Friday, April 17, 2015

Material Structure of Ideology and Politics: Part 3

Another very conservative ideological-institutional cluster I labeled the Religious Right (yes, I am relying very heavily on existing categorizations). Belonging to the Religious Right are think-tanks such as the Family Research Council, Ethics and Public Policy Center, and the Council for National Policy; advocacy groups like Focus on the Family, the Christian Coalition, and the National Organization for Marriage; and figures such as James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Erik Prince (the founder of Blackwater), and Tony Perkins. Pat Robertson, for his part, is a Christian media mogul whose ventures include the Christian Broadcasting Network and the 700 Club.

There are two notable features of the Religious Right.

First, there is a certain amount of overlap between the Radical Right and the Religious Right, as some of the same religious figures and organizations have affiliations in both clusters (for example, Cleon Skousen and other extremist elements of LDS). In fact, the Radical Right and Religious Right have a shared religious basis: extremist-fundamentalist Protestants, Catholics, and Mormons. The primary difference between the two clusters is that the ideas promoted by the Radical Right contain a very detailed and consistent political/economic vision that is integrated with social-religious beliefs and attitudes, whereas the discourse and activities within the institutions of the Religious Right privilege religious belief and social issues (marriage rights, abortion, etc.), and pay only secondary (if any) attention to political and economic issues, resulting in a degree of diversity in the political/economic positions held among individuals associated with this cluster.

In contrast to the consistently anti-establishment positions of the Radical Right, the second salient feature of the Religious Right is its tenuous relationship to the Establishment. I will be able to more fully flesh out exactly what I mean by "the Establishment" when I finish outlining the other ideological-institutional clusters. For now, I will briefly explain two aspects of this relationship. First, individuals, such as Irving Kristol and Donald Rumsfeld, who are more closely associated with the Neoconservative institutional-ideological cluster (the subject of my next post), which has carved out a space for itself within the Establishment over the past few decades, also maintain secondary affiliations with institutions of the Religious Right. The extent to which this relationship is strategic or based on genuine religious beliefs is hard to guess. However, there is definitely some degree of strategy involved, and the second aspect of the relationship between the Religious Right and the Establishment is, in fact, the history of a strategic alliance.

The history of the creation the Religious Right in the cooptation of religious fundamentalists by the Republican Party is fairly well known, so there is no need to detail it here. The important point that I want to make is that the institutions that were ultimately employed as an instrument of Republican control over a large voting bloc have actually never had more than a thin connection to other conservative ideological-institutional clusters nor that aspect of the Establishment that is shaped by the Republican Party. It was always a purely pragmatic relationship and the ties could easily be severed. (Witness the problems caused for the Republican Party by recent religious freedom bills and the pragmatic rhetorical shifts taken by some Republican politicians.)

It can be concluded, then, that although the Religious Right has perhaps a stronger institutional base than the Radical Right, it is still rather limited, primarily consisting of a handful of think-tanks, religious organizations, and business ventures. The Religious Right may, accordingly, be viewed as more of an outgrowth of a few related religious movements that was exploited for political purposes. This is not, of course, to deny the religiosity of many prominent politicians and societal power-holders. It is to say that their thinking is guided more directly by institutions and ideologies with clear political/economic agendas that may also happen to harmonize with their fundamentalist religious beliefs.

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