American democracy and the Enlightenment itself are menaced by
would-be theocrats and their Republican operatives, contends
Salon.com reporter Goldberg. The author brands conservative
Christian influence in public life as proto-fascist and a Western
version of Islamism. In her view, the subversives are everywhere,
passing anti-gay-marriage initiatives and lobbying for
anti-abortion judges; more subversives are on the way, because
homeschooling is simply an incubator for revolution. The menace is
"Christian nationalism," a movement whose tenets Goldberg seeks to
relate to the Reconstructionist theology of the late R.J.
Rushdoony. He was a genuine theocrat, a postmillennialist who held
that Christ would return after believers had thoroughly
Christianized the world. In contrast, premillennial American
evangelicals hold that Christ will return to a collapsing world,
which implies that political reform by believers would ultimately
be futile. One of the great stories in the history of the past
generation has been the search of newly vibrant American
evangelicalism for a political theory. The author infers that
Reconstructionism is the new master philosophy, in part because
conventional politicians and religious leaders sometimes appear at
the same public events as Reconstructionists; she makes no mention
of the systematic efforts by some evangelicals to engage Catholic
social theory. Goldberg does provide some good reporting, however.
She shows that the fiscal controls on the Bush Administration's
faith-based initiatives are loose. During her investigation of
abstinence-only sex education, she allows its proponents to make a
case she finds unpersuasive but plausible. Nonetheless, the author
declares that now is the time to fight the Christian nationalists,
not to placate them. She ends by exhorting her readers to retake
the country from the grassroots up. If you think that Christianity
is the new Communism, then this is the book for you. (Kirkus
Reviews)
Taking the reader on a journey through a country in the grips of a
fevered religious radicalism, Michelle Goldberg demonstrates how
the growing influence of dominionism - the doctrine that Christians
have the right to rule non-believers - is threatening the
foundations of American democracy. She offers the powerful
testimony of "regular" Americans to illustrate the subversive
effect of this conservative stranglehold, and she urges Americans
to turn their attention to the mechanisms of an insidious
fundamentalism opposed to science, pluralism and reason.
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