Is the Christian Right Driving Americans Away From Religion?

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Two societal shifts rocked religion in America in recent decades… the rise of Christian Evangelicals as a right-wing political force and the increasing number of people who decline to affiliate with any faith tradition. New research presents evidence that these trends, usually discussed separately, are in fact related. It reports the rate at which people disassociate themselves from religion is higher in states where the Christian Right exerts its political muscle. A research team led by Denison University political scientist Paul Djupe wrote:

Religious attachments fade in the face of visible Christian Right policy victories. There’s clear evidence that people… probably, those without strong relationships with houses of worship… use the Christian Right as a proxy for religion as a whole, and discontinue their religious identities as a result.

In the journal Political Research Quarterly, Djupe and his colleagues analysed the intersection of personal faith and religion-driven politics on a state-by-state basis. Using polling data aggregated by the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, they noted the percentage of people in a given state who identified as an atheist, agnostic, or “nothing in particular” (known collectively as “nones”), and how it changed since 2006:

A preponderance of the states appear to have experienced some degree of growth in religious “nones” in recent years. This particular pattern holds whether the individual state in question is generally thought of as being a “red” or “blue” state.

However, the rate of growth varied considerably from state to state… and not in the way one might predict. They reported:

Rising “none” rates are more common in Republican states in this period.

To determine why, the researchers measured the political clout of the Christian Right in each state (utilising the expertise of journalists and scholars). They also noted when and where these groups sponsored high-profile initiatives… usually, ballot measures to prohibit gay marriage. The researchers found that, while such efforts were often successful, they created a backlash “that didn’t redound to the benefit of organised religion in general”. They estimated that in states where such campaigns… and their backers… were widely publicised and debated:

Religion lost somewhere between 2 and 8 percent of the population. By 2010, a ban (on gay marriage) was in place in 29 states. These states were more likely to be Evangelical and had smaller populations of “nones” in them in 2006. However, by 2010, that gap between the “nones” in marriage-ban states and those in states with no marriage ban dropped by half.

This suggests that, in those traditionally religious states, the anti-gay-rights campaign soiled the name of religion for a significant number of residents, and they responded by stepping away from their former faith. Djupe and his colleagues concluded:

The decision to de-identify and disaffiliate with religion aren’t solely individual psychological processes. Rather, reactions to specific policy skirmishes that gather public attention and shape decision-making can drive that deeply personal shift.

The results suggest Evangelicals would be wise to consider the consequences of their political advocacy. In a clear case of unintended consequences, it appears to drive people from the pews.

1 May 2018

Tom Jacobs

Pacific Standard

https://psmag.com/news/is-the-christian-right-driving-americans-away-from-religion?utm_source=Pew%20Research%20Center&utm_campaign=25f8d1d984-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_05_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_3e953b9b70-25f8d1d984-399905625

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Charles Bausman Betrays Russia for Fascist Ideology: He’s Digging for Cash Under an Alt-Right Mantra

Pepe the Frog is an Alt-Right icon… we can’t afford to let such sorts circulate amongst us… Orthodoxy isn’t “conservative”… it isn’t, it wasn’t, and it never shall be such… thank God! Remember HH… he loves Cuba the Island of Freedom and he always remembers the poor and suffering on every major holiday. You can stand with Stephen Damick (and his Jew-hating pal Bausman) or you can stand with HH… I don’t think that I need tell you where I am!

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Editor:

HEAR, HEAR! Orthodox people… the same bunch that puts out Russian Insider puts out the website Russian Faith. That tells me that Damick et al share Bausman’s rancid anti-Semitism and hate. Don’t access this site. Please… remember that shitbirds of a feather DO flock together. Our bishops should make Damick and his pals repudiate Bausman and his rancid anti-Semitism publicly and without reservation. They should also make Damick et al remove their website from Bausman’s Alt-Right orbit. Otherwise, we’re tolerating Alt-Right fascism… that’s at odds with Christ’s Church and what we believe as Christians. I don’t care if they’re “pro-life”… if they’re Alt-Right they’re noxious anti-lifers of the worst possible sort. We need to make these jabronies walk the line or walk the plank.

BMD

Charles Bausman, the editor of Russia Insider, published an extraordinary article in which he says that he wishes to “break the Jewish taboo”, and in which he appears to single out Jewish people in the West for their supposed particular hostility to Russia. The article appears to put the blame for the present disastrous state of Western-Russian relations on Jewish people in ways that I find both extremely disturbing and frankly concerning. This article comes with an account of Russian history and of Russia’s interactions with Jews and of White Russian attitudes to Jews that is wrong in so many places as to give a fundamentally distorted view of that history. The Duran and Russia Feed published an excellent rebuttal of this article by Dmitri Babich, to which I have little to add. However, I do want to make one specific point.

