The Hollow Cross

How the Religious Right Destroyed What It Claimed to Defend

This is, after all, a philosophy blog.

The greatest fraud ever perpetrated on American spiritual life wasn't committed by Hollywood. It wasn't the work of secular humanists or liberal academics or “coastal elites.” The most devastating blow to authentic Christianity in America came from those who claimed to be its greatest defenders: the religious right.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And the Christian faith wasn't hollowed out by its enemies, but by those who transformed it from a challenging spiritual practice into a political weapon.

What makes this tragedy so profound is that it represents more than mere hypocrisy. Hypocrisy—the gap between stated values and actual behavior—has existed in religious contexts since the beginning. What the religious right accomplished was something far more destructive: the instrumentalization of faith itself.

True faith, in its authentic form, cannot be instrumental by definition. It represents commitment to principles and truths that are valued as ends in themselves, not as means to worldly power or material gain. The moment faith becomes primarily a tool to achieve political objectives, accumulate wealth, or secure social status, it ceases to be faith in any meaningful sense.

This instrumentalization creates a devastating paradox: a movement claiming to defend the sacred actively desacralizes it through the very act of wielding it as a weapon. The religious right didn't just misapply faith—it fundamentally inverted it, transforming what should be an ultimate end into a mere means.

The Moral Majority and its successors presented themselves as a response to America's moral decline, a return to traditional values, a revival of Christian influence in public life. In reality, they were engaged in something far different: the transformation of a 2,000-year-old tradition centered on redemption, compassion, and spiritual transformation into a political identity focused on cultural grievance, social control, and worldly power.

At the heart of this transformation lies a fundamental theological error: the belief that authentic faith can be established through political power or social coercion.

You cannot force someone to God.

This simple truth appears across religious traditions. In Christianity, it emerges from the understanding that God desires relationship rather than mere compliance. In Islam, “There is no compulsion in religion” (Quran 2:256). In Judaism, a covenant requires willing participants. The divine, in these traditions, seeks not subjects but partners, not automatons but moral agents who choose freely.

The religious right's fundamental error was attempting to establish through political power what can only emerge through individual conscience. By seeking to legislate faith and enforce morality through state power, they not only failed to create a more genuinely religious society—they actively undermined the conditions necessary for authentic spiritual life.

A forced confession is no confession at all. Compelled worship is not worship but performance. The moment coercion enters, whether through political power, social pressure, or manipulation, the very essence of faith is compromised.

What makes this particularly tragic is how it inverted the very tradition it claimed to defend. Christianity begins with a man who refused political power when it was offered to him. Who warned that you cannot serve both God and money. Who taught that the first shall be last and the last shall be first. Who said his kingdom was not of this world. Who reserved his harshest criticism not for outsiders but for religious leaders who loved status and authority.

The religious right transformed this into a movement obsessed with political power, aligned with wealth, fixated on status, and focused on controlling outsiders. Where Christ challenged the religious authorities of his day for their hypocrisy and legalism, the religious right embraced a new legalism and elevated religious authorities immune from criticism as long as they supported the correct political agenda.

This wasn't just a movement that occasionally failed to live up to Christian teachings. It was a movement that systematically inverted those teachings while still claiming their authority. It wasn't just that leaders failed to turn the other cheek; the entire theological framework was reconstructed to make turning the other cheek seem like weakness rather than faithfulness.

Hollywood didn't kill Christianity in America. Right-wing talk radio did.

While the religious right directed people's attention toward external threats like secular entertainment or liberal politics, the real transformation was happening internally—through radio programs, televangelists, and later cable news and social media, that claimed to represent authentic Christianity while fundamentally redefining it.

This ecosystem replaced theological depth with political talking points. Complex religious teachings about justice, mercy, and love became subordinated to culture war grievances and partisan allegiances. The rich interpretive traditions of Christianity were flattened into simplistic us-versus-them narratives perfectly suited to talk radio's confrontational format.

More importantly, it cultivated the opposite of core Christian virtues. Where Christianity traditionally emphasized humility, right-wing media celebrated arrogance; where it called for self-reflection, right-wing media encouraged self-righteousness; where it demanded care for the vulnerable, right-wing media often mocked them. The emotional disposition fostered by this media ecosystem—anger, fear, contempt for opponents—stood in direct opposition to the fruits of the Spirit described in Christian scripture.

