Why were religious conservatives so willing to buy into Bush?
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Cult of the Presidency More Powerful Than “Fundamentalism”
Posted on November 19th, 2008 by Daniel Larison
Andrew writes in response to the post below:
And why were they so trusting of Bush and unable to see his flaws, Daniel? You have to see the link between the fundamentalist psyche and the suspension of critical judgment in the Republican party for the past eight years. A non-born-again president would never have been allowed to get away with it.
Actually, I think we could attribute just as much of this inability to see (or perhaps it was merely unwillingness to criticize?) Bush’s flaws to their identification with Bush’s own religion. This is the same identification or bonding with a politician that made supporters of Palin so livid when she was criticized, because they took it as a criticism of themselves. To that extent, I might be more willing to acknowledge that evangelicals as evangelicals contributed more to the enabling of Bush than I said below, but I can imagine, and I remember, the same thing happening with strong partisans of all stripes and secular ideologues. Let me add that I am skeptical that “fundamentalist psyche” has much to do with it. What Andrew calls the “fundamentalist psyche” seems to me to be the mind of an ideologue, and a lot of the errors in question have more to do with displacing Christianity with the substitute of Americanism. Far more worrisome, and far more widespread, than any fundamentalism (which Andrew has always defined far, far too broadly) is the tendency to give wide latitude to and to make up excuses for the President of one’s own party. This is not something unique to Republican partisans, and it is certainly not unique to evangelicals. If there is a stronger attachment to the cult of the Presidency among Republicans because the White House has typically been their main access to power at the national level since WWII, that is a serious problem within the GOP that would need to be addressed. Caesarism, not so-called “Christianism,” is the much greater problem.
To say that evangelicals are not the sole or primary cause of the GOP’s woes is not to say that they have never gone wrong (for some balance to my original post, I recommend Prof. Bacevich’s chapter on evangelicals in The New American Militarism), but one reason they are so easy to blame is the same reliability of support that allows them and their issues to be taken for granted by the party. Consider what things would look like if the parties’ positions were reversed. If Obama should blunder and become deeply unpopular, but black voters remain steadfastly supportive of him out of a sense of loyalty and support for a Democratic President, will they be what ails the Democratic Party? Wouldn’t attempts to pin the blame on them seem absurd? Wouldn’t there be far more important factors to consider?
Update: Joe Carter makes a similar point about the lack of influence of the “religious right” on policy:
Evangelicals constitute the largest single voting bloc in America, yet what do we have to show for it? Can Parker (or anyone else) name the significant achievements of evangelicals over the past few years? I can’t think of anything. (We can’t even take credit for Prop-8 in California. That was due to the hard work and funding by Mormons.)
Rather than assuming that evangelicals are a large, powerful, committed political bloc that, for some inexplicable reason, is completely ineffective, the more realistic conclusion is that politically engaged evangelicals are like a herd of unicorns: powerful and abundant in the imagination while not actually existing in the real world.
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