With xmas nearly upon us, an
examination of how religious fundamentalism holds the entire country
back
by Amanda Marcotte
Holiday season is in full swing, which means it’s time for American
culture to get even more aggressively religious than usual, which is
saying a lot. Angels, jesus, miracles, usually good TV shows coughing up
saccharine episodes with morally pat endings: For those of us who
aren’t big fans of syrupy religiosity, the last month of the year is
hard to take, no matter how many presents you get to make up for it.
There’s a lot of religious self-congratulation going on, so as a
corrective, here’s a list of 9 terrible things religion has brought upon
American culture. To be clear, as many religious people also have their
problems with some of the excesses of christianity in America, this is
more a reminder of the problems with those excesses than some kind of
slam on religious people generally.
1. War on Christmas hysteria
It’s
become an annual tradition, along with Christmas pop-up shops and
holiday shopping specials: Fox News trying to scare their viewers into
thinking the evil liberals are going to steal xmas from them. This
year, so far, the culprits are
muslims wanting their own holidays,
women who dare complain if holiday stress gets to them, and
Obama for supposedly not being gung-ho enough. (Reality check: The Obama White House has, if anything,
upped the ante for White House xmas decorating.)
All
of this dishonest panic about the imminent demise of xmas is
little more than an excuse for wingnut christians to get even more
aggressive. By redefining every reasonable limit on their proselytizing
or attempt at being more inclusive as somehow “oppression,” they’re able
to shove their religion on others in the guise of resisting this
imaginary oppression.
2. Terrible social safety net
The
jesus christ of the bible is forever going on about the need to clothe
and feed the poor, but the jesus christ of the wingnut's imagination is
just as quick to kick a homeless person as he is to give him a meal.
One of the biggest projects of fundamentalist christianity of the past
few decades is to create a religious justification for slashing the
social safety net. That’s why wingnut christians tend to ignore the
hundreds of verses in the bible about feeding the poor and focus
instead on a single verse, 2 Thessalonians 3:10, which reads, “For even
when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not
work, neither should he eat.”
This verse, in context, is little more
than Apostle Paul laying
out the community-specific rules for a cult during his era–basically
saying that everyone in the cult should pitch in and help–but wingnut christians have exploited the hell out of this verse to
justify all manner of starving the poor and casting them out to sleep in
the cold. Megacult nazi-leader
John Hagee interprets the verse to mean that welfare should be ended. Kevin Cramer
whips the verse out to justify starving SNAP-dependent children. And
Stephen Fincher does the same, even though he wasn’t against taking millions in government aid himself, in the form of farm subsidies.
3. Creationism
One
of the most peculiar ways wingnut christians try to assert
cultural dominance in the U.S. is to reject the theory of evolution and
instead insist on some sort of biblical literalism that suggests humans
were created by dog instead of evolved over time. Because of this,
only Turkey has
lower rates than the U.S. in the Western world of acceptance of the
theory of evolution. Unfortunately, wingnut christians refuse to
limit themselves to simply believing weird stuff. Instead,
creationists are forever trying to find new ways to push their religious beliefs off as “science” in science classrooms,
even though the courts have firmly told them they really can’t be doing this.
Creationism
is just a small part of a larger, ongoing hunger the christian wingnuts
have for access to children in public schools. The First Amendment should
forbid exploiting the fact that kids are required to go to school to
foist christian delusions on them, but the lure of all that captive
audience means wingnut christians keep trying.
In a recent
example, the school district in Orange County, Florida, thought they’d
be clever and merely “allow” a christian cabal to pass out literature at
the high schools, by exploiting a loophole that says proselytizing is
okay so long as all groups get to it. Their bad faith, however, was
swiftly exposed when
the Satanic Temple demanded equal access to the children, forcing the school to reconsider their pro-proselytization policy.
