I take a kind of grim satisfaction in this:
It is not as though [Christian conservatives] did not put up a fight; they went all out as never before: The Rev. Billy Graham dropped any pretense of nonpartisanship and all but endorsed Mitt Romney for president. Roman Catholic bishops denounced President Obama’s policies as a threat to life, religious liberty and the traditional nuclear family. Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition distributed more voter guides in churches and contacted more homes by mail and phone than ever before.
“Millions of American evangelicals are absolutely shocked by not just the presidential election, but by the entire avalanche of results that came in,” R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, in Louisville, Ky., said in an interview. “It’s not that our message — we think abortion is wrong, we think same-sex marriage is wrong — didn’t get out. It did get out.
“It’s that the entire moral landscape has changed,” he said. “An increasingly secularized America understands our positions, and has rejected them.”
I honestly would not mind that we have some very traditional-minded religious people in this country if they didn’t try to take their beliefs and translate them into political power. That bothers me. A lot. It particularly bothers me because the way in which they have attained power is to ally themselves with corporate fat cats. And that is the kind of money-grubbing that caused Jesus to go ballistic in the Temple. It’s just ugly. It gives a bad name to politics, but also to Christianity and religion.
