The truth about evangelicals is
by
old new lefty
06/29/2008, 2:09 PM #
that there are 57 varieties. And you can throw in the the entire political spectrum, if you want. Jim Wallis of Soujourners is an evangelical. Look him up on the internet, and see what he's writing about. He's so liberal (and literate) that he was invited to be the Democratic spokesman who gave the rebuttal to one of Shrub's speeches. On the other hand, you have your knuckledragging, paleocon, hillbilly evangelicals who would make Elmer Gantry look like a Swiss banker. Most likely, we would call this group fundamentalists, but it's no a 100% proposition. And don't forget the various megachurches, and the black evangelicals.
The bottom line is, while it's easy to paint people with a single brushstroke and put them into one convenient stereotype, reality is inconvenient, and it keeps rearing its ugly head.
Given that, I think that the evangelical movement is in a period of decline now overall. The economy is one factor,;as evangelical churches tend to have lower middle class parishioners, and the economy ain't doing so swell lately. But there are other reasons. In recent years, the Republican evangelicals have hogged the attention of the public, and I think their high water mark was 2004 when they got Bush elected along with all the homo-hating state ballot measures.
But things have not been going according to God's plan for these people. The Lord's sweet victory over the Muslim infidels didn't work out so well in Iraq, and Jesus forgot to visit us in person when the millenium came. And some people in the evangelicals are just getting tired of being played like the suckers they are for the GOP. And when Oilman Bush's plan for global warming is to break out the sunscreen and fans, this contradicts with the Christian principles of serving as stewards to the earth.
When you combine the fact that Obama is a devout Christian, all the lying in the world about Obamaosama doesn't take his personal faith away. The genuine spirituality of Obama goes a long way all by itself in deflating some of the venom of the Religious Right, and they look pretty damn foolish when they fulminate against the man.
So my advice is to those leaders of Texas megachurches, start examining your balance sheets to see where you can do some cost-cutting. You're in for a period of what people on Wall Street call a consolidation.
