Why I don't trust religious power in the U.S.

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This Atlantic article (the bolding in the clip below is mine) expresses pretty well how I feel about the influence of the religious right in the U.S.

I nearly titled this post "Why I don't trust the religious right", but opted instead for a broader phrase, "religious power". While I know plenty of fine, caring believers, many of them are directly at odds with the power structures and stated policies of their religious leaders. And it's that power structure I fear. It's that authoritarian impulse, the certainty that "everything we do is ipso-facto good, because the ends are good, and thus the ends justify the means", that I fear.

We should stop believing that merely shaming conservatives, especially the religious right, for being hypocrites is effective, especially on issues of morality. They Don't Care. The end goals are all that matter to them. How they get there, doesn't matter to them.

Anyways, I thought this was a pretty decent read. And I do believe that the GOP has decided to abandon liberal democracy, or any form of democracy. Their actions are certainly saying that.

The Atlantic said:
By the tail end of the Obama administration, the culture war seemed lost. The religious right sued for détente, having been swept up in one of the most rapid cultural shifts in generations. Gone were the decades of being able to count on attacking its traditional targets for political advantage. In 2013, Chuck Cooper, the attorney defending California’s ban on same-sex marriage, begged the justices to allow same-sex-marriage opponents to lose at the ballot box rather than in court. Conservatives such as George Will and Rod Dreher griped that LGBTQ activists were “sore winners,” intent on imposing their beliefs on prostrate Christians, who, after all, had already been defeated.

The rapidity of that cultural shift, though, should not obscure the contours of the society that the religious right still aspires to preserve: a world where women have no control over whether to carry a pregnancy to term, same-sex marriage is illegal, and gays and lesbians can be arrested and incarcerated for having sex in their own homes and be barred from raising children. The religious right showed no mercy and no charity toward these groups when it had the power to impose its will, but when it lost that power, it turned to invoking the importance of religious tolerance and pluralism in a democratic society.

That was then. The tide of illiberalism sweeping over Western countries and the election of Donald Trump have since renewed hope among some on the religious right that it might revive its cultural control through the power of the state. Inspired by Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Vladimir Putin in Russia, a faction of the religious right now looks to sectarian ethno-nationalism to restore its beliefs to their rightful primacy, and to rescue a degraded and degenerate culture. All that stands in their way is democracy, and the fact that most Americans reject what they have to offer.

...

This understanding also helps illuminate the right’s eruption over YouTube’s decision to demonetize (but not remove) the channel of Steven Crowder, a conservative YouTuber who called the Vox reporter Carlos Maza a “lispy queer,” among other slurs. A world in which one can refer to gay people as “lispy queers” without repercussion is one in which the illiberal right is winning the culture war, so it matters little that YouTube is no less a private business than Masterpiece Cakeshop, and has a right to define the rules for using its platform. The same sort of protests that the right decries as illiberal when deployed against right-wing speakers on college campuses are suddenly a legitimate tactic when used against Drag Queen Story Hour. The objective here, in Ahmari’s words, is to defeat “the enemy,” not adhere to principle, and that requires destigmatizing anew the kind of bigotry that was once powerful enough to sway elections.

Indeed, the illiberal faction in this debate retains Trump as its champion precisely because the president is willing to use the power of the state for sectarian ends, despite being an exemplar of the libertinism to which it is supposedly implacably opposed, a man whose major legislative accomplishment is slashing taxes on the wealthy, and whose most significant contribution to the institution of the family is destroying thousands of them on purpose. It is power that is the motivator here, and the best that could be said for these American Orbánists is that they believe that asserting an iron grip on American politics and culture would offer the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Every authoritarian movement has felt the same way.

...
 

Salaha Kleb

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A field yield as much as has been seeded. Without tilling no planting, in the end to no harvest, roughly speaking.
I should say, the means are always part of the outcome, and every step along the way to that goal. That is to say, to measure by the end result alone, as we seem to do--'tis leaves so many tears unshed, and various woes to still.
Many a heart is grieving. How far do merits reach—should we measure virtue.

Thank you for your post
 

Salaha Kleb

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I had need say, you are brave speaking about religion in that manner, much as 'tis guised in virtues, rites and doctrines, lest its mask fall.
 

cbenoi1

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The religious right wants to save our souls. The rapture is coming. The signs are all there. We hear the sound of the trumpets announcing the World tuning upside down.

I don't want to be saved. I'll deal with my Creator all by myself when I get there, thank you. As for the trumpets, well, I think they are Trump's tweets. And yes they are announcing all sorts of very bad things...

-cb
 

Roxxsmom

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If you can't impose your will on others via democratic political processes--and the long-term numbers appear to be against the Right here--try authoritarianism.

Of course, they're being crafty. They've already been effectively gaming the process via things like Gerrymandering, voter suppression, narrowly vetting judicial nominees for their past record on specific issues (don't want any pesky social moderates slipping through the cracks and messing things up like Kennedy and O'Conner did for so many years).

They also seek to modify rules and policies in ways they hope will slip past, because they aren't being honest about their real reasons for imposing these changes. An example would be tightening restrictions on abortion providers in the name of patient safety (when abortion is already safer than carrying pregnancy to term and safer than many other outpatient medical procedures).

