Religion and Politics: Driving People from Churches, War on Gays, Bishops' Faux Religious Freedom War

Three thought-provoking pieces of commentary that catch my attention this morning:

At Alternet, Valerie Tarico enumerates eight ways that the Catholic bishops and their right-wing evangelical Protestant allies are driving people out of the churches in record numbers today--driving them towards atheism or agnosticism.  At the very top of the list: gay-baiting, which numerous studies including Robert Putman and David Campbell's American Grace find is the number one reason young people are abandoning mainline churches now. 

Tarico's conclusion: 

Catholic and evangelical conservatives have made a high-stakes gamble that they can regain authoritarian control over their flocks and hold onto the next generation of believers (and tithers) by asserting orthodox dogmas, making Christian belief an all-or-nothing proposition. Their goal is a level of theological purity that will produce another Great Awakening based largely on the same dogmas as the last one. They hope to cleanse their membership of theological diversity, and assert top-down control of conscience questions, replenishing their membership with anti-feminist, pro-natalist policies and proselytizing in the Southern hemisphere. But the more they resort to strict authoritarianism, insularity and strict interpretation of Iron Age texts, the more people are wounded in the name of God and the more people are outraged. By making Christian belief an all-or-nothing proposition, they force at least some would-be believers to choose “nothing.” Anti-theists are all too glad to help.

At Truthdig, Chris Hedges argues powerfully that, as things grow better for gay Americans in the nation's major cities and cultural centers, they grow much worse throughout much of the heartland.  Hedges thinks gays in the nation's major cultural centers have little sense of what life is like for gay folks in the rest of the country, where severe economic dislocation is leading to the targeting of those identified as the demonic Other, including gays and lesbians--and this demonizing and targeting of vulnerable minorities is being deliberately spurred on by the still-powerful religious right and the leaders of the Catholic church.

The graphic for this posting, which I find equally moving and chilling, is from Hedges's article and is by Mr. Fish.

And finally, the New York Times editorializes today on the lawsuits filed recently by a number of Catholic dioceses and institutions against the Obama administration, and finds those lawsuits . . . all about politics.  Not about religion at all.  The Times's simple and unvarnished conclusion about what the U.S. Catholic bishops are seeking to do via these lawsuits and their out-in-the-open attack on the current administration:

This is a clear partisan play. The real threat to religious liberty comes from the effort to impose one church’s doctrine on everyone.

And the Times is absolutely correct about this.