Why the Christian Right Is Obsessed With the Collapse of Civilization

article-2386882-1B330734000005DC-507_634x720-630x715Source: Alter Net

(In a few words: ” The culture of white conservative Christians is Not the culture of America”.)

Author: Amanda Marcotte

“Most of us are so familiar with the cluster of issues that compel the religious right—opposition to gay marriage and abortion, hostility to the separation of church and state, hostility to modernity—that we don’t often think about the underlying theme holding these disparate obsessions together. It might even be tempting to believe there isn’t a unifying theme, except for the fact that conservatives themselves often allude to it: “civilization collapse.”

Over and over again, right-wingers warn that all the things they hate, from pro-gay Broadway shows to immigration to multiculturalism, are not just signs of an evolving American society, but portend the actual end of it. The Roman Empire is often darkly alluded to, and you get the impression many on the right think Rome burned up and descended into anarchy and darkness. (Not quite.) But really, what all these fantasies of cities burning down and impending war and destruction are expressing is a belief that the culture of white conservative Christians is the culture of America. So it follows that if they aren’t the dominant class in the United States, then America isn’t, in their opinion, really America anymore.

Once you key into this, understanding why certain social changes alarm the religious right becomes simple to see. Hostility to abortion, contraception and gay rights stems directly from a belief that everyone should hold their rigid views on gender roles—women are supposed to be housewives and mothers from a young age and men are supposed to be the heads of their families. School prayer, creationism and claims of a “war on Christmas” stem from a belief that government and society at large should issue constant reminders that their version of Christianity is the “official” culture and religion of America.

It’s hard to underestimate how much of a crisis moment the election of Barack Obama for president was for the religious right because of this. And his re-election, of course, which showed that his presidency was not a fluke. Even before Obama was elected, the possibility that a black man with a “multicultural” background was such a massive confirmation of their worst fear—that they are not, actually, the dominant class in America–that the campaign against Obama became overwhelmed completely by this fear. The media frenzy over the minister in Obama’s church was about racial anxieties, but it was telling that it was his church that was the focal point of the attack. The stories were practically tailor-made to signal to conservative Christians that Obama was not one of them.

Sarah Palin’s campaign as the running mate to John McCain made right-wing fears even more explicit. On the trail, she notoriously described conservative, white, Christian-heavy America with these words: “We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard-working very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation.” McCain’s campaign tried lamely to spin it, but the subtext was text now. The Christian right believes their culture is the only legitimate American culture, and the election of Barack Obama was a major threat to it.

Birtherism, a conspiracy theory movement that posits Obama faked his American citizenship, is easy enough to understand in this light. It’s an expression of the belief that Obama cannot be a legitimate president, because, in white Christian right eyes, they are the only legitimate Americans. So how can someone who isn’t one of them be president?

That’s why the election of Obama has triggered an all-out response from the Christian right. If they seem more enraged and active in recent years, especially with regards to attacks on abortion rights, it’s because they really are afraid they’re losing their grip on American culture and are casting around wildly for a way to regain what they perceive as lost dominance.

Of course, the belief that they ever were the dominant group in America was always an illusion. It was an illusion when Jerry Falwell started the Moral Majority in 1979. The name obviously indicates a belief that white Christian conservatives are the “majority,” but even then, it had a protest-too-much feel to it. While most Americans, then and now, are nominally Christian, most of them do not belong to one of the fundamentalist groups—including the subset of Catholics who are in bed, politically, with fundamentalist Protestants—that make up the religious right. But it was easier for the Christian right to delude themselves into thinking they spoke for the nation in an era when white men who identify as Christian were nearly all the power players in politics and when the percentage of Americans who identified as non-religious was relatively low.

Nowadays, nearly one in four Americans is not even labeled a Christian, and non-religious people are a rapidly growing minority. More importantly, it’s much harder for members of the religious right to ignore evidence that they simply aren’t the representatives of “real” America and that real America is actually quite a diverse and socially liberal place. Contraception use and premarital sex are nearly universal, the pop charts that used to be mostly white and male are sexually and racially diverse, gay people are rapidly approaching equality, and no matter how hard they try, most Americans just don’t think there’s anything offensive about greeting someone with “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.” Oh yeah, and we have a black president who doesn’t seem to be bothered that his wife used to be his mentor.

