I will add (at the risk of sounding callous again) that a doctor that has religious beliefs that hinder his/her ability to provide life-saving medical care in a public “available to all” setting…should not have that job. Work somewhere else where you can take care of yourself and others appropriately.
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I will mention that, although Canada has a comprehensive public health system, this issue also exists here. I do not know of any instances where an emergency abortion was denied or delayed, but currently the issue of religious faith conflicting with medical practice arises often arises over Medical Assistance in Dying.
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Medically assisted dying is not really a life-saving treatment though, I could see where that runs into some moral tension even on the secular humanist side of things. Not like its an emergency on the spot decision either.
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There seems to be some confusion here. Conservative Christians don’t vote for Democrats, but that’s because Democrats aren’t conservative, not because Democrats aren’t Christian.
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There is a faction of people in America who equate Christianity being pro-life, pro-gun and anti-gay. I don’t know how large this faction is numerically, but it seems to have an outsized influence on the GOP.
The confusion is yours. The phase “conservative Christians”, as the context in which I’ve been using it should have made clear, does not refer to Christians who happen also to be socially or politically conservative. It refers to a particular kind of Christian, i.e., a conservative as opposed to liberal Christian, meaning a Christian who holds to a traditional understanding of Christian faith, as opposed to one watered down by compromises typical of those found in the liberal, mainstream churches. One could easily be a “conservative Christian” in this sense and vote for the Democratic Party.
Indeed, it used to be the case that many conservative Christians voted for the Democratic Party, if you go back 50 years or more. But changes in the ethos within the Democratic Party have made conservative Christians feel less comfortable. The changes aren’t always formal changes in policy, though they can include that. The changes are atmospheric, so to speak. And those changes have been enough to cause many conservative Christians to shift their support to the Republicans.
Obviously if a conservative Christian happened also to be “conservative” regarding issues of economics or foreign policy or other matters, that person would have been voting Republican all along regardless of religious considerations. But as the quotations from T. aquaticus show, for many voters religious or ethical issues are so important that they will switch parties over them. The abortion issues is one case: many Christians started supporting the Republicans who previously supported the Democrats, over the perception that the Democrats were too liberal on abortion and the Republicans held a more traditional view. The point is not which view of abortion is right; the point is that we know there are “one-issue voters” who have made the jump over abortion, and it seems that this is not the only religion-related issue where some Christians feel a distinction (whether based on misperception or not) between the parties.
It is probably the fact that you don’t live over here that causes you to adopt a bookish, formal sense of the individual terms “conservative” and “Christian”, instead of grasping the meaning of the phrase as a unit. Your apparent lack of insider experience regarding the varieties of Christianity probably also contributes to your confusion on this point.
You mean like the Democratic Party putting its weight behind Civil Rights, whereas many (religiously) conservative Christians supported Segregation?
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Bullseye.
No, I don’t mean that at all. Segregation was ended in the 1960s; the drift of the Democratic leadership (which is not to say all people who vote Democratic or even all members of the Democratic Party) in the direction of secular humanism is generally thought to have become pronounced in the 1970s. It is since then that many conservative Christians have moved over to the Republicans. This tendency became noteworthy in the Reagan years – which were long after the segregation issue was settled.
Have you provided any evidence of this alleged drift of the Democratic Party towards secular humanism, whether in legislation, policy or statement by party leaders? Or is your claim merely that this is a perception among conservative Christians?
In this discussion, that is the only claim I am making. I’m explaining why so many of them have switched allegiances to the Republicans. In politics, perception is everything; people act on what they think they see, even if their perception is inaccurate.
I believe that a case could be made that the conservative Christian perception of the trend of attitudes among the Democrats is accurate, but to make that case would require a detailed collation of statements and actions going back to at least 1972, and I don’t have time to do that kind of research at the moment. So I limit myself to the claim that the perception exists and is a major motivation for conservative Christians.
P.S. Note that the peculiarities of a particular man, Trump, do not affect the point, since the movement to the Republicans started long before Trump was on the scene, and, I expect, will remain a political reality after Trump is gone.
That’s good advice for all of us in this thread.
It would seem that we are all still living in Nixon’s world. His Southern Strategy saw conservatives in the South move from the Democrats to the Republicans, mainly in protest of the Civil Rights Act. Before that, you had conservatives in both parties. In 1976 you had Jimmy Carter, and I suspect most modern Christian Republicans would have seen him as a fellow Christian. I don’t think that would be case for any Democratic POTUS after that.
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Yes, I agree.
Not only Presidents, but even many of the losing candidates. Maybe all of them (Gore, Hillary Clinton, etc.) have had some church affiliation or other, but I definitely did not get the same religious “vibes” from any of them that I got from Carter.
Maybe. But they didn’t vote for him:
When he campaigned for president in 1976, Jimmy Carter often invoked the late theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and his admonition that “the sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world.” That sort of faith-inflected speech from a major national politician was new to most voters. So was the candidate himself, a former Georgia governor who taught Sunday school and described himself as born again, an obscure term for many millions of Americans.
Mr. Carter managed, narrowly, to win that first post-Watergate national election. As president, he put liberal aspects of his Baptist tradition front and center, whether appealing for racial equality, lamenting economic disparity or making human rights concerns integral to American foreign policy. What he did not win were the hearts and minds of his white co-religionists.
