{"id":3878,"date":"2012-02-25T11:30:27","date_gmt":"2012-02-25T16:30:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.drslewis.org\/camille\/?p=3878"},"modified":"2016-01-25T16:38:51","modified_gmt":"2016-01-25T21:38:51","slug":"renew-conference-how-did-we-get-here","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.drslewis.org\/camille\/2012\/02\/25\/renew-conference-how-did-we-get-here\/","title":{"rendered":"How Did We Get Here?: The Texts"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Religious Right Protests Brown V. Board, 1954<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

So on these grounds<\/a>, I’ve chosen a set of texts that sit between the Scopes Trial and the Moral Majority. This is the era in which historians<\/a> insist<\/a> that<\/a>\u00a0conservative Evangelicals were distinctly apolitical, even anti-political. But they are not. Their political drama simply places them at the center of power so that they needn\u2019t do more than stay-put to maintain it.<\/p>\n

All of these texts are public<\/a>. They are conservative Evangelical, and they are all expressly political. I have just excerpted fragments for the sake of time, but they span every decade. Reading them as a whole, three themes become obvious:<\/p>\n

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  1. The texts relish a nostalgia for a power<\/strong> that was secure in the not-too-distant past — a power the rhetors frame as peaceful and free for all the world and a power which is assumed to be white and Protestant.<\/li>\n
  2. This peace is currently broken by an imminent threat from an outsider<\/strong>. Religious, racial, ethnic, or ideological threats — these distinctions are conflated. There is no difference among an “uppity black” or a “unwashed” immigrant or a “liberal” Protestant. They all threaten “native” power.<\/li>\n
  3. Salvation comes from restoring or preserving that nostalgic ideal through a god-like unity. Not from<\/em> God, but from something god-like. The terms are not simply practical, asking “how can we solve this current problem?” Instead the narratives are always ultimate and always spiritualized and the “Savior” is always human.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
    The complete texts are as follows:<\/div>\n