Evangelical Christian Fundamentalism and American Politics

Lying, hiding and manipulating just like the Unions and Corporations have done over the years? Just like the "Coalition to Stop Gun Violence" and the NRA do? Like the KKK and the South Poverty Law Center do?

Aren't these all just special interest groups and isn't the "Religious Right" just another of them?

The Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith is another religion-based group that uses it's power to influence laws and democracy. What is the difference between them and the "Religious Right"?

fishin' is rolling with things I've been trying to say. I'm going to sit back now and ref when you guys start hitting on points I've been saying all along.

fishin' is dead on right -- there are so many advocacies lobbying and if anyone believes they don't all use manipulation, orchestration, coercion and all the more negative machiavellian techniques I wonder what planet they are on. AARP isn't exactly looking like they are on the up-and-up (not that I ever believed they always were). Is this anything new in human society? No, it's as old as when we hunted and lived in caves.

I don't really know that I'm saying anything! lol I'm just asking questions trying to figure out what the heart of the issue is but, IMO, I think it rests right here between these two comments:





Which, if true, goes right back to previous line pistoff wrote:




It is really the "Religious Right" that is the problem or the loss of a preferred view being in control that led to the inital question? If that is the case (and again, I don't know if it is or not!) then that is all at the very heart of "democracy". A part of a democratic society is that you don't always end up on the side in power. Arguing that one side always should be in control isn't arguing for advancing democracy.

Historians have usually looked to political parties, reform societies like temperance organizations, or fraternal associations like the Masons In fact, evangelicals were its earliest and most energetic inventors.Indeed, as historian Donald Mathews has pointed out, the Second Great Awakening was an innovative and highly effective organizing process. In 1835 religious recruitment was intensely local, a species of grass-roots organizing designed to draw people into local congregations. Moreover, adherence to a particular evangelical denomination also inducted them into the broader evangelical campaign. Aggressively exploiting a wide variety of new print media, evangelicals launched their own newspapers and periodicals and distributed millions of devotional and reform tracts. Not for nothing did evangelicals and nonevangelicals alike dub this new religious phalanx the "Evangelical Empire." Just as a new form of politics emerged in which the pursuit of power came to center on intense, organized competition for the allegiance of an expanding democratic electorate, so too did religion come to revolve around the intense competition of religious bodies old and new to win adherents of their particular belief. Sects and denominations thus can be seen as directly analogous to political parties. Just as the intense competition for their votes seemed to enshrine "the people" as the ultimate arbiter of politics, so too did the competition for religious adherents give communicants power. To succeed--to win elections--politicians had to fashion their message to the needs and interests of their constituents; similarly, if a clergyman wanted to win and hold adherents, he had to fit his preaching to the spiritual needs of his communicants. we need to place evangelicalism in the context of what historian Gordon Wood has called a "social and cultural revolution as great as any in American history." No longer a relatively stable order in which people occupied a recognizable secure place, American society seemed to have become a chaotic jumble in which few things remained unchanged and few people remained in the same place, a scramble of aspiring individuals moving from place to place and situation to situation in what Abraham Lincoln called "the race of life." Americans embraced this new society as unprecedentedly democratic, a land of vast opportunity in which the individual (so long as he was male and white) was free to rise to whatever position his talent and effort took him. But if American society held out unprecedented opportunity for "rise," "betterment," and "improvement," it was also a site of uncertainty, isolation, frustration, and anxiety. For many, evangelicalism provided a counterworld to the chaos and isolation of American life and an antidote to its insecurities and anxieties. Just as had Puritanism, evangelicalism held out a vision of order, direction, and discipline and provided its adherents with the sense of security that came with the salvational promise.Finally, evangelicalism inducted its communicants into an institutional setting that was in many ways the direct opposite of the chaotic, competitive, isolated, and lonely world of everyday life. It's of great sigificance that we recognize that todays evangelicals feel very threatned that the fundamental meaning for their lives is being stolen by an ever increasing secularism. They are, indeed, in a war to preserve what they understand as "the greatest hope" for mankind..a god blessed america...I also think that the majority of them are unaware of the consequences, in the long term, of abdication of personal and civil rights which ultimately will come back to haunt them in their pursuit of political religiosity.

It's definitely the distinct impression of control and authoritarianism that makes any faction seem scary and not in the best interest of the private citizen. It's easy to see the rather amorphous Religious Right filling that bill -- perhaps they are scarier because they want to wish one to go to Hell if they don't agree with them politically? Not.

And on the opposition of being sent to hell is the scarier truth of being placed in jail, have your murder deemed a suicide or just a slow and painful dismantling of your entire life because you think abortion is wrong, helmet laws are stupid, gun control is absurd and cigarettes are fine.

