Recently in Religious Right Category

With the emergence of The Family as a subject of public interest, Religion Dispatches has posted a roundtable discussion on Jeff Sharlet's book of the same name (now out in paper), featuring Sharlet, Anthea Butler, Diane Winston, and Randall Balmer. The discussion is somewhat musty: It was conducted last summer, and so lacks references not only to recent events but also to the Obama Dispensation. It is, nonetheless, instructive.

To his credit, Sharlet has called attention to a little known religio-political enterprise that has plied its trade in Washington for a number of decades. It has operated largely under cover, reached out to political movers and shakers of both parties and different religious persuasions, and its mission is animated by a strong conservative Christian ideology. It is elitist, uninterested in democratic politics except as such politics lifts up the people who run the country. The question is: How significant a role has it played in national affairs?

Sharlet claims that this group is, as his subtitle puts it, "The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power." Now, does that mean that it is the heart of American power, or just that, like many another aspiring lesion, it has glommed onto Washington's power elite? Just like, say, AIPAC, which is the Secret Zionism at the Heart of American Power. (Well, maybe not so secret.) Sharlet is canny enough to leave some ambiguity, but what's clear from the roundtable is that he's offered the left an alternate interpretation of recent political religious history--one that shows the religious right not as the product of genuine popular reaction to the direction of American culture but as an inside job stretching back to the Cold War. The Family becomes a kind of Opus Dei, with Washington playing the role of Rome.

The participant in the roundtable not buying this view is Balmer, who had just savaged Sharlet's book in the Washington Post. What he particularly didn't like was Sharlet's effort to portray The Family as the culmination of an American evangelicalism stretching back to Jonathan Edwards--a lineage that, it seems, The Family has constructed for itself. But claiming a lineage doesn't make it so.

My own view is that The Family is at most a bit player in the spiritual politics of the past generation. To be sure, it's an interesting player, not least because of its determined establishmentarianism--its genetic inclination towards bipartisanship even as religion became ever more partisan. One of the curious things about recent coverage of The Family has been the disappearance of the Hillary Clinton angle. I suspect that's because the Family ties of Clinton, the great Sataness of the 1990s religious right, upsets the interpretive applecart. After all, if the The Family had been pulling all those strings back in the 1990s, surely it would have been able to get Falwell & Co. to chill out, right? 

Once upon a time, when the Contract with America beguiled a people tired of a Democratic-run Congress, Newt Gingrich and Grover were allies, bomb-throwing peas in a pod ready to achieve congressional power by any means necessary. They made common cause with religious conservatives because they needed 'em in their low-tax, small- government coalition.

Norquist is still pretty much where he's always been, but as one of the shrewdest of conservative heads has come to the conclusion that religious conservatives are dragging the cause down. As Jacqui Salmon reports over on Ging:

Norquist said conservative Christian leaders are basically too aggressive. They should be playing more defense and less offense, he says, because they're scaring the bejeezuz out of everyone who's not in their corner.

The Christian right should adopt more of the attitude of "leave me alone and let me raise my kids" and not "everybody agrees with me, therefore you have to do what I say," according to Norquist.

Newt, by contrast, has traveled the Damascus road, not merely converting the Roman Catholicism but taking up vintage 1980s religious right rhetoric and cranking it up a notch. Indeed, he went so far as to say the other day,

"The first job we have as Americans is to reach out to everybody in the country who is not yet saved and to help them understand the spiritual basis of a creator-endowed society."

I'm not entirely sure that most of the people who usually talk this way would regard Newt, the Baptist-turned-Catholic, as among the saved, but never mind. The question is what he thinks he's accomplishing with this kind of talk. I don't underestimate Newt's astuteness as a political agitator, but Norquist's assessment does seem more grounded in current realities. If it's the presidential bug that's bitten Gingrich, then perhaps his idea is to make himself so thoroughly acceptable to religious conservatives that when it comes time to pivot toward his long-held economic convictions, he'll have them, if not in his pocket, at least at his beck and call.  

According to a new Gallup poll, nearly half of all Republicans are non-Hispanic whites who say they attend worship once a week or more. Only one-fifth of Democrats fall into this category and--note this--only a quarter of Independents do. By contrast, 48 percent of Independents, 44 percent of Dems, and 40 percent of Republicans are non-Hispanic whites who attend worship less frequently.

