http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060501/phillips
Theocons and Theocrats
by KEVIN PHILLIPS
[from the May 1, 2006 issue]
Is theocracy in the United States (1) a legitimate fear, as some
liberals argue; (2) a joke, given the nation's rising secular
population and moral laxity; (3) a worrisome bias of major GOP
constituencies and pressure groups; or (4) all of the above? The last,
I would argue.
The characteristics are not inconsistent. No large nation--no leading
world power--could ever resemble theocracies like John Calvin's
Geneva, Puritan Massachusetts or early Mormon Utah. These were all
small polities produced by unusual migrations of true believers.
As a great power, a large heterogeneous nation like the United States
goes about as far in a theocratic direction as it can when it meets
the unfortunate criteria on display in George W. Bush's Washington: an
elected leader who believes himself in some way to be speaking for
God; a ruling party that represents religious true believers and seeks
to mobilize the nation's churches; the conviction of many
rank-and-file Republicans that government should be guided by religion
and religious leaders; and White House implementation of domestic and
international political agendas that seem to be driven by religious
motivations and biblical worldviews.
As several chapters in American Theocracy make clear, this kind of
religious excess has been a problem--indeed, a repeating Achilles'
heel--of leading powers from late-stage Rome (historian Gibbon thus
explained Roman decline and fall) to the militant Catholicism of
Habsburg Spain and most recently the evangelical and moral imperialist
Britain that saw 1914 as something of an Armageddon against the German
Kaiser's Antichrist and wound up in 1917-18 crusading in the Middle
East to liberate Jerusalem. But although this facet of historical
decline constitutes a major caution regarding the future of the United
States, this essay will concentrate on the domestic political
aspects--the theocratic tendencies in the GOP and the notable
"religification" of American politics across a spectrum from life and
death to science and medicine to climate change and biblical creationism.
The Growth of Theocratic Sentiment
The essential US conditions for a theocratic trend fell into place in
the late 1980s and '90s with the growing mass of evangelical,
fundamentalist and Pentecostal Christianity, expressed politically by
the religious right; and the rise of the Republican Party as a
powerful vehicle for religious policy-making and eventual erosion of
the accepted degree of separation between church and state. This
transformation was most vivid at the state level, where fifteen to
twenty state Republican parties came under the control of the
religious right, and party conventions in the South and West endorsed
so-called "Christian nation" platforms. As yet nationally
uncatalogued--a shortfall that cries out for a serious research
project--these platforms set out in varying degrees the radical
political theology of the Christian Reconstructionist movement,
ranging from the Bible as the basis for domestic law to an emphasis on
religious schools and women's subordination to men. The 2004 platform
of the Texas Republican Party is a case in point.
So are the political careers of Pat Robertson and John Ashcroft, two
presidential aspirants whose careers were milestones in the
theocratization of the Republican Party. Robertson's 1988 presidential
bid brought huge numbers of Pentecostals into the Republican Party.
Missouri Senator Ashcroft, who explored a presidential race in
1997-98, got much of his funding from Robertson and other
evangelicals. Picked as Attorney General by Bush after the 2000
election, Ashcroft was the choice of the religious right. Earlier in
his career Ashcroft had decried the wall between church and state as
"a wall of religious oppression," and his memoir describes each of his
many electoral defeats as a crucifixion and every important political
victory as a resurrection, and recounts scenes in which he had friends
and family anoint him with oil in the manner "of the ancient kings of
Israel."
But the national political emergence of Bush was equally relevant.
"Born again" during the mid-1980s, he came up during the same period
and in the same intense mode. As Newsweek noted in 2003, "As a
subaltern in his father's 1988 campaign, George Bush the Younger
assembled his career through contacts with ministers of the then
emerging evangelical movement in political life. Now they form the
core of the Republican Party, which controls all of the capital for
the first time in a half century. Bible-believing Christians are
Bush's strongest backers."
More telling still, in the years since 1988 dozens of reports have
quoted Bush the Younger telling ministers, supporters and foreign
officials that God wanted him to run for President and that God speaks
through him. In mid-2004 one Pennsylvania newspaper reported his
telling a local Amish audience, "I trust God speaks through me.
Without that, I couldn't do my job." Reports that he told Middle
Eastern leaders that God told him to invade Iraq have been denied by
the White House, but this is clearly the sort of language he uses from
time to time.
Since Robertson's run for the White House in 1988 and the victory that
same year by Bush the Elder, the Republican Party has clearly moved
closer to this constituency--and the process was speeded by Bill
Clinton, whose politics and personal conduct offended the churchgoing
South, in particular, enabling George W. Bush to pose as the
standard-bearer of moral restoration in 2000. This metamorphosis
gained further momentum after September 11, 2001, when the younger
Bush responded to the terrorist attacks by declaring the start of a
war between good and evil, speaking in a relentlessly religious idiom
that several biblical scholars have described as double-coding--only
mildly religious on the surface, but beneath that full of allusions to
biblical passages and Christian hymns. They, too, suggested that Bush
cast himself as a prophet of sorts--one who spoke for God.
