Americans Are Losing Their Religion -- But the Fundamentalists Have a Plan

This article I came across yesterday - the title of piece was too long for our formatting here, the actual title is a bit lengthier:
www.alternet.org...

You Wouldn't Believe How Fast Americans Are Losing Their Religion -- But the Fundamentalists Have a Plan

As their power declines in America, fundamentalists are moving to developing countries not as far along the secularization curve. And they're causing massive damage.

And this bothers me very, very much.

It discusses how the mega-churches are missionaries are infecting the most vulnerable populations in foreign countries. Even setting up "satellite" churches abroad -
and it's very disturbing. A few pertinent extracts:

March 15, 2013 |
Sometime last year, the US quietly passed a milestone demographers had long been predicting: for the first time in its history, this country is no longer majority Protestant. Fewer than 50 percent of Americans now identify as Protestant Christians of any denomination.

This change has come on surprisingly recently, and from a historical perspective, with breathtaking speed. As recently as 1993, almost two-thirds of Americans identified as Protestants, a number that had remained stable for the several preceding decades. But sometime in the 1990s, the ground started to shift, and it's been sliding ever since. Whether it's the "mainline" Protestant denominations like Methodists, Episcopalians, Lutherans or Presbyterians, or the independent evangelical, charismatic and fundamentalist sects, the decline is happening across the board. The rise of so-called megachurches, like Rick Warren's Saddleback Church in California or Mark Driscoll's Mars Hill in Seattle, represents not growth, but consolidation.

What's happening to these vanishing Protestants? For the most part, they're not converting to any other religion, but rather are walking away from religion entirely. They're becoming "nones," as the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life puts it. It seems likely that this is the same secularizing trend being observed in Europe, as people of advanced, peaceful democracies find religion increasingly irrelevant to their daily lives.

As it should be, in my opinion, since the churches can't get with modern society and update their stale, tainted dogma ....so...what will the churches do? Well, they try to blame "liberal theology" for the flight of youth from archaic, bigoted stances, and say they need to thump their bibles even harder! But not on the heads of American youths or vulnerable, hurting people - nono...they're taking it to developing countries to assault the 'natives'!

The first example is Uganda, where the most despicable kind of American culture warriors have run amok with horrifying results. Since 2009, the country's parliament has been debating an "Anti-Homosexuality Bill," which among other things would establish a crime of "aggravated homosexuality," punishable by life imprisonment or death.

What's less well known is that three American evangelical preachers, Scott Lively, Caleb Lee Brundidge and Don Schmierer, visited the country a month before the bill was introduced, giving talks about how "the gay movement is an evil institution" which seeks to prey on children, destroy "the moral fiber of the people," and abolish marriage and the family and replace it with "a culture of sexual promiscuity." Lively boasted that their campaign was "a nuclear bomb against the gay agenda in Uganda," and later admitted to meeting with Ugandan lawmakers to help draft the bill, although he professed ignorance of the death penalty provision. Other American evangelicals, including Kevin Swanson and Lou Engle, have also expressed their support for the so-called Kill the Gays bill.

We know about the people killing children and maiming them for being "witches" - it's atrocious. Why doesn't someone stop them?
Well, it's not just Africa, either - Mexico, Brazil, Russia, France, Pakistan, Israel and elsewhere now have "branches" of evangelical preaching outposts mainly focused on persecuting gays and subjugating women - and creating "special priveleges" for 'Christians'.

This just seems beyond bizarre. Didn't Jesus hang out with women and other outcasts?

Do the fundie congregation members know that their "tithes" are being used in this way - and do they approve??!!

This reminds me of how, 500 years ago, the first "Pilgrims" came and accosted the real "Americans", who'd lived here for eons....
bringing disease, slaughter, puritan Protestant rigidity, and FORCED the native peoples to either comply or die.
That's what really happened. (O Happy Thanksgiving! Give thanks! We slaughtered them all!! Now we can eat with the severed head of a tribe chief as a centerpiece! Praise God! We are the victors and the chosen people of God in the New World)

I hope I've sparked your interest enough to look at the article - there is SO MUCH MORE information in it, horrifying and terrible goings-on. These people are insane. Clinically, certifiably insane.

The point of all this is that stopping the religious right is a global issue. The harm they do in America isn't trivial, but they do far greater harm in developing countries where constitutional protections aren't as strong, and where American money exerts an outsized influence. If we can't stop them here, there are people all over the world who will suffer much worse repercussions.
...
For better or worse, what happens in America resonates throughout the world. That's why standing against the religious right is a moral imperative: not just for the sake of people in the First World, but for the sake of people everywhere in the world.

What say you, ATS?

We need more Protestants right now

reply to post by DarknStormy


Erm, to do what?
Stop these snakes? Or help them spread their poison?

Okay, If you want a "protestant" - I PROTEST the religious-right and their nefarious power-mongering and hatred!!

reply to post by wildtimes


Most people will use any excuse to inflate their own power/wealth.

Then there are those few who do it because they actually *believe* it.

Which group is accomplishing the most damage?

reply to post by heyitsok


Sorry, not seeing your point.
Could you please clarify?

