The Bible belt

 From Roman Piso

China becomes global tech leader

 From Jesse Jenkins

How China went from clean energy copycat to global tech leader www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Comment by Chris Bataille

From a US perspective, this is fundamentally worse than Sputnik, and it is having the exact opposite and wrong reaction to 1957 - retreat, shutting down basic science and clean tech commercialization, instead of diving into creating a national science complex and building fast.

Yes. The religious loons have won. The US is retreating into a new dark age.

Evangelicals and death rates

 From James Gundlach

Here is a scatter plot of the percent Evangelical in 2004 and the state's population aged 45-64 death rate from 2001 thru 2010. The scatter plot and regression statistics summarized in the title show that Evangelicalism substantially increases death rates in the United States.

The US is a nice test bed for analysis and policy, because it has 50 States, which have significant powers, so can follow different policies, plus 50 is a big enough number for the results of any analysis to be statistically significant.

In this case, I'm not sure whether there is correlation with a third variable. Possibly, poverty is strongly correlated with the level of fundamentalist Christianity. Poorer States will most likely have higher mortality rates, and (inexplicably to someone from outside the US) also be adherents of extreme religion. In other countries, the poor support socialist parties and policies (free health; fair wages; social housing; trade unions). In the US, religion and the hope of Heaven take their place. The poorest States in America are almost without exception "Red" States and the only ones which aren't poor are oil States. Even the use of Red as the colour for the Republican Party is odd. In the rest of the world, Red = socialist/progressive, and Blue = right-wing/conservative/regressive.

Whatever the reason behind the relationship, its existence is remarkable.

The golden age of America

 By Bill Bramhall

Hypocrisy

 By Nick Anderson

Puritanism

“Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”  H.L. Mencken.

Source: Wikipedia

"The Puritan's utter lack of aesthetic sense, his distrust of all romantic emotion, his unmatchable intolerance of opposition, his unbreakable belief in his own bleak and narrow views, his savage cruelty of attack, his lust for relentless and barbarous persecution – these things have put an almost unbearable burden up on the exchange of ideas in the United States."

Satan and Trump

 Doonesbury (Garry Trudeau)

US church membership plunges

From Salon

The trend of Americans exiting the pews, never to return, has been steady for some years now and shows no signs of slowing down. According to a new Gallup poll released this week, only 47% of Americans polled in 2020 belong to a house of worship, which is the first time that number has fallen below half of the country since they started polling Americans on this question.

But what's really interesting is that the collapse in church membership has happened mostly over the past two decades. Since Gallup started recording these numbers decades ago, church membership rates were relatively steady, with only the smallest decline over the decades. In 1937, 73% of Americans belonged to a church. In 1975, it was 71%. In 1999, it was 70%. But since then, the church membership rate has fallen by a whopping 23 percentage points.

It is not, however, because of some great atheist revival across the land, with Americans suddenly burying themselves in the philosophical discourse about the unlikeliness of the existence of a higher power. The percentage of Americans who identify as atheist (4%) or agnostic (5%) has risen slightly, but not even close to enough to account for the number of people who claim no religious affiliation. A 2017 Gallup poll finds that 87% of Americans say they believe in God. So clearly, what we're seeing is a dramatic increase in the kinds of folks who would say something akin to, "I'm spiritual, but not big on organized religion."

Blame the religious right. Until recently, the U.S. was largely unaffected by the increasing secularization of many European countries, but that started to change dramatically at the turn of the 21st century. And it's no mystery why. The drop in religious affiliation starts right around the time George W. Bush was elected president, publicly and dramatically associating himself with the white evangelical movement. The early Aughts saw the rise of megachurches with flashily dressed ministers who appeared more interested in money and sermonizing about people's sex lives than modeling values of charity and humility.

Not only were these religious figures and the institutions they led hyper-political, the outward mission seemed to be almost exclusively in service of oppressing others. The religious right isn't nearly as interested in feeding the hungry and sheltering the homeless as much as using religion as an all-purpose excuse to abuse women and LGBTQ people. In an age of growing wealth inequalities, with more and more Americans living hand-to-mouth, many visible religious authorities were using their power to support politicians and laws to take health care access from women and fight against marriage between same-sex couples. And then Donald Trump happened.