The core of Charles Bausman’s article is a list of well-known media personalities in the USA and Britain who take strongly hostile positions against President Putin and the Russian government and who happen to have Jewish backgrounds. Producing a list of individuals in this way however seriously distorts the nature of the Western media’s hostility to Russia. I follow the mainstream media in the USA and Britain closely, and what’s striking and depressing about it is the uniformity of its hostility to Russia. This hostility extends all the way from what was once called the “left” to what was once called the “right”. It includes both Jews and non-Jews. To the extent that some of the better-known media personalities who in the West write and speak about Russia in the news media happen to have Jewish origins… that’s purely a function of the fact that for well-known cultural and historical reasons journalism is a trade which in the West tends to attract people with Jewish backgrounds.

However, there’s no evidence that Western journalists or media tycoons who aren’t Jewish (the great majority) are any less hostile to President Putin or to the Russian government or to Russia than are those who are Jewish. In Britain, none of the four most stridently anti-Russian newspapers… the London Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Financial Times, and The Guardian… have Jewish proprietors. In the case of the London Times, the proprietor is the Australian/American billionaire publisher and businessman Rupert Murdoch, who’s known to micromanage his newspapers, and who’s extremely hostile to President Putin and to Russia. In the case of the Daily Telegraph, the proprietors are the strongly conservative Barclay brothers, whose background is south London working-class English. In the case of the Financial Times, it’s Nikkei Inc, which is Japanese. The Guardian is an exceptional case, being an independent newspaper funded by a (rapidly dwindling) trust. Its best-known and arguably most strident anti-Russian journalist is Luke Harding, author of such anti-Putin classics as Mafia State and Collusion, who is, however, not Jewish.

Speaking of Britain, in my experience, the two communities within the British establishment that are by far the most resistant to the current anti-Russian wave are academia and especially the legal profession. Again, for well-known cultural and historical reasons Jews are strongly represented in both. By contrast, the most monolithically and ferociously anti-Russian communities within the British establishment are the senior ranks of the military and the intelligence services. Again, for well-known cultural and historical reasons, Jews have little representation in either.

Though I’m less familiar with the composition of the political establishment in the USA, it seems to me that the pattern there is roughly the same. Academia and especially the legal profession, in both of which people with Jewish backgrounds are very numerous, are the most resistant communities within the US establishment to the current wave of anti-Russian hysteria. By contrast, the communities within the US establishment that have most enthusiastically embraced it are the senior ranks of the military and the intelligence services, in neither of which do people of Jewish background appear to be represented to any great degree. Speaking of the intelligence services, so far as I can tell, none of the chiefs of Obama’s intelligence community who in 2016 bought heavily into the Russiagate conspiracy theory… Clapper, Brennan, Comey, and McCabe… are Jewish. Clapper comes from an old military family, Brennan’s background is Irish Catholic, Comey was born a Catholic but is now a Methodist, and McCabe’s name and background (he was born in Hartford CT) suggest strongly that he isn’t Jewish.

European Russophobia has deep historical roots, in Britain and France going back to the 19th-century, in Germany and Poland going back further still. In the case of the USA, Russophobia appears to have taken root at the start of the 20th-century, partly in response to the Russian Revolution, but also as a consequence of the mass immigration to the USA of Europeans who were already Russophobic in their homelands. Jewish people were part of this phenomenon, but they didn’t cause it, aren’t responsible for it now, and we certainly shouldn’t single them out for blame for it. The malignant ideologies of pseudo-liberalism, politically applied post-modernism, and Russophobia, which are the cause of so much harm, don’t have a national, ethnic, or racial origin. They’re disastrous products of this particular stage of Western culture.

Saying otherwise in a publication such as Russia Insider which claims to defend and explain Russia to the people of the West is a particular betrayal, given that during the Second World War tens of millions of Russians laid down their lives in order to save humanity from the appalling consequences of this sort of malign racist thinking, saving the Jewish people of Europe in the process. That’s the true Russia that we seek to defend and explain in our companion site RussiaFeed. Those who argue otherwise are wrong, and they aren’t welcome on The Duran.

