This is just pisses me off:
Campaigns only remind evangelicals what they have already learned from their religious community: that voting Republican is a natural extension of what it means to be a good Christian. This message is not just reinforced from the top-down during campaign season, by Christian Right interest groups and campaign ads. It is also reinforced from the bottom-up by trusted local leaders who are part of people’s everyday lives.
If we want to increase midterm voting among groups who stayed home, we need to ask who the local opinion leaders might be to reach low-propensity voters. What local settings could play the role of an evangelical small group or Bible study? Where do people learn that voting is expected of them, to be a good member of their network, in a context of personal accountability? And what is the organizational vehicle that will identify and develop these local leaders, who will engage a much larger set of low-propensity voters in year-round base-building? You’ve got to hand it to conservative evangelicals: they really have all of this down.
I am a lapsed Episcopalian but I retain enough of the values of my Christian upbringing that it still makes my blood boil to think of people voting Republican because that’s just what “good Christians” do.
In the long run, fixing that widespread perception might be as important as figuring out how to be similarly effective in turning out our own natural base.
The state tortured Jesus, you maniacs.
Tribalism, x2.
This.
It’s about the tribe. Don’t worry about what,uh, Jesus actually taught.
Just look to your bigoted, “Christian” neighbor. He votes Republican, so you do too.
Because you, like your neighbor, is a good Christian.
What is interesting is the clergy preaches from the pulpit to their flocks to vote GOP. Yet the GOP pushes policies that are directly in opposition to what the Bible teaches. Thus I look upon the clergy as those Jesus called “Wolves in sheep clothing”. These are the very ones that Jesus warned his followers about staying away from.
Well, there really is no “organizational vehicle that will identify and develop these local leaders” that is not also littered from top to bottom with the same people who are sitting in pews every week hearing the gospel of conservative ideology constantly woven into the fabric of the religious message from the pulpit. I think the marriage of fundamentalist Christianity and conservative politics is one which simply will not ever be broken.
There is apparently nothing radical or offensive enough that Republicans can say or do that people cannot find a way to justify in their mind as “god’s will”. And that is because, at their root, the religious mind and the conservative political mind are wired pretty much in the same way. Desire for a well ordered world with a top down hierarchy, absolute deference to authority, devotion to the tribe, a loathing of nuance and relativism, and strong loyalty to tribal customs and norms. It really is a marriage made in heaven (no pun intended).
There really is no liberal equivalent almost anywhere. There is a reason for the analogy that organizing liberals and Dems is like herding cats. Because it’s true. But when politics is framed to religious people, even in a very subtle way, as being in line with god’s will, that is really all that is needed to set the tribal juices flowing and send them streaming to man the battle stations while singing “Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war. With the cross of Jesus, going on before”. Christians are always just one step away from a battle footing. All it takes is a simple reaffirmation from the pulpit that they are, once again, under seige by the forces of darkness and they are instantly in lock-step.
There used to be private sector unions. Once they began to be disappeared, public sector unions began to fill in some of the gap. Now those unions are being pummeled. Except for police, prison guard, and firefighter unions — not sure they have to organize to get their members to vote.
The state didn’t torture Jesus. That was enhanced interrogation.
That’s completely retarded thinking (at best!).
For whatever negative stories written about parochial schools (Catholic) — the harsh nuns I had @ St. Albert the Great (1960’s) — would always remind us kids — “put on your thinking caps!”.
I took that as the green light to really think original thoughts – political or otherwise.
Screw the Christian Right — they couldn’t think their way out of a wet paper bag!!!!
But Jesus was a good guy. I got out of my moms moving car during a discussion about torture in 2009. My family was to torture then. I wonder how they feel about torturing an innocent man to death.
Confusing the terms ‘good Christian’ and ‘religious bigot.’
I’ve long pointed out that those big box churches did not sprout up out of nowhere based on the shoestring budgets of their “flocks”. There is a funding source and that is the same funding source that is behind the right wing thinktank network and astroturf organizations.
And of all the investments made by right wing billionaires, big box churches and the media networks that feed the smaller churches is the most effective. They are not buying votes for a single election, they are building a permanent vote-generating machine.
Here in fundie-paradise (El Paso County, Colorado, home to Colorado Springs and headquarters of literally over 100 Xtian organizations led by Focus on the Family) the evidence for this is overwhelming. You see new wingnut churches sprouting up constantly. They start in someone’s home, then start putting up road signs every Saturday and Sunday next to the open house signs. If successful they eventually scrape together enough funds to rent a local facility – usually a school cafeteria or auditorium or maybe a community center rec room – and increase their weekend roadside advertising. They all have a schtick designed to make them stand out against all of the competition, and ideally a clever name (our local middle schools becomes the “Fuel Church” on Sundays – “fuel for the soul” don’t you see?). It’s actually a good source of supplemental income for the schools and community centers.
The thing is this – having watched this for now over 9 years I’ve found that they NEVER get the funds to build one of those huge monumental churches. At best – in rare cases – they eventually manage to rent a small building that used to be someone else’s church and to do it up with volunteer labor.
So how did people like the infamous Ted Haggard (you remember him – the anti-gay preacher featured in Jesus Camp caught in 2006 doing meth-fed gay sex with a prostitute?) go from no congregation at all to founding the New Life Church and it’s facility costing 10s of millions of dollars in the north of Colorado Springs? He didn’t get it from his congregation – it’s not possible. Someone saw in charismatic methods a person who could lead thousands of people (14 thousand at the time he was deposed) to vote Republican.
In historic times the church was an extension of the state, and played a key role in keeping the feudal populace in line. Often there was a struggle for power between the church and the leaders of the state – hence Henry VIII kicking out the Catholics and forming his own Church of England. But in all cases the relationship was symbiotic.
This is the primary reason the founders so distrusted organized religion and wanted it strictly out of government.
Today the right wing church network is again serving the same purpose, but for only one political party.