Fear mongering?

Earl Shorris has written a volume, The Politics of Heaven: America in Fearful Times (Norton, 2007), which serves up all-too-easy answers. Shorris claims that fear is at the root of both conservative politics and conservative religion. This might have made for an interesting exploration. However, his thesis is, essentially, that a fear-based alliance between neoconservative politics (motivated by fear of political tyranny) and right-wing religious believers (motivated by fear of death and doom) have threatened to undermine the natural optimism that undergirds American democracy.

The discussion is all-too simple and superficial. One Amazon commentator's review as entitled "No cause too obscure, no solution too esoteric." Indeed, Tim Rutten, in his Los Angeles Times review of the book, says: "It's not a very satisfying or particularly useful analysis." He notes, among other things, that it fails to speak to the actual lives of Sunbelt Evangelicals who furnish the majority of the religious right's political leverage. These Sunbelt Christians are, if anything, poster children for ebulliently optimistic capitalism and Americanism. The author apparently tries to conceal his ignorance of the history and actual practice of American religion beneath an avalanche of facts about political philosophers.