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August 12, 2007
Spuiking for Jesus is just not pork barrel, is it? The Christian culture, especially the evangelical strand represented by Hillsong, is based on programmed fear about sin, evil and damnation. So it fits snugly with the conservative politics of fear that is designed to engender obedience to traditional authority.
Matt Golding
But it goes deeper than that. The political discourse today is all about working families as the foundation of political life and that excludes non-working working families, couples without children, single parents and singles. ''Working families" stands for a nuclear family, an overworked mum and dad, both of whom are in the workforce, a couple of young kids earning dollars with part time jobs, living in suburbia, and are hard done by. No one else really matters in this conservative discourse even with Rudd's talk of inclusiveness
That inclusive talk was before the conservative makeover of Rudd to make him the mirror image of Howard who has always talked about " the family". Families are sacred, with family values being bedrock. That means traditional morality or value, Christianity as the source of morality. The decay of community and a common culture in civil society is attributed to the breakdown of Christian family values. Howard's social conservatism is more than personal nostalgia for his 1950s Methodism.
The twist with the Hillsong evangeklcal strand is that you should guilty about making money. God has selected you from the resentful surly horde to be a success. Rich is good. This is the prosperity gospel. those who see aspiring, money making capitalists as bad --like Dante---clearly are bitter old sadists.
Captialism, the ‘hellish thing’, has successfully co-opted evangelism’ into its own ambiguously religious rhetoric. In the process, religiously inflected social conservatism has become firmly enmeshed with right-wing economic thought. However, the two are joined at the hip in that moral strength, as a form of asceticism., means being self-disciplined and self-denying. Otherwise you are weak and self-indulgent, and such moral flabbiness ultimately helps the forces of evil. So welfare is immoral and promote evil because it is seen as working against self-discipline and self-reliance.
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This is making my head hurt.
The new fundamentalist version of the Protestant ethic. Check.
A relatively small bit of the population.
Working families meshes the focus on IR and the focus on the increasingly mythical, but still symbolically powerful idea of the nuclear family. Check.
The two combined? Meltdown.
Aspirational working families I get, but the fundamentalist Hillsong portion of the electorate is pretty tiny isn't it? And they're more than likely Howard devotees regardless, aren't they?
We don't seem to have turned the corner and walked into all out American political culture just yet, I hope.