Fundis

I've noticed that some writers who start off irritating me wind up being some of my favorite writers.   The first couple of dozen times I read Bob "Daily Howler" Somerby, I thought he was some kind of a twit who occasionally hits on a good idea.  Now I have to watch myself to avoid adopting his voice when I'm complaining about some press hackery.  I don't always agree with him.  But I've learned that he's worth listening to, even when he's off base.

I've had the same experience with Amy Sullivan, who writes about one of my lifelong favorite topics, the effects of religion on people's political behavior.  I used to read her blog and groan and make faces about some of the things she wrote.  But now I often find myself saying, "Yeah, she's got that one right."

Here's an example.  I try not to reproduce entire blog posts unless they're just a couple of paragraphs.  But I had to really resist the temptation on this one: Slow Down There.... 11/03/04.  With the Republicans coming out of the gate after Tuesday declaring that "values" made the difference in the presidential election, Amy is saying, all right, "values" does not mean bitching and moaning about gays.  (And, as Josh Marshall points out in an 11/04/04 post, the "values" issue in this election was really about a Karl Rove special, getting those anti-gay-marriage initiatives on the ballot in a number of key swing states like Ohio.)

In fact, until some clever writer like Amy Sullivan or the Howler comes up with a better term, I'm going to use "Republican Values" as a synonym for the Karl Rove kind of demagoguery.

As Amy writes, Republican Values are hardly synomous with religious values, moral values, or Christian values: 

Opposition to the war in Iraq is a moral issue. The alleviation of poverty is a moral issue. Concern about abortion is a moral value, yes, but you can stay at the level of empty rhetoric about a "culture of life" or you can talk about how to actually reduce abortion rates, which is what most people care about more.

I was also struck even more by her informed, realistic look at how the Christian Right and the Republican Party have becomed joined at the hip.  And, while we're on the subject, I'm normally use "Christian Right" instead of "Religious Right," because most of that group are conservative Christians, and mostly Protestants at that.  The occasional Jewish rabbi or Catholic priest is more window-dressing than anything for them, although the Catholic Church obviously contributes in some ways to the attitudes included in Karl Rove's Republican Values.

Amy's quick history:

If I may condense a few decades of history into one sentence, the perfect storm that led to what we now call the Christian Right was this combination:
Angry reaction by conservative evangelicals to court rulings on school prayer, Bible-reading in public schools, and abortion motivating them to enter the political realm for the first time
plus
Outrage among Catholics, who had previously kept kind of quiet while focusing on assimilating amid anti-Catholicism, after Roe v. Wade, mobilizing them into a politically active force
plus
The realization by Republican strategists that they need to form a cohesive electoral block and that their best bet for winning the South was partnering with white church leaders, since those institutions were the last acceptable bastion of racism
equals
Rock-solid coalition of Christian Right and Republican Party.

I notice she uses "Christian Right" also.  I may have unconsciously stolen it from her.

Anyway, I've quoted about half of her realtively short post already, but go read the rest.  We're going to hear the Big Pundits talking a lot of tommyrot (one of my favorite old Mississippi words that I think it's time to start using again) about the Republican Values voters and the mysterious ways of fundamentalist religion.  Amy Sullivan is positioned, it seems, to be one of the more helpful interpreters of the Religious Right phenomenon the next few years.  I for one will be keeping an eye out for her articles.