Republican Raptures

Ever since former Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips published the bestselling "The Emerging Republican Majority" in 1969, the announcement that he's written a new book has typically been first met by political observers and the press with a kind of hushed awe, and then a mad rush to read it. Phillips' books tend to give comprehensive overviews of politics at the national level, and macro social phenomena that shape our national interest. His latest book -- his 11th -- is no different.

In "American Theocracy" (Viking), Phillips examines three crises affecting the country: The dangers that growing instability and shortages in global oil markets pose for our petro-dependent society; the threat that our massive debts and deficits may collapse the dollar and the American economy; and the growing power that the Christian Right has over the Republican Party.

I was curious to hear what Phillips had to say about the rise of the Christian Right, since he came into the Republican Party at a time when it didn't rely on the Bible Belt to keep its electoral pants on.

Jan Frel: You say the GOP has been transformed into the first religious party in the United States. Do you mean something like we've seen with the Christian Democratic Party in Germany or something else?

Kevin Phillips: Yes. Actually, the argument was used by John Green, a well-known political scientist with an expertise in religion at the University of Akron. He suggested in 1988 that things were moving in that direction as people who were high-attending believers of the different Christian denominations were generally more Republican and this tended to parallel in what you might see in the Christian Democrats in Italy or Germany.

Frel: Those religious parties in Europe have no tradition of being anti-democratic …

Phillips: Oh no, they aren't. What happened in the sense of the United States, generally, is that the denominations in the United States have been on different sides. If you grew up in New York or New England in the 1950s -- at that point, the protestants were largely Republicans and the Catholics were largely Democrats. What you're getting now is that religious people now -- across the range of Christian, which is to say biblical denominations are Republican. The Democrats have these people who think in a secular way.

Frel: You also say in your book that 40 percent of the Republican voting bloc is made up of very religious Christian denominations. Who are the other 60 percent?

Phillips: Well, we have to be careful what description we're using. For example, if you take born-agains. The percentage of born-agains in this country is something like 42 or 43 percent. With Republicans, it's 10 points higher, and with Democrats it's 10 points lower. Just a guess. I would say that 40 percent of the Republican coalition is fundamentalist evangelical and Pentecostal. Now, there would be a larger group that would be born again, who wouldn't quite consider themselves in some of these dimensions.

Frel: Where do they diverge in terms of their political interests? Do you think there's enough distance between these groups to prevent some kind of takeover? You call it the "emerging Republican theocracy" at one point in your book.

Phillips: Well, I was just on an interview with Richard Land, and we were talking about the trends and what they represented. And as more and more people, should this happen, have a sense of end times approaching because of war in the Middle East or tsunamis or plagues or AIDS or anything like this, as that happens, people are going to pay less attention to things other than salvation, and they are going to be more concerned with having a churchly government that their preachers are telling them what's happening and what to do. So that could push things a bit further in the direction of a theocratic tendency on the part of the people who are really worried about where the earth is heading and thinking about things in terms of raptures, end times and Armageddon. And it's a large group of people.