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  Viking Press<http://us.penguingroup.com/static/html/aboutus/adult/viking.html>
[1] / *By* *Mike Lofgren <http://www.alternet.org/authors/mike-lofgren> [2]*
 [image: comments_image]
 GOP Insider: How Religion Destroyed My Party

*
*
* August 7, 2012*  |

*The following exceprt is reprinted by arrangement with Viking, a member of
the Penguin Group (USA) Inc., from "*The Party Is Over: How Republicans
Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless and the Middle Class Got
Shafted<http://www.amazon.com/The-Party-Over-Republicans-Democrats/dp/0670026263/saloncom08-20>
[3],*" by Mike Lofgren. Copyright © 2012 by Mike Lofgren.*

Having observed politics up close and personal for most of my adult
lifetime, I have come to the conclusion that the rise of politicized
religious fundamentalism may have been the key ingredient in the
transformation of the Republican Party. Politicized religion provides a
substrate of beliefs that rationalizes—at least in the minds of its
followers—all three of the GOP’s main tenets: wealth worship, war worship,
and the permanent culture war.

Religious cranks ceased to be a minor public nuisance in this country
beginning in the 1970s and grew into a major element of the Republican rank
and file. Pat Robertson’s strong showing in the 1988 Iowa presidential
caucus signaled the gradual merger of politics and religion in the party.
Unfortunately, at the time I mostly underestimated the implications of what
I was seeing. It did strike me as oddly humorous that a fundamentalist
staff member in my congressional office was going to take time off to
convert the heathen in Greece, a country that had been overwhelmingly
Christian for almost two thousand years. I recall another point, in the
early 1990s, when a different fundamentalist GOP staffer said that dinosaur
fossils were a hoax. As a mere legislative mechanic toiling away in what I
held to be a civil rather than ecclesiastical calling, I did not yet see
that ideological impulses far different from mine were poised to capture
the party of Lincoln.

The results of this takeover are all around us: If the American people poll
more like Iranians or Nigerians than Europeans or Canadians on questions of
evolution, scriptural inerrancy, the presence of angels and demons, and so
forth, it is due to the rise of the religious right, its insertion into the
public sphere by the Republican Party, and the consequent normalizing of
formerly reactionary beliefs. All around us now is a prevailing
anti-intellectualism and hostility to science. Politicized religion is the
sheet anchor of the dreary forty-year-old culture wars.

The Constitution notwithstanding, there is now a de facto religious test
for the presidency: Major candidates are encouraged (or coerced) to share
their feelings about their faith in a revelatory speech, or a televangelist
like Rick Warren will dragoon the candidates (as he did with Obama and
McCain in 2008) to debate the finer points of Christology, offering himself
as the final arbiter. Half a century after John F. Kennedy put to rest the
question of whether a candidate of a minority denomination could be
president, the Republican Party has reignited the kinds of
seventeenth-century religious controversies that advanced democracies are
supposed to have outgrown. And some in the media seem to have internalized
the GOP’s premise that the religion of a candidate is a matter for public
debate.

Throughout the 2012 Republican presidential campaign, Mitt Romney was
dogged with questions about his religion. The spark was a hitherto obscure
fundamentalist preacher from Texas, Robert Jeffress, who attacked Romney’s
Mormonism by doubting whether he could really be considered a Christian.
The media promptly set aside the issues that should have been paramount—
Romney’s views on economic and foreign policy—in order to spend a week
giving respectful consideration to an attention-grabbing rabble-rouser.
They then proceeded to pester the other candidates with the loaded question
of whether they thought Romney was a Christian. CNN’s Candy Crowley was
particularly egregious in this respect, pressing Herman Cain and Michele
Bachmann for a response and becoming indignant when they refused to answer.
The question did not deserve an answer, because Crowley had set it up to
legitimate a false premise: that Romney’s religious belief was a legitimate
issue of public debate. This is a perfect example of how the media
reinforce an informal but increasingly binding religious test for public
office that the Constitution formally bans. Like the British constitution,
the test is no less powerful for being unwritten.

