This month, Texas Senate Republicans passed three bills allowing religion into public schools. From Vox:
“The first, SB 1515, would require public schools to display the Ten Commandments in a “conspicuous place” in classrooms. The other bill, SB 1396, would permit public schools to set aside time for students and staff members to pray or read the Bible and other religious texts. The third, SB 1556, would give employees the right to pray or “engage in religious speech” while on the job.”
Some of this sounds unconstitutional. You can be certain that plenty of Texans will be happy to comply as maliciously as possible next fall.
The three bills now go to the Texas House for approval. They follow Texas’s SB 797, which took effect in 2021 and requires schools to display “In God We Trust” signs.
When the Texas Right say they want to bring religion back into public schools, they mean they want to make public schools more Christian. This flies in the face of America becoming noticeably less religious over the past 20 years: Weekly service attendance and religious self-identification are both down 20% overall, which translates to about 50 million fewer Americans than two decades ago.
This is ironic: If religious identification is to increase, it will have to come from “importing” traditional believers from the global south. But few of them are white. So that’s a problem for Trumpism and the reactionary Right. On to cartoons.
State-sponsored religion is hard to swallow:
Biden announces he’s running:
How do young voters fit in the race between these geriatrics?
(Tomorrow’s Monday Wake Up Call will appear on Tuesday)
Let’s talk about the religions that are implicated in two news items this week.
First, the attempted assassination of Salman Rushdie in upstate New York on Saturday. He was hospitalized after suffering serious injuries in a stabbing attack. We don’t know for certain that this was someone carrying out the death threat that Iran’s then-leader Grand Ayatollah Khomeini put on Rushdie in 1989. But it seems to be the most likely explanation.
Police detained a suspect named Hadi Matar, 24, who is California-born, but moved to Fairview, New Jersey in 2014. NBC NY News reported that a review of Matar’s social media accounts showed he is sympathetic to Shia extremism and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps causes. One of Matar’s former high school classmates told The Daily Beast that Matar “was a very devout Muslim” who participated in debate and had several friends.
If religion is behind this, the attempted revenge has occurred two generations later.
Second, Polio was found in wastewater samples from New York City. Polio has been eradicated in the US since 1988. Finding it in NYC water samples follows a confirmed case of Polio in Rockland County, NY, just 35 miles north of the City. The County announced that an analysis of more wastewater samples revealed that the polio viruses have been circulating in the area since May.
Worse, the 20 positive samples detected in the two counties are genetically linked to the virus that paralyzed the unidentified man in Rockland County.
The broader context of both stories is that religions played a part in each. The Polio case in Rockland was found in a resident of one of the orthodox religious towns where a predominantly Hasidic Jewish community lives. Rockland County currently has a polio vaccination rate of 60.5% among 2-year-olds, compared to the statewide average of 79.1%. This same group had a measles outbreak (312 cases) in 2019, and low COVID vaccination rates.
There is a strong anti-vaxx mentality in this community, and that helps create fertile conditions for a formerly eradicated disease to be revitalized. Polio is entirely preventable, and yet, many parents remain hostile to vaccination.
In the Rushdie attack, we’re speculating about the influence of religion. Saying the attacker is sympathetic to Shia Islam isn’t sufficient to make it a religious attack. But Wrongo would be surprised if it turned out to be solely either personally or politically motivated.
On to cartoons. Despite the above, most of the news this week was about the FBI search.
The truth is revealed:
Trump explains:
Beach reading is different this year:
Reactions to IRS have changed:
GOP policy wonks are thinking they may need to change:
Asheville morning, June 28, 2022 – iPhone photo by Wrongo. The log house we’re renting this week is at 4,000’ above sea level.
Wake up calls by the Wrongologist rarely happen on Wednesdays, but since the Roberts Court dismantled the line between church and state in public education with Justice Gorsuch’s decision in Kennedy v Bremerton School District, on Monday, it seems right.
Voting 6-3, the Court declared that an Oregon public high school football coach’s post-game prayer sessions with students were Constitutional, whether the students wanted them or not. That made Monday part of a pretty good run for American theocracy:
“The decision came less than a week after the court ruled, by the same vote, that Maine could not exclude religious schools from a state tuition program.”
