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March 03, 2005

The Problem with the Christian Right

As I've said before, the Christian Right is full of itself and thinks it is a lot more influential than it really is. Simply because it is capable of getting in a catfight with leftist Hollywood scum, the battle gets lots of press and airtime. Meanwhile the rest of us are either alarmed or non-plussed. In the middle of that is somebody like me who believes that the religious have a point and that the Republican Party needs to be careful and clever.

Evangelistic Christianity is a caustic influence in contemporary political activism. The ability of men like Carl Rove to drop the right rhetoric into campaigns, something whose origins are in the reverse psychology of Richard Viguery does not make a campaign righteous. I think the Christian Right is going to be very disappointed when the Christian Left gets rolling and they discover themselves agitating on secular platforms in the upcoming elections. Sooner or later Howard Dean is going to find a Jimmy Carter with brass balls, and that's going to be the end of it. Still in all, its a distraction from the real issues that our government must deal with. Think about it. The country is already 90% Christian, any so-called 'Christian' activism in politics is stupidly redundant or actually very narrow. It's the latter.

So it's a very important to understand not only what the consensus of the Christian Right is, but what particular constituencies within it want, and who exactly they are. I think a lot of me-too-ism is getting exposure based upon the momentum of the Bush win, but when all the confetti has hit the floor, people are going to have to stand on their own.

I know there are a lot of conscientious Christians out there who are identifying as Christians first because of this sound and fury, but who are not Fundamentalists and do believe in the separation between Church and State. But this is a detail which is not often talked about in the simplistic Red vs Blue.

I actually don't want to beat this horse to death again, my essential point is this: The real problem has to do with the legitimation of religious evangelism as a form of political activism. It's a line that shouldn't be crossed in a Western democracy.

And I think anyone who actually goes to church knows that simply having laws written in books is not what keeps people on the straight and narrow, but loving fellowship in a community that is rooted in those laws. You can't just pitch the Bible at sinners across the street and expect that the good in it is going to sink into their heads with a thud. You have to invite them to fellowship and discover what they want and need in their lives. All this moral posturing and bombast doesn't work with Americans. Did you forget who we are? We're Americans! Nobody bosses us around, especially not you.

The problem with the Christian Right is that 'Christian Right' is not a Christian term, but a demographic term employed by political consultants (and bloggers). It's a large amorphous collection of suckers to be seduced by expert con artists like Karl Rove, and rah-rah'd in the Blogosphere. But as soon as Christians start seeing themselves as the 'Christian Right', which master do you think they're serving? Go to you church and ask your pastor, is this the church of the Christian Right? I don't think the answer will be yes.

So I think we have a very basic ethical dilemma here. It has to do with the question of how Christians, whether conservative or not, engage the public. And I think we need to get to the bottom of the current revisionist history which suggests this is a righteous Christian Nation that needs to get back to its Christian roots as if 'Under God' were in the National Anthem. There's a very important reason that our flag doesn't have faces or words on it and I'd hate to have the legitimate beefs of Christians discredited because their tactics would have us burning crosses into everyone's minds.

You see I cannot get over the fact that for 200 years, all the Christians in this country were unable to do what Abraham Lincoln did with the stroke of a pen, and all the Christians in the South found that it took 100 years and Federal Troops to force them to obey the New Covenant. So while I am certainly convinced of the reality of Christian morals, being a son of Ham, I am not particularly impressed with the effectiveness of Christian politics on the law of the land.

Posted by mbowen at March 3, 2005 11:33 AM

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Comments

"You see I cannot get over the fact that for 200 years, all the Christians in this country were unable to do what Abraham Lincoln did with the stroke of a pen, and all the Christians in the South found that it took 100 years and Federal Troops to force them to obey the New Covenant."

You're right, of course. But don't forget about the Quakers who risked liberty and property, and maybe life and limb, to help all the slaves they could to freedom because of their beliefs; and the words of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" - "As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free" and Uncle Tom's Cabin (which I recently read for the first time - wow, what a powerful book!) which led Lincoln to say to Ms. Stowe, "So you're the little lady who started this big war." It was Christians who started the abolitionist movement in England and who supported the war for the sake of freeing slaves. The sad, SAD commentary about human nature (and you know it's human nature, Cobb, not white nature or Southern nature or Christian nature) is that it's so easy for us to rationalize truly horrible and evil things if we think they benefit us somehow. This was brought out in Uncle Tom's Cabin: the rotten hypocracy of those who used the Scriptures to justify slavery. And the fact that although of course black people were the principle sufferers - they suffered mind, body, and spirit - it hurt white people too.

Posted by: Laura at March 4, 2005 05:15 PM

I agree, although I believe it was John Brown who set the high water mark for morality in his day. He alone was willing to take up the horrible swift sword, before troops were taking order to.

Part of my point is that if there is a Christian lock on morality, then you would definitely have to ask which Christians in which church, and that breaks down the whole rhetorical force surrounding the 'mandate' of the Christian Right.

My point is not that whites or Christians are wrong, or to point out anything about human frailty, but to point out the imprecision of the terms, and to debunk the theory that the Christian Right is indeed a coherent coaltion organized from the bottom up. No. It is a target market strategized from the top down, and if you really push it - it will come apart.

Posted by: Cobb at March 4, 2005 11:47 PM

Outstanding post. Love your blog. I wrote an analysis of the Religious Right from an insider's perspective that I think you might find interesting.

http://lawnrangers.blogspot.com/2005/02/inside-religious-right.html

Posted by: Dignan at March 5, 2005 08:47 PM