Some Ideologies are Not Good For You—An Analysis (15 March 2025) by Lawrence Davidson
Part 1— “A Threat of Biblical Proportions”
One of my favorite adages is “Some ideologies are not good for you.” Ideology is defined here as “a doctrine that guides an individual, social movement, or large group.” It can be secular (political) or religious. In either case, it can evolve into a stubborn, habitual pattern of thought that turns the world into us versus them.
With the above in mind, the results of the latest survey from the Pew Research Center on the status of Christianity in the U.S. is worth paying attention to. “After years of decline, the Christian population in the United States has been stable for several years, a shift fueled in part by young adults. The number of religiously unaffiliated Americans, which had grown steadily for years, has also leveled off.” Why should one view this as at least potentially negative? Well, as we will see, Christianity in the U.S., especially in its ascending ideological fundamentalist/nationalist guise, is intolerant and malicious.
Continuing on about the Pew Center results, here is an educated guess as to why these results were found. It is given by a political scientist who has studied this topic for years. “the cause … might be at least partly political. As the perception of Christianity in particular has become increasingly entangled with conservative political movements, identifying as a Christian has become a matter of conservative identity.” In other words, Christian conservatism has merged with a reactionary Republican Party. How many of these young self-identifying Christians have traveled this path? The poll does not tell us. But we do know that overall there are more “born again” Protestants than not. And they have most definitely gone political.
The New Republic published a piece by J. Dylan Sandifer, entitled “Why the Christian Right Demonizes Discourse” in its 13 January 2025 issue. What does he have to say about the conservative Christian who is also a fundamentalist? For someone of this mindset, “ideas themselves have a unique, uncontested power to infiltrate and corrupt our minds and souls.” Sandifer gives the example of the Harry Potter books which are described as a major threat to the minds of young Christians. Thus, “to read a book or discuss a theory, in this worldview, is not to exercise one’s intellectual faculties but to risk being overtaken by a seductive, malevolent force with no hope of resistance.” The result is a fundamentalist fear of discourse and to view diversity of outlook as a threat.*
When conservative politicians such as Ronald Reagan made their pact with fundamentalist Christianity in the form of organizations such as the senior Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, the Fundamentalist “distrust of intellectual inquiry found a powerful ally in American political right-wing. Together they proceeded to reshape the nation’s cultural and educational landscape.” How so? Well, the move by the religious right to take over school boards, libraries, and campaign for censorship of books and curricula has been impacted the United States, particularly the south and west.
A piece by Max Burns in The Hill (02/21/24) described this process, particularly in the form of Christian Nationalism, as a “threat of Biblical Proportions.” Why describe it in such dire terms? Because a majority of the American population has proven susceptible to this sort of faith-based propaganda when combined with the toxic talk of con men like Donald Trump. To the extent that the Christian Fundamentalist Americans, with their fear of discourse, take over government, the liberal population of this country is cast as enemies and pushed into enclaves, mostly in the northeast and far west. This is literally taking place as people start moving to those parts of cities, or regions, where they can more feel more politically comfortable.
Part II— Liberal Dissolution
This disunion of the country, conservative versus liberal, seems to be having the greatest detrimental impact on the liberal side. As the divide widens, conservative organizations appear to grow stronger while liberal organizations appear to weaken. As time goes by, even as some Americans flee to more congenial political states, the liberals’ grasp on their defining principles seems to be dissolving in face of surfacing contradictions.
Chief among these contradictions is the revelation that their country’s foreign policy, while sold to its people as defending the essentially liberal values of freedom and democracy, has often been doing the opposite. And the present major demonstration of that deception is Washington’s unqualified support for Israel’s genocidal onslaught in Gaza. This is traumatic for liberal Americans because for decades Israel has, been sold to them as a Western liberal state, with values “just like ours.” Now this has been revealed to be a lie—or has it? For Americans with a sincere liberal worldview, the lie has indeed become manifest. But for conservatives/fundamentalists, Israel has been transformed into alleged favorable model—a model of the white supremacist faith- based society they desire for the U.S. For this group of Americans, the values match quite well.
Faisal Kutty, an affiliate faculty member at the Center for Security, Race, and Rights at Rutgers University, explains the corrosive impact of this revelation in an article in Middle East Eye (3 May 2025) entitled, “Gaza is the greatest test liberalism has faced since 1945. And it is failing.”
Kutty’s argument is that unqualified support of Israeli genocide against the Palestinians “has exposed Western hypocrisy … and it has shaken liberalism to its core.” Supplemented in the U.S. by a racist culture war against pluralism and tolerance, as well as the corrupting manipulation of powerful lobbies, “commitment to the rule of law and human rights” is being overcome by the application of double standards. Kutty’s conclusion is the following: “if liberalism shows no will, ability or desire to protect civilian life, regional security, a nation’s own national interests and global order, then its mission-defining claims of principle and competence collapse.”
It would seem that we are witnessing something like this now. Here in the U.S., public expression in support of a range of liberal positions, for instance, DEI, LGBTQ political rights, free speech in support of the Palestinians, etc. is facing official repression. People are losing their jobs in the former case and being charged with crimes in the latter. In this way a melding of Christian fundamentalist ideology and reactionary Republican political power has unbalanced enough Americans to threaten the Constitutionally based sanity of the country’s politics. Thus the present imposition of rightwing ideology has not been good for Americans—or the rest of the world.
Part III—Conclusion
Historically, this is not exactly new. The clashing narratives of tolerance and intolerance (more often than not, posed in racist terms) has been messing with minds, for centuries. If there is an irony here, it is that Western Culture managed to uphold a fragile image of tolerance (at least in the eyes of a liberal subset of people) for as long as it did (about 80 years). The ambitions of Christian fundamentalism/nationalism and the Gaza genocide has destroyed that image. And what is the fate of many moderates?
—Too many so-called political moderates have muted their reaction to the threat from the reactionary right.
—They do so to maintain support for the genocide in Gaza. For the sake of allowing a second holocaust to occur in their lifetime they will go along with repression and official intolerance.
—They will give American liberties a final push over the cliff—hand in hand with the reactionary right.
Let us end this essay with an historical true brief story. At the end of World War I, the Japanese, who you might recall were then on the winning side of events, insisted that the Treaty of Versailles should include a declaration that all people represented in the League of Nations were to be considered racial equals. The Western leadership refused to do this. That refusal was supported by, among others, Arthur Balfour, author of the Balfour Declaration. Lord Balfour said that he could not imagine an African equal to a European (or for that matter the rights and interests of Palestinian Muslims equal to those of Jews he identified with the Old Testament). Balfour was a Christian fundamentalist. Today, Balfour’s ideological brothers and sisters have taken control of the much of United States. They assert their alleged ideological superiority in the realm of geopolitics, economics, social propriety and race. It would seem that we are in a time of monsters—monsters whose ideologies are definitely not good for any of us.
- It is only fair to state that their are a number of Christian groups that practice tolerance and diversity. They, like other humanitarian organizations, are being pushed to the margins by the present rightwing, ideologically driven, offensive.
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