It's not just the decline of Christianity; it's a decline in the quality of Christians themselves as watchdogs for ethics and morality. One of the most disgusting, dispiriting things in my adult life has been watching adults and religious figures from my 90s childhood shift from solemnly insisting on the critical importance of "character" for public servants when Clinton was in office to the most obscene mental backflips to excuse everything Trump (or any other national Republican figure) did or does. Christians all of them....ostensibly.
We made the character argument in the 1990s and lost it, resoundingly, with the voters. That was in what Aaron accurately describes as a "neutral world." Since then, the public influence of Christianity has declined still further, and we now live in a "negative world." Christians no longer have the "watchdog" power (if they ever did) to control whom the Republican Party nominates, let along whom the voters put in office. The best we can do is to pick a side and to make the best deal we can in a transactional relationship. Accepting that may be dispiriting, but it's neither disgusting nor obscene. It's just realism.
It's not just the decline of Christianity; it's a decline in the quality of Christians themselves as watchdogs for ethics and morality. One of the most disgusting, dispiriting things in my adult life has been watching adults and religious figures from my 90s childhood shift from solemnly insisting on the critical importance of "character" for public servants when Clinton was in office to the most obscene mental backflips to excuse everything Trump (or any other national Republican figure) did or does. Christians all of them....ostensibly.
We made the character argument in the 1990s and lost it, resoundingly, with the voters. That was in what Aaron accurately describes as a "neutral world." Since then, the public influence of Christianity has declined still further, and we now live in a "negative world." Christians no longer have the "watchdog" power (if they ever did) to control whom the Republican Party nominates, let along whom the voters put in office. The best we can do is to pick a side and to make the best deal we can in a transactional relationship. Accepting that may be dispiriting, but it's neither disgusting nor obscene. It's just realism.