Reasonable Mouth-Foamer Hysterical at Coming "Theocracy"

BELLACIAO has the story

Here's a sampling of Kevin Phillips rending-of-garments:

As early as 1988, Ohio academician John Green, a specialist in religious political behavior, had commented on how the growing correlation between frequent church attendance and Republican presidential voting was starting to raise a US parallel to the religious parties of Europe, most notably the Christian Democrats in Germany and Italy. By 2000-04, this correlation was much stronger, and political journalists began to speak of the "religious gap" that was replacing the "gender gap." The less discussed but even more significant aspect of this upheaval lay in a second set of polls that showed the increasingly theocratic inclinations of the Republican electorate (see chart).

These sentiments did not spring from nowhere. A majority of Americans take the Bible literally in many dimensions, including subjects ranging from the creation and Noah’s Ark to the Book of Revelation. Within the ranks of Republican voters, the ratios are lopsided. For example, in 1999 a national poll by Newsweek revealed that 40 percent of American Christians believed in Armageddon and virtually as many thought the Antichrist was already alive. Because such believers were most numerous in the Republican electorate, I would calculate that roughly 55 percent of Bush 2004 voters believed in Armageddon--and it could be higher.

Such voters are especially prone to theocratic views, and foreign policy is by no means immune. In 2004 a survey by the Pew Center found that 55 percent of white evangelical Protestants consider "following religious principles" to be a top priority for foreign policy. Only a quarter of Catholics and mainline Protestants agreed, but given the makeup of the Bush coalition, I would guess that about half its voters would favor that position. This explains both why so many of Bush’s core supporters cheered the first-stage US involvement in Iraq--and why Bush bungled things in the Holy Land so badly.

Here's a hint, my fine, Reasonable friends: The theocracy you should fear already exists. It's prepared Alliances with other pariahs. It's mobilized it's terrorist proxies throughout the world. It may be in possession of P-2 centrifuges. It's government will pursue an unlimited nuclear program--for peaceful purposes of course. Of course!

This theocracy is the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Perhaps Mr. Phillips and his ilk believe that they'll have more libertine-liscense and redistribution-of-income policies under Sharia law.

Perhaps they should ask how the woman fare.

Perhaps they should ask how the abortionists fare.

Perhaps they should ask how active homosexuals fare.

After all, the lynchpin of Reasonable people like Mr. Phillips appears to be the concerns of these groups. Especially the Moloch-worshippers and the pursuers of the One Thing that Matters (1.0-2.0).

And they know, of course, that those Foolish Christians would never allow that in a Christian theocracy. So, of course, those Fools want to overthrow the American Republic and replace it with the new Geneva.

The obsession that the Reasonable have with Christians participating in the public square blinds them. Their hysteria blinds them to the totalitarian nihilists that gather at our door. Their wailing obscures the pounding drums of war that the blood-lusters of the Mullacracy bring to our border. Their mouth-foaming and gnashing of teeth distracts us all from the approaching confrontation.

If we're not united when it begins, we will Fall. While the Gates of Hell will not prevail against the Church that Christ built, the machinations of Islamofascist Iran could very well endure against a half-hearted and divided American resistance.

What will become of our Reasonable masters' precious agenda then?

Our enemy laughs. We Fools must join our voices together and laugh louder.

And could somebody please break out the broom already? Mr. Phillips has saturated the floor!

Update: Alexandra of All Things Beautiful comments:

You might want to check out my post Do You Fear Christian Theocracy In America, which was essentially written by my friend Patrick O'Hannigan...

Excellent suggestion!

Here's a sample: Were America to renounce secular mores in favor of some kind of constitutional theocracy, we Christians would have more work to do than linking hands to sing “what a friend we have in Jesus.” And a sizable number of us would warn anyone who cared to listen about the arrogance of trying to build the kingdom of heaven on earth. In other words, if hippies gave therapy a jump start by growing old enough to sell out to “the Man” and feel guilty about it, wait’ll you see what happens when people who belong to Christ realize that Uncle Sam demands more of their time.[...]

Is it any wonder that “godly government” ranks as one of those areas where, as Robert Browning famously put it, “a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” All that said, it’s fun to speculate about what an American Christian theocracy might act like, in the extremely unlikely event that it ever came to pass.

My guesses:

* Supreme Court jurisprudence takes the hit that everyone saw coming when Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton are overturned. Despite the wailing that ensues in militantly pro-abortion organizations, however, long-deserved comeuppance for those decisions does not make abortion illegal. Indeed, a theocratic government minding its Constitutional manners simply removes federal support for abortion and returns the question to the states. This would be a good thing and a wrong righted, because state legislators had their collective pockets picked by a thieving majority of Supreme Court justices back in 1973.
* A Christian theocracy would presumably put the kibosh on any talk of “gay marriage” being a Constitutional right under the “equal protection” clause, basing its argument on the nature of marriage, and an originalist interpretation of the First Amendment’s “establishment” clause that has ACLU lawyers investing in over-the-counter remedies for teeth grinding.
* Death penalty cases would be more likely to be overturned on appeal than they currently are, even though Christians come down on both sides of the death penalty issue.
* Grants awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts and similar federal bodies would receive more scrutiny than they do now.
* Teachers’ union objections to vouchers for public schools would meet greater resistance from a newly-courageous, albeit only marginally less craven, U.S. Senate.[...]

Beyond those issues, it’s tough to guess what an American Christian theocracy might do in terms of federal policy. One Jewish friend raised the Catholic objection to artificial contraception, but that’s not a view held by all Christian denominations, so even a theocratic government is unlikely to pursue litigation against manufacturers of contraceptive pills. A smart Christian theocracy would likewise steer clear of mandating the study of Intelligent Design alongside neo-Darwinian macro-evolution, if only because ID advocates rightly point out that theirs is an argument from observation rather than from Christian dogma. No Christian theocracy in America would risk a return to Prohibition, because too many Christians drink. For every storefront church serving grape juice to the faithful on occasional Sundays, there’s a Catholic parish only too happy to point out that Jesus’ first public miracle was changing water into wine (some exegetes claim it was enough wine to keep the whole village of Cana in its cups for three days).[...]

What’s ironic about this whole thought experiment is that it’s occasioned by the fears of people who probably look at life through the secular humanist lens that so many progressives claim as their own, mouthing platitudes about religious “superstition” while forgetting that everything from Soviet gulags to Cambodian killing fields to Nazi death camps was justified in the name of secular humanism.

(snip)

But that doesn’t mean we Christians are working for or toward a theocracy. Any such government would harm the church more than it helped her. Again comes the under-remarked libertarian strain in Christianity—that cracked reflection of freedom in Christ—to point excitedly to the chasm between God and government, even in self-consciously godly government. As a gospel song performed by Allison Krauss and Union Station puts it, “I’d rather have Jesus than silver or gold; I’d rather have Jesus than riches untold.”

People who fear Christianity don’t seem to understand that. Most realize that government doesn’t need divine sanction to go around smiting people. What they forget—sometimes with good reason—is that even suspect formulations like “Mere Christianity” serve to check the smiting impulse, not least because Christian faith is based on a Savior who told Peter to stop his desperate swordplay in the Garden of Gethsemane (Mt 26:52), and nicknamed an impetuous pair of apostles “sons of thunder” when they wanted to call a first-century air strike down on a recalcitrant Samaritan town (Lk 9:51-56).