GOP becoming God’s Own Party

The direction of discourse surrounding the Republican presidential primaries couldn’t be more disturbing if it—well, there’s really no place to go from that. It simply couldn’t be more disturbing.

That’s because the GOP hopefuls for the presidential nomination all seem to be vying with one another to take the most extreme—and, unfortunately, theologically based—position possible. Whether we like it or not (and there is every indication that a great many Americans are made uncomfortable by it), the Republicans are moving into uncharted territory.

They are in danger of becoming an overtly religious party.

Mind you, we’ve got a constitution that makes clear that there is to be no religious test for office. But that doesn’t seem to be stopping the Republican candidates, nor does it seem to be slowing down the party’s activists, who engage in arguments about which candidate is more committed to ending insurance coverage of contraception, pushing a constitutional amendment to declare a fertilized egg a legal “person,” or planning to “unmarry” all the same-sex couples who are legally wed in this country. (Counting the 18,000 married in California between June and November 2008, that’s about a quarter of a million people.)

The latest is as absurd as it is disquieting: GOP officials in Laurens County, South Carolina, have actually asked all potential Republican candidates for office to sign a document pledging not only to lower taxes and oppose marriage equality, but also to avoid porn and have no sex outside marriage. The penalty for refusing to sign is to forfeit the party’s support in the election.

It’s bad enough that we have a climate in which a sizable—albeit misinformed—percentage of the population believes that President Barack Obama is a Muslim when he’s repeatedly discussed his Christianity. Or that polls show a Republican frontrunner as having difficulty in southern states for no reason other than that he is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Or that another leading candidate—a Catholic himself—refers to the late President John F. Kennedy’s speech about the separation of church and state in our Constitution as making him nauseous.

But when an entire party places religious belief ahead of the good of the country, we can only ask if this party understands that the president of the United States is the president of all the people in the entire country.

If, in fact, the GOP is determined to become God’s Own Party in a literal sense, they may gain a number of “true believers.” But they do so at the risk of abandoning the very principles that make this a nation in which they are free to worship God as they choose. When the day comes when this particular brand of Christianity is in the minority, they may also find themselves hoping that others are more willing to remember JFK’s words—and heed them.