My slogan’s “Jesus, guns, and babies.”
Jesus because that’s our First Amendment right. It’s the right to worship Jesus Christ freely. It’s why we have a country. Don’t talk to me about separation of church and state. Church and state was written because the state has no business in our church. But we are the church. We are the church, and we run the state, and Georgia’s sovereign, and we’re running the state with Jesus Christ first.
— Kandiss Taylor, a Georgia Republican gubernatorial candidate
I was part of the Evangelical church for fifty years, primarily as an Independent Baptist and later as a non-denominational Christian. While my theology evolved and changed over the years, one belief stayed with me from childhood to today: the separation of church and state; that there is a wall between religion and government, a wall that must never, ever be breached. As a young preacher, my pastors and professors taught me the importance of this wall. I carried this belief into the ministry. I strongly believed that church and state were two separate spheres, both ordained by God. As a pastor, I stayed out of the government’s business, and I expected the government to do the same with the churches I pastored. When the government tried to stick its nose in our business, I forcefully pushed back. I thought it important to not only defend the wall of separation between church and state, but also to make sure it was maintained and, if need be, repaired. And here’s the thing, every one of my ministerial colleagues believed the same. We believed that societal transformation came from winning souls. Most preachers maintained a strict separation between their personal politics and their theology. While I would preach on social issues, I always did so from a theological perspective. While most of the people I pastored were Republicans (if they voted at all), some of them were Democrats or Independents (especially in churches with union members). Did I ever cross the line and politick from the pulpit? Yes, but as a rule, I kept my partisan politics out of my preaching. (I was a staunch Republican for twenty-five years. In 2000, I left the Republican Party, voting Democrat for the first time.)
Here we are fifty years later . . . many Evangelical preachers no longer believe in a strict separation of church and state. Some even say that there is no such thing as the separation of church and state; that Christians have a duty to reclaim America for Jesus and establish the Bible as the law of the land — a Christian form of sharia law. What changed?
Over time, Evangelicals learned that just saving souls wasn’t going to effect the moral and political changes they wanted. So they turned to raw political power to achieve their goals, and in doing they sold their souls for bowls of pottage. Starting with the Moral Majority in the 1980s and moving to the plethora of theocratic parachurch organizations today, Evangelicals are using the power of the state to force people to conform to their religious beliefs. Since 2015, Evangelicals have abandoned all pretense, sacrificing ethics and morality on the altar of political expediency and power. (Just look at their unapologetic support of pathological liars Donald Trump and Herschel Walker.) Left to their own devices, Evangelicals will use any means necessary, including violence and bloodshed, to establish their corrupt version of the Kingdom of God on earth. One needs to only look at the January 6, 2021 Insurrection to see this played out in real time. Numerically, Evangelicalism is dying, but they now control the Republican Party and the Supreme Court, and for this reason, we must see them as an existential threat to our democracy. Make a list of your top ten bat-shit crazy Republicans. What do they all have in common? All of them are Christians. Most are Evangelicals, and the rest are conservative Catholics. At every level of government, Evangelicals now have control. The wall of separation of church and state, in their minds, is a misunderstood relic from the eighteenth century; a relic that has no relevance today.
So what do we do? Is it too late? Have Democrats/liberals/progressives ceded ground that they cannot regain? Can we vote our way out of this mess? Is Civil War waiting in the wings? Are we watching the decline and destruction of American democracy?
I see the problem. I see how we got here. I am not sure, however, we can reclaim what has been lost. Has cancer been spreading for decades in our society, and now it is so far advanced that it is untreatable? Is there anything we can do to turn back the fascists at the gate? Or will none of this matter because Joe Biden and his fellow warmongers, Republican and Democrat alike, have brought war to our shores?
Please share your thoughts in the comment section.
Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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The number of non-voters in 2020 was estimated to be 80 million. If Americans all voted (or a large majority), things could change. But too many people feel that calling out fascism is being harsh and mean. Leaders in the Republican party make racist, bigoted, homo and trans-phobic comments and it’s considered okay. Fundies/evangelicals have obviously sold out for power. If we can’t fight, they are going to win. Honestly? I don’t have a great deal of hope.
I watch with bated breath as America does its level best to match Iran, Saudi Arabia, and other such states in a rush to theocracy. Dumb, dumb, and dumber seems to be the order of the days. It’s not just rules of moral and ethical conduct that are being turned on their heads, it’s the very language. Even the word ‘democracy’ is being slowly altered so that to Republicans it’s been changed to mean mob rule. In fact, I’m sick and tired of right wingers telling me that rule by majority is mob rule. No, no, no, that’s not mob rule. Mob rule is when a minority forces its views on the majority by methods that are undemocratic! It’s when the losers of an election (by a good margin) succeed in conning a substantial proportion of the population that, in fact, they won the election. It’s when a minority of obsessed gun nuts succeeds in intimidating politicians into the pretence that more guns lead to greater safety (for all its faults, the UK has a greater freedom than gun ownership, in being largely gun free). It’s when a minority of authoritarians, ably assisted by a corrupt Supreme Court, succeed in telling women what decisions they can and can’t make regarding their own healthcare.
