Puritan and Scots-Irish, before large numbers of Catholics changed parties during the early Cold War, largely the root of today's paleoconservative movement.
Whatever happened to it? Traditional Calvinists and Confessional Lutherans do still publish "do we really have to lower ourselves to answering this rubbish?" critiques of "Christian Zionism". But that seems to be as far as it now goes.
Is it?
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The subject of your first paragraph does not have a verb. As a result, this post is largely incoherent.
ReplyDeleteIsn't it?
Even with the title, it's not at all clear what you're going on about.
ReplyDeleteAm I to take it from your response that you're moving away from academic writing towards a new, more populist, style?
You have to read the title.
ReplyDeleteI know, if took me a while to get used to this sort of thing after heaven knows how many years of academic essay-writing, too.
I like to mix them up a bit on here, depending on mthe subject-matter.
ReplyDeleteOf course, I know what "incoherent" means. It means "I can't understand this, because it is not part of the only set of opinions and references to which I have ever been exposed".
I think I follow.
ReplyDeleteBefore the early part of the Cold War (so, say, before 1946) the root of today's paleoconservative movement was Puritans and Scots-Irish.
A mere 60-odd years later, that root has withered on the vine. Somehow, Calvinists and Confessional Lutherans are not the political force they once were, although they do still rouse themselves to make a point about Christian Zionism (not sure what this, other than a belief among Christians that Israel is a legitimate state?).
Or pehaps these congregations have more to offer politics?
Is that right?
Not quite.
ReplyDeleteBefore the early part of the Cold War, the American conservative movement had Puritan and Scots-Irish roots, and had also come to include people like Confessional Lutherans from Germany and Scandinavia.
Then, especially during the Fifties, it also came to include many of what would now be called traditional Catholics, but who, in those days, were just called Catholics, plain and simple. The present paleoconservative movement in very much in that vein.
But the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, the Presbyterian Church of America, the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod, similar tendencies within the "mainline" PCUSA or ELCA, these things are all still going strong.
Yet, beyond the theological critique of Dispensationalism and therefore also of "Christian Zionism", where are they politically? What happened? I'd honestly like to know.
At the risk of asking a stupid question, why do you think that religious denomination should be the organising principle for political movement?
ReplyDeleteWhy can't the congregations of these denominations go their own way politically, rather than being tied to one particular set of policies?
Not necessarily denominations as such (although no one objects to the black churches on that score).
ReplyDeleteBut American conservatism used to be profoundly Calvinistic, in particular. Now it isn't.
Yet the Calvinists haven't gone away, or become any more liberal.
So what happened?
They lost faith?
ReplyDeleteFar from it.
ReplyDeleteUnless you mean that they lost faith with the Republican Party. Who hasn't?