Lakoff on religion as an activator of progressive models for seeing world: [View All]

[AP]

George Lakoff says that up until about 1920, Christians debated whether god was conceptualized within, essentially, a strict father framework or a nurturant father framework. The fundamentalists won that debate in 1920 (probably, in my opinion, because the fears of the disruption to traditional families by women's rights) and since then progressive Christians haven't taken up the argument, thus leaving the playing field to the fundamentalists' strict father god.

Nonetheless, Lakoff says that a majority of the 80% of Americans who consider themselves Christians consider themselves progressive or liberal.

Lakoff says that the crazy thing about this, however, is that when you ask progressive Christians to try to articulate their theologies, they can't do it. He says that when he does field research on them, he can very easily identify their theology, but if you ask them to explain it for themselves they can't say anything coherent. He tells them what he thinks it is, light bulbs go off and they all say, "YES, THAT'S IT EXACTLY!!!"

Lakoff says that that is an indication of how miserably progressives fail when it comes to organizing churches and organizing that huge percentage of Americans who are inclined to see both politics and religion through a progressive framework and for whom activating the metaphors for politics by using the same metaphors for which they think about religion would go a very long way to solidifying them as a coalition that votes for progressive politicians.

I think you could say a similar thing about politics as well as religion. I think a lot of people who think of themselves as not being Republicans have a hard time explaining their political philosophy, and I think that's as big a problem. I think if all those soccer moms who became security moms had a better idea about why they were voting for Democrats in the first place, they wouldn't have so easily abandoned the Democratic Party last year.