Posted by Damozel | Amusingly, conservative pundits are in a panic at the hijacking of their party by the Bible bashers. They're finally sensing that there may be a downside, are they? Krauthammer:
"This campaign is knee-deep in religion, and it's only going to get worse. I'd thought that the limits of professed public piety had already been achieved during the Republican CNN-YouTube debate when some squirrelly looking guy held up a Bible and asked, "Do you believe every word of this book?" -- and not one candidate dared reply: None of your damn business."(The Washington Post)
What did Krauthammer and Rich Lowry expect? As we've been saying since way before Huckabee's recent
ascension---pun intended---in the polls: Lie down with born-agains, evangelists, and apocalyptic Christians; wake up in "the party of God." (Actually, I'm not unsympathetic; "values voters" may have hijacked the Republican party, but they've hijacked my religion.)
Fortunately, Andrew Sullivan's on hand to respond in a voice perhaps loud enough for other pundits to hear.
As Sullivan points out, Krauthammer and Rich Lowry and their ilk have been happy to get into bed with the Christianists when it served their political aims. Now that it looks as if the "base" is about to cash in on the birthright the party sold to it back in the days when it was Esau and the only thing it cared about was getting those right-wing Christian-ist votes. Part of the reason George W. Bush was---in reality show parlance---"the total package" was his appeal to exactly these "values voters."
Alas, it's too late, I think, for Charles to urge an openness toward atheism or non-religion in a party remade on explicitly religious grounds by Bush and Rove. Who was it, after all, who cited Jesus Christ as the most influential "philosopher" in his life as part of his electoral strategy? Who reorganized his party to base it on churches? The man whom Krauthammer eagerly supported in two consecutive elections.
The theocon consensus that front-runners Romney and Huckabee both reflect is that religion is intrinsic to public life and public debate, that it is a necessary component of any political discussion - and that this does not merely mean rote invocations of Nature's God or Providence or the kind of inclusive, vague language that the Founders believed in. It means a very thick, constant and inviolable recourse to religious argument in secular politics. If you haven't noticed this development in the past decade, you have had blinders on. (The Daily Dish)
As Sullivan points out, there's a wide difference between supporting a social policy based on your private religious convictions and trying to get your private religious convictions made into the law of the land. No Christianist will ever, ever see the difference, but the Founders understood it, and religious people like Andrew Sullivan (a conservative) and me (not a conservative) understand it.
The anxious, angry people who constitute the Christian right are by definition people who can't be satisfied with the right to worship in their own way and to follow what they understand to be God's law in their own way; they are by definition people who can't think or act outside of a group; and the sight of the transgressions of those who break their"laws" fills them with the kind of incoherent rage that got the "witches" burned at Salem. And in fact, the society that burned the witches is the same sort of society they crave: conformist, limited, hemmed all round with restrictions and penalties; allowing the fewest possible choices and therefore the fewest possible temptations. They are primitive Christians.
They tend to be Old Testament Christians, people who---despite giving lip service to a literal interpretation of the Bible-- skip over or reinterpret those parts of the Gospels where Jesus deliberately flouts law and custom in the service of a wider principle; inveighs against public displays of religious superiority and public prayer; denounces hypocrisy; consorts with the rabble; drinks wine with his mates; cautions his followers not to presume to judge the worth of others in God's eyes; and announces that the law was made for man and not man for the law.
In his article, Sullivan draws----not for the first time---the key distinction between a Christianist and a mere Christian.
This, to me, is the critical distinction between a Christianist and a mere Christian. One wants to infuse politics with religion; the other wants to respect both, separately, and to keep religion private. I should add I do not want to banish the word "God" from the public square. But I do want that invocation to be as thin and as empty and as formal as the Founders intended. The current Republican party has reinvented itself as a force on opposite grounds. The party of Huckabee and Romney, the party of Hewitt and Dobson, the party of Ponnuru and Neuhaus is emphatically not a secular party.(The Daily Dish)
And he speaks for this slightly leftward tilting Christian when he says:
And that is why part of me, I confess, wants Huckabee to win. So he can lose. So the GOP can lose - as spectacularly and humiliatingly as possible. If we are to rid conservatism of this theocratic cancer, we need to start over. Maybe it has to get worse before it can get better. But it is certainly too late for fellow-traveling Christianists like Lowry and Krauthammer to start whining now. This is their party. And they asked for every last bit of it.(The Daily Dish)
Yes, they did, didn't they? Good luck to Krauthammer & Co. persuading Huckabee's supporters that he isn't really God's chosen candidate or that a sound position on foreign policy and national security are actually more important in a candidate than a sound (from the Christianist standpoint) same-sex marriage policy.
Can I hear you say, "Amen?"
See updates:
As former Republican John Cole of Balloon Juice writes:
I simply can not tell you how much I am enjoying this. The GOP has been pandering to these stupid bastards for years, and every time I pointed it out I was called “anti-Christian” or something or other. Those of us who saw what the party was becoming were told to shut up, that it was good politics.
Enjoy your new GOP, folks. And here is something else to think about- are the evangelicals going to support Romney or Giuliani if you do manage to trash Huckabee enough to secure the nomination for them? Will the eye for an eye crowd learn to forgive and forget? Have fun!....
Can schadenfreude be fatal? (Read more: The Huckabee Panic)
Memeorandum discusses the issue here.
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FROM 'THE MARGINAL CHRISTIAN'S HANDBOOK'
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