The Christian Right and the "stab-in-the-back"

Michelle Goldberg of Salon has just published a very worthwhile book on the Christian Right in America, called Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (2006). In an excerpt that appear in Saving Securlar Society In These Times 05/16/06, she writes:

It would take a national disaster, or several of them, for all these bulwarks [of law and constitutional government] to crumble and for Christian nationalists to truly "take the land," as Michael Farris, president of the evangelical Patrick Henry College, put it. Historically, totalitarian movements have been able to seize state power only when existing authorities prove unable to deal with catastrophic challenges—economic meltdown, security failures, military defeat — and people lose their faith in the legitimacy of the system. ...

The breakdown in the system could also be subtler. Many experts have warned that America's debt is unsustainable and that economic crisis could be on the horizon. If there is a hard landing — due to an oil shock, a burst housing bubble, a sharp decline in the value of the dollar, or some other crisis — interest rates would shoot up, leaving many people unable to pay their floating-rate mortgages and credit card bills. Repossessions and bankruptcies would follow. The resulting anger could fuel radical populist movements of either the left or the right — more likely the right, since it has a far stronger ideological infrastructure in place in most of America.

Military disaster may also exacerbate such disaffection. America’s war in Iraq seems nearly certain to come to an ignominious end. The real victims of failure there will be Iraqi, but many Americans will feel embittered, humiliated and sympathetic to the stab-in-the-back rhetoric peddled by the right to explain how Bush’s venture has gone so horribly wrong. It was the defeat in World War I, after all, that created the conditions for fascism to grow in Germany. (my emphasis)

Another excerpt from the book appears in Salon under the title "Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism" 05/12/06.

She also discusses her book with others at last week's TPM Cafe. This is (apparently) her opening post, and this is a list of all the posts in that series.

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