DAMON LINKER

Praise for
THE THEOCONS:

"Illuminating"
—The Nation

"Important in assessing a fanaticism on the intellectual right."
—Dissent

"An engaging and invaluably informative account of the roots of theoconservatism."
—Reason

"The fact that a former editor of the religious right journal FIRST THINGS has taken pen in hand to detail the movement's attempts to fashion what he sees as a theocratic governing philosophy for the United States gives THE THEOCONS a particular urgency. As Damon Linker further argues, too much of this has been ignored by the mainstream media."
—Kevin Phillips, author of
American Theocracy


"THE THEOCONS is invaluable as firsthand research, alarming in its implications for the future of American freedom, and devastating as a critique of the theocratic ambitions of those who now control the Republican Party."
—Andrew Sullivan


"THE THEOCONS constitutes a major step toward reclaiming the liberal heritage that has made America great."
—Alan Wolfe, author of
The Future of Liberalism


"This is a surprising and important book. With the rise of the religious right and its newfound influence in Washington, most attention has focused on evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants. But, as Damon Linker shows, the influential intellectual strategy for reshaping American society along theological lines has been mainly developed by Catholic conservatives. Sharply but with care, Linker lays bare the development of this strategy and the challenge it poses to a liberal understanding of our constitutional and social order. THE THEOCONS is required reading for anyone interested in the American political scene today."
—Mark Lilla, author of The Stillborn God


"What a story Damon Linker has to tell in THE THEOCONS. His insights into the attack on America's secular politics come from a former insider and they are scary."
—Isaac Kramnick, Cornell University


"Linker's literate, reasonable chronicle and assessment of the theocons . . . is one of the most enlightening critiques of the Religious Right to date."
—Ray Olson, Booklist


“A former editor of the principal ‘theocon’ journal First Things, now an apostate, warns that the religious zealotry of his one-time colleagues is a danger to American democracy. [Linker] takes us through the theocons’s involvement in (and reaction to) some current social issues and events -- the Terri Schiavo case, stem-cell research, the Darwin debate, gay marriage and their central concern: abortion. [T]he theocons . . . envision a sort of fantasy ‘50s world in which men are in charge, women stay at home, gays go to therapy, everyone attends church on Sunday and Christian principles pervade the marketplace and the corridors of power.”
—Kirkus Reviews

An essential history of the influential men who have spearheaded the movement to erode the wall separating church and state.

Beginning as far-left radicals during the 1960s, the theocons in Damon Linker’s book (including Richard John Neuhaus, Michael Novak, and George Weigel) gradually transitioned to conservatism when they grew frustrated with the failures of the decade’s revolutionary goals. Linker shows how, starting during the Reagan administration, they worked to forge a Christian alliance between Evangelical Protestants and Conservative Catholics. By injecting the language of faith into political life, this movement appealed to a wide swath of voters and ultimately played a central role in the election of George W. Bush. THE THEOCONS is an absorbing and revelatory look at an ideological crusade that every American needs to know about.

What a difference two years can make. Following the 2004 election, Richard John Neuhaus and his fellow theoconservatives rejoiced, convinced that President Bush’s re-election victory with over fifty percent of the popular vote vindicated their cause and confirmed their arguments about the incorrigibly Christian character of the nation. The theocons considered the election a watershed—a sign that the country had turned a corner in the culture wars, with the social-conservative side having finally acquired the momentum that would lead at long last to victory.

The results of the 2006 election left a very different impression. The loss of both houses of Congress to the Democrats has been interpreted by many left-of-center commentators as a repudiation of President Bush’s entire agenda. That may be going too far. Just as analysts now recognize that Bush’s victory in 2004 had less to do with “moral values” than it did with the electorate’s fear of terrorism, so it seems that the president’s party suffered in 2006 above all else from the continuing and deepening chaos in Iraq, not from Bush’s alliance with the religious right.

Which is not to say that this alliance has benefited him much in recent years. On the contrary, Bush’s seemingly irreversible slide in the polls began in March 2005, with the decision of the president and the Republican Congress to reward theoconservatives for their support by intervening in the wrenching right-to-die case of Terri Schiavo—an act that disgusted all but the most extreme opponents of euthanasia. Likewise, Bush’s nomination of the evangelical Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court—a second ham-handed act of fealty to the religious right—blew up in the president’s face, as nearly every other faction of the conservative movement openly and adamantly demanded that he withdraw his nominee and appoint a formidable legal scholar and intellectual in her place. During the Miers flap, the theocons largely held their fire, placing loyalty to the president, and deference to his judgment, ahead of what they always insisted was their primary concern—placing high-powered conservative minds on the nation’s highest court. Such loyalty and deference continued through 2006, but it ultimately proved inadequate to the task of persuading the grassroots of the religious right to fall in line behind the president and his party that November. By then, not even the prospect of losing control of one or both houses of Congress was enough to motivate the theoconservative electoral coalition to ignore the chaos in Iraq and vote as a bloc in favor of Republican candidates, even though the loss of Congress (and especially the Senate) meant that the window for enacting theocon policies would be effectively closed two years before the end of Bush’s second term.

This wasn’t the way things were supposed to turn out. The theocons have always considered foreign policy to be important, but it was never their primary concern. What mattered was the domestic culture war, and they counted on the American people to remember its centrality and to vote accordingly. Even if the Iraq war had been badly bungled by the White House—which many of the theocons continued to deny in public through mid-2007—the Democrats were still advocates of a culture of death who needed to be blocked at every turn. The ineptness of the Bush administration was thus beside the point; the stakes in the culture war were so high that they overrode concerns with Republican accountability.

At least in theory. In practice, the American people—including significant numbers of evangelicals and conservative Catholics—have proven to be somewhat less doctrinaire than Neuhaus and his colleagues had hoped and assumed they would be. The result was a major setback for the theoconservative movement. Whatever else the concluding years of the Bush administration might bring, they were not going to be marked by progress in prosecuting the culture war. By early 2007, the most the theocons could hope for was a stalemate....