Sherry Chandler » Which view?
Which view?
from Alan Brinkley’s review of American Theocracy by Kevin Phillips:
Phillips is especially passionate in his discussion of the second great force that he sees shaping contemporary American life — radical Christianity and its growing intrusion into government and politics. The political rise of evangelical Christian groups is hardly a secret to most Americans after the 2004 election, but Phillips brings together an enormous range of information from scholars and journalists and presents a remarkably comprehensive and chilling picture of the goals and achievements of the religious right.
He points in particular to the Southern Baptist Convention, once a scorned seceding minority of the American Baptist Church but now so large that it dominates not just Baptism itself but American Protestantism generally. The Southern Baptist Convention does not speak with one voice, but almost all of its voices, Phillips argues, are to one degree or another highly conservative. On the far right is a still obscure but, Phillips says, rapidly growing group of “Christian Reconstructionists” who believe in a “Taliban-like” reversal of women’s rights, who describe the separation of church and state as a “myth” and who call openly for a theocratic government shaped by Christian doctrine. A much larger group of Protestants, perhaps as many as a third of the population, claims to believe in the supposed biblical prophecies of an imminent “rapture” — the return of Jesus to the world and the elevation of believers to heaven.
Prophetic Christians, Phillips writes, often shape their view of politics and the world around signs that charlatan biblical scholars have identified as predictors of the apocalypse — among them a war in Iraq, the Jewish settlement of the whole of biblical Israel, even the rise of terrorism. He convincingly demonstrates that the Bush administration has calculatedly reached out to such believers and encouraged them to see the president’s policies as a response to premillennialist thought. He also suggests that the president and other members of his administration may actually believe these things themselves, that religious belief is the basis of policy, not just a tactic for selling it to the public. Phillips’s evidence for this disturbing claim is significant, but not conclusive.
Phillips is not some wild-eyed lefty but a Republican thinker who has been around since the Nixon era, the man who invented the very notion that the Republicans would come to dominate American politics, a man with some credibility in speaking of these matters.
Amy Sullivan presents another view of the situation in her article When Would Jesus Bolt in The Washington Monthly:
…a substantial minority of evangelical voters—41 percent, according to a 2004 survey by political scientist John Green at the University of Akron—are more moderate on a host of issues ranging from the environment to public education to support for government spending on anti-poverty programs. Broadly speaking, these are the suburban, two-working-parents, kids-in-public-school, recycle-the-newspapers evangelicals. They may be pro-life, but it’s in a Catholic, “seamless garment of life” kind of way. These moderates have largely remained in the Republican coalition because of its faith-friendly image.
…Groups like the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN) are taking up Cizik’s [Richard Cizak is vice president for governmental affairs of the National Association of Evangelicals) cause; 63 percent of evangelicals in a recent survey released by EEN said that global warming was an immediate concern. Half went even further, agreeing that steps needed to be taken to reduce global warming, even if it meant a high economic cost for the United States. Former National Review writer Rod Dreher has a just-published book that urges religious conservatives to question negative consequences of the free market.
The list of issues these evangelicals care about extends beyond the social hot-buttons that win elections.
I’ll have to say that the evangelicals I know best, that is my own family, seem to fall into this group. They are conservative, yes – they are southern, rural, and evangelical – but they are intelligent and capable of thinking for themselves. And they treat me with respect though they know I don’t see the world the way they do.
Both Phillips and Sullivan agree that the Bush administration uses fear as a major strategic tool. Here is Amy Sullivan in “When Would Jesus Bolt:”
Republican political dominance depends on being able to manipulate religious supporters with fear, painting the Democratic Party as hostile to religion and in the thrall of secular humanists.
and here is Kevin Phillips blogging at the TPMCafé:
Fear is likely to remain a Bush tactic. His people have tried to polarize voters into seeing a fight between good and evil, stoking fear and a sense of global chaos. The doomsday preachers are on the same side.
So we’re afraid of them and they’re afraid of us. Black and white. Divide and conquer.
The old cold warriors need an enemy to preserve their power and their way of life. They don’t have imagination enough to live in a post-cold-war world. My fellow citizens, we must not walk in fear.
I apologize for the length of this post. Kevin Phillips has been blogging all this last week at the TPMCafé Book Club; and some southern contributors to this group blog have had some things to say too.
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