I've been mulling on this as I consider the latest batch of Christians (Real, True, of course). David Flechard is a refreshing thinker who gives rise to thoughtful response. Ken Young is a non-thinker with an agenda. Both of these folks claim to be Christians and are recognized as such by mainstream religionists, even if their respective liberal and conservative leanings are apparent.

If I were to stipulate that some arbitrary significant number of the ideas attributed to Jesus actually came from him, then I submit that Jesus appealed to open minds and Paul appealed to closed ones.

We have the same situation today in the form of the mainstream Christian churches and the evangelical Right Wing churches. People are flocking from the former to the latter, I hypothesize, for precisely the reason above. They are looking for leaders and they don't want to think.

The last real leader I recall in the West was Maggie Thatcher, and I don't recall who came before her in any of the Western countries, except of course, for Hitler (I'm talking leaders now, not statesmen or simple politicians).

As I understand the term "power vacuum," one exists now in all of North America, which has aroused the Right Wing fundies into thinking they can fill it. I am afraid they may have already done so. I don't think we need to worry about keeping *them* from crossing the line between church and state as much as we should worry about individuals abrogating their rights and crossing from state to church, family by family, person by person. We should worry because it is happening in the U.S. and Canada at an unprecedented rate and there has been no sociological or socio-psychological reason put forth for it by people like Cohen (_Mind of the Bible Believer_).

I think I have a handle on it. I think, like 1937 Germany, we want quick fixes to long-term economic and social problems. We have become used to governments who promise everything and deliver nothing. We are looking for leadership, we are looking for someone in whom we can place our trust, and most of us do not wish to accept the responsibility that accompanies freedom, so we are willing now to buy our quick fixes with our individual rights.

I don't know where it will lead or how long it will take, but the migration to the evangelistic movements is in process. I think I shall start watching the move in those terms, forgetting about the wall of separation between church and state, because all but a few careful people have already done so.

The average person does not want to face reality. The average person wants dreams, and if s/he cannot have them, will settle for escape. And all of us here know who sells that.

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