18 January 2018

Alexander Mercouris

The Duran

http://theduran.com/charles-bausman-betrays-russia-for-fascist-ideology/

Lavrov SLAMS Anti-Semitism: “The Most Horrible Crime Against Humanity”

“The Last Jew in Vinnitsa”

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Minister of Foreign Affairs S V Lavrov’s speech at the opening ceremony of the exhibition “Holocaust: Annihilation, Liberation and Rescue” didn’t waste words. Lavrov took part in the opening ceremony of a new exhibition about the Holocaust, the great mass-execution drive of over six million Jews and others deemed by Nazi Germany to be “unfit” for life. The speech was extremely succinct, so much so that we post the full translation. We want to provide a further service though, so in the text of the speech, you will see hyperlinked places that offer further explanation of some of the vague charges Mr Lavrov has given. It’s a classic feature of Russian diplomacy to lay the charge out very clearly, while not naming the perpetrator of the charge. This is statesmanship, and properly applied, it should interest the listener or the reader to conduct their own research to find out what the whole story is. The Duran wants to call to attention again the very important fact that Russia brooks no hostility towards the Jewish people, their religion, or their way of life.

Recently an opinion piece by Russia Insider editor Charles Bausman attempted to explain Western media hostility towards Russia as being a “Jewish-based” phenomenon. Of course, this view is highly charged, controversial, and the rebuttal pieces by The Duran’s Dmitri Babich and Alexander Mercouris show that this point of view is far less true than Mr Bausman holds. Given the text of the speech here, it’s apparent that the Russian Federation stands committed to upholding the dignity of humanity everywhere, and of every ethnicity and creed. At The Duran, we consider free speech and expression to be sacred. However, more than that, we consider honest and objective assessment to be the journalistic Holy Grail, and we strive to achieve this. Nevertheless, we believe that we seek to find and report the truth, and most of all, to do it in such a way that allows our readers to think about topics for themselves. What we DO have on our side is the simple fact that the truth always reveals itself to one who seeks it, and our efforts to analyze and describe the amazingly complex field of geopolitics hopefully are tools to reveal the truth, in hopes that we might act in the knowledge of the truth.

Here is the speech in full:

It’s a great honour for me to address the UN headquarters at the opening of the historical and documentary exhibition “The Holocaust: Destruction, Liberation, Salvation”. This exhibition occurs on the eve of the International Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Holocaust, celebrated annually on 27 January. First of all, I’d like to thank the Scientific Educational Centre “Holocaust”, its co-chairman Ilya Altman, and the Russian Jewish Congress for organising this exposition, which contains unique archival documentary evidence of the terrible tragedy of the Holocaust, such as photographs of prisoners of Nazi death camps and their liberators, (which included) the soldiers of the Red Army.

The Holocaust is one of the most horrible crimes against humanity, the manifestation of merciless cruelty and contempt for the value of life. The mass extermination by the Nazis, of Jews, as well as many victims from other ethnic groups, was the result of the implementation of a misanthropic policy of racial superiority. Our sacred duty is not only to honour the memory of the millions of innocent victims but also to do our utmost to avoid the recurrence of such tragedies in future. One can’t but be disturbed by the fact that recently we have seen a creeping resurgence of Nazism. In a number of countries, including those classifying themselves as “paragons of democracy”, we see a systemic course for revision of the historical outcome of the Second World War, including the glorification of the activities of the Hitlerite activities (Nazism) of local collaborationists.

It is especially immoral that a number of the EU member countries are waging a war on monuments, where they destroy and defile monuments to Soviet soldiers who helped save the world from the horrors of the “brown plague” and who gave their lives in their contribution to ensuring long years of peace and stability on the European continent. Such actions are sacrilegious from the general human point of view. They challenge the postwar architecture of security, based on the UN Charter, the decisions of the Nuremberg Tribunal, and other unshakable international legal documents. All of us need to counteract these extremely dangerous trends.

In Russia, we pay special attention to this problem. Every year, we submit to the UN General Assembly a draft special resolution on combating the glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism, and other practises that contribute to the escalation of contemporary forms of racism and intolerance. The number of states that co-sponsored it has steadily grown from year to year. Once again, we adopted such a resolution a month ago, on 19 December 2017, at a plenary session of the 72nd session of the UN General Assembly. An overwhelming majority of member nations approved the document, but a number of countries didn’t support it, trying to justify their position by referring to the need to respect freedom of speech [the vote was 133 in favour, 49 abstentions, and 2 against… the Ukraine and the USA].

