Candace

Talmadge

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November 10, 2008

Be Vigilant: The Religious Right Will Be Back

“Always, after a defeat and a respite, the shadow takes another shape and grows again.” – J.R.R. Tolkien

With all the excitement over the Democratic administration shaping up under President-elect Barack Obama, it’s too easy to dismiss extreme religious conservatives as has-beens who have gone down in flames at the voting booth, never to return.

Not so fast. They’ll be back, maybe in a different package, perhaps in a less strident tone, but always with the same goal – to remake the United States into a Christian theocracy.

So warns Americans United for Separation of Church and State. This organization, which advocates on church-state separation issues, notes that with religious conservatives’ influence diminished in the Obama White House, they are likely to step up their activity at the state and local levels. The wannabe theocrats indeed may have lost the presidential race, but they engineered and won same-sex marriage bans in Arizona, California and Florida.

The mindset behind religious conservatives is not only closed to change, it also does not give up on attaining political control, according to Canadian sociologist Robert Altemeyer. His 2006 book, The Authoritarians, is an absolute revelation. (A PDF copy is available for free on the Internet on the web site of the author, who is associate professor of psychology at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg.)

Altemeyer has decades of experimental evidence documenting the differences between what he calls authoritarian followers and the rest of us. Authoritarian followers are far more submissive to a society’s established authorities of any political persuasion, whether right-wing (as in the United States), or under a Communist or other left-wing dictatorship.

Highly fearful, authoritarian followers also harbor a simmering cauldron of hostility that erupts when sparked by the self-righteousness they also display in far higher levels than most other people. When they think they have the backing of their adored top dogs, they readily attack others. They usually are only too willing to give a pass to leaders who bend/break laws or rules, even as they are ultra-condemnatory toward mere rank-and-file wrongdoers. Authoritarian followers are also so unaware of self that they usually cannot recognize when they subscribe to contradictory beliefs.

Altemeyer’s years of research also show that the attributes of authoritarian followers hold true for religious fundamentalists of all denominations. In other words, the Taliban and the New Apostolic Reformation are Islamic and Christian versions, respectively, of the same authoritarian impulses to dominate others.

Writing about the 2006 repudiation of the authoritarian followers’ political standard-bearers, the Republicans, Altemeyer warns presciently: “. . . even if the authoritarians play a diminished role in the next election, even if they temporarily fade from view, they will still be there, aching for a dictatorship that will force their views on everyone.”

They most certainly will, led by a new darling in former GOP vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin. According to a Rasmussen Reports survey of 1,000 likely Republican voters the day after the election, 64 percent of them picked the Alaska governor as their preferred presidential nominee in 2012.

The election of Barack Obama, who campaigned on themes of inclusion and reconciliation, has shown most of us that Americans are weary of divisive culture-war rhetoric and moral posturing by those subsequently revealed to be the very thing they railed against.

That interpretation, however, hasn’t penetrated the consciousness of religious conservatives of the authoritarian stripe. They don’t get it and they don’t want to, thank you very much.

And they will rise again, a lot quicker and with much more success than seems likely at the moment. After all, a good deal of the U.S. military has been quietly infiltrated by sectarian extremists who are actively promoting their religious agenda among the troops.

Even while we celebrate the Obama victory, we cannot relax because the agents of intolerance and bigotry never do.

© 2008 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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