I don't see ONE TINY THING about the religious-right zealots' exportation of their rabid "beliefs" and hatred that is noble or humane.

reply to post by wildtimes


here too,
they convert people by promise of money and then still show caste discrimination by making the lower caste christian converts to sit far behind not to offend the higher caste converts!!

They are filling a religious/spiritual vacuum but causing a lot of hatred and violence as the hindu fundamentalists clash with them and the people who suffer are the poor converts.
Its sick to prey on ignorant people just because they desperately need money!!

reply to post by logical7

Its sick to prey on ignorant people just because they desperately need money!!

Yes, it is.
But to impose sick, backward, destructive beliefs on unsuspecting people who didn't ask for it is arguably even WORSE!
It's one thing to screw people over for money - it's quite another to RUIN THEIR LIVES and POISON THEIR MINDS.

They are monsters. I'm sorry, on behalf of America, that this is one of our countries "exports."
Heaven forbid. Really.

Heaven?? *knock knock* ARE YOU PAYING ATTENTION??!

Originally posted by wildtimes
reply to post by heyitsok

 

Sorry, not seeing your point.
Could you please clarify?

I don't see ONE TINY THING about the religious-right zealots' exportation of their rabid "beliefs" and hatred that is noble or humane.

I didn't imply they were being noble or humane. My question is in reference to those very same zealots, two distinct groups of them, and asking the question which group is doing more harm: those who use it as a vehicle to gain mass power and wealth, or those who do it because they truly believe it is right.

reply to post by heyitsok


Ah. I see, thanks.
The combination of the two is what really, really scares me. They believe it, AND they do it for power/wealth.
It's insidious, and evil, and WRONG on EVERY LEVEL.
Thanks for your input!

If this trend continues it will give "liberal theology" here in the US more room to grow. That is a plus. Eventually, "liberal theology" will become orthodoxy. The old heaven and the old earth will pass away. A new heaven and earth will come. Its the natural life-cycle of religion. Or so it seems to me.

BTW, love your new avatar.

reply to post by BlueMule


Agreed, but if people are simply walking away from religion altogether, perhaps it's too little, too late, even for liberal theology. And the really sick part of it is that the cancer is being run out of the host - and jumping onto passersby with their virulence. At least in the US we have the opt-out choice.

These poor people in 3rd world countries don't know how to deflect or handle this kind of assault on their sensibilities.

(EDIT: Thanks! I put it together myself! I think it works well to reflect my attitude and approach and general frame of mind, for now at least. )

reply to post by wildtimes


It's not too little too late. It's a buffer zone between new-and-old orthodoxies.

Everything is as it should be.

reply to post by BlueMule

Yes, I know, that's what keeps me calm. Still, I can't feel that these atrocities should be allowed outside to play.
Just as the UK banned Westboro Baptist Church, so should all countries ban these sharks!

The first US citizens escaped the burdens of european catholocism and based on Protestant beliefs built a new nation that stood out to the world as a beacon of hope for centuries.
Now its a nation going down the toilet with a flurry and a flush, (if what I read on here is to be believed), does that have anything to do with its loss of protestant teaching or is that a coincidence I wonder


And here we have a whinge from an atheists, suggesting Protestantism is going to Africa and the poor Africans are going to turn out like what? The USA,before the atheists took it over. Is that a bad thing?

Yeah there are bad Christians but it was protestant teaching that made the US a place to live.
Wait till the US turns completely to crap and watch how many people turn back to God and the protestant faith.

America is losing their religion and losing their country more like it.

reply to post by wildtimes


Yeah, but Ugnada and other countries have to go through these growth cycles too, and they can't be sheilded from it. They have to build up an immunity. Otherwise you get something sort of like what we have with an over-dependence on antibiotics.

Yeah its a shame but the Divine will find a way to express every pair of opposites within itself.

Obviously they aren't doing a whole lot of good or even the non-Protestants would be fighting to keep them alive. Good riddance.

And cue yet another 30+ page long atheist/religious self-congratulation thread.

Bravo ATS, you've done it again.

reply to post by wildtimes

And this bothers me very, very much.

Fundamentalists, to Christianity, are like the retarded brother the family keeps locked up in the back bedroom.

reply to post by wildtimes

Heaven?? *knock knock* ARE YOU PAYING ATTENTION??!

its difficult to understand your belief. Do you now believe in a attentive Heaven? was this sort of a prayer??

I think Heaven is well aware. It appears to be a self solving puzzle which has to jumble up before it can sort itself out.
Its a beginning of an awakening in the developed countries so the sharks have to move to more gullible people. At least they are getting some money and on paper they are protestants but still stick to their old beliefs.
i wonder who is screwing whom

reply to post by logical7


No, actually, I don't think there is an attentive Heaven.
Nope.

If there was, these sick things wouldn't be happening - again, God is not a person. We must save ourselves from complete annihilation, and step one is STAMPING OUT fundamentalists, whether Islamist extremists or Bible-thumpers. Equally bad. Doing damage in their own way.

Maybe the thumpers aren't igniting car bombs or themselves, but they are doing damage. A more insidious kind.