Many of us on the left have noticed that the lines between Separation of Church and State have blurred, if not been erased, over the past decade or so.
Many congress reps spout biblical quotes daily on the floor of Congress, the ritual prayer to start the session and yet serve their Corporate masters above their citizens with their Moral Hypocrisy accepted by their followers.
It's Tiresome, Disturbing and Deliberate.
The Gospel of Selfishness in American Christianity
Without Christianity, the underlying mean-spiritedness of conservative policies is simply easier to spot. Without religion, you’re stuck making libertarian-style arguments that sound like things cackling movie villains would say, like Ayn Rand saying civilization should reject “the morality of altruism.” Since Christianity teaches altruism and generosity, it provides excellent cover for people who want to be selfish, a sheep’s clothing made of Jesus to cover up the child-starving wolf beneath. Since Christians are “supposed” to be good people, people who really aren’t good are lining up to borrow that reputation to advance their agenda.
I think one of the reasons the conservative Christian churches want to take Americans back to the 50s, is we were Better Controlled then.. With all the new technologies we are better connected, for good or bad, and have access to information that use to only be found in books, in certain buildings which the majority of people didn't bother to read or enter into. It was easier for the Corporatists to hide. The Rich have been running America almost since America declared Independence from the European Rich. Even then they hid behind Christianity and/or other religions.
How the philosophers of selfishness came to use Christianity as their cover story.
The prosperity gospel teaches, to be blunt, that you can tell how much God favors you by how rich you are. While some on the Christian right reject this idea as a tad crude, it’s still wildly popular and its adherents, like Oral Roberts, are some of the major architects and organizers for the Christian right. It’s a perfect example of how conservative ideology leads to pious Christianity. People want to believe that the rich are better than everyone else and the poor don’t deserve squat, so they find a way to blame God for it rather than own their own greed and selfishness.
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Increasingly, the only thing religion has left to justify itself is that it provides cover for people who want to have bigoted, selfish beliefs but want to believe they are good people anyway. As these social trends continue, we can expect the alignment between public piety and grotesquely selfish political beliefs to get worse, not better.
I am often dumbfounded when I hear so many of the 99% Christians justify the reasons they follow and stay in these tainted, controlling institutions. Somehow, they think they Can change their churches from the inside. Kind of like us political junkies on the left thinking we can change things by doing the same thing over and over again and trying to get America back to a democracy in the next election cycle, or the next.
Maybe when the majority gets beaten down all the way, we'll be able to start climbing back up from the very bottom. Somehow, though, I don't see Religion or Politics changing for the better in my lifetime, and certainly not by keeping the Status Quo.