Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] [POLITICS][RELIGION] Clear and Present Dangers

[Stephen Montgomery-Smith <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

Hi Mike,

I read the article.  Here are my off the cuff responses.

Overall, it read just like the articles I used to read in the British 
newspaper, "The Guardian" that my parents subscribe to.  The writer of 
the article clearly writes to an audience who want to hear this stuff. 
Nevertheless, let me try to see through the hyperbolae and take his 
points as they come.

Mike Miller wrote:

................

> Although Phillips is scathingly critical of what he considers the 
> dangerous policies of the Bush administration, he does not spend much 
> time examining the ideas and behavior of the president and his advisers. 
> Instead, he identifies three broad and related trends -- none of them 
> new to the Bush years but all of them, he believes, exacerbated by this 
> administration's policies -- that together threaten the future of the 
> United States and the world. One is the role of oil in defining and, as 
> Phillips sees it, distorting American foreign and domestic policy.

I think that the importance of oil in the recent (i.e. last few years) 
Bush decisions in Iraq is way overstated.  In this part, I think that 
Phillips is completely wrong.  I'll say no more about this.

> The 
> second is the ominous intrusion of radical Christianity into politics 
> and government. 

There is some truth, and also some non-truth, in what he says.  I think 
that a strong Christian influence on government has potential to be a 
very good thing.  However, there is also a large branch of Christianity 
(in my opinion not representative of the true message) that has 
potential to be very damaging.  I think that an example from history is 
the role of Puritanism in the English Civil War - while Puritanism in of 
itself was a very productive theology, it seems to have been inforced in 
a somewhat legalistic and talibanish manner during Cronwell's rulership.

> And the third is the astonishing levels of debt -- 
> current and prospective -- that both the government and the American 
> people have been heedlessly accumulating.

I probably agree with Phillips more on this issue than any other - on 
the other hand I this is the issue I know least about, so maybe my 
viewpoint is based on ignorance.

> Phillips is especially passionate in his discussion of the second great 
> force that he sees shaping contemporary American life -- radical 
> Christianity and its growing intrusion into government and politics. The 
> political rise of evangelical Christian groups is hardly a secret to 
> most Americans after the 2004 election, but Phillips brings together an 
> enormous range of information from scholars and journalists and presents 
> a remarkably comprehensive and chilling picture of the goals and 
> achievements of the religious right.
>
> He points in particular to the Southern Baptist Convention, once a 
> scorned seceding minority of the American Baptist Church but now so 
> large that it dominates not just Baptism itself but American 
> Protestantism generally. The Southern Baptist Convention does not speak 
> with one voice, but almost all of its voices, Phillips argues, are to 
> one degree or another highly conservative. On the far right is a still 
> obscure but, Phillips says, rapidly growing group of "Christian 
> Reconstructionists" who believe in a "Taliban-like" reversal of women's 
> rights, who describe the separation of church and state as a "myth" and 
> who call openly for a theocratic government shaped by Christian 
> doctrine. 

I am not that familiar with "Southern Baptism."  But my sense is that 
modern American Christianity by no means is looking for a "Taliban-like" 
reversal of women's rights.  Indeed, I see the opposite, in that the 
Church is teaching men to respect women as people and not as objects.

With regard to seeing "seperation of church and state as a myth", I 
think that the writer puts this in a highly inflamitory manner.  I think 
that the high degree of seperation as advocated by say the ACLU is a myth.

> A much larger group of Protestants, perhaps as many as a third 
> of the population, claims to believe in the supposed biblical prophecies 
> of an imminent "rapture" -- the return of Jesus to the world and the 
> elevation of believers to heaven.

A large number of Protestants do believe this kind of stuff.  I don't 
think that Bush is one of them.  For example, his attempts to bring 
peace in the Middle East run completely contrary to modern "scofieldian" 
biblical interpretations.  Personally I see this as a fringe phenominum, 
but if it is not, then the way to change this is to deal with the people 
who believe it rather than the leaders.

(My personal opinion on this recent (i.e. last 100 years or so) way of 
interpreting the Bible is that I really have no idea.  For example, 
people during the reformation period thought that their time was the end 
times.  In any case, I would be loathe to fashion foreign policy around 
any desire to try to meet Biblical prophecy.)

> Prophetic Christians, Phillips writes, often shape their view of 
> politics and the world around signs that charlatan biblical scholars 
> have identified as predictors of the apocalypse -- among them a war in 
> Iraq, the Jewish settlement of the whole of biblical Israel, even the 
> rise of terrorism. He convincingly demonstrates that the Bush 
> administration has calculatedly reached out to such believers and 
> encouraged them to see the president's policies as a response to 
> premillennialist thought. He also suggests that the president and other 
> members of his administration may actually believe these things 
> themselves, that religious belief is the basis of policy, not just a 
> tactic for selling it to the public. Phillips's evidence for this 
> disturbing claim is significant, but not conclusive.
>
> THE third great impending crisis that Phillips identifies is also, 
> perhaps, the best known -- the astonishing rise of debt as the 
> precarious underpinning of the American economy. He is not, of course, 
> the only observer who has noted the dangers of indebtedness. The New 
> York Times columnist Paul Krugman, for example, frequently writes about 
> the looming catastrophe. So do many more-conservative economists, who 
> point especially to future debt -- particularly the enormous obligation, 
> which Phillips estimates at between $30 trillion and $40 trillion, that 
> Social Security and health care demands will create in the coming 
> decades. The most familiar debt is that of the United States government, 
> fueled by soaring federal budget deficits that have continued (with a 
> brief pause in the late 1990's) for more than two decades. But the 
> national debt -- currently over $8 trillion -- is only the tip of the 
> iceberg. There has also been an explosion of corporate debt, state and 
> local bonded debt, international debt through huge trade imbalances, and 
> consumer debt (mostly in the form of credit-card balances and 
> aggressively marketed home-mortgage packages). Taken together, this 
> present and future debt may exceed $70 trillion.
>
> The creation of a national-debt culture, Phillips argues, although 
> exacerbated by the policies of the Bush administration, has been the 
> work of many people over many decades -- among them Alan Greenspan, who, 
> he acidly notes, blithely and irresponsibly ignored the rising debt to 
> avoid pricking the stock-market bubble it helped produce. It is most of 
> all a product of the "financialization" of the American economy -- the 
> turn away from manufacturing and toward an economy based on moving and 
> managing money, a trend encouraged, Phillips argues persuasively, by the 
> preoccupation with oil and (somewhat less persuasively) with evangelical 
> belief in the imminent rapture, which makes planning for the future 
> unnecessary.
>
> There is little in "American Theocracy" that is wholly original to 
> Phillips, as he frankly admits by his frequent reference to the work of 
> other writers and scholars. What makes this book powerful in spite of 
> the familiarity of many of its arguments is his rare gift for looking 
> broadly and structurally at social and political change. By describing a 
> series of major transformations, by demonstrating the relationships 
> among them and by discussing them with passionate restraint, Phillips 
> has created a harrowing picture of national danger that no American 
> reader will welcome, but that none should ignore.
>
>   ---
>
> Alan Brinkley is the Allan Nevins professor of history and the provost 
> at Columbia University.
>
>
> Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
>
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