The religious right that formed to defeat Southern Baptist Jimmy Carter, the integrationist, and elect Ronald Reagan the Church of Christ messiah as President should have pointed out that political religiosity is about anointment (in the symbolic sense) of leaders to push their agendas against the Constitutional restrictions. The blog Autostraddle, which supports people’s freedom to depart from strict binary sexuality has an article about someone who just could not fit within the religious right despite being homeschooled to be part of the new Joshua’s army.
This article is about grassroots organizing and pooling of funds to first take over a political party and then take over one government after another. What the so-called New Left thought it was doing but didn’t. What the Democratic Party never in its history ever did.
And what the resistance of whatever the opposition party to Trump-Pence-ism must do and do more quickly than did the religious right.
Unless you have read Jeffrey Sharlet’s C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy, you might want to click through and read this first-person account before commenting. What you think you know about the religious right and how it has developed over the past decade are quite strikingly out of alignment–so much so that it is likely polling is no longer going to ever be a valid way of analyzing politics. Might have to go back to the old-fashioned politico’s way of assessing party strength. Tour the town on a Monday (or the traditional wash day). Count the houses with pajamas on the line as Republicans, the ones without as Democrats.
Why resistance must work at the grassroots and watch Pence more carefully than we watched Cheney. And watch who the religious right keeps backing in Congress and which scared Democrats start drifting in this sectarian orbit.
And “messiah” in the sense used here does not mean The Messiah necessarily, unless he unleashes those Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Otherwise, just someone with the legitimacy of having been oiled up.
