Timothy Noah over at Slate reports on a new PC movement - the media, under pressure from Dominionists, is changing its language to remove the concept of a "Christian right" from the lexicon.
Welcome to Framing 2.0. The mere existence of a radical theocratic right is being removed from the public consciousness.
http://slate.msn.com/id/2109370/
The correct, consensus frame to expose the religious right is to refer to "Dominionists" and their supporters. For more on Dominion Theology and the Old Testament theocrats, read earlier entries in this diary or do a Google search.
Excerpts from the slate article below the fold.
I'm willing to grant that it is not yet official policy at ABC News to avoid the phrase "Christian right." But, according to Nexis, ABC's World News Tonight hasn't used the phrase "Christian right" since Jennings expressed his disapproval this past Tuesday while World News Tonight has used the phrase "evangelical Christian" or "evangelical" at least three times to describe this voting bloc. (The latter calculation is based on a Nexis search using the search terms "ABC News," "evangelical," and "Bush.")
John Green, a political scientist and director of the Bliss Institute at the University of Akron, examined the views of evangelical Christians, along with those of mainline Protestants and Catholics, in a survey for the Pew Forum titled "The American Religious Landscape and Political Attitudes: A Baseline for 2004 ." He assured me that the term "Christian right" has, indeed, been shed by the group it's meant to describe. Why? Partly because liberals, after years of hard work, have finally managed to attach extremist associations to the phrase "the right," in much the same way that conservatives many decades ago established that anything "left" was beyond the pale.
But that isn't the whole answer, he said. It turns out that the Christian right has been renaming itself with a frequency that would make Jesse Jackson blush. In the late 1970s, it was the "religious right." Jerry Falwell favored that term, and the media picked it up. Pretty soon, though, members of the movement perceived that the label had, for some mysterious reason, become pejorative, so the "religious right" was renamed the "Christian right." Now the movement is shedding "Christian right," because that term, mysteriously, has become pejorative, too. The new favored term is "the pro-family movement," but that's so overtly propagandistic--secularists are anti-family?--that it hasn't gotten much pickup. Hence "conservative Christian" or "evangelical Christian."
The trouble with "conservative Christian" is that it confuses the question of whether an individual is conservative in his religious practice with the question of whether that person is conservative politically. (Much of the black church, for example, is conservative in the religious but not the political sense.) Similarly, there are politically liberal "evangelical Christians," and there used to be quite a lot more of them. (In Elisabeth Sifton's book The Serenity Prayer , a memoir of her father, the politically liberal theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, Sifton points out that Niebuhr was an evangelical Protestant.) Even fundamentalists (an evangelical subgroup whom Jennings, incidentally, conflated with the broader Christian right) have some political liberals among them. In ditching the term "Christian right," Green summed up, the Christian right chose to associate itself with the pool of Christians from which it hopes to draw, not the folks who already belong.