As a person who finds his spiritual base in a strange mix of Buddhism and paganism,

[Jackpine Radical]

I often scratch my poor bald head in wonder as I contemplate certain aspects of religion in America.

Perhaps the greatest strategic coup that the right wing ever pulled off was the co-optation of the Christian fundamentalists. People today seem to have no historical awareness of the fact, but many, many evangelicals were social liberals in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The anti-slavery movement was largely the work of Quakers and other religious people.

Certainly the political positions of typical religionists did not map onto modern progressivism with any precision, but the number of parallels is amazing. Take, for example, William Jennings Bryan. Most people, if they know of him at all, know only that he was the lawyer who defended the State's anti-Darwinist law against Clarence Darrow in the 1925 Scopes trial. But here is Wikipedia on Bryan:

Bryan was a devout Presbyterian, a supporter of popular democracy, a critic of banks and railroads, a leader of the silverite movement in the 1890s, a leading figure in the Democratic Party, a peace advocate, a prohibitionist, an opponent of Darwinism, and one of the most prominent leaders of populism in the late 19th - and early 20th century. Because of his faith in the goodness and rightness of the common people, he was called "The Great Commoner."
In the intensely fought 1896 and 1900 elections, he was defeated by William McKinley but retained control of the Democratic Party. For presidential candidates, Bryan invented the national stumping tour. In his three presidential bids, he promoted Free Silver in 1896, anti-imperialism in 1900, and trust-busting in 1908, calling on Democrats, in cases where corporations are protected, to abandon states' rights, to fight the trusts and big banks, and embrace populist ideas. President Woodrow Wilson appointed him Secretary of State in 1913, but Wilson's handling of the Lusitania crisis in 1915 caused Bryan to resign in protest.

To me, it one of the great ironies of the 20th Century that the psychopaths managed to capture the religionists, making them totally forget the message of Christ in the process, converting a message of love, charity, and hope for change into a narrow hatred of certain out-groups, and that this great perversion has formed the basis of the right-wing power base ever since, They have been able to maintain the deception for 50 years now.