When Yoshie first broadened her "populist-religions-better-MLs-than-MLs" line to attempt to include the US awhile ago, I suspected she had a broader ideological hypothesis behind the scenes we were seeing glimpses of. So it's good to see a straight-up mission statement on the subject.
And I'm really, really, really in favor of any operational plan for the left that involves us engaging with ordinary religious people instead of smaller and smaller sects of each other exclusively.
But before going into any big picture world-historical-ideological-whatevers, isn't it worth point out the obvious? How on EARTH is a left bent on whittling itself down to smaller and smaller islands of purity, and fighting bizzarre doctrinal disputes that have nothing to do with 99% of the people in our country, and incapable of engaging politically with people whose views are even somewhat different than our own, ever POSSIBLY going to engage politically with religious america, which is infinitely MORE challenging to get down with for a lefto? You want to have smackdown debates about who is more islamophobic because they don't support the right shia party, or dismiss the 'left-wing of capital' (which as far as I can tell means mainstream leftists in the US), or wouldn't vote for Strickland over Blackwell (Yoshie?), or whatever? I got news for ya--- you ain't seen nuthin in terms of false consciousness yet!
Certainly I stand my ground in some (when you think about it) unnecessarily shrill arguments about unions or whole foods or whatever, but other than e-mail and beers with friends, I talk to nobody but working-class republicans every day, and go to these churches most sunday. And I just have a hard time imagining someone hawking a trot paper at them, much less building a political movement there. Not that I'm saying it shouldn't be done, but, ...
And don't go there about mainline congregations, small and shrinking and upper middle class, where lefties who sit on policy boards issue left resolutions about political issues the general membership couldn't care less about. Or the unitarian universalists, the nice folks thomas jefferson was pretty sure would be a majority of the us population by now, who are probably a bit smaller in size than freedom road socialist organization at this point. Or american judaism, which has a smaller presence in the US working class than many of the smallest and wackiest christian sects.
No, if you're talking about us getting with the religion that is going to dominate the hell out of future american spiritual life, we gotta talk about megachurches, we gotta talk about the pentecostalists!, the Mormons! The Jehova's Witnesses (of whom five people in the service unit I'm working on at the elko hospital now can't join the union because its against their religion), assemblies of god, missouri synod, church of the nazarene, holyness christianity, the megachurch on the edge of town, the rubes who actually attended Ted Haggard's sermons all these meth-smoking-blowjob years. We gotta talk about TD Jakes, Left Behind, the purpose driven life and the Ray of Jabez. Yeah, some goofy fucking shit! The big kahuna of them all, the southern baptists--- who are a lot bigger (-outside- of the south!) than almost any other denomination!
I do believe you'll find some 'insufficiently anti-imperialst' positions there.
However, having shouted all that through chortled laughter, I have to say I applaud the effort yoshie is taking in rethinking our un-sacred cows and re-engaging with the thought of most ordinary people in this country. And also, events as they accelerate in Iraq do seem to be bearing out some of her points about Sadr. So much so I get the feeling he may not still be alive for us to argue about this time next month. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20061201/08949f66/attachment.htm>