This isn't just about religious issues, either. The attempt by right-wing politicians to change the census forms to include a question (in the name of protecting voting rights) about citizenship will undoubtedly stop some immigrants, documented and undocumented, to refrain from filling the form out at all. The anti-immigrant political climate on the Right has increased the likelihood that this will happen, because many people are terrified of being deported or of losing their status as legally protected residents. This will, in turn, suppress the census numbers of many "blue" states, like CA, and affect how congressional districts are drawn as well.

https://www.npr.org/2019/06/14/7325...eing-these-emails-about-the-census-unredacted

The path to authoritarianism lies in disenfranchising institutions and groups that lie in your way.

What I am still unsure of is whether authoritarianism is ultimately the means or the end itself? True, religious conservatives see it as a means to impose their version of social order. But they've been manipulated by politicians for decades into the positions they hold (evangelical protestants weren't always so concerned with abortion, for instance). What if social conservatism is something power-seeking politicians are cynically manipulating in order to increase their own power?
 

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Those who wish for their religious practices to be mandated by law are unAmerican because it's unconstitutional to do so. End of discussion.
 

lizmonster

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Those who wish for their religious practices to be mandated by law are unAmerican because it's unconstitutional to do so. End of discussion.

Except many people are deciding their free exercise of religion should mean they should be free to have the rest of the world forced to live by their "sincerely-held" religious beliefs.

We're the ones infringing on their rights, you see, because they really believe their rules are the right ones, and we should respect their beliefs by changing.
 

AW Admin

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Freedom of religion doesn't mean no one should be allowed to eat pork or shellfish.

Nor does it mean all men must have beards or all women must have their heads coverered.

Nor does it mean that my womb is the business of anyone but my doctor and me.
 

Chris P

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In my (admittedly arm-chair) knowledge of the Enlightenment and the 100 years of history preceding it, I think the US Founding Fathers saw more danger in the state controlling the church than the church controlling the state. Imagine if an officially sanctioned state church had the power of the police and army to enforce its will. If the head of the church is named by the head of state, or is the head of state, the church becomes, rather than a free practice of beliefs and rituals, subject to the will of the head of state. As damaging as the legal mandating of observation of religious practices is, or the forbidding on religious grounds of other practices that do no public harm or even do public good, the flip side of the state becoming an agent of the church is the church becoming an agent of the state.
 

Brightdreamer

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What I am still unsure of is whether authoritarianism is ultimately the means or the end itself? True, religious conservatives see it as a means to impose their version of social order. But they've been manipulated by politicians for decades into the positions they hold (evangelical protestants weren't always so concerned with abortion, for instance). What if social conservatism is something power-seeking politicians are cynically manipulating in order to increase their own power?

At this point, I'm not sure there is a meaningful distinction, at least for those of us staring down the bayonets on the advancing authoritarian religious army, though I do believe that many (particularly at the top) are - or, at least, were - indeed cynically using the brainwashing power of "blind faith" for their own ends. By this point, a few generations into the crusade, it's possible that some of those cynics have been replaced by true fanatic believers (see also: Mike Pence.)

Those who wish for their religious practices to be mandated by law are unAmerican because it's unconstitutional to do so. End of discussion.

One would think... Unfortunately, some people's religious practices require them to "convert or kill" those who do not follow their religious practices - and those people have become disturbingly well placed to enforce their "freedom of religion."
 

Roxxsmom

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My hunch is that, at its very core, the GOP is still about allowing rich people to keep as much of their wealth as possible and to run their businesses with a minimum of government oversight. Since the rich are very much a minority, though, they had to find a way to get more Americans on board. Appealing to themes like patriotism, religion, fear of the other, fear of social change got them more voters than they ever would have gotten from appealing to "business conservatives" alone.

I don't know how many Republican politicians have truly become believers in the party stances re the "culture wars" versus cynically using them to their own advantage, but in the end you're right. It doesn't really matter anymore. The result is the same.
 

BenPanced

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Those who wish for their religious practices to be mandated by law are unAmerican because it's unconstitutional to do so. End of discussion.

Except many people are deciding their free exercise of religion should mean they should be free to have the rest of the world forced to live by their "sincerely-held" religious beliefs.

We're the ones infringing on their rights, you see, because they really believe their rules are the right ones, and we should respect their beliefs by changing.

And it doesn't matter if their religious mandates violate yours. They're right and you're wrong. End of discussion.
 

Salaha Kleb

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At the end of the day, we are all human. Believing, dreaming, hoping, crying, but hard to tolerate differences. Same with religion. Everyone need decide for themselves.
 

MacAllister

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I know a great many people with profound levels of faith, for whom I have enormous respect.

It's hard for me to actually tell how deeply-held the religious beliefs of some on the far right really are, given situations like this.

Let's be gentle with one another, when and where we can, folks.
 
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Larry M

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Those who wish for their religious practices to be mandated by law are unAmerican because it's unconstitutional to do so. End of discussion.

Freedom of religion doesn't mean no one should be allowed to eat pork or shellfish.

Nor does it mean all men must have beards or all women must have their heads coverered.

Nor does it mean that my womb is the business of anyone but my doctor and me.

The GOP and the right wingers don't care about any of that. Because this:

Except many people are deciding their free exercise of religion should mean they should be free to have the rest of the world forced to live by their "sincerely-held" religious beliefs.

We're the ones infringing on their rights, you see, because they really believe their rules are the right ones, and we should respect their beliefs by changing.