> what is mistaken for a "sado-masochistic
> character structure" is a trace of pre-capitalist class relations
> left upon the metaphoric language of Christianity: the Lord, the
> servant, bondage, etc.
>
What you refer to is really the typical family structures of capitalism and the bourgeois family. These have developed over time, and there is some correspondence of family structures to developments in Christianity. (And probably in other patriarchal monotheisms.). The father-dominated bourgeois family is actually feudal in its internal structure, and the relations between its members are a vestige of feudalism. Or, to put it another way, bourgeois society gave the paterfamilias a private status that the feudal lord had had in what would have been the public sphere if there had been the same distinction between public and private under feudalism. "A man's home is his castle," after all.
It is important, for example, that marriage is the existing social institution most lineally descended from feudalism. However, it is similarly significant, that marriage became formalized as an institution for people who weren't royalty and aristocracy just at the historical point when bourgeois society was beginning to become a mass phenomenon.
As capitalism supplanted feudalism, and bourgeois institutions, including the father-dominated bourgeois family structures (there have been several) came to involve more and more people, children increasingly had developmental experiences of their mothers and, especially their fathers, that christian mythology tends to mimic. Hence god-the-father and his churches came to predominate in peoples' experience of the supernatural. European peasant populations lagged behind in this process and, even in the nineteenth century, retained much of an effectively polytheistic, instrumentally magical, mythopoeic outlook, despite the churches' efforts to combat it.
The personality that became dominant in bourgeois families was generally gendered sado-masochistic in character structure. This, of course, does not mean that it was necessarily pathological, rather that, by the nineteenth century, it involved submission to the bourgeois (masculine sadistic) father, and idealization of the bourgeois (feminine masochist) mother. This, of course, happened in a culture wherein the market dominated, but also was experienced as remote and inexplicable. Like the Christian god, who is a collective representation of the market, personified via the experience of the father. Gender rôles are historical, of course -- these are masculine and feminine rôles, not male and female biological functions.
The liberative side of gendered sado-masochism is the psychological aspect of bourgeois liberative movements. Many democratic movements have involved demands for fathers to have control over their women and children. Abolitionism is an example, and much of the most effective abolitionist propaganda involved exposés of masters and overseers sexually exploiting the wives of slaves, who, of course, were not legally their wives. (See Fanny Kemble's diary.). Other liberative movements have rested on feminine masochistic identifications with the self as victim. Residual examples of this remain. Chip referred to some of them.
My problem with political gendered sado-masochism is that it seems now to rest on family structures that are thoroughly decadent or else functionally defunct, and that they must, nowadays, either tend towards one or another form of authoritarianism (not necessarily overtly brutal at any specific moment), or else they need to transcend patriarchal monotheism itself. The little I know of feminist Christianity leads me to think that some of its practitioners are trying to attempt this latter task (using, no doubt, other terminology).
On the other hand, the religious right is a clear-cut authoritarianism responding explicitly to the decadence of the father-dominated family. This impulse beguiles some on the left. Cornell West's notorious flirtation with the Promise Keepers is an example, and there are the Communitarians, who have some roots in the left.
Strategically, one of the left's most important tasks at this point is to develop practical approaches to the material and psychological stress people experience in the outmoded family structures they have to make do with. Part of this would lie in progressive social welfare policy initiatives that the left has yet to develop, and which, for reasons I wish I understood better, much of the left resists attempting.
Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema