Hunky Jesus - The messages of the New Testament held hostage by the Christian Right.

[Igel]

19. It's always been wedded.

Because there is no religion apart from what the bearers of a religion and their leaders say it means.

Because there is no politics or ideology apart from what the bears of a political idea or ideology and their leaders say they mean.

Religion and politics are always united in every person that has both religious and political views. It wasn't entirely by accident or out of pure cynicism that Obama picked the church he did.

Thing is, when your religion and politics agree with somebody else's, you tend to think of them as separate. It's when they are at odds with yours they're suddenly horribly comingled in blasphemous and anti-social ways. Then again, the enemy is always immoral and evil.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_movement is an example of a left/Xian movement that occurred just before the Religious Right. In fact, the Religious Right is sort of a reaction to the religious left. MLK was, after all, a religious figure and grounded his political ideolology in his religion, and he preceded the Jesus movement. Liberation theology is the same, again, hardly on the right, and certainly *before* the American religious right; it's parallel to but radically different from the Jesus movement.

The WCTU was religious. So was the abolitionist movement *before* WJ Bryan. They picked and chose elements of the NT and OT narrative to elevate above all others.

Left-liberal DUer Xians do the same thing. So do right-conservative people that I've met. It's not that they usually discount and discard what they don't want--push, and you find that they belatedly admit that there are those bits of text. They just don't think they're as important. (Some do just say, "I don't think that was part of the original Bible." Most of those are on the left, since disregard of tradition is more of a left than a right trait, at least until the American left had a lot of successes to defend. More, both right and left, find ways to defang annoyingly contrarian Bible text bits.)