TheDC Interview: Pete Wehner on the Christian challenge to the Tea Party in his new book

TheDC: Well you say you share the urgency but you guys did write in the beginning that you dismiss the idea that there is this darker age. So can you split the difference there?

PW: Sure but that was partly a critique of myself frankly. Back in the early 1990s when I worked for Bill Bennett, who was a model to me of public intellectual and public official, I helped him write a series of books called the “Index of Leaning Cultural Indicators” and that took a period of time from the 1960s to 1990s where every social indicator – education, crime, welfare, out of wedlock births, teen pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases, on and on, abortion, on and on and on– got worse, most of which got significantly worse. I was extremely fearful where the country was going and whether it could hold together if these social pathologies continued or got worse. And what happened we saw in the mid 1990s through the following decade was a remarkable turnaround, where there was huge process on issues of welfare – welfare roles dropped by almost 60 percent, and those on welfare actually did better. Crime: you had huge drops in crime, levels of crime that went back to 1960s. You had the transformation of New York City under Rudy Giuliani and several of his police commissioners. The anti-drug movement led by Bill Bennett where you had huge progress against drug use. So there were a whole range of issues where social progress was made and it was made partly because of policy in some cases, mostly because of public policy, and some cases less so. For example you saw a sharp decrease in the rates of abortion, I don’t think that was public policy. It certainly wasn’t public policy alone, but it was a series of other things: sonograms, the public conversation, and so forth. This is a big, strong resilient country and I think sometimes within conservatives – people like Whittaker Chambers and others – there is a tendency towards pessimism, toward woe is me, woe is us, the country is on the edge of oppressiveness. In fact this is a remarkable country with tremendous resilience and resources that can come back. That doesn’t mean that we don’t have serious problems for sure. We have very serious economic problems as well, but I don’t think we are on the edge of a new dark age or anything like that. And people that underestimate the American capacity for self-renewal, make a mistake that’s essential to what we were arguing.

TheDC: I guess in bullet format or I guess in one sentence, summarize your concern for where Christians and conservatives go if they buy into fully to the dark age idea. And summarize for me in one sentence if you can what the worst-case scenario for you in terms of the current administration.