Frederick: Well, one thing would be about, well who exactly are these people we call the religious right? Who are the Catholic bishops, and what are they really about? Know the adversary. Most of us know more about the opposing baseball or football team than we do about the major religious and political figures in our own constitutional democracy, right? That's one thing.
We need to know the adversary and we need to know who our friends and allies are. Atheists and progressive religious people, for example, are not opposed to one another. They actually stand for the same thing--the rights of individual conscience and separation of church and state, right? So, people should not be so suspicious and hostile towards each other over religious differences and particularly between religious and non-religious people. You know? Not all religious people are conservative, and not all non-religious people are progressive. It just doesn't work that way. Those are a few things.
We can begin to understand what it means to have a politics that addresses these kinds of things constructively, and it's been a horrible thing to see A-list bloggers screaming about the American Taliban. Name calling and calling people Nazis and the Taliban, people we send troops overseas to go kill is not a way to have a constructive adversarial politics in the United States. That makes no sense. We have to stop the demonization, and the labeling, and the name calling. We can't even have a conversation among ourselves, let alone people we might begin to persuade.
Rob: If you'd like to give people a "takeaway" from this conversation--you're starting on a new project now, right? You're a senior fellow at the Research Associates?
Frederick: Yep.
Rob: What's your goal? What's your job there?
Frederick: Well, my job there is to do a number of studies and footnoted articles for the magazine The Public Eye; our study's of the right: different elements of the Christian right over the coming year. And that's what PRA does. It's a think tank that studies the right to inform progressive movements about adversaries and trends.
Rob: What would you be studying in particular? Any particular focus you're going to be taking?
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