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.
I came out of that theater knowing that the Force was a more awesome power than all the planet-killing space stations one could construct or command. Then two kittens entered my life and showed me what real destructiveness looked like.
Clothes fascinate me. They’re a powerful sign of our own personal individuality and a statement about how we view ourselves, our place in whatever tribe we call our own, and what aspirations and opinions we hold. Ever since I was a teenager, I’ve been fascinated with the subject. Weirdly, until recently I wasn’t much for modern fashion itself, but the everyday clothes that people choose and wear is something I could talk about all day long. In my case, the sartorial apple didn’t fall too far from the tree. Today I’ll show you how.
As the religion becomes more and more extremist and polarized, we’ll be seeing more and more people damaged by it. Christianity–especially the right-wing versions of it–has managed to press into its adherents’ lives one of the cruelest and most heartless deceptions imaginable, and those adherents’ innocent children are the ones paying the price.
Today we’ll be talking about the increasingly-frantic attempts fundagelicals are making to understand and address the ever-increasing defections of young people from their ranks, and why those attempts are doomed to fail.