Andrew Sullivan is getting at something similar to what I had in mind here when I was discussing the cultural context of Christianity. He writes:
Now, of course, American political rhetoric has been much more saturated with religious imagery and idiom than British or much European discourse since the Enlightenment (though not before). Some of this, as the theocons keep reminding us, has been to the good - abolitionism and the civil rights movement spring to mind. What they're less likely to say is that the institutional core of today's Christianism was on the wrong side of those struggles (SBC anyone?) and that these two Christianist movements emerged to undo the Christianist impulse to enslave, torture and then segregate a race that God had allegedly set apart. It's in the Bible! And much of the rest of Christianist campaigning over the centuries has also been for the bad - Prohibition, anti-miscegenation laws, vicious persecution of homosexuals, etc. The difference between the good and the bad in Christianism is that the good was also often framed in terms of secular, non-sectarian arguments, while the bad, having much less logic to stand on, was more reliant on pure Biblical authority. The more explicitly Christianist you get, in other words, the worse the abuse to human dignity and individual freedom.
In other words: Progressive social movements steeped in Christianity were often relatively secular or ecumenical (broadly defined), whereas regressive backlashes steeped in Christianity were often quite closed off to people not like them. The Civil Rights Movement succeeded in part because it appealed to basic Christian goodness, but it would not have been as successful had it not also appealed to basic American goodness. Christianity was used to unite, not divide. Division necessarily implies regressive politics when religion is involved.
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