Southern Conservativism explained from the inside

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xpost!!

LOL!

Jefferson is spinning in his grave right now!
Like rotisserie!

I contemplate with solemn reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.

or how about

Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Guess what, athiesm and agnosticism are also religions (albeit not as formally established as the christian ones of the olden days), and by favouring christianity through laws you'd be fucking the others who hold different beliefs!
Amazing how that works, no?

2) Those of us who are 40+ years old have lived most of our lives under Democrat rule and have decided we did not like their policies

Nixon? Ford? Reagan? Bush? Bush Jr.?

Which policies?

This is very OTM.

I would like to think that my mom, and every mom like her, is not the face of the enemy. I would like to believe that she only needs to be brought around by more conversations and more exposure, a person and a conversation at a time, to a better understanding of how her own values are being contradicted by the political spectrum she subscribes to.

She's not a nut, not a Conservative Christian anymore, just trying to explain what these people think. She is exactly, EXACTLY right. A lot of my family are Jehovah's Witnesses, and they really do see the world as a battleground in which they will be triumphant because it is the will of God.

I do disagree with this, though.

This is not a problem of ignorance and stupidity.

It's not a problem of stupidity, but it is a problem of ignorance. That's what she means, I think, when she says that people have to be brought around by more exposure, and more questions, and etc. etc. convervative Christians are ignorant, willfully ignorant, and highly suspicious of any new points of view. That doesn't make it any more useful to call them ignorant, but it's best to be clear what you're dealing with when you're talking to a Southern Baptist.

Which policies?

xpost
Didn't the Dems control both houses of congress for decades? I'll try to find the numbers.

You may be right - but I guess he would argue (and so would I, perhaps) that it isn't that they don't read enough, watch enough TV, meet enough people - it's the way in which they have learned to read things, watch things, meet people etc. It's all filtered, twisted and distorted, but it's not really ignorance.

As for our founding fathers, well, you had guys like Samuel Adams who sought a "Christian Sparta" and you had guys like Benjamin Franklin who were members of the Hellfire club. But even if we could get a bead on what those guys really really really meant to do, lo those many years ago, I don't know that necessarily dictates what soul and purpose of our country should be. Maybe there's more things in "America" than are dreamed of in their (or your or my) philosophy, etc.

Well, it would go round and round in an argument, I guess. I feel that what they're fundamentally ignorant of is the fact that these are not the end times, and God is not necessarily on their side. They would of course disagree.

Maybe it wasn't Democratic rule, but this:

Journalist Bill Moyers, a former aide to Democratic president Lyndon Johnson, once recalled a remark made by LBJ the night the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed:
'I found him in the bedroom, exceedingly depressed. The headline of the bulldog edition of the Washington Post said: Johnson Signs Civil Rights Act. The airwaves were full of discussions about how unprecedented this was and historic, and yet he was depressed. I asked him why. He said, `I think we've just delivered the South to the Republican party.'"

"How the South was won" by LYNDA HURST (Toronto Star, November 7, 2004)

Seen any of these lately? I think "Forget, Hell!" is the state motto around here.

I don't know what church you're talking about specifically, but Jehovah's Witnesses are like this to an extreme. My Grandmother wept bitterly when she found out I was going to college.

The entire South's not even Baptist!

But yeah, it's a good and heartfelt and sincere and thoughtful piece of writing. I definitely agree that her mother is not "the enemy" -- any more than my warm, welcoming, funny, smart, gun-owning, Bush-voting in-laws are the enemy. I do think that however much she protests, a certain kind of ignorance is at the root of a lot of what she's talking about -- ignorance of "the world," basically. But I understand her reluctance to frame things quite so pejoratively, and
there's no reason she should.

She went to a Baptist church that rejected the Southern Baptists as too liberal, and when she wanted to go to college, Bob Jones University was rejected as too liberal. (For one thing, they admitted black students, and for another, they allowed women to wear pants in their dorms. And they performed Shakespeare plays without editing them.)

