It takes two things to make a political lie work: a powerful person or institution willing to utter it, and another set of powerful institutions to amplify it.
Rick PerlsteinIn American religious history, theological qualms tend to get pushed aside when politics intervenes.
Rick PerlsteinIt is a lesson of the sixties: liberals get in the biggest political trouble - whether instituting open housing, civilian compliant review boards, or sex education programs - when they presume that a reform is an inevitable comcomitant of progress. It is then they are most likely to establish their reforms by top-down bureaucratic means. A blindsiding backlash often ensues.
Rick Perlstein