Delusional Cloudtalkers

Also known as the Christian Right. Depending on who you ask, we're out to take over the planet or just the United States. Such a worrisome and troubling political development are we that people are writing books about us.

This month Ross Douthat at First Things destroys the "anti-theocracy" arguments in a piece titled (what else?) Theocracy, Theocracy, Theocracy. Douthat focuses on several recent works and dismantles the arguments in each.

The targets include Kevin Phillips, Michelle Goldberg, Rabbi James Rudin and Randall Balmer. By the time he's finished examining the arguments (and explaining how they don't hold up), we arrive at a most basic and true observation that all the critics of the Christian Right ignore:

If that’s all it takes to make a theocracy, then these writers are correct: Contemporary America is run by theocrats. Of course, by that measure, so was the America of every previous era. The United States has always been at once a secular republic and a religious nation, reflexively libertarian and fiercely pious, and this tension has been working itself out in our politics for more than two hundred years. It’s often been a mixed blessing, giving us Prohibition as well as abolition, Jesse Jackson as well as Reinhold Niebuhr, the obsession with free silver as well as the zeal for civil rights. But there’s no way to give an account of American history without grappling with this tension—and with the role played, for good and ill and sometimes both, by religious reformers from Jonathan Edwards all the way down to Jerry Falwell.

Yet this is a history that the anti-theocrats seem determined to reject. The Christian Right isn’t just bad for America because of its right-wing misapplication of religious faith, they suggest—it’s bad for America because any application of faith to politics is inevitably poisonous, intolerant, and illiberal.

Lest you think he's created an easily dismantled strawman, Douthat goes on to answer the charges, not with his own arguments but those of the critics themselves:

Indeed, reading through the anti-theocrat literature, one gets the sense that the surest way to judge if a political idea is wrong, dangerous, or antidemocratic is to tally up the number of religious people who support it.

Except that nobody really believes this line. Just a few weeks before he announced that a “Christian politics” was a contradiction in terms, Garry Wills was in the New York Review of Books celebrating the role of the clergy in the civil rights movement and wiping a nostalgic tear from his eye as he declared that “there was a time, not so long ago, when religion was a force for liberation in America.” After years of blasting any religious encroachment on the political sphere as a threat to the Constitution, the New York Times editorial page awoke to find Cardinal Roger Mahony advocating civil disobedience by Catholics to protest an immigration bill—and immediately praised the cardinal for adding “a moral dimension to what has largely been a debate about politics and economics.” After spending two hundred pages describing all the evils that would pour through any breach in the wall between church and state, Michelle Goldberg suggests that liberals should hope that “leaders on the Religious Left will find a way to channel some of America’s moral fervor into a new social gospel.”

And just a chapter before launching into a florid denunciation of the Christian Right’s “lust for political power and cultural influence,” Randall Balmer celebrates Victorian evangelicals for taking on “the task of reforming society according to the standards of godliness,” and seeking “generally to make the world a better place.” He praises William Jennings Bryan for being “a political liberal by today’s standards” and even defends the Great Commoner against a “brutal character assassination at the hands of H.L. Mencken” during the Scopes trial—this from an author who devotes thirty pages to attacking Intelligent Design as a “battering ram” for theocrats bent on the “conquest of American society.” Bryan, Balmer explains, “had fewer qualms about Darwinism itself than he did about the social effects of evolutionary theory.”

A Christian is allowed to entertain such doubts, in other words, and allowed to mix religion and politics in support of sweeping social reforms— but only if those reforms are safely identified with the political Left, and with the interests of the Democratic party.

After I finished reading it--and I took my time today to get through it--I sat admiring the masterful way Douthat punks the entire concept of a coming American theocracy. As an oft-maligned demographic (White, male, Evangelical Christian who happens to attend a Southern Baptist church), I've viscerally understood that the 'anti-theocrats' and their criticism of Religion in Politics modern-American style is off. As in, not even close to reality. Douthat expertly managed to articulate the visceral and explain just why it is off and just how much.

Douthat's ultimate conclusion is that the criticism is more aptly described as sour grapes. What had been the domain exclusively of the political Left has migrated and finds it's new home in the Right. The past few years have only solidified the trend begun in the early 1970's as a direct result of conscious decisions made by Democrats.

For myself, I find that to make a certain amount of sense. I've always gotten the sense (another visceral observation) that the criticisms of the Christian Right were ultimately political. While many might profess a certain animus towards Christianity (in my limited experience), what they abhorred were the political manifestations of Christian views.

As to that, all I can do is echo Douthat's statement. He says near the very end of the piece: There is no single Christian politics, and no movement can claim to have arrived at the perfect marriage of religious faith and political action. Christianity is too otherworldly for that, and the world too fallen. But this doesn’t free believers from the obligation to strive in political affairs, as they strive in all things, to do what God would have them do. And the moments when God’s will is inscrutable, or glimpsed only through a glass, darkly, are the moments when good-faith arguments between believers ought to bear the greatest fruit. (Emphasis mine).

Religion--no, Faith--is with the believer everywhere they go. Asking them to divorce it from their political positions, lifestyle choices or any other part of their life is an impossible request.

People of Faith cannot live an irreligious life and expect that they likewise live a Godly life.