Theocracy in Motion

In his Friday column, "For God's Sake," Paul Krugman points out an unfortunately little-known facet of the Bush administration. There's a stealth effort to seed the government with extreme Christian theocrats.

In 1981, Gary North, a leader of the Christian Reconstructionist movement - the openly theocratic wing of the Christian right - suggested that the movement could achieve power by stealth. "Christians must begin to organize politically within the present party structure," he wrote, "and they must begin to infiltrate the existing institutional order."

Today, Regent University, founded by the televangelist Pat Robertson to provide "Christian leadership to change the world," boasts that it has 150 graduates working in the Bush administration.

Yes, it sounds like a conspiracy theory, and Krugman admits as much, but he's got some facts to back it up, as well.

But this conspiracy is no theory. The official platform of the Texas Republican Party pledges to "dispel the myth of the separation of church and state." And the Texas Republicans now running the country are doing their best to fulfill that pledge.

Kay Cole James, who had extensive connections to the religious right and was the dean of Regent's government school, was the federal government's chief personnel officer from 2001 to 2005. (Curious fact: she then took a job with Mitchell Wade, the businessman who bribed Representative Randy "Duke" Cunningham.) And it's clear that unqualified people were hired throughout the administration because of their religious connections.

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And there's another thing most reporting fails to convey: the sheer extremism of these people.

You see, Regent isn't a religious university the way Loyola or Yeshiva are religious universities. It's run by someone whose first reaction to 9/11 was to brand it God's punishment for America's sins.

Krugman provides some specific examples, so click thr9ugh if you want to see them.

Of course, all of this raises the question of what would Jesus do. Pat Robertson and his people apparently think he would downplay his faith, sneak underqualified people onto the government payroll, and quietly influence and try to take over the federal government. At the very least, it gets rid of the annoying need to render unto Caesar.