Quote of the Day- Andrew Sullivan on the GOP as a Religious Movement

I have said many times on this blog and elsewhere that the beginning of the end of the Republican Party as a rational fact based political party began when the Christian Right infused itself into the GOP and the party began to lose grasp of the concept of separation of church and state. Over the intervening 20 years, the cancer of religion intertwining with politics has metastasized in the GOP. The party has now become a fundamentalist based quasi-religious movement just as dangerous in its own way as Islamic fundamentalism. Andrew Sullivan sums it up well with these comments:

[T]he GOP, deep down, is behaving as a religious movement, not as a political party, and a radical religious movement at that. . . . . Most theo-political movements need an anti-Christ of some sort; and Obama - even though he is the most demonstrably Christian president since Carter - fills the role.

And so this political deadlock conceals a religious war at its heart. Why after all should one abandon or compromise sacred truths? And for those whose Christianity can only be sustained by denial of modern complexity, of scientific knowledge, and of what scholarly studies of the Bible's origins have revealed, this fusion of political and spiritual lives into one seamless sensibility and culture, is irresistible. And public reminders of modernity - that, say, many Americans do not celebrate Christmas, that gay people have human needs, that America will soon be a majority-minority country and China will overtake the US in GDP by mid-century - are terribly threatening.

But all these nuances do not therefore vanish. The gays don't disappear. China keeps growing. The population becomes browner and browner. Women's lives increasingly become individual choices not social fates. And this enrages and terrifies the fundamentalist even more. . . . .

That's how I explain the current GOP. It can only think in doctrines, because the alternative is living in a complicated, global, modern world they both do not understand and also despise.

My fear - and it has building for a decade and a half, because I've seen this movement up-close from within and also on the front lines of the marriage wars - is that once one party becomes a church with unchangeable doctrines, and once it has supplanted respect for institutions and civility with the radical pursuit of timeless doctrines and hatred of governing institutions, then our democracy is in grave danger.

I sincerely believe that our democracy is in grave danger and that it is those who claim to be the nation's strongest protectors who are in fact destroying the country.