The New Exodus from Oppression

October 23 2006
Counterbias.com
MEL SEESHOLTZ
 

On October 6, 2006 The New York Times featured an article titled “Evangelicals Fear the Loss of Their Teenagers.” The opening sentence said it all: “Despite their packed megachurches, their political clout and their increasing visibility on the national stage, evangelical Christian leaders are warning one another that their teenagers are abandoning the faith in droves.”

Life – especially for a teenager – should be celebratory, not filled with the doom and gloom, fire and brimstone evangelicals love to rain down on everyone, including their own kids. As the muse Serendipity said in the 1999 film Dogma, some Christians – especially bible-thumping, everything-is-a-sin, we’re-right-all-others-are-wrong evangelical Christians – don’t celebrate spirituality, “they mourn it.” And rightfully so, since they’ve killed it with their concocted anti-human dour dogma.

So what did the evangelical elders blame for the teens’ mass exodus?

Certainly not themselves or their message of intolerance, hate and bigotry:

I want you to just let a wave of intolerance wash over you. I want you to let a wave of hatred wash over you. Yes, hate is good...Our goal is a Christian nation. We have a Biblical duty, we are called by God, to conquer this country. We don’t want equal time. We don’t want pluralism.

– Randall Terry, currently a Republican candidate for the Florida state senate

Certainly not their own hysterical preaching that everyone who disagrees with their extremist agenda is innately evil and the cause of all the world’s evils:

The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.

– Pat Robertson

I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way – all of them who have tried to secularize America – I point the finger in their face and say “you helped this happen. … [God allowed] the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve.”

– Jerry Falwell on the cause of September 11, 2001

Certainly not the preposterous anti-knowledge, pro-ignorance claims made by prominent leaders of the evangelical Christian Right:

The Bible is the inerrant...word of the living God. It is absolutely infallible, without error in all matters pertaining to faith and practice, as well as in areas such as geography, science, history, etc. [italics added]

– Jerry Falwell

They blamed “a pervasive culture of cynicism about religion, and the casual ‘hooking up’ approach to sex so pervasive on MTV, on Web sites for teenagers and in hip-hop, rap and rock music.” Ho-hum. How predictable.

Perhaps these self-righteous evangelical leaders should take a closer look at themselves and their “morality” that was so well represented by Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart and, of course, murder advocate Pat Robertson.

Randall Balmer, professor of American religious history at the Barnard College of Columbia University, recently asked the poignant question:

Where’s religious right’s outrage now?

 

Where is the “moral majority” when we need it?

 

In 1979, Jerry Falwell formed an organization called Moral Majority, part of a larger initiative to register politically conservative evangelicals who would bring their “Christian values” into the public arena. The mobilization of these voters, who became known as the religious right, contributed, perhaps decisively, to the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Ever since, the leaders of the religious right have been unsparing in their pronouncements on everything from abortion and welfare reform to Mideast policy and homosexuality.

 

But on the defining moral issues of our day, the war in Iraq and the Bush administration’s use of torture against those it has designated as “enemy combatants,” these “voices of morality” are strangely silent.

 

The war in Iraq claims more than a hundred civilian casualties a day and consumes $250 million daily in taxpayers' money – funds that presumably could go toward rebuilding Iraq or New Orleans, hunger relief in Africa, or the revitalization of public education, especially in neighborhoods mired in poverty. And yet, although the Bush administration led us into war under pretext – the supposed al-Qaeda connection and weapons of mass destruction – leaders of the religious right have yet to question the morality of the war in Iraq.

Professor Balmer was correct, mostly. But at least one of the most hate-filled, rabidly Republican, pro-war, anti-gay leaders of the Christian Right – and a Jack Abramoff beneficiary – advocates not only concentration camps (which he euphemistically called “cities of refuge”), but “Rev. Louis Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition is so in favor of torture he told [John] McCain that the senator either supports the torture bill or he can forget about the evangelical Christian vote. I’d like to see an evangelical vote on that one. I don't know how Sheldon defines traditional values, but deliberately inflicting terrible physical pain or stress on someone who is completely helpless strikes me as ... well, torture” [link added].

Syndicated columnist Molly Ivins was right about Lou Sheldon’s immorality, extreme homophobia, advocacy of torture and the hate that underwrites all three.

Like his hero Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, Sheldon doesn’t believe that every American – every human being – deserves civil rights, a concept the vast majority of America’s youth have grown up with and consider “a given.” Perhaps that’s another reason they’re leaving the evangelical fold. They see through the sanctimonious veneer of its leaders to the rotting bigotry beneath.
 

---