"Strangest Theology"

That phrase,  used two TMR posts back, requires sturdier support than my neurological innards.

It also needs careful separation from the private religious practices of people who thoughtfully work out their personal relationships with Eternity and who feel no compulsion to force others to adopt their spiritual conclusions. 

Kevin Phillips was far from the first to recognize that pentecostalism and premillenial dispensationalism* --  in their various forms -- drive the political behavior of vast swathes of people. But he was among the first to offer a comprehensive look at how modern vote whores exploit masses who derive their deepest beliefs from unusual and unverifiable interpretation of scriptures, Christian and otherwise.

His book on the subject is "American Theocracy"  (2006). His research data and conclusions are likely to please no political partisans.

To summarize, perhaps dangerously so, Phillips suggests that the behavior of right-wing religio-statists can be explained by their broad constituency of people convinced that we live in  end times, on the Rapture's verge.  Planning for any sort of future other than that detailed by St. John the  Divine therefore becomes unnecessary and perhaps even anti-God.

Phillips refuses to absolve secular statists of the left.

"Conservatives fixate on the provocations (vulgar popular culture, e.g.)  and ignore the excesses visible in in the neo-puritan and rightest countertide, and liberals have reversed the error;  keening over the religious threat while ignoring the secular provocation." (p. 209)

The  excesses of state religiosity could include such things as recriminalizing private sexual behavior, transferring general tax revenues to religious bodies, and  restricting the private spiritual practices of believers unfavored by the state.

The leftist secular excesses would continue the protracted fraud of free everything for all who "need" it, a Long March to the rule of the proletariat, supervised only by the new priesthood of selfless commissars.

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"American Theocracy" is useful in a number of ways, particularly in the demographic maps and charts relating religious beliefs to voting behavior.  It would be easy to disagree with some Phillips conclusions, but there's no denying that he brought an impressive amount of information to the table.

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* That mouthful can be explained as the view that God has gone through several periods of relating more or less benignly to His human creatures but that He's now fed up and will, quite soon, implement the horrors and joys of Revelations.