It seems that the religious right is getting more and more extreme by the minute. After all, in recent months I’ve brought you examples of high-profile religious right leaders declaring that Christians are the only ones protected by the First Amendment, claiming that a Christian has no business voting for a Democrat, arguing that jihadists wouldn’t be recruiting Americans if this nation favored Christianity, declaring that church and state separation is a Satanic plot, and claiming evolution is invalid just because it cuts God out of the equation. As frightening as it is that people with such extreme views have influence out of all proportion to their actual numbers, it’s even more frightening is that a lot of this backwards thinking is being imparted to born-again kids in Christian schools and Christian-oriented homeschool curricula.
We got an example of this earlier this week from Jessa Duggar, the fifth child and third daughter of America’s most famous babymakers, Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar. For those who don’t know, the Duggars homeschool their 19-child brood, and drill their hyperfundamentalist worldview into them almost from the time they can crawl. On Thursday, Jessa took to Instagram to talk about a recent visit to the Holocaust Museum. She repeated the standard fundamentalist shibboleth that belief in evolution opened the door for ethnic cleansing.
“Racism, stemming from the evolutionary idea that man came from something less than human; that some people groups are more evolved’ and others ‘less evolved.’ A denying that our Creator–GOD–made us human from the beginning, all of ONE BLOOD and ONE RACE, descendants of Adam.”
Then Jessa went a step further, likening the Holocaust to abortion and euthanasia.
“So they’re murdered. Slaughtered. Kids with Down syndrome or other disabilities. The sickly. The elderly. The sanctity of human life varies not in sickness or health, poverty or wealth, elderly or pre-born, little or lots of melanin [making you darker or lighter skinned], or any other factor.”
Jessa went on to say that our generation must not “sit idly by and allow such an atrocity to happen again.”
Granted, it’s far from the first time that an abortion opponent has compared abortion to the Holocaust. Indeed, just last year, Jessa’s parents said that after a family trip to the Holocaust Museum, they realized “there is a holocaust taking place right here”–namely, abortion. That doesn’t make the lack of proportion any less staggering. Indeed, Jessa was called out–deservedly–for drawing such a parallel. So far, she hasn’t responded.
Chances are that Jessa probably didn’t know how outrageous this sounded to reality-based ears before she and her family became reality TV stars, however. Many hyperfundies more or less cut themselves off from the rest of the world. As a result, many fundie children grow up extremely sheltered in the name of keeping them from bad influences as much as possible. Additionally, for most of them, there’s virtually no gray–almost everything is black or white. I know–I saw it first-hand when I was tricked into joining a highly abusive and controlling hypercharismatic group in my freshman year at Carolina. Their idea of a “victorious Christian life” wasn’t too far removed from the environment in which Jessa was raised–essentially, live in a bubble for four years. In hopes of exposing them for who they really were, I pretended to have “seen the light” and become just like them during the winter of my sophomore year. Several of my “brothers” and “sisters” in that bunch, knowing how loudly I had spoken out against them, said I was like the Apostle Paul. In other words, merely shouting from the rooftops about how they’d taken advantage of me was the same as actually killing Christians left and right. When I heard that, I thought to myself, “Good grief–that was almost me!”
Although it may not seem like it, people like Jessa Duggar are in the minority. The religious right is getting boatraced in the battle for the minds of Jessa’s generation. As I mentioned this spring, a study by the Brookings Institution whopping 62 percent of religious conservatives are 49 or older–namely, around Jim Bob and Michelle’s age. As Brookings put it, the religious right faces “a troubled future” because it doesn’t have much of a foothold among young people.
Jessa is engaged to Ben Seewald; they’re getting married in November. Chances are that Jessa and Ben going to follow in the footsteps of Jim Bob and Michelle if they ever become parents themselves. For instance, Michelle says that her family doesn’t wear shorts or miniskirts because they believe if your thighs are uncovered, you might as well be naked. They also believe that wearing shorts or miniskirts runs the risk of “defrauding” others by encouraging lustful thoughts. If Jessa’s Instagram comment is any indication, it’s also likely that she and Ben are going to raise their kids with very little sense of proportion.
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Darrell Lucus, also known as Christian Dem in NC on Daily Kos, is a radical-lefty Jesus-lover who has been blogging for change for a decade. Follow him on Twitter @DarrellLucus or connect with him on Facebook.
