It appears to me like the Religious Right is trying to conduct an orderly retreat from the political realm and the culture wars. The new chairman of the Southern Baptist Convention, Russell Moore, has a much different attitude than his predecessor, Richard Land. But even Mr. Land seems to be in retreat:
In an interview, Mr. Land said the Southern Baptist leadership is divided into those who think the culture war is lost; those who are weary and want it over; and those who think they are losing the war but feel victory is still possible. He declined to say where he puts Mr. Moore, but said he counts himself among the latter. “We are like where Britain was in 1940, under heavy attack but still not defeated,” he said.
He might be engaging in some tough Churchillian talk, but he acknowledges that the war is not going well.
Baptists are departing from the religious traditions of their childhood faster than any other Protestant group, according to statistics gathered by Pew Research, an independent polling organization. Adult baptisms within Southern Baptist churches, meanwhile, have slid 20% over the past decade, according to LifeWay Research, a polling firm tied to the Southern Baptist Convention. The firm projects the church’s membership will fall by half to 8.5 million by 2050, returning to the level of the mid-1950s.
Recent polls have found younger evangelicals drifting away from some of the conservative views of their parents and grandparents. A March survey of nearly 1,000 white evangelicals by the Public Religion Research Institute, a nonpartisan polling organization, found half of those under 35 favored same-sex marriage, compared with just 15% of those over 65. The younger evangelicals were more likely to be independents over Republicans, while the opposite was true of their elders.
“The religious right was born on the theology of numerical expansion: the belief that conservative churches grow while liberal ones die. That conceit is gone now,” says David Key, director of Baptist Studies at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology.
This brings to mind Jonathan Chait’s thesis that the conservative movement saw the 2012 election as a now or never contest for all the marbles. They felt like they had one last chance to win the culture war and that, if they lost, the war would be decided against them. And then they lost.
Everything that has happened since then in Washington: the backlash against Republican efforts at accommodation, the ever greater frenzies of protest, the rejection of traditional notions of compromise and attainability — this is what never looks like.
On the surface, it appears like they are fighting as hard as ever, but behind the scenes there are signs of recognition. It’s not only that the leader of the Southern Baptists is arguing for less political engagement, we are seeing the same thing from Pope Francis. I noticed that Pat Robertson opposed the government shutdown.
Some evangelical leaders compare the moment today to the retreat that followed the 1925 Scopes “Monkey trial” over Tennessee’s effort to limit the teaching of evolution in public schools. The trial led to a public backlash against evangelicals.
“Evangelicals felt a sting from the culture after the Scopes trial that they weren’t used to feeling,” says Mark Dever, an ally of Mr. Moore and pastor of the Capitol Hill Baptist Church. “What is happening now with evangelicals is a disabusing of any idea of a simple victory of the right in a fallen world. They realize that is not going to happen.”
It’s interesting that Mr. Dever talks about “the sting” of public disapproval because that was what I was talking about in my piece yesterday On Cake and Political Identity, where I said that Republicanism is no longer respectable in the Mid-Atlantic.
…[Mid-Atlantic Republicans] find it increasingly embarrassing to self-identify as Republican because it has come to mean that you are a religious fanatic or an economic illiterate or a science-denier or a homophobe or a racist or the kind of guy who thinks rape can’t cause pregnancy.
Sixty years ago, Mid-Atlantic Democrats felt the same way about the party’s southern wing, and they spent the next twenty years slowly disentangling their party from its southern anchor. It’s true that this led to a long period of weakness at the national level, but I don’t know any Democrats who regret the divorce. Perhaps Mid-Atlantic Republicans will feel the same way sixty years from now.
In any case, I do think the larger battle is won, but that we are living in an unfortunate period of political turbulence and the death rattle of the conservative movement is somewhat deafening. We’ll get though this and be better for it, but it isn’t going to be pleasant.
It has been my hope that ultra-conservative evangelicals will retreat, in despair of changing society, back to the political quietism that once characterized them. If there are indeed early signs that this process may be getting started, that’s very encouraging news.
Maybe the evangelicals are realizing that political power means the death of religion. I’m not sure why that’s the case but it’s pretty consistent – in a theocracy or even in a situation where a religion s allied to the powers that be (e.g. Franco’s Spain) the population almost always stops believing in the religion. Ayatollah Sistani got it, Pope Francis gets it, and (finally) the US evangelicals are catching on.
“Maybe the evangelicals are realizing that political power means the death of religion.”
