Civil Commotion

What do you know? With relentless sexual abuse scandals located in the churches, and evangelicals’ rock-solid support for the First Felon, public regard for clergy continues to decline.

Clergy’s Ethical Rating Continues to Decline

While journalists have experienced a surge in positive ratings, the opposite is true for the clergy. Gallup has measured Americans’ views of the clergy’s honesty and ethics 34 times beginning in 1977, and this year’s 37% very high/high rating is the lowest to date. Although the overall average positive rating is 54%, it has consistently fallen below that level since 2009. The historical high of 67% occurred in 1985.

Positive views of the honesty and ethics of the clergy dropped in 2002 amid a sexual abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church, and although positive ratings rebounded somewhat in the next few years, they fell to 50% in 2009 and have been steadily declining since 2012.

The Pious will insist that this is evidence of the wickedness of “the world,” but the humdrum truth is that the Christian narrative is false, the ethical teachings are cultish, and the Christian business model amounts to no more than degrading the insecure into submission and then exploiting them — a schtick that just doesn’t work any more.

Meantime, we have an example of the converse of the old rule “You’re known by the company you keep,” which is this: You are known by your enemies, too. Yes, journalists are enjoying a nice uptick in public regard, doubtless because Donald Trump, a corrupt madman, can barely make it to the end of a sentence without denouncing them.

Since 1976, Gallup has asked Americans to rate the ethical standards of journalists 29 times, and the overall average positive rating over that period is 26%. Until 2016, strong pluralities or majorities rated journalists as “average,” but after the 2016 presidential campaign, the public’s ratings of journalists declined. In December 2016, 41% of Americans held a negative opinion of their ethics.

Yet this year, positive assessments of journalists’ ethical standards have rebounded, owed largely to shifting opinions of Democrats and independents, who may be reacting to President Donald Trump’s repeated characterizations of the news media as “the enemy of the people.”

It’s just as I never tire of saying: Reality always has the last word.

“… his will subdued by the Spirit …”

Christianity’s death-wish theology is rarely set out so explicitly. Never forget: The goal of the well-lived Christian life is self-annihilation — the annihilation of your self-interest and the annihilation of your self-direction because your self is evil and no damn good.

Have a blessed day!

I pointed several days ago toward a piece in New York Magazine by Andrew Sullivan, noting that he had badly conflated philosophy and religion and seemed to have a poor understanding of how ignorant a lot of the Evangelical Right who comprise the Republican base actually are.

I live in a town that is the home of a Southern Baptist Seminary, and can hardly go outdoors without tripping over some yahoo that genuinely believes everything went wrong when a talking snake tricked a gullible woman into stealing a bad piece of fruit, and that evolution is the make-believe of liberal, Baby Jesus-hating scientists.

What do you know? Albert the Pious devoted a lot of friendly attention to the piece, and today New York Times columnist David Brooks commented favorably on the piece.

Sullivan, Mohler, and Brooks all make the identical mistake: Because they are themselves religious people, they misinterpret the skepticism of scientists and engineers as just another religion, albeit attenuated; they seem unable to imagine an intellectual framework that does not assume some amount of magic, as though scientists and engineers nod toward a different and decidedly peculiar magic.

No. Jerry Coyne put it nicely:

Most atheists simply reject the notion of God because there is no evidence for one. Many of us, including the scientifically minded, reject God in the way we reject the Loch Ness Monster: there could have been evidence for both creatures, but none has shown up. There is evidence that could surface that would convince many of us—I am one, Carl Sagan was another—that a divine being existed. But we haven’t seen any such evidence. In contrast, for many believers there is no evidence that would dispel their notion of God. If evolution, the Holocaust, and the persistence of evil and physical disasters didn’t do it, then nothing will. [emphases in original]

I don’t posit an incorporeal being outside time and space to explain what I don’t understand; I say that I don’t understand, and let it sit or investigate further, and that is the case with every skeptic I know of.

Toward the end of the Progressive Era, when the Pious first began to understand that thought was evolving in a direction that cut them out, the American philosopher John Dewey delivered two lecture series’ that were subsequently re-published as A Common Faith and The Quest for Certainty. The first is available in either print or ebook, and the second is available in only print. Both are worth a read, for Dewey clearly understood that religion would inevitably become a reactionary and destructive force in public life, and tried to suggest antidotes.

Navigating the death of religion — especially the Abrahamic theisms — is the greatest task before humanity, because that death seethes below a lot of global and domestic turmoil, and because that death is spurred by a paradigm shift that much of humanity is simply not competent to make; witness the difficulty of even educated men like Sullivan, Mohler, and Brooks.