American Theocracy
Title: American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century.
Author: Kevin Phillips
Publisher: Viking Penguin, 2006
Pages: 462 pages
Cost: $26.95 (Hardcover)
Kevin Phillips believes the GOP is the first religious party in United States history. A former Republican strategist, Phillips argues that “a political coalition that panders to biblical inerrancy” has taken over the White House and that President Bush is the nation’s “preacher-in-chief.”
He thinks “theological correctness stands to be a Republican Achilles’ heal,” forcing the party to lean too far to the Right.
Oil politics (“Western fuelishness”), preachers (“an American Disenlightenment”), and debt (“overconsumption”) occupy the author’s focus, but he spends most of his time on what he calls radical religion. He contends Bush and the Republican Party have substituted faith for science and a national strategy.
Recalling his well-known 1969 book, The Emerging Republican Majority, he says the party is now in danger of becoming the “Emerging Republican Theocracy.” He blames the governing Republican coalition for America’s declining energy base and unsustainable credit bubble.
Phillips accuses Bush and Republicans of developing policies based upon “the application of hard-line, preformed doctrine rather than the results of evidence seeking.” In Phillips’ view, Republican “TC” is affecting policy on global AIDS, Middle East geopolitics, sex, birth, health, death, and family issues, and church and state.
While this book raises useful questions about the West’s oil vulnerability and its penchant for “borrowed prosperity,” it’s mostly about the author’s antipathy for both President Bush and “dubious” biblical beliefs.
Phillips’ assumption that all religious conservatives deny science and modern knowledge, see Armageddon prophecy in foreign affairs, or always promote hawkishness in war is at best a characterization. His contention that theology has never before been discussed in national politics is revision history, and his description of 9/11 as “a fundamentalist moment” is particularly egregious.
Somehow, in Phillips’ World, all problems can eventually be traced to disaffected religious conservatives working through Republicans controlling Congress and the White House. Partly amazing and partly amusing is Phillips’ naïve assertion that religious conservatives only listen to one another, “creating umbrellas against the effects of secular communications (wherein) the viewpoints of so-called sophisticates have little access to the minds of the faithful.”
Somehow the author missed the fact that the Democratic Party is not without influence. Somehow he overlooks the fact that Americans live in a media saturated age in which virtually no one lives in information isolation. Somehow he forgets that American politics and religion have historically maintained a sometimes uneasy but always potent relationship. Somehow he doesn’t understand that its culture that’s morally changed—dramatically—not religious conservatives.
Phillips is worried about petro-politics and ballooning debt. So are most Americans. But are these problems really the exclusive fault of the “Left Behind” electorate?
Phillips is on a rant. He does not like the Bush family, religious conservatives—especially Evangelicals—“backwater” biblical beliefs, and religious influence in politics. He doesn’t like much of anything that’s happened since the 2000 election.
Sometimes books capture the spirit of an age in eloquent and enlightening prose. Sometimes books simply communicate the author’s biases. This book is the latter.
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This book review was published as “Bias Taints ‘American Theocracy’,” The Grand Rapids Press, (May 28, 2006), p. J21.
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