Some good news from a new survey from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press: just 5 percent of people who attend religious services at least once or twice a month say that their clergy or other religious groups have urged them to vote in a particular way.
That survey makes it clear that most religious leaders don’t want their houses of worship dragged into partisan political campaigns. But their resistance helps explain, perhaps, why David Barton and other religious-right leaders are working so hard to persuade pastors to politicize their pulpits and their congregations.
I hope that’s true. The pastors may caution them to keep it sub rosa. Just in case the feds are listening. To heighten their paranoia.
I think it’s true for most.
What I wonder is, where will all this David Barton etc. crap lead? Will they wear themselves out trying to get some mainstream traction, or will some horrific event stop the country in its tracks and send these people scurrying back to the rocks they crawled out from under.
I know, “…rocks from under which they crawled…
ain’t natural.
The 1925 Scopes Trial is on record as having sent them back under their moist rocks until the 1970s when they discovered the “Jesus High.” If their children keep fleeing their churches at the rates stated in recent news stories (their own numbers of complaint), they may be nearly extinct in 75 years or less. I wish their children would flee to other churches rather than to atheism or agnosticism. Unfortunately, by its very nature, Christian fundamentalist theology demands that total rejection of God be the ONLY alternative option for someone who wants to “bug out” of the fundie scene. In my mind, rejection of Christian fundamentalism would be best served cold as liquid nitrogen on a tray engraved by a better church with a better view of God and the Bible. Give in to Jesus. Never give in to a fundie.
I wonder if TFN is being a bit naive. When a candidate and the County Chair attend all the Black churches in town and are introduced as guests from the pulpit, is an endorsement necessary? When the local “Bible Church” organizes buses to the polls on the Sunday of early voting, and the issues of abortion, gay rights, etc. have been raised in the service, must names of candidates be given? As for not fleeing from fundamentalism to agnosticism, is not the same frame of mind that believes in an unseen, all-powerful, unknowable power without asking for proof, likely to believe in other things (such as Obama being a foreign-born Communist-Nazi-Socialist Muslim) if told this by authority figures?