Influential elements of the religious right are promoting policies and values that contribute to America’s ills while they boost popular religiosity, and vice versa. Inspired by a combination of faith-based ideology and self-aggrandizement, these constituencies emphasize wedge issues such as opposing abortion and gay rights over fighting poverty. They have endorsed a deregulated, low taxation (especially of the wealthy), free market, high-risk ownership society that emphasizes personal responsibility and potential gain over communal cooperation, and has produced a high level of socio-economic disparity. Take a moment to consider that it is supremely ironic, that the folks most opposed to Darwinian science are, in the main, strong advocates of socio-economic Darwinism! The extreme expression of this world-view are the popular Prosperity Christianity and Rapture parallel cultures (whose highly politicized, Bible-based world-view encourages anti-Darwinist’s beliefs).
The megachurches are self-help entertainment complexes operated by self-promoting ministers. As an adjunct to privatization, religious conservatives are promoting the displacement of government services with faith-based charities. This has the advantage of helping the same churches expand their outreach into the larger community – and don’t think that leaders of the religious right don’t know this. But extensive sociological research indicates that the consequences for society at large are not so benign. Private charities can do some things government cannot, but overall they are no more effective than the latter, and cannot provide the comprehensive assistance that government can.
My research has been criticized for supposedly blaming religion as a whole, including the liberal sects, for creating America’s social problems, rather than placing the blame where it most belongs, on the religious right. Liberal believers contend that it is should be possible to construct a nation that is both highly religious in a liberal manner, and socially healthy.
In principle this seems reasonable since left oriented denominations generally favor progressive secular social and economic strategies. But in practical terms this does not work. For one thing, because their world-view is so secularized, liberal sects are hard pressed to inspire high levels of religious activity. Even worse, the implosion of religion that invariably accompanies the adoption of progressive policies applies to faith across the left-center-right spectrum. The only way to refute this hypothesis is for a nation that is highly religious, liberal, and socially successful to appear. So far none has, and there is no logical reason to think one will.
Some of you reading this are by now stamping your feet and saying that Christian capitalist America is an economic power house that will leave the stagnant godless progressive democracies in the dust. It is correct that the secular democracies have some serious economic issues. But the argument is rather thin when the dollar is collapsing compared to the Euro as America loses its manufacturing base while building up enormous personal, national and international debt loads, in what may prove to be a colossal financial bubble.
American finance is afflicted by one bubble after another, as well as a series of scandals, that cast serious doubt on the competence of its laissez-faire leadership. The World Economic Forum recently removed the USA from its perch as the world’s most economically competitive, placing it behind some of its secular competitors. There are worrying signs that American education levels are slipping relative to the rest of the west. Our private health care system is so outrageously expensive -- it costs a third to half more per head than those of all other 1st world nations (while delivering high levels of juvenile and adult mortality) – that it wastes about a half trillion dollars each year. Money that could be used to repair our crumbling infrastructure.
Is the USA doomed to forever remain a conservative Christian land afflicted by a host of societal ills? Fortunately no. The evidence that the religious right – which makes up only a quarter or so of the population -- has peaked and is on its way to long term decline is compelling. Christians as a whole are dropping as Protestants approach minority status for the first time. For a long period it was the “mainstream” sects that were taking it on the chin, now the growth of the conservative evangelicals such as the Southern Baptists has stalled or even reversed.
Bible literalism is sinking with remarkable speed as the rising Bible skeptics threaten to outnumber then in a couple of decades. Church membership has been slipping from its peak in the 1950s, leaving just a fifth of the nation in church on a typical Sunday morning. American youth is increasingly nonreligious. The 2007 PEW survey of political and social attitudes confirms that as Americans continue to secularize they increasingly favor the progressive social policies and cultural tolerance that in turn encourage further secularization and so on in a classic feedback loop.
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