Trump was a thrice-married chronic adulterer who routinely exposed how ignorant he was of religion, and who reportedly — and let's face it, obviously — made fun of religious leaders behind their backs. But religious right leaders didn't care. They continually pumped Trump up like he was the second coming, showily praying over him and extorting their followers to have faith in a man who literally could not have better conformed to the prophecies of the Antichrist. It was comically over the top, how extensively Christian right leaders exposed themselves as motivated by power, not faith.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, Gallup's numbers show numbers of religiously affiliated Americans taking a nosedive during the Trump years, dropping from 55% of Americans belonging to a church to 47%.

To be clear, the drop-off in religious affiliation is, researchers have shown, likely less about people actively quitting churches, and more about churches being unable to recruit younger followers to replace the ones who die. As Pew Research Center tweeted in 2019, "Today, there is a wide gap between older Americans (Baby Boomers and members of the Silent Generation) and Millennials in their levels of religious affiliation."

All of which makes sense. It's rare that people abandon an ideology or faith that they'e had for a long time. Once an adult actively chooses to belong to a church, it's hard to admit that you were wrong and now want to abandon the whole project. But young adults, even those who went to church with their parents, do have to make an active choice to join a church as adults. And many are going to look at hypocritical, power-hungry ministers praying over an obvious grifter like Trump and be too turned off to even consider getting involved.

In 2017, Robert P. Jones, the head of the Public Religion Research Institute and author of "White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity," spoke with Salon about how the decline in religion is concentrated largely among young people. There's "a culture clash between particularly conservative white churches and denominations and younger Americans," he explained, noting that young people were particularly critical of anti-science and homophobic rhetoric from religious leaders.

"[C]onservative white Christians have lost this argument with a broader liberal culture," he explained, including "their own kids and grandchildren."

It's a story with a moral so blunt that it could very well be a biblical fable: Christian leaders, driven by their hunger for power and cultural dominance, become so grasping and hypocritical that it backfires and they lose their cultural relevance. Not that there's any cause to pity them, since they did this to themselves. The growing skepticism of organized religion in the U.S. is a trend to celebrate. While more needs to be done to replace the sense of community that churches can often give people, it's undeniable that this decline is tied up with objectively good trends: increasing liberalism, hostility to bigotry, and support for science in the U.S. Americans are becoming better people, however slowly, and the decline in organized religious affiliation appears to be a big part of that.

Source: Pew Research Center

 

Praise the lard

 I can't read the signature of this cartoonist.  If you know who it is, let me know in the comments.

A straight line from segregation to anti-abortion

 An extremely interesting piece by Randall Balmer in The Guardian about how it wasn't Roe vs Wade which mobilised apolitical Christians into becoming political, but segregation. 

The supreme court’s refusal to block Texas’s restrictive new abortion law suggests that the end to country-wide legal abortion might be at hand. For white evangelicals, the rank and file of the anti-abortion movement who have worked tirelessly to overturn the 1973 Roe v Wade decision, this represents the culmination of efforts that date back to – well, about 1980.

Although leaders of the religious right would have us believe that the Roe decision was the catalyst for their political mobilization in the 1970s, that claim does not withstand historical scrutiny. What prompted evangelical interest in politics, in fact, was a defense of racial segregation.

Evangelicals considered abortion a “Catholic issue” through most of the 1970s, and there is little in the history of evangelicalism to suggest that abortion would become a point of interest. Even James Dobson, who later became an implacable foe of abortion, acknowledged after the Roe decision that the Bible was silent on the matter and that it was plausible for an evangelical to hold that “a developing embryo or fetus was not regarded as a full human being”.

I first began researching the origins of the religious right after a meeting at a Washington hotel conference room in November 1990. The gathering marked the ten-year anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s election to the presidency and, for reasons that are still not entirely clear to me, I was invited to this closed-door celebration. There I encountered a veritable who’s-who of the religious right, including (among others), Ralph Reed of Christian Coalition; Donald Wildmon from the American Family Association; Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention; Ed Dobson, one of Jerry Falwell’s acolytes at Moral Majority; Richard Viguerie, the conservative direct-mail mogul; and Paul Weyrich, cofounder of the Heritage Foundation and architect of the religious right.

