The Passion of the Right: Religious Fundamentalism and the Crisis of Democracy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article argues that under the presidency of George Bush, the Republican Party has increasingly become an extension of the religious right. One consequence is a rampant anti-intellectualism coupled with Taliban-like moralism now boldly translates into everyday cultural practices and political policies as right-wing evangelicals live out their messianic view of the world. Democratic politics and secular humanism are being replaced by a “Rapture” politics in which certainty, moralism, and absolutism drive an attack on science in the name of faith by endorsing Creationism over the teaching of evolution, wage an unrelenting war against gay rights and women’s reproductive rights, and use an appeal to the “culture of life” to support pharmacists who refuse to fill prescriptions for contraception on religious grounds. The attack on religious freedom and secular thought reproduces a debilitating anti-intellectualism throughout the culture and also threatens the separation of church and state, religious freedom, social justice, and democracy. The rise of religious fundamentalism has become one of the great problems facing the United States in the 21st century. The article calls for a cultural politics that defends religious freedom and the values of secular humanism as part of a defense of an inclusive democracy. The article concludes by calling for educators, parents, artists, and others reject the highly political and sectarian uses to which religion is being put by reclaiming those democratic values in which religious freedom rejects the use of religion as a political sectarian tool of the extreme right.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.040 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".