Mike Lofgren: How Religion Destroyed My Party.

Having observed politics up close and personal for most of my adult lifetime, I have come to the conclusion that the rise of politicized religious fundamentalism may have been the key ingredient in the transformation of the Republican Party. Politicized religion provides a substrate of beliefs that rationalizes, at least in the minds of its followers, all three of the GOP's main tenets: Wealth worship, war worship, and the permanent culture war. Religious cranks ceased to be minor public nuisance in the 1970s and grew into a major element of the Republican rank and file. Pat Robertson's strong showing in the 1988 Iowa presidential caucus signaled the gradual merger of politics and religion in the party. Unfortunately, at the time I mostly underestimated the implications of what I was seeing. It did strike me as oddly humorous that a fundamentalist staff member in my congressional office was going to take time off to convert the heathen in Greece, a country that had been overwhelmingly Christian for almost two thousand years. I recall another point, in the early 1990s, when a different fundamentalist GOP staffer said that dinosaur fossils were a hoax. As a mere legislative mechanic toiling away in what I held to be a civil rather than ecclesiastic calling, I did not see that ideological impulses far different from mine were poised to capture the party of Lincoln. The results of this takeover are all around us: If the American people poll more like Iranians or Nigerians or Canadians on questions of evolution, scriptural inerrancy, the presence of angels and demons, and so forth, it is due to the rise of the religious right, its insertion into the public sphere by the Republican Party, and the consequent normalizing of formerly reactionary beliefs. All around us now, is a prevailing anti intellectualism and hostility to science. Politicized religion is the sheet anchor of the dreary forty year old culture wars. The Constitution notwithstanding, there is now a de facto religious test for the presidency. Major candidates are encouraged, or coerced, to share their feelings about their faith in a revelatory speech, or a televangelist will dragoon the candidates to debate the finer points of Christology, offering himself as the final arbiter!