According to Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema:
"Sado-masochism is not a merely psychological explanation, or if it is, it simply abstracts from the social. One of the Frankfurt School's less recognized achievements is in the early studies of authoritarianism, where they analyzed such ambivalences in the Central Europe of their time, and showed the links to changing family structures among proletarianizing bourgeois and others, resulting changes in family structure and relationships, derivative changes in ego development, and much more. Adapting this kind of analysis to the United States, where Christianity is even more prevalent, can clarify many issues."
Ha! Except the idea that the Frankfurt School came up with--the authoritarian personality was a simple right-wing hierarchical patriarchal psycho-social model--has been thoroughly debunked. There is still much of value in the Frankfurt School and its offspring (I especially like the work of sociologist Lauren Langman). But they got a lot wrong.
There are several authoritarian personality types, including leaders (S) and followers (M) and they can be found in religious and secular belief systems, and span left to right.
I don't misunderstand--I disagree. I am not disputing the model, I am disputing its application to Christianity in a simplistic, didactic, and exceptionalist way.
According to Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema:
"At the same time, it is a serious question whether or not political struggles with this unconscious psychological basis can advance democratic and socialist values in the future in the same way as in the past."
Ah, metaphysical v. dialectic. I am sooooo impressed with the scientific, conscious, rational, advancement of democratic and socialist values reflected in Stalin's purges, the Cambodian genocide, even the theories of Otto and Gregor Strasser.
I can match scientific socialist, Christian apocalyptic, and capitalist/imperialist atrocities tit for tat. And the S/M M/F dynamic can be found in all three.
It is not the structure of an ideology that is crucial, it is how the ideology is interpreted, applied, and reinterpreted in real time.
In part my views are shaped by symbolic interactionism. This approach, outlined by Blumer (1969), goes beyond realism’s insistence on things having inherent or intrinsic meaning, as well as the idea that meaning arises through the “coalescence of psychological elements in the
person.” Actors and meanings are seen as fluid and constantly changing. This occurs through a process of interpretation that involves the actor internally considering ideas and events, and then engaging in “a formative process in which meanings are used and revised as instruments for the guidance and formation of action” (pp. 4-5).
-Chip Berlet
Altemeyer, Bob. (1996). The Authoritarian Specter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Blumer, H. (1969). Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and method. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Noël, Lise. (1994). Intolerance: A General Survey. Translated by Arnold Bennett. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth. (1996). The Anatomy of Prejudices. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Brasher, Brenda E. (1998). Godley Women: Fundamentalism and Female Power. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Harding, Susan. (1994). "Imagining the Last Days: The Politics of Apocalyptic Language." In Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby (Eds.), Accounting for Fundamentalisms: Vol. 4. The Fundamentalism Project (pp. 57–78). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Strozier, Charles B. (1994). Apocalypse: On the Psychology of Fundamentalism in America. Boston: Beacon Press.
Langman, Lauren. (1998). "Fascism and the Feast of Fools." Paper, 14th World Congress of Sociology (XIVe Congrès Mondial de Sociologie), International Sociological Association, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.