Republicans don't have a God problem, though I am becoming convinced that there are some conservatives who have a problem with God.
Kathleen Parker, in her latest column assails Republicans for allowing the "the evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy branch of the GOP" to what? Remain in the party? Have a seat at the table? Influence politicians?
Parker lets the mask slip, however, when she says " the GOP has surrendered its high ground to its lowest brows". Now it becomes clear. This is simply another attack by a self-described intellectual elite on a (sizeable) number of Americans who exasperate her.
I haven't set foot in a church in years, and have no desire to start. My religious views are, as Parker suggests they should be for all, "in the privacy of my heart", but to suggest that ours is the only way to conduct ourselves in the political sphere isn't just lunacy, it's damning conservatism to irrelevance.
Where is Ms. Parker's outrage over Barack Obama's plan to ensure that "we are all our brother's keeper", using the government to further his religious beliefs? Where is Parker's disgust at the formation of left-leaning religious/political groups like We Believe Ohio and We Believe Colorado? The Democrats are welcoming religious voters, yet Kathleen Parker thinks Republicans need to reject them?
You don't grow a party by becoming more exclusive. You don't win elections by alienating millions of Americans. Kathleen Parker is showing the right way to become irrelevant as a political party, and I can only assume that her intellectual vapidity is worth it as long as the movers and shakers in D.C. can view her as one of those "acceptable conservatives".
The GOP can be the party of religious diversity, but not at the expense of alienating evangelical Christians. Thomas Jefferson was as close to a non-believer as you could find among the Founders, but even he recognized that freedom of religion protected the rights of the religious as well as the non-believers. Jefferson's Statute for Religious Freedom was written in 1779, during the rise of the Baptist Church in his state. A decade earlier, the sheriff of Spotsylvania County had jailed four Baptist preachers for 40 days. In 1771, Edmund Pendleton (head of the Caroline County Court and member of the House of Burgesses), watched as the clerk of his court dragged Baptist minister John Waller down the courthouse steps, his head pounding "against the ground, sometimes up, sometimes down" and handed him over to the local sheriff. After the sheriff whipped the preacher, Waller "in a gore of blood went back singing praise to God, mounted the stage and preached with a great deal of liberty."*
If Jefferson felt that "evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy" Christians shouldn't have a say in politics, one would think he would have mentioned it. Instead, Jefferson and the founders explicitly protected the religion and speech of radical Christians as well as non-believers. Perhaps it was because even Jefferson realized that the push for liberty had started with the human desire to worship God as one pleased, and that religious freedom had led to greater human freedom. Kathleen Parker may want to exorcise religion from the political sphere, but she should at least acknowledge that if our own Founders had done so, this country would be a far different place... one undeniably worse than it is today.
If Kathleen Parker had advocated coming up with a compelling secular argument for things like traditional marriage and pro-life positions, I would heartily agree with her. It's not enough for a Republican to base their arguments on religion. Conservative principles shouldn't work only for evangelical Christians. Conservatism needs to work for every American, but that's a matter of messaging, not changing what it means to be a conservative.
*The Unknown American Revolution, Gary Nash
