Red state / Blue state

It’s well documented that every social– and family pathology that has ever been given a name is most acute where the churches are strongest. Teen pregnancy, drug abuse, family violence … all are most intense in the Bible Belt; evangelicals, specifically, have the highest divorce rate in the country.

This is a direct consequence of Christianity’s corrupt, anti-life conception of the good — self-annihilation, because the self is depraved and evil. Christianity tells men they were born no damn good, that they can never be any damn good, that their every desire and interest and decision is animated by evil. All of life then becomes a long train of pretensions and pious subterfuges aimed at concealing — literally — guilty pleasures: a cold beer when the yardwork is done, sex without the aim of procreation, intellectual discovery.

Seriously: Is it any wonder that lots and lots of people are grievously screwed-up in a subculture which believes that the bald fact of one’s own existence is an affront to the cosmos itself?

A column by Nicholas Kristof in today’s New York Times takes a look at the malignant effect of this on the formation of culture and voting patterns.

Kristof points toward a study of all this that I’ve already downloaded and will read over the next few days, so I’ll be discussing this more sometime soon. Meantime, go read the column; he’s pointing toward something important about America’s dysfunction.

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