AMERICAN THEOCRACY The Peril Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, Borrowed Money in 21st Century Kevin Phillips New York: Viking Penguin, 2006. 402pp, $26.95 doth (ISBN 0786286938).What a difference an election can make in American politics, in reputation of political books. Upon publication in 2006, American Theocracy was hailed as a trenchant study of American religion politics in such critical generally left-of-centre publications as The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, even Mother Jones. To reviewers unsympathetic with evangelical trappings of George Bush's Washington, American Theocracy was all more welcome in that it came from an author with old-line Republican credentials an ambient contempt for Bush younger Bush elder as well. As a campaign strategist for Richard Nixon in 1968, Kevin Phillips developed notorious southern strategy as a way of cobbling together a majority presidential coalition to supercede Democratic coalition that Franklin Roosevelt had created. book is dedicated to millions of Republicans, present lapsed, who have opposed Bush dynasty, Phillips writes, and disenlightenment in 2000 2004 elections. Yet after November 2006 congressional elections, with Republicans losing control of house senate, Bush administration on skids toward political oblivion, evangelical right fading as a force in official Washington, American Theocracy seems badly dated analytically shallow. In language of American politics, book is a that no longer zings.Without zinger of theocracy deliberately overstated, made-for-television sound-bites in which this volume abounds-for example, that GOP is the first American religious party (182)-the reader is left with a rambling wreck of overwrought political narrative, declinist philosophy of history, a partial misleading account of relation between religion politics in America.The author's account of American religion politics-a subject poorly understood by contemporary foreign observers of US-is analytical heart of book, but it is haphazardly researched, tendentious in argument, a blinkered guide to America's past future. This is a pity, because Phillips knows value of historical research has turned out serviceable histories of his own. The truth is that America has never been a theocracy, not even in lyth-century Massachusetts, where church state operated in distinct realms (John Calvin would not have been happy in Boston). The founding fathers of American republic, many of them inclined to an easy-going, Enlightenment-style deism, took pains to prohibit a federally mandated establishment of religion. American evangelicalism, with its easily lampooned revivalist excesses, did add a moralistic edge to early American nationalism, manifest destiny, Civil War armies of both Union Confederacy, turn-of-the-century imperialism, political crusades of progressive era (prohibition, for example), but over time American religion has become weaker in its intensity more accommodating of a secular society. …