If you ever want an explanation for why some Republicans have grown downright giddy at the prospect of shutting down the federal government, this helps explain why. It’s not a coincidence that some of the biggest Bible-thumpers in Congress are those who are most supportive of finding some way to shut down the government. If you believe America isn’t really America unless the Christian right runs it, it’s not a short leap to look to destroying the system altogether. “If we can’t have it, no one can,” seems to be the guiding principle behind the push to shut down the federal government. They like to frame their claims that America will collapse if they aren’t in charge as warnings. But really, a better word for what they’re doing is “threats.””

Emphasis Mine

See: http://www.alternet.org/belief/why-christian-right-obsessed-collapse-civilization?akid=11274.123424.uMsmoE&rd=1&src=newsletter936195&t=3

Religious Expressions Are Rooted in Fear-Based Politics

From Psychology Today, Our Humanity Naturally

By  Dave Niose

N.B.: Separation of Church/State is more important than ever.

“Most historians trace the origins of the modern Religious Right to the late 1970s, when a surge of conservative religious political activism resulted in the creation of the Moral Majority. It’s true that Jerry Falwell and others on the Christian Right exploded onto the scene at that time, helping to put Ronald Reagan in the White House in 1980 and never looking back thereafter. But if we really want to trace the historical events that gave rise to the Religious Right, we would be remiss if we did not consider the decade that arguably resulted in more successful anti-secular efforts than any other: the 1950s.

Known for the Red Scare and fear-based politics, the 1950s were extremely anti-secular times. In the midst of the McCarthy era, when outward expressions of patriotism were expected and a mere accusation of communist sympathy could ruin a career, visible religiosity crept into all facets of American public life. The first major assault that decade against Jefferson’s wall of separation came in 1952, with passage of a bill that requires the president to declare a “National Day of Prayer” each year. Occasional days of prayer had been declared previously, but they were relatively rare and never an annual occurrence. With the rise of the Soviet Union as America’s chief rival in the post-war world, however, religion suddenly became an important means of distinguishing between America and the godless communism of the Soviet system. Atomic weaponry was now in the hands of both superpowers, and the role of fear in defining the atmosphere of the era is difficult to overstate. With schoolchildren being trained to dive for cover under desks in the event of a nuclear attack from evil communist adversaries, it wasn’t hard for religious interests to lobby successfully for governmental endorsement of religion.

Those religious interests, led by the Catholic fraternal group the Knights of Columbus, scored another huge victory two years later, when they convinced lawmakers to insert the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag. No longer would America be “one nation indivisible,” because instead the Pledge would demand that the nation be seen as “under God.” That this version discriminates against non believers and others who do not accept the idea of the nation being under a God is beyond dispute, but in the hysteria of the McCarthy era such questions of equal rights mattered little.

Still not content, religious interests then turned their attention to the national motto. Since the founding era the de facto motto of the country had been E Pluribus Unum, which is Latin for “out of many, one.” This inclusive, pluralistic motto had served the nation well since the Revolutionary War, but to the God-fearing lobbyists and politicians of the 1950s it didn’t suffice, so in 1956 they passed legislation declaring the nation’s new motto to be In God We Trust. Little consideration was given to those good Americans who simply do not believe in a deity, let alone trust one.

The social psychology that allowed this string of hyper-religious governmental actions arose from a unique confluence of factors: the existence of a godless adversary, the invention of apocalyptic weaponry, recent memories of the horror of the Second World War and the Holocaust, misinformation campaigns that trained the public to associate secularity with totalitarian atrocities, assertive religious institutions determined to get their way, passive secular groups, and the general paranoid environment of the Cold War and McCarthyism. With this as the backdrop, it’s little wonder that religious conservatives found it easy to chip away at the wall of separation between church and state.

Today, over half a century later, we still live with the fallout from the hyper-religiosity of the 1950s, except that few remember the paranoia that gave rise to this mixture of religion and government.  Because Americans tend to be historical amnesiacs, few remember that the annual National Day of Prayer is a recent invention. And few know that “under God” was added to the Pledge in 1954, or that In God We Trusthas not always been the country’s motto.

Most Americans simply assume that it has always been that today’s governmental religiosity traces back to the founding, and therefore religious expressions are seen as proof that America has always been a very religious country. Because of this, a key goal of today’s secular groups and activists is to educate Americans that most governmental expressions of religiosity are not longstanding traditions at all, but recent inventions of religious activists exploiting a climate of fear.”

Emphasis Mine

see:http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/our-humanity-naturally/201111/religious-expressions-are-rooted-in-fear-based-politics