if you are giving money to a conservative church that preaches a religious-right doctrine, and if you are supporting that church by putting your butt in the pew every week, and you are not speaking out, then you are complicit.

I agree that people need to speak out. Ideally churches would be places where a diversity of opinions can exist and people would feel free to speak out about these kind of things. I tried to in my last church and got kicked out for being too liberal. Now I’m starting my own church where we value dialogue and diversity of opinions – we have very conservative people in our church and very liberal people and we all get to have a voice.

However, the Republican party seems to have become a marriage of extremist Christians and corporate greed. Quite disturbing on many levels.

I completely agree. It infuriates me too. And I say this as a Christian. My understanding of the gospel is that the kingdom of God stands in opposition to the oppression and violence and greed of “empire”, so when I see conservative Christians bowing down to the powers of empire and “baptizing greed and violence and injustice in the name of religion… to me it’s a betrayal of the gospel itself.

I was content in my own atheism and not thinking about religion at all for many years, until GWB became president and after 9/11 when all the religious bullshit hit the fan.

My story is very similar. I was rather apathetic towards politics and just concerned with practicing my faith apart from social issues until GWB got into power and 9/11 happened. Then as things just got worse and worse I realized that I couldn’t stay silent. The other thing that happened around that same time is that I started reading my bible more for myself and began to realize that scripture has far, far more to say about economic and social justice than it does about any of the Religious Right’s causes. I started to realize that if I was really going to live out my faith, I would have to start speaking out against the abuses and perversions of that faith by people like GWB and the Religious Right.

Anyway, how long have you been a Christian?

My whole life, and I’m 28. I was raised in a conservative Christian home and for as long as I can remember my mom has been a fan of people like James Dobson and Chuck Colson on the Christian radio stations. I grew up surrounded by the rhetoric of the Religious Right.

But as I said, this stuff comes in degrees. No one in my parent’s churches would have endorsed the kind of extremist behavior you described in your first comment. They were good people, despite my disagreements with their politics. Most that I knew were motivated primarily by only one issue – abortion. There is a deep, passionate concern with the conservative church over this issue – they are convinced that a fetus is human life, and therefore should be protected (though I’ve never met anyone who thinks that protecting the child would ever justify violence against abortion clinics or the like). Until one understands the passion of pro-life Christians to protect unborn children, you cannot understand why and how the Religious Right has gained so much power over the past 30 years.

What grieves and angers me is how the Republican party, and power brokers within the Religious Right itself, have used this one issue to thereby rope evangelical Christians into supporting a whole host of other conservative economic and social issues. Single-issue voting is insane, and yet a whole generation of evangelicals have been duped into thinking there is really only one or two issues that really matter, and thus they turn a blind eye to all the other injustices and evils perpetrated by those on the far right.

I want to know what happened to the churches that I knew as a kid? Have they all been swallowed by the right-wing machine? Or are they still out there. I guess you are staying they are still out there. Or perhaps those churches are gone, but people like you are building new ones to replace them.

If you’re talking about fundamentalist and evangelical churches, yes, most of them became allied with the Religious Right sometime in the past three decades. However, many of them in the past 10 years have begun emerging out from under that umbrella. Especially among “seeker-sensitive” churches and “contemporary” churches there is a relapse into that apathy and non-involvement with politics that you remember from the 1970’s pre-Falwell era. Other evangelicals however are swinging the complete opposite way, as more and more join the Christian progressives bandwagon being spearheaded by people like Jim Wallis. I see this especially among young adults.

And don’t let your fundamentalist roots bias you towards the mainline churches either. They were never roped into the Religious Right machine. Denominations like the United Methodists, United Church of Christ, Episcopal, PC(USA), ELCA, Mennonites and American Baptists (not to mention the African American church) have been consistently speaking up for social justice and pluralistic tolerance for the past half century or more (many of them for several centuries). Their witness has not faltered, even if the media stopped paying attention to them a while ago.

Having been raised a conservative evangelical myself, I too grew up with a bias against these churches. However in the past few years I’ve gotten to know more mainliners personally and discovered that, despite the fundamentalist myths, these churches are still full of real Christians too. They just happen to read the bible a little less literalistically than fundies, and tend to think that gospel actually does have something to say about issues of justice and compassion here and now, and is not just about what happens to us when we die.

Anyhow, sorry for the long reply, but hey, you asked!