It seems if you don't believe in God, the worst that will happen will be a verbal torment promising you a life of fire and brimstone. If you don't let money manipulate all of your decisions, you face a very miserable existence or end here on earth. Such a choice. Such a choice.

A foreigner's view-

The US mixture of religion and politics is fascinating.

While European nations often have many parties and one or two religions, the US has two parties and many religions. It has been said that several characteristics in the building of the United States plunged into this: somehow, grassroots politics in a new world -a world without an aristocracy, with people from different cultures and often not sophisticated in a political sense- worked better in the local level through religious beliefs, than through ideological constructions.

dyslexia's latest post is indeed thought provoking: the sense of religious adherence giving a sense of community, of belonging, of having roots; and at the same time, religion being used as a means to grab power (the way political parties do).

This makes that some religion-related issues, which come and go -or are nonexistant- in the political agenda of most countries, are a source of continuous political bickering in the US: abortion, homosexuality, drugs, the Presidents' or candidates' sexual life, etc.

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Another thing we'd better do is differentiate organized churches that work as pressure groups -typically the Catholic and Jewish churches- and those who work, de facto, as pseudopolitical parties.

What is happening today vs. what occurred during the 60's and 70's is the effective use and manipulation of the tools available in the "Information Age." The entity that controls the gathering of that information and the interpretation of that information has the real power in America.

It's a similar advantage we "Boomers" had with the newly born "Television Culture." Writing letters to the editor and to politicians wasn't having any effect and we learned to dramatically stage large, peaceful gatherings and marches to attract the news cameras for the publicity our various causes were hungry for. The people who were able to attract the larger group gatherings drew the interest of the local news reporters so their message got publicized to the local viewers.

The difference is that now it takes just one person with a computer and internet connection rather then a hundred thousand feet marching on the ground to instantly reach several billions of people with their message. The ground swell of interest that one kernel of well-placed information generates is extremely attractive to advertisers who then fund the production of those messages for delivering an audience to them and they feed upon each other.

That feeding frenzy has been tapped into by the political campaign managers on both sides and a not-so subtle form of subliminal manipulation is occurring at the same time that we are being inundated with all the messages and information from the various forms of communication and advertising. We can't possibly filter it all with the usual intuitive skepticism and much gets through to influence our thinking.

No fair, Dys, typed his response faster then me and prettied up his post with bigger words.

Pressure Groups
Wasn't it the Christians that pressured the USA Govt. to draft anti-Alcohol Laws? Prohibition didn't work too well, although it did seem to make quite few people rich, such as Al Capone and various crime families incl. the Kennedy family. Oh well, slighly off topic but close?

The Agenda
I ran across this on another post. This spells it out.

If the Texas Republicans ran the country

Considering the prominence of the Republican Party of Texas in national politics (George W. Bush, Tom DeLay, Karl Rove, et al.), it's useful to take a look at the 2000 and 2002 party platforms (accessible here) and see some of the policies the Texas Republicans advocate for the nation (items only in the 2000 or 2002 platforms identified as such: all others are found in both platforms):

--The Party calls for the United States monetary system to be returned to the gold standard (2000).

--Congress ... should withhold appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court in such cases involving abortion, religious freedom, and all rights guaranteed under the Bill of Rights.

--The Party supports the immediate adoption of American English as the official language of Texas and of the United States of America....

--The Party calls upon the Texas Legislature and the United States Congress to repeal any and all laws that infringe upon the right of individual citizens to keep and bear arms as guaranteed by the 2nd Amendment to the United States Constitution; and to reject the establishment of any mechanism to process, license, record, register or monitor the ownership of guns.

--The Party believes that the practice of sodomy tears at the fabric of society, contributes to the breakdown of the family unit, and leads to the spread of dangerous, communicable diseases.... The party opposes the decriminalization of sodomy.

--We support the elimination of public funding for organizations that advocate or support abortion. We urge the reversal of Roe v. Wade.

--We call for the abolition of the U. S. Department of Education and the prohibition of the transfer of any of its functions to any other federal agency.

--We support the requirement that schools teaching sex education must teach directive abstinence until heterosexual marriage with an uninfected person as the only safe and healthy means of preventing sexually transmitted diseases, the spread of AIDS, and pregnancies in unwed students, and is also a way to build strong and lasting relationships.

