The Christian Right, the South and the Christian Republican White Peoples Party

Harold Bloom just published an essay that is perhaps more literary than political in the strict sense. But this observation focuses on a couple of important features of the religious and regional influences on current American politics: Reflections in the Evening Land Guardian 12/17/05. He writes:

Our politics began to be contaminated by theocratic zealots with the Reagan revelation, when southern Baptists, Mormons, Pentecostals, and Adventists surged into the Republican party. The alliance between Wall Street and the Christian right is an old one, but has become explicit only in the past quarter century. What was called the counter-culture of the late 1960s and 70s provoked the reaction of the 80s, which is ongoing. This is all obvious enough, but becomes subtler in the context of the religiosity of the country, which truly divides us into two nations. Sometimes I find myself wondering if the south belatedly has won the civil war, more than a century after its supposed defeat. The leaders of the Republican party are southern; even the Bushes, despite their Yale and Connecticut tradition, were careful to become Texans and Floridians. Politics, in the United States, perhaps never again can be separated from religion. When so many vote against their own palpable economic interests, and choose "values" instead, then an American malaise has replaced the American dream.

I also like the essay because Bloom says gives good mention to several of my favorites: William Faulkner, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman and Andrew Jackson.

Although Bloom is right in identifying a heavy overlap between the Christian Right and what we might call the politics of unreconstructed white Southerners, I have major reservations about the "red state/blue state" dichotomy that we so often hear used these days. The South is by no means a monolithic political entity, as the careers of Bill Clinton and Al Gore illustrate. And rabid Republicanism and Christian Right zealotry are certainly not absent from "blue" states.

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