I hope Father Walter and Huffington Post will forgive me for posting Walter’s entire piece here. Do go and see it at the original site:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/the-religious-rights-last-gasp_us_5790d94fe4b0a86259d0d897
And visit the author’s website here: http://www.kerrywalters.net/
The Religious Right’s Last Gasp
I can think of nothing that’s done more damage to American Christianity than the Religious Right.
Despite what the movement’s prophets sanctimoniously shout from their pulpits, it’s not secular humanism, gay marriage, abortion, the ACLU, evolution, porn, or the ban against school prayer that’s most eroded Christianity in this country.
What’s emptied churches is the unseemly ambition of Religious Right leaders like Jerry Falwell (father and son), James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Ralph Reed, and Franklin Graham to crown themselves moral police and political powerbrokers. Make no mistake about it: politics is the tail that wags this dog. From Day One, the Religious Right cynically hijacked Jesus as a front man for its political agenda.
But the Religious Right has now jettisoned any pretense to being genuinely Christian. How else to explain its embrace of a presidential candidate who’s as far from being a Christian as a starfish is from being a star? The endorsement has the feel of a last-ditch, at-any-cost attempt to hold onto the political power the movement’s enjoyed for nearly forty years.
God willing, it’s the Religious Right’s final gasp.
I don’t say this because I’m one of those liberal Christians who, as a clerical colleague of mine hyperbolically states, “believe whatever they want to as long as it makes them feel good.” I’m actually a pretty traditional Christian, although not, perhaps, enough of one for my conservative friends and certainly too much of one for my liberal friends.
I subscribe to what C.S. Lewis called “mere Christianity”: a holding fast to central doctrines, identifiable through revelation and reason, coupled with a willingness to welcome or at least hear out a wide breadth of moral, spiritual, and theological positions. Mere Christianity embraces the humble spirit of St. Augustine’s “in necessary things unity; in uncertain things freedom; in everything charity.”
Augustine’s counsel sticks in the craw of the Religious Right, whose leaders demand lockstep fidelity to the political goals they morph into “Christian” principles.
When challenged, the Religious Right exhibits the denunciatory spirit of the Taliban, even if it stops short of the latter’s nasty practices. From the 1979 launch of the Moral Majority to the present day, the movement has thunderously called down God’s judgment on anyone who refuses to embrace That Old Time Religion version of Christianity it hucksters for political gain.
For all its Bible-thumping, the Religious Right shows scant respect for scripture, cherry-picking scriptural passages that best fit its social and political agenda and ignoring others.
Both Testaments, for example, call for radical hospitality to the stranger. The Religious Right wants to close the borders.
Jewish and Christian Scripture obliges us to care for the orphaned, widowed, and poor. The Religious Right despises “welfare bums.”
The two Testaments consistently warn against the abuse of power, while offering only a handful of observations about sexual conduct. The Religious Right obsesses over sexual morality to the point of lechery, but remains relatively silent about social injustice.
Jesus’ moral teachings in the Gospels center on nonviolent love. The Religious Right never saw a weapons procurement bill it didn’t back.
Again and again, despite its biblical rhetoric, the Religious Right favors Caesar over God. This arrogant doublespeak has not gone unnoticed, and it’s undermined the credibility of Christianity in America.
Because the media can’t seem to get enough of the Religious Right’s antics—after all, reportage of outrageous sectarian positions makes for good copy—thousands of otherwise thoughtful people now believe that the Religious Right and Christianity are synonymous. Thanks to this confusion, those who otherwise might have explored the faith with open minds and hearts are repelled by it.
Moreover, national surveys routinely reveal that Millennials turn away from Christianity primarily because they’re turned off by the Religious Right’s joyless puritanism. Data also show that a sizable portion of once-churched Christians―”nones”―leave because of the Religious Right’s splenetic intolerance and transparent politicking.
But the good news is that the tide seems to be turning. The Religious Right’s jaundiced presidential endorsement can’t but reveal the movement for what it is: an unscrupulous political machine that has nothing to do with genuine Christianity and everything to do with lust for power. This exposure surely numbers its days.
Now, for we mere Christians, begins the uphill work of rehabilitating the faith that the Religious Right so besmirched.
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The evidence continues to mount that this November’s election may indeed represent a watershed for the Religious Right in the US: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/17/us/donald-trump-evangelicals-republican-vote.html
So, how to begin this journey of “rehabilitating the faith”?
In A Spacious Place 
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October 24, 2016 at 9:31 am
elbie
“So, how to begin this journey of “rehabilitating the faith”?”
I think it starts with building relationship … a trusted relationship.
How to do this? I don’t know …?
When culture and church are so closely interlocked it’s harder, but not necessarily impossible to break out of the restraints of culture. It seems what is needed sometimes is a massive circuit breaker … a miracle of sorts.
I don’t think talking or judging with finger-wagging from a far away distance does much to change a cultural perspective … if anything it seems to harden our stance of “It’s easy for them (liberals/fundamentalists?) to say. They don’t understand – it’s different for us where we are. If they were with us, they’d know that “. Nobody really sees themselves as the bad guys.
Even when deep down we know instinctively what we are doing is deeply out of alignment with what Jesus asked of us and taught.
Yet, churches are often the last and most difficult to change from the inside out. Churches are too often also the gatekeepers of our culture. We are captive to our own culture and accustomed to seeing the world outside and around us through this prism. So when the world moves on and rejects our cultural worldview, instead of waking up, we hold on tighter. It’s an odd phenomenon … especially when we consider we who go to and attend church, also live in the world.
Maybe a question is “How do we break free from the constraints of our own culture?” ourselves? “How do we help others to break free from the constraints of their own cultures?” I mean, the constraints that cause us to pre-judge harshly, unfairly, or treat our neighbours as less than ourselves?
It seems we, the churches, need to learn how to heal ourselves … We are so accustomed to thinking the world outside of us needs to be converted to our own particular brand of Christianity, that it’s hard to see sometimes that it is ourselves, we Christians who sometimes need most to be converted to Christianity. We look to the world to forgive us and forget what we have done.
When we talk about ‘Outreach’ is it possible, necessary or even desirable to ‘reach out’ to ourselves? Can we for a short time at least become the target of our own missions? Or do we need to wait for a new cultural order to grow out of the ashes? As the world moves on, I mean?
It’s easy to see we are flagged alongside Jerry Falwell, and easy to forget we are equally flagged alongside St Michael’s Residential school, Alert Bay.
How can we as Christians move towards building healthy trusted relationships? With each other? With the world? Nobody likes to be told what to do or to be judged …. we don’t respond well … Maybe the only answer is to go to Jerry Falwell, meet him in person, face-to-face, look him in the eye, and shake his hand?
I don’t know how to navigate this?