rights & religion (yes, again)

I just finished reading an article about African-American civil rights movement in the 1950s and 60s as a religious movement. It describes the religious overtones at many of the rallies, as well as the role of churches, preachers, and prayer meetings. Most vividly, it suggests that a person could not face police dogs, clubs, firehoses, spit, and hatred from fellow human beings without a sense of spiritual purpose or millenial vision. Something about this tugs on my brain as I think about movements for gay rights and economic justice. The context is very different today: the establishment, the religious & heterosexual mass that makes up the anti-gay rights movement, has learned a lot from civil rights struggles and Vietnam War protests, just as much as those who struggle for justice have learned. But I wonder if there's something to that: have gay people lost touch (or never had touch) with a millenial vision or a spiritual purpose? I'm also reading about ways of remembering sexual experimentation and gay rights in the 1970s in relation to shame and the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. A number of older gay writers who lived through those decades sound surprisingly bitter and disillusioned. I wonder how much AIDS came to be seen, by gay people ourselves, as some sort of spiritual punishment. I wonder if religious conservatives succeeded in triggering shame about ourselves to the point that we do not have spiritual purpose or millenial vision when we seek justice. What enables us to face hatred? Or, in the context of the Bay Area, what enables us to gather as a community here against "those out there" who see us as second-class citizens?
I think the same can be said of economic justice movements - the framework of "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" and "if you don't make it, then somehow you didn't deserve to" (both significant threads behind the dismantling of welfare and social service programs - couple with the visual elements of runaway addiction and mental illness (with little social support for addressing it systemically) to create a sense of shame among homeless and poor people. I'm not sure about this - it's only speculation.
And in the same way, I wonder how a sense of racial justice, especially in the context of gay rights, economics, and shame, plays out in a similar way. Have we as a society numbed ourselves out of millenial hope for a better world here and now with an eschatological hope for heaven as the reward for those who are good?
Again, this is only speculation, but I wonder what role spirituality and moral, visionary hope really plays in the work I'm trying to be a part of.