jimihendrix1
Well-Known Member
In Europe, the rationalizations for capitalism remained primarily secular, looking to the maximization of efficiency for the sake of profit. In the United States, however, where little happens that one side or the other does not ascribe to an overseeing God, secular rationalizations were soon complemented with the notion of divine will. God wanted unregulated economic freedom and minimalist government to prevail.Any government involvement in social welfare was disapproved of because it allegedly promoted laziness among the poor, but this was just a convenient myth. The real reason for keeping government activity to an absolute minimum was the rising business class’ fear and loathing of taxes.
This religious view continues to exist. Today’s struggle to return us to minimalist government and maximum economic “freedom” is led by a collection of fundamentalist Christian right-wingers and Tea Party mad-hatters. Journalist Chris Hedges lays out a worst-case scenario of the drive for power by the Christian Right in his recent article, “The Radical Christian Right and the War on the Government.”
He tells us that “the public face” of this political force is “on display in the House of Representatives” and its main ideological aim is to “shut down the government.” Hedges also points to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, as the archetypal fundamentalist politician leading the charge against big government. Hedges thinks this is just the first step toward the real goal of men like Cruz, which is to make the U.S. a Christian fundamentalist nation.
The Ensuing Struggle
In the struggle that has ensued, the radical conservatives’ enemy is the Democratic (or “big government”) Party in general and President Barack Obama in particular.
As an indication of just how isolating and distorting ideology can be, focus groups of conservative Republicans have revealed a deeply held conspiracy theory. According to researchers who conducted this study, “What drives the Republican base . . . [is] a genuine belief that Obama has a secret agenda to drive the country in a socialist direction.” They also believe that he is the head of a cabal, that he seems to be a politician who “came from nowhere,” and that he is “propelled by some secret forces.”
The focus groups revealed this belief to be held by “two out of every three self identified Republicans.”
In the 2010 election, a high conservative turnout gave the Republican Party control of the House of Representatives and – at state levels – the power to aggressively gerrymander congressional districts that enabled Republicans to retain control of the House in 2012 despite losing the national popular vote by about 1½ million ballots.
The 2010 election also infused the House Republican caucus with many radical right-wing conservatives whose districts often were made politically safer by redistricting in 2012. These radical politicians and many of their constituents shunned the sort of compromise that is, or should be, at the heart of democracy.
For the radicals, principle was more important than compromise. That attitude led to the recent political confrontation with its shutdown of the federal government and the near default on the public debt.
Within days of the shutdown, moderate Republicans began deserting the radical conservatives and expressed their willingness to end demands for such things as the defunding of federally subsidized health care, popularly known as “Obamacare,” the elimination of the government deficit, and a radical reduction in government programs and regulatory power.
Victory Denied.
Once begun, the movement advanced with a rush. Many evangelicals and fundamentalists were disillusioned when, as they saw it, Carter left his personal evangelical convictions in the Sunday-school classes he taught without letting them influence the policies of his administration. In 1977, Anita Bryant drew nationwide support for her successful campaign to repeal a gay-rights ordinance in Dade County, Florida. When the IRS threatened to strip Bob Jones University in South Carolina of its tax exemption because of its policy of racial segregation, mass protests came from several directions. Some of that support rallied for the principle of segregation, but more was generated to protest overweening government power. In the congressional elections of 1978, evangelical activists joined or mounted movements in several states to defeat liberal candidates and elect conservatives. During 1979, in very rapid order, Beverly LaHaye established the Concerned Women for America as a counterforce to what she saw as aberrant feminism, Robert Grant founded “Christian Voice” to accelerate evangelical and Republican cooperation, Randall Terry (inspired by another book and movie from Francis Schaeffer that raised the possibility of civil disobedience to defend the unborn) began militantly pro-life rescue activity, and Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority.
Also in that momentous year, doctrinal conservatives in the Southern Baptist Convention showed what mobilization could mean for a religious body when they ran a get-out-the-vote campaign that resulted in the election of a Memphis minister, Adrian Rogers, as president of America’s largest Protestant denomination. This was the first step in a decade of internal politicking that secured the denomination for conservative theological principles and pushed it toward conservative political action.
Symbolic events in 1980 testified to a political movement that was up and running. In April, Pat Robertson organized a “Washington for Jesus Rally.” The crowd that showed up fell short of the grandiose goals Robertson had announced on his television network, but it was still an impressive number. In August, at the Religious Roundtable’s National Affairs Briefing, the candidate Ronald Reagan proclaimed to rapturous applause that “I know you can’t endorse me. But I want you to know that I endorse you and what you are doing.”
Finally, as has been well-documented elsewhere, the years following evangelical disillusionment with Jimmy Carter witnessed a burst of cooperation between politically energized evangelicals and professional pols of the GOP’s Goldwater wing (including Paul Weyrich, Richard Viguerie, and Howard Phillips). The result was a number of right-wing organizations with full evangelical support, including the National Conservative Political Action Committee, the Heritage Foundation, and the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress. Such organizations gained the trust of white evangelicals and fundamentalists who saw them as vehicles for defending traditional morality. The novelties represented by this cooperation were national political organization and a close working relationship with the Republican Party.
The critical development in the mid-1970s was mobilization, and on a national scale. As that mobilization took place, it transformed well-established traditions of evangelical and fundamentalist religion into a political instrument. As religion, its primary elements were individual redemption as the overriding spiritual concern, family nurture as the critical means for preserving the faith, sexual immorality perceived as a particularly potent enemy of the family, biblical interpretation stressing the perennial clash between good and evil, and opposition to communism considered as the most dangerous world threat to Christianity. Over the course of the twentieth century, many developments in American society had given evangelicals multiple reasons for hastening to the barricades. Yet these evangelical convictions had existed for many generations—and America’s alleged rush to self-destruction had been going on for a long time-without the kind of political mobilization that took place in the mid-1970s.
