I haven’t seen the Frontline episode discussed in this Charles Taylor article, but I gotta strongly disagree with his opening paragraph :

As long as the topic is the Christian right, it’s easy for those of us on the left to insist on the separation between church and state. But there’s at least one example that makes mush of our certainty that religion should never play a role in politics: the civil rights movement. A liberal who argues that religion should always stay out of politics is basically arguing that America could have gone for years without a civil rights act, a voting rights act, a fair housing act: There is no reason to believe any of those gains, nor dozens more, would have happened when they did without the influence and organizational power of the black church.

While I’ve heard (and made) plenty of arguments about the separation between church and state, I’ve never heard any liberal argue that religious people should never play a role in politics. The problem isn’t with people using religion to inform their political beliefs, but with people using their political power to try to change the religious beliefs of others.

Also, the religious aspects of the civil rights movement were about taking Jesus’s teachings to love your neighbor to heart, not enforce obscure passages from the book of Leviticus. Wasn’t the whole point of Jesus’s “new testament” with the Jews that all the legalistic garbage from the Torah be thrown out in favor of a more simplified set of moral codes (which have been often summarized as “do unto others…”)? This point is a crucial distinction between the religious movements of the 60’s left and the modern right, and one that I think has been completely lost of George W. Bush.

Unlike the religious right, the civil rights movement used religion as a way to expand freedom, not restrict it. When Martin Luther King said “Now is the time to open the doors of opportunity to all of God’s children”, he meant it. And his contemporaries like Georgia Rep. John Lewis are sticking to that belief when they fight against Bush’s religiously-fueled desire to keep homosexuals from marrying.

The civil rights movement was all about lifting people up and the religious right is all about knocking them down. Yeah, they may be talking about the same god, but their goals are polar opposites.