Religious punditry rears its ugly head...

I'm not feeling the music today, and so Music Sunday is being rescheduled so that I can say one more thing about what happened Friday in Connecticut. Or, more precisely, about what some people are saying about it.

What I am feeling is a lot of anger.

It has come to my attention that there are people out there saying that the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School happened because "God isn't allowed" in public schools in the United States. Some of them are even saying that God allowed the shootings to happen. Unfortunately, some of those people have access to microphones and the television and radio airwaves, and equally unfortunately others are reposting their hateful remarks all over the Internet.

To be perfectly blunt, I think the people who are saying these things, and those who are reposting them, should be ashamed of themselves and need to shut up.

When you hear or read about them saying these things, you need to be aware that they have an agenda - a political agenda - for saying them. They don't care that they are being deliberately hurtful to the victims at Sandy Hook and their surviving families and friends, to the survivors of the shooting, to the community there, and to the nation as a whole. They only want to impose their own view of God onto the vast majority of people who do not agree with them.

Really. It's nearly Christmas. Whatever happened to "Peace on Earth and goodwill towards men"? Whatever happened to "Jesus loves the little children, all little children of the world"? Whatever happened to Jesus as the "Prince of Peace"? Whatever happened to "the meek shall inherit the earth"?

When did hate and vindictiveness replace love as a family value for the people who are saying these things? I won't call them Christians, because I don't believe they are that at all, although they very vocally claim to be.

Like I said. I'm angry. So, I'll shut up now.

More US voters say, "I don't go to church, and I vote"

NBC News online published an interesting piece today regarding voting and religion, in which they report that a growing number of US voters are calling themselves religiously unaffiliated. According to the report, 12 percent of the electorate this year (and in 2008) said they are not affiliated with any religious group, while 17 percent of voters in 2012 said they never attend church.

What is really interesting about these statistics is that 44 percent more of these religiously unaffiliated voters cast their ballots for Barack Obama than voted for Mitt Romney in the November presidential election. This is true even though 20 percent of these voters call themselves political conservatives and 40 percent self-identify as moderate. However, 66 percent of these voters say they believe that religious organizations are too involved in politics and 70 percent of them think churches are "too concerned with money and power".

So, maybe the high proportion of religiously unaffiliated voters who cast their ballots for Mr. Obama makes sense, especially considering that many of these voters are socially liberal despite half of them reporting that they think the federal government should be smaller and provide fewer public services. They don't, it seems, want the religious conservatives that the Republican Party courts to be in a position to set public social policies.

Maybe the Republicans should sit up and take note of these findings. Does the Republican leadership really think they are going to attract non-religious voters as long as they continue to cater to the religious right? Since the election, there has been much, and very public, discussion about how the Republican Party can attract more African-American voters and Hispanic voters, both very large and important voting blocs, because they know that they cannot expect to win elections if they ignore or alienate those constituencies. Why would they continue to think they can ignore or alienate a constituency, religiously unaffiliated voters, that has grown to roughly the same numbers as either of those groups?

Yet, I suspect that the Republican leadership will continue to ignore these non-religious voters in favor of their religiously conservative base. It will be interesting to see where that gets them in the next presidential election.