{"id":6661,"date":"2010-10-07T05:45:53","date_gmt":"2010-10-07T09:45:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.geneveith.com\/?p=6661"},"modified":"2010-10-07T05:45:53","modified_gmt":"2010-10-07T09:45:53","slug":"when-conservative-christians-were-politically-liberal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/2010\/10\/when-conservative-christians-were-politically-liberal\/","title":{"rendered":"When conservative Christians were politically liberal"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

My point was apparently not clear in yesterday\u2019s post about \u201cgovernment as a force for secularization.\u201d
\nI\u2019m trying to think through the history of conservative Christian\u2019s stance towards politics. There was indeed a time when many if not most conservative Christians were politically liberal. <\/p>\n

I grew up in the buckle of the Bible belt, as they say, in small town Oklahoma, where most people were Southern Baptists. (Not us, we belonged to a liberal denomination.) But virtually everyone was liberal politically. There was no Republican Party in the county where I grew up. They were liberal when it came to economic policy. We thrived on government pork barrel projects, with our long-ensconced representatives building dams and lakes and waterways and all kinds of stuff. If there was a problem, we wanted the government to take care of it. And the reason was not resentment of Abraham Lincoln or anything racial. It was fidelity to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal. He brought us out of the depression, put us to work, started rural electrification, and on and on. None of our political heroes, from FDR to LBJ, did anything to challenge our Christian faith. It never occurred to them to do so. <\/p>\n

\nThen came the Vietnam war. We were good LBJ Democrats, supporting him in his civil rights bill, the Great Society, and his crusade to bring Democracy to Vietnam. But then came another kind of liberal: The cultural liberal. The hippies and the yippies and the yahoos. Our boys volunteered to fight in Vietnam, but now these people are vilifying them. Then the Democrats started being on their side! Then we were getting things from our government like outlawing school prayer. Some of us saw the wisdom of that, but then the Supreme Court legalized abortion. The tide turned. As I heard people say, I didn\u2019t leave the Democratic party; the Democratic party left me. We became Reagan Democrats. And now my county is solidly Republican.\n

Of course conservative Christians can be liberal politically. That was arguably the norm up until a few decades ago. But now things have changed. Most conservative Christians, not all, but most, are now alienated from their government, which in their eyes has become a force for secularization. Now they want a smaller government to minimize its power to threaten their way of life and their beliefs. <\/p>\n

Could the Democrats win them back by focusing on economic and political liberalism, without the cultural liberalism? I suspect so. ButI don\u2019t think that can happen now.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My point was apparently not clear in yesterday\u2019s post about \u201cgovernment as a force for secularization.\u201d I\u2019m trying to think through the history of conservative Christian\u2019s stance towards politics. There was indeed a time when many if not most conservative Christians were politically liberal. I grew up in the buckle of the Bible belt, as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1281,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,34,36],"tags":[455,657,1880],"class_list":["post-6661","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government","category-personal","category-politics","tag-christianity-politics","tag-democrats","tag-republicans"],"yoast_head":"\nWhen conservative Christians were politically liberal<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"My point was apparently not clear in yesterday's post about "government as a force for secularization." 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