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I read an interesting report from the Billings (Montana) Gazette. Of course, what leaped out at me about the report’s research was not what the paper’s editors were attempting to convey.
Let me quote key portions of the report:
The religious makeup of the 119th Congress will be little changed from the prior term, though with some pronounced differences between the two parties, according to an analysis by CQ Roll Call.
On average, Congress will continue to be much more religious than the nation as a whole, with about 95% of lawmakers in the Senate and House identifying with a religious faith. The rest either are nonreligious, did not specify a religion or did not share their faith affiliation.
In contrast, a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center this past year found just under 70% of Americans affiliating with a religious faith.
“Congress represents America as it looked 20 or 30 years ago, not the way it looks today,” said Ryan Burge, a professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University who has written on religion in politics.
“Incumbency advantage keeps people in office that were elected … some of them in the ’80s, in the ’90s, when America was overwhelmingly a religious country,” Burge said. “In some ways, it’s just kind of like it’s a good snapshot of the generational difference in American religiosity.”
An overwhelming majority of Republican members – 98% – identify with Christianity. In contrast, 75% of Democrats or those who caucus with them do the same, with a larger variety of faith traditions as well as nonreligious beliefs represented.
Protestant Christians, from across the denominational spectrum, continue to make up the majority of religious adherents in Congress in either party, with small deviations. Slightly more Episcopalians and Methodists are Democrats, while Baptists overall lean Republican.
The largest single Christian denomination continues to be Roman Catholicism. Democrats account for a larger share, with 83 Catholics across both chambers, compared with the GOP’s 68.
The GOP, however, is home to a wider variety of Christian denominations, including several evangelical and Pentecostal traditions not found among Democrats. All nine Latter-day Saints, or Mormons, in Congress are Republican, as are roughly three-quarters of the 93 members who identify as nondenominational Christians or simply as “Christian.”
Six members of either party are affiliated with one of several Orthodox Christian denominations — two fewer than in the 118th Congress.
The Gazette was obviously attempting to make a big deal out of the nuances of religious preferences between the Democrat and Republican parties. I found the differences to be insignificant.
The Gazette is accurate when it points out the decline in America’s religious devotion since the year 2000. I’ve been pointing out this reality since the decline began. In fact, I predicted the decline during G.W. Bush’s first term in office.
On my national radio talk show, I repeatedly said,
G.W. Bush is destroying evangelical Christianity in America. By the time Bush leaves office, American evangelicalism will not even resemble New Testament Christianity.
I was 100% right.
The Christian G.W. Bush thoroughly brainwashed evangelicals into accepting his preemptive and perpetual war doctrines and his ubiquitous surveillance state. His war on terror in the Middle East and his creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act, etc., forever changed the spiritual mindset of evangelicals nationwide.
During eight years of G.W. Bush’s presidency evangelicals went from peacemakers to warmongers; they went from bold adherents of constitutionally protected liberty to meek appeasers of unconstitutional governmental intrusion and usurpation. I will go so far as to say that the universal display of non-resistance to the Covid tyranny by pastors and churches was mostly due to the intense brainwashing that had taken place during the Bush years. Ditto for evangelicals’ current support for the genocide in Gaza. Who in their right mind could support genocide—anywhere?
But the rest of the focus of the Gazette’s report I find to be extraneous. The two parties in Washington have more similarities than differences. For example:
An overwhelming majority of Republican members – 98% – identify with Christianity. In contrast, 75% of Democrats or those who caucus with them do the same, with a larger variety of faith traditions as well as nonreligious beliefs represented.
Protestant Christians, from across the denominational spectrum, continue to make up the majority of religious adherents in Congress in either party, with small deviations.
Whether the majority Christian faith of party members is 98% or 75%, both are overwhelming majorities. Furthermore, the Gazette acknowledges that Protestant Christians comprise a majority of religious adherents in both parties.
I believe it is a complete waste of time or even a deliberate obfuscation of reality to attempt to make one political party in Washington more Christian than the other party. What the statistics in the Gazette report glaringly demonstrate is that the religious landscape of the U.S. Congress reveals the impotence and irrelevance of America’s religious institutions.
Regardless of religious preference, the vast majority of D.C. politicians are enthusiastically committed to the perpetual war agenda—especially wars fought on behalf of Zionist Israel. They are enthusiastically committed to the expansion of the military/industrial complex. They are enthusiastically committed to the expansion of the authoritarian surveillance/police state. They are enthusiastically committed to maintaining a debt-based driven economic system. They are enthusiastically committed to perpetuating and enlarging America’s hegemony around the world—even at the expense of lawful, moral or civilized authority.
If Christian denominations and institutions are required by their faith to do anything, it is to promote PEACE and LIBERTY.
War is the antithesis of peace; and authoritarianism is the antithesis of liberty. Regardless of denominational differences, any person or institution of persons who flies the banner of Christ should be among the most zealous and ardent promoters of peace and liberty.
Then, how can both parties in Washington, D.C.—parties that are each overwhelmingly composed of people identifying as Christians—aggressively and consistently promote wars around the world and government overreach and usurpation over the private lives and liberties of the American people here at home?
To be sure, numbers of these miscreants are religious in name only. I think we all know that. But many of these Washington insiders actually do practice their religious faith. By practice, I mean attend church services, read the Bible and pray—at least semi-regularly.
House Speaker Mike Johnson has a reputation of being a devout, faithful Christian—a man who ostensibly attends church faithfully and prays and reads the Bible every day. Yet, this man is a rabid warmongering neocon in the similitude of Senators Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton. And as with Graham, Cotton and almost all of the members of the U.S. House and Senate (save only a few such as Thomas Massie), Johnson is owned lock, stock and barrel by the Israeli lobby.
What does this tell you?
It tells me that the religious institutions that these Washington criminals attend are either 1) saying nothing about the truths of God’s Word that directly relate to the duties and obligations that these political leaders have to promote peace and liberty, or 2) publicly promoting the godless agendas of military conflict and civil subjugation.
In other words, what the Gazette findings show is that on the whole America’s religious institutions have become impotent and irrelevant to the proclamation of the principles of peace and liberty.
What I said on my radio talk show in the early 2000s happened exactly as I said it would. I sure wish I had been wrong.
© Chuck Baldwin
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