Generation Joshua

My skin is crawling because I just had a creepy epiphany about the power of religious story in politics.

I've been listening on CNN to Barack Obama preaching, I mean campaigning, in Selma, Alabama. Demagoguery is alive and well in southern churches; in the hands of a master, it does send shivers down your spine one way or another (either because you buy it utterly or conversely because it's frightening to see the congregation buy it so utterly.)

Looks like this will be an even more uneasy election cycle for me than the last two -- and this time not because of far-right Christian activists manipulating lesser-educated minds (always assumed to be headquartered in the South, sigh) with simplistic, storybook preaching to motivate and direct that base straight to the polls like lordly lemmings.

This time I may have to fight the so-called liberals too, those willing to dominate civic and global matters from the pulpit if need be, with an army of God behind their politics . . .

Obama kept evoking "Generation Joshua" this afternoon, to hallelujahs from the crowd (congregation?) If you're a secular homeschooler, that'll send shivers down your spine and if you're not, let me 'splain --

There's a well-financed, evangelical-dominated national organization of lawyers, lobbyists and speakers/advisors in the homeschool movement, known as the HomeSchool Legal Defense Association (HSLDA.) Its heft and heat tend to blot out the sun -- with the Son? -- in homeschool politics and the public mind. AS if that weren't plenty of power for me to fret over, in 2003 HSLDA leaders launched a kiddie "education" project aimed at getting conservative Christians to steer children into Republican politics and government at the highest levels.