re: #719 prairiefire

Yes, the Religious Right. Sigh

I don’t like to think about the religious right as some monolithic group, all spouting the exact same rhetoric, with the same meaning. I think what defines the Religious Right is when you find conservative Christians trying to use that message for divisive purposes, such as we see coming from people like Beck or Robertson etal:

An example…

“But American Christians, I must say to you as I said to the Roman Christians years ago, “Be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.” Or, as I said to the Phillipian Christians, “Ye are a colony of heaven.” This means that although you live in the colony of time, your ultimate allegiance is to the empire of eternity. You have a dual citizenry. You live both in time and eternity; both in heaven and earth. Therefore, your ultimate allegiance is not to the government, not to the state, not to nation, not to any man-made institution. The Christian owes his ultimate allegiance to God, and if any earthly institution conflicts with God’s will it is your Christian duty to take a stand against it. You must never allow the transitory evanescent demands of man-made institutions to take precedence over the eternal demands of the Almighty God.”

That rhetoric, that liturgical language above, sounds “Beckian” in nature, and could certainly have been used, in the mouth of a fiery right wing preacher, at the Beck rally yesterday.

But the fact of the matter, that excerpt is from one of the many sermons of MLK. Certainly he was not using this rhetoric to tear anything down, as we see of certain right wing preachers.

You can find religious conservatives attending churches and staffed by preachers who do not follow the sort of crap we hear from Beck and his like. Unfortunately, they are smaller in number, and short on influence.

It would be nice if all preachers, on any side of the political spectrum, could have the heart of the sort message that MLK was preaching.