The Christian Right Is Helping Drive Liberals Away From Religion

A few weeks ago, the Democratic National Committee formally acknowledged what has been evident for quite some time: Nonreligious voters are a critical part of the party’s base. In a one-page resolution passed at its annual summer meeting, the DNC called on Democratic politicians to recognize and celebrate the contributions of nonreligious Americans, who make up one-third of Democrats.

In response, Robert Jeffress, a Dallas pastor with close ties to Trump, appeared on Fox News, saying the Democrats were finally admitting they are a “godless party.”This was hardly a new argument. Conservative Christian leaders have been repeating some version of this claim for years, and have often called on religious conservatives and Republican politicians to defend the country against a growing wave of liberal secularism.

And it’s true that liberals have been leaving organized religion in high numbers over the past few decades. But blaming the Democrats, as Jeffress and others are wont to do, doesn’t capture the profound role that conservative Christian activists have played in transforming the country’s religious landscape, and the role they appear to have played in liberals’ rejection of organized religion.

Over the course of a single generation, the country has gotten a lot less religious. As recently as the early 1990s, less than 10 percent of Americans lacked a formal religious affiliation, and liberals weren’t all that much likelier to be nonreligious than the public overall.

Today, however, nearly one in four Americans are religiously unaffiliated. That includes almost 40 percent of liberals — up from 12 percent in 1990, according to the 2018 General Social Survey.1 The share of conservatives and moderates who have no religion, meanwhile, has risen less dramatically.

>>But blaming the Democrats, as Jeffress and others are wont to do, doesn’t capture the profound role that conservative Christian activists have played in transforming the country’s religious landscape, and the role they appear to have played in liberals’ rejection of organized religion.
>>Liberal Americans are less religious than they used to be

In the Mid-1960s Time Magazine’s cover pushed the notion “God is dead”.

NOW sought to smash the institution of marriage and patriarchal religion.

50 years of Godless Communism in the ranks of the DNC have done this. It wasn’t some “religious right extremists”.

God out of the schools. God out of the library. 10 Commandments shunned on public property. Taxpayer funding of P*** Christ and other blasphemous and profane works (can’t have something to honor Jesus but CAN have something to associate Him with bodily waste fluids).

We know who the Left are. Saul Alinsky dedicated his rules for radicals to him. Walter Cronkite professed he’d gladly sit at the right hand of Satan to usher in a one world government.

Hardcore liberals are Marxists-lite. Whatever religion they had, with a central belief in “God” or some kind of “supreme being or power” was replaced with the “godlessness of collectivism and the state as god”, not the value of the individual and free will.

Look at Hegel, Marx, Lenin/Stalin, Marcuse, Alinsky, our college professors, our “all power to us” politicians, the soulless leftist media to whom “accuracy”, which was once the god-lines (aka “guidelines”) of ethical, honest journalism, is now not even much of a consideration other than possible libel/defamation lawsuits, plus the Marxist infection of the “Church”, esp. with the Marxist “Liberation Theology” Pope Francis and his surrounding band of mini-Marxists now in charge of the Vatican.

The movie industry is almost totally secular and “The Ten Commandments” movie would be banned today because it starred Charles Heston, once the leader of the NRA, and because it promoted those ten ideals of human behavior and belief in a superior being.

Now movies are all about sex, drugs, crime, power, general immorality and heading towards more child-abuse porn flixes.

Liberals like all this stuff, esp. about having very deep “guilt complexes” over everything from skin color to success and everything in-between.

As I am Jewish, I’ve had a front-row seat to see “Jewish guilt”, esp. from those members of my family who went through the Depression/hardtimes, and family losses due to the Holocaust, followed by post-WW2 success in America.

My father worked damned hard to make our small plumbing supply business an ongoing success (after 4 years in the Army in WW2). There was no “five days a week” work week. It was do the books at night and half a day on Saturday (I was there and saw it first-hand).

He had no “guilt complexes”, just a series of heart attacks and finally cancer that killed him at 65. Don’t think he even got his first Social Security check before he died.

What we got, we earned, from my uncle who went to college during the Depression and had to break the Jewish barrier at Hopkins undergraduate school. He got in because he was smart and a very good student.

Oh, his father, my never-met grandfather died during the Depression at about age 42 so my grandmother had to run the grocery/deli store 7 days a week to put him through college and med school. That is why my mother and other uncle never got to go to college. They couldn’t afford it, even though the average IQ in our family was over 140, with my doctor uncle running around 180 (he was also a famed international art collector/critic). His kids, my first cousins became lawyers (Brandeis, Un. of Wisc/Md, etc).

I don’t have a “guilt complex” unless it is that despite my efforts to help the Vietnamese and Cambodians keep their freedom and avoid a political genocide (I did this for 10 years), I couldn’t do enough to prevent it.

This is not “my cross to bear”. It is my “American/Jewish identity” wishing that I could have done more to help them. I also did things to help Israel, Ethiopian Jews get to Israel and avoid another genocide by the Marxist “Derge” there, Soviet Jewish prisoners/emigres, the people of Taiwan and the poor in the US.

Liberals are worse than Marxists because Marxists known who they are and what they want (except for Marxist-lites/mini-Marxists - ideologically confused, and lonely people who need a cause in order to have any life).

Liberals feel guilty about what they “have”, so they have to transfer this guilt into “what others should have”.

Never occurred to many of them that you can help someone without having to cry over it and beat your chests in a guilty rage over being successful enough to help others.

In Hebrew we call helping people both a “Mitzvah”, “doing good deeds without reward”, and “Sedakah”, helping because it is the right thing to do if you can.

The older Jews left out “self-pity” and “self-centered guilt”. God wouldn’t want any of his followers to be like that. Things done had to be “voluntary” and “from the heart”.

Liberals long ago threw-out “the Heart” as a reason to help people because it was easier to create their own “guilt complex”, blame it on Freud, and accept the basic lies of Marxism. It didn’t require much intelligence to go that way, and the rest is the destruction of America, religion, the Constitution, and our basic good American instincts/deeds.

I wish it was my point. Frankly, I bookmarked that article and have quoted it often since I stopped lurking / joined. It is such a well-written piece and, better than anything I've read, explains today's strident left completely.

I say strident left because some people can still be reached. Pew in 2017 did the best decomposition I've seen.

The Solid Liberals (Antifa snowflakes) and Devout and Diverse Dems (muscle/rioters) are basically lost causes. Those are ones who've made politics their religion. The other two groups aren't enamored with their Dem brethren. While they may not love Trump, they like a leader who tries to bring jobs back to America, who isn't a shrinking violet internationally, and doesn't get pushed around doesnt get pushed around domestically.

It is these latter two groups where Trump is making a play. He doesn't need the political religionists...he's simply being himself and saying "what have you got to loose?" If he can pick off 20-30% of that group without too many squishy RINOs bolting, he's going to do well.

In fact, if you think about it, the article has it backwards: The Political Religionists Are Helping Drive Normals Away From The Democrat Party.

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