“The ‘Religious Right’ is merely the current incarnation of the on-going Middle American Revolution, a cultural and political movement that has underlain the political efforts of the American Right since the end of World War II. Despite what many right-wing sages would like to believe, that movement never had much to do with their perennial holy cow, the free market, but rather with the perception that the white middle class core of American society and culture was being evicted from its historic position of cultural and political dominance and was in fact in the process of becoming an exploited and oppressed proletariat. It was this perception, rudimentary as it was, that to a large extent underlay the political movements around Father Coughlin, Huey Long, and similar figures in the Depression and later around Sen. McCarthy, whose anti-communist radicalism is explicable only as a vehicle for Middle American resistance to and resentment of the ruling class that had by the 1950s displaced the traditional bourgeois elite of the nation.
“Since the end of World War II, the American Right as a mass political force in the United States has been driven by three successive causes. The first, anti-communism, carried not only McCarthy but also Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon in the 1950s, though Eisenhower merely piggy-backed on the synthesis of anti-communism and Middle American class and ethnic consciousness that Nixon and McCarthy had so brilliantly forged. The second, opposition to the civil right revolution based mainly in the South and later in northern white working class suburbs, carried Barry Goldwater, George Wallace, and (again) Richard Nixon, though Mr. Goldwater never understood what he was leading and continues to this day to imagine that it was a movement for ‘individual freedom’ (a delusion that helped him lose the support of the northern working-class voters) rather than a social convulsion for the preservation of class, ethnic and cultural dominance.
“The third cause of the Right is now and has been what was called in the 1970s the ‘social issue’ and in the 90s the ‘culture war’, and, far more explicitly and effectively than the earlier anti-communism and bourgeois individualism exposed by the Right of the 50s and 60s, it focuses on resisting the erosion of traditional morality and the traditional middle class social and economic dominance the morality codified. ‘Cultural issues’ were indeed present in but remained largely tangential to the right-wing efforts of the earlier decades and emerged as prevalent concerns only in reaction to the cultural assaults of the 1960s and afterwards. The most obvious way to defend a moral code is through religion, and the most obvious people to defend it are religious leaders and their followers. Hence, religion emerged logically as the appropriate vehicle for the expression of Middle American moral, social, and cultural counter-revolution.
“What follows from this line of analysis of the religious Right as it exists today is that what ultimately drives its adherents is not religion in the ordinary sense. What drives them is the perception – accurate in my view – that the culture their religion reflects and defends is withering and their withering portends a disaster for themselves, their class, their country, and their civilization. Religion happens to be a convenient vehicle for their otherwise unarticulated and perfectly well-founded fears. But while it is a convenient vehicle and a more effective one than those that carried the Right in earlier days, it is not the most effective vehicle the Right could have.
“This is not to say that the religious Right is composed of hypocrites who use religion for political ends. With the possible exception of most of its more prominent leaders, it’s not. Most adherents of the religious Right are sincerely and seriously religious; but you can be sincerely and seriously religious without being political and without being political in the way the religious Right is. It’s not religion that drives the religious Right; it’s the legitimate frustrations of a social class that has been bludgeoned and betrayed by its established leaders for more than 50 years.
▪ Sam Francis, Shots Fired (Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation, 2006) extract from pages 102 to 105.
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