Amy Sullivan Redux

by tristero

Amy Sullivan responded, and graciously, to my open letter to her. Here are some excerpts, posted with her permission (spelling hers):

… It is good and right to criticize wacked-out crazy conservative religious beliefs. Yes, it is. If you follow *all* of my writing–not just the stuff that gets people hopped up–I do in fact critize all of those guys. Often. But you don’t say,”Boy, I hate that George Bush because he talks about Jesus all the time.” Or, “Man, the whole idea of faith-based initiatives is just religious crap.” Or, “We have a theocracy because Bush went into Iraq and that’s what the apocolyptic crazy Christian nuts want him to do.”

You say, “Bush can talk about Jesus all he wants, but he can’t base his policies on religion and he has to explain why he’s bringing religion into political debate.” And, “The faith-based initiative is a political sham; Bush hasn’t put any money into it because he doesn’t actually want to help poor people.” And, “Bush was wrong to go into Iraq, and those apocolyptic people are crazy, but those are two separate things.”

It may sound like I’m splitting hairs, but I’m not. If you don’t delineate, it’s easy for people to dismiss you because it’s sounds like you’re being reflexively anti-religion. And it makes it harder for you to have any credibility when you do go after them for trying to recruit churches to do GOP campaign work or for giving Dobson a say in picking justices or for wrapping themselves in the Christian flag without living up to any of the social gospel principles in the Bible.

In the sentence directly after the one you quoted, I went on to say that it’s perfectly appropriate to criticize them and I think that should happen. But I think people need to recognize that everything we say and do is scrutinized for evidence of religious hostility. That’s reality. So be smart about it. Give thoughtful religious moderates a reason to say, “Yeah, they’re right. These guys are a bunch of hypocrites. I belong over there instead.” Not, “Boy, those guys seem to hate people like me.” Because they’re NOT all fundamentalists.

Her point is clear and it’s one I, too, have made: focus your rhetoric. She’s right about that general point. There are just a few problems with her own rhetoric.

First, aside from a few village atheists with absolutely zero political power, like a few bloggers and commenters, no one has said any of the things she deplores. So I have to ask directly: Amy, who exactly among the important Democrats or commenters has made these kinds of intemperate comments? Where has, to use your earlier examples, Kevin Phillips or Bill Moyers talked that way?

Secondly, it is not the religious moderates in either party that provoke criticism. It is the genuine apocalyptic loons in the Republican party that have all of us, including Amy herself, alarmed. The serious problem, which Amy finesses, is that these people are in positions of immense power. In fact, the must-read article Amy references makes this abundantly clear. Brownback was appointed by Frist, himself a radical christianist as his remarks on AIDS, abortion, and Schiavo make abundantly clear. Brownback was influenced by Charles Colson, prays with Ed Meese. The man who mentored Pat Robertson has the power to send an envoy to the president of the United States to remind him to be more christianist.

Furthermore, the article describes what can only be characterized as a very serious and very secretive 25 year plus attempt to overthrow the Constitution of the United States and replace it with a theocracy, a conspiracy between Catholic and Protestant christianists (a “co-belligerency”) which, if they were, say communists and socialists, could only be described as treason.

Amy thinks there is no theocracy in the US and that Bush doesn’t want one. She’s right and she’s wrong, respectively. There is still religious toleration, but over the course of his career Bush has let slip several comments, about Jews for instance, that reveal his desire. The seriousness of what is going seems to escape her. Amy apparently misunderstands what is meant by the phrase “religious freedom” (as may Sharlet himself) when used by Brownback and his ugly ilk. She tends to think that this means that genuine Christians feel oppressed by a secularist society that is arrayed against them. Not so. “Religious freedom” is a term Rushdoony uses in “The Roots of Reconstruction” as an explict synonym for a christianist theocracy.*

No one has a problem with Colin Powell’s expression of religious beliefs. Or Christie Whitman’s. Or Chuck Hagel’s. And so on. Unfortunately, they are not at the very top of the Republican Party and the people who *are* are theocrats (political) as well as fanatics (religious). Yes, indeed, we need to hone our rhetoric. But not for a moment must we forget who these people are. Nor can we minimize their extremism. That is a serious mistake, and that is the mistake Amy makes when she criticizes “the left” for allegedly going after religious people when, in fact, that simply is not the case in the mainstream discourse.

[*Update: I am not, for a moment, suggesting that Bush subcribes to Dominionism or Christian Reconstruction. What I am asserting, and hope to demonstrate in some future posts, is that Reconstructionist objectives and language pervades the discourse of the radical right christianists, that Reconstructionist influence is direct via extensive associations with other sects and cults, such as Robertson’s and Dobson’s and that major effort is being expended to minimize these associations and to hide them from wider scrutiny. Bush desires a theocracy, it is true, but he is neither intellectually, morally, or emotionally equipped to understand or advocate pure Reconstructionist thought. He does, however, share many of the same obsessions and use many of the same tactics.]