The Religious Right

I'll admit it. If there's one thing I don't understand about America, it's how the religious right, people whom in Canada would seem next to crazy (and that's being charitable, except perhaps in Alberta where it's conservative enough to make them look mainstream), has as much power and influence as they do. The practicing of religion where I come from is, for the most part, a pretty low-key affair, with people doing their weekly thing on the weekend and, well, that's about it. Here, it's more of a full time institution -- you go to church, go to your prayer group, attend pro-life rallies, listen to Christian music -- you could literally spend all of you time doing churchy stuff, and the thing that blows my mind the most is the number of people whom I’ve met that do.

Now, as a fairly secular and liberal Catholic (seemly one of a minority down here, by the way), I find all of this vaguely creepy. I meet people who apparently 'have the fire burning' within them, and I wonder at what point, if at all, they do the whole St. Thomas thing and periodically have a big retrospective on what's going on with their faith. After all, spirituality is a dynamic thing, and for every crest there has to be a trough. It's the apparent absence of these that makes me wonder to what degree there is self-reflection vs. blind faith.

It's this apparent blind faith in evangelical Christianity that scares the crap out of me. I come from a relativistic view where faith and reason go hand in hand, and thus view with great suspicion those who profess an absolutist doctrine. As I've been down here for a number of years now, I've sort of lumped most evangelical Christians into this category, and credited them with the continuing political success of the GOP, who reflects this type of 'black vs. white' thinking far more than the Democrats.

The problem is though, as evidenced in the recent Slate article "Debunking myths about the religious right," is that you can't really place all evangelical Christians in the 'scary' category, that there needs to be a delineation between them and those and 'fundamentalist' Christians (who are still very scary). I won't go into recreating the article, but you should check it out. It certainly made me pause and consider how I was thinking of the problem of political Christianity in America. I briefly borrowed a book from the library called The Transformation of American Religion: How We Actually Live Our Faith in an attempt to delve more into the sacredization (I assume if secularization is a word, this is too) of American society. Unfortunately I had to return it before I could get much into it, but it's on the short list of things to read in the next little while.