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(Photo: Dale Morrow/iStock)
The New Secular Fundamentalist Conspiracy!
By Frederick Clarkson
The Public Eye, Spring 2008
One of the most remarkable, and least remarked upon, features of the contemporary discussion of faith in public life is that a defining feature of the religious right worldview has filtered deeply into mainstream and even progressive thought. This defining feature is the idea that somehow God, and/or Christianity, and/or “people of faith” are being driven from “the public square.” It is a powerfully animating idea for many Americans; yet it is rarely factually supported and even more rarely challenged.
Interestingly, much of this distortion hinges on a single word. The word is “secular” and such variants as “secular humanists,” “secular fundamentalists,” and just plain “secularists.” While the word has simple and benign definitions, the word is also the touchstone of a powerful and usually subterranean set of meanings that often makes it a term of derision and demonization.
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Living in the Gap
The Ideal and the Reality of the Christian Right Family
By Jeremy Adam Smith
The Public Eye, Winter 2007
People who make it their business to track and fight the Right tend, with good reason, to focus on public, political activity, but the Christian Right sees the private home as a major arena of political struggle and a showcase for the world they want to live in. According to key thinkers, the single-family home - awash with enough sentiment to drown an entire city - might be the closest thing the Christian Right has to an actually existing utopian experiment.
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Churches Under Seige
Exposing the Right's Attacks on Mainline Protestantism
By John Dorhauer
The Public Eye, Summer 2007
The Institute on Religion and Democracy is a well-funded, under the radar organization bent on fomenting dissent within and demoralizing from without Mainline Protestant denominations. It works by turning internal disagreements away from dialogue and into all out battles at which the very life of a congregation is at stake. Even if a church remains within a denomination, too often its social justice agenda is silenced. Read More...
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The Yearly Kos conference
included a track of workshops looking at the Religious Right.
Two of these workshops featured PRA Senior
Analyst Chip Berlet, and Public Eye editorial
board member and contributor Frederick Clarkson.
Chip created a special webpage for people to
download the materials he distributed (or
recommended) at his workshops.
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PRA Live at Values Voters Summit
 Visit PRA-Wire for special coverage of the Christian Right's national political conference, the 2007 "Values Voters" Summit in Washington, DC October 19th – 21st. This gathering of thousands of conservative Christian evangelical activists from around the country featured all of the Republican presidential candidates and leading Right Wing strategists addressing such issues as abortion, "the homosexual agenda," the threats posed to national security by immigration and Islam, racial reconciliation, and voter mobilization.
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The U.S. Christian Right – the largest player in the "Religious Right" - is an overlapping network of religiously based social movements linked to the political realm through the Republican Party and groups such as the Family Research Council. Christians have always been active in the political and social life of the nation, but this recent manifestation grew as a backlash movement to the social liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s: civil rights, women's rights, and gay rights.
Dominionism is a trend in Protestant Christian evangelicalism and fundamentalism that encourages not just active participation in civic life but also attempts to dominate the political process. This is based on the Bible's text in Genesis 1:26, which most mainline denominational Christians (Episcopal, Methodist, United Church of Christ, Presbyterian) interpret as meaning that God gave humankind dominion over the Earth as a mandate for stewardship rather than for asserting total control. For the Christian Right, it justifies their campaign to re-establish America as the Christian nation it believes it once was.
The Christian Right as primarily composed of three main groupings: Christian Conservatives, Christian Nationalists, and Christian Theocrats, defined by how far each is willing to step outside democratic and pluralist principles of civil society to enforce their views. |
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