History Shows the Religious Right's Batsh*T Crazy Version of Jesus Isn't Unique to Modern Times

[rug]

Explaining the toxic blend of right-wing politics and hate-all-sinners Christianity that's infected the Republican party since the 1970s.

By Lorraine Berry / Raw Story May 17, 2016

When I was a kid in the 1970s, my itinerant parents, who moved us eleven times in ten years, would occasionally send my brothers and me to local “afterschool” programs or “summer” programs so that we might meet other kids prior to starting our next new school. Inevitably, these programs were sponsored by Christian churches. Along with chorus and drama arts/crafts and sports, the programs mixed in a type of Sunday school-level theology, often taught to us through the kinds of feel-good modern hymns that emphasized that Jesus was a great guy.

Jesus loves the little children
All little children of the world
Red and yellow, black and white
We are precious in his sight
Jesus loves the little children of the world.

Or so the songs told us. And in my house, my dad’s brand of nominal Christianity was to carry around laminated business card-sized copies of the Sermon on the Mount. He kept that next to similar laminated copies of other motivational texts, including Rudyard Kipling’s “If,” some quotations from the Tao Te Ching, and photos of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mohandas K. Gandhi. That, for me, was Christianity: an ecumenical religion based on the principle of loving one’s neighbor and living in peace.

But, as I have written before, and which Full Frontal with Samantha Bee did a brilliant job of explicating Monday, that vision of Christianity is eons and worlds away from the battlefront put forward by the Christian Right. The toxic blend of right-wing politics and hate-all-sinners Christianity began its infiltration of Republican politics behind the “Gipper” skull of Ronald Reagan in the late 1970s. That brand of Christianity has nothing in common with the radical promise of post-Vatican II liberation theology priests or the drummajors-for-justice nonviolence of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).

http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/history-shows-religious-rights-batsht-crazy-version-jesus-isnt-unique-modern

[MisterP]

1. this is the paradox of anticlericalism: they have to blame the fundies on a reformist

movement that attacked the wealthy and the established church

[rug]

2. It's what comes of an ingrained bigotry toward anything religious.

[MisterP]

3. reminds me of Latin American RW demagogues: they'll save the nation from

Communism's atheist theocratic fascist socialist totalitarian anarchism

that's on the upswing across the continent now, alas

[struggle4progress]

4. Being batshizz-crazy has been a wildly popular human hobby throughout history,

regardless of almost any cultural context