Tag Archives: religiosity

That GOP Retreat From Reality

Watching the Republican Party morph into a cult has been extremely demoralizing–especially to the millions of sane Americans who once called that party home. I have detailed many aspects of the spiraling lunacy–the denial of climate change, the efforts of Christian Nationalists to neuter the First Amendment, the failure to admit that Donald Trump is mentally-ill and getting worse–basically, the Republican insistence on “facts” that are demonstrably untrue.

A recent editorial by Thomas Edsall in The New York Times explores yet another aspect of the GOP’s increasing retreat from reality: science denial.

In “The Polarization and Politicization of Trust in Scientists,” a paper presented last week at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, James Druckman and Jonathan Schulman of the University of Rochester and the University of Pennsylvania wrote:

Consider in 2000, 46 percent of Democrats and, almost equivalently, 47 percent of Republicans expressed a great deal of confidence in scientists. In 2022, these respective percentages were 53 percent and 28 percent. In 20 years, a partisan chasm in trust (a 25-percentage-point gap) emerged.

Edsall quoted Matthew Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University, who warns that distrust of science is “arguably the greatest hindrance to societal action to stem numerous threats to the lives of Americans and people worldwide.” As he pointed out, Americans died because they had been led to believe that mRNA vaccines were more dangerous than a bout of Covid.

Donald Trump’s MAGA movement, Dallek argued, turbocharged anti-science conspiracy theories and attitudes on the American right, vaulting them to an even more influential place in American politics. Bogus notions — vaccines may cause autism, hydroxychloroquine may cure Covid, climate change isn’t real — have become linchpins of MAGA-era conservatism.

Edsall argues that the roots of Republican science denial go back at least 50 years, to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and passage of the  Clean Air and Clean Water Acts.

These pillars of the regulatory state were and still are deeply dependent on scientific research to set rules and guidelines. All would soon be seen as adversaries of the sections of the business community that are closely allied with the Republican Party, although each of these agencies and laws was backed by a Republican president, Richard Nixon.

These regulatory efforts made science a part of political debates, since federal agencies like the E.P.A. and OSHA “are considered adversarial to corporate interests. Regulatory science directly connects to policy management and, therefore, has become entangled in policy debates that are unavoidably ideological.”

Edsall quoted an academic article that found antipathy to science taking hold during the Reagan administration, “largely in response to scientific evidence of environmental crises that invited governmental response. Thus, science — particularly environmental and public health science — became the target of conservative anti-regulatory attitudes.”

Republican distrust of science became far more prevalent when an ascendant religious right began its takeover of the GOP. Religious fundamentalists supported creationism over evolution, and religious and political skepticism of science became “mutually constitutive and self-reinforcing.”

Meanwhile, individuals who are comfortable with secularism, and thus secular science, concentrate in the Democratic Party. The process of party sorting along religious lines has helped turn an ideological divide over science into a partisan one.

These days, when political tribalism shapes identity, people are more and more likely to accept scientific findings only when those findings align with their political beliefs. Edsall noted a recent survey that asked, “How much risk do you believe climate change poses to human health, safety or prosperity?” Strong Democrats saw severe risk potential; strong Republicans close to none. As another scholarly paper has put it,

The fundamental principle of science is that evidence — not authority, tradition, rhetorical eloquence or social prestige — should triumph. This commitment makes science a radical force in society: challenging and disrupting sacred myths, cherished beliefs and socially desirable narratives. Consequently, science exists in tension with other institutions, occasionally provoking hostility and censorship.

There is much more in Edsall’s essay, but the central message is clear–and very disturbing.

It is easy enough to make fun of the “anti-science” folks who–as one Facebook meme has it–use smartphones incorporating  scientific discoveries to post anti-science diatribes to a science-based internet. But the consequences of the GOP revolt against evidence and empiricism has spread to rejection of other facts incompatible with religious beliefs, and to growing contempt for medical and other scientific expertise. It powers not just climate denial, but the GOP’s growing antagonism to vaccination and other public health measures.

You’d think “pro-life” people would notice that antagonism to science is often incompatible with life. You’d be wrong.

There’s a reason Scientific American endorsed Harris–only the second time it has endorsed a Presidential candidate.

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Why They’re Leaving The Church

Christianity in America has been losing adherents, and the loss has become too pronounced to ignore. Reaction to that loss has been one of the more obvious motivators of White Christian Nationalists’ prolonged tantrum.

It wasn’t all that long ago that the media was filled with reports that–while “mainstream” Christian churches were losing ground–that loss was offset by the growth of Evangelical “mega churches.” Today, the reports are that those Evangelical churches are also in decline.

The question, of course, is why.

A Guardian  article a while back addressed the phenomenon, and the purported reasons for it

Churches are closing at rapid numbers in the US, researchers say, as congregations dwindle across the country and a younger generation of Americans abandon Christianity altogether – even as faith continues to dominate American politics.

As the US adjusts to an increasingly non-religious population, thousands of churches are closing each year in the country – a figure that experts believe may have accelerated since the Covid-19 pandemic.

About 4,500 Protestant churches closed in 2019, the last year data is available, with about 3,000 new churches opening, according to Lifeway Research. It was the first time the number of churches in the US hadn’t grown since the evangelical firm started studying the topic. With the pandemic speeding up a broader trend of Americans turning away from Christianity, researchers say the closures will only have accelerated.

The report noted that a large number of churches are being “repurposed” into cafes, museums and shops, reminding me of my last trip to visit my son in Amsterdam, where  repurposed Churches seemed to be on every corner.

Here in the U.S. the pandemic has come in for a good deal of blame: researchers note that when people break the habit of Sunday church attendance, it requires  some significant effort to get them back.

