01-30-2019, 05:50 AM
(01-29-2019, 09:34 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Christian fundamentalism and evangelical churches really have little in common with what Jesus actually taught. The religious right in the USA is a political movement. It is motivated largely today by opposition or revulsion against the counter-culture, feminism, secular humanism, and other movements that came to the fore in the sixties, as they perceive it. Fundamentalism actually goes back some decades before, toward the beginning of the century, but was more often aligned with Democrats and liberals back then, as with W.J. Bryan and the social gospel. Religious fundamentalism is a traditional religious counter-awakening that could be said to have, like other Awakening trends, skipped along from 2T to 2T, and gaining power in the 3T and losing some ground in the 4T.
Neo-liberalism or individualist free-market ideology like Rand's does glorify personal achievement, especially in making money. But the two movements have fused in our time, and in fact were mostly never apart in our times, going back to before the 2T. "Christian character," and especially "American Christian character," is seen to consist in self-reliance, and in opposition to socialism and communism which, being "godless," is quite anti-Christian in their mind. So, charity and taxes for welfare are not compatible, in their view, since liberal programs are seen as socialist in essence (as per Classic Xer). And Marxism is explicitly atheist, and was excoriated as such during the Cold War, preparing the ground for this sentiment among many patriotic and allegedly self-reliant red-state and rural/small town Americans today.
Sometimes, some Christians have a problem with the latest representative of mammon in political power, Mr. Trump, such as Mormons in Utah; but they still vote for him more often than for Democrats, because they see their religion in politics orientation as supporting the good character of self-reliance and opposing communism and socialism.
In Britain, High Tories always preferred traditionalist values to bourgeois values. Their idea of an ideal human being is an old fashioned landowner. (Think of Tolkien's Shire. Tolkien was a High Tory) In France, Catholic fundamentalists like Lefebvre have been even more critical of capitalism and even the American revolution, which they see as a masonic plot. Like the American evangelicals, Lefebvre's brand of paleo-Catholicism has also become influential during the last 2T, as a reaction against the spirit of 1968.
Marxism is obviously atheistic, but it also belongs to the bourgeois Western civilisation since it's in principle a form of scientism. All serious Christians I know despise Marxism, maybe except the supporters of liberation theology in America. But nowadays there are no really influential Marxist movements, so anti-communism only serves as a distraction from all more serious problems I have described in my Western civilisation thread.