--"Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God" (Mathew 19:24).
This past week we witnessed something that should prove disturbing to most Americans: all of the serious Republican contenders for the 2012 presidential election spoke at the Value Voters Summit, a function sponsored and attended by bigots; the SPLC lists both the Family Research Council and Bryan Fischer's American Family Association as anti-gay hate groups. The myriad smears of the LGBT community by these two groups based on discredited or junk science are out there for anyone to read, if you have the stomach for it. Certainly, the appearance of the republican field at this event begs the question: are all of the GOP contenders really bigots or courting the bigot demographic? Perhaps some more than others, and we should acknowledge the irony of Mitt Romney having to defend himself and the Mormon faith and also feeling the need publically to distance himself from Fischer, who spoke after him. Perhaps the best lens for interpreting all of this is one provided by Dave Niose (2011) in his Psychology Today article The Unseen Influence of the Religious Right: Big business is the big beneficiary of social conservative voters.
In a nutshell, Niose argues that corporate interests are best served by exploiting the loyalty of voters who primarily assert their Christian right beliefs at the polls. Here's how it works. Corporatist Christian right politicians like Richy Rick Perry and the factually challenged Michele Bachmann, whose husband purports to be able to cure "the gay," have very loyal voter bases. These voters are often the "one-issue" voters whose votes are primarily meant to combat gay marriage or abortion, for example. All other considerations, their own financial well being and stability, the environment, everything else goes by the wayside at the ballot box. After all, we're not long for this Earth, and what will they say to God on judgment day?
Hence, Perry and Bachmann supporters vote for them because voting for the anti-abortion and anti-gay candidate is more important than voting for the environmentalist candidate who wants to tax the rich and corporations their fair share. As Niose points out, being inherently self-interested and amoral, corporations demand that
Tax rates on corporations and the rich must remain at historical lows, almost negligible, even though government is broke. We must now see serious efforts to privatize Social Security, because doing so would result in huge profit opportunities for Wall Street even if it would make the foundational retirement savings of ordinary Americans dangerously unstable. We must deregulate virtually everything, even though it was unregulated corporate interests that caused the 2008 financial collapse. We must forget about universal single-payer health care, because the interests of drug companies and insurance companies are much more important than the interests of ordinary citizens. We must dismantle government, including public education, because corporate interests hate government unless it is subsidizing their cash flow. This, in turn, explains why we won't see military budget cuts, because military spending is a cash cow for corporate interests. And forget about a rational, sustained effort to preserve the environment or transition to sustainable energy, since these efforts would threaten the profits of many of America's most powerful corporate interests, including oil companies.
Given all of this, corporations know how loyal and single-minded Christian right voters are, so they field and fund corporatist candidates who espouse Christian right and often bigoted ideologies. That way, Christian right voters will consciously vote for candidates who champion the corporate interests listed by Niose, even though those interests conflict with their own. Christian right voters likely to support Perry and Bachmann may very consciously be voting against their own economic and other self-interests because it's more important to stop those "baby killing abortionists" and "degenerate gays" at the polls than it is to have the rich pay their fair share of taxes or to protect the environment. Corporations just have to keep making sure that their political henchmen remain simultaneously corporatist and religiously bigoted. Ingenious, isn't it?
What surprised me is the difference between this situation and false consciousness, the conflict theorist notion that the oppressed internalize the values of their oppressors, values that help entrench the status quo disparity in wealth and power between dominant and subordinate groups. In this case, Christian right voters are very consciously voting against their own economic and other self-interests in order to be "good Christians" at the polls.
Mitt Romney should be asking himself right about now how his deal with the devil is working out.