Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts Faith and Threatens America

If you have already concluded that a Christian Republican is an oxymoron, that conclusory statements supported only by anecdotal evidence constitutes a pursuasive argument, that debate is about who can shout and complain the loudest, then this book may be for you. Otherwise, do not waste your time with this book.I purschased this book as a part of a book group looking for a Christian/Evangelical perspective on current political issues in order to challenge and stretch ourselves. After a review of multiple titles, we settled on this book only to be extremely disappointed.Mr. Balmer tries to intimidate criticism of his book in his conclusion by asserting that he fully anticipates that the Religious Right establishment will attack him personally rather than his arguments in an attempt to discredit him. Unfortunately, this is absurd because Balmer utterly fails to provide any actual arguments. This is because his book is nothing more than angry criticism.Balmer does nothing more than set up straw men which he easily knocks down with his brand of righteous anger. But more disturbing is that his criticism are meaningless because they make no meaningful distinctions, i.e., they can be used to tear down anything and everything regardless of its value or correctness--including any position he might propose as better. But then, Balmer utterly fails to present any other position.Balmer proposes that Christian Republicans use selective literalism of the Bible to support their positions even though Balmer does the same thing. Balmer than oversimplifies his opponents. And then further down, Balmer goes on to advocate what amounts to selective complexity saying his own positions are more complex. In short, he is intellectually dishonest, an intellectual lightweight out of his depth, and does a disservice to all interested in discussing these issues.Let me provide some examples lest you think I did not read the book and to hopefully provide a more useful review...First, regarding selective literalism and my allusion to selective complexity in Mr. Balmer's book, Balmer asserts that there is nothing in the Bible regarding abortion. p. 5. He then goes on to discuss how he believes this to be an attempt by the Religious Right to avoid divorce issues which were on the rise in the 70s. p. 6. His conclusion is that if the Religious Right were so literal about the Bible, why aren't they trying to outlaw divorce. p. 10-11. This logic is faulty, simplistic and misleading.The conclusion includes basic assumptions about the role of government which he does not discuss. Even assuming that Balmer is correct that the Bible is more clear about the right and wrong of divorce than abortion, it does not follow that this "literalism" mandates governmental action and force of law following those things which are "clearest." The application of the force of the state behind a policy is more complex. It includes consideration of the basic philosophy of the role government in society and other such issues. But without even going into that, the basic rebuttal to Mr. Balmer from a Biblical view (which is what Balmer is trying to address) is that divorce is certainly bad, but it was also allowed by Moses.Balmer has a very good point in that the Religious Right often tries to externalize the bad guys (p. 10), but his assertion that the Religious Right is selectively literal actually comes down to very different views about the role of the government in such issues. As a person with a background in the Religious Right in multiple states and cultures (e.g., Virginia, Italy, and Colorado), the Religious Right is often concerned with poverty, divorce, and public education, but they don't necessarily see them as all the purview of the government. In other words, it is more complex than what Balmer superficially represents.Which brings up Balmer's selective complexity. p. 18. Mr. Balmer laments the abortion issue being reduced to bumper stickers so that he can defend is refusal to oppose abortion. In short, he says that it is more complex than just being against murder. He starts wanting to draw distinctions between moral issues and legal issues. p. 19. He starts talking about federalism and state's rights. p. 19. These are all courtesies he failed to extend to the opposing position.By the way, this is also called setting up a straw man. He oversimplifies the other side so that he can easily counter it. He then makes his own side sound much more involved and complicated so that it is harder to counter his own position. This is not honest intellectual consideration of the issues, it is setting up straw men.Second, so that you will not think that I only ready the first chapter, I will now address a later issue--education. Mr. Balmer decries the homeschool and private school movement as fundamentally destructive of democracy. p. 107-108. In short, Balmer asserts that since the beginning of the 19th century, common schools have taught democracy to our citizens. p. 107. He uses this as support for stopping the migration out of schools by private and home schoolers. But his argument is altogether faulty. The very changes in the school system which Balmer admits are the catalyst for the private/home school movements began to take place in schools in the mid 20th century. pp. 87-91. In other words, the tradition of public schools since the 19th century was that they allowed or mandated prayer, they taught the Bible, they taught decidedly Christian ideals, and they even taught creationism. It is of those schools, the praying, insulated, unchallenged, and myopic schools to which Balmer refers when he says they "served to make America what it is" and "provided a laboratory for democracy." pp. 93, 107. Balmer therefore has no real basis to assert that the changes which he likes have not already destroyed the public schools' democratizing influence. And I am