American Theocracy Revisited
Ross Douthat:
First, conservative Christianity is a large and complicated world, and like other such worlds — the realm of the secular intelligentsia very much included — it has various centers and various fringes, which overlap in complicated ways. Sometimes teasing out these connections tells us something meaningful and interesting. But it’s easy to succumb to a paranoid six-degrees-of-separation game, in which the most radical figure in a particular community is always the most important one, or the most extreme passage in a particular writer’s work always defines his real-world influence.Second, journalists should avoid double standards. If you roll your eyes when conservatives trumpet Barack Obama’s links to Chicago socialists and academic radicals, you probably shouldn’t leap to the conclusion that Bachmann’s more outré law school influences prove she’s a budding Torquemada. If you didn’t spend the Jeremiah Wright controversy searching works of black liberation theology for inflammatory evidence of what Obama “really” believed, you probably shouldn’t obsess over the supposed links between Rick Perry and R. J. Rushdoony, the Christian Reconstructionist guru.
There’s more. He’s kinda not entirely wrong?
Point one I’ll grant, but point two reads to me like a call to false equivalency.
I mean, it might be or it might not be, but he’s right: I honestly don’t know. I know that calling Obama a socialist because he has ties to William Ayers is ridic because I am overly familiar with the history of the American left, and so I know that no matter what Ayers says or said, he was never really in a position to install a socialist state in America and right now is way too happy with his life to do anything in particular against capitalism. But if my particular ideological orientation had me in a position where I read “socialism” as “being opposed to everything America stands for” and I didn’t have extensive exposure to Ayers’ type of person, it would be worrying! We read “evangelical Christianity” as “being opposed to everything America stands for” too, and it’s fun, but I don’t think it’s necessarily true. Is the main thrust of John Eidsmoe’s work that American law should be supplanted with a Biblically-based set of laws, similar to the way conservatives paranoiacally fantasize about Sharia law? Maybe! But I honestly don’t know, and it sure seemed like Ryan Lizza (whose piece was generally excellent, I should say) was cherry-picking some quotes to support a darker and more impressive thesis than was perhaps justified. Lord knows I’ve read one or two books by an author and rushed into my advisor with some radical new interpretation before being told that everyone else would find this to be a grave misreading of the author’s work. If there were some quotes in these pieces from the supposed dark mastermind’s peers backing up the writer’s interpretation of their work and/or direct connection to the candidate, we can talk. But no matter how carefully a writer tries to paint these issues as influences on a politician’s thinking rather than a JFK-in-1960 pope-like “taking orders from the dominionists” sort of thing, it’s really hard for readers not to draw that conclusion, and I think it’s playing off our ignorance of conservative culture to make politics seem way more sinister than they almost ever are.