I believe that today’s exhibition wants to send an unambiguous signal that such attempts to reinterpret Nazism are unacceptable. In the coming months, this exhibition will appear in a number of other countries. I’m convinced that that’d help solidify historical truth; it’d once again remind us of the valorous feats of those who defeated Nazism, saving Jews and other peoples from complete destruction.

In conclusion, I’d like to wish good health and all wellbeing to our dear veterans, including those who saved the Jews, who liberated Auschwitz, and to all those who helped to save us by defeating Nazism in Europe. Of course, I’m very glad to see my good friend Arthur Schneier, who’s one of the pillars of New York political life, who carries out a very important work to prevent the glorification of those people who committed heinous crimes. Thank you all and best wishes to you!

19 January 2018

Russia Feed

http://russiafeed.com/russias-top-diplomat-slams-anti-semitism-calling-horrible-crime-humanity/

“Russia Insider” Goes Goebbels: Debunking Charles Bausman’s Warped Vision of Russian Reality

The Hard Right sorts who started Russia Insider are like the “creeps outside”… what’s sad is that many of them have attached themselves to the Orthodox Church. If we don’t oppose them, they could take over and pervert our Church. I, for one, don’t want that… I don’t think that I’m alone.

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Going After Jews Instead of Neoliberals

Charles Bausman, the editor-in-chief of Russia Insider, chose a path well-trodden… he decided to woo his audience by discovering the “Jewish origin” of today’s wars and tensions. Russia Insider’s editor-in-chief railed against the supposed Jewish origin of the world’s ills, but he totally failed to understand Russia’s history or its people. Nothing could be a greater service to the globalist neoliberals and neoconservatives, who try to present alternative voices (and in the first place, alternative voices from Russia) as a chorus of anti-Semites, conspiracy theorists, and Putin’s pals. The detractors of RT and Sputnik in the USA and the EU might quickly forget that RT’s Paula Slier made award-winning documentaries on the Holocaust’s horrors, but that didn’t prevent Paula from reporting on the horrors of Israel’s bombardment of Palestinian areas. However, the detractors of RT and Sputnik will remember Mr Bausman’s recent opus headlined “It’s Time to Drop the Jew Taboo”.

They’ll remember it and cite it as an example of “Putin’s man going fascist”… quickly spreading its ill-fame to all the media outlets that Mr Bausman happened to visit. Such reactions from Western mainstream media figures are already coming in. Judging from the text of his article, Mr Bausman was fully aware of this kind of reaction before starting to pen his feelings about Jews but proceeded with publication.

Nothing To Do With Russia

Attempts to connect Mr Bausman’s article to our country or to its president aren’t just missing the point… they’re outright deceitful. Mr Bausman’s article appeared on his own private media resource, for which he is trying to get donations from the public. Mr Bausman’s anti-Semitic article has nothing to do with Putin or with the “atmosphere in Putin’s Russia” (which isn’t anti-Semitic or xenophobic in general). Moreover, it has nothing to do with the Russian intellectual tradition. Please note that Mr Bausman’s article didn’t refer to Russian thinkers, except for a few illustrations from the legacy of the late Peoples Painter of Russia I S Glazunov, who dismissed accusations of anti-Semitism during his lifetime, but who died last year, so he can defend neither his reputation nor his copyright.

That isn’t an unusual situation for anyone dealing with Mr Bausman… in his article, Mr Bausman writes that Russia Insider “republishes the best articles about Russia with a link to the original”, but he forgot to add that Russia Insider usually does so without permission and, consequently, without any compensation for the holders of the articles’ copyright. This isn’t Mr Bausman’s only omission. In this article, I’ll try to single out just the chief among Mr Bausman’s many omissions. I’m doing this in the hope of backing up my previous paragraph with facts, which are quite plentiful in the dramatic history of Russia’s more than 200 years long “blood liaison” with East European Jews. The vast majority of the Jews that found themselves in the Russian Empire and later in the USSR because of our country’s expansions in the 18th to 20th centuries became our Jews. They call themselves Soviet, Russian, sometimes even Ukrainian, Moldovan, or Georgian Jews, but nonetheless, they’re part of what President Putin called the “Russian world”, and not just because the Russian language is native to them… in most cases, it’s their mother-tongue.

“They” Made Everything from Neoliberalism to the Soviet Atomic Bomb

Mr Bausman wrote:

On the policy side, the neoconservative movement, Russia’s harshest foe, was conceived of, is led by, and consists mostly of, Jews.