Do I think this can change? Maybe I’m being naïve but yes, I do. I think it’s already happening as the rapid increase in ‘nones’, especially amongst the young, continues unabated, with a high likelihood that Christianity will become a minority position in the coming decades. It won’t happen quickly, because the evangelical base is able to punch well above its weight in the nastiness stakes, but eventually it will be subsumed. I think that the Supreme Court composition will change in the long term, but in the short term it will be marginalised as states move away from Republicanism.
Well I hope so….
I think Richard Dawkins once said that religious extremism whether in the form of Evangelical theocrats or Islamic terrorists is just a sign of religion in general being “in its death throes” (or something to that effect). These are disheartening times, but Dawkins’ comment seems to point to a light at the end of the tunnel.
christians have found themselves decreasing in number and now want their external validation by forcing people to appear to agree with them.
I believe that the pendulum swings back and forth. The gains that were made in the 1960s and 70s were net with the conservative backlash of the 80s, to slightly less conservative 90s, the conservative GW Bush era, followed by the Obama era, then the Trump shit-show. The right have been a lot more calculating and strategic with their long term plans that are coming to fruition, while the left have largely had their thumbs up their asses and their fingers up their noses. It’s going to take a lot of work to claw back the freedoms that have been lost, but the majority of people don’t want the bigotry that our nation has embraced. However, it’s going to be hard to encourage people to get off their asses and fight. Women in many states and minorities Inman states have lost rights. LGBTQ people are next, and more rights are probably the going to be removed from women. All polls and research point to the decline of the religious right which is why they are so rabid in their desire to codify their bullshit into law. It’s going to be difficult as f$%& to overturn this bullshit, but I think in 25 years it’s due to happen.
When in my Baptist high school in the mid to late 1970s, our Republican representative to congress, Ralph Regula, addressed our class. He suggested, once we graduated, we run for school boards and county/city councils. He entreated us to bring along our “Christian values” and continue on to run for state and federal elections. This, Regula stated, would ensure that our nation was a Christian one because we would take over and “bring our nation back to God.”
Now, at the same time, we were screaming about keeping the government out of the church and our religious school. Our schools fought for the right to be unaccredited rather than teach “evil-otion” and other secular “nonsense.”
Oh, sure! Keep government out of our churches, but I’ll be damned! They wanted out churches to interfere with the government. Golly-gee!
So here we are, decades later, with far too many having taken up that mantle to go forth with creating a theocracy of the United States.
What to do?
Well, everything. Vote. Counter every statement declaring ours a Christian nation. Expose the hypocrisy at every turn. Now is not the time to rest.
Also, the kids are alright, so let us vote THEM in.
Thanks to you, Bruce, and all your commenters who get it.
I think its significant that the evangelical drive for political power started in the 1970s and 1980s. That was when the sexual revolution, the gay movement, and women’s liberation were starting to create real change in society. Evangelicals saw American culture beginning to veer sharply away from what they thought it should be, and I believe that’s what triggered the desire to gain political power to “correct” those changes.
One thing they have going for them is that they know it’s a long game. Taking over the Republican party and stacking the Supreme Court with theocrats took decades, but they stuck to their program — with the results we see today.
And dear Revival Fires, would you agree that the SEPARATION – with capital letters, since I know you think this is very very important – will be based mainly on what one has done for “the least of my brothers”, “the least of these”? Whoever feeds, clothes, or consoles the helpless in their times of need.
According to Jesus, those acts are what SEPARATE the sheep from the goats.
Infidel–The first two sentences of your comment is a good capsule history. When LBJ routed Barry Goldwater in 1964, Republican leaders saw they could no longer depend on traditional conservatives (some of whom, like Goldwater, had positions on social issues that weren’t much different from those of most of today’s Democrats) or the “establishment” Republicans (Wall Streeters and or folks like Prescott Bush) to help them win elections. So Richard Nixon, who wanted more than anything in the world to be President, hitched his wagon to Southern and Midwestern whites, many of whom were Evangelicals or Conservative Catholics. He, and Republicans after him, may not have thought much, if at all, about issues like abortion or gay rights (Goldwater was for both) but were willing to–pardon the terminology–sell their political souls to keep their party alive, and thriving.
Even when I was an Evangelical Christian, I could see through the ruse: I knew that what the Religious Right really cared about was power, not holiness. I knew that Ronald Reagan wasn’t the affable, principled paterfamilias he presented; I knew that Phyllis Schlafly, Pat Robertson, Tom Coburn and Newt Gingrich were about enriching themselves, not glorifying the God they professed to loving. As we’ve seen, they are willing to abandon any principle of Constitutional law or simple human decency to get there. Their stated attempt to establish the Kingdom of God on Earth is just a smoke-screen for them to make a country that suits their whims and egos.