Why does the Religious Right want a Christian Nation so desperately?
I’m not being facetious or flippant when I raise that question. It is a legitimate question. Why the recent push by religious conservatives to grab more and more control over the Federal Government? In the past, the Christian Right has faced a far more inhospitable climate than it does today, and it had far less power to do anything about its situation. So why do their leaders feel the need to suddenly ramrod bills through Congress that eviscerate the 1st Amendment’s establishment clause, the one that mandates a separation of Church and State? Why the ever increasingly overheated rhetoric about activist judges, the homosexual agenda and the perils of evil Islamofascists? Why mount an openly political campaign in the media against the bogeyman of secularism?
I’ll tell you why. It’s because, frankly, they are losing. Not influence or power (which they have a firm grasp on as one of the leading factions of the Republican Party), but something far more important to them, something whose consequences fill them with dread and despair.
They are losing the Future (courtesy of today’s edition of The New York Times):
Despite their packed megachurches, their political clout and their increasing visibility on the national stage, evangelical Christian leaders are warning one another that their teenagers are abandoning the faith in droves.
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That’s right. Apparently faith is no match for the raging hormones of adolescence. And if it’s scaring the crap out of Mommy and Daddy Fundie, it is practically sending the Pastors of their superchurches into full blown Panic Mode:
At an unusual series of leadership meetings in 44 cities this fall, more than 6,000 pastors are hearing dire forecasts from some of the biggest names in the conservative evangelical movement. […]
“I’m looking at the data,” said Ron Luce, who organized the meetings and founded Teen Mania, a 20-year-old youth ministry, “and we’ve become post-Christian America, like post-Christian Europe. We’ve been working as hard as we know how to work — everyone in youth ministry is working hard — but we’re losing.”
The board of the National Association of Evangelicals, an umbrella group representing 60 denominations and dozens of ministries, passed a resolution this year deploring “the epidemic of young people leaving the evangelical church.”
Among the leaders speaking at the meetings are Ted Haggard, president of the evangelical association; the Rev. Jerry Falwell; and nationally known preachers like Jack Hayford and Tommy Barnett.
It’s simple, really. Lose the teenagers and they lose members to their churches. Lose members, lose both income and political power. Because no one in the Republican party would care one jot for the concerns of the Religious Right if it couldn’t deliver millions of the faithful to the polls each election to touch that Diebold screen on behalf of the GOP’s slate of candidates.
So it doesn’t surprise me that the so-called leaders of the Religious Right are pissing themselves in fear about what the teenage members of their flocks might do. These people have reached the high water mark of their political influence on American politics, and they don’t want to give that up. Despite all their rhetoric regarding the Rapture and the afterlife and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, Fundamentalist preachers are far more concerned with their lives in the here and now.
They want the money to keep rolling in. They want the fame and adulation they receive from their parishioners each week to keep washing over them. And above all, they want to continue gaining political power. All of that is threatened if the basis for all that wealth, glory and power is weakened by the youngest of their followers deserting their faith.
And they have good reason to be concerned:
Over and over in interviews, evangelical teenagers said they felt like a tiny, beleaguered minority in their schools and neighborhoods. They said they often felt alone in their struggles to live by their “Biblical values” by avoiding casual sex, risqué music and videos, Internet pornography, alcohol and drugs.
When Eric Soto, 18, transferred from a small charter school to a large public high school in Chicago, he said he was disappointed to find that an extracurricular Bible study attracted only five to eight students. “When we brought food, we thought we could get a better turnout,” he said. They got 12.
Chelsea Dunford, a 17-year old from Canton, Conn., said, “At school I don’t have a lot of friends who are Christians.”
Ms. Dunford spoke late last month as she and her small church youth group were about to join more than 3,400 teenagers in a sports arena at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst for a Christian youth extravaganza and rock concert called Acquire the Fire.
“A lot of my friends are self-proclaimed agnostics or atheists,” said Ms. Dunford, who wears a bracelet with a heart-shaped charm engraved with “tlw,” for “true love waits,” to remind herself of her pledge not to have premarital sex.
She said her friends were more prone to use profanity and party than she was, and added: “It’s scary sometimes. You get made fun of.”
Put aside for a moment the feeling of schadenfreude that many of us may be experiencing when we read of the horrid situations in which these “Christian Youth” find themselves. Much as this may inspire within you the temptation to gloat, don’t. Because any group that feels itself under attack becomes more desperate, and more dangerous. This is especially the case when the group which sees itself as under attack is one based upon a reactionary ideology which does not countenance dissent among its ranks, and which idolizes authoritarian leaders.
Whether true or not, the perception that their power is on the wane will only embolden the Religious Right to press harder to achieve the goal of remaking America into their version of a “Christian Nation.” Should Republicans lose either house of Congress this year we may begin to see this movement, which previously relied upon our traditional political process to obtain power, turn to alternative means to “complete the mission.” My fear is that some of these “Conservative Christians” may decide that violence against “secularists” should be one of those means to that end.