I’ve thought about this in recent years. How could anyone with left-leaning or moderate views feel welcomed by Churches run by people with full-on vocal contempt for their beliefs? And how could those Church leaders fail to understand that they are destroying the medium- and long-term growth of their followers? These days, the U.S. Catholic Bishops come most quickly to my mind, and I’m glad the Pope is addressing their destructive hubris, but there have been many viciously abusive charismatics over recent decades as well.
It’s kind of mystifying to me. Are religious leaders’ blithe, heedless actions explained by an evil admixture of will to power concepts and faith in the ultimate victory/miracle?
No, it’s just that many cult members eventually shake off their brain-washing. And all religions are cults.
After the 2012 election results, and now that their recent attempt to shutdown the government and let it go into default, their, “If it takes burning down the village to save it, dadgummit, we’ll do it!” strategy failed, maybe they’ll go back from trying to change the nation all at once, to going back to undermining the United States of America, one state at a time.
NC was the most recent example.
A once blue-ing state, dragged back several decades by one uber-rich thug, and his puppet Governor and state legislature.
These people are Manichean Absolutists, and Authoritarian followers, and those people just DON’T quit!
They reassemble and reprioritize – but they WON’T go away!
They haven’t yet, despite all of the advancements made since “The Enlightenment.”
They want an “En-Darkenment” – a return to The Middle Ages.
Comedy.
I’m smelling a book deal.
The Southern Baptist Convention has been working to leave it’s racist past behind them and there has been some movement on that in the last 2 decades. They elected an African American president recently and I think he is still serving his term. Minority membership has grown substantially in the last 15-20 years.
I suspect this improvement has a fair amount to do with disengaging with the extremist right history of the organization. IMHO, the religious right could not have succeeded decades ago were it not for the racist forces driving it. Sure they decided “states rights” and other such euphemisms were the new issues, but segregation was what they nostalgically longed for.
I’m curious to see if this new inspirational pope will draw new people into the Catholic fold. That could help Dems a bit.
Also, I could be wrong, but I don’t think the pope is telling people to have “less political engagement”. I think he is saying that over-attachment to ideology is not possible for a person with genuine faith. To simplify: politics are an acceptable activity, but prayer comes first. (And recently he made the distinction between praying and merely “saying prayers”.)
By the way, I think it is really interesting that an article focusing on changes of the SBC and political “culture wars” mentions NOTHING about the racist past of the SBC and the recent attempts (albeit small) to recognize the past and change.
But then I don’t think that Murdock publication wants to dig too deep there anyway.
There is anecdotal evidence that some lapsed Catholics are now at least “RC-curious” because of Pope Francis.
The future Republican party can not exist as a regional party, so it must change, if it wants to survive. Southern politicians had clout during the first two centuries, but as Democrats. Since the “Big Switch”, they have had clout due to the Northern and Western Republicans. Now that these geographic areas are rejecting this extremism, Southern Republicans will be more marginalized. Also, one must not forget the Libertarian flair of some of the Western Republicans. However, if Mike Lee is too conservative for Utah, the Libtards will have to change too. In the meantime, we get to watch Molly Ivins words come to life–“You’ve got to dance with them what brung you.” What a spectacle.
Gross simplification ahead: in the Mid-Atlantic an independent is a Republican who doesn’t want to admit it to his peers. In the South an independent is a Democrat who doesn’t want to admit it to his Baptist parents.
Right.
And that’s my point.
Growing up, the doctors, lawyers, and executives were proudly and unapologetically Republican. The professors were the main element of the elite who were Democrats.
Now, the only people who are still unapologetically Republican are the shut-ins who watch FOX all day and the horse farmers who are too rich to understand anything besides the acreage of their land holdings.
The battle to destroy Obamacare and every vestige of American social democracy is an obsession of the libertarians and the fiscal conservatives.
The shutdown, the budget battles, and the battles over the debt limit are all driven by that agenda.
As are all the talk about shrinking the government and drowning it in a bathtub, “letting capitalism be capitalism,” so to speak.
The right wing radicals held the American government and economy hostage, and maybe the world economy, too, for that agenda.
There was nothing in it, ever, for the Christian right.
From the point of view of the Christian right it was all for naught.
And the same is true of all the damage to the conservative and Republican and even tea-bagger brands.
However much, out of coalition politics, the Christians may howl about capitalism, sounding just like the guys from Wall Street, that is not really their prime concern and for many it’s just going along to get along.
The truth is that is the modern conservative movement is an unstable alliance of two kinds of enemy of current, actually existing America, both of them out to make rather than prevent radical change, but the two favoring different radical changes.
The class warriors, plutocracy enabler wing wants to destroy social democracy and drown the regulatory state in its bathtub.