This religious view continues to exist. Today’s struggle to return us to minimalist government and maximum economic “freedom” is led by a collection of fundamentalist Christian right-wingers and Tea Party mad-hatters. Journalist Chris Hedges lays out a worst-case scenario of the drive for power by the Christian Right in his recent article, “The Radical Christian Right and the War on the Government.”
He tells us that “the public face” of this political force is “on display in the House of Representatives” and its main ideological aim is to “shut down the government.” Hedges also points to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, as the archetypal fundamentalist politician leading the charge against big government. Hedges thinks this is just the first step toward the real goal of men like Cruz, which is to make the U.S. a Christian fundamentalist nation.
The Ensuing Struggle
In the struggle that has ensued, the radical conservatives’ enemy is the Democratic (or “big government”) Party in general and President Barack Obama in particular.
As an indication of just how isolating and distorting ideology can be, focus groups of conservative Republicans have revealed a deeply held conspiracy theory. According to researchers who conducted this study, “What drives the Republican base . . . [is] a genuine belief that Obama has a secret agenda to drive the country in a socialist direction.” They also believe that he is the head of a cabal, that he seems to be a politician who “came from nowhere,” and that he is “propelled by some secret forces.”
The focus groups revealed this belief to be held by “two out of every three self identified Republicans.”
In the 2010 election, a high conservative turnout gave the Republican Party control of the House of Representatives and – at state levels – the power to aggressively gerrymander congressional districts that enabled Republicans to retain control of the House in 2012 despite losing the national popular vote by about 1½ million ballots.
The 2010 election also infused the House Republican caucus with many radical right-wing conservatives whose districts often were made politically safer by redistricting in 2012. These radical politicians and many of their constituents shunned the sort of compromise that is, or should be, at the heart of democracy.
For the radicals, principle was more important than compromise. That attitude led to the recent political confrontation with its shutdown of the federal government and the near default on the public debt.
Within days of the shutdown, moderate Republicans began deserting the radical conservatives and expressed their willingness to end demands for such things as the defunding of federally subsidized health care, popularly known as “Obamacare,” the elimination of the government deficit, and a radical reduction in government programs and regulatory power.
Victory Denied.
Once begun, the movement advanced with a rush. Many evangelicals and fundamentalists were disillusioned when, as they saw it, Carter left his personal evangelical convictions in the Sunday-school classes he taught without letting them influence the policies of his administration. In 1977, Anita Bryant drew nationwide support for her successful campaign to repeal a gay-rights ordinance in Dade County, Florida. When the IRS threatened to strip Bob Jones University in South Carolina of its tax exemption because of its policy of racial segregation, mass protests came from several directions. Some of that support rallied for the principle of segregation, but more was generated to protest overweening government power. In the congressional elections of 1978, evangelical activists joined or mounted movements in several states to defeat liberal candidates and elect conservatives. During 1979, in very rapid order, Beverly LaHaye established the Concerned Women for America as a counterforce to what she saw as aberrant feminism, Robert Grant founded “Christian Voice” to accelerate evangelical and Republican cooperation, Randall Terry (inspired by another book and movie from Francis Schaeffer that raised the possibility of civil disobedience to defend the unborn) began militantly pro-life rescue activity, and Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority.
Also in that momentous year, doctrinal conservatives in the Southern Baptist Convention showed what mobilization could mean for a religious body when they ran a get-out-the-vote campaign that resulted in the election of a Memphis minister, Adrian Rogers, as president of America’s largest Protestant denomination. This was the first step in a decade of internal politicking that secured the denomination for conservative theological principles and pushed it toward conservative political action.
Symbolic events in 1980 testified to a political movement that was up and running. In April, Pat Robertson organized a “Washington for Jesus Rally.” The crowd that showed up fell short of the grandiose goals Robertson had announced on his television network, but it was still an impressive number. In August, at the Religious Roundtable’s National Affairs Briefing, the candidate Ronald Reagan proclaimed to rapturous applause that “I know you can’t endorse me. But I want you to know that I endorse you and what you are doing.”
Finally, as has been well-documented elsewhere, the years following evangelical disillusionment with Jimmy Carter witnessed a burst of cooperation between politically energized evangelicals and professional pols of the GOP’s Goldwater wing (including Paul Weyrich, Richard Viguerie, and Howard Phillips). The result was a number of right-wing organizations with full evangelical support, including the National Conservative Political Action Committee, the Heritage Foundation, and the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress. Such organizations gained the trust of white evangelicals and fundamentalists who saw them as vehicles for defending traditional morality. The novelties represented by this cooperation were national political organization and a close working relationship with the Republican Party.
The critical development in the mid-1970s was mobilization, and on a national scale. As that mobilization took place, it transformed well-established traditions of evangelical and fundamentalist religion into a political instrument. As religion, its primary elements were individual redemption as the overriding spiritual concern, family nurture as the critical means for preserving the faith, sexual immorality perceived as a particularly potent enemy of the family, biblical interpretation stressing the perennial clash between good and evil, and opposition to communism considered as the most dangerous world threat to Christianity. Over the course of the twentieth century, many developments in American society had given evangelicals multiple reasons for hastening to the barricades. Yet these evangelical convictions had existed for many generations—and America’s alleged rush to self-destruction had been going on for a long time-without the kind of political mobilization that took place in the mid-1970s.
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