Chip Berlet wrote:
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.
Actually, leaders are both S and M. So are followers. There also is the phenomenon of authoritarian rebellion, which helps us understand many historical forms democratic struggle that were formally leftist, at least insofar as they opposed aristocracies and bourgeoisies in various places. I recently reread Brenan's THE SPANISH LABYRINTH, and found the anarcho-syndicalists a probable example.
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> 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.
Christianity has not always been authoritarian. But it has always been a manifestation of sado-masochistic character structure. This, to reiterate, is not necessarily or even usually clinical psychopathology, though it sometimes is. At the same time, Horkheimer's essay in the 1934 STUDIEN shows how bourgeois character becomes decadent when material circumstances leave it behind. This is what I was referring to here, that Christianity's liberative potential is more and more attenuated:
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> According to Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema:
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> "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."
Now of course the examples you cite are not inspiring --
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> 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 know too little about the Cambodian genocide to comment, the other examples seem pretty clear examples of the ambiguities of the democratic impulse playing itself out in contexts where gendered sado-masochism was the norm. Recognizing the parallels between (at least some kinds of) Christianity and Stalinism is not new.
Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema