Our democracy, as most Americans have known and lived it, is under serious and increasingly effective assault from within. This has been going on, steadily gaining strength, for about a quarter century.
Pushing, pulling, eating away at our government and political system mostly just out of sight are highly politicized Christian fundamentalists. Of late they’ve won some political allies among Catholics and Jews, adding to their clout and the seriousness of the threat they pose.
These Christian fundamentalists and their allies co-own with big-money and corporate interests the national Republican Party as well as most state Republican parties. What makes them a threat is not their belief in God, in their respective churches and in traditional family values. The threat comes from their intention to make the tenets of their faith and all their associated beliefs into political policies affecting everyone, and into laws binding on everyone.
Their beliefs include that the Christian Bible should be taken literally as the inerrant word of God; that laws in the U.S. should conform to biblical law; that the U.S. always was, is and must be a Christian nation; that church-state separation is a myth perpetuated by evil nonbelievers; and that what’s going on in the Mideast is the lead-up to the end times, Rapture and return of Christ.
Kevin Phillips charts the threat Christian fundamentalists pose, their purposes and progress in his latest book, “American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21stCentury.” It’s an excellent book, one we wish every American would read before the upcoming election.
In a chapter titled “Church, State and National Decline” in a section headlined, “The Theologization of American Politics: Symptoms and Prescriptions,” Phillips discusses the impact of Christian fundamentalists, including President George W. Bush and his administration, on science and government. Following discussion of the Christian right’s ongoing campaign to replace evolution science with creationism, or more recently with the camouflage version known as intelligent design, there is this:
Meanwhile the bigger message — depressingly reminiscent of our imperial predecessors —is that science in the United States is already in trouble. Money is draining out, with dire consequences. Intel chairman Andy Grove says critical scientific infrastructure spending is being neglected, and the premier research universities are losing their edge. Susan Hockfield, the president of MIT says, “We’re falling behind. We’re not keeping up with other countries. The science and math scores for our high school graduates are disastrous. We’re underfunding research in the physical sciences and lagging seriously on publications in these sciences.”Stanford professor Irving Weissman, a stem cell researcher, told the Boston Globe, “You are going to start picking up Nature and Science, and all the great journals, and you are going to read about how South Koreans and Chinese and Singaporeans are making advances the rest of us can’t even study.”
In 2005, the Business Higher Education Forum released new data showing that 15-year-old Americans are worse at problem solving than their peers in 25 countries. Something else young Americans don’t seem to understand —perhaps not surprisingly —is evolution. In 1993 an international social survey ranked Americans last —behind Bulgaria and Slovenia —in knowledge of the basic facts of evolution.
Part of the explanation involves the religious right’s larger view of economic matters and the 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 Department of Energy; it also demanded the abolition of the Internal Revenue Service and the 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. Apparently the White House was not embarrassed.
As many of us have been trying to point out for the past several years, Bush and the people who most ardently support him aren’t traditional conservatives and Republicans. Neither are they traditional mainstream Christians. They are radical right-wing extremists with extreme views — and intentions — concerning church and state.
When I first started reading this, I thought you were joking. Organized religion has been in retreat in this country for the last 50 years. We are going the way of Europe. Evangelical Christianity has shown some growth, but it doesn’t match the decline overall in church attendance and the importance of oraganized religion in peoples lives. The fundamentalists are fighting a few battles: creationism, and abortion and by extension some stem cell research, but I don’t see any victory there.
I don’t see where Christian Fundamentalism is ascendent anywhere in our culture. Certainly not in our popular culture. Our business culture can hardly be described as Christian. Politics maybe? Are there a bunch of Christians promoting their values in politics? And that’s led to a decline in education? As far as I recall, Americans have never been that high in education compared to other countries. Wasn’t the complaint in WWI that our soldiers came to boot camp not knowing their left foot from their right foot?
I often wonder why you complain so much. If your left/progresive/Democrat values are so obvious and fundamental to a good society, won’t they triumph in the end over the lying, sneaking Karl Rove and his right wing Christian fundamentalist roaders?
Part of the problem is that the Left has fed too much rope into the political system by pushing for more federal oversight over all things governmental, which they have won, by and large, but this has required more end runs around the legislative process, either by court fiat, or a more powerful executive branch (I read someplace that Bill Clinton did more legislating by executive order than any other president). Now the Right is using this executive and judicial rope.
