Website review: Liberals and Conservatives, Religio...
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•questia.com/PM.qst
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aliasinkhorn discovered 4 months ago- Liberals and Conservatives, Religious and Political: A Conjuncture of Modern History - Book Excerpt Randall Collins, University of California, Riverside From the page: "In the twentieth century, religious and political liberalism have generally been congruent, as were religious and political conservatism, along the dimension of universalism and particu larism. In recent years the terminology has grown confused, when communists in the ex-Soviet region are described as conservatives, and proponents both of market capitalism and of ethnic nationalism are described as liberals. Changes in content of liberalism and conservatism are also found in religious history. The issue of married priests today is considered to be a liberal reform within Catholicism; whereas in the twelfth century, reformers attacked married priests as corruption and abuse; at the Protestant Reformation, it was presented as church reform to abolish clerical celibacy. The rhetorical contrast "liberal/conservative" ties the concepts to the mobilization of conflict irrespective of its content. Our familiar congruence of liberalism and conservatism in religion and politics is historically specific; it emerged at the exhaustion of the religious wars in the late seventeenth century, and developed along with secularization into the early twentieth century. As particularism along ethnic and gender lines becomes a major grounds of mobilization in the late twentieth century, the classic liberal/conservative contrast appears to be eroding. What is the difference between a liberal and a conservative? Around 1965, if you were an American intellectual, the difference was obvious. A conservative was like a southern sheriff: racist, authoritarian, anticommu nist, intolerant, fundamentalist in religion. The liberal was the civil rights worker, the opposite of the conservative on every political point; in religion, she or he was an atheist (possibly a secular Jew) or a cosmopolitan such as Unitarian or an adherent of nonsectarian Hindu spiritualism. Religious and political liberalism were congruent, as were religious and political con servatism. Sociologists like Talcott Parsons connected the distinction more abstractly to the dimension of universalism and particularism. By the end of the 1980s, the difference had become confused. In the period of glasnost reform in the USSR, and concomitant movements in Eastern Europe culminating in the revolutions of 1989 and 1991, it was common for both observers and participants to use the terms "liberal" and "conser vative." But now the meanings were almost the opposite of those twenty years earlier in the United States. The Soviets who attempted a reactionary coup against the reformers were called "conservatives." But were they conservative in the same sense as Ronald Reaqan or Jerry Falwell? On the other side, Gorbachev was considered a liberal, Yeltsin a radical, and others were considered even more extreme as reformers. The "radicalness" of this -127-" Questia Media America, Inc. www.questia.com Publication Information: Article Title: Liberals and Conservatives, Religious and Political: a Conjuncture of Modern History. Contributors: Randall Collins - author. Journal Title: Sociology of Religion. Volume: 54. Issue: 2. Publication Year: 1993. Page Number: 127.
- simpletwist rated 3 months ago
- ...The rhetorical contrast "liberal/conservative" ties the concepts to the mobilization of conflict irrespective of its content. Our familiar congruence of liberalism and conservatism in religion and politics is historically specific; it emerged at the exhaustion of the religious wars in the late seventeenth century, and developed along with secularization into the early twentieth century. As particularism along ethnic and gender lines becomes a major grounds of mobilization in the late twentieth century, the classic liberal/conservative contrast appears to be eroding. What is the difference between a liberal and a conservative? Around 1965, if you were an American intellectual, the difference was obvious. A conservative was like a southern sheriff: racist, authoritarian, anticommunist, intolerant, fundamentalist in religion. The liberal was the civil rights worker, the opposite of the conservative on every political point; in religion, she or he was an atheist (possibly a secular Jew) or a cosmopolitan such as Unitarian or an adherent of nonsectarian Hindu spiritualism. Religious and political liberalism were congruent, as were religious and political conservatism. Sociologists like Talcott Parsons connected the distinction more abstractly to the dimension of universalism and particularism.
