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<TD class=headline align=left><STRONG><FONT size=6>Oil and right-wing
religion intertwine in the life of President Bush</FONT></STRONG> </TD></TR>
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<TD class=byline align=left>BY CHARLES STEPHEN / For the <EM>Lincoln
Journal Star<BR></EM>Sunday, Apr 30, 2006 - 12:12:01 am CDT </TD></TR>
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<TD class=content align=left><EM> (“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.)</EM> 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.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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.”<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR><EM>Charles Stephen is co-host of
“All About Books,” heard weekly on NET Radio.</EM> </TD></TR>
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