religious crackpots in public life, was Re: The heart of a leftist

[Gordon Fitch]

I probably should have said "outer class" rather than "lower
class."  Many fundamentalists (like some other seriously
religious people) reject the dominant bourgeois academic
authorities on such matters as cosmogony, evolution, and the
status of science in general, as well as bourgeois professions
on individual rights in such matters as sexual behavior,
abortion, freedom of speech, and freedom of and from religion.
I have even heard fundamentalist preachers on the radio go so
far as to denounce unrestrained capitalism.  And the suspicion
of such people for interventionist, that is, imperialist
foreign policy has been a staple of bourgeois derision since
the end of World War II.  I didn't mean they might not be
prosperous, merely that they appear to be at odds with
ruling-class opinions and practices.

As I said before, these ideological stances may be superficial,
that is, may not be thought to call for strenuous praxis, but
provide instead a mental refuge from the abrasions of modernity.
Ronald Reagan grew up in a fundamentalist context and went to
a college run by the Disciples of Christ.  However, in later
life he didn't seem to have a lot of trouble with imperialism
and unrestrained capitalism, and in spite of the lip service
given to fundamentalist social ideals nothing much actually
happened.

Probably, there are a lot of people more or less like Reagan,
which is why he was called "The Great Communicator" while he
actually communicated very little in the sense of literally
transmitting information.  His audience already knew he was
one of them: they were in communion, not communication.  And
this was enough, the ship of State needing not to be 
unnecessarily rocked.

Gordon wrote:
> 
> >in the
> >case of fundamentalism it might offer lower-class traditionalists
> >and nostalgics relief from bourgeois cultural pressures and
> >continuous modernization.

Yoshie Furuhashi:
> Margaret Talbot, "A Mighty Fortress," New York Times Sunday Magazine 
> 27 February 2000 (p. 40):
> 
> *****  The re-emergence of a Christian right in the mid-80's took no 
> one by greater surprise than the liberal academics and journalists 
> who were frequently called upon to account for itŠ.As a result, much 
> of the commentary on conservative Christians has tended to portray 
> themŠ"as a group somehow left behind by the modern world - 
> economically, culturally, psychologicallyŠ.
> 
> The trouble with this theory of "status discontent" - of conservative 
> Christians as downwardly mobile rubes - was that most of them were 
> neitherŠ.Of all these groups [evangelicals, liberal Protestants, 
> Catholics, and nonreligious] evangelicals are the least likely to 
> have had only a high school education or less.  They are more likely 
> than liberals or the nonreligious to belong to $50,000-and-above 
> income bracket.  And they are no more likely to live in rural areas 
> than anyone else; the new centers of conservative Christianity, it 
> turns out, are the prosperous suburbs in Midwestern states like 
> Kansas and Oklahoma.   *****
> 
> Yoshie
>