I love listening to NPR, despite their left-wing bent I think that it is still a great source of news and entertainment. One thing that I have heard repeated many times over the last few weeks is a flabbergasted wondering how the right-wing could have so solidly taken control of religion and morality.
The answer is simple. The left gave it away.
It was not always like this. Back in the thirties and forties there was often a distinct religious zeal for aspects of socialism. When Labour took over in England and started the welfare state they said that it was to turn their nation into a new Jerusalem. You would find similar beliefs in America; people acting on their “Christian duty” to care for their fellow man through the proactive use of government. Many of the first communes were started by Christian to better make real these ideas of material equality, the Amish are a surviving remnant of this.
Then came the 60’s and the counter culture. Young people who grew up in the aftermath of WWII found themselves against everyone and everything. They did not simply reject western thought and religion, they actually flouted their disdain for it with sexual promiscuity, drug use, and chants of “Hey Hey Ho HO western cultures got to go”. These kids were not called they disgusting, ignorant, slovenly fools that they were by the left-wing establishment, but instead they were labeled idealists and dynamic, who would bring about an exciting new world of change.
And so the religious element of the left became alienated and slowly switched sides.
The right-wing has not taken over religion in America, they did not have to. The left gave it to them.
While the hard core right wingers may indeed be religious, I am not so sure the the vast majority of “religious” ppl are what I would call right wingers. At least IMHO, most of the ppl that attend church service on a regular basis are not right wing activist. The majority do have strong moral / family values, but don’t go out of their way to impose those beliefs on others. They may shake their heads at some of the things they see or hear about, but other than thinking what a screwed up world we live in they don’t pay it much mind (unless it’s being crammed down their throats).
I see it a different way. Many of the most religious people in America are/were also racial bigots. During the civil rights struggles, while the Left stuck by their ideals and fought against racism, the Right pandered to the hate-filled rednecks. Said rednecks jumped ship, because they’d go along with whatever party didn’t force them to share drinking fountains with “dem cullered people.” A similar schism formed around feminism–the Left was bravely struggling for equal rights in the workplace, the Right was content to pander to slack-jawed yokels who felt women should remain barefoot and pregnant. This divide between bright-eyed idealistic progressives and reactionary Gawd-fearin’ Christians can still be found in politics today.
It’s pretty simple. The left has a lot of positions on issues that religious people just can’t abide - many people can’t separate what the state regulates from their
moral beliefs.
So, if they’re against abortion, the government has to be.
If they feel being gay is wrong, the government should, too.
If they like to pray, the public schools better organize it.
The religious element of the left never switched sides. It was and is situated in the African American churches and Western moderate churches that generally shy away from divisive politics (i.e., they are unlikely to form PACs and carefully plan agitprop setups in order to push their agenda and so forth http://www.reuters.com/printerFriendlyPopup.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=6911883
)
The religious left, outside of the African American churches, just isn’t as in your face or arrogantly moralizing. Which, I suppose, is the irony.
As George Stephanoplos (sp?) said to Dobson after explaining that his father was a Greek Othrodox preist and he was very religious: who are you to tell me what is moral?
No, the left has a lot of positions that some religious people can’t abide. The overwhelming majority of Democrats have some kind of religious belief. Likewise, there are plenty of people on the right who can’t abide the religious beliefs of others on the right. This issue is a great deal more complicated then “religious people” not being tolerant of the left’s beliefs.
Here I was thinking that it had something to do with the Republicans being better at framing issues in terms favourable to them, and focusing the discussion on a limited subset of morality (e.g. abortion, gay marriage, and Monica Lewinsky), while Democrats failed to focus the discussion on the moral aspects of their own platform.
'Cause I have a hard time believing that the sole cause of the current political climate regarding “moral values”, is the actions 40 years ago of people who almost by definition had nothing to do with politics.
Seriously, Maud’Dib. For your thesis to make any sense we’d have to believe that the Democratic party was somehow the “party of hippies” back in the 60s, and that just doesn’t compute. The hippies were apolitical, having nothing to do with either party. Certainly not with the Democrats: remember LBJ? The Democratic president who led the United States into the Vietnam war? Not exactly a flower child. So why would the religious left abandon the Democratic Party because of hippies, if hippies and the Democratic Party had nothing to do with each other?
it depends on how you define morality. Technically haven’t the right wing always had a monopoly on public morality? If you look at radical right wing groups (i’m not comparing these groups to modern US right wingers btw) like the KKK or the Nazis they ran on moral platforms and promoting public morality and family values and they were right wingers. Conservativism is the school of thought that says ‘the old ways are great, lets not change’ and that is to a large degree what public morality is. Lets not change; lets not let gays marry, lets not let people walk around half naked on tv. So if you define morality as maintaining ‘polite culture’ then the right wing has always had a monopoly as far as I can tell.
However, if you define morality as caring for your fellow man, then the left has always had a monopoly on morality.
Not just hippies, but the entire counter-culture. That means everyone from hippies to the Weathermen. All of whom were far left groups that I belive scared away middle America. The closest the right had was the John Birch society.
Don’t forget that back then the KKK was made up almost entirely of Democrats.
As to your second point, I agree, but that is what I think the Left gave away back in the sixties when they allowed a radical fringe to define what it meant to be left-wing.
If people want to know how Liberal became a dirty word all they have to do is look back at the sixties and early seventies.
i’m sorry but that’s just ridiculous. You just cannot call all the myriad threads of the 60’s counter-culture ‘far left’. You just reduce the term to playground finger-pointing and name calling.
You seem to have forgotten the KKK and the numerous militia nutcases too.