That's that is often forgotten. Every now and then, though, some conservative, upon looking at the statistics that show that African-Americans are by and large, theologically quite conservative, gets the bright idea that political conservatives can base an appeal to African-Americans on that basis. This, however, never gets very far.
Jim Farmelant http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant
---------- Original Message ---------- From: SA <s11131978 at gmail.com> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] M. Parenti joins the New Atheists? Date: Thu, 25 Mar 2010 13:49:45 -0400
Doug Henwood wrote:
>> In the present thread the error appears in the form of explaining the
>> politics of fundamentalists in terms of their religius thought rather
>> than explaining their religious thought in terms of their politics.
>
> You mean that fundamentalism as a pre-existing condition of American
> life has no effect on the political evolution that people take? That
> the religiosity of Americans compared to other first worlders isn't
> something of interest to be explained, but just some sort of secondary
> phenomenon?
I think Carrol has the better of this argument. Let's look at the effect of fundamentalism on Americans' politics:
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/306623.html
> Table 4.1 Votes for Democrats in the 1992-2000 presidential elections
> by race and denomination
>
> Bible is:
> Word of God 96 92 34 40
> Inspired word 94 89 37 47
> Book of Fables 86 -a 54 61
The above table is too complicated to fully label in email, so here's what it is: The first two columns are blacks: members of Black Protestant denominations, then "other." The second two columns are white Protestants: members of conservative denominations, then mainline denominations.
As the essay at the link discusses (an excerpt from Michael Hout's recent book, which I haven't yet read), blacks are the most "fundamentalist" demographic group in the county, and the most pious, yet they also vote Democrat far more than any other. And blacks are almost certainly the demographic core of the ~20% of the US pop who Doug says form the potential base for a social democratic politics.
So what exactly is the political effect of believing in the inerrancy of the bible?
SA ___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
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