Evangelical Realism

In an interview on Pat Robertson’s CBN network, Chuck Colson presents an interesting perspective on why America became disenchanted enough with Republicans to put Democrats in power: it’s because the Republicans failed to make deep enough cuts in the government:

“There’s so much to government today. It’s so incredibly complex.

He continued, “We’ve piled program upon program upon program until it becomes unworkable. But every program has a special interest group. And everybody’s been sucked into the earmarks thing…its stealing money made palatable, because we’re robbing it from the taxpayers to give to our constituents, so it’s okay.”

“They threw out Republicans who promised to clean things up and didn’t… deservedly so. Conservatives have an obligation that goes beyond party politics. It is to preserve the moral order. If you begin to abuse the moral order, I don’t care which party you’re in, throw ‘em out.”

Colson likes the job that President Bush has done so far, despite the setbacks in Iraq. And he says the president has been damaged by the political culture in Washington.

That’s right, the last national elections had nothing to do with the quagmire in Iraq, the organized assaults against the Bill of Rights, or the Plame-gate cover-up. No, the real problem is that the government is spending too much money on social services, and Republicans failed to cut back sufficiently on all that spending. Curiously, spending money to overthrow a powerless government, at the cost of untold human suffering and of a weakened military, does not seem to count against the Republican’s self-imposed mandate to preserve “moral order.”

This is a good example of what “worldview” means. Colson may look at the same planet as the rest of us, but obviously he sees a completely unrelated world.

Update: Colson’s remarks appear particularly ironic when compared with this post from Pharyngula…