> Now you are straining credibility. Are you claiming that the followers
> are in fact the leaders? That they are forcing their money on the fat
> cats at the top of the hierarchy, who don't make any effort to
> encourage this?
What foreigners often have a hard time understanding, besides the role of religiosity in U.S. culture, is the fact that Protestant congregations hire and fire their ministers. The democracy of Protestantism in the U.S. is much more genuine, in fact, than that of the U.S. political system as a whole.
The TV evangelists who have been caught in the well-known financial scandals are in fact not at all typical of the average fundamentalist or evangelist preacher. Parishioners contribute to the TV programs to support the proselytizing "missions" which bring the "good news of JC" to the heathen (i.e., folks like us). As with many religious movements, there are always a few crooks who take advantage of the proclivity of "true believers" to accept what "holy preachers" tell them uncritically, but most fundamentalist ministers are financially honest enough, as far as I can tell.
The interesting thing about the "fundies," to me, is that there is a strong strain of popular or populist resistance and skepticism about ideas they feel are imposed on them by "foreign" intellectual authorities. For example, they feel they are competent to judge the validity of theories such as evolution, liberal Biblical criticism, and socialism -- and their judgment is of course decidedly negative. The rejection of "foreign" socialism is tied up with the whole resistance to immigration going back a century or more.
Leftist fundamentalists and evangelicals like Jim Wallis may have a point that the U.S. left will have to bite the bullet and learn to speak to these folks in religious language, as he does, if it ever wants to reach them. I don't have the talent or the nerve to do this, but there are a few who are capable of it.
> The question in my mind is this, what means this reactionary religious
> sentiment in the US? Is it an indication of a tactical weakness of the
> US working class, or a tactical strength? That is to say, is state of
> class consciousness in the US so hopeless, thus giving rise to this
> religious mania? Or on the contrary perhaps are the US working class
> on the brink of an awakening of class consciousness and the religious
> fervour a desperate attempt to stave off such a disaster?
I belong to the school of thought that holds that "class consciousness" is not a particularly useful concept. Usually, it seems to me, "class consciousness" means "what *our* political party or grouplet thinks the working class *should* think." I.e., it's something the "true consciousness" folks are trying to force on other people, for whose intelligence they really don't have much respect. Instead, I think that cultural phenomena like working class fundamentalist religion *is* a type of class consciousness which doesn't need to be rooted out of workers' minds; rather, they need to be taught to see the anti-capitalist implications of that very consciousness, which is what people like Wallis are trying to do. There have been Left fundies before, and there is no reason why there can't be more of them.
Probably a large part of the problem is that the mass media (especially in parts of the country outside the Northeast and some parts of the West Coast) are in the hands of reactionaries who aren't about to let Left fundamentalist/evangelical ideas reach very many eyes and ears, any more than they are hospitable to any other Left ideas. But there are probably other obstacles too, which those who are closer students of fundamentalism than I could point out.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A sympathetic Scot summed it all up very neatly in the remark, 'You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk-dancing.' -- Sir Arnold Bax