How the Evangelicals Doomed the Republican Party, God and (Maybe) America

No one sane disputes the fact that the base of the base of the Republican Party — post Roe V Wade and with a big “assist” from my late Religious Right leader father Francis Schaeffer and me (before I changed my mind) — is evangelical voters. No one sane disputes the fact that the Republican Party is funded these days mainly by a handful of billionaires with a vested interest in seeing that government does their economic will. No one sane disputes the fact that this attempt to work the billionaires’ economic will has little-to-nothing to do with the core “family values” and “pro-life” issues that motivate the vast swath of Right wing-leaning evangelical voters. And no one sane disputes the fact that in the old days voters disagreed over policy but mostly agreed on basic facts from which policy would be derived.

These days the Right disputes the facts from how life evolved to unemployment numbers to where the President was born. For instance the Right disputes the reality of climate change and our human contributions to that change.  Evangelicals have mostly  signed up for this often oil and coal companies-funded  alternative view of “reality” because their theology teaches them to reject the “world” and look for some other explanation of the cosmos and everything in it than that offered by science.

In other words for those who reject the science of evolution — or reject the science on how people become heterosexual or homosexual, or the economic facts as to why women have abortions (48 percent fall below the poverty line), or what an embryo is,  or if the biblical account is literally true and so on  –  it is easy to embrace other alternative “explanations.” This is especially true for those who see themselves as an embattled persecuted minority of victims of “liberalism.”

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