The religious right’s professed insistence upon “family values” might
appear at first blush to be at odds with the anything but saintly personal
behavior of many of its leading proponents. Some of this may be due to the
general inability of human beings to reflect on conflicting information: I
have never ceased to be amazed at how facts manage to bounce off people’s
consciousness like pebbles off armor plate. But there is another, uniquely
religious aspect that also comes into play: the predilection of
fundamentalist denominations to believe in practice, even if not entirely
in theory, in the doctrine of “cheap grace,” a derisive term coined by the
theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. By that he meant the inclination of some
religious adherents to believe that once they had been “saved,” not only
would all past sins be wiped away, but future ones, too—so one could pretty
much behave as before. Cheap grace is a divine get- out-of-jail-free card.
Hence the tendency of the religious base of the Republican Party to cut
some slack for the peccadilloes of candidates who claim to have been washed
in the blood of the Lamb and reborn to a new and more Christian life. The
religious right is willing to overlook a politician’s individual foibles,
no matter how poor an example he or she may make, if they publicly identify
with fundamentalist values. In 2011 the Family Research Council, the
fundamentalist lobbying organization, gave Representative Joe Walsh of
Illinois an award for “unwavering support of the family.” Representative
Walsh’s ex-wife might beg to differ, as she claims he owes her over one
hundred thousand dollars in unpaid child support, a charge he denies.

Of course, the proper rituals must be observed before an erring politician
can obtain absolution. In November 2011, at a forum sponsored by religious
conservatives in Iowa, all of the GOP presidential candidates struck the
expected notes of contrition and humility as they laid bare their souls
before the assembled congregation (the event was held in a church). Most of
them, including Cain, who was then still riding high, choked up when
discussing some bleak midnight of their lives (he chose not to address the
fresh sexual harassment charges against him, which surely would have
qualified as a trying personal experience preying on his mind). Even the
old reprobate Gingrich misted up over some contrived misdeed intended to
distract attention from his well-known adventures in serial matrimony.

All of these gloomy obsequies of repentance having been observed, Gingrich
gave a stirring example of why he is hands-down the best extemporaneous
demagogue in contemporary America. Having purged his soul of all guilty
transgressions, he turned his attention to the far graver sins bedeviling
the American nation.

If we look at history from the mid-1960s, we’ve gone from a request for
toleration to an imposition of intolerance. We’ve gone from a request to
understand others to a determination to close down those who hold
traditional values. I think that we need to be very aggressive and very
direct. The degree to which the left is prepared to impose intolerance and
to drive out of existence traditional religion is a mortal threat to our
civilization and deserves to be taken head-on and described as what it is,
which is the use of government to repress the American people against their
own values.

That is as good an example as any of cheap grace as practiced by seasoned
statesmen like Gingrich—a bid for redemption turned on its head to provide
a forum for one of the Republican Party’s favorite pastimes: taking
opportunistic swipes at the dreaded liberal bogeyman. How quickly one
forgets one’s own moral lapses when one can consider the manifold harms
inflicted on our nation by godless leftists!

- – - – - – - – - -

Some liberal writers have opined that the socioeconomic gulf separating the
business wing of the GOP and the religious right make it an unstable
coalition that could crack. I am not so sure. There is no basic
disagreement on which direction the two factions want to take the country,
merely how far it should go. The plutocrats would drag us back to the
Gilded Age; the theocrats to the Salem witch trials. If anything, the two
groups are increasingly beginning to resemble each other. Many
televangelists have espoused what has come to be known as the prosperity
gospel—the health-and- wealth/name-it-and-claim-it gospel of economic
entitlement. If you are wealthy, it is a sign of God’s favor. If not, too
bad! This rationale may explain why some poor voters will defend the
prerogatives of billionaires. In any case, at the beginning of the 2012
presidential cycle, those consummate plutocrats the Koch brothers pumped
money into Bachmann’s campaign, so one should probably not make too much of
a potential plutocrat-theocrat split.

Most of the religious enthusiasts I observed during my tenure on the Hill
seemed to have little reluctance to mix God and Mammon. Rick Santorum did
not blink at legislative schemes to pay off his campaign contributors: In
2005 he introduced a bill to forbid the National Weather Service from
providing weather forecasts for free that commercial forecasters—like
AccuWeather, a Pennsylvania- based company which had contributed to his
campaign—wanted to charge for. Tom DeLay’s purported concern about the
dignity and sanctity of human life, touchingly on display during the
controversy over whether Terri Schiavo’s husband had the right to tell
doctors to remove her feeding tube after seeing her comatose for fifteen
years, could always be qualified by strategic infusions of campaign cash.
DeLay’s quashing of bills to prohibit serious labor abuses demonstrates
that even religious virtue can be flexible when there are campaign
donations involved.

One might imagine that the religious right’s agenda would be incompatible
with the concerns for privacy and individual autonomy by those who consider
themselves to belong to the libertarian wing of the Republican Party—the
“don’t tread on me,” “live free or die” crowd that Grover Norquist once
called the “leave me alone” conservatives. Given their profound distaste
for an oppressive and intrusive federal government, one would think they
might have trepidations about a religious movement determined to impose
statutory controls on private behavior that libertarians nominally hold to
be nobody’s business, and particularly not the government’s business.

