I like the first one, the focus on baseline. Which we often ignore at our own peril because it's not a fun, interesting, sexy topic.There are three big reasons why American evangelical Christianity is right wing:
These issues have tended to make American evangelical Christianity right wing.
- The South is typically more conservative than the North, at least among the white community, and evangelical Christianity has the strongest following in the South
- The shameful silence or opposition of Evangelical Christianity on the 1950s-60s Civil Rights Movement
- One factor divided into three subfactors
- Roe v. Wade
- Francis Schaeffer's book A Christian Manifesto, which helped create the Christian Right
- The diverging platforms of the Democratic and Republican Parties with respect to abortion. If the Democratic party had not been monolithic on abortion issues, at least for presidential candidates and congressional leaders, you would have likely not seen the Catholic move to the GOP.
Alright, from the 1973 decision on abortion (which was actually a doctor's rights decision, not a women's or a patients' rights decision at least not initially) up until 1978 mid-terms in several Senate races, evangelicals tended to think of abortion as 'a Catholic issue.'
In a similar way, did white ministers think of civil rights as 'an African-American issue'?
And it shouldn't surprise us too much if people are tribal, even spiritual persons. We probably all have our groups and causes we more closely identify with.
And what was missed with abortion was the idea, given that a Constitutional Amendment will probably take a while, let's see what we can do in the meantime to reduce the incidence . . . in large part leading to issues of economic justice.