Phillips, Kevin - American Theocracy

Chances are, by very virtue of your reading this book review at the Burnside Writer’s Collective, you contribute to the erosion of our national health. At least that’s what former Republican strategist, Kevin Phillips, would say, because he believes he knows what is wrong with our nation—and he’s not afraid to point fingers.

Philips book, American Theocracy: The Politics and Peril of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century is sometimes scathing and at other moments coolly analytical in its survey of dangers the author sees threatening America’s superpower status.

Part I examines the effects of America’s dependency on oil. Our industry, automobiles, and military have an insatiable appetite for oil. Phillips argues that this energy dependency gives “Big Oil” too much sway over our domestic and foreign policies. So at home we lax our environmental laws to accommodate oil drilling and abroad we resort to “international thuggery” to secure control of Iraq’s mostly untapped oil fields. “The war on terror?” “Importing democracy to the Middle East?” Phillips sees these as slogans to sell an imperialistic war.

In Part II: “Too Many Preachers”, Phillips takes aim at Christian Fundamentalism, a movement the he sees embodied by the Southern Baptist Convention, Pentecostals, and the charismatic movements. Phillips chronicles these denominations rise to prominence and how they increasingly shape national politics. Phillips charges the culture wars are provoked by radical Christians attempting to establish a theocracy—a Christian America governed by God’s rules. “Disenlightenment” is Phillip’s descriptor for the effect that these empowered believers have on our country: they value faith over science and a literal Armageddon over peace.

Phillips closes his diatribe with Part III, a reprimand about our national and individual debt. Phillips provides a valuable historical context at how debt played a role in the decline of England, Spain, and the Netherlands as superpowers. Phillips offers an undeniable outline of the depths of our national debt as well as our personal credit lodes. He argues that our increasing debt and decreasing hard industry has created a thin ice that will eventually give in under American largesse.

American Theocracy finds its value when Phillips is able to sustain his analytical voice—and he’s able to do so for dozens of pages at a time. His historical perspective on our oil dependency, the changing face of American religion, and our national debt demand attention. I’ll confess, as an evangelical with political tendencies a few notches right of centrist, this was uncomfortable stuff to read.

Even so, Phillips places important issues on the table, and he demands critical response.

However, when Phillips slips into his polemic voice the book, and he can sustain this tone for as long as he can be analytical, he becomes tedious and shrill. Phillips has open contempt for people of faith who are superstitious enough to subscribe to the Biblical creation account, the story of Noah’s Ark, or a dispensational interpretation of Revelation (as popularized by the Left Behind franchise.) Phillips seems to be in a rush to discredit Christianity and he seems aware of gaps in his arguments. Too often he tries to vault these gaps with clauses like, “Although the evidence is weak…” He appears on a mission to connect the dots against the legitimacy of Christianity and is willing to supply any missing points along the way.

Make no mistake; Kevin Phillip is too angry and biased to be an objective observer. But are there any takeaways in American Theocracy for the evangelical and fundamentalist Christian communities? I think so. This book provokes Christians to ask several poignant questions, such as:

- Have we developed what Phillip’s calls “American Exceptionalism”; a belief that America has an exclusive blessing from God? How does this belief influence our voting tendencies and foreign policy?

- Does our theology concerning the End Times make us overly tolerant of military interventions in the Middle East? (i.e., “The faster we get to Armageddon the faster we get to heaven.”)

- Are we susceptible to being manipulated by politicians who justify military interventions in the Middle East by using religious language?

- Should the political arena be our primary method of advancing God’s kingdom on Earth? Does Jesus truly expect that we establish an “American Theocracy?”

I won’t pretend to offer the final word on these questions. Instead, I will just note that in spite of all the book’s weaknesses, American Theocracy provides the agenda for an important conversation long overdue among Christians.

This review originally appeared at www.nappaland.com.