The Christian right wants to replace our fairly secular government and society with the domination of both by the Christian clergy, using the power of the state to undo the sexual revolutions, advance the faith, and enforce their God’s law.
The class warriors and plutocrats have no real sympathy with the aspirations of the Christian right, but are glad to throw them bones now and again – and to give their values lots of lip service – to get the “values voters” to give them in return crucial support at the polls and crucial propaganda cover, hiding or anyway disguising what they are actually up to.
And they made that lack of sympathy abundantly clear in the recent episodes of destabilizing radicalism on the part of the House Republicans.
This fissure within the right, rather than the one between the radicals who supported GOP hostage taking to the bitter end, even urging that they force the country into default, and those who in the end were not willing to push the nation off a cliff, is perhaps in the long run the more important one.
Maybe even this week.
We don’t have a lot of time to get through this. I hope whoever is the Democratic nominee in 2016 will be talking very seriously about climate change and the overwhelming need to take dramatic action to move the country (and the world) towards sustainability.
The Christians current fail started with their inability to confront the evil of Westboro. The Christian community basically throw their hands up in the air as Westboro disrespected dead soldiers and their families.
Westboro exists because of the 1st Amendment and some really good lawyers. It’s an insulated church and they don’t really care about the opinions of other Christians.
Jeebus, now this American Talibaner sees his Christianist Warriors as hanging on by their fingertips as the Goering’s Godless Flyboys devastate Atlanta, er, London. They’ve never had so many lunatics in control of state gub’mints all over the country, brag about their mssive “farm team” of elected Christianists, their Repub House caucus sings Amazing Grace as a policy proposal, and their turn-out in 2004 gave us a far rightwing Supreme Court sympathetic to most Taliban scripture. Their Radical Repub House churns out new ammo in their religion-based War on Wimmen(tm) every week and many of these initiatives wind up being adopted in Repub Redland. Anyway, it’s hard to see much strength in the Battle of Britain analogy. And I wonder who Mormon Mitt was in this analogy if he was their “last hope”?
I’d say we’re still locked in a titanic struggle with the Christianist Talibaners, and that the situation is more akin to the Russian front in WWII, with the Talibaners as the Hitlerites, contra Mr Land. Since this Talibaner likes WWII images, perhaps he should see this as the Wehrmacht’s final drive on Moscow in 1941, if one wanted to be optimistic as a progressive haha. The Wehrmacht, of course, advanced close enough see the spires of the Kremlin before being driven back…
I have to wonder when this movement would ever be “satisfied”. They arose largely in response to Roe, decided in 1973. They have now succeeded in turning Roe into an empty letter across vast stretches of Traditional America, with so many state (and even federal) burdens on the right that only the elite ladies have reproductive choice in Redland. Abortion “rights” are basically not protected by the courts. Talibaners have largely succeeded in their chief objective, in other words.
They have now opened an entire new front on birth control of all things, and don’t think that battle has been won or isn’t now raging—the “conservative” courts will be getting into the act on the side of the aggrieved religious employers and many Repub controlled legislatures are introducing new restrictions. This will also get to the “conservative” controlled Supreme Court.
Things admittedly have not gone so well on the Gay-Hatin’ front which the Taliban began stoking in 2004. You can’t win ’em all, Talibaners, but losing a battle is not losing the war. And in any event all the victories on this front have been fought in the Blueland battlefields, with Redland as impregnable as ever.
It would be great to think that the Baptists’ decision to stick their noses into everyone else’s bedrooms would end up alienating their children, weaken Talibanism and result in profound disgust with their aggressive religiosity in the minds of their (non-Taliban) neighbors and compatriots. And it would be great if their awful movement of braindead science illiteracy were becoming spiritually and economically exhausted. But it took along time to push back the Hitlerites in Mother Russia and the result was a close run thing that generated massive human damage. I have to wonder if “victory” over the Religious Right will only be clear in hindsight, as the wreckage of their culture war is surveyed.
That’s very interesting. It looks like the 1978 coup aimed to elect Ronald Reagan has finally run its course in the leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention after having shoved out major universities an a third of its congregations in the 1980s, and now after loss in new, young membership in the remaining two-thirds that stayed with them. That reading the Bible every Sunday, doing Bible Study during the weeks, and having to listen to politicized preachers on Sunday creates some cognitive dissonance after a while. Especially when the proteges of Jerry Falwell and Liberty University keep dissing your black friends. Or your gay friends. Or your Democratic friends. Especially when you notice that the loudest voices in the church speak for money and without compassion.
