Provocative New Theory: the Devout are Rational and Thoughtful!

It's a reflection of how much bad faith exists in American politics and public debate that an academic study sympathetic to the Christian right as an organizational phenomenon would be described as "provoctive," but that is the world we live in: A Provocative Book About the Christian Right

If you wanted a book title to speed the pulse of liberal academics, journalists and politicians, you couldn’t do much better than “The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right.” For many people that’s a title akin to “The Winning Ways of Serial Killers.”

The two leading arguments of the book, written by Jon A. Shields and published last month by Princeton University Press, are no less provocative.

“Many Christian-right organizations,” Mr. Shields writes, “have helped create a more participatory democracy by successfully mobilizing conservative evangelicals, one of the most politically alienated constituencies in 20th-century America.”

Well, actually that thesis, which the book supports with all the requisite tables and data about party identification, voter turnout, and political knowledge and activity, might be accepted by many of Mr. Shields’s fellow political scientists.

It is his second argument that is sure to stir cries of “No, no, no; impossible.”

“The vast majority of Christian-right leaders,” he writes, “have long labored to inculcate deliberative norms in their rank-and-file activists — especially the practice of civility and respect; the cultivation of dialogue by listening and asking questions; the rejection of appeals to theology; and the practice of careful moral reasoning.”

You mean Christian activists aren't all bug-f*** crazy "activists" like Eric Rudolph?! Who knew? Well, I did, and so do most fair minded people in the US. But most of the people who previously controlled the public discourse - the academy, the media, and the business & political elite - do NOT know this. To them "southern evangelical" still means "barefoot snake handler" and "Sarah Palin" is the cynical manipulator of ignorant rubes. In fact, it is these sorts of attitudes that gave rise to the so-called Christian Right in the first place. The social and moral concerns of the elites and the millions of practicing Christians in the US diverged decades ago. Worries about the sudden court expansion of abortion, gay rights, free speech for pornographers - which have come at the same time religious freedom in the form of school prayer and public displays have been officially curtailed - have not just been dismissed by much of the cultural and political elite; such worries have been rejected high-handedly. Is it any wonder that, having been rejected politically, the devout would band together to create political strength for themselves and their ideals? I would hope not.