The line between church and state is being erased before our eyes. Gorsuch, cherry-picking the facts of the case, wrote that football coach Kennedy had sought only to offer a brief, silent and solitary prayer:
“Respect for religious expressions is indispensable to life in a free and diverse republic — whether those expressions take place in a sanctuary or on a field, and whether they manifest through the spoken word or a bowed head…”
Justice Sotomayor responded that the public nature of his prayers and his stature as a leader and role model meant that students felt forced to participate, whatever their religion and whether they wanted to or not. She gave a different account of the facts, taking account of a longer time period:
“Kennedy consistently invited others to join his prayers and for years led student-athletes in prayer…”
In an unusual move, Sotomayor’s dissent included photographs showing Mr. Kennedy kneeling with players, which debunked Gorsuch’s selective use of facts.
Do you really think that this decision would have been the same if those prayers had been offered by a Muslim?
In the process of ruling for Mr. Kennedy, the majority overturned a major precedent on the First Amendment’s establishment clause, Lemon v. Kurtzman. That ruling was decided by an 8-0 vote under Republican Chief Justice Warren Burger. As an aside, John Dean (of Watergate fame) has said that during the Nixon administration, Burger threatened to resign from the Court if Nixon nominated a woman to it.
It came to be known as the Lemon test, which required courts to consider whether the challenged government practice had a secular purpose, whether its primary effect is to advance or inhibit religion, and whether it fosters excessive government entanglement with religion.
Sotomayor acknowledged that while the Lemon test had been frequently criticized by various members of the court:
“The court now goes much further…overruling Lemon entirely and in all contexts.”
So, by tossing out Lemon and saying that Coach Kennedy was not speaking for the school because it was an extra-curricular activity, the barrier between prayer and secular school has been permanently breached.
In today’s America, outside money will fund your culture wars grievance in the courts. The longer you can keep your case moving up through the courts, the better chance you have of running into a conservative Christian judge who will find a precedent for the White people’s Jesus in the Bill of Rights.
Teachers will now feel empowered to “invite” a group to pray with them. A few kids will jump in right away, while others will look around uncomfortably and gradually agree to join in, because the social opprobrium that comes with refusing is huge for kids. And since the person inviting you to pray is an authority figure: a teacher, coach, or principal, you really risk a lot by having them decide you aren’t: A.Good.Christian.
When given the choice between upholding traditional case law or creating de novo judicial principles, the Roberts Court is almost always going to favor the latter.
Wrongo isn’t a lawyer, but many lawyers are now pointing to the extraordinarily shoddy nature of the Court’s majority opinions, including all three of the precedent-shattering ones the Court has issued over the last week.
It’s time to wake up America! Why is it so hard for Christians in the United States to just practice their religion without involving the rest of us?
We’re getting very close to the establishment of a default Christian American religion. We know that there are many public school teachers who have been silent despite their sincere religious beliefs while at school. Now they will be actively pressured by their pastors to begin proselytizing while on the clock.
To help you wake up, let’s travel to the 2022 Glastonbury music festival, which always creates great live music. On June 25, Olivia Rodrigo and Lily Allen dedicated the latter’s song “Fuck You” repurposed to express anger at five of the six Conservative members of the court.
Rodrigo named the Justices one by one, while Allen raised alternating middle fingers to them:
These artists aren’t afraid of controversy. Millions of us now feel exactly the same.
Abandoned house, eastern plains of Colorado photo by Daniel Forster
On Sunday, Wrongo talked in passing about how religion may bring some people together, but that it divides many more. And that the lessons about being a good person are too often pushed aside in the service of doctrine.
A fine example of this comes from the Religion News Service, who reported that Daniel Darling, SVP of communications for the National Religious Broadcasters, was fired after making pro-vaccine statements on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”.
Darling told Joe Scarborough:
“I believe in this vaccine because I don’t want to see anyone else die of COVID. Our family has lost too many close friends and relatives to COVID, including an uncle, a beloved church member and our piano teacher…”
Sounds innocuous, but them’s firing words to the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB). According to its website, the NRB “works to protect the free speech rights of our members by advocating those rights in governmental, corporate, and media sectors.” Of course they do.
Darling shared his personal experience at a time when White evangelical Christians and Hispanic Protestants are among the faith groups most likely to be hesitant or refuse to get the COVID-19 vaccines, according to a recent survey from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI). Although the study found vaccine hesitancy has dropped recently, 1 in 4 White evangelicals said they refuse to get a vaccine, while an additional 1 in 5 was hesitant.
