood, well, that's probably the way it happened, too.
2. Lay Understanding of Same. - Big Bang theory and the KT Event and the existence of dark matter do not affect the lives of most people. What does impact their lives are concepts such as electricity and genetics and physics. There are people alive thanks to medicine that cannot exist, if the underlying principles behind it are contraindicated by reactionary readings of Christian scriptures, and some of those people who are alive thanks to science are Christians. In fact, quite a few of them. After all, unless the principles of heredity and selection are in play, there's quite a lot of vaccines and antibiotics that didn't really work, and don't work now. And yet-- where's polio? Whooping cough? Measles?
3. Fear of Ridicule. - This goes two ways. One, beliefs that cannot be easily offset by communication of disproof to others will flourish, then persist. Two, beliefs that can be easily offset will be challenged, and via some discreditation process either amend their errors, retreat a step or two from claiming universual and comprehensive authority, or be discarded, creating niches for new belief systems to step in. Of course, people react strongly, sometimes violently, when their values are tested and found wanting. In fact, they get angry just about every time. Then they feel ridiculous and either amend their ways, find new ones, or go without.
4. Social Inertia. - As a rule, every society has a certain inertia, which takes two paths -- a desire not to change, and a resignation that certain things will never change, but oh! If only it were so! Threatened faiths seek to capitalize on social inertia, creating an epistemological cartel to shut out and illegitimize innovation and criticism as heresy, treason, thoughtcrime, yada yada. Innovators seek the opposite, decrying in various ways that God (or international labor, or FSM's) judgment is nigh and right soon. These are the prophets on the hillside, the rabbis from the sticks, the epileptic in his cave. Occasionally, one of them gets hits the right note and the right time, and the local sociological milieu takes the turn its been ready for, but has not for want of a guide.
5. The Economics of Belief. So, what makes a society or part of same ready for a sea change in beliefs? Thanks for asking: In my observation, it's contact with new ideas, borne on the backs of new modes of economic activity -- trade, crafts, sciences, ideas -- coming into contact with the old, sometimes in constructive, sometimes in desructive fashions. These ideas percolate up over time, or are imports from other lands, other cultures, or some of both. However, it is no accident that every major religion on the books, or change in same, has arisen in a place and time soon if not immediately after a significant conflict or merging of cultures, or the emergence of a new mode of economics or a transformative technology, or some of all the above.
Where lay change occurs, ecclesiastical change is never far behind.
6. The Class of Conscience. What the riff-raff adhere to, and what the richese espouse, are quite often different things. In some societies, practices were deliberately bifurcated, in order to differentiate between rulers and ruled all the more efficiently. Basically, in every society some benefit from orthodoxy, others from innovation, and there is little mistaking who is whom, for those who rule are jealous creatures and they do not like a lot of company. And their ideas do not like a lot of gate-crashers, either.
This applies in politics as well as in religion, and explains why in Rome the Populares never embraced the mob they advocated, and instead became in time indistinguishable from the Optimates, the more conservative faction. But I'm sure there's no metaphor for current-day Democratic leaders and Republicans. I mean, that would be like calling for class warfare or something.
7. Rote Ritual, or Living Word? For many, faith is a liturgy, a self-reinforcing habituation of attendance and practice and gesture and there is no major religion on the planet that does not have a strong prana-bindu thread running through it, a merging of physical posture or placement with attainment of an appropriate state of receptivity and submission, with lowered limbs, hands, gestures extended forward, head inclined forward...or assertion and acclamation, with tall standing, and the center of gravity raised high with upraised arms and faces, and loud exclamation, chanting or singing of psalms. To assume submissive stance is to become more submissive. To assume a proud posture is to become more proud. Try it out.
But is this enough? Most people do not have the time or self-discipline or support structure to spend their days practicing their faith's version of mudras, the postures of meditation and prayer. So if their faith of choice has declined to nothing more than a calisthenics, that might qualify as a faith on the ropes, both individually and globally.
8. New Revelations about Reality. Consider what challenges have faced Christianity, which we'll pick on since I'm actually Christian and I'm both egotistical and tough like that, in the past several centuries. Let's see...the Patrimony of St. Peter is repudiated. Copernicus comes up with some outrageous notion that the Sun is the center of the Universe, not the Earth, then that troublemaker Galileo up and builds a telescope based on Dutch lenscrafting and finds that there are moons orbiting Jupiter, which justs open a big ole can of worms. So first some goob named Luther (or was it John Huss?) challenges the authority of Holy Mother Church, then some geeks get a notion to challenge the Curiae on what is and is not acceptable teaching to the faithful.
Then the Thirty Years' War comes along, and it becomes apparent that the politicization of faith is a really, really bad thing because ambitious kings and would-be kings aren't beyond killing millions of fellow Christians in the name of God, if it makes them more powerful. And after that, it becomes possible to see that perhaps, just perhaps, we need to get some separation of church and state going on.
Then Darwin finds finches in the Galapagos. Then Mendel derives a mechanics of heredity. And about the same time, somebody figures out that there were once millions of species alive on Earth that are now all extinct, none of which resemble anything alive in the here and now.
Then the atomic bomb happens. And the Holocaust. And genetic engineering. And women's suffrage. And interracial dating. And people coming out of the closet. And cloning. And artificial intelligence. And nanotech. And the possibility of extraterrestrial civilizations.
That's a lot of change.
The Evolution (heh heh) of the American Christian Right
In the face of this nonstop onslaught, Christianity has either tiptoed back or been shoved back from whole swathes of authority, because in many spheres it has been shown -- as practiced in the past -- to be a serious danger both to the people and to itself.
Which left open the question of how to change practices, or find something new, or abandon religion for another belief or values system, or to fight back, tooth and nail, and let the world burn in Hell before turning its back on God.
Some have chosen the latter. Others have modified Christianity somewhat -- I would submit that both the Church of Latter-Day Saints and the Unification Church qualify as post-Christian doctrines. Recruitment and sequestration of believers is the strong card of both denominations, and this innovation has been adopted...by those who have no truck with either group.
Into the same class I'd toss in the Christian Fundamentalist movement, which is in fact a contemporary of the Enlightenment and has over two centuries of experience fighting a dedicated rearguard action, almost always choosing the wrong battles but fighting fiercely nevertheless, developing in that time a robust persecution culture that eight generations of incremental failure have produced. Increasing isolation, moral and cultural, has been extant for going on two centuries. The disconnect between the Christian right as we call them and everyone else has been developing for centuries. It is not a question of moral turpitude, but of memetic evolution -- they truly might as well be a nation apart. Most Amerians now have more in common with Canadians and Mexicans, than with the American right.
Consider what has -- and has not -- happened to make this possible.
1. Rolling Back Monarchy Was A Mistake. - The American Right, meaning the Christian right, was born out of contact with reality -- starting with the empirically verifiable premise that that monarchy is not God's will, but the will of the people, to have or discard at their pleasure. And it just got better for America and worse for the champions of reaction after that. The dominant tactic of the right has been to stem the ever-rising tide of reality that threatens to swamp its jealously-guarded presumption that the right, and only the right, can possibly be right.
2. If Science Means Progress, Well Eff That. - Challenging the teaching of objective reality to children has been a main plank of the reactionary agenda for centuries, for kids that learn science and the value of individual dissent and the means to develop the capacity to make their own judgments is wrong, if it leads them to judge to do things differently. Clearly, progress requires science. But science threatens belief, so we'll just have to do without progress, then. It is an embrace of ignorance, and an imposition of ignorance on children who would otherwise wish to learn, in order to avoid the risk of change or reform of faith in order to match reality.
3. Smother Us In Love, Them In Hate. - This has had two effects -- a banding-together, a safety-in-numbers herdthink to affirm easily-challenged doctrine by keeping the membership as closely-integrated into the reinforcement structure as possible. You have heard the phrase 'church community'? Well, keeping people either in their homes, at their jobs, or at church is what it's all about. As much as possible, the social life of the movement begins and ends in the sanctuary.
Second is what you love to hate most: the neverending campaign of slander, lies, and ridicule of all that are not of the faith, a heartfelt embracing of the code "Well, you started it, but we're gonna finish it!" justification that extends back two hundred years. By our starting it, the reactionaries mean that had we not up and not read too much into the Thirty Years' War and the killing off of 40% of the population of central Europe, then there'd be no separation of Church and State and we'd all still have kings and perhaps more modern sorts of autocrats, just like the Islamic world enjoys. Gosh darn it, those liberals at the Peace of Westphalia and later on at the Constitutional Convention up and ruined everything. :)
4. Shilling for States Rights, But Only When Some Suffer. - Any time there has been recalcitrance at a change of public policy, the reactionaries have jumped on the bandwagon of obstruction or reversion, and most every time have failed, yet that has not stopped them, anyway. Isolated from an ever-increasing proportion of their countrymen, the reactionaries have mistaken a general tapping of the brakes of social transformation for a sign from God that their time has come again. However, civil rights are here to stay, ditto women's suffrage, slavery and monarchism will never be acceptable in America, ever again, nor the abomination of leaders presuming to speak for God, when they order thousands to their deaths. One of the most recent bad stands was the Terri Schiavo debacle. Never think for a second that the reckless chances taken by the right with law and society in that farce represented a divergence from right-wing procedure. It was of a piece with the Scopes trial, with Jim Crow, with the Dred Scott case. It was a stand taken against the weak and vulnerable, because that is all the extreme right has got. Sometimes, the right wins a round (see the litany of outrage from the past). But they always lose, and steadily, though they've become very good at being a slowly-dying culture.
5. Tax-Farming the Unbelievers In The Name of God. Newer modes of economic activity are virtually closed to the right, for it is impossible to be much more than a mediocre teacher, or doctor, or engineer, or scientist, or programmer, or decisionmaker at any level of responsibility and reject the underlying basis of these activities. Economically speaking, to choose ignorance, even with lots and lots of company, is a dead end. At some point, it will no longer be possible to underwrite the reactionary right without extracting rents from the public treasury.
Which, I believe, is being done lately.
6. The Bipartisan Church of Cynicism. I seriously doubt there is such a thing as a sincere practicioner of any belief system in Washington, save for the Church of Cynicism, which is quite ecumenical in its membership. If pandering to the right makes one ridiculous and lose votes, it is not done. If the opposite is the case, it is always done...until it's no longer profitable. And this, I believe is the calculus of the day; those in power, and wishing to be, even those who are purportedly on the left, cannot from their perspective begin to see how taking on the reactionaries is profitable, even as the reactionaries never, ever stop riduling and attacking them.
Why? Because they've bought into the same belief system through the back door. They know, as their life experiences have taught them, that the reactionary right is an ever-fading phenomenon that's just happened to put together some strong moves lately. However, they fear the right now, the immediate, sudden and terrible sanction that the reactionaries seem capable of bringing to bear on anyone, at any time.
And none among them are motivated to be martyrs, only caretakers, biding their time for an inevitable turnaround that will never come, if they are incapable of pushing forward, for the reactionaries are most certainly pushing time backwards, as hard as they can, desperate with centuries of ingrained fear of extinction, exhultant with two decades of recent success, and an appetite to make the liberals fear for their ideological survival.
7. They Eat and Breathe This Crap, And Like It. It should be noted that in this category, the reactionary right is quite strong; for the reactionaries, their belief system is something that is lived, not practiced, though it is most certainly enforced by social pressure and frequent checkpoints in the lives of the movement membership. To overlook this vitality is to grossly endanger oneself and everything one values, to miss what gets the reactionaries fired up, for it is in fact simple: fear of extinction of their beliefs, fear that competing values will resume their own vitality and crowding-out of the American reaction, and a prayerful desire to kill off American liberalism, once and for all, and save all a grateful world by doing so.
Never for a second forget -- the American right cannot possibly consider Al Qaeda to be Enemy Number One, not while you exist as a liberal, not while one American liberal exists, for they and their forebears have been fighting you and everything you are about since before there was such a thing as the United States of America.
Once you were a rebel, then an abolitionist, then a suffragist, then a socialist, then a Communist, then a card-carrying member of the ACLU, and now you carry water for terrorists.
You and your forebears are all these things, and whatever new challenge appears, you'll be accomplices to those enemies, too. Whatever the enemy of the day, it was paired with hatred of you and everything you are and ever wish to be.
The point being, the reactionaries have always had you in their sights first and foremost, for you are the unvanquished enemy, because you are still here after two hundred years of trying to squeeze you and your children and everything that you stand for back into the Pandora's Box that you came from.
8. Oppose It -- Because Liberals Wish It. Support It -- Because Liberals Don't. And now we are on the verge of many great discoveries, all of them an affront to the American right, not because they are intrinsically heretical or harmful to the right, but because such findings and their implications help you.
Global warming is something everyone profits from having a heads-up about. But its validity requires an acceptance of science, and it's something that environmentalists and liberals want, so there must be something wrong with it.
AIDS could easily kill off two billion people before running its course sometime in the next century. Or it could keep perfusing through the human family tree, mutating to stay one step ahead of treatments, until by the late Third Millennium there is no one without the condition, and much of human energy goes to keeping the current generation alive long enough to raise and maintain the next HIV-positive generation, so they can do the same.
And if there is ever an interruption in the technological basis of that civilization, it's game over for Humanity.
But stopping HIV is something that liberals want, especially (by reactionary superstition) homosexuals, so the right seeks to not only obstruct but destroy active efforts against the plague.
Nuclear weapons are kind of bad news; a nuke-posessing terror cell doesn't especially care if a given major city is trending Dem or Pub in the last several election cycles. Neither do countries that covet nukes, because of the freedom of action that nukes provide regimes that own them, even against great powers that have thousands of similar weapons. If there was a bipartisan issue, surely it would be non-proliferation.
But again, that's something that the peaceniks want, so the champions of reaction are not only against it, but actively handing over sensitive nuclear technology, and given known accomplice regimes of proliferation (China, Pakistan) a pass.
Wrap
And there you have the natural history of American reaction, its origins in the general natural history of religion, and the sources of its vitality and ferocity, its origins two centuries ago as an allergic response to the Age of Reason, and the motivations for the current last-ditch grab for power, and some speculation as to why a lot of Democrats who we think should be doing something about just can't quite make themselves go against the Holy Roller Church, must as they might secretly wish to do so.
Because they are too close to the fire, and therefore the fear, and have simply put lost their nerve to do what the majority of Americans insist of them: That they stand and fight for truth and justice and what is still the American way, no matter how the reactionaries seek to pervert such things in the name of a creed that has long since abandoned any pretence of godliness, which God (I do believe) has long since cancelled any association with whatsoever.