And I thought I was the only leftist, anarcho-communist, feminist, anti-imperialist, anti-racist in North America who was rasied a Protestant Christian Fundamentalist!
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz: Being a Protestant Fundamentalist
The Democratic Party appears incapable of challenging organized fundamentalism and the transformed Republican Party. Many liberals and a good number of leftists seek to restore the New-Deal-to-War-on-Poverty stance of government, but the policies of that era were driven by the organized working class in the first instance and the massive Civil Rights Movement in the second; those government policies were stopgaps to prevent the overthrow of capitalism. Now it is obvious that they did not go to the root causes of oppression and exploitation, and it is doubtful that the reform strategies of the past can be re-enacted today or in the future.
What concerns me is not so much that the ruling class has come to this strategy of populist fascism with politicized Christian fundamentalism as its mass base — after all, capitalism is a corrupt and unworkable (for the many) system — as that so many of those who are committed to social justice, even to a future socialist society, have written off the poor and the working class that they perceive to make up the “mass movement” of this project. Instead of working to unmask the agenda of the ruling class, many liberal and left activists are trying to figure out how to offer religion lite and avoid the issues of abortion, gay liberation, and other “social” issues. One thing I know about Protestant Christian fundamentalists from having been one, however, is that it cannot be substituted by “spirituality.”
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