So, here’s an Evangelical Christian trying to do the right thing. Urging others to get vaccinated is something that will help them and our society. But his religious organization, one apparently dedicated to “free speech”, fires him for expressing an opinion, something that’s an obvious good for humanity, that is contrary to their policy.
Darling’s statement is clearly free speech. And his viewpoint doesn’t infringe on the rights of either those who are promoting the vaccine, or those who have decided not to get the vaccine. Wrongo has no stake in whether this is wrongful termination. That is a legalistic construction which has nothing to do with what our individual duty is to each other and to society.
Sadly, this is another example that some Christians haven’t developed a code of ethics to guide their lives. Instead, they rely on learned doctrine to justify their behavior, even when their actions fly in the face of good humanity.
Let’s also spend a minute thinking about the impact of Hurricane Ida on Louisiana. As Wrongo writes this, the eye is 10 miles in diameter, the storm is over land, and severe damage reports are starting to come in.
Remember too that Louisiana hospitals are just starting to reduce their census of Delta patients after a record surge of Covid infections. Now New Orleans is evacuating because of the Hurricane Ida storm surge, but hospitals have nowhere to send patients.
We should also remember that Ida went from a tropical storm to a Category 4 Hurricane in 48 hours. There are no rental cars, the highways are clogged. The airport in New Orleans is shut down.
Wake up America! Our 21st century horrors rare rarely subtle. And 2021’s horrors range from what we’re seeing in Afghanistan to Louisiana. Maybe that makes firing an Evangelical for speaking his mind about Covid a lesser problem, except for doctrine taking precedence over a good act.
To help you wake up today, let’s listen to “This is All I Want” by Corey Ledet, from his 2021 album, “Zydeco”. Ledet has incorporated Kouri-Vini, a regional Cajun dialect spoken by family members, into songs on his album. It’s a lot of fun and you should listen to it:
Rua Nova do Carvalho, Lisbon Portugal – 2016 photo by Brotherside. Formerly a part of the red light district, but when the street was painted pink in 2011, it quickly became the epicenter of a vibrant party scene.
In a week with a Hawaiian volcano’s eruption, Bibi’s nuclear song-and-dance, and Rudy’s confessions on Fox that Trump had indirectly paid hush money to Stormy, you may have missed the report that the fired House Chaplain is back at work. The WaPoreported:
House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-WI) reversed course Thursday and agreed to keep the Rev. Patrick J. Conroy on as House chaplain after an extraordinary showdown that included the priest alleging anti-Catholic bias among Ryan’s staff.
Ryan defended his original decision and continued to question whether Conroy was delivering sufficient “pastoral services” to the entire House. “I intend to sit down with Father Conroy early next week so that we can move forward for the good of the whole House,” Ryan said.
That is how it ended. His return started when Rev. Pat Conroy rescinded his resignation in a letter to Ryan. Conroy wrote:
While you never spoke with me in person, nor did you send me any correspondence, on Friday, April 13, 2018 your Chief of Staff, Jonathon Burks, came to me and informed me that you were asking for my letter of resignation. I inquired as to whether or not it was ‘for cause,’ and Mr. Burks mentioned dismissively something like, ‘maybe it’s time that we had a Chaplain that wasn’t a Catholic.’
Great job, Mr. Burks! Did you know that there have been exactly two Catholics as House Chaplain?
Fr. Conroy continued:
At that point, I thought that I had little choice but to resign, as my assumption was that you had the absolute prerogative and authority to end my term as House chaplain.
This was mostly about the tin ear that some Republicans have when it comes to social issues. One House member, Rep. Mark Walker (R-NC), who is also a Baptist pastor, apparently said that the next House chaplain needed to have a family.
That would rule out anyone who, like Fr. Conroy, had taken a vow of celibacy. Why do some people continually use their religion to bludgeon others?
Democrats and a few Republicans have said they believed that Speaker Ryan was facing pressure from evangelicals within the GOP conference to find a chaplain whose politics more closely aligned with theirs, but for now, this little “holy war” in the House is over. Maybe the next House Chaplain should be a Zen warrior priest who roams the halls, hitting Congress critters with his sword, you know, in a pastoral manner.
Spring has sprung with a vengeance in the Northeast. Today, Wrongo has battled a love sick bird that is trying to build a nest above the kitchen door at the Mansion of Wrong. The determined bird tried three times before finally bowing to Wrongo’s will.
