Howard Dean has pronounced the Republican party as consisting of mostly white Christians, and now this editorial concerning Christian proselytizing at the Air Force Academy describes a disturbing trend.
It appears that some Christians are getting more and more aggressive and belligerent in their efforts to promote and defend their religion. To some extent this is the result of liberals like Dean trying to promote a Christian bad guy to have an enemy to fight against.
Back in the 80's when I used to belong to People for the American Way, I got regular fund raising letters proclaiming the coming state of repression under a Christian Right government. I recall thinking that that was the first I had heard of this ominous Christian Right. The entire focus was on the Orange County school board, which was predominated by Christian fundamentalists who wanted to teach creationism in the schools, along with a strict adherence to the three R's. Not coincidentally, I think, Orange County for a long time had one of the top school systems in the country academically. I have no idea where they are now, I do know that the liberals succeeded in taking over there as well.
Gradually the left has accelerated an attack on the Christian right that has gotten more and more extreme. In fairness, the Christians in the south brought it on themselves by demanding that kids say prayers in school. It is not that all of a sudden they started doing this, they always have, but what happened is that as more people starting moving into the south through the 70's and 80's, many of them were not the traditional Christians that resided there and they began to feel ostracized by the fundamentalism that is ubiquitous there.
That in turn caused the left to start to fight them, and then the left hit on the idea of using the right wing Christians as a punching bag to scare people into supporting policies of the left. In California in particular, the Christians began to fight back against the left wing culture that was gradually replacing the more conservative culture in the schools and society throughout the 70's and since.
The left took the prayer issue and began a full scale assault on Christians and Christian values that seems to continually get worse. My sympathies lie on the Christian side of things, even though I am not a Christian and truth be told I don't much like Christianity. However, looking at it strictly from a political perspective, we are far better off having Christian boundaries in society than the anything goes, nothing matters culture of the left. At least the Christians recognize there are good things and bad things and we have to promote the good and fight the bad. That is so basic that I am astounded by the mind pretzels that liberals get themselves into trying to say everything is morally equivalent--it is just dumb.
At any rate, like the argument that the left makes that Bush's war in Iraq has stimulated terrorist recruitment, the war the left has provoked on Christians has radicalized Christians and is making them fight back harder, harden positions, and look to enforce their will politically and in arenas of public life like the Air Force where they never would have before.
Many, many conservative Christians do not agree with the fundamentalists who are trying to take more and more power in society. My family is from the deep south, almost all Christians, including my mother. The religion just never stuck with me, I never believed it even when I was a kid going to church every Sunday. We don't discuss politics a whole lot because most of them, unlike myself, have at best a passing interest. I was suprised then to hear that my mother voted for Kerry, and the reason is that she heard Bush say something on TV about God supporting America that offended her sense of separating church from the running of government. I have to give her a lot of kudo's for that, even though I don't agree with her view of Bush.
In the final analysis here, what we have is a left that has radicalized the Christians to step further and further over the line of propriety by one stupid thing after another, like trying to remove the phrase "under God" from the pledge of Allegiance, or any reference to God in the public square altogether. It is a dumb war, and what is needed is to step back and live and let a little here. Christians are not the boogie men the left would like to promote them as, and Christianity or any other religion is not something that should even be discussed in schools or other public institutions in terms of proselytizing.
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