Republican Insider Explains How Religion Destroyed the GOP

[Soph0571]

Religious cranks ceased to be a minor public nuisance in this country beginning in the 1970s and grew into a major element of the Republican rank and file. Pat Robertson’s strong showing in the 1988 Iowa presidential caucus signaled the gradual merger of politics and religion in the party. Unfortunately, at the time I mostly underestimated the implications of what I was seeing. It did strike me as oddly humorous that a fundamentalist staff member in my congressional office was going to take time off to convert the heathen in Greece, a country that had been overwhelmingly Christian for almost two thousand years. I recall another point, in the early 1990s, when a different fundamentalist GOP staffer said that dinosaur fossils were a hoax. As a mere legislative mechanic toiling away in what I held to be a civil rather than ecclesiastical calling, I did not yet see that ideological impulses far different from mine were poised to capture the party of Lincoln.

The results of this takeover are all around us: If the American people poll more like Iranians or Nigerians than Europeans or Canadians on questions of evolution, scriptural inerrancy, the presence of angels and demons, and so forth, it is due to the rise of the religious right, its insertion into the public sphere by the Republican Party, and the consequent normalizing of formerly reactionary beliefs. All around us now is a prevailing anti-intellectualism and hostility to science. Politicized religion is the sheet anchor of the dreary forty-year-old culture wars.

[link:https://www.alternet.org/republican-insider-explains-how-religion-destroyed-gop|

[democratisphere]

1. GOP greed, selfishness, self-centeredness and racism have annihilated

the redumbliCON party too!

[Achilleaze]

2. It wouldn't be so tragic if they were REAL Christians who actually...

followed the teachings of Christ. But the republicans have shown the world time and again that they are happy to advertise the teachings, but loathe to live them out. Instead - following the lead of of their "god-emperor" Dirty Donny, the ignoble & immoral republican Draft-Dodger-in-Chief, they piss on the Golden Rule.

[Blue_true]

7. I just can't get over a Europeanized Jesus in the ancient Middleeast.

Some things are wonderous.

[jes06c]

11. Reminds me of a Kurt Vonnegut quote:

How about Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes?

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth.

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.

And so on.

Not exactly planks in a Republican platform. Not exactly George W Bush, Dick Cheney, or Donald Rumsfeld stuff.

For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that's Moses, not Jesus. I haven't heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere.

"Blessed are the merciful" in a courtroom? "Blessed are the peacemakers" in the Pentagon? Give me a break!

[tanyev]

3. They had plenty of opportunities to stop courting their votes and disown them.

They didn’t.

[oberliner]

4. What is this saying about Iranians and Nigerians?

The implication is that Europeans and Canadians are superior to people in Africa and the Middle East because they are less religious.

[GulfCoast66]

9. I read it differently...

People, nations, cultures or societies that have effectively removed religious bigotry or even religion itself from their nation, culture or society create superior nations, cultures and societies than those who do not. Pretty simple and undeniable in my opinion.

[sharedvalues]

5. GOP decided the religious were useful fools to get votes for billionaires

Explained here

http://www.chicagonow.com/politics-now/2017/12/the-gop-despises-the-trump-base-and-so-does-trump/

[JHB]

6. He soft-pedals how conservatives were already a form of "dominionist"...

Movement Conservatives had a vision of the way government ought to be, lionizing the Gilded Age when great fortunes were amassed, labor issues could be dealt with by clubbing or shooting strikers into submission. "Government tyranny" was anything that interfered with businessmen acting like tyrants themselves, or (gasp!) taxed them. They always had an authoritarian streak (e.g., about 60's protests: "This is what happens when you let just anyone go to college" ), and were fanatical about stamping out every last vestige of the New Deal and Great Society. Newt Gingrich and Paul Ryan were both publicly salivating at the opportunity after the election went Trump's way.

The "libertarian conservatives" he mentions, Grover Norquist and Dick Armey, were on board with that. "Shrink government until you can drown it in a bathtub," in Norquist's words. Lofgren may draw a distinction between these guys and those above, but to anybody outside of their club the distinction is moot.

Conservative activists Paul Weyrich and Richard Viguerie helped Jerry Falwell found the Moral Majority in 1979. Weyrich was a founder of the Heritage Foundation and ALEC. Armey is Heritage's current head.

The zealots of the conservative movement and the zealots of the forms of religion Lofgren is decrying were wedded for his whole career. They advance their causes by the same means: ousting backsliders and apostates to position themselves to enact their Greater Vision Of How Things Should Be. They have more in common with Maoists or Bolsheviks (remember Norquist's bust of Lenin?) than anybody in the Democratic party or even the Republicans in the time of Ike and Rockefeller.

I'm glad Lofgren noticed the problem back in 2012, when he wrote his book, but he was still in denial as to how much his own faction was a willing participant.

[RandomAccess]

8. KEY Sentence -

Politicized religion provides a substrate of beliefs that rationalizes—at least in the minds of its followers—all three of the GOP’s main tenets: wealth worship, war worship, and the permanent culture war.

[Zorro]

10. The perniciousness of religion being inserted in the political process

is one reason why the country's founders created the First Amendment.

I doubt if the majority of Bible thumpers know that their ancestors left their home countries to be free of state-sponsored religion, and to be able to practice their own faith without government interference.