I came across some encouraging news while browsing over at the Christian Worldview Network. (That's a sentence I never expected to write.) Someone named Coach Dave Daubenmire has written an open letter to James Dobson begging him to form a third party for conservative Christians and to draft Roy Moore, the disgraced former chief justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama, to run for president in 2008.
Daubenmire's proposal, I'm sorry to say, is not likely to happen. Dobson, the founder and emperor of the Focus on the Family media conglomerate, is more than a bit batty, but he's not dumb, and he's not as politically naive as Coach Dave is. Dobson is capable of simple electoral arithmetic, so he knows what a right-wing Ralph Nader could do for his side.
But even if the coach's call for a right-wing Christian party isn't likely to get anywhere, it's notable for the anger and frustration it shows that many right-wing Christians feel toward the GOP:
Christian voters are disgusted. … Many are standing on the sidelines waiting to help. They will never return to the Republican Party. Certainly you feel the frustration, the exasperation bubbling up in America.
These disgusted Christians are not going to mobilize to help Karl Rove win the mid-term elections in 2006, or to elect another Republican president in 2008. That doesn't mean, of course, that they're suddenly going to start voting along with "Tree huggin’, love makin’, pro choicen, gay weddin’, widespread diggin’ hippies like me." They might write in Roy Moore or some other god-fearing Confederate revivalist.* More likely, they won't vote at all.
Not voting at all would be the logical conclusion of Daubenmire's reasoning. "They say politics is the art of compromise," he writes. "Is that what Christ died for — compromise?"** No compromising for Daubenmire. And therefore no politics. (And no citizenship, either, based on the way he reads 2 Corinthians 6:14, "Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers …")
Anyway, some highlights from Coach Dave's rant against the Republicans:
Dr. Dobson, it is time to build an ark. It is time to leave the Republican Party. Jesus will not ride into town on an elephant.
… it has become increasingly apparent that the core values of the Republican Party are not Christian values. It is time all Christian leaders ask ourselves if it is possible for God to bless a polluted party. Make no mistake, the Republican Party is polluted.
… the Republican Party has become a conglomerate of special interests. Christians are now standing shoulder-to-shoulder in a party that supports homosexual candidates, pro-abortion candidates, and those who support homosexual marriage.
… the Republicans Party is not interested in promoting Christian values.
… Christians, through the Republican Party, have supported the likes of Bob Ney, Mark Foley, Bob Taft, Duke Cunningham, and Arlen Specter. … Do they represent the values of Christ?
Let’s look down the road two years. Who will the Republican Party nominate for president? … Will we once again be forced to vote for a man who has a “form of godliness, but denies the power thereof”?
That last bit seems to be a direct shot at the man the Republicans nominated at their last two conventions. Interesting. Saint Dubya may be losing the confidence of the Worldview Network crowd.
"Republicanism is making Christianity look bad," Daubenmire writes. I wholeheartedly agree. Daubenmire's proposed alternative, however, is to make Christianity look even worse.
His idea of a "Christian" party seems wholly devoid of what I regard as essential Christian values — justice, liberation, compassion, solidarity, magnanimity, stewardship, love — and the formation of such a party would be Very Bad for American Christianity. But it would also cut off the party of corporate elites from the electoral base they have conned into supporting them for the past 30 years. Without the knee-jerk support of that bloc of voters, it would be impossible for those elites to maintain their grip on power. And that would be Very Good for America.
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* One of Daubenmire's goofier points is his claim that drafting Roy Moore to run as the "Christian" candidate for president would unite white and black Christians. He imagines that black Christian voters who "love Jesus, but … don't want to be on the Republican team" would enthusiastically rally in support of a CHINO racist like Moore, who spent a good chunk of 2004 fighting to preserve segregationist, Jim Crow language in Alabama's state constitution.
** Daubenmire is correct here, sort of. Christ's death was not a "compromise." It was an unconditional surrender.
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