Lately we’ve been talking about North Carolina’s House Bill 2, which demands that people use the public bathrooms corresponding to the sex marked on their birth certificates. We’ve spent a lot of time talking about this bill and what it means for both toxic Christians and LGBTQ folks. Today I want to look at some new developments in the bill’s future–and explain why it’s important to understand fundagelicals’ sudden obsession with transgender people.
Sometimes right-wing Christians can behave in ways that confuse outsiders to their culture. The National Day of Prayer (NDP) and its associated grandstanding may seem like yet another example of that confusing behavior, but it really isn’t. It fits in perfectly with their motivations and goals. Understanding the NDP can help us understand Christians themselves better–and better understand where their religion is going and why.
One of the biggest ways that overzealous Christians reveal that their religious grandstanding is, well, just a pretendy fun-time game is in how they publicly talk about and engage in prayer. One of the very last things they should be doing is letting that fact slip to the rest of us–but they show us, in so many ways, exactly how little they themselves believe the words they say. Here is one major way that we can tell that Christians don’t have much faith at all in prayer.
I mentioned being very very helpful the other day, and today I want to demonstrate that helpfulness by giving the duly-appointed (and self-appointed) representatives of the Religious Right some new slogans they can use to market their simple, universal human message of terror, misogyny, brutality, tribalism, abuse, and violence.
Losing one’s faith can feel a lot like mourning the passing of a loved one. There’s so much emotion bound up in a deconversion that it can be hard to unpack exactly what’s happening. I’ve been thinking about the topic lately because we’ve been touching on the topic in comments here and there. Strangely, it was an old song that really crystallized and solidified some of my thoughts.
When we look at the balance of news coming out about Christianity, one fact seems absolutely inescapable: the religion in general is starting to lose its privileged position in American culture. But for some reason, many Christians still act like they’re totally astonished and blindsided when they are confronted with this fact. Today I want to examine this tendency–because it shows us something important about what’s going on in right-wing Christian culture.
Even the most optimistic, chirpy Christians have started noticing that something is definitely wrong.
Last time, I uncovered some interesting links between the National Day of Prayer (NDP) and the Red Scare manufactured by the Religious Right in the 1950s. Today I want to touch on how the “holiday” is practiced in the modern day. This manufactured holiday–such as it is–is nothing less than a perfect symptom of the coming downfall of the religion that its biggest proponents seek to protect and enshrine into power.
I have a quick aside. With a thankful h/t to Hemant Mehta, enjoy an awesome video Samantha Bee and Patton Oswalt just put out about those fake “abortion clinics” that deceive women. I wanted to mention something about it that hit me personally.
As I dug into the history of the National Day of Prayer, I remembered that old saying about how religion’s a lot like sausage-making in that you don’t ever want to view too closely the making of either one. This “holiday” was concocted in a perfect storm of Christian entitlement, persecution fantasizing, control-lust, naked opportunism, and desperation. There is absolutely nothing noble, loving, or (if I may be permitted to use the term) Christlike about how the National Day of Prayer came about, nor about how it is practiced today.