How Christian Tribalism Empowers Hardliners Against the Wishes of Most Americans

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/belief/how-christian-tribalism-empowers-hardliners-against-wishes-most-americans



The Christian right has long understood that in order to get the power they desire, they need to portray themselves as a group that is working for a majority. Sometimes they claim to speak for a majority of Americans and sometimes just for the majority of Christians, but either way, they understand that positioning themselves as spokespeople for a majority is an excellent way to push forward their agenda, even when that agenda is absolutely against what the majority actually wants. More than any other group in America, the Christian right knows that you can shove through a massively unpopular policy by appealing to people’s sense of identity and solidarity. Indeed, you can often get people to support you who would be utterly repulsed by your actual agenda.

How do they do it? They understand better than anyone how, in politics, identity trumps grittier concerns like actual policies. Labels like “conservative” or “Christian” create intra-group loyalty that allows the radicals within a group to push their agenda knowing that while the majority in their group may disagree with them, they won’t fight too hard because they don’t want to be accused of not being Christian or conservative enough.

Understanding how identity often matters more than belief is key to understanding how the religious right manages to gather so much power while pushing an agenda completely out of lockstep not just with the mainstream of America, but the mainstream of conservatism.

A good example of how this works is with the recent attempts by the anti-choice movement to undermine women’s access to contraception. Will Saletan, recently writing for Slate, denied that the anti-choice movement is any real threat to access to contraception, because the majority of self-identified pro-lifers, who are almost entirely self-identified Christians, actually support contraception. He triumphantly declared that one cannot believe the “pro-life” movement is really about misogyny.

[theHandpuppet]

1. And it goes beyond banning abortion

from the article...

A number of lawsuits trying to kill the mandatory contraception coverage policy in the Affordable Care Act have been successful, suggesting that it’s going to go to the Supreme Court soon. The anti-choice movement successfully kept emergency contraception off drugstore shelves for years, for no other real reason than it was a new contraception and therefore easier to politically organize against. And anti-choicers have successfully slashed family planning funds earmarked for pregnancy prevention and convinced the Republican party to repeatedly use the threat of a government shutdown to attempt to destroy contraception subsidies permanently.

These same forces are also fighting the teaching of sex education in schools.

[marmar]

2. k/r

[MisterP]

3. it reaches its ultimate extreme in Jack Chick, who warns us of "churchianity" and wants his idiots

to do Bible study--because They'll get you for reading on your own: he hates *Protestantism* as much as Catholicism

you can't be a RTC unless you deny global warming/evolution/sphericity

(and, Garwood noted, if creationism/End Timerism/Satanic NWOism--why those but not any other Adventist heresy?)