Now, if you're trying to figure out a successful future for the GOP, the best target is those less religious, non-Hispanic white Independents. Independents are swing voters, and that's the biggest bloc of them. They also happen to look like nine-tenths of your existing members. But you're not going to appeal to them by pushing your pro-life, anti-gay marriage agenda. You've got to dial back on the social conservatism. 

Is it interesting that the senior director of Focus on the Family's Sanctity of Human Life department thinks the Obama administration is "really listening" on the subject of foster care? Yes it is. And even more interesting that the thought is purveyed via a canned quote on Focus' CitizenLink website.

A lot of people, even the odd Republican herself, are indulging in the thought experiment of imagining what the GOP should do to get its groove back. Open the doors to moderates! Throw social conservatives under the bus! Go back to basics! Stay the course! Unless I'm missing something, though, no one has proposed readjusting the anti-regulatory, tax-cutting, government-is-the-problem orthodoxy that has been in command since the Reagan era. Take Mike Huckabee, he who once dared to question said orthodoxy (a little). In a recent discussion of religion and politics, he wouldn't go anywhere near there. The result is that you've got Republicans in Congress prepared to vote for measures cracking down on credit card shenanigans and predatory housing lenders, but against the position of their leadership and without an articulated adjustment of philosophy. So sure, dial back on the social conservatism; but while you're at it, dial back on the laissez-faire too. In a pragmatic country, a party wedded to ideology has no place to go but down.

Update: RealClearPolitics' David Paul Kuhn has a column up about how social conservatives are feeling all aggrieved about being scapegoated by the GOP establishment. But why the hell aren't any social conservatives proposing to broaden the party by softening its economic conservatism? Does Grover Norquist have them by the short and curlies? Are their leaders just a bunch of clerical frontmen for the hard-eyed money guys? It's been a century since William Jennings Bryan led the social conservatives of his day on a crusade for economic justice. Has that gene been surgically removed from the evangelical body politic?

A decade ago, conservative syndicated columnist Cal Thomas won some liberal props for criticizing the religious right in Blinded by Might, a book he wrote with Grand Rapids megachurch pastor Ed Dobson. Thomas and Dobson were old comrades-in-arms of Jerry Falwell--Thomas VP of the Moral Majority and Dobson associate pastor of Falwell's Thomas Road Baptist Church. The book charged MM and the religious right generally of succumbing to the blandishments of power, and without backing off conservative social values, opened the door to a wider vision. Here's a Wallis-esque passage from an essay of theirs based on the book (available here) that gives the flavor:

Both the religious left and religious right go wrong when their theologies and their practices are selective. They take from God those things that seem to bless their political agendas and reject or ignore those things that won't raise money or that make them feel uncomfortable.

Dobson has gone on to live out this vision. Retired and suffering from Lou Gehrig's disease, he determined last year to live as Jesus lived, growing a beard, keeping kosher and observing the Jewish sabbath and holidays, taking the occasional alcoholic beverage, and preaching the word of God from place to place. And towards the end of the year, he decided to vote for Obama, despite the latter's support for abortion rights. As he told Charles Honey of the Grand Rapids News:

I felt, as an individual, he was closer to the spirit of Jesus' teachings than anyone else. (Obama) was a community organizer, so he was into the poor, the marginalized, the oppressed, which Jesus is very much into.

Not surprisingly, this earned him some national attention and caused some consternation in the evangelical world.

For his part, Thomas has stuck to the religious right's straight and narrow. Last week, for example, he took out after Meghan McCain and Steve Schmidt for presuming to suggest that the GOP should rethink its conservative orthodoxies, particularly on gay marriage.

Republicans are in electoral trouble for many reasons, but one of them surely is not that they are insufficiently liberal on social issues. What's the point of having a two-party system if one party mimics the other? Many erstwhile Republican voters turned on the GOP not because they were insufficiently liberal, but because they were insufficiently conservative. 

And true to form, Thomas' GOP orthodoxy extends to economic policy--as witness this early attack on Obama's stimulus package.

No doubt, as Thomas and Dobson argued in their book, those phone calls and invitations from the White House suckered some true believers into reposing too much hope in the Republican Party. But the real seduction was the Faustian intellectual bargain that bound religious conservatives to a reactionary economic agenda. Thomas remains in thrall to it. Dobson asks, "What would Jesus do?"