Since Max Blumenthal raised the issue of the Democratic Party and the religious right, I thought I'd add a few more thoughts on that and Republican Gomorrah.

The Democratic Party's, as well as much of the media's, reaction to the religious right is internally contradictory. On the one hand, they view the movement as too ridiculous to be taken seriously as a political threat. (Besides, that thinking goes, the religious right represents only a tiny fraction of America, and is concentrated in the increasingly irrelevant South.) On the other hand, though, as we have seen with the ongoing catering to the "concerns" of the religious right on abortion, same-sex marriage, and separation of church and state generally, the movement's issues should be taken seriously because you wouldn't want policy to offend "people of faith."

Blumenthal's book documents and amplifies the puritanical, apocalyptic, and authoritarian visions that animate the religious right, and shows how the personal lives of its leaders demonstrate the hypocrisy of its claim to the moral high ground. Just because someone claims to be representing Christianity or "moral values" doesn't give them automatic God cred.

Or does it? David Vitter, John Ensign, and Larry Craig all still serve in the United States Senate despite calamitous falls off the moral values wagon. Jeff Sharlet has investigated and chronicled the secret political influence of The Family (as opposed to "the family," as in the "pro-family" values the religious right mythologizes). Through that network, elected officials and political operatives are taught what you might call the Secret Washington Jesus Handshake. To play ball, you have to pray with them, and play along with the fundamentalist power structure of "godly men" that shapes policy behind the scenes.

Which gets us back to the Democrats. As Sharlet has reported, there are Democrats who are members of The Family, notably Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI), who held up the House health care bill until he got his restrictive abortion funding amendment included. Although much attention was focused on the eleventh hour lobbying of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the bishops' position was shared, and advocated, by numerous religious right groups and activists. They are, as demonstrated by the recent Manhattan Declaration, increasingly making political alliances with the Catholic hierarchy to defend their "religious freedom."

Just this week, Rep. Mike McIntyre (D-NC), also a member of The Family, participated in the Family Research Council's "prayercast." He appeared by video, touting how the Congressional Prayer Caucus, which he co-chairs, "gives us an opportunity to leave party labels at the door and come together on a weekly basis to pray for wisdom, as we look at what the legislation might be that lies ahead." (Aren't you glad they're praying about the health care bill they'll never vote for, instead of um, studying policy?) McIntyre added, "The true source of power is not found in the halls of Congress or the chambers of the Supreme Court, or the Oval Office or the West Wing, but rather found on our knees before the throne of grace."

But the "prayercast" was emblematic of more than just the God-in-government agenda of the religious right, which, as I said, are simultaneously easy to dismiss because it seems so outlandish yet seemingly impossible for Democrats to criticize lest they appear scornful of "people of faith."

Sure, the prayercast was a festival of theocracy. But there was something much deeper at work there: demonization of political enemies -- even by participants seen as allies to the Democrats.

As I wrote about the "prayercast" earlier this week:

But now, in the (ahem) spirit of the season, the movement is using new rhetoric that allowing (even tangential) government subsidy of abortion is turning America into a land run by a modern King Herod, who attempted to murder the baby Jesus.

The Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, head of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference whom Sojourners' Jim Wallis has labeled "one of the most hopeful young Christian leaders of our time," led the charge for this narrative . . . .

Specifically, Rodriguez prayed, "Father, the same spirit of Herod who 2000 years ago attempted to exterminate the life of the Messiah today lives even America. The legislation that incorporates death and infanticide all under the canopy of reform." Rodriguez is courted by Democrats for supposedly representing the "evangelical center," a demographic supposedly ripe for electoral gains. Yet he accuses the Democrats' signature legislative initiative of being comparable to murdering the Messiah.

Blumenthal argues that the religious right has "shattered" the GOP, rendering it a motley crew of theocrats, screwballs, and addled incompetents. But the religious right has shattered more than the GOP, and has done so with more ammunition than luring people out of personal crises with its authoritarian salvos. Fundamentalism has undermined our democracy, through its proponents' demands that every piece of legislation, every political appointee, and every judicial decision respect their religious "conscience." When the Democrats try to be "friendly to religion," then, they get the whole package: the seemingly innocuous prayer for the good of the country pabulum, and the demonization narratives that election cycle after election cycle seek to undermine their candidates and agenda.

Did Obama's supporters, with their "secular salvation narrative," open the door to demonization of their hero by the religious right? I doubt it. The religious right would've done it anyway.