Help! DUers who are experts on the rise of the Christian Right

[Arkana]

I'm doing a paper on the failure of the Enlightenment in the West, and I thought the Christian Right was a great example. Anyone know where I can get something like a comprehensive history from, like, the mid-80s on?

Thanks in advance!

[Danocrat]

1. Not an expert but

I remember back in the Reagan years that several articles had concerns about how the religious right in California was infiltrating, just at first, school boards. That their objective was to work their way to the top. That this was being accomplished and people should wake up. I'd search California news in the early '80's.

[teach1st]

2. Try these

http://www.theocracywatch.org/

Lots of history: http://www.theocracywatch.org/christian_recon_planet_weekly_mar2004.htm

http://www.thementalmilitia.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=251&mode=thread

[BrklynLiberal]

3. Here are two places to start

http://www.theocracywatch.org/

http://www.yuricareport.com/

[jonnyblitz]

4. failure of enlightment...that is an understatement. nt.

[Arkana]

5. Thanks, all of you

The Theocracy Watch website looks particularly useful.

[RevCheesehead]

6. Here's a great book which might help:

Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans), 1994.

(from the book flap):

"...tracing the history of evangelical thinking in America... Noll's analysis:

* shows how Protestants successfully aligned themselves with national ideals and with the particular expressions of an American Enlightenment in the decades before the Civil War

* explains how fundamentlists at the start of the twentieth century preserved essential elements of the faith, but only by grievously damaging the life of the mind

* gives specific attention to evangelical thought on politics and science

* discusses what some have called an "evangelical intellectual renaissance" in recent decades and shows why it is more apparent than real.

Written to encourage reform as well as to inform, this book ends with an outline of some preliminary steps by which evangelicals might yet come to love the Lord more thoroughly with the mind.

********************

I would also recommend Jim Wallis' book God and Politics.

[BrklynLiberal]

7. Another link

http://www.religioustolerance.org/reconstr.htm

[xray s]

8. You have to start here

John Nelson Darby (1800-1882)

He is the guy who invented the rapture myth. That is the underpinning of the religious right. Understand the rapture myth, and you will undeerstand how thier mind "works".

[Kathy in Cambridge]

9. where do you go to school?

is this for a PoliSci class?

[Arkana]

11. Nope

I go to Providence College, and this is for a paper for my Development of Western Civ class.

[Kathy in Cambridge]

12. Duh-you told me you went to PC before

[Zomby Woof]

10. Robert Boston's "The Most Dangerous Man In America?"

About Pat Robertson and the RR, espeically in the 80's. He is chair of AmericansUnited, and it is worthy read.

[Missy Vixen]

13. I'm not sure if these will help

but try the writings of Bishop John Philip Spong. Spong rocks the free world. At the very least, it'll make a good looking bibliography.

Some of his more well-known works: "Why Christianity Must Change or Die," and "Rescuing the Bible From Fundamentalism".

Julie

p.s. You might also want to try the Heritage Foundation website for additional research. You may have to Google for a link :scared:.