Religious Right retreat (if only from our fevered imaginations)
by digby
Ed Kilgore knows better than to get too excited about recent proclamations that the Religious Right is withdrawing from politics. It’s pretty to think so, but it’s highly unlikely, even if the new leadership of groups like the Southern Baptist Convention sounds as if they’re signaling a retreat.
But there are some positive signs:
The best news to me in the profile was actually a reference to the Southern Baptist Convention’s declining membership numbers along with this comment from a professor at my alma mater:
“The religious right was born on the theology of numerical expansion: the belief that conservative churches grow while liberal ones die. That conceit is gone now,” says David Key, director of Baptist Studies at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology.
Part of the power of the Christian Right has always been its inflated reputation among secular observers who figure the only “real” Christians are the conservatives, who are thus the wave of the religious future. Thus conservative evangelical firebrands and Catholic hyper-traditionalists are presumed to speak for many millions of believers who don’t share their views at all. If someone in Moore’s position fears the winds are blowing in a different direction now, that could ultimately mean real change.
This would be very good news on many levels. Religion is a huge part of American life and that’s fine. But the conservative churches have played an outsized role in our public imagination for decades now and it would be hugely beneficial if they were seen as just another religious group instead of the moral arbiters of the entire culture.
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