Republican Raptures

From AlterNet:

Frel: You also say in your book that 40 percent of the Republican voting bloc is made up of very religious Christian denominations. Who are the other 60 percent?

Phillips: Well, we have to be careful what description we're using. For example, if you take born-agains. The percentage of born-agains in this country is something like 42 or 43 percent. With Republicans, it's 10 points higher, and with Democrats it's 10 points lower. Just a guess. I would say that 40 percent of the Republican coalition is fundamentalist evangelical and Pentecostal. Now, there would be a larger group that would be born again, who wouldn't quite consider themselves in some of these dimensions.

Frel: Where do they diverge in terms of their political interests? Do you think there's enough distance between these groups to prevent some kind of takeover? You call it the "emerging Republican theocracy" at one point in your book.

Phillips: Well, I was just on an interview with Richard Land, and we were talking about the trends and what they represented. And as more and more people, should this happen, have a sense of end times approaching because of war in the Middle East or tsunamis or plagues or AIDS or anything like this, as that happens, people are going to pay less attention to things other than salvation, and they are going to be more concerned with having a churchly government that their preachers are telling them what's happening and what to do. So that could push things a bit further in the direction of a theocratic tendency on the part of the people who are really worried about where the earth is heading and thinking about things in terms of raptures, end times and Armageddon. And it's a large group of people.

Click here for the rest.

This is from another interview with former GOP wunderkind strategist Kevin Phillips--when a Republican genius criticizes the Party, one had better take notice. The bottom line to Phillips' analysis is what seems obvious to me but not others, especially in the mainstream news media: the Religious Right has a great deal of influence over the Republican Party. An alarming amount of influence that affects GOP policy and position across the board, from policy in the Middle East to global warming, pretty much everything. And Bush is one of them. Really, most of what the GOP asserts about how this country should be run is incomprehensible without an understanding of fundamentalist influence and belief. Nonetheless, the media, and the Democrats, too, I might add, continue to behave as though this weren't the case, that Republican policy is formulated in a reasonable way. The reality is that lunacy prevails.

I've really got to read Phillips' new book.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$