Murc's Law on Steroids

"Explaining the Rise of Americans With No Religious Preference:Politics and Generations", GSS Social Change Report no. 46, 2001.

In around 2000 researchers for the General Social Survey (GSS) noticed a startling development in the 1990s: after a long period (at least 20 years) in which the number of Americans claiming to have no religious faith had remained steady at around 7%, it had doubled in a decade to 14%. Other surveys were finding around the same pattern. What was going on?

Michael Hout and Claude Fischer (paper linked in the picture caption above) looked, and found that the change wasn't actually about religion, but politics:

Downward Trajectory

Cistercian Abbey of Mount St. Bernard. Photo by Financial Times.

A weird thought from the theologically-minded Elizabeth Bruenig, having dinner with some  evangelical Trump supporters in a small town an hour or so from Dallas during Easter week, in a big article in the Washington Post last week:

In some sense it seemed that Trump is able, by being less Christian than your average Christian, to protect Christians who fear incursions from a hostile dominant culture. But that paradox also supplies a handy solution to the question of whether Christians should direct their efforts to worldly politics or turn inward, shunning political life for spiritual pursuits. By voting for Trump — even over more identifiably Christian candidates — evangelicals seem to have found a way to outsource their fears and instead reserve a strictly spiritual space for themselves inside politics without placing evangelical politicians themselves in power. In that sense, they can be both active political agents and a semi-cloistered religious minority, both of the world and removed from it, advancing their values while retreating to their own societies.

It's like only Nixon being able to go to China without freaking out the rightwingers because his anti-communism was such a certain thing, or maybe the mirror image of that; the very extremity of Trump's worldliness, his open worship of money and sex and himself and his total lack of compassion, makes him the man who can achieve their aims or delay their downfall without corrupting any "good" people in the process. Since they believe all secular life is rotten with corruption it will take corruption on the grand scale to get it done, and he's corrupt enough already.

What kind of Christianity is that?

Speaking of Calvin...

"Evangelical Republican" is a perversion of christianity. Their support of people like Roy Moore and Trump shows they do not follow the tenants of their supposed faith.#TheResistance #MAGA #Trump #FoxNews #Resist #ImpeachTrump #CCOT pic.twitter.com/ecCsWr11VY

— Fredon Moniteau (@FMoniteau) December 10, 2017

So obviously what stopped me there was the "tenants" of the faith ("Of course not," I want to say, "they despise people who pay rent, they follow the landlords of the faith"), but it also struck me that there's a theological error there; the tenets of the faith of conservative American evangelicals are completely consistent with supporting Trump.

That's the problem. You can't get anywhere by telling them Trump is a bad man because this increasingly Calvinist denomination doesn't believe there's any such thing as a good man; man is born totally depraved. Nor is there any necessary relation between the kind of depravity a man displays in his character and the work God has selected him to do; Trump's idea that he should be judged in terms of all his "winning" sounds right to them, the manifest sign of his predestined status.

We started seeing this years ago, in the 1980s, in the scandals inside the church of Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart, in which the faithful didn't see these men's sexual escapades as disqualifying for the ministry but instead thrilling dramas of sin and redemption. In the same way what Trump may have done in the distant past (e.g. when he was in his 60s, at the time of the Access Hollywood video) is of no relevance to the heroic things he may be doing now, singlehandedly protecting us from the vicious enemies surrounding us, except to the extent that if he was that bad then, the fact that he's so good now illustrates God's awesome power to exalt the weak and humble the great, or something.

Fox News was suggesting God had punished the Olympic skier Lindsey Vonn for criticizing Trump a couple of days ago:

They later deleted the tweet, but the Washington Examiner kept the idea in their headline:

And then, it's not exactly relevant, but there was the Alabamian in the Frank Luntz focus group who thought,

Forty years ago in Alabama, there’s a lot of mamas and daddies that’d be thrilled that their 14-year-old was getting hit on by a district attorney.

It's just not the kind of nice, earnest, naggy but well-meant Christianity you mostly see on television. These people are in a different moral world.

Monday Trump Dump

Image from Reddit via Giphy.

