Ed Kilgore, whose main gig is at the Washington Monthly, had some good news and some bad news on Wednesday for lefty readers at his home away from home, Talking Points Memo. Kilgore noted “promising signs in 2014” that “conservative Christian paranoia” was diminishing, but warned that it won’t be long before religious-right bigwigs start “lashing their troops into a frenzy of fear at the prospect of another liberal president.”
The middle of Kilgore’s piece assessed the appeal that the 2016 Republican presidential aspirants might have for Christian conservatives. He touched on pretty much every rumored candidate, from Ted Cruz (“frequently deploys as his warm-up act his father Rafael Cruz, a fiery conservative evangelical minister who believes Christians must ‘take back society’ from ‘the progressives’”) to Scott Walker (“a conservative evangelical who often speaks of carrying out his anti-union, pro-corporate agenda on instructions from the Almighty”) to Rick Perry (“has long enjoyed close relationships with crypto-dominionists and radical self-styled Christian Zionists”) to Rick Santorum (“on occasion [has] hinted that mainline Protestantism had been captured by Satan”).
That left the first and last sections of the article for Kilgore’s blasts at the religious right (emphasis added):
For both alarmed non-Christians and embarrassed moderate-to-progressive Christians, there were promising signs in 2014 that conservative Christian paranoia and determination to wage spiritual battles against “liberal secular culture” might finally be abating. Pope Francis has led the way in encouraging believers to look inward with self-criticism instead of outward with self-righteousness in encountering the world. As unlikely a voice as the Southern Baptist Convention’s Russell Moore has lashed his co-religionists for aligning with political reactionaries in denying the need for racial progress. And even Bill O’Reilly appears to have declared victory in his annual Christian self-pity party, the War on Christmas, which implicitly compares the faithful to the persecuted saints and martyrs of the ages for having to suffer the torment of “Happy Holidays” greetings…
…Even if the supply side of theocratic impulses in America is abating a bit, the demand side will boom in 2015 thanks to a large and noisy Republican presidential nominating fight in which Christian Right resources will be a fiercely contested prize…
It is entirely possible that Christian Right activists will fatally split among different candidates, just as they did in 2008 and 2012…
But there’s little risk of a sworn enemy of the Christian Right winning the nomination. Every “mentioned” GOP candidate for 2016 favors making abortions illegal again, and if there are any who dissent from the latter-day conservative litmus-test position defining “religious freedom” as justifying defiance of anti-discrimination laws, they have been very quiet about it…
So it’s pretty likely conservative Christian leaders will be making a less-than-joyful noise in the New Year, lashing their troops into a frenzy of fear at the prospect of another liberal president and the hope of reshaping the country according to the Gospel of the Day Before Yesterday.
