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American theocracy near, warns former Republican
BY: MARILYN H. KARFELD, Senior Staff Reporter
This fall, the nation will closely watch Ohio to see how large a role evangelical Christianity will play in the 2006 elections, said former Republican strategist Kevin Phillips, who now calls himself an independent.
All eyes will be on the gubernatorial race between Republican Ken Blackwell, Ohio secretary of state and darling of “the End Times constituency,” and Ted Strickland, Democratic congressman and ordained minister from a conservative rural part of the state.
Speaking recently at The City Club, Phillips said Ohio’s election this November would be a litmus test for the 2008 presidential and congressional elections. It will demonstrate whether or not “religion and state can come together” and the “religious right can attempt to dominate and transform US policy.”
Adding to Ohio’s primacy as the nation’s most important political barometer is the Ohio Restoration Project (ORP), Phillips said. This organization was founded by a Columbus-area pastor to “institutionalize the mobilization of evangelical voters,” who helped Bush carry Ohio in the 2004 presidential election, he said.
Furthermore, the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s biggest Protestant denomination with 20 million adherents, has announced it will target Cleveland for conversions in 2006-07.
The religious right’s politicking on behalf of Blackwell has been so blatant it led 31 Ohio clergy to file a complaint with the IRS asking for an investigation of the ORP, Phillips noted. Blackwell, “an extremely capable, charismatic African American” who opposes all abortions, even to save the life of the mother, is working closely with the national religious right to sew up Ohio in 2008, Phillips added.
The race between Strickland and Blackwell will be extremely tight, Phillips said. While Strickland, a Methodist minister, can expect to receive votes from some Republican women and mainline Protestants, Phillips predicted that Blackwell will almost certainly make major inroads among black Democrats. The Southern Baptists’ prosyletizing will also help him.
Phillips’s latest book, American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century, inspired a question at President Bush’s recent City Club speech that received national attention. City Club trustee Jan Roller asked Bush if he viewed the rise in terrorism and the war in Iraq as a sign of the Apocalypse.
The question, Roller said in her introduction of Phillips, was designed to elicit Bush’s attitude toward the separation of church and state. It was a question that the president avoided answering.
Phillips, a political and economic commentator and former Nixon strategist who wrote The Emerging Republican Majority nearly 40 years ago, said the confluence of several factors has resulted in religion’s importance in today’s politics. These include the growth of the church-going South in the late 20th century Republican Party, the Middle East’s move to the center of world affairs, and the rise of radical Christianity and the religious right as a force in the GOP.
Quoting John Green, politics professor at the University of Akron, Phillips said, “The GOP is fast becoming the first religious party in US history.”
The creation of Israel has played a crucial role in the GOP’s religiosity, he said, because evangelicals have substituted Islam for the Soviet Union. Muslims have become the “modern-day equivalent of the Evil Empire,” he said.
A 1999 Newsweek poll indicated that 45% of Christians (and 70% of evangelicals) believe in the End Times or biblical Apocalypse, when war and chaos will lead to the end of the world. This period precedes the Second Coming of the Messiah. Many fundamentalist Christians think the return of the Jews to all of biblical Palestine is necessary before the Second Coming can occur.
Bush, who became a born-again Christian in 1986 and his father’s liaison to the religious right in 1988, turned his rhetoric heavily religious after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Phillips said. Then came the invasion of Iraq.
While Phillips estimated that oil was nearly half the White House’s motivation to invade Iraq, religion may also have been a factor. The war in Iraq would then be considered “an essential conflagration on the road to redemption . . . Does Bush believe in End Times?” Phillips speculated. “I wouldn’t be surprised.”
Even more pertinent is whether or not Bush and his supporters see the US as a theocracy or one in the making. A theocracy is a state governed by divine guidance or a political regime with leaders who claim they speak for God.
Phillips cited a number of examples where Bush has said he is doing the work of God. After 9/11, the Washington Post surveyed leaders of the religious right, who agreed that God put Bush in office, Phillips said.
