Where Did the Fundamentalists Go?

It’s a good question when you consider how media once so vocal about the religious sect Christian Fundamentalists are now practically mum on the topic.

The fringe movement emerged in the U.S. during the start of the culture wars in the late eighties to the turn of the 21st century.

Before Donald Trump was elected president, fundies were the chief bugbear of the left with their name featured in all social discourse, and not in a good way.

But they’ve been noticeably absent from the picture since Donald Trump became president.

If this wasn’t your typical magician’s rabbit in the hat trick of now you see it now you don’t, what else could it have been.

I’ll be willing to bet fundamentalism was re branded for the sake of political and religious expediency as part of a two pronged strategy.

The Gage Moves …….

The 2016 elections saw Republican front runner Donald John Trump win the presidency but it was a devastating blow to the blue team gutting Democrats, causing a firestorm.

Right away Dems set their minds on finding something to blame for the sorry state of affairs something less obvious but more tangible than the fact the Republicans won the election.

The Russian Collusion narrative never stuck so it was the fault of Republican conservatives who overwhelming voted for Trump, but there had to be more.

An extract from a Washington Post 2016 article provides some insight:

Exit polls in 2016 showed white evangelicals voted overwhelmingly for Trump at 80–16 percent.

Like any opinion poll, exit polls are subject to skewing thus interpretations of demographic bias not forgetting they don’t include absentee votes of all kinds.

Exit polls also have a larger intrinsic margin of error than regular polls because of cluster techniques this added to the fact they not carried out at every precinct, only randomly selected ones.

This could make the margins for error somewhere between 50–90% higher than they would be for comparable telephone surveys.

But most of all, as with any poll the end result can reflect pretty much anything it sets-out to, with Dems using polls to overstate their share of the vote in 2004 and beyond.

No matter, people accept the story line that best supports their politics so you can be sure the acolytes believed as they were told.

After the elections white evangelicals became the new whipping boy and they’ve hit that boy hard over the past four years.

For all intents and purposes evangelicals are the successors of the fundamentalists, meaning the same biases against its fundamentalist predecessors will be directed their way without as much as missing a beat.

What’s in a Label

Don’t expect media to be particular about how evangelicals define themselves they masters of invention so they’ll improvise an identity to match their broader socio-political goal.

With standard Christianity in the line of fire, the only religion they’ll tolerate is one in sync with a progressive world view, a reworked type of Liberation Theology appropriating the terms Christian and Church.

The tactics are predictable but at the same time you have to wonder about the gall, with hubris the operative word.

Think about the preferred and maligned groups in history to realize the U.S. has come full circle.

In keeping with the anti-evangelical trend stories with titles like; Why I left Evangelism abound on certain social media platforms, when not too long ago they trended as; why I left Fundamentalism, proving the more things change the more they stay the same.

With exactly the same reasons given for their decision to leave as before.

Okay, barring one extra reason; Evangelicals elected Donald Trump.