I grew up in a very religious home. Back in the 1950s
and 1960s, that most probably meant a conservative Christian home. Mom
kind of directed the religion part of the home and her religion spilled
into her political views. She was staunchly Republican, as was here twin
sister, and it seemed that her political views were conflated with her
Christian faith.
Another feature of our home is that we were
sheltered--that came from growing up in the suburbs. The only thing I
knew about Democrats is that we didn't want them elected. And while
protests of the 1960s and 1970s were spreading throughout America, we
didn't talk about them at home.
From an early age I learned to conflate conservative politics with my
Christian faith too. I was patriotic and believed that America stood for
what was good in the world. I believed that Communism was bad without
knowing what Communism was. Not knowing what it was didn't stop me from
calling people with whom I strongly disagreed a 'Communist.'
And because I was raised a Christian and Republican, I held to
conservative politics for much of my life. I was a strong religiously
conservative Christian and a Republican voter when I voted. I believed
in Capitalism, a militarily strong America, a defender of American
Exceptionalism, a hater of Communism, and so forth. And I could be
pretty arrogant in expressing either my conservative religious beliefs or my political beliefs.
But I began to change during the
summer of 2001. My best friend, who is a nominal Roman Catholic and a
registered Democrat, showed an example of caring for others that I had
not seen except in one or two of the religiously and political
conservative people I knew. So I reckoned, 'reckoned' is a word I
learned to use while going to college in Oklahoma, that maybe there are
things I can learn from non-conservatives. So on a whim, I picked up two
books by two leftists: Noam Chomsky and Martin Luther King Jr.
Chomsky
had a passion for fairness. By that I mean that the same standards the
US used to judge other nations must be used to judge the US too. Martin
Luther King Jr. had a passion for winning people over. Instead of trying
to conquer them or defeat them, he wanted to convert them to supporting full equality for people of all races. And as I read their material, I
found that their passions were very Biblical. Thus I read more and more
people on the Left. I have even read some of Karl Marx's works. And I
continued to find more and more Leftist views that I perceived as being
Biblical.
However, if, like my mom, I conflated my political
views with my Christian faith, what happened to my faith? My religious
views stayed the same. But it was a very deep tearing process because
the changes in my political views meant that I had to separate my religious views from my political views
Thus, even though I had very much
conflated my political views with my religious views, my political
disillusionment with conservative political beliefs did not result in a
disillusionment with conservative Christian beliefs. However, that has
not been the story for many a Christian Millennial. We will have to see
if Christian Generation Z and Christian Generation AA believers suffer
the same fate.
Going on my own data sample, political
disillusionment for Millennials who grew up like I did often leads to
religious disillusionment. But why them and not me? I really don't know
for sure but I think one possible cause has to do with Post Modernism.
Post Modernism is a view that rejects the notion of using the
metanarratives, which are systems of beliefs used to interpret the
world. Past metanarratives consisted of faith along with science and reason. The
reason for Post Modernism's rejection of religion and both science and reason is
because Post Modernism has seen the historical failures of religion and
both science and reason to work for a just world.
Post Modernism
has had a stronger influence on the most recent generations than on the
older ones. And thus, the dynamics of religious disillusionment are rather simple. Political
disillusionment in a person who has conflated their conservative
political views with conservative religious views most often results in a rejection of past religious beliefs as well. After all, if two sets of beliefs are strongly associated with each other, rejection of one set of beliefs can very easily trigger a rejection in the other. And that is the price that many
religiously conservative Christian parents are now paying for conflating
their conservative political views with their religious views. Post
Modernism points out how many of those conservative political views have
led to oppression, war, exploitation, marginalization and so forth. And
thus rejecting conservative political views often leads to rejecting
conservative religious views.
But what about those religiously
conservative Christians who have conflated their conservative political
views with their faith and who have not been politically disillusioned?
They are causing those who disagree with their political views to
unnecessarily criticize their Christianity. That criticism is not
necessarily a persecution of religiously conservative Christianity per
se, it is fallout criticism that stems from a rejection of conservative
Christians' political views.
The
moral of the story for religiously conservative Christians like myself
is this, it's fine to base your politics on your religious beliefs. It
is fine to be a political conservative. Just don't conflate the two.
Learn how to use your faith to criticize at least some your political
positions. Understand that you can learn from political liberals and
leftists. Don't shut yourself off from the outside. Church history tells
us that we can bring unnecessary shame to and/or persecution of the
Gospel when we do that. Remember that the Roman Church, along with
Calvin and Luther, use to sharply criticize Galileo for claiming that
the sun was the center of our solar system.
www.flamingfundamentalist.blogspot.com
(Please note that not all pictured here are flaming fundamentalists)
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This Month's Scripture Verse: For the love of money is a root of all sorts of evil, and some by longing for it have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs. I Timothy 6:10 |
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