Article VI Blog

Theocracy! Theocracy! Theocracy! by Ross Douthat, is the featured article in the August/September issue of First Things. I heartily recommend the entire article, in which Douthat reviews four books attacking the rise of religious influence in American politics. Here are two excerpts. The first tells you where Douthat is going:

The term theocrat has become a commonplace, employed by bomb-throwing columnists, otherwise-sensible reporters, and “centrist” Republicans such as Connecticut’s Christopher Shays, who recently complained that the GOP was becoming the “party of theocracy.” And now the specter of a looming Khomeini’ism has migrated into the realm of pop sociology, producing a spate of books with titles like The Baptizing of America, Kingdom Coming, Thy Kingdom Come—and, inevitably, American Theocracy, the Kevin Phillips jeremiad that shot to the top of the New York Times bestseller list this spring.

Kind of strikes a familiar chord, doesn't it? The second excerpt is one of Douthat's concluding paragraphs:

So the rise of the Religious Right, and the growing “religion gap” that Phillips describes but fails to understand, aren’t new things in American history but a reaction to a new thing: to an old political party newly dependent on a bloc of voters who reject the role that religion has traditionally played in American political life. The hysteria over theocracy, in turn, represents an attempt to rewrite the history of the United States to suit these voters’ prejudices, by setting a year zero somewhere around 1970 and casting everything that’s happened since as a battle between progress and atavism, reason and fundamentalism, the Enlightenment and the medieval dark.

As both John and I have argued here several times, whether the GOP nominee is Romney or someone else, if that nominee is an unabashedly religious person, the fearsome attacks will come from the left, and from the kinds of writers who authored the books Douthat reviews. If Romney is in fact the nominee, any attacks on his Mormon faith from evangelicals during the GOP primaries will seem like child's play compared to what the Daily Kos fever swamp, and the likes of Kevin Phillips, will dish up. Update: John notes below that calling attacks from some evangelicals "child's play" tends to understate the level of venom they will carry. Good point. What I am saying is that as terrible as those intra-religious attacks will be, I think the eventual attacks from the left will be farther beyond the pale than we can even imagine now. I hope I'm wrong. I hope I've whetted your appetite for Douthat's entire article. It's well worth your time. John adds: I agree it is an excellent piece, and I agree that any GOP nominee of strongly identifiable faith, Mormon or creedal Christian, will suffer massive attacks from the anti-religious left, but I am not yet entirely convinced that attacks on Romney from the Evangelical right will be "child's play" - that's a very strong phrase. There is little more potentially venomous confrontation in the world than a believer attacking a "competing" believer. I am increasingly convinced that the size of the group on the right that would carry out such attacks is not as large as feared, so the attacks may not be that effective, but measured in pure venom…
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