[amc] Armageddon: Bring it on: Religio-Political Content

From: "Ray Gingerich" <RGingerich@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Austin Mennonite Church" <amc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 23 Apr 2006 18:32:45 -0500
How the GOP Became God's Own Party


By Kevin Phillips
Sunday, April 2, 2006; Page B03

Now that the GOP has been transformed by the rise of
the South, the trauma of terrorism and George W.
Bush's conviction that God wanted him to be president,
a deeper conclusion can be drawn: The Republican Party
has become the first religious party in U.S. history.

We have had small-scale theocracies in North America
before -- in Puritan New England and later in Mormon
Utah. Today, a leading power such as the United States
approaches theocracy when it meets the conditions
currently on display: an elected leader who believes
himself to speak for the Almighty, a ruling political
party that represents religious true believers, the
certainty of many Republican voters that government
should be guided by religion and, on top of it all, a
White House that adopts agendas seemingly animated by
biblical worldviews.

Indeed, there is a potent change taking place in this
country's domestic and foreign policy, driven by
religion's new political prowess and its role in
projecting military power in the Mideast.

The United States has organized much of its military
posture since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks around the
protection of oil fields, pipelines and sea lanes. But
U.S. preoccupation with the Middle East has another
dimension. 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. 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.

The political corollary -- fascinating but appalling
-- is the recent transformation of the Republican
presidential coalition. Since the election of 2000 and
especially that of 2004, three pillars have become
central: the oil-national security complex, with its
pervasive interests; the religious right, with its
doctrinal imperatives and massive electorate; and the
debt-driven financial sector, which extends far beyond
the old symbolism of Wall Street.

President Bush has promoted these alignments, interest
groups and their underpinning values. His family, over
multiple generations, has been linked to a politics
that conjoined finance, national security and oil. In
recent decades, the Bushes have added close ties to
evangelical and fundamentalist power brokers of many
persuasions.

Over a quarter-century of Bush presidencies and vice
presidencies, the Republican Party has slowly become
the vehicle of all three interests -- a fusion of
petroleum-defined national security; a crusading,
simplistic Christianity; and a reckless credit-feeding
financial complex. The three are increasingly allied
in commitment to Republican politics. On the most
important front, I am beginning to think that the
Southern-dominated, biblically driven Washington GOP
represents a rogue coalition, like the Southern,
proslavery politics that controlled Washington until
Abraham Lincoln's election in 1860.

I have a personal concern over what has become of the
Republican coalition. Forty years ago, I began a book,
"The Emerging Republican Majority," which I finished
in 1967 and took to the 1968 Republican presidential
campaign, for which I became the chief political and
voting-patterns analyst. Published in 1969, while I
was still in the fledgling Nixon administration, the
volume was identified by Newsweek as the "political
bible of the Nixon Era."

In that book I coined the term "Sun Belt" to describe
the oil, military, aerospace and retirement country
stretching from Florida to California, but debate
concentrated on the argument -- since fulfilled and
then some -- that the South was on its way into the
national Republican Party. Four decades later, this
framework has produced the alliance of oil,
fundamentalism and debt.

Some of that evolution was always implicit. If any
region of the United States had the potential to
produce a high-powered, crusading fundamentalism, it
was Dixie. If any new alignment had the potential to
nurture a fusion of oil interests and the
military-industrial complex, it was the Sun Belt,
which helped draw them into commercial and political
proximity and collaboration. Wall Street, of course,
has long been part of the GOP coalition. But members
of the Downtown Association and the Links Club were
never enthusiastic about "Joe Sixpack" and middle
America, to say nothing of preachers such as Oral
Roberts or the Tupelo, Miss., Assemblies of God. The
new cohabitation is an unnatural one.

While studying economic geography and history in
Britain, I had been intrigued by the Eurasian
"heartland" theory of Sir Halford Mackinder, a
prominent geographer of the early 20th century.
Control of that heartland, Mackinder argued, would
determine control of the world. In North America, I
thought, the coming together of a heartland -- across
fading Civil War lines -- would determine control of
Washington.

This was the prelude to today's "red states." The
American heartland, from Wyoming, Colorado and New
Mexico to Ohio and the Appalachian coal states, has
become (along with the onetime Confederacy) an
electoral hydrocarbon coalition. It cherishes
sport-utility vehicles and easy carbon dioxide
emissions policy, and applauds preemptive U.S.
airstrikes on uncooperative, terrorist-coddling
Persian Gulf countries fortuitously blessed with huge
reserves of oil.

