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

From Democracy Now, Amy Goodman interviews former GOP strategist Kevin Phillips about his new book that shows in exhaustive detail how the religious right's influence over the Republican Party affects, well, pretty much everything:

AMY GOODMAN: The war in Iraq was over oil?

KEVIN PHILLIPS: I think it was principally over oil. If you – and let me qualify that by saying I think a certain amount of the reason for the war in Iraq was a larger geo-strategic situation in which we were going to have to leave Saudi Arabia. And the way to develop an alternative oil supply and base was to aim at Iraq. Now, that went beyond purely oil as a consideration.

Another facet of the invasion of Iraq, in 2002, George W. Bush gave a speech in Texas, in which he talked about how Saddam Hussein had tried to assassinate his father. So there you have sort of the family aspect. And lastly, the Middle East is a battleground of biblical Armageddon and everything. And that's swimming into play. A number of the religious right people talked about Saddam Hussein as the anti-Christ, and the Left Behind series, which is the Tim LaHaye 60 million sold context of the end times and Armageddon, while the Antichrist comes from New Babylon and Iraq, and the attempt was to portray Baghdad, Babylon, as the focal point of the end times, so that a whole lot of supporters of the administration, they didn't care about weapons of mass destruction. This was part of the unfolding biblical epic of the end times and the war between good and evil. And this is something that I get into in the book; it’s hard to explain it just in a short conversation.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’ve got some time.

KEVIN PHILLIPS: Well, this is very central to the whole Republican constituency. What you’ve got is that 45% of American Christians believe in Armageddon, and the more religious ones, the fundamentalists and evangelicals more than anybody else. So, my assumption is that the Bush electorate is probably 50 to 55% people who believe in Armageddon and probably more or less the same numbers who believe that the Antichrist is already on earth. And when you have this backdrop and you have a president who got his start in national politics as his father’s liaison with the religious right back in 1987 and ‘88, you just have an enormous exposure to this whole psychological context and an awareness on the part of people in the White House that this huge constituency interprets the Middle East in this very unusual way.

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Phillips moves seamlessly from subject to subject, from politics to banking and credit to history to the judiciary to oil, always carefully illustrating how fundamentalist Christianity lurks in the background, and finally concludes that the United States is facing for numerous different reasons several massive crises. The short version is that the religious right appears to live in a different reality where deficits, oil shortages, fiscal collapse, and the future itself have no importance. And they have massive influence over the Republican Party. And the Republican Party runs everything now. We're screwed.

Years ago my buddy Vince, an atheist, flat out rejected my assertion that the fundamentalists were a dire threat to our very way of life. "No they're not," he said, "they're just a bunch of lunatics, and I think most people realize that." Of course, my belief at that time, the early mid 90s, was probably coming more from the fact that I had recently quit being a Southern Baptist, and had (and still have) an axe to grind, than from any sort of political brilliance on my part. Nonetheless, it turns out I was right. The GOP play to these people hardcore; the religious right is one of their most reliable voting blocs. We're now at the point, after years of incremental increases in their political power and influence, where the fundamentalist vision for America is becoming a reality, and as my pal Vince correctly observed years ago, these people are, indeed, lunatics. Consequently, America is increasingly in a state of dangerous lunacy. That's not good at all.

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