Apocalypse and Reason

I happened to see on CSPAN the other day, where President Bush was asked to confirm his belief in the impending return of Christ. From the CNN transcript:

QUESTION: Thank you for coming to Cleveland, Mr. President, and to the City Club.

My question is that author and former Nixon administration official Kevin Phillips in his latest book, "American Theocracy," discusses what has been called radical Christianity and its growing involvement into government and politics. He makes the point that members of your administration have reached out to prophetic Christians who see the war in Iraq and the rise of terrorism as signs of the Apocalypse.

QUESTION: Do you believe this, that the war in Iraq and the rise of terrorism are signs of the Apocalypse?

And if not, why not?

BUSH: Hmmm.

(LAUGHTER)

The answer is I haven't really thought of it that way.

(LAUGHTER)

Now, it seems to me that there are two answers to this question. Either you think the chaos in the Middle East is a sign of the Apocalypse, or you don't. If someone asked me that question, it would be easy to answer. If someone asked Pat Robertson that question, I assume it would be just as easy for him. How can somebody not know what they think about this?

The audience laughed nervously, it was the sound of embarrassment. Everybody knows that Bush claims that God speaks to him, claims to be born-again, and it would be rude, really, to question or challenge that. It's not right or wrong to be a born-again Christian, it's a choice you make. You don't argue with somebody about it, or criticize them for it in public. A simple "yes" would have cleared up a lot, and I doubt it would have actually counted against him in terms of votes or political support.

The strange thing is that he wouldn't answer the question.

The book that the audience member mentioned is not in the stores yet, as far as I know, but reviews are coming out, and it sounds like a fascinating thesis. Sidney Blumenthal writes about it in Salon. I'll give you a paragraph about the author first:

...[I]t is almost certain that his Cleveland Q&A was the first time Bush had heard of Phillips' new book. Phillips was the visionary strategist for the presidential campaign of Richard Nixon in 1968, foreseeing in its lineaments the making of political realignment. His 1969 book, "The Emerging Republican Majority," spelled out the shift of national power from the Northeast to the South and Southwest, which he was early to call the "Sun Belt." He grasped that the Southern Democrats in reaction to the civil rights revolution would become Southern Republicans. He also had a sensitive understanding of the resentments of urban ethnic Catholics against blacks on issues like crime, school integration and jobs. But he never imagined that evangelical religion would compound and transcend these animosities to transmute the coalition he helped fashion into something radically new that now horrifies him.

In "American Theocracy" Phillips describes Bush as the founder of "the first American religious party," in a country that has "never had a national religious party of any kind." The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 gave Bush the pretext for "seizing the fundamentalist moment." Rather than forging a new realignment, Bush won narrow victories by manipulation of a "critical religious geography" and hyping of issues such as gay marriage. This was a politics beyond mere resentment. Phillips writes, "New forces were being interwoven. These included the institutional rise of the religious right, the intensifying biblical focus on the Middle East, and the deepening of insistence on church-government collaboration within the GOP electorate." The rise of the religious right, according to Phillips, portends a potential "American disenlightenment," already apparent in Bush's hostility to science.

Ooh, I've got to say, I like that. "American disenlightenment." It has a nice sound to it, doesn't it? Partly because, to get any meaning from the term, you'd have to understand (ironically) what "enlightenment" was in the first place.

Even Bush's failures have become pretexts for advancing his transformation of the American government. On March 7, for example, he issued Executive Order 13397, establishing a Center for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives at the Department of Homeland Security. He has already created such centers in other federal departments. Exploiting his own disastrous emergency management in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Bush is funneling funds to churches on the Gulf Coast as though they can compensate for governmental breakdown. Last year, the White House deputy director for faith-based initiatives, David Kuo, resigned with a statement that "Republicans were indifferent to the poor" and that the White House had "minimal commitment" to "compassionate conservatism."

As Bush's melding of church and state accelerates, the faith-based turns into the reality-based. The theocratic impulse has always been about earthly power and has provoked intense and unexpected opposition. Within hours of its publication, "American Theocracy" skyrocketed to the No. 1 bestseller on Amazon. At the movie theaters, "V for Vendetta" -- a dystopian thriller in which an imaginary Britain is a metaphor for Bush's America, ruled by a totalitarian, faith-based regime, where gays are rounded up and the hero is a Guy Fawkes-like terrorist who blows up the Parliament -- is a surprise No. 1 box office hit. Bush has succeeded in getting American audiences to cheer for terrorism. In Bush we trust

These are indeed strange times for American history, and I think we need to be careful. It's like there's a battle between the forces of Good and Evil, and the forces of Evil have given themselves the name "Good."

Recently, I ended a post about the Kansas state school board's craziness with this comment:

Will the voters keep this school board? Is this kind of thing gaining or losing ground? Midterm elections later this year will give us some insights. I am very eager to see if we can get our country back on its feet.

As I wrote those words, I worried that they would seem histrionic, but I am seeing now that many, many Americans are worrying about this same thing, and at the same time many are introspecting, analyzing their own anger and fear.

There's a blog in Kansas that's kind of like ours, only focused on the subject of evolution instead of sex-ed. Red State Rabble keeps track of the dynamics of the debate on that subject, focusing on the unique things that are happening in Kansas, but keeping up on related developments all around the country. He has a recent post there that explores this topic in just the way I am thinking of it.

It's a longish, thoughtful piece, and I encourage you to read it. Near the end, he ponders this question:

Opinion on the book [American Theocracy] ranges from the pessimistic view expressed by Michelle Goldberg, who writes that the book provides "a historical framework to think about the looming, ambient sense of crisis and breakdown that seems to pervade everything these days. Things in America certainly seem very bad to me, but it can be hard to grapple with the extent of our peril without falling into the secular version of Left Behind apocalypticism."

At the other end of the spectrum, Kevin Drum says that he can't make up his mind "whether Kevin Phillips was a visionary with an important wakeup call or a once-brilliant analyst who had let Bush hatred turn him into an obsessive crank."

Red State Rabble must admit that these are the very questions that have preoccupied us over the past year as we followed the controversy over science education. At various times, and in various moods, we've succumbed to each of these views in turn.

It is difficult to disentangle motives, that's the problem with our perspective. We don't have a book or authority telling us what we believe, we have to make it up as we go along. Are we fighting this fight for the right reasons? I'll tell you, the other side doesn't ask itself that.

He started this post with some quotes from Fritz Stern, a scholar and refugee from Nazi Germany, and he ends by going back to that:

Can a minority that believes that Armageddon is just around the corner really take over the largest, most powerful democracy in the world? If the religious right is a danger, what must be done to prevent them from seizing the reins of government. If moderates unite and take action, can we prevent the worst from happening, or is it already too late?

We can't help but think the decisions the American people make in the coming months will be crucial. Our nation has worked diligently to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of terrorists and rogue nations. Will we now, out of lethargy, turn the world's largest nuclear arsenal over to people who believe that the sight mushroom clouds blooming in the atmosphere above the world's cities is a welcome harbinger of the coming rapture?

Many in Fritz Stern's generation spent their lives pondering how the Nazi horror could have been allowed to happen. Will ours end up doing the same?

I think a lot of us are asking ourselves these same questions now. It's that lethargy thing you gotta watch out for.