Here in rural MS there is an interesting phenomenon occurring that the Brit Hume brouhaha brings into clearer focus. There is a rapid demeaning of religion, especially the Christian religion, occurring here. If you travel down any road, you will see churches popping up everywhere. I've lived here my entire life, and it used to be that each community had one church, usually Baptist, sometimes Methodist or Presbyterian, with a place name. Now they have names like Bread of Life, The Living Water, and By Faith; single-word names like Cornerstone, Compass, and Centricity. They pop up in the middle of nowhere, in abandoned storefronts, in closed-down factories, in metal buildings put up in the middle of the woods. And everyone has a preacher who is called Brother, or Elder, or Bishop.
And all these fundamentalist (I assume based on looks and publicity) churches spend the majority of their time either directly or indirectly involved with local, state, and national politics, involved in the Teabagger movement, the War on Christmas movement, the myriad boycotts movement, and posters and ads of every conceivable real or imagined movement.
As someone who had become immune to most of it, I can't help but be aware of the way in which religion in this area has been very deeply cheapened. It ceases to occupy a space of personal and public sacredness. It focuses not on the personal, but the political. And I am even beginning to detect this cheapening in acquaintances who I know to be quite religious. There is no war on the sacred; they are doing it themselves.
Update: Be sure to read Bill in Portland Maine's take on this.
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