Ferguson and the Theocons

Here is a letter I wrote to Andrew Ferguson, a columnist for Bloomberg, regarding his column U.S. Braces for Attack of the Giant Theocons.

Your column attacking Kevin Phillips and his use of the word Theocon makes no distinction between fundamentalism and liberal religion (in the tradition of, say, Universalism).

The abolition and civil rights movements both rested on the the foundation of liberal religion. They sought to expand liberties. Abolition urged a single premise, that all men were created equal and slavery was therefore wrong. Lincoln was not a fundamentalist, and though his beliefs were strong, he never let superstition trump reasoned decisions.

The civil rights movement, once again, demanded the equal participation of second class citizens in all areas of American life. Martin Luther King was not a fundamentalist. He didn't believe other faiths were evil or wrong. He wasn't an agent of exclusion.

Philips isn't talking about these religious types. He is talking about fundamentalists who not only believe that they are right, but that all others are wrong. Their beliefs are arrogant, divisive, absolute and tyrannical. And they care about democracy only insofar as it gets them closer to their goal of a purely Christian theocracy; insofar as they can codify their beliefs into laws through legitimate means. But the absolute truth of the Bible, as they interpret it, ultimately supercedes the principles of democracy. As cultists, polygamist mormons and well-known preachers have all demonstrated, American laws can be ignored if they go against the perceived teachings of the Bible.

The confluence of fundamentalist religion and politics is anti-democratic, as so many states in the Middle East demonstrate. And it is becoming increasingly clear that many fundamentalist Christians are aiming for a theocracy in America. If you disagree, you haven't been to an Evangelical church lately. They are scary. Indeed, anyone who believes that the sometimes-beautiful, grotesque, magical, brutal, contradictory and hallucinatory stories of the Bible are somehow a perfect and infallible communication from the Creator of the Universe scares me. They have forgotten the difference between connotation and denotation, between history and allegory. The world would be a much better place without that mistake.

While I wouldn't prohibit orthodox believers from participating in politics, I would urge the rest of us to see clearly their rigid, intolerant, tyrannical, arrogant absolutism. It is antithetical to pluralism. We should fear it and argue against it without excluding it.