Religious Right Thrives in a Red-Hot Vacuum
Laarman, Peter
Leo Ribuffo's mild rebuke of the left's typical response to American religiosity ("Religion, Politics, and the Latest Christian Right," Dissent, Spring 1995)—a response of horrified...
...Their leaders offer "answers," but more important, they supply a vehicle for the mobilization of moral energy...
...The muting of civil discourse that accompanies the meltdown of other mediating institutions goes a long way toward explaining how conservative churches become totalizing institutions in the lives of their adherents...
...It's SUMMER • 1995 • 389 Arguments too banal even to invite an articulated response...
...Ribuffo also doubts that the ascendancy of the "latest Christian right" is anything to be particularly exercised about, whereas I think it's more dangerous than previous incarnations, simply because the cultural situation is more dangerous...
...A left that wishes to be taken seriously again will have to bring more nuanced understandings of the new economic situation to the policy debate...
...As Sean Wilentz rightly points out in the same issue of Dissent ("Populism Redux"), the post390 • DISSENT Arguments Keynesian realities of the global economy are not quite as simple as all that...
...A powerful, organized movement for both economic and civil democracy could still redress this glaring power imbalance and greatly improve the life-prospects of current and future generations of ordinary citizens...
...this group's control over resources and power is won and maintained at the expense of justice and democratic principle...
...We will need to focus on the social location at which conservative religion and politics are fused...
...Not all the people gravitating toward "movement" churches these days experience economic anxieties, but many do...
...They displace their need for vindication and reward as the conviction that God will be their advocate and ultimate vindicator...
...Nevertheless, some things must not be nuanced away...
...Leo Ribuffo's mild rebuke of the left's typical response to American religiosity ("Religion, Politics, and the Latest Christian Right," Dissent, Spring 1995)—a response of horrified incomprehension— gets most of it right...
...In a society in which too many citizens don't know who their neighbors are—and don't care to know unless the neighbor's children would make suitable playmates for their own—the totalizing church becomes a substitute neighborhood, a substitute political club, a substitute source of identity and confirmation...
...In most parts of the country, the old gathering spots, the old conversation sites—the union hall, the vets' hall, the corner market, the PTA group, the political club—have all fallen silent...
...E-mail and talk radio can never replace such "back porch" political discourse because communication through these media never occurs as part of the natural rhythm of life...
...Although the most vulnerable in society are most directly victimized by the exercise of unrestrained greed, millions of heretofore middleclass Americans are also being set back and injured...
...Right-wing "movement" churches may lack a credible theology, but at least their adherents can say they have integrity—that they belong to their members in a way that the national political parties do not...
...Struggles "here below" are linked to a cosmic struggle whose outcome ensures that faithful saints will finally wear crowns of glory...
...Today's progressives, on the other hand, are thoroughly dispirited in the literal sense: they have no juice, no passion, no conviction at all that there is a new world waiting to be born...
...What people who have stopped reading and stopped speaking to one another experience is something akin to weightlessness: not only have the daily rhythms of interaction and conversation been suspended, but in their place the electronic culture offers only the passive consumption of schlock or the active discharge of bile by means of talk radio...
...SUMMER • 1995 • 391...
...history, organized movements for progressive change have been able to connect with the messianic and apocalyptic currents that crackle and seethe in the American psyche...
...Rather, these are media that tend to attract individuals with urgent ego needs or private obsessions: they are natural vehicles for cranks...
...To borrow Ted Solataroff's phrase of thirty years ago, the political mobilization of evangelical and fundamentalist churchgoers thrives in the red-hot vacuum created by the breakdown of other mediating institutions, by the trashiness and weightlessness of popular culture, and by the sham character of today's corporate-funded politics—our repellent Tweedledum and Tweedledee show...
...electoral politics completes the priming operation, lending newly militant churches still more legitimacy...
...The people thronging to the Church of Galloping Christ (or whatever) recognize that something is drastically wrong with wired mass-media culture: the culture of television, video games, and omnipresent amplified music...