Because the United States is beginning to run out of
its own oil sources, a military solution to an energy
crisis is hardly lunacy. Neither Caesar nor Napoleon
would have flinched. What Caesar and Napoleon did not
face, but less able American presidents do, is that
bungled overseas military embroilments could also
boomerang economically. The United States, some $4
trillion in hock internationally, has become the
world's leading debtor, increasingly nagged by worry
that some nations will sell dollars in their reserves
and switch their holdings to rival currencies.
Washington prints bonds and dollar-green IOUs, which
European and Asian bankers accumulate until for some
reason they lose patience. This is the debt Achilles'
heel, which stands alongside the oil Achilles' heel.

Unfortunately, more danger lurks in the responsiveness
of the new GOP coalition to Christian evangelicals,
fundamentalists and Pentecostals, who muster some 40
percent of the party electorate. Many millions believe
that the Armageddon described in the Bible is coming
soon. Chaos in the explosive Middle East, far from
being a threat, actually heralds the second coming of
Jesus Christ. Oil price spikes, murderous hurricanes,
deadly tsunamis and melting polar ice caps lend
further credence.

The potential interaction between the end-times
electorate, inept pursuit of Persian Gulf oil,
Washington's multiple deceptions and the financial
crisis that could follow a substantial liquidation by
foreign holders of U.S. bonds is the stuff of
nightmares. To watch U.S. voters enable such policies
-- the GOP coalition is unlikely to turn back -- is
depressing to someone who spent many years
researching, watching and cheering those grass roots.

Four decades ago, the new GOP coalition seemed certain
to enjoy a major infusion of conservative northern
Catholics and southern Protestants. This troubled me
not at all. I agreed with the predominating Republican
argument at the time that "secular" liberals, by badly
misjudging the depth and importance of religion in the
United States, had given conservatives a powerful and
legitimate electoral opportunity.

Since then, my appreciation of the intensity of
religion in the United States has deepened. When
religion was trod upon in the 1960s and thereafter by
secular advocates determined to push Christianity out
of the public square, the move unleashed an
evangelical, fundamentalist and Pentecostal
counterreformation, with strong theocratic pressures
becoming visible in the Republican national coalition
and its leadership.

Besides providing critical support for invading Iraq
-- widely anathematized by preachers as a second
Babylon -- the Republican coalition has also seeded
half a dozen controversies in the realm of science.
These include Bible-based disbelief in Darwinian
theories of evolution, dismissal of global warming,
disagreement with geological explanations of
fossil-fuel depletion, religious rejection of global
population planning, derogation of women's rights and
opposition to stem cell research. This suggests that
U.S. society and politics may again be heading for a
defining controversy such as the Scopes trial of 1925.
That embarrassment chastened fundamentalism for a
generation, but the outcome of the eventual 21st
century test is hardly assured.

These developments have warped the Republican Party
and its electoral coalition, muted Democratic voices
and become a gathering threat to America's future. No
leading world power in modern memory has become a
captive of the sort of biblical inerrancy that
dismisses modern knowledge and science. The last
parallel was in the early 17th century, when the
papacy, with the agreement of inquisitional Spain,
disciplined the astronomer Galileo for saying that the
sun, not the Earth, was the center of our solar
system.

Conservative true believers will scoff at such
concerns. The United States is a unique and chosen
nation, they say; what did or did not happen to Rome,
imperial Spain, the Dutch Republic and Britain is
irrelevant. The catch here, alas, is that these
nations also thought they were unique and that God was
on their side. The revelation that He apparently was
not added a further debilitating note to the late
stages of each national decline.

Over the last 25 years, I have warned frequently of
these political, economic and historical (but not
religious) precedents. The concentration of wealth
that developed in the United States in the bull market
of 1982 to 2000 was also typical of the zeniths of
previous world economic powers as their elites pursued
surfeit in Mediterranean villas or in the
country-house splendor of Edwardian England. In a
nation's early years, debt is a vital and creative
collaborator in economic expansion; in late stages, it
becomes what Mr. Hyde was to Dr. Jekyll: an
increasingly dominant mood and facial distortion. The
United States of the early 21st century is well into
this debt-driven climax, with some analysts arguing --
all too plausibly -- that an unsustainable credit
bubble has replaced the stock bubble that burst in
2000.

Unfortunately, three of the preeminent weaknesses
displayed in these past declines have been religious
excess, a declining energy and industrial base, and
debt often linked to foreign and military overstretch.
Politics in the United States -- and especially the
evolution of the governing Republican coalition --
deserves much of the blame for the fatal convergence
of these forces in America today.

Kevin Phillips is the author of "American Theocracy:
The Perils and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and
Borrowed Money in the 21st Century" (Viking).
[amc] Armageddon: Bring it on: Religio-Political Content

Other related posts:
