A Weblog of Centrist Voices in American Politics
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A Weblog of Centrist Voices in American Politics | |
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March 27, 2005Religious Right and Religious LeftI did a Google Search of "religious right". The search reported "about 909,000" results. A comparison search for "religious left" found about 51,900 results. Interestingly, the first page of results for religious right were all about fighting it, with the exception of a neutral wikipedia article which notes that some to whom the term is applied consider it a negative stereotype of liberal media. The first page of results on religious left, by contrast, all seem to be positive about their subject. The term "religious conservatives" seems to be the preferred one by those who identify as such. It has 124,000 results, and the first page of results contains a number of positive uses of the term. The term "religious liberals" has 21,500 results, and the first page of results if predominantly positive. What does this tell us about the use of language? Frequently, labels are used by critics to refer to "them." However, if "they" are successful enough, a counter-label may arise. It's not clear to my why some labels are consider more palatable than others. Posted by rickheller at March 27, 2005 02:31 PMComments
Labels help one easily categorize so that the messy tasks of understanding and engaging can be easily disposed of. "Religious Right", "Bleeding heart liberal", "Secular humanist", "Radical feminist" etc. All serve this purpose well. Posted by: c3 at March 27, 2005 05:06 PMI'd say "ditto," but that word has been hijacked...lol. I've always believed that people (including the media) often resort to labels for several reasons: 1) Laziness, 2) Intolerance, 3) Plain ignorance. Posted by: AH at March 27, 2005 08:59 PM"Secular Humanist" at least has a fairly respectable pedigree; it was created by a specific group of people to describe themselves and their creed. You can go to www.secularhumanism.org to learn about them, their mission statement, their credo, and so on. Thus at least some people who attack "Secular Humanism" are actually addressing a very specific credo and ideology. The same can't really be said of the others. The "religious right" is made up of a fairly diffuse, hardly unified set of groups that align roughly along a few basic lines. I'll grant you that there is also a "religious left" and always has been, and they get very little attention. Posted by: Dean Esmay at March 27, 2005 09:50 PMI suspect that the reason religious conservatives don't care for the term "religious right" is because to them Marxism is just one of many movements they oppose. It doesn't deserve special billing by calling themselves the "right". Dean; |
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