Belief:
At the Values Voter Summit, Wing-Nut Christian Right Plots Its Comeback
Rob Boston
Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace:
Here's the Skinny on Why Wal-Mart Is So Evil (and Has Made Such a Killing)
David Moberg
DrugReporter:
'Prince of Pot' Marc Emery Jailed in Canada Pending Extradition to US
Phillip S. Smith
Environment:
What If Being Fat Is Not Your Fault? America's Obesity Epidemic May Be Fueled by Chemicals in Everyday Products
Tara Lohan
Health and Wellness:
Is Soy the Ticket to Good Health or Infertility? Here's the Scoop
Sarah Irani
Immigration:
Bait and Switch: ICE Says Program Targets "Dangerous Criminals" but Casts Wide Net
Michele Waslin
Media and Technology:
Fox TV's Bizarre New Cartoon Comedy Is a Minstrel Show, Pure and Simple
Jasmyne Cannick
Movie Mix:
Barack Obama Must See Michael Moore's New Movie (and So Must You)!
Arianna Huffington
Politics:
Tea Party Movement Returns Christian Right to Its Racist Past
Michelle Goldberg
Reproductive Justice and Gender:
A Day in the Life of an Abortion Clinic Escort
Anonymous
Rights and Liberties:
Do You Want the Right to Kill Yourself? Renegade Doctor Offers Controversial 'Death Kit'
Liliana Segura
Sex and Relationships:
What Is an Orgasm, Anyway?
Take Action:
G-20 Meetings: Nothing Much Happened in the Suites, and There Was Too Much Punch in the Streets
Laura Flanders
Water:
Our Love Affair With Our Lawns Is Hurling the U.S. Toward Water Crisis
Dara Colwell
World:
What's Really Behind Conservative Pundit George Will's Call for Total Withdrawal From Afghanistan?
Byard Duncan
Now that popular conservatism has given itself over so avidly to racial resentment, it's curious to remember how hard the right once tried to scrub itself of the lingering taint of prejudice. Indeed, for a decade and a half the Christian right -- until recently the most powerful and visible grassroots conservative movement -- struggled mightily to escape its own bigoted history. In his 1996 book Active Faith
"Racial reconciliation" became a kind of buzz phrase. The idea animated Promise Keepers meetings. "Racism is an insidious monster," Bill McCartney, the group's founder, said at a 39,000-man Atlanta rally. "You can't say you love God and not love your brother." The Traditional Values Coalition distributed a video called "Gay Rights, Special Rights" to black churches; it criticized the gay rights movement for co-opting the noble legacy of the civil rights struggle.
Throughout the Bush years, homophobia and professions of anti-racism were twinned in a weird way, as if the latter proved that the right wasn't simply still skulking around history's dark side. At a deeply surreal 2006 event at the Greater Exodus Baptist Church, an African American church in downtown Philadelphia, leaders of the religious right invoked Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks on behalf of gay marriage bans and Bush's judicial nominees. At the end of the evening, several dozen clergymen, black and white, joined hands in prayer at the front of the room. "Black Americans, white Americans," said a beaming Tony Perkins, leader of the Family Research Council. "Christians, standing together." The whole premise of compassionate conservatism -- which shoveled taxpayer money towards administration-friendly churches like Greater Exodus Baptist -- was that the right cared as deeply as the left about issues like inner city poverty.
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.
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. By all accounts, there were more confederate flags than crosses at last weekend's anti-Obama rally in Washington, DC. Glenn Beck has become a far more influential figure on the right than, say, James Dobson, and he's much more interested in race than in sexual deviancy. For the first time in at least a decade, middle class whites have been galvanized by the fear that their taxes are benefiting lazy, shiftless others. The messianic, imperialistic, hubristic side of the right has gone into retreat, and a cramped, mean and paranoid style has come to the fore.
See more stories tagged with: racism, religious right, homophobia, tea party movement
Michelle Goldberg is a senior correspondent at The American Prospect. She is also the author of Kingdom Coming and The Means of Reproduction
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