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Two really devilish guys materialized in Toccoa, Ga., last month to harangue 600 true believers on the gospel of a thoroughly theocratic America. Along with lesser lights of the religious far right who spoke at American Vision's "Worldview Super Conference 2006," Herb Titus and Gary North called for nothing short of the overthrow of the United States of America.
Titus and North aren't household names. But Titus, former dean of TV preacher Pat Robertson's Regent University law school, has led the legal battle to plant the Ten Commandants in county courthouses across the nation. North, an apostle of the creed called Christian Reconstructionism, is one of the most influential elders of American fundamentalism.
"I don't want to capture their (mainstream Americans') system. I want to replace it," fumed North to a cheering audience. North has called for the stoning of gays and nonbelievers (rocks are cheap and plentiful, he has observed). Both friends and foes label him "Scary Gary."
Are we in danger of an American Taliban? Probably not today. But Alabama's "Ten Commandments Judge" Roy Moore is aligned with this congregation, and one-third of Alabama Republicans who voted in the June primary supported him. When you see the South Dakota legislature outlaw abortions, the Reconstructionist agenda is at work. The movement's greatest success is in Christian home schooling, where many, if not most, of the textbooks are Reconstructionist-authored tomes.
Moreover, the Reconstructionists are the folks behind attacks on science and public education. They're allied with proselytizers who have tried to convert Air Force cadets -- future pilots with fingers on nuclear triggers -- into religious zealots. Like the communists of the 1930s, they exert tremendous stealth political gravity, drawing many sympathizers in their wake, and their friends now dominate the Republican Party in many states.
Titus' and North's speeches, laced with conspiracy theories about the Rockefellers and the Trilateral Commission, were more Leninist than Christian in the tactics proposed -- as in their vision to use freedom to destroy the freedom of others. That's not surprising -- the founder of Christian Reconstruction, the late fringe Calvinist theologian Rousas J. Rushdoony, railed against the "heresy" of democracy.
A Harvard-bred lawyer whose most famous client is Alabama's Judge Moore, Titus told the Toccoa gathering that the Second Amendment envisions the assassination of "tyrants;" that's why we have guns. Tyranny, of course, is subjective to these folks. Their imposition of a theocratic state would not, by their standards, be tyranny. Public schools, on the other hand, to them are tyrannical.
North is best known to Internet users for his prolific auguring that a Y2K computer bug would cause the calamitous end of civilization. In the days prior to the advent of this millennium, North urged subscribers to his delusional economic newsletters to go survivalist and prepare for the end. Many did so, dumping investments and life savings, a big oops.
"I lost a million and a half dollars when I sold off real estate," one of North's fans, a home-schooling advocate from Florida, told me during a lunch break between lectures touting creationism and damning secular humanism. But my lunch companion still anted more than pocket change to hear North make more prophesies in Toccoa. "I believe Gary North on Bible issues," he explained. I suggested that false prophets often pocket big profits, but I was talking to deaf ears.
Hosting the "Creation to Revelation... Connecting the Dots" event was a Powder Springs, Ga., publishing house, American Vision, whose pontiff is Gary DeMar. The outfit touts the antebellum South as a righteous society and favors the reintroduction of some forms of slavery (it's sanctioned in the Bible, Reconstructionists say) -- which may explain the blindingly monochrome audience at the gathering.
The setting was the Georgia Baptist Conference Center, a sprawling expanse of woods, hills and a man-made lake in the North Georgia mountains. Four decades ago, the Southern Baptists officially declared, "no ecclesiastical group or denomination should be favored by the state" and "the church should not resort to the civil power to carry on its work."
Times change. The Baptists lust for power, and they demand the state to do their bidding. I guess that explains the denomination's hosting of theocrats no less rigid and bloodthirsty than the Taliban's mullahs.
DeMar christened the gathering with invective against science.
"Evolution is as religious as Christianity," he said, a claim that certainly must amaze 99.99 percent of the scientific community. Science is irrelevant to these folks.
Everything they need to know about the universe and the origin of man is in the first two chapters of Genesis. They know the answer before any question is asked. DeMar's spin is what he calls a clash of "worldviews." According to DeMar and his speakers, God sanctions only their worldview. And that worldview is a hash of enforcing Old Testament Mosaic law (except when it comes to chowing down on pork barbecue), rewriting American history to endorse theocracy and explaining politics by the loopy theories of the John Birch Society. (Christian Reconstructionism evolved, so to speak, from a radical variation of Calvinism, AKA Puritanism, and the Bircher politics of such men as the late Marietta, Ga., congressman, Larry McDonald.) For most of the four-day conference, DeMar turned the Bible over to others to thump. North blamed the Rockefellers and the Trilateral Commission for the success of secularists. Titus told of Jesus making a personal appearance in the rafters of his Oregon home.