Trump responds to allegations from British prime minister:

“Number one I’m not stupid, I can tell you that right now. Just the opposite. I don’t think I’m a divisive person. I’m a unifier.” (Via Independent)

Well, then, that settles that. Who would know better than the man himself? He's not so sure whether he's divisive or not, but he's positive on the stupid issue. No pussyfooting or equivocation, no "I have no recollection of being stupid" or "it depends on what the meaning of 'stupid' is". Just boldly acknowledging the fact.

David Brooks goes takfiri

Q: Why is Ted Cruz like the Paul Reilly design for the Church of St. Frances de Chantal in the Bronx (1971)?
A: Because he says he's Christian, but David Brooks says he's Brutalist. (Uncredited photo via American Guild of Organists, New York City chapter.)

Shorter David Brooks, "The Brutalism of Ted Cruz", January 12 2016:

I'm shocked, shocked to discover that one of the Republican candidates for the presidency is offering a hard, combative and gladiatorial approach, sowing bitterness, influencing his followers to lose all sense of proportion and teaching them to answer hate with hate, and seems to be a stranger to most of what would generally be considered the Christian virtues of humility, mercy, compassion and grace. Though I agree with some of his positions.

Pause to note that grace would not generally be considered a Christian virtue in that it isn't a property of people at all but of God. Or by extension sovereigns ("God save our gracious Queen") and dukes and duchesses ("your grace"). So I have to say Brooksy's still not quite ready for his theology orals.

Technical issues aside, far be it from me to dispute these takfir accusations; I don't think Cruz represents the Christian virtues or the liberal, forgiving spirit of the New Testament very well either. I do think it's kind of funny how Brooks seems to be putting himself in the position of warning the conservative evangelical community that their preferred candidate isn't very humble or merciful: does he think they're not listening to what Cruz says?

Cantor on the roof

The Third Temple for All Mankind, a hyper-ecumenical proposal by architect Moses V. Komsky.

All week I've been walking past a headline in the Jewish Daily Forward:

Jews Cast Wary Eye on Evangelicals

I finally took the time to look it up online, and found it's reporting a poll from the Public Religion Research Institute that

asked Jewish respondents to rate the favorability of several religious groups. Mormons received a 47% favorability rating, Muslims 41.4%; the group [jump]

Rum, Romanism, and Ridiculous

Something else I called attention to a while back (in mid-January) is the curious relationship developing on the US right between the Roman Catholic hierarchy and our ancient Know-Nothing community, which traditionally identified the Pope as Antichrist and Rome as the Scarlet Woman who rides that seven-headed beast in the book of Revelation.

The Whore of Bablylon. From Sacred Texts.

Now the Times religion columnist, Samuel G. Freedman, has caught onto the same thing, with a very interesting nuance that has apparently been showing up in the primaries: while Evangelical Protestants have adopted Rick "Sanctum" Santorum as the standard-bearer of "religious" conservatism, Catholics haven't—Catholic Republicans are mostly voting for Romney. Freedman comments, primly,

Through a critical reading of the data, Mr. Santorum’s base of evangelical Protestants and conservative Catholics could be seen by cynics as a coalition of zealots, held together by intolerance. By another way of thinking, however, his candidacy offers proof of a growing tolerance on the part of evangelical Christians, a willingness to shed ancestral religious prejudices.

And then the Catholics who won't vote for Santorum are more tolerant still? (They are voting for somebody who believes God has plural wives, except, of course, for the Democrats, whose tolerance is not under discussion.) Forgive me, but if you think it's a big deal that evangelicals now recognize white Catholics as white people, I realize that wasn't always true, but color me less than impressed—I think Freedman's cynic idea works better.

Holy Alliances, Batman!

I love the developing story of the conservative Christians having a summit at a ranch outside Houston to agree on a Republican candidate as their Anointed One, getting snookered by the Catholic contingent, by a little sharp electoral practice, into naming Rick Santorum (don't forget to click, it's still down in fourth place).

The Sufi saint Ibrahim ibn Adham (c. 718–c. 789) in an 18th-century Indian miniature. This version found here. He is the subect, under a garbled name, of Leigh Hunt's poem "Abu ben Adhem".

It seems that after two indecisive ballots a number of the delegates had to leave to catch planes, so a rump cast a third ballot without them, or with (possibly kind of forged) proxies, and [jump]