Sunday, May 20, 2007
(11:44 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Reflections on the Religious Right
Reading Frank Rich's column this morning, it seems to me that the current conventional wisdom is that the religious right -- once declared all but omnipotent in the wake of its role in getting George W. Bush a commanding 51% victory in 2004 -- may now be on its way back to virtual irrelevance. I have long thought that despite the real dangers posed by the religious right, both in terms of policy influence and random outbreaks of violence, they are basically, at the end of the day, pathetic. Their political power only manifests itself when they are organized from the outside, most famously by the Machiavellian agnostic Karl Rove.I have come under a lot of harsh criticism in various corners of the blogosphere for taking the line that the religious right is not The True Danger. It has been suggested that this stems from some residual affection for the religious right. I can assure you that this is not the case -- but my position as a former "insider" does definitely play a role. First, I see how completely crazy the "true believers" really are, the kind of people who have really digested the talking points and want to push the stuff on everyone. These people can have real negative effects, and that shouldn't be unduly downplayed, but they're so incredibly naive and willfully ignorant that they're ultimately pretty ineffective in actually getting what they want. If Dr. Dobson is the leading political strategist in getting abortion outlawed, I think that abortion rights are pretty safe on the whole.
Second, and probably more importantly, I see that the rank-and-file evangelicals -- the "people in the pews" -- really don't hold too firmly to the "Kool-aid" type of stuff. Yes, they're patriotic, and yes, they'll tell you the right thing if you ask what they believe, but they are far from being totally brainwashed. I've seen too many people leave the evangelical movement, and I've had too many private conversations in which people have expressed skepticism on the reigning orthodoxy to believe that the average religious person is not open to persuasion.
The people who identify enough with it to become leaders and spokesmen (Dobson, Falwell, Robertson, et al.) are, for all practical purposes, total lost causes -- it would take a miracle to change them. But by and large, the "people in the pews" are really not like that. I don't have some prescription for how they can be reached, but I know it's possible. In fact, there seems to be a growing shift from within evangelical circles away from the culture war issues and toward social justice issues, including even the environment (which used to be a completely forbidden topic under the religious-right orthodoxy).
Again, I don't know exactly what will come of this, but it seems to further indicate that what I've called "religious-right hysteria" is misplaced. This is not to say that they're totally neutralized by any means, just to say that combatting the religious right doesn't seem to be the main front of the political battle. I'm more concerned with unfettered executive power, torture, endless war, etc. -- none of which are distinctively religious-right values, though the religious right does bear some definite responsibility for helping to enable the advocates of those things to take power. Overall, though, the religious right strikes me as too easy of a target, and as a target that is by now severely weakened. I understand the desire to continue kicking them when they're down, but perhaps if we secular left-wing types left them to nurse their wounds on their own, it would open up more of a space for them to recognize that they've been consistently duped by the Republican Party and are being callously cast aside now that they've outlived their usefulness.