But a more likely diagnosis is the decreasing religiosity of the American population.

But while Covid-19 may have accelerated the decline, there is a broader, long-running trend of people moving away from religion. In 2017 Lifeway surveyed young adults aged between 18 and 22 who had attended church regularly, for at least a year during high school. The firm found that seven out of 10 had stopped attending church regularly.

As the article noted, some of the reasons were logistical–prompted by people moving away for college or starting jobs which made it difficult to attend church. But–as the research also found–other reasons were more philosophical. When researchers asked why they had broken with their churches, one  of the top answers was that the respondent saw church members as judgmental and hypocritical.

About a quarter of the young adults who dropped out of church said they disagreed with their church’s stance on political and social issues.

A study by Pew Research found that the number of Americans who identified as Christian was 64% in 2020, with 30% of the US population being classed as “religiously unaffiliated”. About 6% of Americans identified with Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism.

“Since the 1990s, large numbers of Americans have left Christianity to join the growing ranks of US adults who describe their religious identity as atheist, agnostic or ‘nothing in particular’,” Pew wrote.

“This accelerating trend is reshaping the US religious landscape.”

In 1972 92% of Americans said they were Christian, Pew reported, but by 2070 that number will drop to below 50% – and the number of “religiously unaffiliated” Americans – or ‘nones’ will probably outnumber those adhering to Christianity.

Scholars of religion quoted in the article noted that the move away from religion occurred much earlier in other countries.

“Canada, Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand, the nones rise much earlier, the wake of the 1960s the baby boom generation, this kind of big, growing separation of kind of traditional Christian moral morality,” Bullivant said.

“What happens in America that I think dampens down the rise of the nones is the cold war. Because in America, unlike in Britain, there’s a very explicit kind of ‘Christian America’ versus godless communism framing, and to be non-religious is to be un-American.

That belief–that one must be religious–or actually, White and  Christian–in order to be a “true” American permeates the current White Christian Nationalist movement. Rage at the decline of that (ahistorical) insistence is fueling what I’ve characterized as a “tantrum,” leading to periodic eruptions of violence like that of the January 6th insurrection, which was striking for its numerous displays of Christian imagery.

A few days ago, a commenter to this blog noted that animals are most vicious when cornered, and that much of the rage we are seeing is triggered by similar perceptions of growing irrelevance. I think it’s a valid analogy.

The question is, how long does it take to tame that rabid animal?

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Theocrats At HHS

Readers from Indiana will understand why I found this recent Politico headline chilling: “How Mike Pence’s Mafia Took Over Health Care Policy.”

Pence, of course, could care less about health care, or policy of any sort that doesn’t advance his Christianist agenda. And he “serves” (or is that word “serviles”?) a President who has no discernible interest in any policy–or anything other than his own self-aggrandizement. So the fact that Pence has installed his preferred people at Health and Human Services tells us that health policy will be made on the basis of ideology, not science or evidence.

Behind the scenes, Pence has developed his own sphere of influence in an agency lower on Trump’s radar: Health and Human Services. It’s also the agency with the ability to fulfill the policy goal most closely associated with Pence over his nearly 20 year career in electoral politics: de-funding Planned Parenthood.

Numerous top leaders of the department — including Secretary Alex Azar, Surgeon General Jerome Adams and Medicaid/Medicare chief Seema Verma — have ties to Pence and Indiana. Other senior officials include Pence’s former legislative director from his days as governor and former domestic policy adviser at the White House.

“He has clearly recruited people connected to him who share his very extreme views on sexual and reproductive health care,” said Emily Stewart, the vice president of public policy at Planned Parenthood. “This has been one of the most active administrations ever on rolling back reproductive rights and there’s no way that happens unless you have people in the White House driving the effort to put out policies at such a rapid clip.”

Before the courts intervened, HHS was getting ready to implement rewritten federal policies to curb abortion and–Pence’s wet dream– cut funding to Planned Parenthood. The new regulations would also have tightened the conditions under which Title X federal family planning grants are awarded, ensuring that clinics wouldn’t even be able to refer women to entirely separate abortion providers.

And in a nod to Pence’s longterm efforts to privilege religious bigotry, the agency this month boosted “religious conscience protections” for providers who refuse to perform certain medical services, including abortion, citing religious or moral objections.

The changes to Title X are the culmination of a battle Pence waged first as a member of Congress, then as governor and now in the White House. The Title X rules, which force providers of federally funded family-planning programs to separate themselves from abortion providers, are aimed squarely at Planned Parenthood, which relies heavily on such funding. The Title X changes don’t cut off Medicaid funds from Planned Parenthood — although cutting off that big pot of money is on the GOP wish list as well.

Pence has installed a number of people at HHS who were part of his Indiana administration. As White House staff members have confirmed, from the very outset of the Trump administration, Pence had carte blanche to identify nominees he preferred  “particularly in roles Trump didn’t really care about,” as one GOP operative put it.

Even somewhat smaller projects appear to bear the vice president’s ideological imprint — for example, a recent HHS decision to grant South Carolina a waiver that allows foster care providers to reject potential families who have different religious beliefs.

These conservative and religious views have played into the administration’s foreign as well as domestic policy. Internationally, Trump and Pence have gone beyond even other Republican administrations in curbing access to abortion and contraception by expanding the so-called Mexico City policy barring U.S. foreign aid to groups that promote or provide abortion.

Trump is fixated on himself. Pence is fixated on imposing his peculiar version of Christianity  on America.

Neither they nor any of the criminals and incompetents they’ve installed as cabinet members and White House staffers care anything at all about We the People, the Constitution, or the Rule of Law.

If we don’t evict the whole crew in 2020, there may not be any going back.

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