David Breeden is speaking all week about the issues with liberalism.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden and the senior minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a humanist congregation historically. And so we talk about topics from a secular viewpoint, philosophical viewpoint, and we look at religious and theological trends in the United States. This week we’ve been looking at what I’m calling the Holes in liberalism. And I had added an essay because that’s one of the holes, as we have so many different definitions of what liberalism is. It’s not just the contemporary social liberalism that we tend to think of here in the United States and in European terms. It is very much a different kind of thing to be looking at today. I wanted to think a little bit about the way our political system works with religion a little bit here. The idea here is what percent of each political party is Christian, etc. and this is a Pew Research term and it says that among conservatives, e ighty five percent of conservatives in the U.S. consider themselves Christian. Of that, 38 percent are evangelical Protestant. That would be 38 percent of all conservatives do notice that we have then mainline Protestants at about 15 percent of conservatives, historically black Protestants, about six percent and Catholics at twenty one percent. And that is going down as time goes on, as the Catholic Roman Catholic Church itself bifurcates into two very different political stances.

This comes from religion dispatches. I’ve mentioned this before. It is a daily email that looks at religion in the United States. This particular article from Monday says, I have. “Why do evangelicals finally lost control of the narrative?” This is by one of the writers for religion dispatches, Chrissy Stroope. And she talks, for example, about a whole host of hashtags that are going on in social media now, people who are leaving evangelicalism. So X-band Jellico empty the pews, a church to to to write deconstruction decolonized. Yeah, I leave loud. Don’t just don’t just leave leave loud and say why you’re leaving white evangelicalism behind. She has this to say in that particular article that I think is interesting. Evangelicals understand the power of narrative, which is why they’re so concerned with controlling the stories the public hears not only about themselves, but also about those of us who leave evangelicalism and tell the truth about how it has harmed us. Criticizing evangelical theology as well as the racism, misogyny, anti LGBTQ animus and culture whoring politics that theology bolsters as evangelicals’ own story of engaging politically out of serious concerns about morality and sincerely held religious beliefs, has lost influence with the public because of the transparent hypocrisy they displayed to the trumpeter’s. Space has opened up for a shift in the national discussion that includes a sympathetic hearing for ex evangelicals.

Stories and perspectives, shifting the national conversation as elite evangelicals and right wing political strategies are well aware, lays the groundwork for shifts in politics and policy. Yes, what we’re talking about is that thirty eight percent of the conservative base that it calls itself evangelical Christian and that does appear to be eroding at the present time. Again, over the questions of what was the support of Trump all about. We’ve discussed that on “Coffee and Wisdom”. It is a little bit complicated because different theology within fundamentalist and evangelical Christianity see this in very different ways. But as I have mentioned the last couple of days, studies have found that religious individuals an...