--The Republican Party of Texas reaffirms the United States of America is a Christian nation, which was founded on fundamental Judeo-Christian principles based on the Holy Bible (2002)

--Our Party pledges to do everything within its power to restore the original intent of the First Amendment of the United States and dispel the myth of the separation of Church and State. We support the right of individuals and state and local governments to display the Ten Commandments on public property subject to their control (2002) (similar language in the 2000 platform).

--Since Secular Humanism is recognized by the United States Supreme Court as a religion, and our government–funded schools are prohibited from teaching any religion, the Party believes that Secular Humanism and New Age Religion in any form should be subjected to the same state and federal laws as any other recognized religion.

--We support individual teachers’ right to teach creation science in Texas public schools.

--We support and strongly urge Congress to pass a Religious Freedom Amendment which provides: “Neither the United States nor any State shall prohibit student–sponsored prayer in public schools, nor compose any official student prayer or compel joining therein.”

--The Party supports amendment of the Americans with Disabilities Act to exclude from its definition those persons with infectious diseases, substance addiction, learning disabilities, behavior disorders, homosexual practices and mental stress thereby reducing abuse of the Act (2002)(similar language in the 2000 platform).

--The Party supports an orderly transition to a system of private pensions based on the concept of individual retirement accounts, and gradually phasing out the Social Security tax.

--We urge that the IRS be abolished and the Sixteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution be repealed.

--We further urge that the personal income tax, inheritance (death) tax, gift tax, capital gains, corporate income tax, and payroll tax be eliminated. We recommend the implementation of a national retail sales tax, with the provision that a two-thirds majority of the U.S. House and U.S. Senate is required to raise the rate (2002).

--The Party believes the Minimum Wage Law should be repealed and that wages should be determined by the free market conditions prevalent in each individual market (2002)(similar language in the 2000 platform).

--We demand that our federal legislators vote only for balanced budgets. Social Security should be taken off budget. In case of a budget surplus it should never be used to increase spending, but rather to pay off debt or be returned to the United States taxpayer.

--The Party believes it is in the best interest of the citizens of the United States that we immediately rescind our membership in, as well as all financial and military contributions to, the United Nations.

--The Party urges Congress to support HJR 77, the Panama and America Security Act, which declare the Carter-Torrijos Treaty null and void. We support re-establishing United States control over the Canal in order to retain our military bases in Panama, to preserve our right to transit through the Canal, and to prevent the establishment of Chinese missile bases in Panama.

One of many reasons I like Dean is his openess to any group in the US, including the southern poor who drive pickups and have the rebel flag on their bumpers. They are typical of people who are involved in fundamental religions--people who live from paycheck to paycheck, with little education and few prospects and almost no access to diverse populations. They feel this rapidly changing civilization is leaving them behind (it is) and that they have no real place left in this society.

Instead of vilifying them as being crazy religious nuts who are out of touch with 'normal' society, Dean is embracing them, trying to understand them and make them feel as if they count as much as the so-called elitist, more educated liberals (which they do). Finally, a Democrat is being truly democratic and giving an important segment of society a voice. It's about time. The Republicans have had them in its vise for decades, even generations.

The fundamentalist leaders are secretive and dangerous, using fear, a sense of belonging and the heady prospect of power to gain support from most of their parishoners. If someone like Dean can show them another message, of belonging to a larger society in which their voice is taken seriously, I think there is hope that they will wake up to the dangerous road their leaders have taken.

fishin

If you haven't read Berlin's essay (actually it's 'two concepts of freedom'), you are in for a treat. I'll let him make that particular argument.

But I think we would be mistaken to equate all 'special interest groups' and to simply assume that all of them function identically and that none of them present any unique danger to liberty.

Most special interest groups have a singular interest, such as the NRA or gay rights groups. They push for a particular policy (or group of policies) related to the isssue, and they may also seek to place friendly politicians in office. Other groups, such as unions, may have a broader area of concern (workplace safety and international trade rules, etc).

But what of a political party which seeks to, for example, bring all resources and on-going business activies under the control and ownership of a central planning authority? Or another which holds that the government, for security considerations, ought to exert strict controls over all media?

What if we began to witness an orchestrated (and highly effective) movement which was placing Scientologists into important and powerful positions within mental health organizations, with the aim, evident from their literature, of dismantling all such programs and organizations and replacing them with only Scientology counselling?

Can we agree, as a first point, that special interest groups are not all equal?

I haven never said they were all the same because it isn't true.



Largely true. But that is the purpose of them being the NRA Inc, or Planned Parenthood Inc., etc.. There is no "Religious Right Inc.". The "Religious Right" is a collection of hundreds of individual smaller groups.



Come on now! The Green Party isn't quite THAT bad! lol



Like Leiberman and Gore's wife wanted to do?



