However, one must also ask just what the progressive strategic utility of any patriarchal monotheism is in the contemporary United States. In the past it has been considerable. Apologists for faith like Michael Kazin never tire of trotting out the Abolitionist and Civil Rights Movements as examples of how crucial religion has been. True enough.
Obviously the abolition of slavery and the enfranchisement of a whole portion of the population were key advances. But the fact that democratic rights for African-American people had to come under such retrograde auspices is a symptom of American exceptionalism and of the general backwardness of the US left. Politically it would be sectarian to fail to make do with what resources are out there, and for example, to have shunned the Civil Rights Movement because clerics had a large leadership rôle, but it also is realistic to notice how meager these resources are.
Moreover, these two examples religion's progressive strategic utility are extremely dated in one case and fairly dated in the other. The gendering of most domestic US issues makes religion less and less applicable to progressive politics. Any political economic politics of social welfare needs to address the gendering of debate on family policy. This ties political-economic issues directly to the issues feminism and the gay movements raise. So too, issues of racism, which more and more become issues of the way women of color get stigmatized. Not surprising that many African-American clergy have begun to make rapprochements with the Republicans. An example would be Floyd Flake.
None of this touches on the longer-range relationship between patriarchal monotheism and capitalism. Even when it opposes policies of some capitalists, or even capitalism itself, it tends to do so on the basis of compassion, a fundamentally retrograde political emotion, however admirable it may be on an interpersonal level. The link between patriarchal monotheism is historical and intimate, and the facile attempts of religious leftists to ignore it are not helpful.
Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema
Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema