The Religious Right Has Tried for Years To Lose Its Reputation for Racism.
With the emergence of the Tea Party and its overtly racist attitudes, one can’t help but be reminded of another so-called Christian organization: the KKK. Over the years, the Christian Right has tried to wash itself clean from its racist past. In his 1996 Book titled Active Faith, Conservative Christian activist?Ralph Reed, Jr admitted that Christian conservatives had been on the wrong side of the civil rights movement.
?The white evangelical church carries a shameful legacy of racism and the historical baggage of indifference to the most central struggle for social justice in this century, a legacy that is only now being wiped clean by the sanctifying work of repentance and racial reconciliation,? [Ralph Reed,Jr]?
“Racial Reconciliation” has become a buzzword for the Christian Right.
During the Bush years, factions of the anti-gay and anti-racism were co-mingled in a weird way. In 2006, at the Greater Exodus Baptist Church?– an African American church in Philadelphia — leaders of the religious right invoked the words of Martin Luther King, Jr and Rosa Parks on behalf of gay marriage bans and Bush judicial nominees.?All this played into the Bush compassionate conservative narrative that he ran on in 2000. According to an article in Progressive Values. Org, what a difference an election makes.
‘Even if you believed that compassionate conservatism was always a bit of a con, it’s amazing to see how quickly it has vanished, and how fast an older style of reaction, one more explicitly rooted in racial grievance, has reasserted itself.’ And??”today’s grassroots right is by all appearances as socially conservative as ever, but its tone and its rhetoric are profoundly different than they were even a year ago. For the last 15 years, the right-wing populism has been substantially electrified by sexual anxiety. Now it’s charged with racial anxiety.”
As soon as?Democrats took?office the anti-government, religious right screwballs began their demagoguery.However, with the recent explosion of GOP sex scandals and other scandals, the right has had to take a break from their incessant moralizing.To compensate, we have seen the right-wing politicians and pundits, and their media echo chambers shift gears to a relatively new term: “Producerism.”
What is Producerism?
Producerism sees society as divided between productive workers ? laborers, small businessmen and the like ? and the parasites who live off them. Those parasites exist at both the top and the bottom of the social hierarchy. They are both financiers and welfare bums and their larceny is enabled by government.
This shift in gears plays well with the personality traits of the racist right-wing wing extremist and religious zealots.?During distressed economic times when people have a sense of “getting screwed,” these sentiments of racism and ?antisemitism are emboldened. So, the occasion of having our first black president elected to office has given these factions a green light to flood our existence with this tomfoolery.
“It’s not, after all, as if the Christian right was something completely removed from the old racist right ? rather, as Reed acknowledged all those years ago, they were initially deeply intertwined.” [badattitudes.com]?
Tony Perkins, before he immersed himself in homophobic interracial amity, once paid Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke $82,500 for his mailing list.?In 2004, David Barton?–?president of the Texas GOP at that time — spoke at an event featuring white preachers and ministry workers dropping to their knees before their black brethren to plead for forgiveness.
Years earlier, Barton, was a keynote speaker at a Christian identity movement. At this event, Barton was on the narrative of this movement’s mantra that “blacks are sub-human” and “mud-people.”
The bottom line is that blacks have become more politically active and a force in the electorate. The factions on the Christian Right front have had to change their tune of racism and bigotry towards gays and lesbians and immigrants. But, the old truism “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks” is a valid one in that, with the election of a black president, these deep-seated prejudices have festered once again.
Watch the video below.
