Gregg Easterbrook's analysis of the political leanings of American Christians (cited by Hunter Baker below) is indeed a good one, providing a sensible conclusion that the nation's Christians are about as politically diverse as any other major group.
J. Bottum wrote a similar piece on American Catholics before the election, "The Myth of the Catholic Voter," in the Weekly Standard, available here.
Easterbrook, however, is quite deceived when he writes the following: "Surely it has been bad for American political debate that, on September 11, the nation was attacked by an enemy issuing religious threats; this now seems to cause us to see the world in terms of religious threats. God-fearing conservative Christians are no threat, though some of them can, I'll admit, be pretty exasperating."
As I noted in yesterday's American Spectator, available here, the Left made its choice to jettison all but the most tame, Leftist Christians a long time ago, having in fact moved very far down that path by the early 1960s. To pretend that a confusion over the meaning of the September 11 attacks caused the Left to begin to view Christians with suspicion in recent years is just plain silly. As exemplified by the hysterical response to the brief rise of the Moral Majority, the terror instilled by Pat Robertson's presidential campaign, and the like, the American Left has viewed God-fearing conservative Christians as a threat for quite some time. This is not a momentary confusion, and it is a very big problem for the Democratic Party.
1 comment:
Your memory is long, Mr. Karnick. But do you think the Robertson and Moral Majority hatred was ever quite as pitched as what we see today with the attacks on John Ashcroft and George W. Bush? I'd argue that in almost any other time, Bush would be seen as a modestly right of center leader. Today, he's painted as a theocratic extremist.
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