RSF tells us:
The following is from a 2004 report by The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press:
RSF, you really should do a little research before firing off opinions stated as fact. Reading Phillips’ book would be an excellent place to start.
It’s not just a matter of how many people are strongly religious. How the strongly religious behave is a critical factor.
As Lenin liked to point out, it only took a small, determined group of Bolsheviks to topple the monarchy, seize power and transform Russia.
Based on history and common sense, I see having no wall separating church and state as a prescription for oppression and endless strife. I see formulating public policy on the basis of faith and dogma, instead of on facts and logic, as extremely dangerous. Daily events are proving my belief is correct.
I suspected you would bring up this poll or some similiar ones.
Mainstream Protestant and Catholic churches have seen a membership decline since 1950, nationwide. Some religions, i.e. Mormons, have seen a steady rise since 1950. Evangelical, Pentacostal types have seen pretty big growth in the last 20 years.
Because people report to a pollster they pray, or believe in God, that doesn’t translate into political action, or a wish for such action. Our age is marked by a lack in participation in organizations of all types (see the book “Bowling Alone”, which points out this trend).
The “small, determined groups” I see running around crafting public policy are those like the ACLU, who are writing laws in every state assembly.
The separation of Church and State largely means the State can’t endorse or fund a State religion. That is not on the horizon. I suspect this latest salvo by you and your ilk is just one more action to marginalize a conservative influence.
From a Washington Post review of Phillip’s book:
“Yet even Phillips must admit that in terms of concrete policies, the so-called theocracy he describes has been surprisingly ineffective at turning its agenda into law. “As of this writing,” he concedes, “none of the half-dozen pieces of quasi-theocratic legislation drafted by the religious right . . . had achieved passage, but the time could come.” In fact, according to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, white evangelicals’ electoral influence is not on the rise; they constituted only 23 percent of the electorate in both 2000 and 2004. And the percentage of Bush voters who are white evangelicals remained constant at 36 percent in 2000 and 2004; as the Pew Center noted, Bush in 2004 “made relatively bigger gains among infrequent churchgoers than he did among religiously observant voters.”
RSF, I’m very skeptical of that “23 percent of the electorate” figure. But in any case, as I said, it’s not just a matter of numbers.
As for not getting their agenda through Congress, some of us think we’re in a crisis situation when Congress ignores matters such as having 46.6 million Americans (more than 18 million of those being children) without health care insurance in favor of holding showpiece votes on flag burning and same-sex marriage bans.
Sounds like a good book, SWA. I’ll have to check that out. It seems to me that there may not be a larger number of intensely religious people today than in the past, but among those who are there is a much larger number of people willing to shove their religion in my face and try to make me conform to it. Mainstream protestants, catholics, jews, etc. don’t do that very much; it’s the fundies that are doing it.
As far as the rise of Christian fundamentalism in politics, I think it’s fair to say that Christian fundamentalists have aligned themselves with the republican party, thus “social conservatives.” On their own the fundies may not have directly changed a lot of laws, but throwing their considerable support behind conservative causes has helped them meet some of their objectives. Can you imagine the Schaivo nonsense taking place in the Reagan years? I can’t.
That book “What’s the Matter with Kansas” excellently covered the alliance of fundies and political conservatives.
In my high school days, the John Birch Society was
in power in some of the school boards in our county.
This very conservative, right-wing extremist group
went so far as to ban my junior grade history text
because the cover was RED! This is not a joke. We
were all given a day off school to attend an out-
door stadium conference on the bases of their
beliefs. This group still exists. They were the
original drafters of “Impeach Earl Warren” from
the Supreme Court.
I saw the signs of this new wave of extremism
coming, and I feared that it would at first appear
to be just a growth of religion in a more Biblical
form. It was. Now we are all under their power, and
only true viligance and use of their under-cover
tactics will rid our governments the large down
to the tiniest townships of this curse.
This is not Christianity. There is no love. There is
no acceptance of all races. Remember the Samaritan?
This is a grab for wealth and power of Machiavellian
proportions.
Be afraid. But do not fear to speak out (yet) and to
elect good officials where you can find them with
no concern for party affiliation. We must do it all
in the same 20 years that they had. That’s all we
have!