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For those offended by The C Word....
Sep. 17th, 2004 02:43 pm...move along. It's okay..
>>The priorities of the religious right are in fact more cultural than religious.
Take this lobby’s strong support of capital punishment. It received supporting arguments from religion, but it is grounded in patterns of social control that includes racist lynching and vigilantism. It is deeply cultural, coming from a long tradition of southern militarism and frontier justice.
The religious right, to the extent that it is political, is merely a creature of the political right itself rather than a movement that gave rise to the right. As an appendage and supplicant, it has been used and abused by the political right wing in its quest for power. For all the ballyhoo over its alleged power, most evident in Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition or Jerry Falwell’s earlier Moral Majority, such campaigns have been confined to those issues on which it already finds consensus with the larger secular conservative movement, such as its opposition to gay rights.
In any case, religion loses its soul when it morphs into a set of rules such as the religious right is now pressing, from prayer in schools to a ban on abortions.
Since the time of Roman Emperor Constantine, the church was always absorbed within the empire or was made into a “state church.”
Our nation’s founders made it possible for religion to enter the public square freely for the first time in 1,500 years. The U.S. Constitution insisted on separation. That gave religion a chance to do things differently, the freedom to speak its conscience.
How tragic if that blessing were squandered in idolatrous pursuit of the American Dream.
http://www.beliefnet.com/story/152/story_15276_2.html
>>The priorities of the religious right are in fact more cultural than religious.
Take this lobby’s strong support of capital punishment. It received supporting arguments from religion, but it is grounded in patterns of social control that includes racist lynching and vigilantism. It is deeply cultural, coming from a long tradition of southern militarism and frontier justice.
The religious right, to the extent that it is political, is merely a creature of the political right itself rather than a movement that gave rise to the right. As an appendage and supplicant, it has been used and abused by the political right wing in its quest for power. For all the ballyhoo over its alleged power, most evident in Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition or Jerry Falwell’s earlier Moral Majority, such campaigns have been confined to those issues on which it already finds consensus with the larger secular conservative movement, such as its opposition to gay rights.
In any case, religion loses its soul when it morphs into a set of rules such as the religious right is now pressing, from prayer in schools to a ban on abortions.
Since the time of Roman Emperor Constantine, the church was always absorbed within the empire or was made into a “state church.”
Our nation’s founders made it possible for religion to enter the public square freely for the first time in 1,500 years. The U.S. Constitution insisted on separation. That gave religion a chance to do things differently, the freedom to speak its conscience.
How tragic if that blessing were squandered in idolatrous pursuit of the American Dream.
http://www.beliefnet.com/story/152/story_15276_2.html
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