This means that even in the South you are going to start to see a shift away from the craziness of the past three decades.
The flip of the Southern Baptist Convention from wild support of Jimmy Carter to vicious denouncement of him occurred with a political coup int the Southern Baptist Convention in 1978. And it took maybe 15 until that was consolidated. It will be interesting to see how quickly this realignment occurs. And what Baptist politicized institutions get slowly delegitimized. And what begins to happen in all those rural Southern Baptist churches across America.
Speaking as a former Southern Baptist who lived through the conservative upheaval in the SBC during the 70’s and early 80’s, I have to say that I find a lot of these reversals and swipes at moderation quite remarkable. Unless one lived through the events, it is difficult to comprehend or overstate the conservative death-grip that took hold of the denomination during that time. For years people left in droves, myself included, until the only thing left was a structure of far-right religious and political ideologues and zealots; all marching in lock-step to the authoritarian leadership. To be honest, the experience irreversibly hardened my view toward evangelical Christianity, a view which I maintain to this day.
I find it heartening, though, as there are a lot of very good people within the SBC who are still deeply committed to their religion. I can only hope that this trend continues and that things can finally come full circle, where the true tenets of their professed faith can, once again, be practiced in such a manner that they might unify instead of divide.
The amazing thing about that “marching in lock-step to the authoritarian leadership” is how contrary to Baptist congregational doctrine that is. It was almost like a Baptist papacy, or at least a council of elders or a presbytery.
My mom, who grew up in a Baptist church but was a Methodist all of her married life, was amazed at what was happening as were bunches of her local (SC) Baptist acquaintances and friends.
The Baptists in my personal network deserve better than what they’ve been getting from the clergy in the last three decades. Some of the most unreligious of them growing up have turned into GOP-religious robots. And a few of them have effectively ex-communicated their “apostate” friend to keep themselves pure.
It’s also interesting to consider that the 1978 coup you mention was part of the general right wing movement that had been talked about starting with Goldwater’s landslide defeat but didn’t really kick into gear until the creation of the Heritage Foundation in 1975. That was the point when there began to be informal coordination of all of the various elements of what became the conservative movement.
That conservative movement was, as most conservative movements are, the unholy alliance between those who bankrolled (the very rich, wanting policies that would make them richer) and those who provided the votes (the average citizens, upset at recent changes and fearful of future changes – usually changes in terms of race, gender, ethnicity, etc). In the 1970s the fundamentalists, who had until then been sitting on the political sidelines, were egged on by overpaid leaders (think Jerry Falwell) to elect candidates who in word were supportive of their so-called “traditional values” but in practice focused mostly on making the rich even richer.
One key aspect of this was the bankrolling – people like Falwell got most of their money from the rich donors, not the rank-and-file, because he was basically a GOP vote generation machine. Those $10 million big box churches don’t get built by themselves – Ted Haggard went in 10 short years from a small downtown ministry that focused on lower income people to a massive church complex in north Colorado Springs and the contributions from his “flock” couldn’t have paid for even a small part of that.
And that ongoing bankrolling has been why it’s been so hard for these organizations to break free from the conservative movement. Over the past 10 years a number of evangelical groups have tried to break the movement away from the climate change denialists, but have failed every time. There is no logical reason for evangelicals to deny climate change – except that the oil companies send so much money to people like Ralph Reed that climate change denial is now an important movement tenet.
So when I see the SBC start to break away from the more rabid elements in their group two thoughts come to mind. First, if the people who bankroll the SBC don’t like this change then the SBC will quickly be reduced to irrelevance on the right. Second, and OTOH, perhaps this is part of a movement amongst some of the right wing bankrollers to shift the movement towards moderation, given the recent tea party disasters.
It will be interesting to watch what happens.
Credit the Powell memo for focusing the GOP on religious leaders.
1971. Was in the first draft of my comment but edited it out.
At this time, mid 70’s and 80’s the mainline Protestant churches were a couple decades in the forefront, coming off the Civil Rights movement and anti War movements they were taking up ordination of women, inclusive language and merging branches of the denominations that had split a century previous over slavery. The context of the Southern Baptist leadership’s stance was women seeking ordination and functioning as pastors in congregations, for example. The Southern Baptists had split off over slavery.
I’m curious. In his campaign ads does Christie mention that he’s a Republican? Does he try to link himself to any other Republican, living or dead?
Nope.
Great ads, he’s running. Some of the best I’ve ever seen. But not acknowledgement that he’s a Republican. Key is “compromise is not a dirty word.”
It’s infuriating that so many people are so easily taken in by that kind of BS.