RSS
TOP NAV
BOOK
ROAD TO THE
MIDDLE CLASS
Chapter 2:
Down in South Carolina and Out in Brooklyn
| | <<prev | 1 | 2 | (3) | |  print view |
To many progressives, the rise of the religious right is an insult, a threat to return America to a barbarous past, a cancer that must be stamped out before it metastasizes and kills the body politic. To Fogel in the Fourth Great Awakening, the sudden upsurge in religious enthusiasm is not a cancer but a negative drug reaction, a wakeup call for progressives. They need to change the prescription before the patient loses faith in the progressive doctor and leaves to find another one.
We shall return to analyze the curious phenomenon of the intolerance for religion among elite classes that so boldly advertise their tolerance. But first we shall examine the present upsurge in religious enthusiasm. Is it mere coincidence that the unlooked for upsurge in religious enthusiasm has occurred on the progressive watch when progressives and secularists have dominated the culture, or is it a direct response to the progressive hegemony? Perhaps this spiritual Awakening is a rejection by the ordinary people of the very basis of the progressive vision, the idea of leading the lower classes to leap in one bound from pre-bourgeois victimization and rural idiocy to cosmopolitan creativity and community. Maybe the Mary Johnstons and the Juan Riveras have a better idea. Maybe they just want to seek out and plod along the road to the middle class, not saunter along an I-beam like Mohawk ironworkers. Unlike the educated elite, they live close to their redneck or inner-city roots, and they know the danger. They know how drugs and drink and cheating hearts can destroy a life and damage all the lives nearby. Having found the road to the middle class, they want to stay on it, and are content to drive a car built for safety, not for speed.
Of course, this spiritual Awakening among the ordinary people of the United States in the latter half of the twentieth century is not unique. It is not even particularly special. Similar outbursts have occurred again and again down through recorded history. But to understand the outburst of our own time, it is well to understand the Awakenings that have come before. One such was the Great Awakening of the mid-eighteenth century. It led to the American Revolution of 1776.
| | <<prev | 1 | 2 | (3) | | print view |
Click for Chapter 3: Awakenings of Monotheism
Your comments are welcome. Please e-mail to Christopher Chantrill at mailto:chrischantrill@gmail.com, and take the RMC test here.
©2005 Christopher Chantrill
What Liberals Think About Conservatives
[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican
Racial Discrimination
[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,”
Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District
Liberal Coercion
[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State
Churches
[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
Sacrifice
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
Pentecostalism
Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization
Conservatism's Holy Grail
What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph
Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture
These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self
Drang nach Osten
There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion
Government Expenditure
The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
