Rich Lowry almost makes a point

From Natl Review.

What does Cromwell’s rule have to do with contemporary American political life? If your answer is anything other than “nothing,” you are probably in the grip of the “theo-panic” that is sweeping precincts of the American commentariat. They warn that America is beset by raging theocrats seeking to overturn our liberal democracy.

The theocracy charge relies mainly on blowing Christian conservative positions out of proportion. Do Christian conservatives oppose the public funding of embryo-destructive stem-cell research? Well, then, Calvin’s Geneva can’t be far behind. Never mind that in opposing such funding, they are usually supporting the status quo. It’s a little like saying that because Democrats oppose cuts in Medicaid, they favor a dictatorship of the proletariat.

Rich has a point here. He really does. Alarmism is stupid, dishonest, and politically opportunistic, and sad to say, everybody does it.

On the other hand, I'm not sure he doesn't go too far in the other direction in downplaying the theocratic wing of the Christian conservative movement. I have little question that a majority of Christian conservatives, rank-and-file as well as leadership, are pragmatic and relatively realistic, who don't actually think that voting a certain way on a ballot is going to make Jesus show up or, alternately, smite their neighborhood with a hurricane.

I agree, it is unfair to conflate a certain political position with a grandiose end-game like theocracy or Communist totalitarianism. But it is also dishonest to whitewash the fact that some Christian conservative leaders, such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, have gone on record explicitly saying that they want to change American society. Sorry, saying "only Christians and Jews should be allowed to be in government" is actually a departure from the "status-quo".

Purveyors of the theo-panic love to exaggerate the influence of the bizarre Christian Reconstructionists who actually want an American theocracy. As New York Times religion writer Peter Steinfels notes in a review of the spate of new books, Christian Reconstructionists play “a greater role in the writings of the religious right’s critics than they ever have in the wider evangelical world.” He notes that the flagship evangelical journal, Christianity Today, almost never shows up in these books, because, inconveniently, it is “moderate, reflective and self-questioning.”

National Review senior editor Ramesh Ponnuru has pointed out that you can take all Christian conservative positions — including far-fetched ones like banning sodomy and contraception — and if they happened overnight they “would merely turn the clock back to the late 1950s. That may be a very bad idea, but the America of the 1950s was not a theocracy.”

No, now you're conflating positions- just as not all Christian conservatives are Christian Reconstructionists, so too, not all Christian conservatives hold positions as harmless as the Cleavers. First of all, 1950s America was not that great- you had anti-miscegenation laws, Jim Crow, McCarthyism and Black Listing, homosexuality being defined as a mental disorder, etc...

Second, there's the issue that contemporary American society is so significantly different (particularly as regards people and groups that don't or wouldn't have fit in with the ideal-1950s society) than it was in the 50s that attempts to turn back the clock to that period would require a MAJOR degree of coercion, both from government and civilian peers, in order to enforce it. No one's suggesting that the 1950s was the same as contemporary Iran, but it's BS to pretend like that sort of society didn't exist without certain people imposing that lifestyle and worldview on others- and it would be all the more so in order to obtain a similar situation today. Forcing school prayer, for instance, would definitely qualify as a theocratic act today, because you have a much larger percentage of people, including children, who identify as atheists, than did in the 1950s.

So, yeah. Xian Recons don't just want the 1950s, and imposing the 50s on the rest of us wouldn't be very cool, either.