It’s Saturday, and we need to downshift, to turn our focus from all that is wrong with the world, to all that’s right. To help you make the change, start by brewing a cup of Taiwan roaster Kakalove Café’s Mandheling Onan Ganjang sourced from the northern part of the Indonesian island of Sumatra ($18.50/16 oz.). The roaster says it is deeply sweet with vibrant acidity, and a syrupy mouthfeel.
Now, sit outside, take in the nature surrounding you, and listen to Sierra Boggess singing “The Lusty Month of May” from Camelot. It is performed live in 2012 at the BBC Proms:
Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.
(There will not be a Monday Wake Up Call this week. Blogging will resume on Tuesday 12/12)
Jerusalem, Roy Moore, Franken, Bears Ears. Quite the week, but let’s start with this: Walmart pulls controversial t-shirt that encourages violence toward journalists:
The t-shirt’s message is: “Rope. Tree. Journalist. SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED”. Walmart has now pulled it from its website. The shirt was also sold in the online store of a company called Teespring, who was the third-party seller for Walmart. The shirt was circulating well before that, though, as Jezebel found a tweet referencing the shirt from April of 2009.
Teespring allows users to design their own t-shirts and other merchandise. They sold a shirt with the words “Black women are trash”, and one that said “Eat Sleep Rape Repeat”. Wrongo fears that there will be no recovery from our slide to the lower reaches of hell.
Trump gave the Middle East a sign. Now he wrongly expects peace will break out:
Trump has success getting the world to change the subject:
Franken’s out. In with the new (giant) asshole:
The logical outcome of the religious freedom argument:
Waiting for the trickle down is like waiting for Godot:
The Atlantic’s Peter Beinart has an article called “Breaking Faith” that references polling conducted in February by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI). Beinart makes a few interesting points about religion and politics that are at odds with conventional thinking about its role.
He points out that over the past decade, there has been a dramatic shift in religious affiliation in the US:
Americans—long known for their piety—were fleeing organized religion in increasing numbers. The vast majority still believed in God. But the share that rejected any religious affiliation was growing fast, rising from 6% in 1992 to 22% in 2014. Among Millennials, the figure was 35%.
Beinart shows that the conventional thinking − that this new secularism would end the culture wars and bring about a more tolerant politics – was wrong. More from Beinart:
Secularism is indeed correlated with greater tolerance of gay marriage and pot legalization. But it’s also making America’s partisan clashes more brutal…As Americans have left organized religion, they haven’t stopped viewing politics as a struggle between “us” and “them.” Many have come to define us and them in even more primal and irreconcilable ways.
This had huge ramifications in the 2016 presidential election. PRRI reports that the percentage of white Republicans with no religious affiliation has nearly tripled since 1990, and that this shift helped Trump win the GOP nomination. Even though commentators had a hard time reconciling Trump’s apparent ignorance of Christianity and his history of pro-choice and pro-gay-rights statements with his support from evangelicals, the polls showed it had little effect:
A Pew Research Center poll last March found that Trump trailed Ted Cruz by 15 points among Republicans who attended religious services every week. But he led Cruz by a whopping 27 points among those who did not.
Beinart reports that culturally conservative white Americans who are disengaged from church experience less economic success and more family breakdown than those who remain connected, and they grow more pessimistic and resentful. Since the early 1970s, rates of religious attendance have fallen more than twice as much among whites without a college degree as among those who graduated college. And that was a big part of Trump’s support. According to PRRI:
White Republicans who seldom or never attend religious services are 19 points less likely than white Republicans who attend at least once a week to say that the American dream “still holds true.”
And secularization created political differences on the left too:
In 1990, according to PRRI, slightly more than half of white liberals seldom or never attended religious services. Today the proportion is 73%. And if conservative non-attenders fueled Trump’s revolt inside the GOP, liberal non-attenders fueled Bernie Sanders’s insurgency against Hillary Clinton: While white Democrats who went to religious services at least once a week backed Clinton by 26 points, according to an April 2016 PRRI survey, white Democrats who rarely attended services backed Sanders by 13 points.
Beinart point out that the trend is also true among Blacks, where the Black Lives Matter movement exists outside of the influence of Black churches:
African Americans under the age of 30 are three times as likely to eschew a religious affiliation as African Americans over 50. This shift is crucial to understanding Black Lives Matter, a Millennial-led protest movement whose activists often take a jaundiced view of established African American religious leaders.
Beinart speaks about Chris Hayes’s book Twilight of the Elites, in which Hayes divides American politics between “institutionalists,” who believe in preserving and adapting the political and economic system, and “insurrectionists,” who believe it’s rotten to the core:
The 2016 election represents an extraordinary shift in power from the former to the latter. The loss of manufacturing jobs has made Americans more insurrectionist. So have the Iraq War, the financial crisis, and a black president’s inability to stop the police from killing unarmed African Americans. And so has disengagement from organized religion.
The grim conclusion is that secularization may be dividing us more than we realize. Beinart closes with:
Maybe it’s the values of hierarchy, authority, and tradition that churches instill. Maybe religion builds habits and networks that help people better weather national traumas, and thus retain their faith that the system works. For whatever reason, secularization isn’t easing political conflict. It’s making American politics even more convulsive and zero-sum.
The corollary seems to be that religious affiliation brings at the very least, some appreciation of community and civility to our culture.
But, the increasing distrust in institutions in America continues to grow. If it’s big and rules-based, people are less interested than ever in participating, and that includes churches.
Now, let’s hear a song for Zeus’ sake! Here is REM with: “Losing My Religion” from their 1991 album, “Out of Time”:
Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.
As we continue our deep dive into American demographics and its impact on politics, today, let’s consider the role of evangelical Christians in our primaries. In Iowa, evangelical and born-again Christians account for 60% of those who attend Republican caucuses. Last fall, The Economist published a chart showing the percentage of evangelicals by state, and each state’s power at the Republican Party convention:
The Republican candidates are trying hard to court evangelicals. Nationally, Ted Cruz has a 64% favorable rating among evangelicals, according to Public Policy Polling (PPP), behind Ben Carson, who has a 69% rating. Marco Rubio and The Donald are at 54%.
Blog readers may remember our review of “One Nation Under God” by Kevin Kruse. In that book, Kruse shows how Rev. Billy Graham influenced our politics for 50 years. He believed that our way of life and our economic system were ordained not just by God, but by the Christian God.
Billy Graham said during the 1952 presidential campaign:
The Christian people of America will not sit idly by…They are going to vote as a bloc for the man with the strongest moral and spiritual platform, regardless of his views on other matters.
Well, Billy’s son, Franklin Graham, has a group called Decision America that is conducting a 50-state tour to energize Christians to vote. From his website:
I’m going to every state in our country to challenge Christians to live out their faith at home, in public and at the ballot box…
Franklin Graham has been involved in politics before. He supported Romney. He has backed ballot initiatives opposing gay marriage; he led prayers at the first inauguration of President George W. Bush.
Like many evangelicals, he sees a pattern of bullying by secular forces and their allies in government. He worries about Christian employers having to fund health insurance that covers birth-control, and wonders if religious colleges will one day have to admit gay students (like they don’t already!).
As Kevin Kruse shows, the history of American Christianity is full of prayer meetings in which the faithful bewail a nation adrift, and vow—like the tribes of Israel before them—to stand fast in the face of tyrannical rulers. At his kick-off meeting in Des Moines, IA, Franklin noted that:
…an estimated 20 to 30 million Christians stayed home in the 2012 election.
He wondered what our country would look like if city councils, school boards and mayor seats were filled by believers in the next two or three elections. And he urged Christians to not only vote in next year’s elections but to run for office at every level of public office. Franklin Graham will not be supporting any specific candidates or parties. He says that he left the Republican Party in late 2015 in favor of an independent status.
Gee, political enlightenment came just a few months ago.
But today, most American politicians are already believers. HuffPo says that 92% of 114th Congress are Christian. Compare that to the 73% of American adults who are Christian, according to Pew Forum. A full 99% of Republicans in Congress are Christian, compared to (only) 81% of the Democrats.
And Graham’s not being a member of a political party is a fiction. His agenda is supported by just one party, the one that his 97 year-old father affiliated with back in 1952. The party that already has 99% of its Congress people affiliated with the Christian religions. And it takes a fair amount of cognitive dissonance for a religious group that already has a supermajority of Congress and takes an absolutely important part in our politics to claim persecution at the hands of the government.
Franklin Graham may be a bit more subtle in 2016 than he was in 2012, but you have to wonder if his ultimate goal is to impose his own version of Christianity on the entire nation.
The Old Time Religion of both Billy and Franklin Graham has a deep, visceral attachment to the Republican Party from the marriage of capitalism to Christianity in the 1930’s that promoted religious hostility to the New Deal, to convincing Eisenhower to add “In God We Trust” to our currency, and “Under God” to our pledge of allegiance.
That Old Time Religion is still at work for the GOP, even if Franklin Graham says he is non-partisan.
The book begins with the election of Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 and describes how, through succeeding administrations, Americans came to think that we are a Christian nation instead of a nation of Christians. What started in Eisenhower’s living room ended up in corporate boardrooms, and finds a place at the heart of campaigning in today’s politics.
In 1935, James W. Fifield, a Congregationalist pastor from Los Angeles founded an organization called Spiritual Mobilization. Channeling donations from businessmen like tire magnate Harvey Firestone, Hollywood producer Cecil B. De Mille, Sun Oil’s J. Howard Pew, and the National Association of Manufacturers, Fifield built a nation-wide publishing and propaganda campaign that called ministers to action, saying:
Every Christian should oppose the totalitarian trends of the New Deal…
And to oppose:
The anti-Christian and anti-American trends toward pagan stateism in America.
This was conflated with slogans promoting: “free pulpit, free speech, free enterprise, free press, and free assembly.”
The Spiritual Mobilization campaign’s thesis was that if religiosity could be widely and officially deployed, it would be the sword that defeated both collectivist liberals and Communists who, in their view, were both working to undermine America.
Some context: The percentage of Americans who claimed membership in a church was low in the 19th century. Kruse shows that it increased from 16% in 1850 to 36% in 1900. It rose to 49% by 1940. It peaked in 1959 at 69%. Along the way, we adopted “Under God” and “In God We Trust” with little opposition from organizations like the ACLU. Much of what Kruse tells us is about familiar events:
• The addition of “Under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954
• The official adoption of “In God We Trust” on all American currency in the late 1950s
• The Supreme Court decisions that struck down state-mandated prayer and Bible reading in public schools in the early 1960s, and the huge polarization it brought among individual Christians vs. their Church leaders, mostly abetted by politicians who saw a campaign issue
Overall, the book is an excellent analysis of how Christian fundamentalism and capitalism were conflated in the 1950s to erode the divide between church and state, re-casting progressive political philosophy as both “un-American”, and “anti-Christian” at the same time. Importantly, he describes the thinking that emerged from Fifield’s movement and its subsequent embrace by Billy Graham; that our way of life and our economic system were ordained not just by God, but by the Christian God.
Graham said during the 1952 presidential campaign:
The Christian people of America will not sit idly by…They are going to vote as a bloc for the man with the strongest moral and spiritual platform, regardless of his views on other matters.
Graham meant Eisenhower. Kruse details the incestuous relationship between clergymen and politicians, with particular focus on Rev. Billy Graham’s remarkable ability to get close to, and influence, presidents.
Some have criticized the book, saying it does not prove its case about the influence of corporate America in the promotion of “One Nation Under God”. Wrongo disagrees. Most of the funding for these efforts, which began in the 1930s and continued through the Nixon administration in the 1970s were contributed by corporations and corporate executives. In fact, the book’s main premise is that corporatists are as responsible as politicians and clergy for making America a more Christian nation.
We continue to see the impact of these corporate/clergy efforts today: It bolsters the idea of American Exceptionalism, it limits the range of acceptable political debate, it fosters class warfare, and suborns churches to the cause of politics.
Today’s religious fundamentalists want to blur the lines between church and state. They seek to control American culture, to use faith in the service of ideals that leave no room for social programs, no room for diversity, no room for science, no room for ideas that contradict or challenge the myth of America as a Christian-capitalist-ordained-by-God empire.
This movement that started in the 1930s explains why many Americans favor policies that are clearly against their best interests. Not coincidentally, many of those in that category are also “religious conservatives.” A recent interview with a rural Kentuckian who voted for Republican Governor Matt Bevin who plans to roll back Medicaid expansion, despite her need for insurance, said:
My religious beliefs outweigh whether or not I have insurance…
She voted for an anti-abortion, anti-gay rights candidate, despite her personal need for insurance.
