[Vision2020] From the Heartland of America

[Art Deco]

      Oil and right-wing religion intertwine in the life of President Bush  
        
      BY CHARLES STEPHEN / For the Lincoln Journal Star
      Sunday, Apr 30, 2006 - 12:12:01 am CDT  
        
       ("American Theocracy:  The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century" by Kevin Phillips,  Viking, 462 pages, $26.95.)  In the late 1960s, Kevin Phillips, a Republican strategist who would shortly go to work with the Nixon Administration, wrote a popular and insightful book, "The Emerging Republican Majority."  In it he wrote of the demographic changes that were occurring in the country and of how those changes would help the GOP to dominate the nation's politics for decades to come. Phillips, no longer a Republican, and not enamored of the changes he once, correctly, foresaw, is a prolific and important commentator on public affairs, and this latest book, "American Theocracy," views with alarm the current state of American democracy in general and the Republican Party in particular.

      Phillips divides his book into three parts: oil, religion and debt. And in each section he faults the Republican Party, the current party, not the one he grew up supporting decades ago. He coined the phrase, "the southernization of U.S. politics" some years ago, and he applies it to the current situation in which oil and right-wing religion intertwine in the life of President Bush and, especially, within the right wing of the GOP. When Baghdad was invaded in 2003, he recalls, it was the oil ministry of Iraq that was guarded by U.S. troops, not the National Museum, which was ransacked. "There is something about oil," he writes, "that makes high officials lie." And he reminds us (who needs reminding?) that the oil industry and the automobile industry are "in the driver's seat in Washington," with both the president and the vice president having come from the oil industry, and the (now resigned) White House chief of staff, Andrew Card, having been the former president of the American Automobile Manufacturers Association.

      But it is not just oil and its burdens that disturb Phillips; it is the convergence of end-time religionists, absolutist in their philosophies, with Big Oil and the anti-global warming, anti-science folks. "No other contemporary western nation," he writes, "shares the religious intensity and its concomitant proclamation that Americans are God's chosen people and nation." He notes the drop in membership in mainline Protestant churches, such as Methodist, Episcopalian, Presbyterian and UCC, and the rise of fundamentalist and evangelical groups, many of which proclaim the forthcoming return of Jesus. We  never before have had a religious party in this nation, he writes, but now we do. This is at the foundation of Phillips' concern and fear.

      This is not to say, and Phillips does not suggest it, that religion has not played a role in our democracy. Phillips remembers, rather nostalgically at times, an earlier time when those who claimed to be Christian sought to bring their influence upon the larger world in humane and intelligent ways. But the conservative coalition, right wing, anti-intellectual, evangelical, believing they grasp total truth, is not the Christianity he grew up with. The United States has become, he says, "the world's leading Bible-reading crusader state, immersed in an Old Testament of stern prophets and bloody Middle Eastern battlefields." And he quotes Republican Congressman Christopher Shea as saying a few years ago that "the party of Lincoln has become a party of theocracy."

      The last section of the book deals with the immense personal and federal debt that looms over this nation and its future. Phillips calls it a "national-debt culture," and while he does not wholly blame the Bush Administration for it, he does protest the hugely unbalanced budgets of our day, and the growing gap between the wealthiest and the poorest Americans. He sees the evangelical belief in a forthcoming rapture and end of the world as influential in making planning for the future unnecessary in some religious groups. Harshly critical of the Bush Administration and the conservative Republicans who champion it, this book is still not a partisan screed, but a thoughtful, well-documented critique of the nation we have become.

      Charles Stephen is co-host of "All About Books," heard weekly on NET Radio.  
        

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