Interesting notes from Hillfaith [1]:
It is a commonplace in many of the most influential public policy precincts in the nation’s capitol these days — including among congressional aides working for senators, representatives and committees — that Christianity is in steep decline in America, that the country is fast becoming more secularized with every passing day.
That certainly appears to be the case, judging by many aspects of the elite culture and the intellectual, social media and political rhetoric it sanctions, but a totally opposite picture is easily seen once you get outside of Amtrak’s Acela Corridor and the LA-San Francisco-Seattle axis to examine the data that reveals the real America.
There we find a nation whose people are becoming more, not less, involved in their churches, small groups, Bible studies and caring ministries reaching out in their communities. Perhaps even more surprising is the fact that the same thing is true in their own ways of most of the rest of the people with whom we share this Earth.
Parallel:
I wrote [2], a couple of weeks ago, as regards the movement away from establishment politics, and towards individual freedoms…
The Democrats are forever labeling any opposition to them as “far right”. The fact of the matter is it’s anything but.
I suppose it’s easy for the Democrats to blame massive opposition they are seeing on a vast right-wing conspiracy… (Hillary Clinton call your office) …but in fact thats too easy. In labeling it as such, what they avoid is having to face the idea that the opposition that they are seeing is due to their own overreach to the left…. That the left is being rejected by the voters. Far from being isolated to the far right, the opposition to their nonsense has gone mainstream. They’ve gone too far even for the supposed political center. That it is in fact they who have become disconnected from the minds and hearts of the American people, the American voter. thus, the election of Donald Trump with the overwhelmingly clear mandate that he is to clean house, and that mandate has the establishment of both parties working overtime to protect their little fiefdoms.
Nor, I think, is this limited so these not so United States. Consider the Brexit movement. Consider the recent elections in Germany. Consider the rather startling unpopularity of Macron in France. Consider Viktor Orban over in Hungary. The umbrella movement in Taiwan.
Everywhere you look around the globe, we are seeing long empowered establishment politics being removed or at least resisted, and for the most part the people taking this action have not been heretofore involved with politics all that much.
In putting these two together, I cant help but wonder if that world- wide trend I spoke of, isn’t part and parcel of the trends that HillFaith documents.
The very idea of individualism on any level, and the idea that there is an entity that is more potent, more important, and untouchable by any invention of man, is antithetical to the proponents of big government, who as I noted in the previous post, are finding themselves being replaced around the world.
(Observe, as extreme examples, Marx, Stalin, Mao, Hitler, etc, who, to a man, struggled to remove both religion, and individualism… each of them recognizing that the growth of the power of government, and its power, was restrained by those.)
So, it seems pertinent and logical to suggest that the two situations, the rise of religion documented by HillFaith, and the rise of the individual over the big government types as I mentioned in that previous post, are directly related.
Understand… I have always held that politics are a reflection of the values and desires of the individual.
That being true, it also seems logical that those values and desires that religion teaches, will be reflected in the politics of those individuals.
Martin Luther
Now, of course, all religions are not equal, any more than all cultures are equal. I cannot imagine an America being conceived with Islam, Buddism, or any of the pantheistic religions as it’s philosophical base. No, it took Christian philosophy, and within that, Martin Luther and his concept of the sovereignty of the individual.
Those are the boundaries of the word-wide battle we are witnessing today.