In a 2004 Lancaster, Penn., speech reported in the local newspaper, the Lancaster New Era, Bush said to a group of Amish, “I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn’t do my job.”
In a 2005 BBC documentary, Palestinian leaders, including President Mahmoud Abbas, said Bush told them, “I’m driven with a mission from God ... (God said), ‘George, go fight in Afghanistan. George, go fight in Iraq. George, get the Palestinians their state.’” The White House denies the conversation ever took place, Phillips noted.
Evangelicals, Pentecostals and fundamentalists are a key Bush constituency and comprise one-third of the US population and perhaps half the Republican electorate, Phillips pointed out. In 2004, the Pew Center found 55% of white evangelical Protestants said following religious principles is a top priority for US foreign policy.
“This makes religion and Bible a major consideration to be addressed in implementing and explaining foreign policy,” he said.
Phillips, who belongs to a Congregationalist church in Connecticut and describes himself as a born-and-bred Republican, lamented the GOP’s takeover by right-wing conservative Christians.
Moderates and Republicans who want fiscal conservatism but not rightwing religion are desperately looking for mainstream Democratic candidates “with guts” to support, said Phillips, who reluctantly voted for John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election.
Noting that his City Club audience was clearly a Democratic one, Phillips said the trouble with Democrats is “they don’t go for the jugular, they go for the capillaries.” Fixating on the details and ignoring the big picture, Democrats “don’t understand the battlefield.”
Last month, We Believe Cleveland, a group of liberal and moderate clergy representing Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Muslims and Sikhs, launched a sister movement to one in Columbus to counteract the religious right. But Phillips suggested that a much more forceful approach is needed.
Hope Adelstein, who attended Phillips’s talk, praised his speech as very informative and powerful. “Democrats have to push the ‘on’ button. If you don’t speak out, you can’t beat these conservatives who have a mantra and a mind of their own. And the country is going down the drain.”
The downfall of many former economic powers — from the Roman Empire to Britain in the early 20th century — coincided with the rise of a state religion, Phillips said, that was “too intolerant, too evangelical, too morally imperial and too prone to team up with state power, ambition and alas, misjudgment.”
mkarfeld@cjn.org
All eyes will be on the gubernatorial race between Republican Ken Blackwell, Ohio secretary of state and darling of “the End Times constituency,” and Ted Strickland, Democratic congressman and ordained minister from a conservative rural part of the state.
Speaking recently at The City Club, Phillips said Ohio’s election this November would be a litmus test for the 2008 presidential and congressional elections. It will demonstrate whether or not “religion and state can come together” and the “religious right can attempt to dominate and transform US policy.”
Adding to Ohio’s primacy as the nation’s most important political barometer is the Ohio Restoration Project (ORP), Phillips said. This organization was founded by a Columbus-area pastor to “institutionalize the mobilization of evangelical voters,” who helped Bush carry Ohio in the 2004 presidential election, he said.
Furthermore, the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s biggest Protestant denomination with 20 million adherents, has announced it will target Cleveland for conversions in 2006-07.
The religious right’s politicking on behalf of Blackwell has been so blatant it led 31 Ohio clergy to file a complaint with the IRS asking for an investigation of the ORP, Phillips noted. Blackwell, “an extremely capable, charismatic African American” who opposes all abortions, even to save the life of the mother, is working closely with the national religious right to sew up Ohio in 2008, Phillips added.
The race between Strickland and Blackwell will be extremely tight, Phillips said. While Strickland, a Methodist minister, can expect to receive votes from some Republican women and mainline Protestants, Phillips predicted that Blackwell will almost certainly make major inroads among black Democrats. The Southern Baptists’ prosyletizing will also help him.
Phillips’s latest book, American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century, inspired a question at President Bush’s recent City Club speech that received national attention. City Club trustee Jan Roller asked Bush if he viewed the rise in terrorism and the war in Iraq as a sign of the Apocalypse.
The question, Roller said in her introduction of Phillips, was designed to elicit Bush’s attitude toward the separation of church and state. It was a question that the president avoided answering.
