McChurch - Lift High the Cross: Where White Supremacy and the Christian Right Converge

Lift High the Cross: Where White Supremacy and the Christian Right Converge
Both the Christian right and right-wing white supremacist groups aspire to overcome a culture they perceive as hostile to the white middle class, families, and heterosexuality. The family is threatened, they claim, by a secular humanist conspiracy that seeks to erase all memory of the nation's Christian heritage by brainwashing its children through sex education, multiculturalism, and pop culture. In Lift High the Cross Ann Burlein looks at two groups that represent, in one case, the �hard� right, and in the other, the �soft� right�Pete Peters's �Scriptures for America� and James Dobson's �Focus on the Family��in order to investigate the specific methods these groups rely on to appeal to their followers.

Arguing that today's right engenders its popularity not by overt bigotry or hatred but by focusing on people's hopes for their children, Burlein finds a politics of grief at the heart of such rhetoric. While demonstrating how religious symbols, rituals, texts, and practices shape people's memories and their investment in society, she shows how Peters and Dobson each construct countermemories for their followers that reframe their histories and identities�as well as their worlds�by reversing mainstream perspectives in ways that counter existing power relations. By employing the techniques of niche marketing, the politics of scandal, and the transformation of political issues into �gut issues� and by remasculinizing the body politic, Burlein shows, such groups are able to move people into their realm of influence without requiring them to agree with all their philosophical, doctrinal, or political positions.

Lift High the Cross will appeal to students and scholars of religion, American cultural studies, women's studies, sociology, and gay and lesbian studies, as well as to non-specialists interested in American politics and, specifically, the right.

Customer Review: An Interesting Look at the Right

I expected to take issue with Ms. Burlein's thesis but could not. In a time in which left-of-center politics dominates academic debate and ideology, I expected to read a knee-jerk review and condemnation of conservative values. I was pleasantly surprised.There was no brow-beating of those who value heterosexulaity over its counterpart nor was there any denigrating discussion of the traditional values of the "white right."

"Lift High the Cross" is an excellent academic discussion of a widely-held worldview. Whether to believe the proposition that Christian Right is an extension of the klan is left up to the reader to decide. Though I did not grow up in Ms. Burlein's region of the U.S. I now live and teach there, I can appreciate her desire to discuss in neutral language a very pressing issue facing our nation today.

After reading her book, I have a better understanding of many of the issues concerning white supremacy, some of which I had never considered until I read her book. In conclusion, I must say that although my political beliefs incline toward the right, at no time did her thesis make me feel "wrong" because of my personal politics. I recommend this book highly.

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