Einzige wrote:That's because business tends to err on the side of freedom with regards to issues like this. Northrup Grumman is perhaps among the most reactionary of all major American corporations, and yet their reactionary positions are staked entirely on economics. If you could, I'd take that e-mail, pass it around to all of my piss-poor Fundie friends, and show them how little their corporate masters think of them. Then insinuate it's the same in most companies, and watch them blow a fuse as they reach the limits of political doublethink.
I've been saying this for ages. Mainstream political Christianity is only tolerated in the United States ONLY so long as it stays firmly in the tradition of "ye slaves be submissive to your master" and "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's". They're an extremely stupid, gullible, psychologically collectivist and culturally totalitarian group, with a weakness for authoritarianism and fantasies of using the State to beat its (perceived) enemies. They are kept around because they will line up firstly and most enthusiastically when the intellectuals and propagandists of the state-corporate complex beat the drums, for a myriad of elite interest hobby horses, like hating on taxes, unions, environmental regulations, and support for recognizing Palestinians as human beings. The statist reactionary/nationalist fanatic wing of the state-corporate elite -- aligned mostly the GOP -- lean on them heavily as essentially their only significant mass base, and subsidize and throw some scraps to kept pastors and theologians in order to keep their concept of political Christianity alive and dominant.
As for how there was ever such a fanatic religious base to exploit for these purposes in the U.S., well I think its a product of several things. One, it has become increasingly impossible, and even often contrary to capitalist goals, to exploit racism to beat the drums, necessitating a replacement for the poor white reactionary. Two, in the U.S. in particular there is both a strong history of religious revivalism and restorationism, providing an essential cultural ingredient. Third, and I'd argue most importantly, in this most business-run of advanced societies, there is
a poverty of strong social and civil institutions, and an extraordinary poverty in meaningful grassroots political activism, organization, and working class culture and workers' organization (with the dramatic war on unions since the 1950s, with corresponding expected collapse in labor standards and wage growth since). Chomsky points this out, and I think he's right, that the church remained one of the handful of cohesive local institutions of associational life not destroyed in the atomizing suburbanization of the American middle class, and one of the few succors for the sores of the working class and working poor in the absence of labor culture and institutions. Add opportunistic far-right sponsorship of people like Jerry Falwell and their ilk, the saturation of "cultural issues" over substantive and economic ones, and the literal corporatization of evangelical Christian culture (the megachurches, the huge televangelist business empires, literature farms, diploma mills,
ad nausuem) and your ugly fruit is ripe for the picking. It helped that the cultural revolution's causes were taken up by the left, thus providing yet another motive for setting the dogs on them.
The last thing they want is legitimate political Christianity -- the Christianity of the poor peasant, the untreated sick, the starving child, etc. One should recall that tiny sectors remain politically Christian -- and left, and skeptical of concentrated power. The U.S. war against the public of Latin America in the 1980s was waged, especially in El Salvador, often against the native Roman Catholic Church. How odd that Falwell and his lemmings were trying to strum up donations to pack into Oliver North's cocaine rucksack to be hauled down to the Contras, while simultaneously his backers were encouraging and aiding assassination campaigns against churchmen who spoke out against abuse of peasants. Glenn Beck is trotted out to denounce "social" Christianity to Christian rightists, like some learned theologian vice allegedly-recovered alcoholic-and-drug-addict-turned-Mormon. They make sure to rip off his LDS Christian consumer warning label and scrub him of the stink of Mormon, as to avoid the Romney Factor (funny how eager they are to paste over deep and real fissures in American Christianity, if Mormonism can even be convincingly shoe-horned into that group). How quickly it is Uncle Sam throws Jesus in the ditch when he's not turning tricks.
In the end what you're describing is pretty much capitalism by the book. The firm has no loyalty when it might lose money alienating customers, expertise, or labor (for no reason). It wants us to be interchangable cogs, so in the big picture, except for specialized exceptions, it tends to work against racism, sexism, and homophobia, in a limited sense.
