A few years after we moved to Fort Worth, my daughter had a regular playdate with a girl who lived nearby. Once at dinner, my daughter’s friend surprised us by announcing her mother had told her she’d probably not live long enough to marry or have babies.
“You see, the world is going to end before I’m old enough,” she said. “It’s in the Bible.”
“Really?” I said, then glanced over at my daughter, who suddenly had an almost stricken look on her face. She’d never heard that kind of talk before.
My daughter’s friend continued, “Right now, we’re going through the times of tribulation. That’s why the world is so messed up right now.”
“Some could say the world has always been messed up,” I offered with a smile, trying to hide the anger rising in me.
I knew her parents were born again and conservative, but this? Fortunately, my wife and I steered the conversation back to Earth, but I remember later having a serious discussion with my daughter about why some Christians believe in apocalyptic fantasies.
Flash forward almost 30 years, and, no big surprise, the end of the world that so many biblically illiterate evangelicals happily believe they will be raptured from hasn’t occurred. In fact, a few years back, my daughter ran into her old buddy and happily learned her friend has lived long enough to marry and have a child.
Let’s call this right-wing Christian torturing of their children with Revelation Porn what it really is. Telling your kids they don’t have a future and that they’ll never live long enough to marry or have kids is straight-up child abuse.
Normally, we believe a person’s religious belief is a private matter. Generally, I agree, but these so-called Christians are endangering our country in more ways than scaring the bejesus out of their children with horror-filled tales about the literal end of the world.
WFAA recently said that eight of the 10 schools in North Texas with the lowest vaccination rates for measles are private Christian schools. One unvaccinated child has already died in West Texas, so because of irresponsible “Christian” parents, all of us are affected right here where we live. My youngest grandchild who is 1 and a half and other children who haven’t had their second dose of MMR vaccine are more at risk because of these “Christians.”
These people believe in lies about vaccinations, like those spread by our present Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the man who, The New York Times said, “during a 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa that killed 83 people (79 of them children), actively worked to undermine public trust in the one thing that would have helped most,” vaccinations, not Vitamin A or cod liver oil, for God’s sakes.
Surveys say that 80% of evangelical Christian voters supported Trump in the last election. Without them, Trump would have limped off the world’s stage in November and finally faced legal consequences for his life of crime. As bad as Trump was his first term, we’ve learned these past few months that Trump 47 promises to be many times worse. So, what are we to do?
I’m not anti-religious. I was confirmed in the Lutheran Church of America and once seriously considered the ministry, spending one year at Austin Presbyterian Seminary. But these conservatives give Christianity a bad name and harm our country by being a major voting bloc in support of a klepto-mafioso regime.
In Texas, conservative evangelicals are the backbone of three decades of Republican dominance, widespread governmental malfeasance, and open corruption. Locally, they are the wind beneath the wings of our right-wing county government. If we are to make Texas and Tarrant County sane again and not laboratories for the worst conservative ideas, we must find a way to put a dent in this critical voting bloc.
Over the years, I have met countless refugees from evangelical churches. Those people might be key to reaching out to the evangelical community. I suggest they start with the Bible for the simple reason that if you erased wokeness out of the Good Book, you’d no longer have an epic of Western Literature but a very dreary, very short novella.
We don’t have to convince all evangelicals. We just need to shave off some of that voting bloc by appealing to those who are sane-curious and want their beliefs to be biblically grounded, not based on hate or crazy conspiracy theories. There is nothing Christian about scaring your kids with apocalyptic fables, denying them perfectly safe vaccines, or hating on the most vulnerable people in our society.
This column reflects the opinions and fact-gathering of the author(s) and only the author(s) and not the Fort Worth Weekly. To submit a column, please email Editor Anthony Mariani at Anthony@FWWeekly.com. He will gently edit it for clarity and concision.
