Meet the Christianists

I hate to say it, but I was right. Last week my prediction for the presidential election was a 51% - 47% Bush victory in the popular vote, and a 276-262 victory in the electoral college. Normally I would be crowing about such a remarkably close prognostication. But not today.

Make no mistake about it, Tuesday Nov. 2, 2004 was the day that the Christian Conservatives took over America.

Thanks it part to the brilliant wedge-issue gay marriage ballot initiative strategy not only did George Bush win Ohio (where 25% of voters identified themselves as born again in exit polls) but religious conservative Senators won in 5 states where self identified evangelicals ranged from 31 to 36% of the electorate. In aggregate national election polls the issue of “moral values” trumped all other issues, including terrorism and the war in Iraq. Folks, Pat Buchanan wasn't kidding all those years ago when he said a culture war was on, a jihad by our own version of the Arab world's radical Islamists. And on Tuesday the forces of Christian sharia flat out won. In fact, I think it's fair to call this group the Christianists.

The Christianist agenda is, and always has been, to make the United States a Christian nation by encoding into law and regulation not just Christian, but denominational evangelical values. It is an agenda that is unconstitutionl and unamerican no matter what they argue. The United States was not founded as a Christian nation; the United States was not founded under the principle that it is ordained by God to rule at home and lead abroad. These ideas were explicitly rejected by the drafters of the Constitution. Every nation before the founding of the United States claimed a divine provenance for it's earthly rule—from the divine right of kings to America's own, earlier Articles of Federation which invoked “the Great Governor of the World” as providing political legitimacy. But in drafting the Constitution the framers rejected any language suggesting a divine investiture of power, choosing instead to invest all power in a secular source: “We, the People.” The founding of the United States was explicitly a rejection of the divine as a source of political legitimacy. The framers went further passing the First Amendment's establishment and free exercise clauses intended to create a complete separation of all things religious from all things civic. These are core American principles and have been since the founding of the nation. For more than 200 years they have been defining parts of who we are as a people.

But these principles are no longer held and will not be protected by the majority of members of the federal government. Throughout his first term the President has used the language of evangelical triumphalism to invest his policy choices with the weight of divine perfection. And the Christianists have already begun funneling Federal money into Christian institutions through the White House Office of Faith-based Initiatives (an Orwellian mouthful) and will continue over the next two years with policies that will offer tax benefits to parents who send their children to Christian madrasas. James Madison must be rolling over in his grave.

Despite rhetoric to the contrary over the last two days, the White House and the Congress will not play to the middle or relent when it comes to pushing the Christianist agenda including packing the judiciary, especially the Supreme Court, with judges who will help undermine these core principles by breaking down the walls erected by Madison, Jefferson, and Washington. There was no evidence in the President's first time that he intended to do anything but push the evangelical agenda, and then he had no mandate and a less significant lead in Congress. There is no reason to expect anything different now.

The group of voters that I hold most culpable for allowing the rise of the Christianists are not the Democrats, who after eight years of running as Republicans-lite seem to have awakened to the failure of that tact, but to the fiscal conservatives and moderate Republicans who profess discomfort or even downright distaste for the Christianists but who have sold out their party and the nation's historic founding principles for the sake of electoral gains. Shame on you, now you have the government you deserve.

Next: What the Democrats Should Do About it

Comments

[Phil]

"Christianist" is a remarkably useful phrase. I have thought of them as an American Taliban, but that is both unclear and too narrow. "Christianist" makes the Islamist parallel better and points out what needs to be kept in mind--that fundamentalism, be it Islamic or Christian (of Hindu or Jewish for that matter), is the real enemy of freedom. We don't need to go to Iraq to fight it!

[chervokas]

Phil, thanks. Spread the term around. Also useful I think is the phrase "political Christianity," which is both accurate and illustrative of the church/state contradiction and similarly draws the parallel with political Islam. (Although to me "political Islam" is a less useful phrase because from the days of the prophet Islam was as much a political movement as a religious one.)