Deceiving Politics

Republicans are having a hard time with religion. Well not actual Republicans actually. The problem is that the Republican emphasis on religion denies them votes. Some Republicans are making an effort to do something about it.

Since the 1980s, organizations like Focus on the Family, the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition cemented religious conservatives as visible and potent force in the Republican coalition and enforced discipline on social issues such as abortion and gay rights. But now, the religious landscape is changing beneath their feet.

Studies suggest the number of unchurched has doubled in the past two decades and shot up by 25 percent in the last four years. The shift has taken place across the country and across economic classes, most notably among the young; one fifth of adults and one third of Americans under thirty now declare themselves religiously unaffiliated.

The new and expanding group of unchurched voters overwhelmingly support same sex-marriage and legal abortion, and so they gravitate toward the Democratic Party.

“It’s clearly a concern—we have a lot of work to do,” said Gary Marx, executive director of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, which worked to boost turnout among Catholics and evangelical voters.

Well the discipline has been so enforced on me that I have recently quit a number of Republican lists. Here was my parting message to one list:

1. If we don’t get our fiscal house in order there are going to be a lot more abortions from bad economics (1930s).
2. All this abortion talk puts off some voters
3. Americans are 70% against abortion
4. Only 25% want a government solution
5. There is some nuance between those numbers
6. Do you really need government guns to solve the problem?
7. Will government guns solve the problem?
8. Might it not be safer to solve the problem in the private sector?
9. I’m quitting the list because of all this
10. I’m going to help the Democrats and Libertarians. At least they are making progress in ending Prohibition. I blog. I’m going to take as many as I can with me.

Keep up the good work!

And how about that outreach? Brilliant move to go trolling for votes in a declining cohort.
And what do you know? Pat Robertson a very loud voice on the Christian Right and who also favors marijuana legalization had this to say:

What no one expected was the rebuke from televangelist and longtime Christian conservative leader Pat Robertson, dismissing theories of a “young Earth.”

“If you fight science, you are going to lose your children,” Robertson said last week during an appearance on the Christian Broadcast Network, the television empire he founded three decades ago.

Robertson wasn’t directly speaking to Rubio, but the senator and others in his party might heed the advice. Viewed by many voters as anti-science and too conservative on social issues such as gay marriage, the Republican Party is in danger of losing young and less religious voters for years to come.

I always like the dodge some believers use to maintain their beliefs “well God could have made the earth look like it was billions of years old, but he really made it in less than a week. Six thousand years ago.” So. OK. God designed the universe to fool the rubes. So God is a deceiver. Making God the Devil. Clever these Christians. Too clever by half.

Back to the topic at hand. Even Evangelicals are not what they used to be.

There is growing evidence that young evangelicals are simply less interested in politicizing hot-button issues.

“Young evangelicals don’t look at the country as a battlefield, but rather a mission field,” says James Wilcox, a George Mason University political science professor. “They’re are less scared than their forbearers: They see the ‘War on Religion’ narrative as nonsense; they see churches thriving, the outlets they have, and the extent of religious pluralism in this country.”

The new generation sees community activism, rather than electoral politics, as the means for their faith to shape the world, Wilcox argues. They may disagree with liberals about same-sex marriage, but they also believe that states have the right to determine such policies.

That is what I keep telling the old fart Republicans (my cohort). Privatize your issues. (notice that theme in my resignation missive?) Not only is it safer, but you might also get a few more votes if you took your crusades out of politics.

And finally some one gets the big picture. I have been calling Republicans the ‘ “War On…” Party’ for quite some time. Some one else sees it too:

“Put aside this talk of wars,” Rozell says, “Republicans could easily adopt the rhetoric of “rights” and “tolerance” that liberals currently own, to speak to secular types about the value of pluralism and religious conscience.”

Ah. Yes. Religious pluralism. I’d love to see some. For instance I’m still waiting to hear how abortion foes will deal with Orthodox Jews who in some cases consider abortion mandatory to preserve the mental health of the mother. But I get it. With no competent religious authority in America, once you allow that for a religious minority every one who wants an abortion will be claiming it. And there goes your whole crusade. Well it is going anyway. But there is always a chance I misunderstand. Perhaps there is as some woman once said, “Too much money in it.”