Some more libertarian-leaning Republicans have in fact pushed back against
the religious right. Former House majority leader Dick Armey expressed his
profound distaste for the tactics of the religious right in 2006—from the
safety of the sidelines—by blasting its leadership in unequivocal terms:

[James] Dobson and his gang of thugs are real nasty bullies. I pray
devoutly every day, but being a Christian is no excuse for being stupid.
There’s a high demagoguery coefficient to issues like prayer in schools.
Demagoguery doesn’t work unless it’s dumb, shallow as water on a plate.
These issues are easy for the intellectually lazy and can appeal to a large
demographic. These issues become bigger than life, largely because they’re
easy. There ain’t no thinking.

Armey had previously been an economics professor at several cow colleges in
Texas, and when he came to Congress in 1985, libertarian economics was his
forte. I do not recall religious issues motivating his political ideology;
instead, economics was what gripped him, particularly the flat tax, which
he tirelessly promoted. I believe his departure from Congress was impelled
not only by the fact that he was not on the inside track to become Speaker,
but also because of his disillusionment with the culture wars, as his
passionate denunciation of Dobson suggests. But later, Barack Obama’s
election and the rise of the Tea Party induced a miraculous change of heart
in Armey, as no doubt did the need to raise money for his lobbying
organization, known as FreedomWorks. By 2009, Armey had become a
significant voice of the Tea Party. As such, he attempted to declare a
truce between fiscal and social conservatives, who would thenceforth bury
their squabbles and concentrate on dethroning the Kenyan usurper in the
Oval Office. That meant soft-pedaling social issues that might alarm
fiscally conservative but socially moderate voters, particularly women, who
lived in the wealthier suburbs.

In September 2010 Armey took one step further in his reconciliation with
the people he had called thugs and bullies when he announced that a GOP
majority in Congress would again take up the abortion fight, which was only
right and proper for those who held such a sincere moral conviction. When
the Republicans duly won the House two months later, they did precisely
that. State legislatures across the country followed suit: Ohio, Texas, and
Virginia enacted the most severe abortion restrictions in any legislative
session in memory. Suddenly Armey didn’t seem to have any problem with
social issues preempting his economic agenda.

The Tea Party, which initially described itself as wholly concerned with
debt, deficit, and federal overreach, gradually unmasked itself as being
almost as theocratic as the activists from the religious right that Armey
had denounced only a few years before. If anything, they were even slightly
more disposed than the rest of the Republican Party to inject religious
issues into the political realm. According to an academic study of the Tea
Party, “[T]hey seek ‘deeply religious’ elected officials, approve of
religious leaders’ engaging in politics and want religion brought into
political debates.” The Tea Party faithful are not so much libertarian as
authoritarian, the furthest thing from a “live free or die”
constitutionalist.

Within the GOP libertarianism is a throwaway doctrine that is rhetorically
useful in certain situations but often interferes with their core, more
authoritarian, beliefs. When the two precepts collide, the authoritarian
reflex prevails. In 2009 it was politically useful for the GOP to present
the Tea Party as independent-leaning libertarians, when in reality the
group was overwhelmingly Republican, with a high quotient of GOP activists
and adherents of views common among the religious right. According to a
2010 Gallup poll, eight in ten Tea Party members identify themselves as
Republicans. Another study found that over half identified as members of
the religious right and 55 percent of Tea Partiers agree that “America has
always been and is currently a Christian nation”—6 points more than even
the percentage of self-described Christian conservatives who would agree to
that. This religious orientation should have been evident from the brouhaha
that erupted in mid- 2009 over the charge that the Obama administration’s
new healthcare reform plan would set up “death panels.” While there was
plenty to criticize about the health-care bill, the completely bogus charge
garnered disproportionate attention. Republican political consultants
immediately recognized that they had found a classic emotional issue that
would resonate with the same people on the religious right who had been
stirred up over the Terri Schiavo case. The Tea Party, a supposedly
independent group of fiscal conservatives outraged by Obama’s profligate
spending plans, fell prey to the hysteria Republican Party operatives
whipped up over end-of- life counseling. This self-unmasking of the Tea
Party may help explain why, after three years in existence, public support
for the organization has been dropping precipitously.

