The end of evangelicalism

Bruce Gerencser has published a nice prĂ©cis of the Evangelical Right’s position on a variety of hot-button issues, explaining why they doom the movement. I imagine most readers are familiar with each of the topics individually, but it’s arresting to see the list in one place. Go take a look.

I’ll add just one thing more, the role of ‘worldview,’ a word I dislike intensely because it’s vague and few people actually have a worldview; what they have is a grab-bag of unrelated and disjointed opinions adapted from various influential people dating from their childhood and modified by experience.

However inadequate the word is, it alludes to something important — the approach we take to understanding the world. Rational inquiry, science, consistently works more reliably than attributing circumstances and events to supernatural beings, and in a mere 300-years has displaced uncountable millennia of ignorance and superstition — religion’s roots. The result is that we are in the midst of an epochal shift in human thought, a shift as dramatic as the displacement of polytheism by monotheism. This, I am convinced, lies at the bottom of much of our international and domestic discord.

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