Coming on Too Heavy By That 20%

Earlier this week, Whiskeyfire had up a post that featured one of those signs that pop up in front of what we used to call Holy Roller Churches, that made a big deal about using Christmas in all your greetings. The sign ended with "Freely Use the 'C' Word."

Thers had this to say:

"Christmas" is not "the 'C' word," and never has been....pretending that "Christmas" IS a swear word reinforces and indeed helps to invent a particular kind of social identity for a particular group, a group united around an array of shared grievances that are not less deeply felt merely because they're largely imaginary or even preposterous.

I have been there, so I know how acutely embarrassing it is to the kids who get dragged into these fundie organizations of all sorts. That's why I think the extremes of the evangelicals are something of a self-solving problems. The next generation is bound to run as fast as it can to the exits and get to a life that produces something other than aggravation for all concerned. Today I saw really encouraging sign of that being reported in Kansas, of all places.

Kansas has also long been home to religious revivals and eccentric preachers, a few of them deeply wacky, to put it mildly.

Creationists, for instance, keep up a constant low-level guerrilla war in this state and, if that is insufficiently odd for you, try going to Topeka to see the Reverend Fred Phelps and his flock at the Westboro Baptist Church.

'God's punishment'

They entertain themselves by turning up at public events with placards saying: "God hates gays".

Their campaign against homosexuals came to national prominence when they protested (and this really did happen) at the funerals of soldiers who had been killed in Iraq.

The sexual orientation of the individual soldiers was not the issue.

According to the church, all Americans who die there are part of a punishment God is visiting on the United States because of his profound dislike of homosexuality in this country.

The point is that Pastor Phelps and his followers are not much liked by anyone inside or outside Kansas. The "burning at the stake" wing of America's Christian churches - the wing that stresses vengeance over love - is in trouble.

The gentle, Nativity-scene crowd are the ones on the up.
snip)
The concerns of his (another pastor the author visited) ministry are, he said, human rights and the environment.

Golly, this is a big change.

I have come to town to speak to these people about whether they still support the Republican Party but that is a minor issue, it seems to me, compared with the much bigger question of how they still support God.

Hidden in plain sight this Christmas, is the softening of evangelical America.

A million Kansans will be taking their Bibles to church in the coming week but they will not be bashing them.

There is a quiet growing up sort of evolution that happens when extremes show their underside of rottenness. It happens to kids who grow up in an absurdly restrictive environment, and it happens to adults who are revolted by an agenda of hatred.

It's inevitable as the snow melting in the spring.

The GoPervs have sown the wind, and are reaping the whirlwind.