Early in January I posted a piece discussing how
the Gingrich adultery/divorce thing is showing that a big chunk of the
religious right is a collection of hypocrites for giving serious and in many
cases enthusiastic consideration to the former Congressperson as a presidential
candidate ( click here ). That was when
it looked like Newt's fortunes were on the wane. Now that he kicked Romney's
butt in the first Confederate -- oops, sorry, that's southern -- and Bible Belt
primary state, it is opportune to take a further look at what the past of the
darling of many a theocon tells us about the moral nature as well as the
demographic slide of the religious right.
Before continuing there is a need to be careful
about how one dumps on Newt and the right. A fair number of conservatives were
appalled at how the audience cheered Newt's fake indignation at a legitimate
question about his marriage/infidelity history. He bemoaned how such questions
kept "decent" people from running for office. Even though they were
as morally disgusted as moderates and liberals at the thought that a man, with
such an unsavory personal and political history, representing the party this
fall. Nor should liberals be on too much of high horse about this. Many a
progressive Democratic president has had serious sexual skeletons in their
closets, FDR, JFK and WJC to be specific. A fair number of liberals are OK with
couples choosing open marriage. The problem with the right's peccadilloes is
the eye-popping hypocrisy that goes along with it. It is morally galling that
Gingrich proudly, and loudly, has and is proclaiming himself a transformative
figure who is working to return the nation to those good old fashioned
All-American values including no messing with around with heterosexual nuclear
family fidelity. To the degree that he told wife #2 that she should keep quiet
about his affair because it was more important the adulterous divorcee continue
to be able to tell the nation about family values. He is still at it. His stump
speeches prattle on about how he is best suited to beat Obama and return the
nation to its traditional moral ways.
And it is morally galling and appalling how so
many so called traditionalist conservatives are not only backing Newt's bid for
the White House, they are cheering on his crude diversionary tactic of blaming
the media for daring even to bring his personal history up at all. As Gingrich
did to Clinton after the latter lied about Monica and the former was enjoying
another affair. In South Carolina four married female primary voters opted for
Newt over the faithful Romney. As I explained in the earlier essay, this is all
part of a marvelously cynical campaign by a large portion of the right to set
things up so that theoconservatives can do pretty much what they please and get
away with it. While the right retains the ability to shame any liberal who
dares think of straying from what the godly conservatives tell everyone else
what they can and especially cannot do.
But as I further discussed in the earlier piece,
the theoconservative effort to mainstream divorce and adultery as long as it is
done by right wingers who then announce that they have sought and received the
forgiveness of their God is not working all that well. Always a minority the
Moral Majority was neither. American
theoconservatism is in such sharp decline that it is setting off alarms among
the more astute leaders of the Christian right.
It's partly a matter of stats. It has long been
popular wisdom that the mainline churches have been in growing trouble since
the 1960s. That's true, but the theocon churches are not particularly healthy
either as I explained at Washington Post/On Faith ( click here ). The
megachurches we all hear about draw in about 1.5% of the population on a given
Sunday, in general a quarter or less of Americans are regular church goers.
Every ten years the good folks at Faith Communities Today, bless them, report
on the state of the churches. It's not so good. Congregation size shrunk as
much as 20% in the first decade of the new millennium as churchgoers age.The
pews of conservative denominations are emptying along with those in the
moderate establishments. The National Association of Evangelicals calculates
that less than one in twenty children born into an evangelical home "will
be Bible-believing Christians as adults." An internal report by the
Southern Baptists, the largest theocon denomination, warns that
"evangelistically, the denomination is on a path of slow but discernable
deterioration." They are baptizing new members at the same absolute rate
as they were half a century ago when the population was half what it is now,
and it is young folks are most resistant. The creationists look like they are
at long last starting to drop ( click here ). That is not
surprising because the Bible literalism that creationism depends upon has been
steadily slipping from 40% to 30% over these last 30 years.
