Thursday, May 17, 2012

More on Millennials Walking away from Homophobic Churches: Andrew Sullivan and Amanda Marcotte



Interesting overlap between what Andrew Sullivan posted here early yesterday afternoon, and what I had posted around noon on the same topic.  My posting notes that 

of those millennials who happen to have roots in the churches, a significant proportion are walking away as fast and as furiously as they can, to distance themselves from the ugly and unholy behavior many "Christians" continue to be intent on displaying towards human beings who happen to be born gay.

As I also pointed out, abundant data suggest that millennial Christians are walking away from homophobic churches as fast as their feet can carry them precisely because they have grown up in a generation in which many of them know and love folks who are gay--and so they bitterly resent the misuse, the breaking, of lives of people they love by heartless political operatives claiming religious warrants for their demonization of gay human beings.  While these pseudo-religious political operatives violate what is core and central in all faith traditions of the world--the call to practice compassion and  justice.

Sullivan points to a posting by Rachel Held Evans at her blog site after amendment one passed in North Carolina.  Held writes, 

I’ve said it a million times, and I’ll say it again...(though I’m starting to think that no one is listening): My generation is tired of the culture wars. 
We are tired of fighting, tired of vain efforts to advance the Kingdom through politics and power, tired of drawing lines in the sand, tired of being known for what we are against, not what we are for. 
And when it comes to homosexuality, we no longer think in the black-and-white categories of the generations before ours. We know too many wonderful people from the LGBT community to consider homosexuality a mere "issue." These are people, and they are our friends. When they tell us that something hurts them, we listen.

Amanda Marcotte makes similar points at Alternet today, also citing Held's blog commentary.  Marcotte's article concludes,

With all this hatefulness on display, no wonder conservative Christianity is losing young people. While just a little over half of Americans supporting gay marriage, nearly two-thirds of adults born after 1981 do. The Christian Right is increasingly out of step with how Americans feel about gay rights. This issue, even more than abortion rights, might be the one that destroys them in the end.

She's right.  Except that movements which sow seeds of social division and outright hatred between minority groups (as the heavily Catholic-identified National Organization for Marriage boasts that it explicitly tries to do, vis-a-vis African Americans and gays) have a crafty of way of surviving when social consensus shifts and thwarts their attempts to engage in wedge politics.  They survive by reinventing themselves.

When one wedge fails, they simply create another.  When anti-semitism receives pushback, they move on to Islamophobia.  When racism falters, they try homophobia, instead.  

And in all of this, they are used and protected by the 1% in whose interest it is to drive wedges between minority groups--they are used and protected by the 1% for whom they work and to whom they have sold their souls.  To my way of thinking, the moral failing the top leaders of the Catholic church are now displaying in their gross attacks on gay and lesbian human beings around the world is even grosser because these attacks are political attacks being spearheaded (and funded) for political reasons by super-rich handlers to whom those Catholic pastoral leaders have yielded their souls.

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