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NEW RELIGIOUS RIGHT l 1295 God) it refers. Lord is retained when referring to “the Lord Jesus Christ” and substituted when it is clear it refers to God. Jesus Language A distinction is made between Jesus the human and the post-Resurrection Christ, as pointed out earlier. Frequently in the New Testament, Jesus is referred to as “Son”: Son of God, Son of Man, Son of the Blessed One, Son of the Most High, Son of David, and so on. When in the gospels the historical person Jesus is referred to as “Son, the word is retained. But when Jesus is called “Son of God” or “Son of the Blessed One,” and the maleness of the historical person Jesus is not relevant, but the “Son’s” intimate relation to the “Father” is being spoken about, the formal equivalent “Child” is used for “Son,” and gender-specific pronouns are avoided. Thus readers are able to identify with Jesus’ humanity. If the fact that Jesus was a man, and not a woman, has no christological significance (i.e., makes no difference for how Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection save humanity ) in the New Testament, then neither does the fact that Jesus was a son and not a daughter. If Jesus is identified as “Son,” believers of both sexes become “sons” of God, but if Jesus is called “Child,” believers of both sexes can understand themselves as “children of God.” The title “son of man,” found frequently in the gospels , has a complex history and is translated “the Human One” in the inclusive language. “The Human One” is clearly a title of a nonandrocentric form and is also open to the many nuances of interpretation that are possible in the original Greek term. No gender is ascribed to the term. The continuing challenge of inclusive language is to raise consciousness among religious communities that the language we use for each other and for the divine is partial, incomplete, and constantly changing. This includes the recent history of inclusive language translation itself. It must be semper reformanda. SOURCES: Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father (1973). Marjorie Proctor-Smith, In Her Own Rite: Constructing Feminist Liturgical Tradition (1990). Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976). NEW RELIGIOUS RIGHT Laura R. Olson THE “NEW RELIGIOUS Right” commonly refers to the political movement of evangelical Protestants that began in the 1970s. Evangelicals, who believe that scripture is the revealed word of God and actively seek to convert others to Christianity, first attracted substantial attention from the national press in 1980 when they voted in large numbers for Ronald Reagan. The intense political mobilization of evangelical voters that attended the rise of the Religious Right marked a departure from the longstanding evangelical tradition of political avoidance. For generations, evangelical Protestant leaders had argued that politics was a dirty and sinful forum; Christians, they felt, would be better served by avoiding involvement in such a realm. Events of the 1960s and 1970s brought about a sea change in evangelical opinions about the propriety of political participation. Many evangelicals felt threatened by the sweeping social changes of the 1960s. They lamented the U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions that school prayer is unconstitutional and abortion constitutional. There was also great disappointment in evangelical circles with what were perceived as overly liberal policy initiatives during the presidency of Jimmy Carter, a professed born-again Christian. During the 1970s evangelical leaders came to feel that their political views were not being represented by what they viewed as an increasingly secular American government, and the Religious Right movement was born. While the Religious Right’s most visible leaders have been men such as Jerry Falwell, Marion “Pat” Robertson , and James Dobson, women have played important, if less obvious, roles as well. Particularly noteworthy are the multitudes of evangelical women across the United States who have supported the Religious Right despite the movement’s rather conspicuous rejection of feminism . A central plank of the Religious Right’s political and social agenda has been the preservation of the nuclear , heterosexual model of family. Evangelical women are discouraged from working outside the home and are expected to defer to their husbands. Female supporters of the Religious Right tend to embrace this notion of “male headship” and cherish their roles as mothers and homemakers. Not surprisingly, relatively few visible female leaders have arisen within the Religious Right. Only two—Phyllis Schlafly and Beverly LaHaye—have attained national prominence. However...

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