Understanding Ourselves For Religiously Conservative Christians, Part 2

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.