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Why Religious Right leaders won’t abandon Republicans

Corruption, torture, thievery, sexual improprieties, coverups, lies … if the GOP were a city, anyone taking a last look at it as they fled would turn into a pillar of salt. Maybe that’s why religionists such as Focus On The Family’s James Dobson refuse to turn their backs on the party despite the decidedly un-Christian behavior of its leaders and members: the temptation to take that last glance would be overwhelming. The guiding lights of what Dick Armey, Tom DeLay’s predecessor as House majority leader, called a “gang of thugs” might say that it’s a case of “love the sinner, hate the sin;” given the lack of tolerance the religious right offers sinners on the left side of the aisle, the more accurate answer appears to be that the Bush administration and the Republican Congress have given the religious right what they want: a fledgling theocracy.

Historian Garry Wills describes the near-total breakdown in the separation of church and state in a New York Review of Books essay entitled “A Country Ruled by Faith.” Along the way, he documents how the administration and Congress have colluded to hand large chunks of the government along with not inconsiderable sums of cash over to followers of Armey’s gang of thugs.

Wills says that “Bush promised his evangelical followers faith-based social services, which he called “compassionate conservatism.” He went beyond that to give them a faith-based war, faith-based law enforcement, faith-based education, faith-based medicine, and faith-based science.” Some of the resulting changes in behavior among government agencies gifted with religious right leadership became noisily public, as with the FDA’s steadfast faith-based refusal to approve the “morning after pill” for non-prescription sale and numerous instances of scientific data scrubbed from government reports and web sites; others, such as the replacement of a disaster relief specialist with an evangelical adoption agency head as the chief medical officer for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq — an act representative of the administration’s insistence on saddling the CPA with a cohort of ideologically and religiously correct staffers rather than experienced ones — didn’t.

When George Bush chooses people of a particular religious sect to administer programs according to the views of that sect, he’s imposing those views upon all of us. Government imposition of the religious views of a particular sect is called theocracy. We may not yet be an officially fundamentalist Christian state in name, but we are in governance. We may not have heresy laws on the books — although the almost universally applicable “enemy combatant” is a step in that direction — but any public official who speaks out against religionist subversion of the government is sure to face censure while those who advance the cause are rewarded. (Wills offers the example of General William “Satan’s Thumbprint” Boykin as an example of the latter.)

Dobson, Gary Bauer, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and others of their fellow travelers down the food chain are committed to the GOP because no matter how morally, ethically, physically and financially corrupt the party has become, it remains the only vehicle through which religionists can retain and gain further control control of government agencies positioned to advance an agenda that is not only anti-progressive but fundamentally anti-Enlightenment. And despite the Bush administration’s occasional public failures to toe the moralistic line, in private they’ve delivered, as Dick Cheney might say, big time.

Democratic moralists are fond of telling liberals that we have to be sensitive to evangelicals and religous folk in general. In isolation, that is — to borrow from Cheney again — a no brainer. The problem is that with very rare exceptions, liberals, many if not most of whom are religious themselves, don’t attack religion or practitioners thereof; they simply refrain from loud, public declarations of faith and they object to the attempts by religious right leaders to impose their vision upon the rest of us.

Part of the the fixation on making nice with the religious among us stems from vocabulary: when I use the word “evangelicals” in a negative sense, I’m talking specifically about those leaders and followers who seek to force a narrow, angry, aggressive and viciously punitive version of Christianity upon all Americans. Many evangelicals don’t subscribe to that version: they want to bring people to God, not force God upon people, and if you ask them to leave you alone they generally, if sometimes reluctantly, will. The way to their electoral hearts is not to engage in what many correctly identify as essentially coerced protestations of piety, but to identify issues where traditional religious and liberal positions coincide, of which there are a great many.

So what’s an appropriate term for the cynical, power-mad leaders of the religious right and the followers who embrace their ugly vision? “Christianist” is one suggestion floating around, in imitation of the “Islamist” epithet popularized by CNN’s Lou Dobbs, but just as “Islamist” does, it’s guaranteed to offend people to whom it isn’t meant to apply. I use the word “religionist,” which has the advantage of appearing in dictionaries, describes at least in part the characters of Dobson et al, and applies equally to every stripe of religious fanatic.

In an ideal world the question of what word to use in describing religious fanatics wouldn’t arise. In an ideal world everyone would be mature enough to respect the personal boundaries of others, to recognize that religion is a personal choice and to recall that every attempt to impose it upon other people or to prevent the free exercise of it ultimately comes to a horrific end.

But we don’t live in an ideal world: we live in a theocracy. Calling it something else and respecting the sensitivities of those who have orchestrated it is at best stupid, at least irrational and arguably insane.

Update: Armey is at it again.

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Hat tip to Digby on the Wills essay.

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