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bor: i am not sure that i understand what is going on with your posts here.
1. to say that the cc "is just like any other special interest group" may be true if you assume that all interest groups have always operated as they do now--but that would be false.
ralph reed--as much as i loathe the guy--is pretty slick and has in fact developed from very innovative ways to both mobilize folk and to create the impression of mobilization. the second one is linked to developing switches that enables telephone canvassers who worked on behald of the coalition to patch people directly through to their congressperson's office if they answered correctly on a series of issue-specific questions. the first is more powerful and dangerous--reed was instrumental in trying to erase any meaningful line between evangelical churches and political entities---so that it became ok for a church to use its buses to get parishoners to voting booths--after they have been coached, of course, via voter guides and the words of preachers, about which way god wanted them to act once they were inside the booths.
this is new--politics and religion have not always been collapsed into each other in this way--and the christian coalition is--empirically--a basic force behind the development.
2. i dont know about you, but i think there is kind of a problem with preachers using their power within a church to tell people how god wants them to vote. seems a bit---o what's the word---authoritarian, doesnt it?
and it happens. i have experienced it in my wayward youth, i know preachers who do it, the cc website encourages it...and you do not get this in catholic churches--you might get the priest telling you the church's position--but it is the churches position. god does not tell people how to vote.
seems to me that if devoutly religious folk impute some authority to a preacher because they imagine him or her closer to god, or endowed with more wisdom then they are, then that preacher has alot of power--it also seems to me that telling people that god wants them to vote one way or another is an abuse of that power.
but hey, maybe i just put too much stock in the illusion to separation fo church and state on the one hand, and in the idea that democracy, even in its pathetic american form, involves at some level people gathering information and making decisions on issues based on that information.
3. i get the impression that you think whenever someone uses the term christian fundamentalist that they are really dissing entire regions of the country. i dont understand this--particularly not in this particular thread, where the "bickering" (as you do nicely describe it) has mostly to do with refuting blanket statements that were initially imputed back to host, but which in the end turned out to be examples of poor argument.
so i dont understand.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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