A woman named Tara Mack represents my district in the State House. She is also a fundamentalist Christian married to one of the pastors of a huge mega-church in the area.
Recently she quite literally got caught with her pants down in the parking lot of a nearby park with a Republican legislative colleague.
About the same time this incident happened there was a YouTube clip of Professor Clay Christensen of the Harvard Business School talking about a comment by a Marxist economist from China studying here as a Fulbright Scholar.
The economist remarked that he was surprised to discover that American democracy depends so heavily on religion to function. He went on to explain that most people voluntarily obey the law (the key to democracy working) and it seemed to him that religion promoted the kind of personal morality that gives rise to this voluntary compliance.
Christensen agreed, noting that years ago most Americans regularly attended a church or synagogue where they were taught such a moral code. But he now worries about the future of our democracy in light of the decline of the influence of religion we are seeing.
(As a footnote, the actual extent of the influence of religion on people’s moral conduct is in dispute. The results of a recent study published online September 11 in the journal Science showed that people live by comparable moral codes whether they are religious and not.)
Be that as it may, if religion can and does have a positive influence on people’s personal moral standards, and in that way helps our democracy function, its decline may have quite serious ramifications for the future for our democracy as well as religious institutions.
That brings me back to Tara Mack. I think she represents the kind of Christian who is contributing to Christianity’s decline in America, and that of the church.
Being caught with her pants down in a car with another brought renewed focus on her political views. They are what you would expect – anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, anti-social programs, anti-Muslim, pro tax cuts for the wealthy, supporting everything else Republicans stand for these days. What is more, two years ago she was a very vocal proponent of a constitutional anti-gay marriage amendment she said would protect the sanctity of traditional marriage.
Her hypocrisy alone is enough to make people turn away from religion, but religious hypocrites have been around a long time. What’s different is that their moral crusades now become headline news and are reported far and wide across numerous media outlets around the world.
The result is that Christianity gets the reputation of making people moralistic, self-righteous, unthinking, uncaring, nationalistic, militaristic, and unbalanced, and more and more people are choosing not to get near it.
But there is a healthier Christianity and churches that teach it than what people like Tara Mack or Kim Davis of Kentucky embody.
The question is, will the latter so poison the public perception of faith that a healthier Christianity will lose its voice entirely and churches that teach it will fade away?
We can only hope the die has not already been cast.
linnposts.com 