Tuesday, February 21, 2017
Religion and the Radical Right
In her 25
April 2013 article Press Sanitizes or Ignores Howard Phillips’ Role in
Using Religion to Radicalize the Political Right, Rachel Tabachnick at
Talk to Action notes the key was uniting Free Market Christians with the
white supremacists in the Constitution Party and the Christian
Reconstructionists now behind Ron Paul initiatives through The
Conservative Caucus. The New York Times article on Phillips, says
Tabachnick, makes no mention of his party’s mission “to restore American
jurisprudence to its Biblical foundations.”
“Like
former Rep. Ron Paul, with whom he worked closely for many years,” says
Tabachnick, “Phillips was at the nexus of the free market gospel and
authoritarian Christianity, using biblical inerrancy as the
justification for both social and economic policy. The redefining of
libertarianism and ‘religious liberty’ as part of a theocratic agenda,”
she says, “is a driving force behind the radicalization of today’s
political Right and its ‘Constitutional Conservatism’.”
As
quoted by Tabachnick, author Sarah Diamond wrote in 1991, “Howard
Phillips correctly sees third party building as a long-term proposition,
and he’s banking on the kind of economic downturns that will give his
message greater resonance. ‘My hope is that there are circumstances in
which people are so upset at the way things are going that without even
necessarily knowing or buying into all of the things that we advocate or
believe, they will support us in protest against the things they
disapprove’.”
