Frank Schaeffer reports on the "Dumb Evangelicals who are holding the US hostage."

Courtesy of Patheos:  

The media failed to tell the real story of how we reached the shutdown and brink of default. To get what’s happening to the GOP and, to America, you need to understand the theology of the extremist frankly stupid and misinformed evangelical heartland. We don’t have a political problem. We have an evangelical stupidity problem. The Republican Party has fallen into the grip of an evangelical-led group of religious fundamentalists who are either true believers or who know how to cater to them. Now the experience of the hostage taking these “Christians” did in the shutdown is over, it’s worth figuring out how things got so crazy because they will again– until we admit who and what is at the root of our political dysfunction. 

In the late 19th Century a battle began between fundamentalists and liberal Protestant theologians. The battle between those who claimed to believe in the Bible literally and those who wanted to bring historic fact, science and nuance to their faith raged on into the 20th Century. By the mid 20th Century the liberals had won the argument but they lost the popular vote as it were. But for all its popularity fundamentalism was no longer intellectually respectable. So it was rebranded by a core group of image conscious preachers and evangelists as “evangelicalism” to take the edge off the scorn reserved for faith rooted in biblical literalism. 

The echoes of the bitter theological battle left the evangelicals feeling embattled and adversarial. Then from the mid 20th Century forward, Billy Graham, and many other evangelicals (including my late evangelist father and religious right founder, Francis Schaeffer) convinced a huge swath of America to convert to born-again faith. 

While the evangelical camp grew the mainline denominations shrank. The fine print of conversion to a hot literal faith included a directive to not to trust facts (the way those liberals did) but to look for special information which was visible only to the faithful. This way of thinking led inadvertently to an us-or-them view, revealing those with whom you disagree to be not just wrong, but lost, or even willfully evil. When politicians operate from this mindset, the agenda is no longer political. It’s a holy war. While the Tea Party gets blamed, there tends to be silence about these folks’ religion. But to cover the story of the takeover of the GOP by extremists without delving into the beliefs behind it is inexcusable. I’m not anti-religious. I’ll be in church next Sunday. I’m just against the insanity of literalistic, retributive theology that’s the basis of the bitterness evident in the recent shutdown and near default. 

The evangelical subculture has bought into an angry God whom we must placate by being saved through a revivalist born-again formula. This pits the true believer against not just science but any information that comes through nonapproved channels. There are two kinds of facts: theirs and ours. This theology has trained millions of brains to choose between God and truth. The folks that believe in a literal Bible don’t believe in evolution, in global warming, in gay rights or, we now know, even in increasing the debt limit. These are not theological issues per se but the spirit of sectarian warfare is at the heart of the bitter refusals to be swayed by mere facts.

This of course is exactly what I have been talking about for the last nine years as well. The Tea Party is just the latest incarnation of a nasty little group that has been attacking our fundamental rights for decades.

And they are part of the underlying darkness which continues to permeate our politics and endangers our future.

The more we recognize this, and report on it, the harder it is for them to operate in secret, and the quicker they will be removed from power. Perhaps not soon, but someday.