The televangelists, with their carefully crafted performances of faith, represented not just hypocrisy but a deeper emptiness—the replacement of genuine spiritual practice with its simulation. The megachurch experience, with its emphasis on entertainment and emotional catharsis, offered the aesthetic of religion without its ethical demands.

The religious right was, at its heart, a nihilistic project.

This isn't hyperbole. The movement didn't seek to embody religious principles but to weaponize religious identity. Faith became not an end in itself but a means to political power. Sacred texts and traditions weren't approached as sources of wisdom to be wrestled with but as arsenals to be mined for political ammunition.

When forced to choose between maintaining political influence and adhering to proclaimed principles, the movement consistently chose power. This pragmatic abandonment of stated beliefs revealed that those beliefs weren't actually foundational—they were conditional, negotiable, disposable when inconvenient.

What makes this truly nihilistic is that it didn't just fail to achieve its stated aims—it actively undermined the very values it claimed to defend. It didn't strengthen faith communities; it hollowed them out. It didn't preserve traditional morality; it corrupted moral discourse itself by treating it as merely tactical. It didn't protect religious freedom; it transformed religion into a political identity that depended on state power for validation.

Perhaps most devastatingly, the religious right commercialized faith, turning it into a product to be consumed rather than a practice to be lived. The prosperity gospel—that grotesque theological innovation that transforms Christ's warning that you cannot serve both God and money into the promise that God wants you to be rich—wasn't a deviation from the religious right's approach. It was its logical conclusion. Once faith becomes instrumental, why not make it an instrument of personal enrichment?

The televangelists with their private jets, the megachurch pastors with their designer clothes, the conference speakers with their book deals—they weren't aberrations but the perfect embodiments of a movement that had replaced spiritual substance with marketable performance.

Right-wing media figures didn't just discuss religion; they sold it—through books, seminars, merchandise, and fundraising appeals that transformed spiritual seeking into market transactions. Faith became less about transformation and more about consumption, less about practice and more about performance.

The true devastation wasn't just political but spiritual—creating a simulation of Christianity that retained its external markers while inverting its ethical substance. This wasn't merely a corruption of Christian practice but a fundamental redefinition of what Christianity meant in American life.

The consequences are visible in the data. The rise of the religious right correlates not with a revival of genuine faith but with its decline. Young people haven't rejected Christianity because it was too challenging or countercultural, but because the version they encountered seemed hypocritical, judgmental, and aligned with power rather than compassion.

The “nones”—those who identify with no religious tradition—aren't fleeing authentic spiritual practice; they're rejecting its hollow simulation. When faced with a choice between the Christianity represented by the religious right and no Christianity at all, many have reasonably chosen the latter.

Consider how this transformation played out across American cultural terrain. The church, once a place of reflection and community, became a political rally with hymns. Prayer, meant to be a practice of humility and openness, became a performance of tribal identity. The cross, a symbol of sacrifice and reconciliation, became a culture war emblem to be planted on courthouse lawns as a marker of territorial dominance.

The Bible itself underwent a strange metamorphosis in this ecosystem—from a complex, challenging text that has inspired thousands of years of interpretation and debate to a collection of isolated verses to be deployed as rhetorical weapons. The same people who insisted on the Bible's literal truth felt remarkably comfortable ignoring vast portions of it—particularly those portions that challenged wealth, demanded care for the stranger and outcast, or questioned religious authorities who aligned with power.

This selective approach to scripture wasn't just inconsistent; it revealed the fundamentally instrumental nature of the movement's relationship to faith. The Bible wasn't treated as a source of truth to which believers submitted, but as a tool to be selectively deployed for predetermined ends. When scripture aligned with the movement's political goals, it was proclaimed as the unchanging word of God. When it challenged those goals, it was quietly set aside or reinterpreted to conform.

Consider the moral contortions required to transform a faith founded by a man who said “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God” into a movement aligned with tax cuts for the wealthy. Or to take a tradition built on the command to “love your enemy” and refashion it into a movement defined by its hostilities. Or to claim the mantle of “pro-life” while supporting policies that increase suffering for the already born.

