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Pretty damned depressing. The above implies Gallup was attempting to find the influence of the then rising rightwing Christians. Which in turn implies that they had already achieved their major standing as a voting block and have remained more or less a fixature of US politics.
The first anti-abortion demonstration I saw was on Dwight a couple blocks down from where I live now, back in the late Seventies and thought a bus load of crazies from the South had decided to bring their bullshit message to Berkeley. That was the location of the local city hospital--Herrick. The demonstrators were not from around here (obvious from their straight clothes) and were extraordinarily obnoxious and wondered into traffic waving their signs, like they had seen on tv. I thought, it was absurd or funny---the right was imitating the left, especially in Berkeley.
Anyway, they stayed for months on end and every few years after that they were back.
Meanwhile back at church, in my youth, down in the LA-Hollywood area, the only thing that kept me from staging a majory shit fit at twelve was the youth program had been taken over by a couple guys who were queer and who had organized a local recreation program for LA metro neighborhood kids who lived nearby. The local kids didn't have to go to church, but they certainly made use of the big gym and basketball court in the church basement. The counselors were in their late twenties and a hell of a lot of fun. Most of the kids knew they were queer and just kept a certain tought-kid distance---or I assume they did. Anyway these guys were great. They took us all out to the beach, the mountains, the desert, various events around town.
Here's one of the culture trips. There was a strong black revival movement in that period and a whole circuit of singers, choirs, and visiting preachers would show up in LA on their tours from the south and midwest. So our counselors decided we mostly white, mexican, and a few black kids needed exposure to our christian roots or something like that. So they took us for a Sunday night revival performance (dress suits, white shirts, ties manditory)---it was the first time I had ever seen anything like it. Big women in white, belting out for Jesus, deacons dressed in all black singing Ahmen and clapping their hands. It was like rock and roll---well in my thirteen year old mind---and it was being broadcast on AM radio.
They took us to the Sierras for my first back packing trip. This was a hilarious trek to the wilderness for city kids. We stopped to gas the flat bed covered rental trucks up in Long Pine (The LA YMCA was actually funding this trip). I hopped out of the back to make it to the tolites--only to find all the kids in the cramped tolite were lighting up. Oh, yeah, we be smoking for jesus.
Years later, I realized these guys were wannaba be teachers and social workers doing their thing for city kids and they were great at it. They had been kids themselves in the same north-central areas, wasted in the WWII years in the vast empty city vacant lots and streets, wondering around, getting into trouble and they identified with at least some of us. Their queerness was somehow part of that. They were the tought-guy variety or working class version---something admirable about that. Real heros. If they scored now and then, so what? We cut quite a wild figure in rural California and relished the local scorn.
We were little fucking christian nightmares from hell.