Missionary Politics

Here is a fascinating article by a progressive Democrat that gives the responsibility for the resurgence of the right in American politics to the willingness of the Republican Party to recruit, to do the dirty work of going door to door, of evangelizing, and to be very strategic about building institutions that create new conservatives and bring one issue voters into the Republican fold.

The article consists of an aggressive exhortation by a Democrat to other Democrats to begin recruiting, to be missionaries of progressivism, as they call whatever it is that they believe these days.

Christopher Hayes writes: "And yet the improbable fact about missionary activity is that it works, regardless of the faith's specific dogma. Mormons are the fastest-growing church in the country. Evangelical protestant congregations make up 58 percent of all new churches in the United States. Globally, Islam continues to reach into new and unfamiliar lands, experiencing explosive growth in China. Religions that actively proselytize – Pentecostals, Mormons, Muslims – grow, almost without exception." This is fascinating and accurate analysis of the growth of primarily Charismatic and Pentecostal churches around world, to the exclusion of all other Christian denominations except for conservative leaning wings of the mainline denominations in Third World countries, not to mention fundamentalist branches within the United States, primarily in red states.

Also interesting is that Hayes slaps down the liberals who insist that the electorate is essentially progressive at heart and has only been deceived into voting conservative. He admits that the conservative movement has actually created a conservative majority, that people are at heart conservative, but he believes that this is a result of aggressive recruitment on the part of the armies of the right.

Hayes: "Common sense would suggest that the best explanation for this is that most voters are conservative and the Republicans are the conservative party. If this is true, we cannot continue to imagine there exists a slumbering progressive majority waiting to be awakened with the right trumpet call. We cannot cling to the fiction that conservatives have somehow hypnotized the electorate, hoodwinking them into voting for Republicans and reactionaries while leaving untouched their internal worldviews, which somehow remain fundamentally progressive. It is important that we stare directly into the sun on this point. The right has fundamentally reconstituted the way Americans view government, politics, policy and the public sphere. We need to change it back."