COMMENTARY: Be very worried about the religious right

(UNDATED) My 2006 book, “The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right’s Plans for the Rest of Us,” describes the disturbing goals of a group I call “Christocrats.” They are an overwhelmingly white group of extremists who want to change the basic structure of American society. While the vast majority of evangelicalsare not committed to altering […]

(UNDATED) My 2006 book, “The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right’s Plans for the Rest of Us,” describes the disturbing goals of a group I call “Christocrats.”

They are an overwhelmingly white group of extremists who want to change the basic structure of American society. While the vast majority of evangelicalsare not committed to altering the historical relationship between church and state, zealous Christocrats seek the legal transformation of America into a Christian nation governed by God’s laws (as they define them) and not theConstitution.

Some critics accused me of being an alarmist and “overreacting.”


They reminded me the United States has always had its religious “fringe kooks” who never succeeded in significantly influencing public policy or permanently damaging our extraordinary record of spiritual freedom and religious pluralism.

Following the 2008 elections, my critics falsely believed the religious right and its agenda was dead and buried. President Obama was in the White House and there were large Democratic majorities in Congress, a huge change from three years ago when President George W. Bush worked with a GOP-controlled Congress that included Rick Santorum and Tom DeLay, two religious right favorites.

Back then the Rev. Jerry Falwell was alive, and two aging Christocratic leaders, Pat Robertson and James Dobson, were still influential. While I had many sharp differences with them, my book recognized that all three old-timers worked within the existing system to impose their beliefs on the body politic.

Today that is no longer true. The religious right and its media supporters, staggered by successive electoral defeats, are like angry cornered animals, making them more dangerous than they were in 2006. Many Christocrats have abandoned the democratic process and have joined others in attempts to intimidate, shout down, and frighten the general public on a host of issues, including health care reform, environmental protection, immigration, energy, education and even vitally needed research in medicine and science. Threats of physical violence have recently been hurled at elected officials.

Frank Schaeffer, who has rejected his famous father’s Christocratic beliefs, has warned that extremist religious and political leaders have figuratively placed a “loaded rifle on the table” making it easy and acceptable for fanatics to carry out political assassinations.

Opponents of the religious right’s plans are routinely smeared as “Nazis,” and the president is likened to Adolf Hitler. Many Christocrats indiscriminately use the word “Holocaust,” once reserved solely to describe the mass murders in Europe between 1933 and 1945, as verbal spray paint for ugly rhetorical graffiti.

The trivialization of Nazism is an obscene attempt to bully opponents into submission and silence. I am convinced many religious fanatics who place Hitlerian mustaches on presidential photos have no idea of what Nazism really represents: murderous, radical evil. Using Nazism as a grotesque metaphor for anyone and anything that opposes the Christocrats will become more frequent as death reduces the number of elderly Holocaust survivors.


Recently some have asked me about the sources of the current religious right fury. Let me count the ways.

Within 40 years whites will constitute a minority in the U.S., while the majority of Americans will be Hispanic, black and Asian. Frightened religious right members can posture and scream in front of TV cameras about “taking back” America, but the population changes are inexorable.

Coupled with that, the number of Americans identifying as Christians — now slightly less than 80 percent — is also declining. Millions of adherents of every religion in the world are represented in our society, and atheists and agnostics are increasing, too.

Christocratic disenchantment with politicians is rampant, especially after several GOP religious right standard bearers — Gov. Mark Sanford, Sen. John Ensign and former Rep. Chip Pickering — publicly admitted adulterous affairs, even though all three are members of the now infamous C Street House run by a Christian fellowship group.

Be worried; be very worried about today’s religious right.

(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious adviser, is the author of “The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right’s Plans for the Rest of Us.”)

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