Damon Linker - The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege

Ideologists are terrible simplifiers.

Ideology makes it unnecessary for people to confront individual issues on their individual merits. One simply turns to the ideological vending machine, and out comes the prepared formulae. When these beliefs are suffused by apocalyptic fervor, ideas become weapons, and with dreadful results.

DANIEL BELL

The ordinary resources of empirical observation and ordinary human knowledge give us no warrant for supposing that all good things are reconcilable with each other.

ISAIAH BERLIN

An unbridled passion for the total elimination of this or that evil can be as dangerous as any of the delusions of our time.

RICHARD HOFSTADTER

Complexity is the destiny of thoughtful individuals, from which they will never be rescued.

LEON WIESELTIER

Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt.

JOHN HENRY NEWMAN

PREFACE

O N THE EVENING of October 22, 1962, President John F. Kennedy addressed the American people about a grave danger confronting the United States. Aerial surveillance of Cuba revealed that the Soviet Union had begun to construct a series of offensive nuclear missile sites on the islandsites from which the Soviets would be capable for the first time of striking any city in the southeastern United States, including Washington, D.C. In response to the Soviet threat, the president committed the country to an extraordinarily risky policy of imposing a naval blockade, forcibly searching all vessels bound for Cuba, and turning back any and all ships found to contain cargoes of offensive weapons. Having just set the country on a path that could easily lead to worldwide nuclear conflagration, Kennedy concluded his address to the nation with these words: Thank you and good night.

Thirty-nine years later, addressing the country at another moment of national crisis, President George W. Bush struck a very different note. Speaking from Washingtons National Cathedral on September 14, 2001, three days after the massive terrorist attacks of September 11, the president assured the nation that Americas duty was clearnot only to answer these attacks, but also to rid the world of evil. Bush then explicitly asked Almighty God to watch over our nation and grant us patience and resolve in all that is to come. Having committed the country to a breathtakingly bold new policy and having appealed to God for assistance in its implementation, Bush concluded his address by invoking St. Pauls Letter to the Romans (8:3839): As we have been assured, neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, can separate us from Gods love. May he bless the souls of the departed. May he comfort our own. And may he always guide our country. God bless America.

Something has happened to the United States during the past four decades. In 1962 a president informing the American people about a potentially catastrophic threat to the country and the world felt no need to invoke the blessings of the divineand no one considered it an oversight because no one expected otherwise. By 2001 expectations had changed so dramatically that it was hardly noticed when a different president, responding to another national crisis, led the country in prayer from the altar of a cathedral. Indeed, it would have been far more noteworthy had Bush failed to invoke God in his address, breaking from the tradition started by Ronald Reagan of politicians concluding their major speeches with God bless America. Bushs decision to paraphrase the New Testament on Gods boundless love certainly went several steps beyond previous expressions of presidential piety, but it merely built on and solidified a trend that had been under way for quite some time.

This is a book about a vitally important (and unjustly neglected) aspect of this transformation. It tells the story of how a small group of theoconservative intellectuals has decisively contributed to the unprecedented rise of public religiosity in our time. As the story begins in the mid-1960s, the men who would become the theocons march for civil rights and against Vietnamand ponder the morality of advocating the violent overthrow of the American government in the name of divine justice. Searching for a new ideological orientation during the tumult and uncertainty of the 1970s, they end up rallying to the side of Ronald Reagan during the 1980s and propose to inject conservative Christianityand conservative Catholicism, in particularinto the nations politics. Then, facing various political and cultural setbacks during the 1990s, they recapitulate their youthful radicalism on the far right, stopping just short of advocating a religious revolution against the godless American regime. With the election of 2000, the theocons rise to the peak of political power and influence in Washington, where their ideas inspire the most controversial and divisive policies of the Bush administration. The story ends with an examination of the theocons deeply troubling vision of the nations futurea future in which the country is thoroughly permeated by orthodox Christian piety, and secular politics are driven out in favor of an explicitly theological approach to ordering the nations public life.

The history that follows is based largely on the published writings of the members of this enormously influential and understudied movementa movement to which I once belonged and from which I now strongly dissent. Later chapters also include some anecdotal material, which is based on my experience of working closely with the theocons for just over three and a half years, from May 2001 through February 2005. Unless stated otherwise in a footnote, I am the source for this material.

I have written this book to alert Americansand especially those who cherish our nations tradition of secular politicsto the threat that the theocons pose to the country. Until now, their aims and influence have been largely ignored by the mainstream media and even by scholars of recent political and religious history. For the past three decades the theocons have devoted their considerable polemical and analytical talents to analyzing and assaulting every conceivable aspect of secular liberalism, but the attention hasnt been returned. It is long overdue. Before political secularists can hope to triumph at the voting booth, they will have to begin to defend themselves on the battlefield of ideas. And before they can do that, they must familiarize themselves with the men who have placed them in the dock and charged them with treason against the American experiment in constitutional democracy. I will consider this book a success if it manages to contribute in some small way to preparing would-be champions of secular politics to defend themselves against their self-declared enemies.