Being a free and open society I'd hope that other professionals from within the field would open their mouths and enough of them would come forward with factual evidence and "we the people" would correct the situation when enough of us were convinced of it.

But you have reduced the equation here from the "Religious Right" to Scientologists which is only a small faction of like minded people. Maintaining the same type of coheviseness at the larger "Religious Right" level isn't quite as easy. Within the "Religious Right" you have sub-groups that oppose many of the ideas of other sub-groups so if/when they get to a point of any real significant control they'll fraction into their smaller sub-groups and the threat is thwarted.

Essentially true, however the efforts of a dedicated few to manipulate these associated groups by coercing votes from them has been successful at the local and state levels, and seems likely to succeed at the national level. In addition, by the use of the appointment mechanism to positions that are not subject to election, this group is busily "stocking the pond" in preparation for upcoming presidential and congreesional elections.
I personally think that for these individuals, like Donald Wildmon, etc., their "faith" is a justification for the desire for power. For the rank and file, it seems to be a way of expressing misgivings about the rate at which chage occurs in contemporary society. They hearken to a mythologized past, best illustrated by 1950s TV shows, that never existed in the real world. The leaders of the larger groups feed the fear and hatred that "Christians" feel toward anything that is outside of their experience.

-Education is bad because it leads to independent thought, which might lead to questioning one's leaders and the "scripture" that they use to establish their authority.

-Affirmative action is bad because it might lead to an "other" achieving parity or surpassing your standard of living.

-Welfare is bad, because it denies the notion that poverty=sinfulness, and therefore wealth=godliness, and instead indirectly involves the citizenry in the care of those many consider to be "undesireable".

-Homosexuality is bad because it represents the separation between sexual desire and reproduction. If non-reproductive sex is made acceptable and not a furtive event, then biblical notions of social control may be invalidated.

-Abortion is bad because not because it represents the death of a foetus, but because it implies the personal control of a woman over her own body.

-Internationalization is bad because it represents the acknowledgement that the US is not an exceptional institution, but part of a wider community of nations, therefore also implying that other forms of governments, and by extension other ideologies are also valid.

-Freedom of dissent is bad because it allows the expression of opinions counter to those of the movement's leadership, thereby possibly instilling dissention among the governed.

One other thing I would like to touch on in this admittedly lengthy post, is that our fearful leader has stated publicly in an interview with Ha'aretz, a reputable news source, that he feels he is fulfilling the "will of God." I remain amazed that this has not been the cause for alarm by the citizenry of this nation. I think the reason this event has escaped frequent mention may be that the idea is so bizarre to the average citizen that we have collectively gone into denial over it. It is so strange that it is easier to avoid it than to contemplate it. This may prove to be a major mistake on the part of the citizenry.

fishin

Progress, of sorts, then.

The scientologist example wasn't meant to be a substitution of one religious group for another, rather as just another example of how a group's agenda or goals might make it uniquely worthy of concern. That is a goal of theirs, by the way, though not likely to succeed because it's unlikely they will gain such centrality of power.

Let's take then, as a more appropriate example, the circle of individuals who call themselves neoconservatives. A decade ago, no one, except perhaps them, dreamed they would assume a centrality of power such as they have managed. Now, I'm hoping you won't go partisan on me and argue that there's not much new about these boys and their ideas. For the sake of argument, let's agree that pre-emption is a new and significant notion and policy, and that it has large significance for the polity.

Is it not possible that such an element, but theistically minded rather than Straussian, might gain such a centrality of power?

Wow. Some real decrepit stuff being thrown around in this debate. When I return tomorrow, I will address each and every issue. Some things are so right, they couldn't possibly be wrong and you want to walk all over them from some deranged science unheard of in any real world. It is sickening what some of you have to say and you are afraid of the religious zealots?

Hitler
He too used the words Almighty to wrap into his reasons for Lebensraum and the domination of the Aryian race. It is still astounding to me that very few are disturbed at the take over of our Govt. by zealots who in my view are not any different than the Taliban or Al Quada. Anyone that does not see the parallels is not using their grey matter. We have a President who is not unlike Osama bin Laden, expect that Osama is much more intelligent.

I think the crux of the Religious Right v. Secular World lies in groups' rights overlapping.

If you have a woman with children in a room with say...people using profanity. They all have all equal belonging there. She tells the cursers to stop, so her children don't hear it, and she is offended, as well. Should they stop? If not, hasn't her right not to hear the language been taken from her... What of their rights? Someone will always lose. I think the Religious Right feels they have lost too many of these face offs.

Of course, all of the issues won't fit into this simple analogy, but many do.