<div class="print-logo"><img class="print-logo" src="http://www.alternet.org/sites/all/themes/custom/alternet/logo.png" alt="Alternet" id="logo">
</div>
<div class="print-site_name">Published on <em class="placeholder">Alternet</em> (<a href="http://www.alternet.org">http://www.alternet.org</a>)</div>
<p>
</p><div class="print-breadcrumb"><a href="http://www.alternet.org/">Home</a> > GOP Insider: How Religion Destroyed My Party</div>
<hr class="print-hr">
<div class="print-content">
<div id="node-688703" class="node node-story view-mode-print clearfix">
<div class="byline news-politics">
<span class="field field-name-field-sources field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden"><span class="field-items"><span class="field-item even"><a href="http://us.penguingroup.com/static/html/aboutus/adult/viking.html">Viking Press</a> <span class="print-footnote">[1]</span></span></span></span> / <em>By</em> <em><a href="http://www.alternet.org/authors/mike-lofgren">Mike Lofgren</a> <span class="print-footnote">[2]</span></em>
</div>
<div class="story_comments">
<span class="small">
<img alt="comments_image" src="http://www.alternet.org/sites/all/themes/custom/alternet/images/talk_box_news-politics.jpg" border="0">
<span class="news-politics comments_link"></span>
</span>
</div>
<div class="headline">
<h1 class="node-title">GOP Insider: How Religion Destroyed My Party</h1>
</div>
<div class="the_body body_news-politics clearfix">
<p style="font-family:Georgia,Arial,Sans-Serif"><em><br></em></p>
<div class="story-date"><em>
<span class="field field-name-field-date field-type-date field-label-hidden"><span class="field-items"><span class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single" content="2012-08-07T21:00:00-07:00">August 7, 2012</span></span></span></span></em> | </div>
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p class="p1"><em>The following exceprt is reprinted by arrangement with Viking, a member of the Penguin Group (USA) Inc., from "</em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Party-Over-Republicans-Democrats/dp/0670026263/saloncom08-20">The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless and the Middle Class Got Shafted</a> <span class="print-footnote">[3]</span>,<em>" by Mike Lofgren. Copyright © 2012 by Mike Lofgren.</em></p>
<p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><blockquote><p>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.</p></blockquote><p>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!</p><p>- – - – - – - – - -</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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:</p><blockquote><p>[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.</p></blockquote><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.”</p><p>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.</p><p><em>Reprinted by arrangement with Viking, a member of the Penguin Group (USA) Inc., from <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Party-Over-Republicans-Democrats/dp/0670026263/saloncom08-20">“The Party is Over”</a> <span class="print-footnote">[3]</span> by Mike Lofgren. Copyright © 2012 by Mike Lofgren</em></p>
<p> </p> </div></div></div>
</div>
<div class="big_story_tools_bottom_container">
<div class="talk_box">
<span class="small"></span>
</div>
</div>
<div class="story_tools_bottom">
<div class="text-size">
</div>
<div class="story_tools_email">
</div>
<div class="story_tools_print">
</div>
<div class="story_tools_share">
</div>
</div>
<div class="tags">
<em>See more stories tagged with:</em> <div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden">
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">
<a href="http://www.alternet.org/tags/gop">gop</a> <span class="print-footnote">[4]</span>, </div> <div class="field-item odd">
<a href="http://www.alternet.org/tags/religion-0">religion</a> <span class="print-footnote">[5]</span> </div> </div>
</div> </div>
<div class="comment_button">
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="print-footer">
</div>
<hr class="print-hr">
<div class="print-source_url"><strong>Source URL:</strong> <a href="http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/gop-insider-how-religion-destroyed-my-party">http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/gop-insider-how-religion-destroyed-my-party</a></div>
<div class="print-links"><p><strong>Links:</strong><br>[1] <a href="http://us.penguingroup.com/static/html/aboutus/adult/viking.html">http://us.penguingroup.com/static/html/aboutus/adult/viking.html</a><br>
[2] <a href="http://www.alternet.org/authors/mike-lofgren">http://www.alternet.org/authors/mike-lofgren</a><br>
[3] <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Party-Over-Republicans-Democrats/dp/0670026263/saloncom08-20">http://www.amazon.com/The-Party-Over-Republicans-Democrats/dp/0670026263/saloncom08-20</a><br>
[4] <a href="http://www.alternet.org/tags/gop">http://www.alternet.org/tags/gop</a><br>
[5] <a href="http://www.alternet.org/tags/religion-0">http://www.alternet.org/tags/religion-0</a><br>
</p></div>
<br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)<br><a href="mailto:art.deco.studios@gmail.com" target="_blank">art.deco.studios@gmail.com</a><br><br><img src="http://users.moscow.com/waf/WP%20Fox%2001.jpg"><br><br>