Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

Chip Berlet today started the first in a series of posts about "coalitions" in American politics. Knowing Chip, this series should help us to think more strategically about how to reframe our thinking as well as the actual coalitions of the future. Coalitions are by definition, temporary. How long they last, and what the nature of the coalition is, changes over time. The New Deal Coalition ain't what it used to be. This piece briefly discusses the coalition that made the Bush administration possible.

Berlet starts out:

Today, many ideas, concepts, and frames of reference in modern American society are legacies of the history of Protestantism as it divided and morphed through Calvinism, revivalist evangelicalism, and fundamentalism.
Even people who see themselves as secular and not religious often unconsciously adopt many of these historic cultural legacies while thinking of their ideas as simply "common sense."

He quickly adds: "That what is common sense to one group, however, is foolish belief for another."  

How the major ideological tendencies in the U.S. negotiate their differences is the stuff of which the coalitions that determine the direction of the nation are made.

Cyncooper has a hairaising story of a "faith-based" federal grant that well, let her tell it:

Now, along with grant partner Baptist Health System Foundation in Knoxville, Tenn., CMDA [Christian Medical and Dental Association] received $309,000 from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for an "embryo adoption awareness grant." ...

The grant will support the National Embryo Donation Center:  

When couples go through fertility treatments, such as in vitro fertilization, there are usually an excess of fertilized eggs (embryos) that are cryopreserved - frozen and stored for later use.

It is estimated that 400,000 human embryos are currently in cryopreservation in the United States. When the genetic parents decide that their family is complete and embryos are still available, they are faced with a dilemma: donating their embryos to research, thawing them and letting them die, or donating them to a couple who is unable to conceive. Many believe that embryo donation and adoption is the most life-honoring solution to this difficult choice.

Jonathan Hutson discusses a recent essay by one of the key theorists of theocratic politics in the U.S. -- and shows a key point of departure between the overt advocates of Christian theocracy and those they see as compromised by their alliance with the GOP. North and other theocrats hate where the Christian Right has gone. A movement they were pivotal in helping to create, has gone corrupt in their view. This is an important read.

"The Christian Right wants a halfway house between democracy and theocracy," writes Gary North in "What Went Wrong with the Christian Right," an essay published in January 2006 on the Chalcedon web site. "It also wants a halfway house between theonomy and autonomy, revelation and rationalism, creationism and evolutionism. It wants equal time for Jesus, which means equal time for Satan."

North, a cofounder of Christian Reconstruction, is admitting that the full arrival of theocracy means, necessarily, the death of democracy. It is not possible for both to exist together, and he is willing to tolerate no halfway measures. North's view of a Christian Nation is not a democratic nation; his fundamental Christian country is fundamentally unAmerican.

In making clear that his vision of a Christian Nation is fundamentally unAmerican, North surfaces and shines a light on a powerful message frame. North's vision of a Christian Nation is a nation without democracy. And without democracy, our nation cannot enjoy freedom and liberty, cannot pass along America's history and heritage to our children's children.

Hutson concludes his analysis of North's essay this way:

North concludes that the Christian Right cannot continue to cooperate with humanists in the Republican Party:

"We see the outworking of two rival Christian covenants: two rival strategies. The Christian Reconstructionists want replacement, not capture, of tax-supported institutions. The Christian Right wants capture, but with shared power as the price -- shared power with Republican Party humanists who hate the idea of Christian civilization far more than they hate the Democrats. Then the Christian Right seems amazed when power is not shared.
"The Christian Right is terminally naive."

If the Republican Party is now a halfway house, then North is leading conservative Christians farther and farther from the dream of democracy, from religious freedom, from respect for different cultures and creeds -- farther, and inevitably away from, the America that we love, where we live, which we hope to pass along to future generations.

These are the kinds of things we read, write about and discuss every day at Talk to Action.