A new movement of white evangelicalism awakened during his presidency, one that was socially conservative and hostile to his agenda and to him personally. In 1980, Mr. Carter lost the White House to the Republican Ronald Reagan, who had support from two-thirds of white evangelical voters. They liked Mr. Reagan’s staunch anti-Communism and his calls for limited government, so much so that they closed their eyes to aspects of his character — twice-married, alienated from his children, almost never attended church — that flew counter to much of what they considered elements of an upright life.
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Support for segregation lingered a lot longer than its legality did. Bob Jones University, anybody?
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The Democratic Party’s former Southern (religiously and politically) conservative voters had already started to leave the party – first as the Dixiecrat break-away, then as part of Nixon’s successful ‘Southern Strategy’, well before the 1970s.
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I would point out that, like much of what you post here, the “drift of the Democratic leadership … in the direction of secular humanism” in or around the 1970s is asserted not substantiated. Most would have identified as Christian, albeit a more liberal form of Christianity. (And don’t bother telling me how you think “liberal Christian” and “secular humanist” are much the same thing – I’ve heard it before, and really don’t give a pair of fetid dingo’s kidneys about your prejudices on the subject.)
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And even if such a drift did occur, it would appear to be a product of the pre-existing drift, not the cause of it.
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But a “more liberal form of Christianity”, even if it doesn’t equal secular humanism, is still something that traditional, Bible-based Protestants reject; so they are still going to move away, or stay away, from the Democratic Party if to them it smells of liberal Christianity.
That other factors were involved, such as the ones you have pointed out, doesn’t mean that the conservative religious factors were not also important.
They aren’t prejudices, but the result of decades of scholarly reflection on the historical relationship between the liberalization of Biblical religion and secular humanism. They are conclusions from a lifetime of research in my field of academic training, not a prejudice I started out with. Indeed, I started out with the assumption that secular humanism and Christianity were polar opposites, and it was a surprise to me to discover that secular humanism was partly nourished on the breast of liberal religion – but it was the way the evidence pointed. And to follow the evidence is not prejudice.
In any case, as I’ve already said, I don’t have time to do a major research program on the religiosity of Democratic leaders at the moment. So, even though I feel quite confident, based on a fair body of circumstantial evidence, that secular humanism is much more closely woven into the minds of the Democrat intelligentsia than the Republican intelligentsia, I limit my claim to “this is how the intellectual leadership of the Democratic Party is perceived by religious conservatives, that they are at best religious liberals and at worst secular humanists.” That’s enough to explain why the Democrats are having trouble winning back millions of former voters. And it’s easy to test my view; let the Democrats elect, as their next leader, a Jimmy Carter-like figure; on my hypothesis, some of the lost vote will come back. If they do that, and vote doesn’t come back, I’ll admit that my analysis was wrong.
Having already preemptively expressed my opinion of @Eddie’s further unsubstantiated, and now long past the stage of becoming ad nauseam, defense of his anti-liberal Christian views, I will instead expand on an earlier point.
The split between the Democratic Party and its conservative Southern wing can be traced back at least as far as (Democratic) President Truman’s ordering the racial integration of the military in 1948. This led to the formation of the short-lived States’ Rights Democratic Party (aka the Dixiecrats) which contested the 1948 presidential election with Strom Thurmond as its candidate. This weakened the previous Democratic stranglehold on the South, and Nixon won several Southern states in 1960. 1964 saw the passage of the Civil Rights Act, which Southern legislators largely opposed. That year, Thurmond defects to the Republican Party, but never renounced his prior segregationist positions (though he did moderate them over time).
This led President Lyndon Johnson to reportedly state that Democrats “have lost the South for a generation.” after he signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
This in turn led to Nixon’s Southern Strategy.
This defection would have inevitably moved the Democratic Party’s centre of gravity leftward, and the Republicans’ rightward. This in turn led to the marginalisation and eventual evaporation of the liberal wing of the Republican Party, whose voters would have drifted to Democratic candidates. This realignment process would have become self-reinforcing, and likely irreversible, well before the alleged Secular Humanist movement of the Democratic leadership in the 1970s.
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Right. Conservative Christians don’t vote for Democrats because Democrats aren’t conservative - eg they’re “too liberal on abortion”. Not because Democrats aren’t Christian.
There is no confusion on my part. You’ve incorrectly assumed that I meant politically conservative, and accidentally confirmed my point.
I believe that you said you lived across the ocean. (Correct me if I’m confusing you with someone else.) Probably because you live on the other side of the ocean, and rely on book-knowledge (more likely, internet knowledge), you lack the fuller perceptions which come from actually living in a place, and your account is one-dimensional. You assume that the only relevant cause here is the South/North divide over civil rights. But in fact, it’s not merely in the South that conservative Christians shy away from the Democratic Party. There are plenty of people in the North and Midwest etc. who supported civil rights legislation and who left the Democrats later, for reasons nothing to do with the civil rights issue. I’m talking about those other reasons. But you’re too obsessed with the civil rights question to talk about anything else, or to listen to anyone with relevant knowledge of other factors, so there’s no point discussing this further. I leave you to your dogmatic, preconceived, non-Christian, outsider’s analysis of events.
But for such conservative Christians, abortion is not a practice that Christianity allows. So anyone who endorses it is endorsing an un-Christian practice. And who is it that would endorse an un-Christian practice? You should be able to connect those dots, surely. But to make it explicit, the answer is: Someone who is insufficiently Christian, or too liberal (theologically and ethically) a Christian. And a conservative evangelical is not going to want to vote for someone like that, if there is a more Christian alternative available.