Well then, is the religious right a bunch of crybabies who flinch at political hardball, as Michael Kinsley complains, or is it a threat to the republic, as Vic Fazio, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, warns? It might be a good idea for liberals to make up their minds. The current headline, “Crybabies threaten U.S. takeover,” lacks a certain pungency, let alone credibility.
As election day approaches, I suspect the Fazio line-the radical juggernaut swallowing the Republican Party before going on to conquer the country-will predominate. The reason is obvious. While Democrats are right that some Republicans have taken to personal attacks on President Clinton because they have no ideas of their own to run on, the obverse is also true: Democrats are demonizing the religious right because, with November approaching, they are hardly eager to talk about Clinton. They would rather discuss barbarians at the gate clutching Bibles.
As candidate Clinton liked to say in ’92, you can run on hope or you can run on fear. For the Democrats in ’94, fear is their best hope. They are trying to scare moderate Republicans into thinking their party is about to be theocratized. And they are trying to scare socially conservative (Reagan) Democrats who came back to the party in ’92 but are now thoroughly disillusioned with Clinton from defecting yet again to the opposition.
So Fazio declares that the “fire-breathing Christian radical right” is about to take over the Republican Party. Democrats talk darkly about the religious taking control of various Republican state apparatuses (and giving Oliver North the Virginia senatorial nomination) as if little green men-or white-sheeted bigots-had infiltrated the workings of American democracy.
It is a strategy born of desperation, and shows it. In a country that is both overwhelmingly Christian and the most religious in the Western world, running a campaign against religious Christians makes little sense. Nor is it very believable that the 15 million to 40 million evangelicals are robotic foot soldiers of Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell.
They are, instead, members of a diverse community sharing a simple if nostalgic agenda: returning America to the cultural condition and social values of the immediate postwar era. For them that means two-parent families, schools with authority, limited government, a culture not yet drenched in sex and violence.
True, parts of their agenda are not popular, particularly their opposition to abortion. But in the end they have supported Republican candidates who recognize political reality, like pro-choice Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, belying the notion that they are the Shiites of American politics, bent on martyrdom.
Moreover, the rest of their agenda-government policies that encourage intact families, the teaching of virtue, the encouragement of responsibility, and the punishment of criminality-is overwhelmingly popular. And so what if this particular community came to this political agenda out of deep-seated religious belief? Today Democrats denounce the religious right for its theologically rooted politics. Yesterday, Democrats extolled the religious left for its civil rights, anti-war and anti-nuclear politics, also theologically rooted.
More Top Picks Best Snake Boots For Men
The idea that there is something illegitimate about politics infused with religious imagery and motivation is not just hypocritical but profoundly ahistorical. One need not go back to Lincoln’s deeply religious Second Inaugural for evidence. Consider what in September 1952 was seen as an unremarkable event: a speech at the inauguration of a new translation of the Bible given by the. . .secretary of state.
“Who are these people, these Americans?” asked Dean Acheson. “They are a people who. . .hold sacred the Word of God. . . . And the source and record of the spiritual purpose of this community of men is the Holy Writ-the Book which brings us together this evening.” It was considered perfectly proper for Harry Truman’s secretary of state to utter these words. Let some prominent Republican utter them today and the Fazios of the land would be on CNN proclaiming the advent of Khomeiniism.
But anti-religious bias is not just a political phenomenon. It is a social one. Its undertone is the contempt of an educated secular class for the great unwashed believers of the hinterland. This reaction, notes social critic Michael Horowitz, recalls the horror of the New England elites when Jackson and his Western frontiersmen took over the White House in 1824.
Irving Kristol has likened the politicization of the religious right to the entry into politics of another out-group, the turn-of-the-century immigrants. Democrats then had the vision to welcome rather than disdain the newcomer. For decades thereafter they reaped the reward. This time, it seems, they would rather indulge their snobbery.