Phillips, a political and economic commentator and former Nixon strategist who wrote The Emerging Republican Majority nearly 40 years ago, said the confluence of several factors has resulted in religion’s importance in today’s politics. These include the growth of the church-going South in the late 20th century Republican Party, the Middle East’s move to the center of world affairs, and the rise of radical Christianity and the religious right as a force in the GOP.
Quoting John Green, politics professor at the University of Akron, Phillips said, “The GOP is fast becoming the first religious party in US history.”
The creation of Israel has played a crucial role in the GOP’s religiosity, he said, because evangelicals have substituted Islam for the Soviet Union. Muslims have become the “modern-day equivalent of the Evil Empire,” he said.
A 1999 Newsweek poll indicated that 45% of Christians (and 70% of evangelicals) believe in the End Times or biblical Apocalypse, when war and chaos will lead to the end of the world. This period precedes the Second Coming of the Messiah. Many fundamentalist Christians think the return of the Jews to all of biblical Palestine is necessary before the Second Coming can occur.
Bush, who became a born-again Christian in 1986 and his father’s liaison to the religious right in 1988, turned his rhetoric heavily religious after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Phillips said. Then came the invasion of Iraq.
While Phillips estimated that oil was nearly half the White House’s motivation to invade Iraq, religion may also have been a factor. The war in Iraq would then be considered “an essential conflagration on the road to redemption . . . Does Bush believe in End Times?” Phillips speculated. “I wouldn’t be surprised.”
Even more pertinent is whether or not Bush and his supporters see the US as a theocracy or one in the making. A theocracy is a state governed by divine guidance or a political regime with leaders who claim they speak for God.
Phillips cited a number of examples where Bush has said he is doing the work of God. After 9/11, the Washington Post surveyed leaders of the religious right, who agreed that God put Bush in office, Phillips said.
In a 2004 Lancaster, Penn., speech reported in the local newspaper, the Lancaster New Era, Bush said to a group of Amish, “I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn’t do my job.”
In a 2005 BBC documentary, Palestinian leaders, including President Mahmoud Abbas, said Bush told them, “I’m driven with a mission from God ... (God said), ‘George, go fight in Afghanistan. George, go fight in Iraq. George, get the Palestinians their state.’” The White House denies the conversation ever took place, Phillips noted.
Evangelicals, Pentecostals and fundamentalists are a key Bush constituency and comprise one-third of the US population and perhaps half the Republican electorate, Phillips pointed out. In 2004, the Pew Center found 55% of white evangelical Protestants said following religious principles is a top priority for US foreign policy.
“This makes religion and Bible a major consideration to be addressed in implementing and explaining foreign policy,” he said.
Phillips, who belongs to a Congregationalist church in Connecticut and describes himself as a born-and-bred Republican, lamented the GOP’s takeover by right-wing conservative Christians.
Moderates and Republicans who want fiscal conservatism but not rightwing religion are desperately looking for mainstream Democratic candidates “with guts” to support, said Phillips, who reluctantly voted for John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election.
Noting that his City Club audience was clearly a Democratic one, Phillips said the trouble with Democrats is “they don’t go for the jugular, they go for the capillaries.” Fixating on the details and ignoring the big picture, Democrats “don’t understand the battlefield.”
Last month, We Believe Cleveland, a group of liberal and moderate clergy representing Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Muslims and Sikhs, launched a sister movement to one in Columbus to counteract the religious right. But Phillips suggested that a much more forceful approach is needed.
Hope Adelstein, who attended Phillips’s talk, praised his speech as very informative and powerful. “Democrats have to push the ‘on’ button. If you don’t speak out, you can’t beat these conservatives who have a mantra and a mind of their own. And the country is going down the drain.”
The downfall of many former economic powers — from the Roman Empire to Britain in the early 20th century — coincided with the rise of a state religion, Phillips said, that was “too intolerant, too evangelical, too morally imperial and too prone to team up with state power, ambition and alas, misjudgment.”
mkarfeld@cjn.org
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