In my view, Doug's belief that most Americans love authoritarian politics has a more negative political implication than many Americans' belief in angels, though two beliefs are equally mythical. The thing is that well educated people like Doug don't recognize their own beliefs as myths, while being very good at spotting the myths held by less educated people. As a matter of fact, a widespread American belief in angels is contrary to the authoritarian inclination that Doug attributes to most Americans. Authoritarians should believe in Satan and hell rather than angels and heaven, but most Americans' religious beliefs have become more liberal, tolerant, and ecumenical -- the politics of the Christian Right is a reaction to that change:
<blockquote>In the Bible, the devil appears, most famously, as Job's tormentor and Jesus' tempter. ("Get thee hence, Satan," Jesus declares in Matthew 4:10, rebuking the devil for having offered him "all the kingdoms of the world.")
So if less than one in three Americans seems willing to give the devil his due, academic authorities say, then that is a result of fundamental, long-term shifts in the nation's religious culture.
R. Scott Appleby, a historian at the University of Notre Dame, said that within the Roman Catholic Church, the influence of the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s and the broader ecumenical movement, together with a greater interest by church authorities in the behavioral sciences, had pushed aside much discussion of hell and the devil.
Appleby, director of the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at Notre Dame, cited an academic study of sermons preached by parish priests in the 1980s. It showed that talk of Satan "had diminished markedly," while far more emphasis was placed on topics like loving one's neighbor and being a good steward of the earth and its resources.
E. Brooks Holifield, professor of American church history at Emory University, said that among many Protestants, belief in the devil probably fell during "three big shifting points" in their religious culture -- in the 1830s, the 1890s and the 1920s -- when an emergent theological liberalism overrode Calvinist and fundamentalist thinking. (Gustav Neibuhr, "Poll Indicates Diminished Role of Devil," New York Times, <http://faculty.plts.edu/gpence/html/satan.html>, May 10, 1997)</blockquote>
>BUT, even by the late 80s, it had been debunked by growing evidence
>that the people turning to conservative religions were not
>stereotypically "white trash". They were, instead, more likely to be
>from the 3 br, 2 ba, 3 cg middle, uhm er, class, and a good number
>of them from the professional-managerial, er -- okay -- strata.
That's what I have been saying: e.g, <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20050221/004073.html>. -- Yoshie
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