5. Convincing people to vote against their own self-interests
The
2014 midterm elections were strange, in that nearly every time voters
had a chance to vote directly on legislation–such as raising the minimum
wage–they voted for the liberal side, but somehow repugicans still
swept the elections. There are many complex reasons for this, but one of
the most straightforward is that this is the problem with religiosity.
The repugicans thump the bible hard and frequently, and that causes a
lot
of people to believe that a vote for repugicans is a “christian” vote.
The fact that repugicans refuse to walk the walk–attacking the poor to
fluff up the coffers of the wealthy every chance they get–matters
little. The religiosity is skin deep, but that’s all it needs to be to
get votes.
6. christian “entertainment”
The
sense that “the world” is corrupt and sinful has led many wingnut
christians to feel uncomfortable with–or boycott entirely–mainstream
music, TV shows and movies. This, in turn, has created one of the great
scourges of American culture: explicitly christian entertainment. When
wholesomeness is prioritized over quality, no big surprise, quality
suffers. Thus there’s an
endless outpouring of crappy christian movies (
sometimes with Kirk Cameron!),
terrible christian 'music' that weakly rips off mainstream music, and even
fourth-rate christian
comedians peddling deeply unfunny humor. You almost feel sorry for the
people that have to endure this nonsense, but then again, they bring it
on themselves.
7. Faith healing
One of the
saddest aspects of the grand American tradition of competitive piety is
how many charlatans gleefully exploit people’s desire to be the most
faithful to squeeze them for their money and/or loyalty.
Faith healing is
one of the biggest scams going, with the so-called healers conning the
true believers, who often have serious health problems, into believing
that all they need to get better is pray. In some cases, the belief that
all you need is prayer goes so deep that parents
have allowed their children to die of preventable causes rather than take them to a doctor, a practice that is sadly legal in many states.
8. The modern repugicancabal
Many
political observers are prone, at times, to wonder how it is that the
repugican cabal of the mid-20th century seems to have disappeared
entirely. Gone are repugicans like Dwight Eisenhower or Gerald Ford,
who while certainly wingnut, at least seemed to feel somewhat
beholden to things like “facts” or “desire to govern,” and instead it
seems like every new crop of repugican politicians going into office is
nuttier than the last.
This is entirely due to religion.
The past few decades have been a stampede of religious fanatics into
high office. The results are disturbing:
Congressional panels convened to push the idea that contraception is some great moral evil,
Congress forbidding the EPA from consulting actual scientists on science questions,
anti-science fanatics heading
science committees, anything Michele Bachmann had to say during her
stint in Congress. Sure, some of the anti-fact ideology of the repugican
cabal isn’t about religious claims–even some non-believing wingnuts
deny the reality of climate change–but the bible thumpers
and their insistence that conviction matters more than facts really
helped get the repugican cabal to a place where politicians feel
confident ignoring inconvenient facts entirely.
9. Rape culture
Most
of us are fully aware of how wingnut christian hostility to
reproductive rights and gay rights is setting back progress, but it’s
also true that christianity plays a big role in making it hard to
address the problem of sexual assault. Many wingnut christians
eagerly spread the discredited myth that women make up rape in order to
“cover up” for having consensual sex, which is what Todd Akin was
doing when he claimed women cannot get pregnant from “legitimate rape.”
But more than that, because of their hang-ups about sexuality, wingnut christians generally get wrapped up in the idea that the
problem with sexual violence is less the violence part and more the sex
part.
Witness, for instance, National Review hack Carl Eric Scott, when he writes about the
problem of rape:
He assumes that the problem is not forced sex, but consensual sex, and
his “solutions” to the rape problem are all centered around trying to
discourage consensual sex. It’s a little like arguing that the way to
stop a mugging problem is to discourage gift-giving. Unfortunately,
because they keep injecting their anti-sex agenda into the discourse
about rape, wingnut christians continue to confuse the issue about
what exactly causes rape, by leading people to believe it’s just about
too much sex when it’s actually about power and domination.
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