It is not just demographics that are exposing
how theoconservatism is beginning to list to starboard like the Costa
Concordia after its incompetent leadership steered it onto the rocks. Hard
line theocon think tanks like Focus on the Family are downsizing as funding
dwindles. The Moral Majority and Christian Coalition no longer exist. When 150
conservative Christian opinion leaders got together and issued a statement that
the born and rightist Catholics should all rally around Santorum. Most voters
in the deep southern Bible Belt primary state South Carolina paid them no mind
as a lot of them voted for who may qualify as the best known serial philanderer
in the country. The three most dedicated evangelical candidates, Santorum,
Perry and Bachmann, have failed or look to be going that way.
Fact is, the right never really has gotten the
guy they want. Even Reagan was a nonchurchgoer divorcee (the first in the White
House) who more talked the theocon talk rather than walked the evangelical
walk. Then there was Bush 1 who was mainstream Protestant rather than
born-again. Same for Dole, who ended up doing erection ads.After his run for 1600
Pennsylvania Ave. Same for McCain. Looks like the pattern is holding for 2012.
If either neoCatholic Gingrich or Latter Day Saint Romney gets the nomination,
the evangelical right will have failed to get the man or woman they have been
desperately seeking for decades. The reason is that there just aren't enough
right wing theists to vote one of their own into the presidency, or even the
nomination, and that is not going to change.
The main reason that the theoconservative
minority is becoming an even smaller minority is simple enough. The country is
becoming more atheistic, with those who lack belief in God having quadrupled
since the 1960s. To about a fifth of the population rivaling the religious
right in numbers. What sends chills down the theocon spine is that it's mainly
a youth thing. Current twentysomethings are twice as nonreligious as the same
cohort was in the 1990s. And secularization is rapid, atheists increased their
numbers by 10 million over the last decade. Also on the rise are those who
support evolution. It's a creationist demographic nightmare. As for why the USA
is going down the secular road, that's what has happened in every other
advanced democracy,it has to do with the overwhelming forces of modernity, like
modern science, education, prosperity, and the corporate-consumer culture which
has been doing a bang up job of converting citizens from the pious church goers
a lot more of them were a century ago into secular consumers and the churches
are not able to cope with it or reverse it.
But theoconservatives are not helping
themselves. A public relations factor that's abetting the religious right's
trip towards the demographic ICU, is that after a few decades of watching them
screw up like everyone else, it is painfully clear that they are just pulling
everyones legs when they try to tell the rest of the nation how everyone else
should behave. Being human beings like the rest of us, they cannot help
themselves from slipping on one ethical banana peel after another, and have no
optionbut to try to brazenly bluster their way through the messes they create
and hope for the best. Their biggest advantages are the money that flows from
the rich rightists and the organization provided by the theocon churches. These
combine to leverage the power of conservatism well above its minority status,
and gives them the power to do considerable harm to the nation. But that power
is very likely to wane. Money and organization only go so far in the face of
ineptitude, moral and otherwise, that the right exhibits in spades, and if the
not so Grand Old Party actually manages to nominate the man that the American
Spectator has labeled as having shown a "proclivity for girl
hopping" over an alternative who apparently is family values wise squeaky
clean, then the majority of the right will forever have exposed themselves as
exquisitely base and corrupt. Morally valueless relativists of convenience who
have lost any claim to any ethical advantage. And the American majority will
notice, that will do a good job of accelerating the decline of the right. That
is not likely to happen, but even so considerable the right has done itself
considerable damage by keeping Gingrich a major player.
The take home message is that the left has not
been fighting a desperate holding action against a growing threat from the
shamelessly hypocritical right. Notice, for instance, how the relatively
secular Occupy consists mainly of the youth that represents the future while
the much more theist Tea Party is largely aging baby boomers that are not going
to be around a whole lot longer (surveys confirm the more progressive orientation
of younger Americans. What the left needs to do is to devise the means to
further weaken and accelerate the decline of a right that is already in
long-term retreat. That means that progressives should not be adopting a
defensive stance, but have to be on the offensive, in order to push the center
to the left. That of course is what Occupy is about.
