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yusime
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Location: United States
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http://jsr.as.wvu.edu/essay.htm
He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake since for him a spinal cord would suffice. Albert Einstein
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timmy
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Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
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You have more stamina that I do, Pat! I tried to read it, honest, but my eyes drooped.
Any chance of a bullet point summary?
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
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yusime
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Likes it here |
Location: United States
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Messages: 195
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The author is making the argument that traditional Southern culture has been changed more by the Religious Right than by the Civil Rights movement. Religious Fundamentalism has never had as strong a hold over the American South as it did over the Northeast. I thought it was strange that most of the early settlers who came to the North American continent were looking for Religious Freedom and settled in the Northeast. The south was home to people who were looking for a way to make a life for themselves and second religious freedom. Religious Fundamentalism was not overly present in southern life until the 1970's. Baptist were almost unanimously pro separation of church and state. "I have attended a Baptist Church that still teaches separation of church and state since I was young."
The Religious right, though comprised of religious zealots throughout the country, is largely against trying to compromise its beliefs and avoid the split that has occurred between the religious moderates and fundamentalist in the Northern part of the country. The strange part is "Not even a snug theological fit and a shared mission were sufficient to impel widespread interregional collaboration.". Seems like the South wanted to remain the south even though the religious Right would have had more power if it had welcomed the rest of the countries religious zealots with open arms.
The southern Fundamentalist were largely against the civil rights movement. "If they did not devote much energy to defending segregation, neither did they feel called to challenge it." "When Presbyterian conservatives--let's call them lower-case fundamentalists--created the PCA in the 1970s, they had to do so by withdrawing from a parent body, the PCUS (Southern). By the 1980s, "fundamental conservatives" in the SBC mobilized themselves into a major force and acquired power in that massive organization. Theirs was a well-orchestrated takeover, not a defection, and they have successfully defended their domination through the intervening years."
"Fundamentalism insists on establishing public policy for the entire public whether most, many, or only a few subscribe. That is the force of its inner authoritarian logic. It is perhaps too simplistic to label these competing views of public life as a contrast between democracy and theocracy, but their conflict is apparent."
"The ultimate effects of such fundamentalist reasoning on national life remain to be seen. What can be said for certain is that Fundamentalism's great achievement thus far has been to make Southern religion less Southern, that is, less culturally influenced or even less culturally captive. Fundamentalism has succeeded in the dissolution of two southern denominations as we have known them. No one ever had any reason to doubt that the PCUS or the SBC were Southern. Both exhibited a strong alliance, or a neat fit, between church and culture in the American South; a fact affirmed by the incapacity of popular Southern religion to be effectively exported to other American regions. But at home it has always been at home. No one could have imagined fifty years ago that Southern bastions like the PCUS or the SBC would ever forfeit their identity and solidity. But something deemed more important than Southernness intruded, namely, ideological correctness. Being sound, being right--theologically--toppled classic regional identity from its throne. A provincial spirit has continued, to be sure, but its dynamic has shifted from being an informal, strong cultural hegemony to being a crusade to conquer the region and the nation. From this angle of view, this radical revolution has certainly lived up to its prophetic vocation."
"While the South never was an undifferentiated mass culture, there was for a long time an identifiable Southern culture. What the fundamentalist-minded Baptists and Presbyterians and their third force compatriots (the independent Bible churches and the Charismatic and Pentecostal churches) have wrought is the supplanting of being true to the South. Now being the right sort of church person and citizen comes first."
"My contention here, more like a hypothesis, is that the Southern religious sundering of our time bespeaks and furthers the disappearance of the South as a highly distinctive culture. The application, of course, is complex. These recent changes make the persistence of Southern culture more tenuous. They have done so by forging new alliances between very conservative religious forces in the region and in the North and West. And by dividing and conquering, they have weakened the internal unity of the traditional denominations, prying them loose from their comfortable link with traditional Southern culture. That in itself is an accomplishment that those who repute Fundamentalism to traditional Southern religion seem to miss."
Trying to explain 6-7 pages is something different from trying to explain 3-4. Those are some of the most important aspects to the paper.
He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake since for him a spinal cord would suffice. Albert Einstein
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timmy
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Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13802
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That's a great précis. And it still takes some digesting. I'll have a ponder and probably not come to any sensible conclusion
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
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