not asserting that he is wrong, only that his book is bad because he fails to even address these fundamental issues while drawing conclusions based on assumptions he never addresses.Balmer's straw men extends to his use of certain figures in the Religious Right to make his points. Unfortunately, being personal or using one person as a specific example says nothing about the Religious Right as a whole. Balmer instead often takes one person, on the extreme and tries to paint the picture of all people on the Religious Right as the same. For example, Gary North and Rushdoony on page 64-65. Balmer's tone assumes his reader is being introduced to these figures for the first time and they are certainly on the extreme of the conservative Christians. Even so, I have not found a lot of anti-Semitism in their writing as suggested by Balmer. p. 64. And that then raises the issue of whether Balmer has accurately portrayed these people he writes about. As a person who has paid attention to, or read the writings of, a lot of the central figures of the Religious Right, he is often wrong about the few people I am familiar with, and because his arguments are otherwise basically dishonest and extremely biased, he has no credibility when describing them those figures.Take Rick Scarborough... pp. 37-40 for example Balmer has some great criticism of that guy in which I heartily join, but he is not the Religious Right, he is one pastor of one church in Texas. And more than that, I can no longer trust Balmer that he is giving me an accurate picture of the guy. He is instead at most a straw man because he is the perfect person to set up Balmer's criticisms, he is the example that makes Balmer's point. However, a true argument which is addressing the argument instead of particular persons, takes the best of the other side and hits it head on. Balmer only cherry picks the examples he can beat up and the arguments are therefore lame, inaccurate, and useless for the larger debate.These are only some of the myriad notes in the margin of my copy of the book. Suffice it to say that the length of this review is indicative of what I could write on almost all of the issues raised by Balmer and other reviewers. But I will relent hoping that I have presented something someone might be able to use in their search for a satisfying book on the issues.

True to his word, Balmer writes as a jilted lover. He wastes no time in launching into an account the Religious Right's fixation on abortion and homosexuality, which he sees as paradigmatic of what is wrong with the Religious Right. According to Balmer, their fixation is not a function of religious or moral conviction so much as a result of political expediency.The social evil against which conservative Christians railed most vehemently was divorce until it was demonstrated that conservative Christians led the nation in divorce rate (they also abandoned evangelical Christian president, Jimmy Carter in favor of divorcee Ronald Reagan). "To get from divorce to abortion in the early 1980s, the leaders of the Religious Right resorted to a favorite evangelical redoubt, the RUSE OF SELECTIVE LITERALISM. The Religious Right simply ignored or explained away Jesus' admonitions about divorce and focused instead on a political issue that had traction at the time." (Emphasis added) 8."Selective literalism continues to serve an important function for the Religious Right. It allows them to locate sin outside of the evangelical subculture (or so they think) by designating as especially egregious those dispositions and behaviors, homosexuality and abortion, that they believe characteristic of others, not themselves. This externalization of the enemy is a favorite tactic of fundamentalists everywhere, be they Muslim fundamentalists of the members of the Religious Right." 10.Other issues championed by the Religious Right strike Balmer as equally disingenuous and/or misguided:Prayer in schools -- Jesus criticized those who made prayer into a spectator sport - "go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father."Creationism -- Until the intelligent design creationists "can devise experiments consistent with the scientific method to test their claims, they should stop parading as scientists." 140. "Intelligent design is religion, not science and the proper venue for the propagation of faith is the home or the church, not the university." 138.Home schooling -- "For much of the twentieth century, evangelicals found comfort within their subculture as a place of refuge from the outside world, which they came increasingly to regard as both corrupt and corrupting. The homeschool movement and the impulse to send children to religious schools merely represent an extension of that fortress mentality." 107.Anti-environmentalism - "for decades, evangelicals have neglected the environment because it seemed to them unimportant in their grander scheme of biblical interpretation." 145. Now groups such as the Interfaith Council for Environmental Stewardship which is a coalition of Religious Right leaders aiming to counteract the environmental movement, with support from James Dobson, Charles Colson among other high profile of the Religious Right, simply "echo the pro-business and antiregulatory sentiments of political conservatives." 154.Torture - unconscionable silence. [Who Would Jesus Torture?]Perhaps most disturbing of all is how "Leaders of the Religious Right [Dobson and others] have expressed their disdain for toleration and for pluralism itself." 90. "Their ideology, laced as it is with the rhetoric of militarism, represents a betrayal of the faith. The shameless pursuit of affluence and power and political influence has led the Religious Right into shady alliances and has brought dishonor to the gospel." 189.Balmer is one of a growing number of evangelical Christians that are speaking out against the curse of a militant religiosity in America that calls itself Christian. It's about time.