The upshot of this escalating religiosity on the part of the
Republican national leadership has been an escalating and parallel
religiosity on the part of the Republican rank and file. Those voting
Republican for President since 1988 have become increasingly religious
in motivation. After 9/11 pro-Bush preachers described Bush as God's
chosen man while hinting that Saddam Hussein, whose Iraq was the
biblical "New Babylon" of fundamentalist preacher Tim LaHaye's eerie
Left Behind series, was the Antichrist or at least the forerunner of
the Evil One. In 2004 a further wave of evangelical, fundamentalist
and Pentecostal turnout helped to cement the Republican
transformation, even as moderate mainline Protestants shuddered and
turned in a small Democratic trend between 2000 and 2004.
As early as 1988, Ohio academician John Green, a specialist in
religious political behavior, had commented on how the growing
correlation between frequent church attendance and Republican
presidential voting was starting to raise a US parallel to the
religious parties of Europe, most notably the Christian Democrats in
Germany and Italy. By 2000-04, this correlation was much stronger, and
political journalists began to speak of the "religious gap" that was
replacing the "gender gap." The less discussed but even more
significant aspect of this upheaval lay in a second set of polls that
showed the increasingly theocratic inclinations of the Republican
electorate (see chart).
These sentiments did not spring from nowhere. A majority of Americans
take the Bible literally in many dimensions, including subjects
ranging from the creation and Noah's Ark to the Book of Revelation.
Within the ranks of Republican voters, the ratios are lopsided. For
example, in 1999 a national poll by Newsweek revealed that 40 percent
of American Christians believed in Armageddon and virtually as many
thought the Antichrist was already alive. Because such believers were
most numerous in the Republican electorate, I would calculate that
roughly 55 percent of Bush 2004 voters believed in Armageddon--and it
could be higher.
Such voters are especially prone to theocratic views, and foreign
policy is by no means immune. In 2004 a survey by the Pew Center found
that 55 percent of white evangelical Protestants consider "following
religious principles" to be a top priority for foreign policy. Only a
quarter of Catholics and mainline Protestants agreed, but given the
makeup of the Bush coalition, I would guess that about half its voters
would favor that position. This explains both why so many of Bush's
core supporters cheered the first-stage US involvement in Iraq--and
why Bush bungled things in the Holy Land so badly.
The Bible, Theology and American Politics
This is a bit of a chicken-versus-egg situation. Have the issues that
matter most to Americans become more theological because religion has
become more of a political force--or has the growth of issues with a
religious dimension spurred the increasing religious divisions?
Probably some of each, but the list is frighteningly long.
First and foremost are the issues involving birth, life, death, sex,
health, medicine, marriage and the role of the family--high-octane
subject matter since the 1970s. These are areas where perceived
immorality most excites stick-to-Scripture advocates and the religious
right. Closely related is the commitment by the Bush White House and
the religious right to reduce the current separation between church
and state.
Topics such as natural resources, climate, global warming, resource
depletion, environmental regulation and petroleum geology mark out a
third important arena. Organizations such as the Acton Institute for
the Study of Religion and Liberty have enlisted a fair amount of
conservative religious and corporate support for preparing what
amounts to a pro-business, pro-development explanation of Christian
stewardship. The institute's director, Roman Catholic Father Robert
Sirico, contends that left-tilting environmentalism is idolatrous in
its substitution of nature for God, giving the Christian environmental
movement a "perhaps-unconscious pagan nature."
Then there is the subject matter of business, economics and wealth, in
which the tendency of the Christian right is to oppose regulation and
justify wealth and relative laissez-faire, tipping its hat to the
upper-income and corporate portions of the Republican coalition.
Christian Reconstructionists go even further, abandoning most economic
regulation in order to prepare the moral framework for God's return.
The last arena of theological influence, almost as important as sex,
birth and mortality, involves American foreign policy, bringing us to
the connections among the "war on terror," the rapture, the end times,
Armageddon and the thinly disguised US crusade against radical Islam.
Since Islam and Christianity began fighting in the seventh century,
the Holy Land has often brought disillusionment: after the Crusades
(all nine of them); after the fall of Constantinople in 1453; and five
centuries later for the British, in particular, after World War I.
Unmindful Western nations may still be playing out the Crusader hand.
In the months before George W. Bush sent US troops into Iraq, his
inspirational reading each morning was a book of sermons by a Scottish
preacher accompanying troops about to march on Jerusalem in 1917.
