By Lewis Diuguid, Kansas City Star Editorial Page columnist

Kathleen Parker is on the right track in her recent column fingering religion as the culprit behind the hobbled state of the Republican Party.

But she didn’t go far enough. Robert N. Minor does in his 2007 book, "When Religion is an Addiction." Minor is a professor of religious studies at the University of Kansas.

Minor writes that the marriage of right-wing religion and politics “fulfilled the progressive needs of the religious addiction,” and the election of George W. Bush as president added to “the list of the addiction’s pushers.”

Minor calls the addiction to religion a “process addiction.” Other examples are addictions to gambling, sex and work. But an addiction to a faith causes some people to become “religiously righteous.” Minor says feeling is “similar to the high of cocaine.”

“Like the experience of the high in other addictions, the high of being righteous and on the side of goodness and the Divine numbs one against the worries, insecurities, threats and pain of other life experiences,” Minor writes.

“The high affirms momentarily the rightness, goodness and acceptability of the believer by no less than the Universe itself. And it distances believers from those other unrighteous people whom they would otherwise experience as threatening, as sinners who could challenge the religious and moralistic beliefs that the religious believe save them.”

Religious addicts see themselves as the persecuted victims, and they constantly seek a more intense high in promoting their righteousness cause. GOP politics and the election of Bush have been great outlets for the faithful.

Minor noted that “the feeling of righteousness could be restored and intensified by political victories, as if these victories proved they were okay.”

“Addictions, remember, are progressive and usually fatal to the addict.”

Bush’s popularity sinking and breaking apart like the Titanic also took down the religiously addicted base of the Republican Party and John McCain’s candidacy for the White House. The GOP, it appears, is going through some serious withdrawal symptoms.