I went to the bookstore last week with the intention of buying
Kevin Phillips’ ostentatious new title American Theocracy.
I was disappointed to learn the book is neither principally nor
even predominantly about religion in public life. Phillips
dedicated one of three sections — a little more than a hundred
pages — to conservative Christianity. The rest of the book is
about oil and government debt. Instead of offering anything new,
Phillips has merely repackaged old obloquies about the president
and his family. His book is worthy of, at best, a roll of the eyes.
I left the bookstore empty-handed.
But Phillips’s
op-ed in Sunday’s Washington Post, titled “How the GOP
Became God’s Own Party,” contains a string of inexcusably
Christianity-ignorant calumnies that must be dealt with.
To begin with, Phillips attributes the rise of the American
South as an electoral force to “a high-powered, crusading
fundamentalism,” by which he means evangelical Christianity. And
yet modern evangelical Christianity, which is the real growing
force in American politics today, is neither fundamentalist nor
particularly Southern.
Southerners are not especially more likely to do things such as
attend church weekly than Midwesterners and Westerners. For
example, according to the Christian polling outfit the Barna Group,
48% of Southerners attend church on a regular basis, compared to
46% of Midwesterners and 41% of Westerners. It is only when we look
at Northeasterners that the number falls to 35%.
Moreover, as pollsters Anna Greenberg and Jennifer Berktold
observed in their 2004 study, “Evangelicals in America,” “White evangelicals are not
overly concentrated in the South, despite popular assumptions.
Rather, white evangelical Christians are evenly spread out
throughout the country.” Twenty-eight percent of the nation’s
population lives in the Deep South, 31% of evangelicals live there.
Whereas 16% of the nation’s population inhabits the East North
Central, 19% of evangelicals live there. And whereas 16% of the
nation’s population lives in Pacific states, 14% of evangelicals
call the West Coast home.
Conservative Christianity is an American religion, not a
Southern one.
Secondly, Phillips charges that the GOP has fallen under the
spell of “an end-times electorate.” Without a single reference,
quote, or definitive tie to public policy, Phillips nevertheless
asserts:
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.
Phillips here is talking about premillennial dispensationalism, the
latest obsession among liberal pundits whose earlier efforts to
marginalize conservative Christians on matters of public policy
(abortion, evolution, etc.) have not borne fruit. Finding
themselves fighting now from the business end of countless “80-20
issues,” liberals try to secure middle ground by attributing to all
orthodox Christians the theological doctrine that believers will
sit at the right hand of God while unbelievers suffer through the
rapture.
Yet premillennial dispensationalism enjoys something far short
of consensus among Christians. As Kyle Fisk, executive
administrator of the 30 million strong National Association of
Evangelicals, told me, “We don’t even talk about the end times
because we can’t come to a consensus view about it.” Fisk seemed
positively nonplussed in my presence that premillennial
dispensationalism would rise to the level of anti-evangelical
talking point. “It’s not even a majority view among evangelicals,
certainly not pastors.”
Further, the only “proof” I have ever found to support the “many
millions believe in premillennial dispensationalism” argument is
the impressive sales figures of the Left Behind series of
novels, which takes the rapture as its setting. And yet this same
unscholarly approach can be used to conclude from the extraordinary
sales of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code that
Magdalene-worship is America’s predominant faith tradition.
Absurd.
Worse still is Phillips’s jab about “George W. Bush’s conviction
that God wanted him to be president,” again without any supporting
reference. This is yet another oft repeated attack on the
president. But Phillips either intentionally ignores what most
Christians believe about predestination or he is himself ignorant
of it. As a believing, born again Christian, President Bush sees
God as the author of all things, not merely his presidency.
And so, of course God called George W. Bush to that high office,
just as He, for reasons all His own, called Kevin Phillips to write
such a mean-spirited, dishonest op-ed in the Washington
Post.