Controversies over life and death--often pivoting on precise
definitions of each--can only continue to burgeon. The arguable rights
of women (or parents) are being displaced by the rights of embryos or
by the prerogative of sperm and egg to join, decisions rooted largely
in theology, not science. Perhaps the preoccupation involves
maximizing the potential soul count for the hereafter, in the manner
of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century inquisitors who ordered that
heretics must die even if they repented, yet pursued repentance to
save their souls first.
The theology of death is cloudier and also riskier politically.
Although Bush took a bold and ultimately unpopular stand in the Terri
Schiavo case, bending over backward to insist on continuing her life
support, blocking death is not the theological equivalent of enabling
birth. The Bible abounds with the killing of those already born, both
by God and by lawful authorities. Bush himself, as governor of Texas,
sent hundreds of prisoners to the electric chair.
The next throbbing cluster of issues involves church-state relations.
The nonradical theocon wing of the GOP demands a more conservative
judiciary and an expanded role for religion in education, social
services and the constraining of what they consider to be immoral
behavior--abortion, homosexuality, pornography and contraception--but
avoids spelling out any grand revolutionary mandate. The Christian
Reconstructionist movement, by contrast, proclaims ambitions that
range from replacing public schools with religious education to
imposing biblical law and limiting the franchise to male Christians.
The federal judiciary is the arena in which the battles most critical
to incipient theocrats will be fought out judge by judge, court by
court. Signs of their anxiety to control the federal judiciary burst
into view in an early 2005 meeting at which conservative evangelical
leaders were addressed by Tom DeLay and Senate majority leader Bill
Frist. The focus of the strategy session was how to strip funding or
jurisdiction from federal courts, or even eliminate them. James Dobson
of the Colorado-based Focus on the Family named one target: the Ninth
Circuit Court of Appeals. "Very few people know this, that the
Congress can simply disenfranchise a court," Dobson commented. "All
they have to do is say the 9th Circuit doesn't exist anymore, and it's
gone." A spokesman for Frist said he did not agree with the idea of
defunding courts or shutting them down, but DeLay, who had once said,
"We set up the courts. We can unset the courts," declined to comment.
Beyond the judiciary, pressure for theological correctness became
overt in federal government relationships with the varieties of
science--from climatology to geology, and even entomology--that can
conflict with the Book of Genesis. For the growing number of elected
officials who uphold Genesis, the Almighty, not carbon dioxide, brings
about climate change. The consequences here go far beyond the
evolution-doubting books being sold by the National Park Service or
inconvenient information about climate change or caribou habitats in
oil lands being deleted from government websites. In Texas, where the
cotton industry is plagued by a moth in which an immunity to
pesticides has evolved, a frustrated entomologist commented, "It's
amazing that cotton growers are having to deal with these pests in the
very states whose legislatures are so hostile to the theory of
evolution. Because it is evolution they are struggling against in
their fields every season." Meanwhile, the bigger
message--depressingly reminiscent of our imperial predecessors--is
that science in the United States is already in trouble. Irving
Weissman, a stem-cell researcher, told the Boston Globe, "You are
going to start picking up Nature and Science and all the great
[research] journals, and you are going to read about how South Koreans
and Chinese and Singaporeans are making advances that the rest of us
can't even study."
Part of the explanation involves the religious right's larger view of
economic matters and dismantling of government. In the radical Texas
Republican platform adopted in 2004, the Lone Star GOP was not content
to call for abolishing the Environmental Protection Agency and the
Energy Department; it also demanded abolition of the Internal Revenue
Service and elimination of the income tax, the inheritance tax, the
gift tax, the capital-gains levy, the corporate income tax, the
payroll tax and state and local property taxes.
Evangelicals, Southern Baptist Convention adherents and others oppose
government social and economic programs because they interfere with a
person's individual responsibility for his or her salvation. Others
were diverted by rapture and end-times possibilities. "Overall, this
kind of teaching has certainly stifled social consciousness among
evangelicals," said Tim Weber, professor of church history at Northern
Baptist Theological Seminary. "If Jesus may come at any minute, then
long-term social reform or renewal are beside the point. It has a bad
effect there."
These are divisive issues, and they divide both parties, but survey
data suggest that they divide the Republicans somewhat more than the
Democrats. True, liberals were front and center in trying to shrink
the role of religion in the public square, and they have paid the
price. However, the more important confrontation is now within the
GOP, as the essential tensions shift from the unpopular derogation of
religion so prevalent decades ago to the theologization and theocratic
excesses of the conservative countertide.
Three prominent Republicans have staked out the boundaries. Former
Republican Senator John Danforth of Missouri complained in 2005 that
"the only explanation for legislators comparing cells in a petri dish
to babies in a womb is the extension of religious doctrine into
statutory law." Rhode Island Senator Lincoln Chafee suggested that
George W. Bush's "I carry the word of God" posture ought to be a 2004
election issue. And Representative Christopher Shays of Connecticut
regretted that "the Republican Party of Lincoln has become a party of
theocracy."
Unhappily, that's the direction in which it's been trending.
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