GOP Ideology as Religion

  The rise of politicized religious fundamentalism (which is a subset of the decline of rational problem solving in America) may have been the key ingredient of the takeover 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:
 

1-That there is a divine blessing for personal enrichment and minimal taxation - the kind of Gospel that is compatible with Rand;

2- pro-military power (with a major emphasis on the punitive, interventionist God of the Old Testament); 

3-pro-radical change and a contempt for existing institutions (as a product of their so-called  “End-Times” thinking).

The GOP is behaving as a Religious Movement, much more so than as a political party, and a radical religious movement at that. 

Concern over the economy attaches to the fundamentalist worldview purely by (coalition) necessity. Fundamentalists are not that interested in don’t give a fat rat’s ass about debt or economics (they sure didn't give a damn as spending exploded under Bush) but if their coalition partners insist on a certain “economic doctrine”, they'll easily go along with it - as long as it is never compromised. If it's presented as Eternal Dogma, they can handle it - and defend it with gusto. [[If it also means that President Obama is wrong, so much the better. Most theo-political movements need an anti-Christ of some sort, and the wing-nuts have been able to fill that role with him.]]

This political deadlock conceals a religious war at its heart. For those whose “Christianity” can only be sustained by denial of modern complexity, by denial of scientific knowledge, and denial of what scholarly studies of the Bible's origins have revealed, this fusion of political and spiritual into one seamless sensibility and culture, is irresistible.

But their god cannot vanquish the threats to their parallel universe. The gays don't/won’t disappear. China keeps growing. The population [of the world] becomes browner and browner. Women's lives increasingly become individual choices not social fates.

This enrages and terrifies the fundamentalist even more. Hence the occasional physical lashing out, but more profoundly the constant endless insatiable cultural lashing out at the "elites" [read those who actually completed high school] who have left fundamentalism behind, and have, on many core issues, science on their side. So within this religious core, and fundamentalist mindset, you also have the steely solder of resentment, intensified even further by a period of white middle and working class decline and economic crisis.

The current GOP can only think in doctrines, because the alternative is living in a complicated, global, modern world they both do not understand and also despise. Taxes are therefore always bad. Government is never good. Foreign enemies must be pre-emptively attacked. Islam is not a religion. Climate change is an elite conspiracy to impoverish America. Terror ‘suspects’ are terrorists. When Americans torture, it is not torture. When Christians murder, they are not Christians. And if you change your mind on any of these issues, you are a liberal, an apostate, and will be attacked.

If your view of conservatism is one rooted in an instinctual, but agile, defense of tradition, in a belief in practical wisdom that alters constantly with circumstance, in moderation and the defense of the middle class as the stabilizing ballast of democracy, in limited but strong government ... then the GOP is no longer your party.

Religion has replaced all of this, reordered it, and imbued the entire political-economic-religious package with zeal. And the zealous never compromise. They don't even listen.

Once one party becomes a church with unchangeable doctrines, and once it has supplanted respect for institutions and civility with the radical pursuit of timeless doctrines and hatred of governing institutions, then our democracy is in grave danger.

If you ask why I remain such a strong Obama supporter, it is because I see him as that rare individual able to withstand the zeal without becoming a zealot in response, and to overcome the recklessness of pure religious ideology with pragmatism, civility and reason. That's why they fear and loathe him, not because his policies are not theirs', but because his temperament is their nemesis. If he defeats them next year, they will break, because their beliefs are so brittle, but will then reform, along Huntsman-style lines. If they defeat him, I fear we will no longer be participating in a civil conversation, however fraught, but in a civil war.

~~  Edited from op-ed by Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Beast 12 September 11

[ original based on the 9-3 Truth-Out op-ed by Mike Lofgren]