I live in the heart of fundamentalist Texas. The Creationist Museum is just a short distance away from my home. Only last week one of my neighbors was talking about his high school reunion in a small Panhandle town. He expressed shock because the town now lets "Mexicans" play on the city golf course.
Another of my lifelong friends, whom I love like my own brothers, and who is a staunch Baptist, recently spoke with quiet revulsion, or was it anger, about the way the TV program, ER, defended a woman who was homosexual. I never watched ER because I can not bear the traumas portrayed there so I did not know exactly what he was talking about. But apparently some woman on the staff of the hospital was homosexual and the show presented her in a favorable light, at least to the eyes of my friend.
I offer the foregoing among many other similar examples in order to ask for help. I never heard the political terms of "left" and "right" until I was a college sophomore. My political science professor explained it as a spectrum of political beliefs. He spent a day talking about it in detail, gave some examples, and I forgot about it until the Little Rock school battle. I think that I have some general understanding of where the "left" and "right" stand on some political issues, but I couldn't mark lines on the "left/right" political spectrum to show where various political organizations, American or otherwise, might fall. I think I have an idea of the extreme right's positions because I am surrounded by them, but I frankly can't tell you who belongs in the middle or on the extreme left.
And now I have begun to wonder what the spectrum of religious belief looks like. Fundamentalists belong on the extreme right, but who is the middle and who is on the extreme left. I read where a national organization of Churches of Christ, I think I remember this correctly, voted to welcome gays into their churches. Where do these folks belong on the religious spectrum? Where do the Catholic Church, the Southern Baptist Convention, the Jehovah's Witnesses belong?
The reason I am bringing this up is that I am beginning to suspect that the American spectrum of religious belief is side-heavy on the right side. I suspect, but I don't know, that few churches could be called moderate and almost none could be called liberal. If my suspicions are correct, and if a vast majority of Americans are religious, how will the liberal/progressive point of view ever prevail?
Is it not possible that the reasons most churches do not speak out against the anti-Jesus policies of the fundamentalists, is that they are actually sleeping in the same bed so to speak? Is it not possible that all religions, well, most of them, in America secretly would like to overturn the Constitution and live in a country where the Bible is the law of the land?
In any case, can y'all educate me? What does the spectrum of religious belief in America look like? Who is on the left? Who is on the right? And who is in the middle?