According to this column from The Guardian, it looks as though the right wing has taken their strange brew of fundamentalist Christianity and politics about as far as they can, and now things are starting to move back towards a more tolerant middle:
…a growing number of American Christians are uneasy about allowing religion to become so politicised and so closely associated with one party. Fundamentalist Islam has also made a difference; it has reminded the bulk of Americans of the wisdom of the American constitution - keeping religion and state firmly apart.
For two faiths coexist in the United States: one is devotion to God and the other to the Constitution. The genius of the founding fathers was to make sure that the two did and do not mix. Religion is a private matter, with which the state is barred from interfering - and which is barred from interfering with the state. Fundamentalist Christians have had ambitions to overturn that long-standing convention
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The mood has been reflected by an extraordinary little book, Letter to a Christian Nation, by Sam Harris. It has become a bestseller. Harris quotes passages from the Bible that I did not know existed, such as one in Exodus discussing the demands you should make when selling your daughter into slavery. One passage from Deuteronomy encourages Christians to stone to death anybody who tries to draw them away from their God. As for governing America according to the 10 Commandments, Harris is withering; four do no more than outlaw other religions and the rest are a routine expression of core moral precepts.
For a book which ridicules religion and ruthlessly exposes the inadequacies of the Bible to become a bestseller is a classic Schlesinger-style signal that times are a-changing. And politicians are feeling the mood swing.
Those are good signs, but then there is this reminder that the pendulum still has quite a ways to fall back from its apex high on the right.
A year ago, he was a Pentecostal Christian minister at Camp Anaconda, the largest U.S. support base in Iraq. He sent home reports on the number of “decisions” — soldiers committing their lives to Christ — that he inspired in the base’s Freedom Chapel.
But inwardly, he says, he was torn between Christianity’s exclusive claims about salvation and a “universalist streak” in his thinking. The Feb. 22, 2006, bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra, which collapsed the dome of a 1,200-year-old holy site and triggered a widening spiral of revenge attacks between Shiite and Sunni militants, prompted a decision of his own.
“I realized so many innocent people are dying again in the name of God,” Larsen says. “When you think back over the Catholic-Protestant conflict, how the Jews have suffered, how some Christians justified slavery, the Crusades, and now the fighting between Shiite and Sunni Muslims, I just decided I’m done. . . . I will not be part of any church that unleashes its clergy to preach that particular individuals or faith groups are damned.”
Larsen’s private crisis of faith might have remained just that, but for one other fateful choice. He decided the religion that best matched his universalist vision was Wicca, a blend of witchcraft, feminism and nature worship that has ancient pagan roots.
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He learned about Wicca, ironically, from the Army, in an overview of various faiths at the Chaplain’s Basic Training Course at Fort Jackson, S.C., in 2005.
Well you probably can guess how his request to switch from a Pentecostal chaplain to a Wiccan chaplain turned out. Request Denied Sir! There will be no Wiccan chaplains in the U.S. ARMY SIR!
It’s a pretty interesting article. Read it all here.
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