Wonder-working power: the roots and the reach of the religious right.

• Author: McCarthy, Daniel
• Position: In Defense of the Religious Right: Why Conservative Christians Are the Lifeblood of the Republican Party and Why That Terrifies the Democrats - The Theocons : Secular America Under Siege - Book review

In Defense of the Religious Right: Why Conservative Christians Are the Lifeblood of the Republican Party and Why That Terrifies the Democrats, by Patrick Hynes, Nashville: Nelson Current, 288 pages, $24.99

The Theocons : Secular America Under Siege, by Damon Linker, New York: Doubleday, 304 pages, $26

THE CHRISTIAN Coalition was instrumental in the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, but before long its power seemed to be waning. In 1996 Bill Clinton--the draft-dodging, pot-smoking, abortion-rights-supporting womanizer who embodied everything Christian conservatives abhorred--handily won re-election against Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.). Two years later, Republicans lost ground in Congress as they prepared to impeach Clinton, and Paul Weyrich, the man who had first suggested to Jerry Falwell the name "Moral Majority," adapted a phrase from Timothy Leary: It was time, he told Christian conservatives, to "turn off," "tune out," and "drop out."

Weyrich wasn't the only influential Christian conservative driven to rethink his movement's prospects in the late '90s. In the year of Clinton's re-election, a federal district court ruling to permit physician-assisted suicide shook the editors of the Catholic journal First Things so violently that they began to ask whether judicial tyranny had destroyed democracy itself. This led to the magazine's November 1996 symposium, "The End of Democracy?," in which contributors concluded that civil disobedience, even revolution, might soon be justified. "America is not and, please God, will never become Nazi Germany," editor Richard John Neuhaus wrote, "but it is only blind hubris that denies it can happen here and, in peculiarly American ways, may be happening here."

Times have changed. You won't find much sympathy at First Things for those who today use such language in the context of President Bush's war on civil liberties. And Christian conservatives no longer feel so despondent about democracy. The president has assiduously cultivated their support, an effort rewarded in 2004 when nearly 80 percent of evangelical Protestant voters and 52 percent of Catholics voters cast their ballots for Bush.

In the wake of that election we've seen an avalanche of literature purporting to explain the revival of the religious right and its implications for the country. Patrick Hynes' In Defense of the Religious Right celebrates Christian conservatives' power, even while claiming Christian conservatives are harried and besieged, ever on the defensive against an encroaching liberalism. Damon Linker, on the other hand, argues in The Theocons that it's the religious right, and the First Things coterie in particular, that's doing the encroaching. Each gets only half the story right. Hynes fails to prove that Christian conservatives are the persecuted majority he thinks they are, while Linker is persuasive about the aggressive agenda of the religious right. But Hynes better explains where Christian conservatives' real power lies--not with a Catholic elite, as Linker would have it, but with the mass of evangelical voters loyal to the party of Lincoln.

Hynes is a campaign consultant--in the words of his dust jacket, "a hack with an impressive record of electing Republicans." According to his book, "the GOP is, perhaps, God's Own Party," not only because religious voters today prefer Republicans but because the party originally arose from the Second Great Awakening and the abolitionist movement. Abolition itself, he writes, "was the result of Christians imposing their moral values on their fellow Americans." Republican Christians, that is: Hynes emphasizes the typically Democratic affiliation of those Southern Christians who supported the peculiar institution, though he doesn't note that some of the...