Well, right, but that's really just justifying ignorance by saying "God told me to be ignorant." Just because it's doctrinal and deliberate doesn't make it not ignorant -- it's doctrinal and deliberate ignorance.

"a key mantra of Campus Crusade was this: If you're not being persecuted for your Christianity, then you're doing something wrong."

People interested in hearing why that feeling comes from Paul of Tarsus 's hate of the body can read this thread: the construction of christianism

There's a parallel to be made between first totalitarian state, Constentine's christian empire and the religious right that got hold of the policy making machine in the US because both are making christian laws that hates the body, in that sense are anti-hedonist: the former legiferated to make divorce very hard to do, forbade concubinage, prostitution and forbade every forms of libertinage, in other words it made our occidental world while the latter as we know wants to ban abortions, gay rights, multiculturalism, stem cell research etc

Notes on the election -

0. The Republican win was predicted and predictable. Now the infinity of analysis begins, an infinity that has already missed the point.

1. There is nothing the Democrats might have done 'better.' The country voted its conscience.

2. Its conscience is founded on a morality-based worldview, which is rural in origin, and relatively rigid.

3. 9/ll played a critical role, not only in revealing the extreme vulnerability of the country, but also in the production of an Islamic- fundamentalist alterity that could not be dismissed.

4. With the religious right, fundamental ontology replaces the episteme.

5. Bush appeared, alive and life-like at the World Trade Center ruins almost immediately after, conjoining his image with the intensity of destruction.

6. The left continuously focused on the negative aspects of the Republican party, over-determining, at least in print, the violence of a world-view at odds with the rest of the planet.

7. Absolute morality is not concerned whatsoever with opinion.

8. The right has been organizing, in the US, for at least a century and a half; this election and the last have been in preparation for decades. With the elimination of the 'fairness doctrine' under Reagan, and with monopoly ownership of local broadcasting, the right has been able to dominate the 'heartland' without opposition. The corporate and Christian merge, to the benefit of both.

9. In the 60s, which for many of us appears to be a history of the left, the right quietly embraced both technology and structural compromises that increased and solidified its power base, in rural and impoverished areas of the country.

10. A fundamental flaw is the assumption that so-called minority votes are liberal and leftist; in fact, the opposite is increasingly the case.

11. The 'American dream' is both part of class distinctions, and a force in their elimination. Don't underrate its influence; no matter how hard we try, there is no revolutionary class, but only power, desire, economic status, and diffused and focused oppression.

12. Corporate America is far more diverse and problematic than the left assumes; it also presents a very real world of almost infinite choice and identifications. Its collusions and corruptions are our collusions and corruptions, and have absolutely nothing to do with God and God's State.

13. Cultural capital in the US is far more important than economic capital, and its boundaries cut across the latter in terms of class. We are all white trash and we are all intellectuals and theorists.

14. Far too many judgments are made 'for' rural and so-called back- water areas, which are almost never heard themselves. The information discourse networks and religious institutions of the majority of American voters are concretely effaced by abstraction. The water of baptism is not H2O.

15. Morality and fear are interwoven; it is the abject stereotyped image of gays fucking that appears to corrode the 'clean and pure' body politic. Your marriage wrecks my marriage. It is a failure of the left not to deal with this; dismissing the violent imaginary out of hand ensures its force within the political arena.

16. In conservative America, the negation of negation is not dialectical, but also a return to a rapturous positivity.

17. If one's religion insists that abortion, for example, is murder, then any means, including murder as literal self-preservation, may be used in return as a defensive and pre-emptive action. It is not ever a question of one side listening to another; it is a question of war to an infinite degree.

18. The church in rural and disenfranchised America is a communal and cohesive force, one of the few institutions capable of lived-community and defense against the rest of the world. But more than this, the church is also the locus for community activity and identity. To dismiss it, even in its intolerant and sometimes evangelical varieties, is to miss the point of its existence. For the individual, the church is salvation, explaining and preserving morality, even forgiving and abetting the temptations of sin.

