Send the Bill For the Shutdown to the Evangelicals
Don’t like the shutdown? Send the bill to the evangelicals. People schooled to live in a make-believe magical facts-be-damned world took over the Republican Party. The Tea Party is the pro-life evangelical subculture reborn with a few libertarian nuts thrown in. I’m talking about the bedrock mostly southern and mountain state evangelical conservatives that are anything but conservative. The pro-life, home-school, anti-government far right is the evangelical movement. And it’s radically anti American. Without this movement the 40 extremists in congress who are the radical right of the far right would not have been elected.
Following the election of our first black president, the politics of the Evangelical, Jewish, Roman Catholic, and Mormon far right was not the politics of a loyal opposition, but rather the instigation of revolution, which was first and best expressed by Rush Limbaugh when even before President Obama took office he said, “I hope Obama fails.”[1] Mix in a dose of southern racial politics and we had the recipe for a disaster. It is upon us.
Ironically, at the very same time as evangelicals like me — as I used to be — and my late father Francis Schaeffer and home-school anti- government and anti-public school pioneer Mary Pride, were thrusting ourselves into bare-knuckle politics in the 1970s and 80s, we were also retreating to what amounted to virtual walled compounds. In other words we lashed out at “godless America” and demanded political change—say, the reintroduction of prayer into public schools—and yet also urged our followers to pull their children out of the public schools and home-school them.
The rejection of public schools by evangelical Protestants was a harbinger of virtual civil war carried on by other means we face today. All that was lacking back then was hatred of a black man that took the anti-everything fact free class of evangelicals and libertarians to another level of dysfunction. Protestants had once been the public schools’ most ardent defenders.[2] For instance, in the 1840s when Roman Catholics asked for tax relief for their private schools, Protestants said no and stood against anything they thought might undermine the public schools that they believed were the backbone of moral virtue, community spirit, and egalitarian good citizenship.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/frankschaeffer/2013/10/send-the-bill-for-the-shutdown-to-the-evangelicals/
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