Ayn Rand, an occasional darling of the Tea Party, has become a cult figure
within the GOP in recent years. It is easy enough to see how her tough-guy,
every-man-for-himself posturing would be a natural fit with the Wall Street
bankers and the right-wing politicians they fund—notwithstanding the
bankers’ fondness for government bailouts. But Rand’s philosophy found most
of its adherents in the libertarian wing of the party, a group that
overlaps with, but is certainly not identical to, the “business
conservatives” who fund the bulk of the GOP’s activities. There has always
been a strong strain of rugged individualism in America, and the GOP has
cleverly managed to co-opt that spirit to its advantage. The problem is
that Rand proclaimed at every opportunity that she was a militant atheist
who felt nothing but contempt for Christianity as a religion of weaklings
possessing a slave mentality. So how do Republican candidates manage to
bamboozle what is perhaps the largest single bloc in their voting base, the
religious fundamentalists, about this? Certainly the ignorance of many
fundamentalist values voters about the wider world and the life of the mind
goes some distance toward explaining the paradox: GOP candidates who
enthuse over Rand at the same time as they thump their Bibles never have to
explain this stark contradiction because most of their audience is
blissfully unaware of who Ayn Rand was and what she advocated. But voters
can to some extent be forgiven their ignorance, because politicians have
grown so skillful at misdirecting them about their intentions.

This camouflaging of intentions is as much a strategy of the religious
right and its leaders—James Dobson, Tony Perkins, Pat Robertson, and the
rest—as it is of the GOP’s more secular political leaders in Washington.
After the debacle of the Schiavo case and the electoral loss in 2008, the
religious right pulled back and regrouped. They knew that the full-bore,
“theoconservative” agenda would not sell with a majority of voters. This
strategy accounts for Robertson, founder of the Christian Coalition (who
famously said that God sent a hurricane to New Orleans to punish the
sodomites), stating the following in October 2011: “Those people in the
Republican primary have got to lay off of this stuff. They’re forcing their
leaders, the front-runners, into positions that will mean they lose the
general election.” I doubt he thought the candidates held positions that
were too extreme, merely that they should keep quiet about those positions
until they had won the election. Max Blumenthal, author of Republican
Gomorrah, argues that this is a “lying for Jesus” strategy that
fundamentalists often adopt when dealing with the snares of a wicked and
Godless world. Since Satan is the father of lies, one can be forgiven for
fighting lies with lies.

Hence the policies pursued for at least two decades by the religious right
on the federal, state, and local levels. It usually starts at the school
board, after some contrived uproar over sex education or liberal
indoctrination. The stealthily fundamentalist school board candidates
pledge to clean up the mess and “get back to basics.” After a few years
they capture a majority on the board, and suddenly “Catcher in the Rye” is
heaved out of the curriculum and science teachers are under pressure to
teach the (imaginary) controversy about evolutionary biology. This was the
path to greater glory of Michele Bachmann: Her first run for public office,
barely a dozen years ago, was for a seat on the school board in Stillwater,
Minnesota. Up until then she had drawn a taxpayer-funded salary for five
years working as an attorney for the Internal Revenue Service, not, of
course, because she was one of those lazy, good-for-nothing government
bureaucrats that Republican candidates routinely denounce. She was secretly
studying the ways of the government beast so as to defeat it later on.

Bachmann, Rick Perry, and numerous other serving representatives and
senators have all had ties to Christian Dominionism, a doctrine proclaiming
that Christians are destined to dominate American politics and establish a
new imperium resembling theocratic government. According to one profile of
Perry, adherents of Dominionism “believe Christians—certain Christians—are
destined to not just take ‘dominion’ over government, but stealthily climb
to the commanding heights of what they term the ‘Seven Mountains’ of
society, including the media and the arts and entertainment world.” Note
the qualifier: “stealthily.”

At the same religious forum where the GOP candidates confessed their sins,
Bachmann went so far as to suggest that organized religion should keep its
traditional legal privilege of tax exemption while being permitted to
endorse political candidates from the pulpit. The fact that government
prohibits express political advocacy is in her imagination muzzling
preachers rather than just being a quid pro quo for tax-exempt status
equivalent to that imposed on any 501(c)3 or 501(c)4 nonprofit
organization. But for Bachmann and others of like mind, this is persecution
of a kind that fuels their sense of victimhood and righteous indignation.

*Reprinted by arrangement with Viking, a member of the Penguin Group (USA)
Inc., from “The Party is
Over”<http://www.amazon.com/The-Party-Over-Republicans-Democrats/dp/0670026263/saloncom08-20>
[3] by Mike Lofgren. Copyright © 2012 by Mike Lofgren*


         *See more stories tagged with:*
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[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/mike-lofgren
[3]
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[4] http://www.alternet.org/tags/gop
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