RE: AU's report on the Values Voter Summit
September 12, 2016 at 10:31 pm
(This post was last modified: September 12, 2016 at 11:23 pm by Crossless2.0.)
(September 12, 2016 at 10:11 pm)Thumpalumpacus Wrote: That's exactly it. As the generations pass, the numbers of believers here in America decline. No doubt there's a baseline somewhere, but the fact is that we've seen the peak and ebb of the tide which started in, oh, perhaps '65, peaked in the early 90s, and is now waning. More stringent rules are in place in schools regarding religion. The courts have slapped down most all attempts at public displays on public property. Kids nowadays have the internet on their phones and are therefore less susceptible to parental programing.
The erosion has certainly started.
Will they figure out a way to appeal to the young? They'll have to drop any further support for homophobic bigotry, racism, and tamp down their message even more.
In a way, it's a sort of homeopathic atheism. There will be no knockout blow, simply an incremental dilution of their power in our society.
I agree entirely. There won't be a knockout, but they will, as a political force, begin to look a bit like a fighter who has taken ten rounds of punishment to the body. But it will be gradual, since the GOP and the conservative Christians have entered into a symbiotic relationship -- one, I suspect, about which each party is beginning to have some misgivings.
But you and I are the same age, Thump, and it is within our living memory when it wasn't always so. Evangelicals and white Southern Baptists -- though they voted as individuals, of course -- were as groups largely apolitical and disdained the messiness and compromise of politics as being too much 'of the world'. I can't really see them toning down their rhetoric regarding homosexuality, etc. so I expect in time that these groups will expire of their own irrelevance in the political arena and become more inward and ever more culturally tone deaf. Fine. Let them teach the Cross and Christ's redemption to anyone who cares to listen. I'll be content when they stop trying to push their unconstitutional agenda and their unscientific nonsense on the rest of us.
