The Christian Right in America today tends to behave as though there is only one valid way to be a Christian and, if people aren't sensible enough to accept this voluntarily, then Christian values will have to be imposed through force of law. It's common to argue that this is un-American, but what many may not realize that it can be described as un-Protestant as well.
In Sacred Choices: The Right to Contraception and Abortion in Ten World Religions, Daniel C. Maguire explains how individual liberty in Christian beliefs is supposed to be fundamental to Protestantism:
Amid all this diversity, [Beverly] Harrison [former professor of Christian Ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York] says, the main uniting theme of Protestantism was based on "shifting the locus of theological teaching authority from hierarchical control of doctrinal interpretation to something like shared discernment in reinterpreting doctrine and morals."
The protest of Protestantism was against mind control in faith and morals. There was no one magisterium to which all should bow. Protestantism tumbled to the fact that there were a lot of good people who see things differently. In Harrison's words, there are "complex alternative ways of being religious and Christian." Flexibility, and a certain openness to pluralism in religion and in ethics, was the fruit of this.
One problem with this analysis is the fact that so few of the original Protestant groups really accepted this principle for themselves. They may have been willing to promote the idea of flexibility and pluralism in order to justify breaking away from the church institutions they were already subordinate to, but as soon as that was accomplished, they quickly set up their own church institutions and refused to accept anyone else saying that they had just cause to break away from those.
We can see that pattern repeated again and again through the history of Protestantism: religious freedom for me, but not for the rest of you rabble. This makes it impossible not to think that there is an equally strong strand of authoritarianism running through Protestantism and, therefore, that the Christian Right today is simply emphasizing that aspect of their history over the more flexible and pluralistic aspects. Granted, the flexible aspects are generally preferable to the authoritarian ones, but being preferable doesn't make them any more "true" or "genuine." We can't pretend that the negative parts of Christian tradition are illegitimate.
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