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International Journal

August 2007

AMERICAN THEOCRACY

The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century

Kevin Phillips

New York: Viking Penguin, 2006. 462pp, $26.95 cloth (ISBN 067003486X)

What a difference an election can bring to American politics, and to the reputation of political books. Upon publication in 2006, American Theocracy was hailed as a trenchant study of American religion and politics in such critical and generally left-of-centre publications as The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, and even Mother Jones. To reviewers unsympathetic with the evangelical trappings of George Bush’s Washington, American Theocracy was all the more welcome in that it came from an author with old-line Republican credentials and an ambient contempt for Bush the younger and Bush the elder as well. As a campaign strategist for Richard Nixon in 1968 Kevin Phillips developed the notorious “Southern Strategy” as a way of cobbling together a majority presidential coalition to supercede the Democratic coalition created by Franklin Roosevelt. “This book is dedicated to the millions of Republicans, present and lapsed, who have opposed the Bush dynasty,” Phillips writes, “and the disenlightenment in the 2000 and 2004 elections.” Yet after the November 2006 congressional elections, with the Republicans losing control of the House and Senate, the Bush administration on the skids to political oblivion, and the evangelical right fading as a force in official Washington, American Theocracy seems badly dated and analytically shallow. In the language of American politics, the book is like a “zinger” that no longer zings.

Without the zinger of “theocracy” and the deliberately overstated, made-for-television sound-bites in which this volume abounds—for example, that the GOP is “the first American religious party” (182)—the reader is left with a rambling wreck of overwrought political narrative, declinist philosophy of history, and a partial and misleading account of the relation between religion and politics in America. Again, this book was all the rage among the chattering classes barely one year ago.

The author’s account of American religion and politics—a subject poorly understood by contemporary foreign observers of the U.S.—is the analytical heart of the book, but it is haphazardly researched, tendentious in argument, and a blinkered guide to America’s past and to its future. This is a pity, because Phillips knows the value of historical research and has turned out serviceable histories of his own. The truth is that America has never been a theocracy, not even in seventeenth century Massachusetts, where church and state operated in distinct realms (John Calvin would not have been happy in Boston). The founding fathers of the American republic, many of them inclined to an easy-going, Enlightenment-style deism, took pains to prohibit a federally-mandated establishment of religion. American evangelicalism, with its easily lampooned revivalist excesses, did add a moralistic edge to early American nationalism, manifest destiny, Civil War armies of both the Union and the Confederacy, turn-of- the- century imperialism, and the political crusades of the Progressive Era (prohibition, for example), but over time American religion has become weaker in its intensity and more accommodating of a secular society. This is the case as well with the influential strands in American religion Phillips has neglected, including theological modernism (which has flourished in America since the end of the nineteenth century among Protestants, Catholics, and Jews) and that “spiritual but not religious” philosophical orientation deriving from Transcendentalism, which is one of the main intellectual currents among educated Americans today. Bill Clinton loved to wave his Bible but his real inspiration was Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Hillary Clinton, who now tells us she is from a “praying family” of Methodists, is fully capable of speaking the language of the Protestant Social Gospel when this is advantageous politically. America has long had Elmer Gantrys of the spiritual left as well as the religious right. Of course it has long had sincere believers as well. By his exclusive focus on the Southern evangelicals, many of whose dispirited leaders now realize they were snookered by the Bushies, Phillips leaves us ill equipped to appreciate the next turn of the screw.

Besides religion and politics, this book treats two other matters that deserve mention in brief compass. One is the author’s personal laundry list of problems facing America today. Barely two paragraphs into the preface, Phillips writes, “Reckless dependency on shrinking oil supplies, a milieu of radicalized (and much too influential) religion, and a reliance on borrowed money—debt, in its ballooning size and multiple domestic and international deficits—now constitute the three major perils to the United States” (vii). While this is obviously a highly selective list—omitting, for example, matters of war and peace, global poverty, growing inequality within advanced societies, and the hollowing out of democracy by money—Phillips focuses on these three problems because, according to his metahistorical scheme, religion, oil, and debt represent the keys to the prospective decline of the American empire. Less rigorously and less interestingly than the historian Paul Kennedy, Kevin Phillips sets out an elaborate declinist paradigm that views the United States as trending to the fate of such defunct empires as those of “Rome, imperial Spain, the Dutch Republic, and Britain”(xv). Phillips warns specifically of “the pitfalls of imperial Christian overreach” (99), of “religious excess and overambition” which, if not reversed, may well result in “an epitaph for the twenty-first-century United States.” (394).

America, it has rightly been said, is a nation with the soul of a church. So pervasive is the influence of religion on American intellectual culture that even the country’s secular and anti-religious writers insensibly absorb its tropes and styles of argumentation. American Theocracy has had its fifteen minutes of fame as political wisdom and has justly been remaindered. Yet the book retains a certain antiquarian interest as a specimen of that distinctively native literary genre identified by the eminent Canadian scholar Sacvan Bercovitch—the American jeremiad.

James Eldin Reed / Harvard University

© 2007 Canadian Institute of International Affairs