The Christian Right Is in Decline, and It's Taking America With It

[Zorro]

The presidency of George W. Bush may have been the high point of the modern Christian right’s influence in America. White evangelicals were the largest religious faction in the country. “They had a president who claimed to be one of their own, he had a testimony, talked in evangelical terms,” said Robert P. Jones, chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute and author of the 2016 book “The End of White Christian America.”

Back then, much of the public sided with the religious right on the key culture war issue of gay marriage. “In 2004, if you had said, ‘We’re the majority, we oppose gay rights, we oppose marriage equality, and the majority of Americans is with us,’ that would have been true,” Jones told me. Youthful megachurches were thriving. It was common for conservatives to gloat that they were going to outbreed the left.

Activists imagined a glorious future. “Home-schoolers will be inordinately represented in the highest levels of leadership and power in the next generation,” Ned Ryun, a former Bush speechwriter, said at a 2005 Christian home-schooling convention. Ryun was the director of a group called Generation Joshua, which worked to get home-schooled kids into politics. The name came from the Old Testament. Moses had led the chosen people out of exile, but it was his successor, Joshua, who conquered the Holy Land.

But the evangelicals who thought they were about to take over America were destined for disappointment. On Thursday, P.R.R.I. released startling new polling data showing just how much ground the religious right has lost. P.R.R.I.’s 2020 Census of American Religion, based on a survey of nearly half a million people, shows a precipitous decline in the share of the population identifying as white evangelical, from 23 percent in 2006 to 14.5 percent last year. (As a category, “white evangelicals” isn’t a perfect proxy for the religious right, but the overlap is substantial.) In 2020, as in every year since 2013, the largest religious group in the United States was the religiously unaffiliated.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/09/opinion/religious-right-america.html

[lagomorph777]

1. Basically good news, but they are replacing bibles with guns.

So there's that...

[orwell]

2. What does the big "guy" in the chair in the sky say?

You know...the one who bets on sports teams, rains money on the chosen, and hurls thunderbolts at the non-believers...

[Escurumbele]

3. All I can say is GOOD! it is about time that people wake up and stop fantasizing about the man in

the sky that no one has ever seen.

Enough with cults, people must be educated to stop believing in ghosts, although cults also idolize 1/2 living people like the buffoon.

[Missn-Hitch]

4. As the revered analyst and therapist Dr. Tobias Funke once quipped,

"That is glorious news!"

[ToxMarz]

5. And for all their reverence of home schooling

These are the same people that bitched the loudest about the damage being done to kids by not being in school and being home schooled during covid. Just to be contrarian and support Trumps failed presidency.

[Martin Eden]

6. White Evangelicals are their own worst enemy

Reasonable people see their bigotry, their hypocrisy, and their eager embrace of the falsehoods from the extreme right -- and want no part of it or them.

Especially their embrace of The Former Guy -- egregiously unfit mentally and morally for any position of public trust or authority.

The religious right and the Republican Party have anchored themselves to this treasonous con man.

May that anchor drag them all down to political oblivion.

[P-Nutt]

7. Facts Always Win Out Over Fiction

Sometimes, it takes a while, but no matter what kind of spin that you put on facts, they remain facts. Those hiding behind a buy-bull, will eventually be covered in it's poo.

[NEOBuckeye]

8. Fuck The Christo-Fascists

The country will long outlive them.

[Missn-Hitch]

9. I admire your optimism. I think it's going to get messy. Cheers!

[Zorro]

10. The concluding paragraph raises the author's serious concern

"I was frightened by the religious right in its triumphant phase. But it turns out that the movement is just as dangerous in decline. Maybe more so. It didn’t take long for the cocky optimism of Generation Joshua to give way to the nihilism of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists. If they can’t own the country, they’re ready to defile it."

[czarjak]

11. No less than the Abusive Boyfriend Syndrome?

[thucythucy]

12. Back in 2000 I read an article that said

leaders of the religious right were in despair after eight years of President Clinton because they were anticipating four years at least under a Gore administration.

Clinton had shut down much of the "faith based initiatives" funding by the federal government under Reagan and Bush I.

Bush II re-opened the spigot, giving the evangelical politicians a new lease on life, funneling more millions of tax payer dollars into their coffers.

This is perhaps at least a partial explanation on why those folks are so anti-Democratic. Democrats tend to derail their federal taxpayer subsidized gravy train.

Just one more reason why Bush II was an unmitigated disaster.

[BigmanPigman]

13. Catholic Church goers are also dwindling in numbers.

Such a shame.

[BComplex]

14. The baptists are the majority of the "evangelicals". And they are definitely a cult.

And rightwing extremists from the pulpit on down.

[BigmanPigman]

16. When I was reading encyclopedias to prepare

for a teaching exam I learned that the Catholic Church was considered a cult too. I have the feeling that a lot of the popular religions lean towards cult-like behaviors.

[vercetti2021]

15. Good!

Organized religion needs to die. And in a hurry. This current gen and the next are more open minded about science and fiction. A book written by man shouldn't be someone's guideline on how to live. People should form their own way of doing good for others on their own. Sadly they can't. At least those with a lower IQ can't