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Old 10-21-2008, 12:46 PM   #30 (permalink)
roachboy
 
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abaya---i know that evangelical does not denote a monolithic entity---the more public far right face of the movement is a direct result of the work done by the christian coalition under ralph reed during the late 1980s-1990s.

to wit, wikipedia style:
Ralph E. Reed, Jr. - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

so there's a reason that far right politics and evangelical protestants tend to get grouped together--and making that linkage is still an impressive organizational accomplishment, not matter what you think of the consequences of it in other areas.

i too passed through one of these organizations in my wayward youth. but it wasn't until circumstances too curious to be detailed here landed me at the "word of life bible institute" marooned on some island in upstate new york that i started to get a sense of how the reactionary politics<-->evangelical thing worked. it seemed predicated on an abuse of power on the part of the people with strange ideas about hairstyle who were in the pulpits--word of life were among the organizations that funded anita bryant's anti-gay people campaign, which was a kind of foreshadowing of things to come.

fact is that there are ALOT of organizations that are populated by folk for whom there is no break between a literal interpretation of the bible and politics that are classically poujadiste.
it is also the case that the xitan soldier thing sits in a strange relationship with the message of the gospels, and that it typically gets turned into an outside (the xtian souljah)/inside (love and all) split.

at the same time, one of my oldest and dearest friends was an evangelical preacher. he runs a halfway house for men with substance abuse issues now. he materially helps people in often really fucked up situations more than almost all the academic leftist types i know together. and tempermentally, his politics run to the left, until the statements about politics get explicit, and then things flip (if you cite gramsci at him without telling him it's gramsci, he'll be in agreement: but tell him who that was and...less these days, though.)

and it stands to reason that there'd be splits within the evangelical protestant movements that double those in catholicism between quite socially left lay people and more reactionary officialdom, and that this can play out on a church-by-church basis , one running in direction a, another in b....but since we're talking about the responses to the change in political fortunes of the far-right coalition that the republicans have been in bed with since the end of the reagan period, and the inability of elements within that coalition to deal with those changing fortunes, i figured the frame was tight enough that it wasn't necesssary to start with the acknowledgments of diffuseness on the ground.

like whitehead said, in nature everything is ragged at the edges. only signifiers make the world seem sharply bounded.
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