The Jehovah's Witnesses oppose blood transfusions.

Sometimes, I get it right.

drive-by
: done or made in a quick or cursory manner

And again, I'm pretty sure that legally they are a religion.

+1


I thought you were inquiring about religion DS was referring to when he mentioned blood transfusions.

I think the commonly accepted historical narrative is that White Evangelicals began to ally themselves with the GOP as a direct result of Roe v. Wade and the formation of the Moral Majority in the 70's, as you point out. However, the immediate reaction to Roe by Evangelicals was mixed before the issue became intentionally politicized by church leaders. I think I subscribe more to the narrative that the White Evangelical/Conservative alliance has its roots not in any religious issue, but racial, ie Brown v Board of Ed.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/st...origins-107133

Decent piece if you have the time.

Again, I think your saying 'Christian' in your points is not totally accurate, as Catholics did not defect to the Conservative side en masse as did the White Evangelicals, so clearly it cannot be due totally to religious concerns.

However as always, with narrative driven histories, we are both likely oversimplifying things.

I think the framing in that article is misleading, presenting its conclusion as an either/or when it is actually a both/and. As Balmer points out, opposition to desegregation of private religious schools was a primary reason some early leaders of the Religious Right became politically active. However, in order to become a mass movement, it had to broaden its concerns to appeal to religious social conservatives more generally, hence abortion (and other religious issues).

He goes on to discuss other influential religious leaders like Francis Schaeffer whose initial political focus was on abortion. I just think it is silly to deny that that opposition to abortion was integral to the rise of the religious right. I agree it wasn't the only issue, and of course, as with any mass movement, there are leaders who use the passion of the movement for their own ends. But it was abortion that has persisted most as an issue, even now four decades later.

However, my main point here is not to muse about the origins of the religious right in the 1970s, but about the religious right as it exists today. I see few religious right people advocating for or defending legal racial segregation in schools. You don't see racial polarization in support for current conservative education policy priorities like school choice or charter schools. But I have lived through decades of religious conservatives being very publicly concerned about abortion, homosexuality, women serving in the military, sex in the media, and a bunch of other traditional social conservative ideas associated with evangelical Christianity. I don't buy into the progressive racial hermeneutics of suspicion, so I mostly just believe them.

Notice I said "conservative Christians" had this view of social changes being in opposition to traditional Christianity. This is true among (religiously) conservative Catholics as well as Protestants, even if their political opposition sometimes takes different forms.

At least since Vatican II, Catholic teaching as a whole has been much more liberal than evangelicals on economic issues. On the other hand, the Catholic teachings on so-called "social issues" such as abortion and homosexuality and birth control are more CONSERVATIVE than most evangelicals.

As s result, many Catholics are conflicted, because they like the Democrats on many economic issues, while supporting the Republicans on many social issues.

Correct, abortion, etc. is how leaders got the masses to align themselves with conservatives. The argument is that the roots of the disenchantment with the left, and the fomenting of white evangelicals into an identifiable conservative voting bloc stems from those original racial motivations. That abortion became such a rallying cry lends itself to your position.

Understandable. I'm sure someone like lagtight who's actually lived through it might think this is all a bunch of liberal revisionist history nonsense. In my own personal experience, I've grown up around a lot of very religious Asian Americans, who did not seem nearly as obsessed over above mentioned issues, and tended to vote D, which is just juxtaposed with the image of the politically active white middle America evangelicals in my mind. I suppose we are all just shaped by our personal experiences, and I'd probably be a Trump slappy if I grew up in an Appalachia trailer park.

I think there is definitely a strange conflict within Christianity, with regards to real life political applications, between the teaching that one should help the less fortunate and the general Christian/John Locke type ideas that hard work leads to prosperity and one should not be looking for handouts.

I'm trying to make sense of this argument. The claim is that the root of white evangelicals becoming a reliable conservative voting bloc is because of original racial motivations of some of its leaders to get involved in politics. However, the author acknowledges racial social conservativism was too unpopular and toxic to attract popular support, and so social conservativism instead grew as a mass movement on the basis of more popular social conservativism issues, like opposition to legalized abortion. Huh? I understand the Religious Right as primarily a mass movement, not a story of elite power. Most of the leaders of the Religious Right, eg Falwell, Dobson, Schaeffer, etc never had much direct political power and mostly stayed out of DC.

This is like the inverse of those conservative arguments that point to Margaret Sanger's support for eugenics as demonstrating that the pro-choice movement roots are racist.

Fair enough, although I'll point out that the more Christian countries in Asia Pacific typically have conservative laws on abortion, i.e. it is mostly banned in the Philippines, South Korea, and Papua New Guinea.

It is noticeable that even though America is much more Christian than Europe, we don't have a significant Christian Democratic party faction (conservative on social issues, center-left on economic issues). Black and Hispanic voters have some of this impact in the Democratic party, but few black and Hispanic Democratic party political elites are publicly social conservatives.

Are progressive's insinuations of thoughtcrime a function of their tyrannical nature, or their oversensitivity? Or perhaps tyranny sprouts from oversensitivity and bigotry (as they claim)?

Do you feel pleasure from insulting strangers on the internet?