19. The church overdetermines the rest of the world; rural and other- wise isolated communities have a surprisingly low degree of information flux. The church provides stability in a late-late-capitalist world of postmodernity, where selves, ideologies, and languages are contested. Within testament and testimony, there is no contestation; the church, in other words, 'puts a hedge around the Torah' (Pirke Avot).

20. In my opinion, the image of Kerry hunting (and killing) was not only hypocritical and distasteful, but also a premature sign of defeat. However, this had no affect on the election per se, which was already determined, way back in the late 60s and early 70s, when Billy Graham created the first automated post-office in the US - a religious embrace of technology that forecast the future of the country. Perhaps the left 'created' - i.e. the hacking manifesto - but the religious right utilized, entrenched, constructed a primary embrace of individual and instrumental reason that guaranteed the supple application of power when and where needed. The only real question here is why it took so long.

21. The left has been hampered by split ideologies and critique; the right, which permits no critique, has worked constantly with umbrella ideologies.

22. What has been exposed and contested in the US is often business as usual in the rest of the world. We are witnessing a movement from republic to empire, from the primacy of voting, to the primacy of dominant interests.

23. On a personal level - I have lived in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and the Bushlands of Texas and Florida. What happened was no surprise. I voted early yesterday, and felt a sense of relief at the minor _punctum_ I experienced. But I had no doubt that Bush would win, that my voice was primarily personal therapeutic. Instead of despair late last night/this morning, I've felt that our work, that of an opposition, has only just begun - that it could only just begin. We have to recognize, above all, that the US has done the will of the majority; the more we overlook this, excuse this, theorize this, wonder 'what went wrong,' the more we are weakened. Perhaps this is a positive sign - in the sense that the enemy, if it is an enemy, is clear, and no longer can be dismissed as an aberration.

24. The 'cultural war' is war.

25. Terror is an instrument of war.

26. Religion sublimates terror.

27. I live, you die. Vote or die holds no truck with the faithful.

28. Language is not action. Belief is action. Belief is not language.

29. The explication of fact in Michael Moore is replaced by the internalization of sin and the body in Mel Gibson. Old Testament, New Testament.

30 What the right knows: There is always already closure.

Religious belief is not an exemption from ignorance, especially when you follow a religious belief that emphasizes the ignorance of everybody else in the world who doesn't follow that belief.

The same way the Bush administration rejects scientific findings that don't mesh with their environmental policy!

"See, I grew up being taught that Catholicism was almost-sort-of-not-quite-but-we-won't-talk-about-it cult. Really. Lots of Southern Baptists believe Catholicism is a cult, despite the fact that it is the largest practiced religion in the world. "

see thats what happened when i moved down to south carolina from upstate new york. i'd be asked about "what church did i go to" and i'd say the catholic church my family attended. and they'd say "you don't believe in jesus, do you?" i would reply, "yes, we do." but they insisted, "no you don't, you believe in mary!" this happned more than a few times.

talk about a self-esteem boost!

"We're still waiting for the results." Where results = Armageddon.

The Gay Marriage Myth: Terrorism, not values, drove Bush's re-election

so to further show their retardation, all of the places directly affected by terrorism voted for kerry!

Amazing!

Besides, I feel misunderstood too, damnit! Are there any other Southern Christians out there who'd like to read "Northern Liberalism from the Inside"?

of course not ... they already know all about it < / sarcasm >.

The generalizations are starting to get to me. Y'all.

i don't either, but if the red staters had their way they'd certainly build a Berlin Wall along the Mason-Dixon line. (can we get atlanta west berlin-stylee, please?!?)

To keep the Ohioans out? Huh?

yup -- that explains molly ivins and james carville (and our own cinniblount, come to think of it).

(oh yeah, jewish-american ILXors don't kid yerselves -- they still hate you, too. their "support" for israel notwithstanding. but you know that already!)

they died because they were liberal

RI Police: 24-year-old son killed parents with hoe

That's all I'm saying, just saying like.