The War On Religion, Political Research Associates

THE WAR ON RELIGION--Pra 12-27-14, 837 words excerpted by al bratton, al's liberal blog. re-posted 12-27-14 by Al bratton ms liberal secularist. 

"Since the 1970s, conservative evangelical Christians have adopted the earlier Catholic narrative that there is a determined secularist campaign to destroy religion and replace it with “humanism.”83 Francis Schaeffer, Tim and Beverly LaHaye, Jerry Falwell, and Adrian Rogers (the leader of the Southern Baptist Convention following the conservative ‘coup’ of 1979), and many others drew on what historian Richard Hofstadter would call “paranoid” themes in right-wing American anticommunism, dislocations in traditional life brought on by post-1960s flights to the suburbs,84 and changes wrought by the civil rights, women’s, and gay liberation movements to depict an overall war on religion itself. Secularism has become the new socialism85—though in the racist way President Obama is depicted in some of this literature, it seems the themes are reunited".

"To some, this battle is literally the battle between God and Satan. Tim LaHaye, for example, demands that Christians “resist the devil and… put on the whole armor of God.”86Beverly LaHaye wrote in 1984 that secularists are “priests of religious humanism and are evangelizing our children for Satan.”87 Donald Wildmon’s outrageous tome Speechless is of the same ilk. These formulations seem unlikely to appeal to more moderate Christians, and on the contrary are likely to turn them off. Yet they have a strong appeal among evangelicals. In a 1990 survey reported by Sarah Barringer Gordon, more than 90 percent of those who self-identified as evangelicals (not just conservative evangelicals but evangelicals in general) agreed with the statement that “Christian values are under serious attack in the United States today.”88

This rhetoric, even in its extreme form, is not simply propaganda but reflects a sincere sense, justified by opinion polls, that show the country moving away from traditional religion89—that an old Christian order is waning. Rather than ascribe this trend to socioeconomic, scientific, psychological, or other factors, the Christian Right narrative9looks for an enemy: Satan, socialism, communism, liberals, the War on Christmas, secularists, Barack Hussein Obama, feminists, homosexuals, evolution, abortionists, socialists, humanists—or, best, a hodgepodge of all of the above. “Religious liberty” rhetoric is part of this narrative. Christianity is not losing its power in this narrative; someone is taking it away.

Christianity is still the dominant religion in America, but its power is changing. One recurring theme in the right-wing literature is the sense of a “coming storm,” to quote from an antimarriage equality commercial by the National Organization for Marriage.91 Like the red menace, the secularist danger is imminently looming. The metaphors are appropriately biblical: soon there will be a flood of litigation, a firestorm of controversy. Indeed, these apocalyptic pronouncements resonate closely with the millennialism that one finds in conservative evangelicalism generally and Christian Reconstructionism/pre-millennialism specifically. The “coming storm” and the End Times are not distant from one another.

The theme of the “war on religion” also intersects with the conservatives’ blend of fact and falsehood in their “religious liberty” arguments as discussed in the previous section. For instance, Roman Catholic legal theorist Thomas Berg writes that “if sexual-orientation discrimination should be treated in all respects like racial discrimination— as many gay-rights advocates argue—then the precedent of withdrawing federal tax-exempt status from all racially discriminatory charities, upheld in Bob Jones University v. United States, would call for withdrawal from all schools and social service organizations that disfavor same-sex relationships.”92 Note the elisions here: from “many gay-rights advocates argue” to a position that no court has ever taken, from withdrawing tax-exempt status to overall “withdrawal,” from a racist policy to “disfavor.” The “coming storm,” is highly unlikely to come in this way.

In describing the war on religion, conservative “religious liberty” discourse taps into the martyr narrative found in Christian history.

In more intellectual circles, the “war on religion” is attributed to a false distinction liberals supposedly make between freedom of conscience, worship, or belief on the one hand and the free exercise of religion on the other.93 According to this narrative, as described in such books as Stephen Carter’s The Culture of Disbelief, liberals misunderstand religion and are seeking to circumscribe how religion can be exercised. What Carter called the privatization of religion has now become a trope in conservative “religious liberty” discourse: that the “war on Christianity” in part results from an improper circumscription of religious liberty to simply what one believes in private, or within the church walls on Sunday, rather than what one practices in all aspects of life.94 It is this theory that allows conservative “religious liberty” advocates to insist that their employment decisions and commercial life are also the “free exercise of religion,” and to project a straw man secularist who believes that religion should only happen on Sundays. Of course, this “misconception” is not actually present in progressive thought on this subject; rather, the claim is that one’s free exercise of religion is one of many civil rights, and that it may not necessarily trample on the rights of another. read more at PRA:http://www.politicalresearch.org/category/blog/

link: http://abrattsliberaltupeloms.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-war-on-religion-pra.html