The alliance of religion and the GOP

LAST SUNDAY, AUTHOR and political commentator Kevin Phillips wrote a piece in the Washington Post with the headline “How the GOP became God’s Own Party.”

The premise of Phillips’ opinion piece, and his new book on the same topic, is that the GOP has become the first truely religious party in United States history.

Phillips draws a connection between the apparent increasing religiosity in the politics of the United States and the increasingly militant posture of the U.S. military and national security strategy.

“In addition to its concerns with oil and terrorism, the White House is courting end-times theologians and electorates for whom the Holy Lands are a battleground of Christian destiny,” he wrote. “Both pursuits – oil and biblical expectations – require a dissimulation in Washington that undercuts the U.S. tradition of commitment to the role of an informed electorate.”

Phillips’ analysis is right on, yet the emergence of a religious party is not necessarily a bad thing for the United States. Most other countries are home to at least one theologically based party. Germany’s new governing coalition, for example, includes the Christian Democratic Union party and the formerly governing Social Democrats.

Yet America is not in Europe and has a far different system from the parliamentary form of government that most European democracies follow to varying degrees.

The United States has only two major parties that amount to coalitions in themselves.

The Republican coalition, as Phillips has observed, is largely a mixture of the Religious Right, business interests, “old school” Republicans in the mold of John McCain and certain elements that joined the party in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.

These varying interests often come in conflict with one another when the party lacks internal discipline, as is the case with immigration reform efforts, the most radical of which would severely harm businesses by deporting a large percentage of the nation’s low-level workforce.

The Democratic Party, for its part, is a largely ragtag combination of environmentalists, labor interests and social libertarians that amounts to one of the most fractious major center-left parties in the world.

Note that the Democratic Party, despite its long-standing control of Congress until the early 1990s, has been largely out of power and on the decline since the Reagan Administration. The one Democratic president in that period, Bill Clinton, continues to be regarded by many left-wing activists as a Republican in disguise, mainly for his fiscally conservative policies.
The main concern Phillips expressed in his column is that largely affluent evangelical voters, who s

trongly support military interventions abroad and economic policies at home that continue the bubble of easily obtained credit and high housing prices, will eventually result in the collapse of the American economy through military expenditures and the cycle of spending that has resulted in a large number of people with zero net savings when their debt is taken into consideration. Furthermore, Phillips argues, the modern world has never seen before an industrialized and modern nation so fully in the grips of religious expression that science has been swept by the wayside.

He cites the recent controversy over Intelligent Design theory as an example of this trend away from the secular science of the Enlightenment.

Phillips is correct on this point, and his vision of a future confrontation in the mold of the 1925 Scopes Trial over the teaching of evolution that will decide the course of American political culture for a half century is hard to deny.

America today is one of the few industrialized nations in the world where religion is used as a weapon in the political arena.

The consequence for politicians has been electoral victories, yet the long-term consequences for the country could be bleak, as Phillips argues.

This is not to say anything about the value of religion. But religious convictions don’t have to lead to the policies and extreme beliefs that concern Phillips and should concern every American.

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