An Incoherent Journey

Never read this book. I implore you, however, to read this review in order to better understand those on the left who attack conservative positions through lies and distortions.

How does one summarize nearly 500 pages of historical ramblings that weave facts and falsehoods into a fabric so flawed the book reads like a journey through Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland?

Phillips chose his title primarily to grab attention, since he admits the book is more about politics than religion. He leaps from the starting blocks, however, with this statement: “the Republican national coalition had become a willing vehicle for radical religion, entrenched energy policy and interests, and a run-amok indulgence of our ascending debt and credit.” To support each of these premises he traces what he calls “radical religion,” an unquenchable thirst for energy, and a wanton lack of concern for debt as far as five centuries into the past. How all of this history is relevant to his point remains a mystery.

The title itself is what drew me to the book. I consider myself eminently qualified to review a book on religion in America because I myself am a “devout atheist.” I have no vested interest to defend. Aside from the title, however, religion is not mentioned for a full 99 pages.

Questing for Oil

Instead, Phillips advances the premise that our government’s foreign policy is entirely driven by our quest for oil. I consider myself an expert in this area as well, since I have 54 years of experience in the energy field and am currently editing Wiley’s forthcoming Encyclopedia of Energy.

Phillips enjoys piling on Bush, as only a lapsed conservative-turned-leftist can do. He believes Bush is a paranoiac—both delusional and megalomaniacal. In Phillips’ 99-page opening diatribe against oil, he traces the history of petroleum exploration and development all the way back to Colonel Drakes’ well in Pennsylvania in 1859. Its relevance to our current thirst for hydrocarbons completely escapes me.

He then segues to Britain’s growth and dependence on coal with no raison d’etre. He then jumps on the doomsayer forecasts of diminishing oil, beginning with M. King Hubbert’s first predictions in the 1950s that oil production in the U.S. would peak in the ‘70s. Hubbert was a friend, colleague, and mentor of mine, but he was still wrong.

Phillips’ history of oil bounces from the current Iraq War to the Civil War and back without any coherent thought linking his ideas together. His storytelling reminds me of the popular TV show Lost, which continually bounces between present time and flashbacks.

Skewering Religion

Finally in chapter four he gears up to skewer religion. Phillips believes Christianity, especially Protestantism, has always had a combative, evangelical streak. In its recent practice, he says, the radical side of U.S. religion has embraced cultural anti-modernism, war hawkishness, Armageddon prophecy, and in the case of conservative fundamentalists, a demand for government by literal biblical interpretation.

Phillips admits, however, that there is a large and growing secular culture in the United States. Among northern university graduates and cultural elites, secularism is dominant—stronger by far than the biblical and salvationist contingent. How then can religion in America be such a threat?

For reasons known only to himself, Phillips attempts a 500-year history of Christianity. His conspiracy theory tale includes the following gems:

“In retrospect, the apparent seamlessness of holiness, fundamentalist, and pentacostal expansion from the 1880s and 1890s through Graham’s Christian crusade should focus our questions about the rise of today’s influential sects” and

* “From colonial days to the present, war and politics in the United States have borne a heavy imprint of church leadership and denominationalism, the latter frequently overlapping with racial, regional and ethnic self-identifications.”

He then scoffs at a host of unfulfilled prophecies over the past 2,000 years and, on these grounds, dismisses religion entirely.

Although I am no fan of organized religion, I find his 1984-like rewrite of history disgraceful.

Astonishingly, Phillips completely undermines the premise of American Theocracy when he writes, “religion, while feared by liberals, is actually a joke, given the increasing secular population, continuing obscenity and violence in Hollywood, brothels and gambling in Vegas, and gay-marriage in San Francisco.” He admits that “any incipient theocracy in the 21st century in the U.S. would bear little resemblance” to John Calvin’s 16th century establishment. Again I ask, if religion is being routed, why does Phillips find it so threatening?

Phillips then launches into a vitriolic criticism of the religious beliefs of President George W. Bush and John Ashcroft, whom he believes are creating a theocracy. He completely fails to recognize that if religion is taking over America, it is not the established Christian religion but rather the secular worship of all things “green.” The eco-religion practiced passionately by many liberals is far more likely to win the day than traditional Christianity.

Bemoaning Debt

In the third section of the book, Phillips prophesies doom due to the increasing debt our nation carries. He begins with a tutorial on national economics before lapsing into the fearmongering cliches of those economists who continue to believe debt will be our undoing. He uses the stock market crash in 2000 as support for his gloomy outlook, acting as though the run-up of stock prices to form a bubble had never happened. Phillips’ anti-capitalist bent is on full display in this section.

In his final chapter, “The Erring Republican Majority,” Phillips reveals his liberal credentials, as he belittles the party’s religious members. However, in the process of excoriating all things Republican, he makes perhaps his most honest statement of the entire book:

“The Republican electoral coalition, near and dear to me four decades ago, when I began writing The Emerging Republican Majority, has become more and more like the exhausted erring majorities of earlier failures: the militant, southernized democrats of the 1850s; the stock-market dazzled and Elmer Gantry-ish GOP of the 1920s; and the imperial liberals of the 1960s, with their Great Society social engineering, quagmire in Vietnam, and the New Economy skills expected to tame the business cycle. Now the Republicans are again the miscreants.”

Phillips will get no argument from me there.