Here is a very interesting slideshow, found through Ros Taylor on the Guardian’s election blog. I have posted about it before, when I took the survey, but this is a very lucid explanation of the Axis of UKIP, as they call hostility to foreigners and criminals.
What strikes me is that the Axis of UKIP corresponds very closely to the Liberal / traditionalist divide in Protestant Christianity, which is not about sex but boundaries. It just so happens that sexual behaviour is the boundary easiest to cross in a modern society.
> the Liberal / traditionalist divide in Protestant Christianity, which is not about sex but boundaries.
Is this the same as gray vs black & white?
Liberal: the world is complicated. You can’t draw hard lines.
Traditionalist: the world may or may not be complicated, but you have to draw lines.
?
I think there is something in this. But the question is, why should we need lines? And I think the answer to that is social. The lines between insiders and outsiders are enormously important in the division of resources.
There is a lot of sociology of religion which deals with the distinction between high-cost and low-cost religions. You might interpret the difference as doctrinal, but it seems to me that this is secondary — the classic counter-example would be the Hare Krishnas, who are, in the West, a high-cost religion, but whose beliefs are prefectly norrmal and entail no social price in India. So the distinctive factor is not what they believe, but what the society around them makes of these beliefs.
If we map this onto liberal and conservative Christianity, the real difference appears to be that many forms conservative Christianity demands a much higher price in terms of distinctiveness than liberal ones do. I’m thinking here of things like Sabbath observance, temperance, obnoxious witnessing. The link is not absolute Actually to be a conscientious “liberal” christian is very hard. In some societies, there is no cost whatever in adopting the outward marks of Calvinism. But in any case, the essential thing is that in a high-cost religion you know who’s in and who’s out, never mind their sexual behaviour. You know you can trust yyour fellow saints, becasue they too have suffered.