Afterword: End times in america religious fundamentalism and the crisis of democracy religious fundamentalism and the crisis of democracy

With George W. Bush’s presidency ended, religious funda-mentalism seems once again to be in overdrive in its effort to define politics through a reductive and somewhat fanatical moralism, this time centered on its support for Sarah Palin, the newest light in the evangelical quest to make religion the ultimate measure of one’s politics. This kind of religious zealotry has a long tradition in American history extending from the arrival of Puritanism in the seventeenth century to the current spread of Pentecostalism. This often ignored history, imbued with theocratic certainty and absolute moralism, has been quite powerful in providing religious justification to the likes of the Ku Klux Klan, the parlance of the Robber Barons, the patriarchyimbued discourse of “family values,” and the recent gold standard of religious fanaticism and spectacularized violence on full display in Mel Gibson’s film, The Passion of The Christ. A glimpse of this history was evident when George W. Bush kicked on his first presidential campaign by speaking at Bob Jones University and soon afterwards appointed Ralph Reed, former head of the Christian Coalition, as one of his top advisers. A more recent indication of the mixing of power, religion, and politics occurred when Republican presidential candidate John McCain, in 2008, fully embraced the support of right-wing religious television personality John Hagee, who has argued among other things that all Muslims have a “mandate to kill Christian and Jews.”1 McCain also courted the support of Rod Parsley and the late Jerry Falwell, right-wing religious extremists whom McCain had once labeled as “agents of religious intolerance.”