Kathleen Parker is melting down:

And shifting demographics suggest that the Republican Party — and conservatism with it — eventually will die out unless religion is returned to the privacy of one’s heart where it belongs.

This is wrong, but the sort of conventional silliness that we have all come to expect in mid to late November of an election year. It is, of course, entirely incompatible with her statement later in the same column:

Meanwhile, it isn’t necessary to evict the Creator from the public square, surrender Judeo-Christian values or diminish the value of faith in America. Belief in something greater than oneself has much to recommend it, including most of the world’s architectural treasures, our universities and even our founding documents.

“Something greater than oneself”? Is John McCain writing Parker’s copy now? But this can’t be right–Parker just informed us that religion must return to the privacy of the heart where it belongs. If religion belongs nowhere but inside the heart, it had better not be expressed, confessed or discussed in public. However, to speak of religion is to speak in large part about practice, which is done almost anywhere but inside one’s heart. I’m not sure how you can seriously claim that there ought to be some meaningful public role for religion, or that we should acknowledge our Creator, affirm those “values” or emphasize the “value” of faith, and at the same time say that religion must retreat into the closet.

So Parker’s broader claims don’t seem to make any sense. What about her more specific political recommendation? She writes:

To be more specific, the evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy branch of the GOP is what ails the erstwhile conservative party and will continue to afflict and marginalize its constituents if reckoning doesn’t soon cometh.

It never ceases to amaze me how the least influential, but most reliable factions in the GOP are so readily blamed for what is wrong with that party. I am trying to think of some comparable example on the other side. It would be something like blaming the travails of the Democratic Party in 2002 on antiwar progressives or civil libertarians, groups that clearly had little or no pull with party leaders at the time and haven’t had nearly as much since then as you might suppose they would. Despite their numbers, and in large part because of their reliability as Republican voters, evangelicals and social conservatives draw very little water in the GOP. Each cycle GOP leaders see how little it will take to get these voters to turn out for their candidates, and what that amount of lip service is each cycle they try to reduce it. The voters continue to turn out, despite having less and less reason to do so, and for their trouble they are accused of the errors that the party leaders made and into which the establishment dragged them.

Certainly there is an argument to be made that dead-end partisans qua dead-end partisans who cannot speak to anyone outside their party are a problem, and you can make the case that the holdouts who still think Bush has done a good job are complicit to some degree in all of his errors and crimes. Maybe there is some significant overlap with the so-called “oogedy-boogedy” set, but then the problem with them wouldn’t be their religiosity or their social conservatism or any of the cultural markers that freaked out every pundit east of the Appalachians when Mike Huckabee would start to speak. Instead, the problem is that they were too wedded to the Bush administration and its failed record, and they were too dependent on reciting the trite slogans they heard on the radio and read in syndicated conservative columns.

Of course, the war was a major reason why the GOP fell into disrepute, and Parker notably still has nothing to say about that. I am going to go out on a limb and guess that she has rarely, if ever, written a single word of serious criticism of the administration regarding the war. You cannot diagnose what ails Republicans if you have no credibility on this most basic of policy questions, and there is no reason to think that Parker has any.