>SDS chapters in Texas were heavily influenced by radical left
>Christianity.
I wonder if we shouldn't view the influence of religion on the US left as not as something to be celebrated or noted but instead yet another symptom of the American left's weakness. A country founded by a bunch of religious nuts just can't escape the curse...
And then there's this, an excerpt from Adolph Reed's book on Jesse Jackson <http://www.autodidactproject.org/quote/reedjess.html>:
>Assertions that organic, clerical legitimations preempt those
>[secular] procedures, on the contrary, remove churchly agendas from
>the arena of orderly public scrutiny and debate. The principle of
>religious superordination might adequately reflect the preferences
>of those who identify with the church, but it potentially sabotages
>democratic organization of the contemporary black polity. This is
>hardly to deny the possible limitations of electoral proceduralism;
>however, if commitment to the value of democracy is to be
>maintained, challenges to the adequacy of proceduralism must emanate
>from a more open and more extensively participatory standard of
>representation. Appeal to such a standard is conspicuously absent
>from notions alleging representative priority of church-based
>legitimations among Afro-Americans.
>
>The rhetoric of organic or primalistic authenticity surrounding
>assertions of the church's special political status covers a model
>of authority that is antithetical to participatory representation.
>As Frazier indicated, "the pattern of control and organization of
>the Negro church has been authoritarian, with a strong man in a
>dominant position." The basis of clerical authority lies outside the
>temporal world and is not susceptible to secular dispute. The
>community constituted in the church is not reproduced through open
>discourse but is bound by consensual acceptance of a relation that
>vests collective judgment in the charismatic authority of the
>minister. The status of superordinate ministerial authority can be
>acquired through vocation or being "called." However, once attained,
>that status uncouples the minister from the body of the faithful
>and-because of the assumption of privileged clerical access to
>divine purposes mysterious to others-exonerates clerical leadership
>from susceptibility to secular criticism.
>
>This model of authority is fundamentally antiparticipatory and
>antidemocratic; in fact, it is grounded on a denial of the
>rationality that democratic participation requires. Diane Johnson,
>in an essay that includes the distinctive style of black charismatic
>religion among several factors that led to the massacre at
>Jonestown, observes that this black religious style devalues "the
>powers of analysis and penetration that education supposedly
>confers." Black ministers, she notes, "in particular sustain a
>traditional style of histrionic worship in which real and false
>prophets are . . . easily confused." Frazier argues, moreover, that
>because of its important role in the social organization of the
>black community, the church's distinctive patterns of authority have
>exerted a powerful authoritarian force in the elaboration of
>Afro-American institutions in general, a consequence of which has
>been a chronic and extensive undervaluation of democratic processes
>in the black community. The church and religion, Frazier concludes,
>"have cast a shadow over the entire intellectual life of Negroes."
>This antiparticipatory and antiintellectual impetus deauthorizes the
>principle of individual autonomy, which is the basis of citizenship,
>and-when combined with the church's intrinsically antitemporal
>eschatological orientation-mandates quietism, political and
>otherwise. [pp. 56-57]