This diary is what partly what inspired this post. Consider it part of an occasional series which you can read here and here.
But the real inspiration came at dinner the other evening, and just indulge me for a moment. My Partner, his biological father, his aunt (biodad's sister) and his grandmother (biodad's mother) were all sitting around eating pizza. Conversation was rather innocent. They're trying to get Gram (as they call her) to be a bit more socialble. I kept my mouth shut; those who know me know that I'm not the most social creature in the pantheon and I rather like it that way.
Gram doesn't always want to leave her house, but she believes her late husband is in the home with her. This is where the conversation went downhill.
I generally keep my mouth shut as there's a time and place to pick battles on the things human beings believe (like when Partner says Sylvia Browne is right when everyone with sense knows she's a total and complete fraud) and to me this wasn't one of them. Partner's dad thought otherwise and said "there's no such thing as spirits. That was a demon."
See, Partner's dad, after a long life of issues that included a prison sentence for drug sales and use, is now a Jehovah's Witness. Long story short and ten minutes later (and a crying gram, and then a minisermon about the End Times even though Jehovah's have been saying that crap since they got themselves started), we got off of the topic. Partner can generally hold his own even though I don't think he's actually opened a bible in several years. Case in point, when I moved in, I moved the bookmark that was in Leviticus to Samuel. I don't think he's noticed, because the bookmark is still there. This is important to my point.
As an aside, I don't know what possesses some folks, like Partner's dad, or Glen BeckKK, or former President Dubya, or any number of relatives I can think of (or you can think of) to go from one extreme (drug abuse/alcohol abuse/etc.) to the other (fundamentalist religion) but one thing is certain, they really do retain all of their former psychologies. That's why Glen BecKKK retains his psychotic authoritarian rantings (although let's admit that the crack probably melted his brain), Dubya--well, we're all still recovering from that one, and my relative lost her home to an unscrupulous prosperty gospel church. And so on. I won't try to explain Sarah Palin except that it's pretty well known that she's been mean her entire life, so the nasty faith she's chosen is actually perfect for her.
However we've seen that whenever anyone criticizes BecK, Dubya, or Palin (or anyone else) one retort is "they're a Good Christian." That's one thing they (they, being the Religious Right) toss at us. We're threatened by the aformentioned's "good Christianity." Nevermind the fact that all espouse religious beliefs that border on the ugly.
I want to touch on that a bit. After the argument, dinner broke up and Partner's dad went with into another room to try on shirts. Partner's Aunt and Partner, after agreeing that the Jehovah's are a brainwashing cult (something that's pretty well known to just about everyone), Aunt said "I should join a Bible Study because I really don't know about a lot of this." This is what struck me, and why people like Palin, Beck and Dubya among others can get away with the "Good Christian" label when none of them are even good people by any sane metric, and in another diary, we can unpack the phrase "Good Christian," since it, on many levels, means something completely different to the Religious Right then it does to others.
I posit that a significant portion of people have only a cursory understanding of their faith and this could be dangerous. In fact, unchurched people like my Partner and his aunt are who megachurches, who almost all are associated with various trends within the Christian religious right, love because they're exceptionally easy to manipulate. I also posit that this is deliberate, because the religious right has successfully played the martyred meme and the media won't do any deeper analysis of them. Megachurches actually go out of their way to not appear to be like churches. This is what focus groups have told them. It allows the religious right to package up all sorts of things in a sort of bland nothingness and sell it to a public that doesn't want that old time religion, at least not one that resembles that old time religion overtly. Remember Rick Warren? I'm still disturbed that media outlets described him as an evangelical even liberals could love. Nevermind the fact that the only real difference between he and James Dobson is tone, and it was Rick's church who helped remove a civil right from a portion of California's population, and it was people connected to Rick's church who are probably gleefully awaiting the genocide of gay people in Uganda. But if you look at Saddleback you get a whole lot of pablum and their rightwing agenda is hidden behind dogwhistles and euphamisms.
While we may document these, and many other, disturbing items here in the blogosphere, they tend to go without notice in the wider sphere. Of course, it's certainly true that certain networks outright ignore (or tacitly approve) of the tactics of the Religious Right, but why has no one rebutted the NOM folks for their backers who want the US to be a theocracy? Or Sarah Palin's church, who has terrorized the Mat-Su Valley for years now (and wants to, among other things, burn witches)? And other then on outlets not generally available to the wider population, no one has challenged Beck's view of history, which comes from an author so extreme even the Mormons backed away from him.
Robert Heinlein wrote a cautionary tale about this.
Now, lots of people have lots of opinions about Robert Heinlein. It certainly is true he had some fairly nutty ideas and he went down a fairly right-wing path after being a left-winger for many years. But he didn't share all of their traits. For one thing, he wasn't racist (and publishers seem to miss this when they do the art for his book covers--many of his characters are not white) and he wasn't religious. He had some fun ideas about sex (Lazurus Long becoming his own father notwithstanding.) In fact the religious right, which was beginining to organize in the 1950s, scared him.
He created the character "Nehemiah Scudder." Scudder was a televanglist. Probably affable in person, he eventually becomes president. After that, there are no further elections. Heinlein never actually wrote his story in full--the idea scared him too much. His aftermath is discussed in
Revolt in 2100
When I watch what's going on today, I see that Mr. Heinlein was remarkably prescient, predicting superchurches, a nasty brand of Protestanism, and similar uglies that pervade our society.
It is time for a major pushback. I've been saying for some time now that I accept that religion isn't going the way of the Dodo, no matter how much I may want it to. However, who do I see on my TV whenever the media asks for "the religious view." Until he died, it was Jerry Falwell, or anyone from the former Christian Coalition. Now it's Sarah Palin, or Mike Huckabee (both of whom could be Nehemiah Scudder and I often refer to both of them as such), or Rick Warren, or any number of televangalists. I rarely see any examples of liberal Christianity out there. Then again, I watch very little cable news because of that (and other reasons.)
Why the pushback? Utah (hell, many states) ongoing assult on women. When the Virginia Attorney General can tell universities "We want you to discriminate," there's a reason for that. When something as commonsense as repealing DADT becomes a huge cultural issue because of "the ghey." Where we live in a nation where scientific principles such as evolution are up for debate because "both sides of the issue" need to be heard. No, not every issue has two valid sides. That's the making of idiotland, right there. Or that Muslims are all evil, atheists eat your babies (and it's telling in a nation that has such issues with gays that they'd elect a gay president long before an openly atheist one), everyone needs to be Christian, etc. etc. etc.
I certainly don't fear these people, but we ignore them at our peril. Shine the flashlight. I wish the media would, because the rise of a Nehemiah Scudder would be the end.