{"id":3905,"date":"2006-03-21T10:45:43","date_gmt":"2006-03-21T10:45:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/03\/theocracy-alert.html"},"modified":"2006-03-21T10:45:43","modified_gmt":"2006-03-21T10:45:43","slug":"theocracy-alert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/03\/theocracy-alert.html","title":{"rendered":"Theocracy alert"},"content":{"rendered":"

At First Things, Jody Bottum looks at Kevin Phillips’ new book and yearns for historical perspective:<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

But there was the New York Times<\/em> proclaiming during the presidential campaign of 2004: \u201cNever before have so many bishops so explicitly warned Catholics so close to an election that to vote a certain way was to commit a sin.\u201d Does the Times<\/em> really know nothing of the Know-Nothings\u2019 anti-Catholic campaign of the 1856? Of Al Smith\u2019s run in 1928? Of John F. Kennedy\u2019s election in 1960? <\/p>\n

Apparently not, for on Sunday the Times<\/em> carried a long, glowing review<\/span><\/u><\/a> of Kevin Phillips\u2019 American Theocracy<\/span><\/u><\/a><\/span>, the latest entry in the ongoing series of America-Is-Becoming-a-Religious-Dictatorship books. The review is like a parade of those who should know history better than this: if not the editors of the New York Times<\/em>, then surely Kevin Phillips, who once wrote a very important political analysis called The Emerging Republican Majority<\/span><\/u><\/a><\/span>, and if not Phillips, then at least the reviewer, Alan Brinkley, who is a senior professor of history and provost at Columbia University.<\/p>\n

But no. All of them assert, for what must be partisan political reasons, that the republic is in peril from its historically unprecedented religious activists. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At First Things, Jody Bottum looks at Kevin Phillips’ new book and yearns for historical perspective: But there was the New York Times proclaiming during the presidential campaign of 2004: \u201cNever before have so many bishops so explicitly warned Catholics so close to an election that to vote a certain way was to commit a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3905","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nTheocracy alert - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/03\/theocracy-alert.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Theocracy alert - 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3905","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3905"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3905\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3905"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3905"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3905"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}