“Mind your own damn business.”
Jesus didn’t say that, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz did, but it’s the street version of the Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” a moral principle found in every major religion, including Christianity.
Walz directed his “mind your own damn business” comment at political evangelicals who worked for years to get the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade and are now trying to persuade state legislatures to ban abortion rights entirely.
It is unlikely political evangelicals will pay any attention to Walz’s plea because they show no interest in the Golden Rule that is supposed to be part of their faith.
They are more concerned with forcing people to live the way they think they should live when they won’t do it on their own. They believe it is their duty, if not obligation, to do so.
Political evangelicals are modern descendants of New England Puritanism that controlled the public life of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Puritans believed God’s law (as they interpreted it) should control every aspect of civic life.
So do political evangelicals, and for many years they had a lot of success in getting their way. Businesses were closed on Sunday, Wednesday nights were designated for church activities, school vacation breaks were scheduled around Christian holy days, Christian devotionals started the day in elementary schools, Christian prayers were offered at Friday night football games, manger scenes were displayed on courthouse lawns at Christmas time, and on and on.
While the Constitution established us officially as a religiously neutral nation, unofficially Christianity’s intrusion into public life, including government, existed every where you turned.
Then things began to change when non-Christians began filing lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of local, state, and federal governments allowing Christianity to be present as if it was a state sponsored religion.
The Supreme Court was forced to begin making decisions based on the Constitution instead of the Bible, enforcing the principle of the separation of church and state implicit in the 1st Amendment. School sponsored prayer, ministers praying at athletic events, and Christian displays such as Manger scenes on public property were all deemed unconstitutional.
If that wasn’t enough to upset evangelicals, the sexual revolution of the 60s exploded, women started insisting on having equal rights, including in the workplace, and then the bombshell hit when the Supreme Court ruled that women had the legal right to choose whether or not to have an abortion within the third trimester of a pregnancy.
Soon thereafter gay and lesbian Americans stopped hiding their sexual identity and began claiming their rights as citizens, including the freedom to marry. When the Supreme Court agreed, legalizing gay marriage, evangelicals were convinced the nation was going to hell in a hand basket.
That’s when they turned to politics, joining up with the Republican Party and turning themselves into a political force that earned them the name, political evangelicals.
Once they gained sufficient power among Republican voters to make a difference in who got nominated in primary contests, they began to insist the party adopt political and policy positions that would re-establish Christianity’s influence in and on the nation the way it used to be.
“Culture wars” is what we call their political efforts to make America great again by making it “Christian” based on the narrow and moralistic way they understand Christianity.
This history is the context out of which political evangelicals emerged to become the most loyal base of the Trump MAGA Republican Party.
That Trump himself is a morally corrupt man doesn’t matter to them. If he is willing to help them re-establish the United States as a “Christian” nation – even if it only exists in their imagination because of their ignorance of American history and their disregard for the Constitution – so be it.
God, they believe, can use evil to accomplish good, and, for them, the only “good” that matters is to have laws that force people to conform to their view of Christian morality.
Minding your own damn business is, of course, a stumbling block to this end, and they will fight it every step of the way. Their version of the Golden Rule is, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, so long as those “others” are willing to do it your way.”
You can see the problem those of us who are the “others” are facing.
The good thing is that at this point the Constitution still stands, albeit the conservative majority on the Supreme Court is trying its best to take the nation back to a time when evangelicals had more influence.
For the moment, though, the only way political evangelicals can get their way is to out vote the rest of us. They managed to pull that off in 2016, but it’s not going to happen this year.
Trump is going to lose in November (a bold, but confident prediction on my part), along with Republicans in Congress, which will be a joyful triumph for the country that sends the unequivocal message to political evangelicals – “mind your own damn business” – whether they listen or not.
linnposts.com 