What has happened? One opinion attributes the growing religious indifference of young people to scientific knowledge that has made a creator of natural phenomena irrelevant. God didn’t design the evolution of species or arrange for the big bang. Yet American universities sanctified Darwinian biology for many decades along with the demystifying explanatory powers of physics loosening the ties of young Americans to their traditional faiths. True, there is a correlation between higher education and religious skepticism. However, even after most colleges and universities had broken ties with the religious denominations that had founded them and ended compulsory chapel, pollsters in the post World War II years had no need for the category “none” in recording the religious beliefs of college students. Theologians, Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich among them, attracted large audiences on college campuses and wrote best sellers used in college courses.
What is new and epitomizes what’s gone wrong with American religion is the moral bankruptcy of the single largest group of American Protestants, white evangelicals. A moral pecking order seems to have been turned on its head. In August 2017, President Trump had to dissolve two of his business advisory councils, composed of people not normally regarded as obsessed with ethical reflection, because of a massive defection of CEO’s. They emerged as moral giants compared to the members of his Council of Evangelical Advisors who remained steadfast in their loyalty to the president.
It was already hard enough to keep a straight face when James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, claimed on the eve of the 2016 election that Trump was “tender to things of the spirit.” Dobson’s endorsement dismissed the candidate’s taped remarks demeaning women as past history. Trump was a changed man, and his sins washed away.
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The moral corruption apparent in the largest segment of American Protestantism began in the ’80s when Jerry Falwell Sr.’s Moral Majority and Ralph Reed’s Christian Coalition started to cozy up to politicians with a conservative social and economic agenda. It’s precisely at that moment when pollsters began to record a retreat from religion by an important segment of the population. Religion disguised as partisan politics may energize evangelical voters, but with respect to faith it has backfired. Yet it goes on. President Trump’s effort to remove restrictions on church political activism has encouraged evangelical leaders to organize their troops to vote Republican in the 2018 midterm elections.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/blame-evangelicals-for-the-decline-in-christian-faith
What is new and epitomizes what’s gone wrong with American religion is the moral bankruptcy of the single largest group of American Protestants, white evangelicals. A moral pecking order seems to have been turned on its head. In August 2017, President Trump had to dissolve two of his business advisory councils, composed of people not normally regarded as obsessed with ethical reflection, because of a massive defection of CEO’s. They emerged as moral giants compared to the members of his Council of Evangelical Advisors who remained steadfast in their loyalty to the president.
It was already hard enough to keep a straight face when James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, claimed on the eve of the 2016 election that Trump was “tender to things of the spirit.” Dobson’s endorsement dismissed the candidate’s taped remarks demeaning women as past history. Trump was a changed man, and his sins washed away.
...
The moral corruption apparent in the largest segment of American Protestantism began in the ’80s when Jerry Falwell Sr.’s Moral Majority and Ralph Reed’s Christian Coalition started to cozy up to politicians with a conservative social and economic agenda. It’s precisely at that moment when pollsters began to record a retreat from religion by an important segment of the population. Religion disguised as partisan politics may energize evangelical voters, but with respect to faith it has backfired. Yet it goes on. President Trump’s effort to remove restrictions on church political activism has encouraged evangelical leaders to organize their troops to vote Republican in the 2018 midterm elections.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/blame-evangelicals-for-the-decline-in-christian-faith