...Absent a feisty, spirited, secular campaign to build the New Jerusalem, the churches appear to have the field of moral struggle all to themselves...
...We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old" certainly carries this raw messianic charge (as, of course, does Julia Ward Howe's original "Battle Hymn of the Republic" on which Ralph Chaplin based his labor anthem...
...The conservative totalizing church knows exactly what to do in this situation: it disperses the oppressive blue haze of cultural ennui in a flash by denouncing certain parts of the electronic culture as the devil's work while supplying its own firm structure of (divinely given) meanings...
...Socalled "gangsta rap" at least identifies itself for what it is, but the stupid, sleazy, cynical, violent stuff that passes for mainstream television programming carries no such plain label: it's just "what's on...
...Politically active right-wing church leaders can offer their flocks the best of both worlds: certain rewards in the life to come and a chance to smite Satan and his minions in this life by means of political interventions...
...I will treat each of these background factors briefly, then turn to the big lure in lurid religion: its vision of a new heaven and a new earth...
...There is an essentially religious story line here that progressives must learn to recognize and amplify...
...In case the collapse of other mediating institutions and the trashification of the common culture were not enough to make the totalizing church an appealing refuge for many Americans, the transparent fraudulence of U.S...
...There is clearly a dominant or ruling class in this country...
...At critical times in U.S...
...The modern civil rights movement succeeded in part because it could locate the struggle for black liberation within familiar biblical typologies...
...What's missing is a contemporary left with a biblical hunger for justice...
...Ribuffo is quite right to say that religiously based cultural concerns "are not easily trumped in the voting booth by economic concerns...
...The left has a far more legitimate claim to these images than the right...
...At a minimum, it signifies a widespread conviction that God rules the world, that evil will be punished and good rewarded, even that God will bring history to an end in a spectacular way: the same polls report that 60 percent of our citizens expect Jesus to return in the role of cosmic judge...
...Sociologists say that the fervent religion of the apocalyptic variety appeals most strongly to people whose this-worldly situations are marginal or threatened...
...Moreover, as I've indicated, there is an unprecedented degree of cultural desolation at work to give such churches unprecedented power over their adherents...
...There is certainly no shortage of biblical images and analogues available to describe principal elements of the growing economiccum-ethical crisis...
...But that's in part because, with very rare exceptions, leaders on the left do not know how to bring the heat of righteous indignation to bear in economic discourse...
...We have cultural scapegoats aplenty in part because we have been shy about identifying concentrated economic power as the evil oppressor— the very Antichrist, as it were...
...But Ribuffo doesn't address in any depth the sources of conservative Protestantism's resurgent grip on the loyalties of millions of our citizens...
...Even the 1960s image of a dawning Age of Aquarius appealed to the wider culture's latent messianism...
...Generating a Politics of Moral Passion The background factors to which I have attributed the growing strength of right-wing churches tell only half the story: these are all negative "flight" factors driving people toward the churches, but the positive draw of these places is, of course, religious...
...Americans no longer engage in face-to-face conversations that allow them to process political and economic news with their own voices and in their own words...
...For progressive politics to succeed, we will need more than Ribuffo's proposed truce in the war of rhetoric between progressives and leaders of the religious right...
...We will need to adopt an organizer's perspective toward the movement's rank and file: the folks who trundle off with the kids to the newly built "multifunctional" church with the big parking lot on the outskirts of town...
...I will propose, with some trepidation, that the left needs a soupcon of messianism in order to flourish in what Harold Bloom aptly calls a "religion-drenched" American culture...
...Ribuffo mentions that 80 percent of Americans tell pollsters they expect to be judged by God, but he says nothing about what this expectation signifies...
...Although the Republican party wishes that it owned the loyalty of the Christian right rank and file, these voters actually perceive that both major parties and most leading politicians have long since sold their souls to big-money interests...
...Of course, this material becomes especially deadly because there's no conversation around it and no possibility of conversation...
Vol. 42 • July 1995 • No. 3
