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xchrom

(108,903 posts)
Thu Jun 26, 2014, 10:08 AM Jun 2014

The Great Secession

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/07/the-great-secession/372288/

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A few months ago, an odd news story out of St. Louis caught my eye. A Christian-owned dog-walking business had fired, so to speak, a customer who supported legalizing marijuana. “We simply said it was against the idea of being clean and sober-minded and treating your body as a temple to the Holy Spirit,” one of the service’s owners told The Huffington Post.

The service, Pack Leader, Plus (motto: “Faith. Family. Dogs.”), is not alone in its determination to shut its doors to un-Christian custom. Religious business owners have declined to provide services for gay weddings and commitment ceremonies and refused to offer insurance that covers certain kinds of contraception (as in the Hobby Lobby case that came through the Supreme Court this term). Mississippi passed legislation in April allowing businesses to claim a religious defense if sued for discrimination; Arizona almost passed such a law (after intense debate, the governor vetoed it); similar measures are in the offing elsewhere. The apparent aim of these bills is to let people like caterers, bakers, photographers, and florists decline to provide services for gay weddings or gay-pride events. But the laws are written broadly and could be used to defend discrimination of many sorts. “We’re trying to protect Missourians from attacks on their religious freedom,” the sponsor of one such bill told The Kansas City Star.

I am someone who believes that religious liberty is the country’s founding freedom, the idea that made America possible. I am also a homosexual atheist, so religious conservatives may not want my advice. I’ll give it to them anyway. Culturally conservative Christians are taking a pronounced turn toward social secession: asserting both the right and the intent to sequester themselves from secular culture and norms, including the norm of nondiscrimination. This is not a good idea. When religion isolates itself from secular society, both sides lose, but religion loses more.

Over the decades, religious traditionalists’ engagement with American secular life has waxed and waned. After the public-relations disaster of the Scopes evolution trial in the 1920s, many conservative Christians recoiled from politics, only to come out swinging in the 1970s, when the Moral Majority and other elements of what came to be called the religious right burst onto the scene. If you believe in cultural cycles, perhaps we’re due for another withdrawal. Certainly, the breakthrough of gay marriage has fed disillusionment and bewilderment. “I suspect the initial reaction among evangelicals is going to be retreat and hope to be left alone,” Maggie Gallagher, a prominent gay-marriage opponent, recently told The Huffington Post.
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CanonRay

(14,038 posts)
1. You can't "sequester" yourself, and run a public business at the same time
Thu Jun 26, 2014, 10:12 AM
Jun 2014

It just doesn't work that way. Go buy some mountain top and put up a fence, if you want sequester.

DetlefK

(16,423 posts)
3. EXACTLY the same philosophical mindset as extremist muslims:
Thu Jun 26, 2014, 11:47 AM
Jun 2014
http://www.democraticunderground.com/123024055
http://www.democraticunderground.com/113465151

Extremist Muslims basically want the world to return to a simpler time, the "Golden Age", the almost mythical epoch of medieval times, when Islam was untainted by western-influenced philosophies of critical discourse and at the same time the most advanced civilization of mankind. (Ironically, this dominant position stemmed from absorbing foreign scientific, e.g. ancient greek, knowledge. And ironically, this Golden Age ended when Islam changed and an isolationist, irrational, conservative school of thinking became dominant, effectively preventing any further scientific and social progress from that point onward. Contact with then-underdeveloped Europe was cut off, but as the Middle-East did not have an infrastructure to support independent researchers and thinkers, they were eventually eclipsed by Europe.)

This desire for purity and salvation started in medieval times, it was multiplied when colonial powers reshaped the Middle-East into artificial nations and splintered the islamic community, and it is today's motivation of islamist terrorists who think they are fighting evil.


These Extremist Christians are exactly the same: They dream of a mythical Golden Age when Christians were society's unchallenged top-dogs and they seek to recreate it by isolating themselves from the "sinful barbarians".

pinto

(106,886 posts)
4. Good points. I suspect the most extreme would welcome secession of a sort, though.
Thu Jun 26, 2014, 12:35 PM
Jun 2014

Yet, as the author notes, just how far can you isolate yourself from an increasingly multi-cultural, diverse and equanimous society.

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