As the Right fights…
After dominating the country’s politics for years, the conservatives’ grip on power was quickly fading. The Chief Executive was already enormously unpopular when a financial tsunami struck. Over a million homeowners ended up in foreclosure. Unemployment soared. To avert economic disaster, the government poured billions into a bailout of the financial sector. But it was too late. In the next election, voters expressed their lost confidence in conservative leadership, and the liberals swept to power in a landslide victory.
You’d be forgiven for thinking I’m talking about the past two months in the US. In fact, I’m describing the UK in the 1990s. The British Conservative Party held the reins for 18 years, then was trounced by the liberal Labour Party—at which point the Conservatives went through a “struggle for the soul of the Party” — precisely what’s now happening in the U.S.
They eventually split into three factions: the centrist “One Nation” Conservatives, Free Market Conservatives, and The Cornerstone Group, social conservatives whose motto “Faith, Flag and Family” says it all.
Because compromise is a longstanding element of British politics (and British life in general), the three elements remain under a single party identity, struggling for dominance of the platform. But infighting among the factions is credited in part with keeping the Conservatives out of power for over a decade.
Republicans in the US have a similarly mix of the sane, the selfish, and the sanctimonious, and it’s becoming ever clearer that these bedfellows are heading into a bloody civil war. Because compromise is seen as weakness in American culture (and religion), I don’t see it ending in a three-winged party. The big red tent can no longer hold Colin Powell, Pat Robertson, George Will and Sarah Palin. I think the GOP will split in half. And (in case you were wondering about relevance) this will open a completely new way of looking ideology in the US—including religion.
The new parties:
THE NEW REPUBLICAN PARTY (NRP)
The New Republicans are intelligent advocates of small government, limited social engineering, and fiscal conservatism. They are furious at having their party hijacked by the mindless lunatic fringe and their moralistic obsessions. The NRP will merge with Libertarians to revive Goldwater Republicanism.
THE CHRISTIAN AMERICA PARTY (CAP)
Populist, anti-intellectual, ultra-nationalist and über-religious, The CAP will finally have a party unfettered by compromises with the real world. Informed by American exceptionalism and fundamentalist Christianity, it will be in essence an American fascist party.
I use “fascist” here not as a cheap epithet but as a literal political descriptor. The historian Robert Paxton defines fascism as “a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”
Political theorist Roger Griffin adds that “The core mobilizing myth of fascism which conditions its ideology, propaganda, style of politics and actions is the vision of the nation’s imminent rebirth from decadence.” A perfect description of the Religious Right.
The Christian Americans will front a candidate for President in 2012 by the name of Sarah Palin.
Freed from the unwieldy social obsessions of the Religious Right, the New Republicans will have more in common with Democrats — not everything, but more — than with the Christian America Party. It would be in the interest of the Dems to work with the NRP to keep the CAP from exerting undue influence.
But if Democrats have become too blindly allergic to the word “Republican,” they may fail to recognize the transformation of the Republican brand, driving the NRP back into the arms of the Religious Right. Which would be bad.
And now the point.
This new fault line in American politics might help dissolve another strained coalition in American life: the big tent of religious faith. Progressive religious believers have long been uncomfortable with those on the wingnut fringe of their worldview but are often compelled to defend “faith” in general because they are under that same big tent. That has made bridge-building between the nonreligious and progressively religious difficult. And that’s a shame, because as I never tire of pointing out, liberal religionists have much more in common with secularists on a wide range of issues and attitudes than they do with fundamentalism.
As Bruce Bawer (author of Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity) has noted,
theological liberals of every denomination have found that they have more in common with one another than with the conservatives in their own denominations. Responding to the research of biblical scholars and the ”historical Jesus” movement, they have de-emphasized doctrine.
Meanwhile leaders of the religious right have preached that salvation depends on believing the correct dogma, even as they have succeeded in reducing the considerable doctrinal distinctions that once divided evangelicals, fundamentalists and charismatics.
As a result, American Protestantism is in the midst of a major shift. It is being split into two nearly antithetical religions, both calling themselves Christianity.
These two religions — the Church of Law, based in the South, and the Church of Love, based in the North — differ on almost every big theological point.
I would simply add that Bawer’s “Church of Love” also has much more in common with the nonreligious than with the “Church of Law.”
You can see this in my August post about the Belief-o-Matic Quiz. A secular humanist shows a 60-75 percent overlap with mainstream-to-liberal Christians, while an evangelical shows only a 20-40 percent overlap with mainstream-to-liberal Christians.
The coming fracture on the right can help to isolate and more clearly define the anti-intellectual, fundamentalist side of religious expression in the US. I think that now is the time for the nonreligious to get over our allergy to the word “religion”—to begin opening dialogues and building bridges of common interest and common values with the sizeable non-insane segment of religious believers in this country.
[UPDATE: AHA! I have apparently convinced Christine Todd Whitman.]
[UPDATE: And now Kathleen Parker!]