Republicans no longer hold an ironclad grip on America’s powerful evangelical vote. God’s faithful are becoming more concerned about issues like global warming and poverty in these uncertain times—and Democrats are reaching out to them. Obama’s religious language is now matched by an increasingly sophisticated and well-funded campaign geared towards religious voters. But will it pay electoral dividends? And if so, would this mean a secular shift in US politics, or the reverse? James Crabtree reports from the new frontier of the pious—Rick Warren’s megachurch in Orange County.
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Having created the “ugly, right-wing nutter evangelical”, it is not too difficult to find signs of moderate, “liberal” life among evangelicals. Evangelicals have always articulated a variety of messages and there are ongoing debates over various issues.
Once it is understood that evangelicalism covers a very broad range of attitudes, theologies and values, there’s nothing too remarkable that some evangelicals may find Obama attractive. Considering that some 40% of Americans claim to be born again, it’s only logical that all political parties will attempt to build common ground with this constitutency.
Some other things to bear in mind:
1. Rick Warren has for a long time opened up his platform to all kinds of people of different beliefs as part of his ’seeker sensitive’ philosophy.
2. Jim Wallis has always been on the fringes of evangelicalism, sometimes exiting it altogether. Last time he exited to follow liberation theology/marxism and then came back to orthodoxy.
3. Bill Clinton also claims to have had a born again experience - but it didn’t help him. Jimmy Carter is card-carrying evangelical, but his policies didn’t cut much ice with evangelicals either.
A related point? I note that Sarah Palin is characterised this month as being against abortion “even in the case of rape or incest”. The implication is that this is extremist or perverse. But the objection to abortion is most commonly that it is wrong in principle, a principle that still controls however inconvenient it may be in particular cases. Take something that is more widely agreed to be wrong in principle - torture. Would it be regarded as extremist to be against torture “even in cases where the victim possesses information that could save innocent lives”?
All of the so called debate about god and whose brand of religiosity is the best in the USA is so boring and fake and entirely predictable—full of sound and fury and signifying absolutely nothing except the strutting self-imporatance of all of the benighted players.
Amd most, if not all that is promoted by the “right” is pure dark-minded psychosis. Sex paranoid puritanism dramatised all over the planet. The stench of fake institutional “holiness” that wouldnt have a clue as to what to do with its penis, and that finds all “sin” in peoples under wear.
What is commonly recognized and defended as religion in todays world is only the most superficial and factional and often dim-minded and perverse expression of ancient national and tribal cultism.
In an age of worldwide political and cultural interdependence, of super-techology and the atomic bomb, and of the quantum sciences inititated by intellectual geniuses such as Einstein, the people must not fail to be equipped with a true, practical, supremely intelligent, universal, and full esoteric understanding and practice of Spiritual religion. To remain in the embrace of the archaic, myth-laden, exoteric, divisive religions of the past is, in effect, to be bereft of Religion in this time and place.
ALL of the god and gods of man are, whether male or female in their descriptive gender, merely and entirely the personal and collective tribal, and entirely dualistic myths of the godless ego — whether individual or collective.