NEW AS THE REPUBLIC ITSELF:

NEW-TIME RELIGION (Hendrik Hertzberg, 2004-05-31, The New Yorker)

The salient division in American political life where religion is concerned is no longer between Catholics and Protestants, if it ever was, or even between believers and nonbelievers. It is between traditional supporters of a secular state (many of whom are themselves religiously observant), on the one hand, and, on the other hand—well, theocrats might be too strong a term. Suffice it to say that there are those who believe in a sturdy wall between church and state and those who believe that the wall should be remodelled into a white picket fence dotted with open gates, some of them wide enough to drive a tractor-trailer full of federal cash through.

President Bush is the leader of the latter persuasion, and his remodelling project has been under way for more than three years. This project goes beyond the frequent use of evangelical code words in the President’s speeches; beyond the shocking and impious suggestion, more than once voiced in the President’s approving presence, that he was chosen for his position by God Himself; beyond the insistence on appointing judges of extreme Christian-right views to the federal bench; beyond the religiously motivated push to chip away wherever possible at the reproductive freedom of women. It also includes money, in the millions and billions. The money is both withheld and disbursed: withheld from international family-planning efforts, from domestic contraceptive education, and from scientific research deemed inconsistent with religious fundamentalism; disbursed to “abstinence-based” sex-education programs, to church-run “marriage initiatives,” and, via vouchers, to drug-treatment and other social-service programs based on religion. Though Congress has declined to enact the bulk of the President’s “faith-based initiatives,” the Administration has found a way, via executive orders and through bureaucratic novelties like the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives and the Department of Health and Human Services’ Compassion Capital Fund. “The federal government now allows faith-based groups to compete for billions of dollars in social-service funding, without being forced to change their identity and their mission,” the President boasted a couple of weeks ago, in a commencement address at a Lutheran college in Mequon, Wisconsin. He did not mention that “their identity and their mission”—their principal purpose, their raison d’être—is often religious proselytization.

Though Mr. Hertzberg seems unenthusiastic about it, this theocratic reaction--which dates to roughly the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980--accounts for most of the astonishing divergence between a once-again ascendant America and dying Europe.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 1, 2004 7:34 AM