I've noticed a number of stories recently on people who have counterintuitive combinations of political attitudes and consumer habits, or politics and religion, or whatever. First was the "conservative punk" thing I wrote about this weekend; then I noticed Wonkette giving a nod to the same article. In that post, she pointed out recent articles about conservative college students and conservative hipsters.
Now the American Prospect has gotten into the "black is white, up is down" game with a piece on freestyle evangelicals. They're political versions of Jonny Moseley, doing the seemingly impossible with daring and unconventional ways of deriving politics from religion:
As one believer told the Prospect, "I am a political moderate, not despite my theological conservatism but because of it."
I have two ways of reading this: First, that your consumption of politics doesn't have to be internally consistent, because it's just a vast buffet of different consumer choices. Late capitalism allows you to have your Tony Bennett and your Clash, your Sleater-Kinney and your Supremes, your Pixies and Lawrence Welk. So, without any fear of contradiction, it also permits "odd" combinations of politics and faith: moderate evangelicalism; punk-rock Republicanism; statist anarchism.
My second way to understand this -- not necessarily inconsistent with the first -- is that the focus on the oddity of evangelical moderates is a way of reinforcing the conventional wisdoms about liberalism. The dominant story is that liberal politics is necessarily secular politics. Thus you have scribes like David Brooks acting surprised that a left-wing cause -- in this case the civil rights movement -- can have religious underpinnings.
The idea that Christian fundamentalism invariably leads to an anti-welfare state, pro-business, intolerant worldview, is just a result of incredibly strong Republican propaganda to the effect that their politics is the church's politics. And to slip in the idea that a theologically conservative person might conclude that Jesus's teachings require a strong welfare state, the Prospect has to invent a new term: "freestyle" evangelicals. "Freestyle" suggests that they are loose, unpredictable, dangerous: it thus cedes the rhetorical ground to the Republican/Christian right before the battle has even begun. By emphasizing how strange and deviant the moderate evangelicals are, the term just bolsters the idea that the "normal" Christian is conservative.
The Prospect article ends on a hopeful note:
But the extremist ideology of this administration -- clearly antithetical to virtually everything Jesus Christ stood for -- has created an opening among religious voters ... The Democrats can win some votes, redefine the role that religion plays in American public life, and neutralize one of the right wing's great wedge issues -- if they choose to pursue it.
But the terminology, and thus the concept, is all wrong. These aren't "freestyle" evangelicals -- they're just gentler interpreters of church teaching. Democrats could make a better case if they can show how mainstream this is, not how deviant.
