The Christian right has long understood that in order to get the power they desire, they need to portray themselves as a group that is working for a majority. Sometimes they claim to speak for a majority of Americans and sometimes just for the majority of Christians, but either way, they understand that positioning themselves as spokespeople for a majority is an excellent way to push forward their agenda, even when that agenda is absolutely against what the majority actually wants. More than any other group in America, the Christian right knows that you can shove through a massively unpopular policy by appealing to people’s sense of identity and solidarity. Indeed, you can often get people to support you who would be utterly repulsed by your actual agenda.
How do they do it? They understand better than anyone how, in politics, identity trumps grittier concerns like actual policies. Labels like “conservative” or “Christian” create intra-group loyalty that allows the radicals within a group to push their agenda knowing that while the majority in their group may disagree with them, they won’t fight too hard because they don’t want to be accused of not being Christian or conservative enough.
Understanding how identity often matters more than belief is key to understanding how the religious right manages to gather so much power while pushing an agenda completely out of lockstep not just with the mainstream of America, but the mainstream of conservatism.
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What’s going on here is that, simply put, the hardliners in the Christian right are able to pressure other people into going along with them by using in-group loyalty. Your average pro-lifer wants abortion and contraception to be legal in some cases, but they will continue to give money and political support to anti-choicers trying to get rid of legal access to both because, at the end of the day, expressing solidarity with the movement matters.
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Once you understand how loyalty to the tribe causes people to squelch their objections to what the leaders of the tribe want, it becomes much easier to see how the Christian right convinces people to go along---or at least avoid fighting them---when the leaders decide to push radical right-wing agendas.
How Christian Tribalism Empowers Hardliners Against the Wishes of Most Americans | Alternet
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