Aj, I guess I’d prefer to decide who is a political ally or not based on empirical evidence, not on what some guy writes in an op/ed piece.
If someone will write a letter to a Congressperson in favor of my cause, or will come with me to the public comment period of a school board meeting to make the case for not teaching creationism, then I consider them an ally, regardless of what Sam Harris thinks.

I agree

Aj, may you take comfort in your ideological purity. It’s a funny thing though, I’ve found that the process of working together toward shared goals can open new channels of communication and new opportunities for people to evaluate their priorities and question their assumptions.

Aj, I guess I’d prefer to decide who is a political ally or not based on empirical evidence, not on what some guy writes in an op/ed piece.
If someone will write a letter to a Congressperson in favor of my cause, or will come with me to the public comment period of a school board meeting to make the case for not teaching creationism, then I consider them an ally, regardless of what Sam Harris thinks.

I like reading articles for ideas and reasoned argument, not to hold up as an authority, or to dismiss them out of hand for lack of it. Lie down with dogs, wake up with flees, I’m not getting any flees.

OTHER PRO-EVOLUTION EVANGELICAL CHRISTIANS Between 1910 and 1915 a 12-volume set of books was published, titled, The Fundamentals, filled with essays by conservative Protestants, among them, R. A. Torrey (an editor of The Fundamentals), George Frederick Wright and James Orr, who all advocated a cautious pro-evolutionary stance. Only in the eighth volume of The Fundamentals did two aggressive rejections of evolution appear, one by an anonymous essayist and another by the relatively unknown Henry Beach, both of whom lacked the theological and scientific standing of the senior Evangelicals already mentioned. Reverend Orr, one of the more renowned contributors, was a theologian of the United Free Church College in Glasgow and widely respected as an apologist for Evangelicalism, but expressed doubts as to how literal, Genesis, chapter three, ought to be taken: “I do not enter into the question of how we are to interpret the third chapter of Genesis — whether as history or allegory or myth, or most probably of all, as old tradition clothed in oriental allegorical dress…” [James Orr, The Christian View of God and the World (1897), p. 185, 447]

I thought the point of the article (and a major theme of the blog) was furthering the cause of secularism? Please tell me how we can push back at the fundies by pissing off political allies? It’s not like it’s the annoying evangelical door-to-door salesmen who have brought the religious right to power, but one of the most successful grassroots organizations in history.

Moderates are not my allies, they are the problem, if it wasn’t for them fundamentalists would be insignificant annoyances. They’re not necessarily secularists, or agree with me on anything. Perhaps they’re your political and philosophical kin, but I really can’t see how they’re much better than the fundies.

The Virus of Religious Moderation

Fundamentalists can be secularists, and many see church influencing state as the first step towards state influencing church. I’m not adverse to working with any group that wants to separate religion from the state.

As it happens, the blogger does make clear in the comments that she asked her friend to stop the inundation. It’s not that the overeager atheist friend was doing something wrong or bad by some objective legal yardstick. He was annoying his friend, and not stopping when asked, and his attempts had become counter-productive.

She does say that she asked him to stop on the last but one comment. It only gives a time, not a date, so I’m not sure if it was there when I read the blog post and most of the comments. Obviously pesisting in pestering someone, is harrassment, on any topic. Even in that comment she makes the separate points that somehow religion and faith are special topics, that a) you shouldn’t try to persuade someone to change their mind on, and b) are pointless because it’s a matter of “faith”.

I believe that’s the third time she’s stated that “we can’t know whether god exists”, so it’s a “matter of faith”, either way, and it’s “pointless” to discuss further. I wouldn’t waste my time on such a person.

I don’t even remember writing about “effective social action”. If the majority of people are like you, the fundies have won.

I thought the point of the article (and a major theme of the blog) was furthering the cause of secularism? Please tell me how we can push back at the fundies by pissing off political allies? It’s not like it’s the annoying evangelical door-to-door salesmen who have brought the religious right to power, but one of the most successful grassroots organizations in history.

I like to think that in my attempts at social activism, I have pissed off a quite a few people. But, I’ve taken a cue from some of my mentors to try and only piss off the right people, in the right way, as part of an overall strategy.

As it happens, the blogger does make clear in the comments that she asked her friend to stop the inundation. It’s not that the overeager atheist friend was doing something wrong or bad by some objective legal yardstick. He was annoying his friend, and not stopping when asked, and his attempts had become counter-productive.

He would have been much much better off to direct his energy into writing letters to his Congressperson, or fund-raising for a secular cause. With his friend, he could have made an honest attempt to understand his friend’s attachment to religion, which would probably make him a better activist.