How very interesting! Following the same logic and sticking to the same standards of accuracy, I could say that the Soviet atomic bomb, Russia’s dearest friend, was conceived of and developed mostly by, Jews. Yes, Academician A F Ioffe was the head of the physics department at the Soviet Academy of Sciences that answered Stalin’s question about the feasibility of a nuclear weapon back in 1942. Ioffe’s conclusion was a positive one, with proposals on the way to make the bomb real (here we have the Jewish “conception” of the Soviet bomb). Chief engineer Rotshild and chief technologist Zilberman (so their surnames sound in Russian) headed the work on producing plutonium for the first Soviet atomic bomb.

In reality, of course, a multi-ethnic team of heroes, with a variety of motivations, created the Soviet atomic bomb. Some of them had an ideological motivation (serving communism), some wanted to protect Mother Russia and mankind from an American nuclear monopoly (serving Motherland and humanity), and some were just saving their lives since the sinister Minister of Internal Affairs L P Beriya supervised the project. According to eyewitness memoirs, Jews were in all three groups.

Not Blood, But Ideology

In the same way, it’s profoundly unfair on Mr Bausman’s side to reduce the cruel and extremist neoliberal and neoconservative ideologies to the Jewish origins of some of their proponents. Writing on the matter, Mr Bausman forgets to mention that neoconservatism’s most vocal and best-known opponent in the USA is none other than Professor Stephen F Cohen… a Jew. Talking about responsibility, where shall we stick the father of the drone killings’ program, the CIA’s top Angel of Death John Brennan, who happens to be an Irish Catholic (oh, my God, even a practising one)? Taking into account the skin-colour of Barack Obama and Condoleeza Rice, the father of the Ukrainian war and the mother of the Iraq invasion, one could think of the IDEOLOGICAL similarities between neoliberalism and neoconservatism rather than of any Jewish conspiracies. Or, following Mr Bausman’s logic, we must put the blame for America’s wars on people of African origin, probably with the even more “colourful” inclusion of Colin Powell into this affair (as Mr Bausman put it, “there’s overwhelming ethnic imbalance”).

The truth is that Mr Powell’s “test-tube speech” at the UN and Mrs Nuland’s distribution of cookies to Maidan rebels was indeed unseemly, but these affairs had nothing to do with their Jewish or non-Jewish origins. These affairs reflected not ethnic hatreds, but the Western infatuation with its own ultraliberal ideology, an explosive mix of vulgarised 20th century “old dead truths,” justifying murders and lies in the name of “elections” and “justice”, which somehow must always bring “liberals” to power. Mr Bausman also forgot to notice one other important thing… very often neo-libo-conservatives declare themselves Jews out of sheer conformism.

Take Madeleine Albright, Clinton’s Secretary of State during NATO’s invasion of Yugoslavia in 1999. She conveniently found Jewish roots in her family only AFTER bombing Yugoslavia, until then she was a proud daughter of a prominent Czech diplomat, Josef Korbel, who during the advent of Czech nationalism in the first half of the 20th century felt himself the most Slavic of Czechs. Mrs Albright rushed to fit the positive neoliberal vision of Jews with the same passion that Mr Bausman showed when he tried to squeeze the Jews (Russian and non-Russian) into a negative stereotype.

Repeating the Whites’ Mistakes

Bausman wrote:

Many White Russians fleeing the revolution believed that it was mostly a Jewish coup d’état, financed by wealthy bankers in New York and London who were sworn enemies of Christian Tsarism.

Indeed, many White Russians thought so, and this is the reason why they lost the Civil War, even though those same American, British, and French interventionists (whom Mr Bausman so rightly despises now) supported the White Guard. Many of the White Guard’s generals considered Jewish radicalism Russia’s only (or at least Russia’s main) problem, and they didn’t bother to suggest to the Russian population a viable alternative to Bolshevism… only a return to the status quo before 1917. The formula “let’s get back to the past + anti-Semitism” didn’t work in Russia during the Civil War in 1918-20, and it doesn’t work now. Even G A Zyuganov understands that, but Mr Bausman is still living encapsulated inside the minds of not the wisest of the White émigrés. The wisest, such as the writers V V Nabokov and I A Bunin, were against anti-Semitism. Nabokov even had a Jewish wife (many call Vera Yevseyevna Nabokova the best writer’s wife in the history of literature) and made a row in an American restaurant that had a sign “Gentiles Only”. However, Mr Bausman will probably never understand THIS KIND of Russian.

18 January 2018

Dmitri Babich

Russia Feed       

http://russiafeed.com/russia-insider-debunking-charles-bausman-russia-reality/