This came to a head in the years leading up to WWII and then the immediate follow-up of the Cold War. The wealthy opposed any attempt to pry their money loose from them even when they were clearly violating both the constitution and common decency to enrich themselves at the expense of others. Poor whites began to grasp the idea of class warfare, and labor unions began growing.
Seeing communist and socialist governments taking root in Europe and Asia, the wealthy allied with conservative religious leaders to create a propaganda parody of Marxism / communism / socialism: Their fantasy version included taking everybody's homes and guns and Bibles and forcing them to treat Negroes as equals while encouraging their children to have sex and use drugs. It was a winning sales pitch and it found a lot of support among white and conservative and Christian audiences, especially where two or more of those audiences overlapped.
Following WWII, with the rise of Billy Graham and other evangelicals-cum-politicians, we saw the most flamboyant of the evangelical movement become aligned with politicians and companies that either deliberately hindered American social progress or got the country involved in disastrous foreign entanglements.
The religious right has always strongly supported every war we have marched off to fight, even long past the point where it became obvious to everyone we had fought the wrong war for the wrong reasons and had lost.[1] The religious right fought against desegregation and civil rights because it removed the fig leaf that let them justify their unjust attitudes towards non-whites.
They still fight against women's rights and against LGBT rights.[2] Jerry Falwell famously conjured up "Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve" to justify his anti-gay bigotry, but long before that he was fighting against busing and school integration and interracial marriage, and to help lily white Christians escape the big bad black man, he established so-called "Christian" academies and Liberty College.
There is the rotten, cancerous, gangrenous, pus-spewing source of the infection: The religious aspect of the dominant white male culture, a culture that fears the day they are no longer in charge and fights tooth and nail to keep it at a distance.[3]
- As long as we Christians allow Pat Robertson to babble on incoherently in a manner that is offensive to all sane, just-minded people...we are endorsing him.
- As long as we Christians allow Franklin Graham to openly espouse hate in the name of God against people who have done him no harm...we are endorsing him.
- As long as the Duggars are celebrated for fucking without birth control and condemning an entire class of people by falsely claiming they are child molesters while hiding a child molester in their midst...we are endorsing them.
And I can go on and on and on.
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[3/1] Look how many people claim to this day that we lost Vietnam because liberals prevented gallant American soldiers from effectively fighting the enemy.
[3/2] The SBC, whom we can only refer to as the ultimate slow learners of Christianity, have just announced they are going to ignore any Supreme Court ruling on same sex marriage that is contrary to their beliefs which is exactly the same attitude they took to slavery in the run up to the Civil War.
[3/3] Often by denying they -- the dominant white male culture -- even exists, thus enabling them to paint themselves as the victims of aggression and prejudice from the very people objecting to being oppressed by them.