Evangelicals are NOT Christian, they ar"e something else

[regnaD kciN]

81. Evangelicals in many other parts of the world tend to be more "Christian"...

...even if their definition of "Christian" might still be too traditionally strict on certain moral teachings than most here would like. For example, evangelicals in the U.K. and Australia tend to be rather to the left politically, critical of capitalism and insistent on the need to care for those "on the bottom" in society.

In the U.S., it's different, because U.S. evangelical Christianity has veered into being more of a "civil religion." This is a term that Abraham Lincoln used to describe religious teachings that promoted the national image. It didn't matter if they were true or not, merely that they gave divine sanction to the civil order of the country.

This became a central, if unspoken tenet, of the "religious right" even before the Reagan/Falwell/Robertson era. One of the major manifestos of the incipient religious right, Francis Schaeffer's book and film series How Then Are We To Live?, took this tack. Rather than arguing for Christianity on the basis of the truth of its message, Schaeffer began by highlighting the chaotic times we lived in, connected those times with the decadence of the late Roman Empire, and then advanced the notion that both of those were caused by a decline in religious belief and, therefore, the need of a belief in an ultimate "supreme being" with a moral code to give order to society and halt its disintegration. The flaw, as I pointed out after screenings of the film series in local protestant churches where I was living at the time, was that it wasn't about the necessity of the Christian God -- that, in fact, any supreme being would do, as long as said being provided a moral code that was congruent with society. You could have the Holy Trinity, YHWH, Allah, Odin, Zeus, or anyone else; it only could be seen as promoting traditional Christianity by reason that it was already the dominant religion in the U.S. at the time.

Needless to say, my criticism fell on deaf ears locally and, indeed, the same happened nationally. If you look at any of the propaganda of the religious right in the late '70s and early '80s, you'll find the "civil religion" aspect to the forefront: America used to be great, now it's a mess, and the abandonment of That Old Time Religion is the reason. Few noticed that said Old Time Religion wasn't Christian in content at all -- it was just a belief in a God, Christian only because of circumstance, who had a strict moral code of rights and wrongs that just happened to coincide to the values that they wanted to make the agenda of American society (hard work, individualism, military strength, sexual restraint, patriarchy). And such it has been with evangelicalism in America for the past four decades or more.