Why Evangelicals Enabled the Corporate Takeover of the Republican Party - Frank Schaeffer

[Shallah Kali]

http://frank-schaeffer.blogspot.com/2011/03/why-evangelicals-enabled-corporate.html


What's so curious is that in this religion-inflicted country of ours, the same Evangelicals, conservative Roman Catholics, and others who have been running around insisting that America had a "Christian foundation" and demanding a "return to our heritage" and/or more recently trashing health care reform as "communist" have ignored the fact that one great contribution of historic Christianity was a commitment to strong central government. For instance, as early as the fourth century, this included church support for state-funded, or state-church-funded, charities, including hospitals.

Government was seen as part of "God's plan" for creating social justice and defending the common good. Christians were once culture-forming and culture-embracing people. Even the humanism preached by the supposedly "anti-Christian" Enlightenment thinkers of the eighteenth century was, in fact, a Deist/Christian "heresy," with a value system espousing human dignity borrowed wholesale from a once religious/biblical ethical system.

In the scorched-earth era of the "health care reform debates" of 2009 and beyond, Evangelicals seemed to believe that Jesus commanded that all hospitals (and everything else) should be run by corporations for profit, just because corporations weren't the evil government.

snip

The Religious Right/Far Right et al. favored private "facts," too. They claimed that global warming wasn't real. They asserted this because scientists (those same agents of Satan who insisted that evolution was real) were the ones who said human actions were changing the climate. Worse, the government said so, too!

more at the link...

[riverbendviewgal]

1. Read Rainbow Pie

Joe Bageant who is the author writes about these religious right people. Great book.

[LibertyLover]

2. Frank Schaeffer is an amazing individual and writer

with a first-hand knowledge of the what the far right religious groups want to do to America and how they intend to do it. Thank you for this article.

[hifiguy]

3. Schaeffer is always worth reading

because he completely understands how and why the wingnuts are as crazy as they are and why they are so frightening to sensible people. How the man ever escaped his past with all of his marbles still in place is nigh on a miracle.

[patrice]

4. I'll mark that miracle up to a passion for the Truth as in "I am the way, the truth and the life..."

John 14:6. Something a lot of other people who say they have made that commitment are not being as honest as Schaeffer is about it.

[DeSwiss]

5. K&R

Meanwhile, the world outside Burt's or Winchester, Virginia doesn't exist. Not really. If you spend your days at a soul-numbing repetitious job with a brain simmering in anti-depressants, a belly stuffed with high fat, supercarb comfort food, and evenings half drunk or recovering on the couch from work . . . well . . . when the heck are you supposed to find time or mind to grasp the implications of global warming even as you contemplate being one payday ahead of homelessness? A while back I watched this bar full of people stare at a game of Afghani dead goat polo in silent, rapt attention. If that isn't brain dead I don't know what is.

The relentless autocratic, blue collar American workplace has ground my people down, smashed 'em right into the couch. There they are force-fed the huckster's hologram of "personal freedom" in advertisements for off road vehicles. Getting a lousy public education, then being played against your fellow workers in Darwinian fashion by the free market economy does not make for optimism or open mindedness. It makes for a kind of bleak meanness nobody is openly talking about in the American political dialogue today.

I seem to remember a time when we weren't so mean, back when most people in Burt's believed in the American dream. A few still do, or at least pay lip service to it, though now they have been reduced to being grateful for having a job, any job. When you're easily replaced and are devalued you no longer pretend to have a choice. To feed your family you work harder and for less and without benefits. You eat shit and you ask for seconds.

Eating shit eventually makes you bitter and resentful of anyone who does not appear to be eating their share of shit. So you feel that anyone else who gets a break, especially a government-assisted leg up is cheating you. From resentment it is only a short skip to hatred and the illogical behavior that comes with hatred. Like voting Republican against your own best interests.

By Joe Bageant, http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2005/04/lets_drink_to_t.html">Let's Drink To The Slobbering Classes

[patrice]

6. K! & R! for both of the links contained herein. nt

[randr]

7. Radical Islam and Radical Christianity need to be seen as two sides of the same coin