For the second time this year, former Senator John Danforth (he is also an Episcopal minister) has bizarrely railed against the influence of conservative Christians on the Republican party. The first time was in a New York Times op-ed less than five months after the Republican party’s sweeping victories in the 2004 elections. The second time was last week at the “Bill Clinton School of Public Service,” at the University of Arkansas. He said that the Republican party (the party of George Bush, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Paul Wolfowitz, Mike Bloomberg and Dennis Hopper) had been “taken over” by “the Christian right.”

My first reflex would be to lock him in a room with a couple of those C-Span callers who claim the Jews have taken over the Bush adminstration, and not let them out until they come to an amicable understanding (perhaps it wouldn’t take very long, on consideration).

Richard John Neuhaus of FIRST THINGS has a more reasoned (and more devastating) reaction:

[Danforth] deplored the fact that the Republican Party has been “taken over by Christian conservatives, the Christian right.” These are the people who think “they understand God’s truth, and they embody it politically.” The great danger of religion in politics is that it is divisive and produces results such as we see in “Iraq, Northern Ireland, and Palestine.”

John Danforth is an ordained Episcopal priest and a good and decent man. It is a pity that he is letting himself be used in this way. Or maybe this is what he really believes. If so, he is more than a little confused. He calls for “people of faith” to involve themselves in politics, but then seems to add the proviso that they must be people who share his understanding of faith. Or, if they have a different understanding, they should not let their faith impinge on their politics.

Of course there are kooks on the right who are as crazy as kooks on the left. I have written extensively on the wrongheadedness of Christian “reconstructionists” and “theonomists” (see, for instance, “Why Wait for the Kingdom? The Theonomist Temptation,” First Things, May 1990). They are marginal and carefully contained. To describe Christian conservatives in general as people who think they know God’s truth and embody it politically is a leftist slur unworthy of John Danforth.

As for his examples of religious “divisiveness,” he surely knows that with Iraq and Palestine we are dealing with a very different religion. Christians in politics represent the religion that provides the foundational ideas of a just and free society - as in “Render to Caesar . . .” and “We holds these truths to be self-evident . . .” The reference to Northern Ireland is egregiously inapt. In terms of tyranny and mayhem, the atavistic tribal thuggery in Northern Ireland is hardly a world-class conflict. Moreover, the violence has been declining for years and only held our attention for so long because it was happening in the Christian West and was so atypical of the way Christians engage one another in political contest. As for Northern Ireland’s relevance to the American scene, Mr. Danforth surely knows that the “Christian conservatives” in this country whom he so unfairly caricatures are evangelical Protestants and Catholics making common cause - the very parties that are in conflict in Northern Ireland. In short, his example makes a point exactly opposite to what he intends. One might think that Mr. Danforth would rejoice in the growing amity and cooperation between Protestants and Catholics in America.

Again, almost everybody agrees that John Danforth is a decent man who has rendered valuable service to his country. I hope he will think again and not continue on the course of acting as a shill for proponents of a naked public square who would exclude from public life the very “people of faith” whom he encourages to become politically engaged.

Danforth has evidently come a long way since he endeavored to buck up Clarence Thomas during those horrible confirmation hearings of 1991 by playing Onward Christian Soldiers on a tape recorder.

I wonder what’s on his iPod now?

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