"There has never been anything like it in our history,"
said Princeton historian Sean Wilentz. "'God's Own Party'
now really is just that."
The new GOP does not seem to be sitting well with the
American people as a whole, or even with many traditional
Republicans. Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine is only the latest
non-AFP-type Republican to decide to leave politics and/or
the party. In the new ruling class, "revival tent"
proponents are driving out the old "big tent" advocates. And
a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll
shows that 40 percent of American adults think less of the
party after watching its transformation this electoral
season.
The American Faith Party is a doctrinally schizophrenic
coalition bound by faith in the power of biblical values to
create a better country; by fear of federal power,
especially that of the federal courts and President Barack
Obama and his administration; and by fear of rising Islamic
political power around the world.
The AFP unites Catholic traditionalists who especially
revere the papal hierarchy; evangelical, fundamentalist and
charismatic Protestants; some strands of Judaism, including
those ultra-orthodox on social issues and Jews for whom an
Israel with biblical borders and a capital in Jerusalem is a
spiritual imperative, not just a matter of diplomatic
balance in the Middle East; and Mormons, who ironically
aren't regarded as Christians by most other members of the
coalition. Romney, a devout Mormon, is their man.
The four still-standing Republican presidential candidates
are all AFP members in good standing on most of the party's
key agenda items. The GOP platform is sure to feature all of
them, including opposition to abortion and gay marriage;
measures to counter what Republicans regard as attacks on
religious liberty; expressions of fear about the extent of
federal power, especially from the courts, on social and
medical issues; libertarian economic policies that limit
regulation and taxes (for religious conservatives and
economic libertarians share a common enemy: government);
denunciations of Islamic political power; and support for
Israel. (Ron Paul is a dissenter on the last two points.)
All the candidates, including Paul, adhere to the AFP's
central operational tenet: that professing your own faith --
once verboten in American politics -- is a necessary
precondition to being taken seriously.
In the American Faith Party, in other words, every day
begins with a prayer breakfast, a public ritual that used to
occur only once a year.
Religious parties are familiar phenomena in most of the
world. Europe has Christian Democrats in every country.
Egypt has the Muslim Brotherhood. But the Bill of Rights ban
on the establishment of religion and religious tests pushed
American parties away from such overt identification.
Historians say that never before has the U.S. had a party
whose central identity and avowed cause was the profession
of religious faith in politics.
A generation in the making and like the original Republican
Party it has supplanted, the AFP is the product of a
fundamental moral conflict -- in this case, over the
relative roles of church and state, and over the role of
religion in guiding public policy.
Ronald Reagan began the process a generation ago, reaching
out to evangelical, Bible Belt Protestants, who had shied
away from politics ever since the Scopes "Monkey Trial" in
Tennessee in the 1920s. In Reagan's case, the motivating
force was the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision supporting a woman's
right to an abortion, which led Catholics to ally themselves
with conservative Protestants.
To be sure, there have been other avowedly religious
presidential candidates in recent years, among them Pat
Robertson, a televangelist, in 1988 and Mike Huckabee, a
preacher in his spare time, in 2008.
But never before has the entire party essentially been
singing from the hymnal. Candidates in 2012 who did not do
so, such as Jon Huntsman and Herman Cain, went nowhere;
implausible entrants such as Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry
went further than they would have in an earlier era of the
Republican Party.
As seen from strongholds such as Steubenville, the new
party is built in equal measure on hope and fear. Its
leaders and adherents deny their goal is theocracy and say
they only want religious freedoms protected and an
acknowledgement that biblical faith and morals were central
to the founders' vision of America -- and must be central
again if America is to survive at all.
There's enough resonance to their concern about the
secularization of American culture to give their grievances
credibility and even populist nobility. "When they frame
their cause in terms of religious liberty, that's something
that Americans agree with," said Wilentz. "That approach
creates an inspiring sense of mission."
According to historians, the closest entity akin to the new
AFP was the anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant Know-Nothing Party
of the early 19th century. "They were all Protestants, but
they were entirely about what they were against, not what
they were for," said author and historian Michael Beschloss.
The Prohibition and civil rights movements were
church-based, but their objectives weren't per se religious,
said Wilentz.
To the parishioners of St. Peter's in Steubenville, this
history is beside the point. Their point is that government
alone can and will never nourish the proper regard for the
sanctity of life, the dignity of humanity and the role of
faith in creating moral character that Americans need to
govern themselves in a democracy.
"We can't ever think that a fetus is somehow undesirable or
even disposable," said Justine Schmiesing, a mother of seven
who noted that she does not "contracept." "We don't want
government to act in ways that ignore life, and that is why
we are speaking up."
Posted: 03/05/12