These weren't merely political compromises made by religious people. They represented a fundamental transformation of what Christianity meant in American public life—from a challenging ethical tradition to a political identity marker, from a call to sacrificial love to a justification for self-interest, from a radical practice of enemy-love to a validation of tribal enmity.

The religious right didn't just fail to live up to Christian ideals. It actively inverted them while claiming their authority. This wasn't hypocrisy; it was alchemy—transforming the gold of faith into the lead of power politics while insisting nothing had changed.

The most profound evidence of the religious right's nihilism emerged in its ultimate political allegiances. After decades of insisting that character mattered, that moral leadership was essential, that America needed Christian values at its highest levels, the movement overwhelmingly supported a leader who embodied the opposite of every virtue they claimed to champion. This wasn't just a compromise or a “lesser of two evils” calculation. It was the final revelation that the entire project had been, at its core, about power rather than principle all along.

Faith leaders who had spent decades insisting that private character was essential for public service suddenly discovered that policy achievements mattered more than personal morality. Those who had warned about moral relativism became its most adept practitioners, developing increasingly byzantine justifications for what they had previously condemned as indefensible. Those who had positioned themselves as the guardians of traditional family values found ways to excuse behavior they would have denounced as evidence of cultural decay if exhibited by their opponents.

This wasn't just ordinary political hypocrisy. It was the final unveiling of the hollow core at the center of the project—the revelation that what appeared to be a movement based on transcendent principles was actually a movement based on the pursuit of immanent power. The religious right didn't compromise its values to achieve its goals; the pursuit of power had been the value all along. The rest was aesthetic.

This explains why the movement has been so ineffective at actually creating a more genuinely Christian culture. The religious right didn't fail despite its tactics; it failed because of them. By treating faith as an instrument of political power, it undermined the very conditions that make authentic faith possible. By aligning Christianity with worldly power and status, it made the faith less compelling rather than more. By reducing complex religious teachings to culture war slogans, it made them easier to dismiss.

The movement claimed to be fighting secularization while actually accelerating it. It positioned itself as the defender of Christianity while transforming it into something unrecognizable to its founder. It promised revival but delivered simulation—the appearance of faith without its substance, the aesthetics of religion without its ethical demands, the language of transcendence without its transformative power.

The hollowing out of American Christianity wasn't accomplished by external enemies but by internal corruption. The transformation of faith from an end in itself into a means to political power didn't preserve Christian influence but profoundly undermined it.

This tragedy offers a profound lesson about meaning itself in our age of simulation. When meaning becomes merely performative—when symbols are detached from substance, when identity replaces practice, when tribal signaling substitutes for ethical commitment—it collapses from within. No external force can destroy authentic meaning as effectively as its instrumentalization.

The crisis of faith in America isn't that too few people attend church. It's that church itself has been redefined as a political rally with religious aesthetics. It's not that prayer has been banned from schools. It's that prayer itself has been reimagined as a public performance rather than a transformative practice.

The path forward isn't through more culture war battles or more aggressive assertions of Christian identity in public spaces. It's through the recovery of faith as something more than an instrument—as an end in itself, as a relationship rather than a weapon, as a practice rather than a performance.

This would require a painful reckoning with how thoroughly Christianity has been transformed in American public life. It would mean acknowledging that the greatest threat to authentic faith came not from its supposed enemies but from those who claimed to be its greatest defenders. It would require separating the substance of faith from the political and commercial infrastructure that has grown up around it—a separation that many institutions would not survive.

But what other choice remains? The data is clear: the religious right's approach has led not to revival but to decline, not to renewal but to rejection. Young people aren't turning away from Christianity because it demands too much but because the version they've encountered demands too little—offering tribal identity rather than transformation, certainty rather than mystery, political power rather than prophetic challenge.

The religious right promised to save Christianity in America. Instead, it hollowed it out from within, replacing its ethical substance with political performance while retaining just enough of its aesthetic to maintain the illusion of continuity. It didn't defend the faith; it reengineered it into something its founder would scarcely recognize—a movement aligned with wealth and power, focused on controlling others rather than transforming the self, more concerned with winning culture wars than embodying the radical love at the tradition's core.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And authentic faith cannot be legislated, imposed, or reduced to a political weapon without being destroyed in the process.

The center must be held—not because it is easy, but because it is ours to hold.

“Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven.” — Matthew 6:1