Yes I've been saying this all along. I know their intellectual and moral bankruptcy, because I was on the inside of it once upon a time. They got nothin'.
The open question is not whether they're on the way to irrelevance, but how it will play out. There are still Handmaid's Tale-like scenarios that could lead us through a dystopian hell before it collapses. It's rather like how slavery was an inherently doomed strategy, but it took a horrific civil war to bring even a half-assed end to it.
Sounds fun. I want to be an unholy warrior.
Slavery is still alive and well. It is not as pervasive as it once was, and it is underground in most places, so we don't see it. Still, we read about isolated cases, and these may be the tip of the iceberg. A domestic worker essentially enslaved in Kuwait, a group of field hands in Mauratania, and victims of human trafficking forced into the sex trade all over the world.
The usual story, Love thy neighbor unless he is black, brown, gay and on and on. Discrimination is the heart of today's evangelicals which calls into serious question their claim to be morally superior. Unfortunately, it will take a lot of time and work to undo their damage to our secular system.
Evangelicals may be dwindling....but people who are small minded, petty and angry will still band together under some other name or premise to spew their hatred and bigotry. There is a very good reason for separation of church and state and we need to elect officials who understand that. IMHO
Holy crap, I hope so.
Trouble is, they're such a loud bloc of voters and they turn out at every damn election, so they swing more power than they should account for by their numbers. If atheists, for example, were organized around the issues we cared about, like free speech and so on, we would swing more weight than them. But atheists/agnostics are all over the map politically. It's only religion where we tend to agree.
It boggles my mind that they favored an immoral person like Trump.
Simply because he ran as a Republican. If he had run as a Democrat, they'd have been all over him; but on the R ticket, God obviously wanted him to be president, so they made every excuse in the book.
What with the Republicans being the party of moral purity and all. <sarcasm>
I hope that it's true, but here in Missouri I have to wonder. We use to be considered a purple state, but with each election we're becoming more red. Missouri has a large segment of the population that's still evangelical, and that's reflected in the overwhelming number of Republicans in office at the state level.
Trump was not elected by White evangelicals. Donald Trump was elected by a broad spectrum of voters from around the country. Only 20% of Americans report being White evangelicals, and only 77% of those voted for Trump. The numbers just aren’t there but I guess it feels good to have someone to blame.
The connection between religious association and voting is tenuous. Probably only half of Protestants are active church members. Because of cultural heritage they might SAY that they’re an evangelical, but it is a meaningless bit of data that has nothing do with their vote.
Why do people assume that people voted for Trump because of their church membership? Correlation does not prove causation. If you grew up in an agricultural region there is a good chance that you will have conservative values. Part of that conservatism might be expressed through membership in a Baptist or Methodist Church. To then say that folks voted for Trump because of their church—that borders on the ridiculous IMO.
All the talk about evangelical churches being hypocritical haters—that’s hogwash. I think it is clear who the haters are. They are busily engaging stereotyping and innuendos.
SOUTHERN BAPTIST CONVENTION
RESOLUTIONS:
Finally, it is noteworthy that the evangelical candidate in the last presidential race was Hillary Clinton.
You provided a really important number: 77% of evangelicals voted for tRump. I have read that the number is even higher, but let's assume that your number is correct. That is a higher rate than any other demographic. And since the orange gasbag only won by the slimmest of margins, it is valid to say that evangelicals put him in the WH. Of course they had help. But their reasons for voting for him is what really sets them apart. They want to create a Christian State. They want to shove their religious values down our throats. And tRump is facilitating that to the best of his ability. THAT'S why we go on about the evangelicals.
That 77% made him president as did the farmers and most voters in the southern states all of which voted as a block in this election and most others.
Harrumph!
My sister is a Baptist and she has absolutely no interest in creating a Christian State, nor does anyone else I know. You are way, way off in conspiracy theory land sir.
It is truly odd that you would ascribe Trump’s victory to such a small demographic. Hey, 52% of White women voted for Trump. Why aren’t you ragging on them? Vast swaths of your own state of California voted for Trump. The votes were counted, Trump won, and not by a slim margin at all in terms of electoral votes. No one is to “blame”—the wishes of the public were made known. If all redheads in the Midwest had voted for Clinton she might have won. They didn’t and it is a meaningless speculation.
I myself didn’t vote for Trump, but since he won, out of respect for the judgment of my fellow Americans I am giving him my full support, just as I did for Obama. That’s what democracy is about.
Do their votes not count? Who makes them vote as a bloc? I thought a bloc would be 100% and it was nowhere near 100% anywhere. Maybe it wasn’t a bloc, aye?
Look at a map of the parts of the country that went for Trump. It was a total landslide in terms of electoral votes. You can not blame any one region or any one demographic.
@WilliamFleming
Look man, Trump is a treasonous, low-life scumbag, criminal, and that is not even the worst of it. His obstruction of justice, money laundering, illegal campaign finances, election rigging, all that, is peanuts compared to the fact that he is a mouthpiece for the fossil fuel industry. He denies climate science when we most need true leadership in the other direction. His craven attitude drives another nail into the coffin human civilization and countless millions of species. If you are not very science-savvy then you are not going to get it. But kids who are alive today are going to suffer big time. So please do us all a favor and do you homework. Democracy is not about blind loyalty. It's about being a well informed voter, and faithfully executing that office.
@Flyingsaucesir Well said.
As a kid, I remember watching them on television and thinking WTF, I repeat as a kid! I can't wait to see the back door slam their backsides as they leave
It is indeed. The problem is that other delusional lumps of humanity still represent a huge portion of the population of the world, some of them more dangerous existentially than the fading evangelical christians.
Word is that Jerry Falwell Jr needed help from Michael Cohen to explain away his "pool boy".