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Ted Haggard Giddily Predicts End of the Religious Right
This seems to be the case with the disgraced Ted Haggard, former president of the National Association of Evangelicals, who was exposed as being a regular patron of a male prostitute. He says evangelical churches should become less "judgmental." While that idea may have come too late for Haggard, his Twitter feed is apparently alive with such claims as these: "I believe we are at the end of what church historians will, in the future, call the Billy Graham era." We have seen a number of such episodes recently in which the Religious Right has gone vastly underestimated. Last week, Religious Right leaders objected when Mitch Daniels, the Republican Governor of Indiana, called for a "truce" on contentious social issues. Religious Right leaders replied that such a truce is the equivalent of "surrender." Daniels, a possible 2012 GOP presidential contender, backed off. Writer Rob Boston concluded that "Daniels' quick retreat" indicates "that the Religious Right has lost none of its political punch." Recently, New York Times columnist Frank Rich went so far as to declare that the end of the culture war is at hand because of some progress on gay rights. (This, despite the obvious fact that the culture war has always been about more than one issue.) To catalog all such episodes would take a book (and maybe one would be worth doing in order to deconstruct the many false or poorly substantiated assumptions on which such claims are based.) But it seems likely that otherwise smart and well-informed social and political leaders will continue to flounder on these points. And those of us who are paying attention will continue to deconstruct the fallacies.
Ted Haggard Giddily Predicts End of the Religious Right | 2 comments (2 topical, 0 hidden)
Ted Haggard Giddily Predicts End of the Religious Right | 2 comments (2 topical, 0 hidden)
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