roachboy

thanks for posting that, mojo:
for me at least it helped quite alot in making sense of your position.

some questions:
1.
i have never really understood the version of the history of america that starts with plymouth and then works its way outward--while it works formally, that is chronologically (chronology is in itself a factor, but not necessarily an explanatory factor, in ordering historical material)--what it also does it to drag the particular issues that motivated the particular factions within the english puritan movement to emigrate across the whole history of the states, and with that also drags the centrality not just of religion and the "escape from religious persecution" but radical protestant ideology across that history, as if everything that happened thereafter was somehow shaped by the same motivation, by the same issues--which even a cursory look at the diverse histories of the colonial period shows to be false empirically.
even in massachusetts, the puritan communities were not long the only game in town--the area around gloucester was founded on quite different, more commercially oriented grounds (though it might seem a strange book to cite here, charles olson's maximus poems are about this counterhistory, renarrating the early history of america around a different mythology)...the various stories of the colonies running north to south are well known, the distinctions between them obvious (e.g. the cavalier culture of virginis--a playground for the second sons of the english aristocracy who were doomed from birth by way of primogeniture has nothing to do with the puritans--the history of georgia has nothing to do with the puritans--the history of new york has nothing to do with the puritans--nor maryland (catholic)--and on and on.)

so the idea that from the outset the u.s. was geared around religion seems more an ideological than historical narrative. but you run into this ideological narrative in elementary school and later, presented as if it was The history of the states. if you keep going, taking university-level classes for example which do not work around the same assumptions, and then go back to the starting point, you find things are strange indeed.

the small (and still-marginal) "history" dear to some of the more important conservatives (from gingrich through--shudder--lynne cheney) is not only committed to the replacement of analysis with heroic mythology, but also would reinscribe the history of the states around this same plymouth narrative--but in their case, the motives for doing so are obvious--it is about the claims they are making in the present, which they want to backwrite. which brings us to the conservative instrumentalization of christianity....

secondly: for myself at least, when i react to posts in various threads about islam, it is usually motivated by either factual errors or by the sense that islam is now the object of "legitimate" racism--its "legitimacy" follows from its centrality in packaging the war footing that the bush administration has exploited and continues to exploit for its own ends. most assertions from folk who i take to be conservative about islam--about "fundamentalism" in particular (because this is almost inevitably the wedge that starts or anchors the arguments) are based on no research whatsoever, no attempt to figure out who people are where they come out of what their goals are. too often you see the slide from "fundamentalism" as anchor point to a whole series of arbitrary assertions about the "nature" of islam, etc--which have everything to do with the degenerate state of discourse in the present context in the states and little or nothing to do with its purported object (islam).

this kind of racism strikes quite close to home for me.

that said, i dont think that you can simply stand this on its head, mojo, when it comes to thinking about the treatment accorded the christian right even in this thread--the positions outlined here tend to work from a much different level of familiarity with the object, and work to split apart claims made to the basic category "christian". secondly, they are made from within a particular ideological context which is and has been the object of a sustained campaign mounted in the context of what the neocons have understood from the early 80s (at least) as being a cultural war. within that campaign, the rhetoric of christianity has operated in very particular ways to structure the belief system itself (conservative ideology) and as a trope within that system that tends to be associated with the most intolerant, more regressive aspects of conservative social policy.

for me at least, for what its worth, when i talk about the christian right, it usually has to do with this political correlation. the effects of the politics that tries to define the term christian in one way and one way only tend to be a problem in my view. i try to limit what i say to this register--whether i manage it or not is another matter, and comes down to obscurity on my part or a slipping in mode brought about by getting annoyed as i write--which are my problems.

i sometimes wonder what kind of correlation really exists between individual evangelicals and the ideology created and floated in the name of evangelical christianity. one of my oldest friends is an evangelical preacher--his particular politics are very very different from the ideology that would speak in the name of the religious position he occupies. but i find that he allows that ideology to structure his views on topics that are more removed from his immediate experience/involvements. i expect that there is considerable diversity of position within the actual evangelical protestant communities. it is curious that you do not really hear about such diversity as i assume exists.

thinking about these questions from this angle serves to isolate the ways in which the word christianity is used and manipulated by conservative ideology from the positions occupied by individual believers. i find that seperation strange.

once again, my apologies for the length of this post.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite