Mixing Christianity and politics is killing the church

[applegrove]

Mixing Christianity and politics is killing the church

By Regina Nippert at the Hill

http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/religious-rights/243397-mixing-christianity-and-politics-is-killing-the-church

"SNIP...............

Now that pastors are protected from the law of the land, who will protect Christians from legislators misrepresenting their beliefs in order to gather political capital?
In the early 1970’s, about the time I left our church youth group to head off to college, the Moral Majority was awakening, galvanizing conservative voters and using them to reverse the social reforms of the Great Society.

At the same time, church attendance began its slow but steady decline.

With each election, the Religious Right’s impact grew. It convinced the Republican Party to drop support for the Equal Rights Amendment and killed Nixon’s support for quality childcare for working parents.



...............SNIP"

[Yorktown]

1. The Church will wane anyway: higher education does that

+ internet access to voices dissenting from the 'moral majority' in any given corner of the woods.

[xfundy]

2. I've been saying it for years.

But when I first started saying it, I cared. Let 'em keep cranking up the volume. We will know they are Christians by their LOVE.

Ha, ha.

[Act_of_Reparation]

3. This story is getting tiresome.

People desperately want to believe the religious right is ultimately responsible for the decline in religiosity among millennials, but the numbers simply don't support this. The churches reporting the largest downturn in membership are mainstream churches. Do we really think kids are leaving their own churches out of protest against what some other church is doing? Sounds pretty silly to me.

The important thing to remember is the disparity between millennials and previous generations becomes less stark when controlling for certain factors, such as education and social networking. This suggests that something more complicated is at work here, that for an increasingly large segment of the population, organized religion is becoming both less useful and easier to step away from. Taking the religion out of politics -- while an endeavor I support without reservation -- probably won't reverse this trend.

[TreasonousBastard]

4. UUs have been deeply involved in trying to understand this...

and we have come to the obvious conclusion that most churches simply do not give a relevant experience to younger people. We are trying a few ideas and will see how it goes.

FWIW, we don't get many at Sunday services, but less formal functions and "calls to duty" such as feeding the homeless, demonstrating for bus shelters, cleaning the beaches, etc. get a pretty good turnout.

And, of course, the parents of the millennials dropped out of church years ago, and so don't set an example for churchgoing.

And, finally, churches have been deeply involved in politics since colonial times. While there's a good argument for keeping them out, the first Great Awakening was partly responsible for the Revolution and subsequent ones led anti-slavery and women's rights movements.

[Act_of_Reparation]

6. I brought that up in an other thread.

Christianity has been deeply entwined in American politics since at least the Second Great Awakening in the early 19th century. Anyone who thinks the theocratic inklings of the religious right is a recent or novel phenomena must not have been paying attention in their American history class.

[skepticscott]

5. The church has been mixing Christianity and politics

for how many hundreds of years? Sheesh.

[mr blur]

7. Lucky that you've got the Constitution to prevent such a thing. nt