Walter C. Uhler: 'Crackpot Christianity and America's current moral degeneration'

With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil -- that takes religion.
-- Steven Weinberg

Kevin Phillips is certainly correct when he claims that "the radical side of U.S. religion has embraced cultural antimodernism, war hawkishness, Armageddon prophecy, and in the case of conservative fundamentalists, a demand for government by literal biblical interpretation." [American Theocracy, p. 100]


Readers of Michelle Goldberg's new book, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, can see Crackpot Christianity at work today, subverting America's liberal democracy in an attempt to impose Christian "Dominion" - essentially southern political and religious culture -- over the entire country. According to Ms. Goldberg, "Dominionism is derived from a theocratic sect called Christian Reconstructionism, which advocates replacing American civil law with Old Testament biblical law." [p. 13].

"it is difficult to escape the conclusion that America's Crackpot Christians are no less delusional than the Islamic jihadists who expect virgins in paradise as the reward for their martyrdom. (One scholar of ancient Semitic languages believes that the Koran's "virgin" is a mistranslation of the term "hur," which should be translated to read "white raisin," a prized delicacy in the ancient Near East. See Alexander Stille, "Scholars Are Quietly Offering New theories of the Koran," The New York Times, March 2, 2002)

But an understanding of their delusion goes far to explain the election of a Crackpot Christian as President of the United States, America's subsequent invasion of Iraq for the sake of oil and Israel, and the current indifference to the tremendous suffering precipitated there by the United States -- all of which has resulted in the precipitous collapse of America's moral stature around the world."