InfamousBrad t1_iycaqdk wrote on November 30, 2022 at 9:34 AM

Reply to comment by moses420bush in For The First Time, Less Than Half Of UK's Population Is Christian: Report by khushraho

What you're seeing is the last gasp of the boomer generation. Someone forwarded me a column the other day, by an evangelical lobbyist who'd seen the cross-tabs on the 2022 mid-terms, lamenting the fact that the millenial and "zoomer" generations are "completely lost to us," permanently alienated. (He blamed the schools, unsurprisingly.)

What you're chalking up as victories for them are more like desperation plays. They're willing to stretch for any short-term gain, however unpopular or unsustainable, because they know they've got maybe 4-6 years before they're so small they're not even useful to the Republicans any more, and then their movement is over.

moses420bush t1_iyceku5 wrote on November 30, 2022 at 10:32 AM

Yeah that's a good answer, its nice to look on the brighter side. I'm still worried about "desperation plays" with the system the way that it is now. A handful of people with enough power have the ability to change law against the popular opinion, changes that may take years to repeal.

I'm also not sure you can say there won't be a new Christian right forming and taking over from the old, there are many reasons why people turn to more extreme politics and those reasons are increasing throughout the west. If certain laws are put in place now which change the world and perceptions of the next generation its not too hard to see a more difficult few decades coming.

InfamousBrad t1_iyf1bow wrote on November 30, 2022 at 10:21 PM

I'm not going to blow smoke up your ass and say that I know that you're wrong, but that doesn't seem to me to be the way that it's gone in the past, at least not here in America. This last decade feels a lot like the 1850s to me, or the 1930s. And remember that evangelical fundamentalism was founded as a reaction to what came after the rubble stopped bouncing in 1865 and then again in 1945. Both of those disasters left the public with an intense distrust of ideologues and partisans, and Christianity changed both times to become more social-gospel and less partisan, people flocked out of the mainstream churches, and into either secularism or mainline denominations.

After the chaos of the last 60 years, I think we're due for decades of the American people remembering what ideological purity and hyper-partisanship cost us or almost cost us and reacting against that, not burrowing deeper into it. At least, that's what I expect.