Jesus is a political prisoner: An American history of Christianity’s corruption
http://www.salon.com/2015/05/24/jesus_is_a_political_prisoner_an_american_history_of_christianitys_corruption/SUNDAY, MAY 24, 2015 12:00 PM EDT
Nowadays, the Christian right is a fixture of the political world. But it hasn't always been that way
SEAN ILLING
Mike Huckabee, Michele Bachmann (Credit: AP/Danny Johnston/Reuters/Jonathan Ernst/Wikimedia/Photo montage by Salon)
According to the Pew Research Center, the Christian share of the population has declined in recent years from 78.4 percent to 70.6 percent. At the same time, the number of Americans identifying as religiously unaffiliated – including atheists and agnostics – has increased from 16.1 percent to 22.8 percent. The study attributes the changing religious landscape largely to millennials, who attend church far less than previous generations. But the trend is noticeable among older demographics as well. So what are to we make of these findings?
They should be seen, in part, as an inevitable result of the politicization of Christianity. Politics and religion have always made uneasy bedfellows, but there was a definitive shift in America’s political and religious culture in the 1940s that set Christianity on its current course. As historian Kevin Kruse notes in a recent essay, it was during this period that Christian America was co-opted by corporate America. Following the Great Depression, Big Business had something of an image problem, and needed rebranding. Also problematic was FDR’s New Deal, which was indispensable to the middle class but anathema to corporate interests.
Industrialists realized, Kruse writes, that, “As men of God, ministers could voice the same conservative complaints as business leaders, but without any suspicion that they were motivated by self-interest.” Kruse goes on to explain how religious authorities were recruited by business leaders: “It was a watershed moment – the beginning of a movement that would advance over the 1940s and early 1950s a new blend of conservative religion, economics, and politics that one observer aptly anointed Christian libertarianism.” Under the guise of this ideology, American clergy began to demonize the state: individualism was exalted; secularism was synonymous with socialism; and collectivism became the preferred boogeyman of businessmen and Christians. In short, capitalists purchased the pulpits of preachers, who equated economic freedom with spiritual salvation, God with limited government.
This alliance paved the way for the prosperity gospel, a preposterous doctrine according to which godliness and wealth are one and the same. Although the prosperity gospel emerged in the late 1940s as an independent Pentecostal movement, it aligned perfectly with the free market theology of Christian libertarianism.
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Not only here in the US, where's it's become much more blatant, but in other countries as well. Take the recent Irish Republic popular referendum on marriage equality...
I think you are correct about the public's growing distrust of some of the religious intrusion into politics.
Gotta love the Irish.
Great time with mucho rain, rain, rain. Got one afternoon in on the beach, though and got into the Gulf surf first time in 40 years. (We beach camped here when I was a kid.)
Loved to see the Irish vote. Good heads up for the Irish-American electorate here, I think. Times are changing.
And glad you got out before the deluge.
Politicization of Christianity is not a modern phenomenon. I don't know where Illing was when they were teaching the Second Great Awakening in his American History class, but I surmise he was sick, stoned, not paying any fucking attention, or perhaps some combination of the three.
Illing neglects over a hundred years of populist Christianity in the Southern and Midwestern United States and then uniformly fails to connect the rise of the modern Christian Right and concurrent decline of liberal Christianity to the Southern Strategy.
Nicely done.