In the course of the first session, Weyrich tried to make a point to his religious right brethren (no women attended the conference, as I recall). Remember, he said animatedly, that the religious right did not come together in response to the Roe decision. No, Weyrich insisted, what got the movement going as a political movement was the attempt on the part of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to rescind the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University because of its racially discriminatory policies, including a ban on interracial dating that the university maintained until 2000.

During a break following that session, I approached Weyrich to ensure that I had heard him correctly. He was emphatic that abortion had nothing whatsoever to do with the genesis of the religious right. He added that he’d been trying since the Goldwater campaign in 1964 to interest evangelicals in politics. Nothing caught their attention, he insisted – school prayer, pornography, equal rights for women, abortion – until the IRS began to challenge the tax exemption of Bob Jones University and other whites-only segregation academies.

Indeed, in 1971 the Southern Baptist Convention had passed a resolution calling to legalize abortion. When the Roe decision was handed down, some evangelicals applauded the ruling as marking an appropriate distinction between personal morality and public policy. Although he later – 14 years later – claimed that opposition to abortion was the catalyst for his political activism, Jerry Falwell did not preach his first anti-abortion sermon until February 1978, more than five years after Roe.

Falwell, who had founded his own segregation academy in 1967, was eager to join forces with Weyrich and others to mount a defense against the IRS and its attempts to enforce the Brown v Board of Education decision of 1954 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. “In some states,” Falwell famously groused, “it’s easier to open a massage parlor than a Christian school.”

So how did evangelicals become interested in abortion? As nearly as I can tell from my conversation with Weyrich, during a conference call with Falwell and other evangelicals strategizing about how to retain their tax exemptions, someone suggested that they might have the makings of a political movement and wondered what other issues would work for them. Several suggestions followed, and then a voice on the line said, “How about abortion?”

Still, it took some time for opposition to abortion to take hold among evangelicals. According to Frank Schaeffer – who produced a series of anti-abortion films called Whatever Happened to the Human Race?, featuring his father, Francis Schaeffer, and C Everett Koop, who later became Ronald Reagan’s surgeon general – the evangelical response was at best tepid when the films appeared early in 1979.

And when Reagan addressed 20,000 cheering evangelicals in August 1980, he mentioned his support for creationism and criticized the IRS for its supposed vendetta against evangelical schools. He said nothing whatsoever about abortion. Only in the early 1980s did opposition to abortion finally become an evangelical battle cry.

The beauty of the religious right’s embrace of abortion as a political issue is that it allowed leaders to camouflage the real origins of their movement: the defense of racial segregation in evangelical institutions.

Cartoon by Steve Sack

Climate change vs Noah

Christian fundamentalist support for Trump

A cartoon by Mike Luckovitch

A snippet from a Guardian article:

Another image framed this split-screen 4 July: that of the children, separated from their parents, who are caged in detention camps on America’s southern border. Accounts by lawyers and doctors who were allowed brief visits to these hellish places are almost unbearable to read: children deprived of sleep, denied access to blankets or mattresses, not allowed to wash their hands or brush their teeth; toddlers left alone on cold, hard floors, so traumatised they sit in stunned, tearless silence. I’m especially haunted by the report of “a suicidal four-year-old whose face was covered in bloody, self-inflicted scratches”.

This too is what dictators do: demonising a group – in this case, migrants – as an alien threat, an army of invaders, so intensely and for so long that eventually any fate, no matter how brutal or inhumane, seems deserved, even when it is inflicted on that group’s youngest and most vulnerable members. Breaking up families, caging children in hot, fetid, disease-ridden camps – this is what dictators do.

It is extraordinary that evangelicals can defend or justify this treatment of children.  I am astonished at the intellectual and moral contortions that evangelicals have to make to justify behaviour so contrary to Christian doctrine.  Their support for this cruelty is contemptible and hypocritical.   Every day they continue their support for Trump is another day their good name diminishes.

A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another. 

(John 13:33–35)

The hypocrisy

America is becoming less Christian

From Pat Bagley

The New Pharisees

A cartoon by David Horsey

Trump is God's plan

Evangelicals: Clinton vs Trump

Trump worship