Right Wing Religion Support Crumbling

Monetary support for right wing religious organizations has been declining for years and their budgets have been shrinking. Robert Schuller's Crystal Cathedral organization, still the largest televangelist ministry in the World, is on the ropes and it's media footprint has dramatically shrunken from what it was in it's hay day, 20 years ago. Most of the mainstream ministries of the past, run by the Robertsons, Falwells, Roberts, Swaggarts, and Bakers are defunct or moribund. The Crouch's TBN Network continues to broadcast pleas for money, made by gaudily dressed Okie hucksters, dripping in gold jewelry and phony hairpieces, Worldwide, to an ever decreasing audience.

The recent American election showed that while the people may not be clear about what they want, they are clear about what they don't want. What they don't want, most particularly, are the ravings of glossalalian, six toed, snake handling, exorcist, thumpers, telling them what they must believe and how they must live their lives. Americans, more than any other people on earth, consider themselves religious. They have been raised to decide what kind of a relationship with God they will have, each his or her own. They believe others should have that right as well. Spirituality is not a one size fits all garment. They don't want someone else's idea of morality shoved down their throats. They don't want to shove their ideas down anybody else's. God pitches a big tent. There is room under it to shelter all of us that want in.

Today, James Dobson and his wife bailed out of the Focus on the Family organization, that they have spent 30 years building. The money and the support just aren't there anymore. They will probably go out on the circuit, where they can get lucrative speaking engagements and maybe get on as paid correspondents with Fox News, while there is still some money to be had there.

Even Pope Ratzo I is looking to downsize the Catholic Church. The American franchise, the only one that still pays its own way, is full of liberal fellow travelers, who want an ever increasing level of autonomy in their lives and worship. The huge South American franchise has been shaken by revelations that the divine cult of veneration focused on the Virgin Mary is really just a continuation of the pagan native worship of the Earth Mother, beaten down when the Conquistadors brought Catholicism to the Western hemisphere, with bloody sword and fire hardened stake.

Those who really value the nurturing of religious thought, around the World, breath a sigh of relief.