At the heart of what was taught by a succession of speakers:
Education earned the most vitriol at the conference. Effusing that the Religious Right has captured politics and much of the media, North proclaimed: "The only thing they (secularists) have still got a grip on is the university system." Academic doctorates, he contended, are a conspiracy fomented by the Rockefeller family. All academic programs (except, he said, engineering) are now dominated by secularists and Darwinists.
"Marxists in the English departments!" he ranted. "Close every public school in America!"
Among North's most quoted writings was this ditty from 1982: "[W]e must use the doctrine of religious liberty to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up a generation...which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God." Titus followed that party line when he proclaimed that the First Amendment is limited to guaranteeing "the right to criticize the government," but "free expression is not in the Constitution." When I asked him if blasphemy -- castigating religion -- was protected, he shook his head.
Like North, Titus sees public education as decidedly satanic. Also, welfare. He contended the Founding Fathers -- and Americans today -- owe their "first duties to God. It's not just worship. It's education... welfare to the poor. Welfare belongs exclusively to God. Why do schools fail? They're trying to do the business of God. Medicaid goes. Education goes. The church gets back to doing what it should do." And what should the church be doing According to these self-appointed arbiters of God's will, running our lives. And stoning those who disagree.
At the Toccoa conference, DeMar organized several debates -- and he commendably invited articulate opponents of his creed.
One was Ed Buckner, a retired Georgia State University professor, unabashed atheist and a member of the Atlanta Freethought Society. He debated Bill Federer, who makes a living trying to prove America's founders intended this to be a Christian nation.
Buckner offered to concede the debate if Federer could disprove any one of four points: Americans don't agree on religion, human judgment is imperfect, religious truth can't be determined by votes or force and freedom is worth protecting. Federer ran from the challenge, and instead offered a litany of historic quotes showing that most of America's founders believed in God.
Federer never got the point that if, as he argued, government should endorse his faith today, tomorrow officials might decide to ban his beliefs.
The other debate featured University of Georgia biologist Mark Farmer versus Australian "young earth" creationist Carl Wieland. Farmer, religious himself, tried to explain that no evidence had ever damaged evolutionary theory -- at best, creationists point to gaps in knowledge.
"Yes, we don't know the answers to everything," Farmer told me. "That's what science is all about, finding answers."
It would be easy to dismiss the Reconstructionists as the lunatic fringe, no more worrisome than the remnants of the Prohibition Party. But, in fact, they have rather extraordinary entrée and influence with top-tier Religious Right leaders and institutions.
James Dobson's Focus on the Family is now selling DeMar's book, America's Christian Heritage. Dobson himself has a warm relationship with many in the movement, and he has admitted voting for Reconstructionist presidential candidate Howard Phillips in 1996.
TV preacher Robertson has mentioned reading North's writings, and he has hired Reconstructionists as professors at Regent University. Jerry Falwell employs Reconstructionists to teach at Liberty University. Roger Schultz, the chair of Liberty's History Department, writes regularly for Faith for all of Life, the leading Reconstructionist journal.
Southern Baptist Bruce N. Shortt is aggressively pushing his denomination to officially repudiate public education and call on Southern Baptists to withdraw their children from public schools. Shortt's vicious book, The Harsh Truth about Public Schools, was published by the Reconstructionist Chalcedon Foundation.
There are big theological differences between the Religious Right's generals and the Reconstructionists. Traditional Christian theology teaches that history will muddle along until Jesus' Second Coming. That teaching is tough to turn into a political movement. Reconstructionists preach that the nation and the world must come under Christian "dominion" (as they define it) before Christ's return -- a wonderful theology to promote global conquest.
In short, Dobson, Robertson, Falwell and the Southern Baptist Convention (the nation's largest Protestant denomination) may not agree with everything the Reconstructionists advocate, but they sure don't seem to mind hanging out with this openly theocratic, anti-democratic crowd.
It's enough for Americans who believe in personal freedom and religious liberty to get worried about -- before the first stones start flying.
John Sugg is senior editor of Creative Loafing Newspapers. He was the recipient of the 2005 Society of Professional Journalists "Green Eyeshade" award for serious commentary, and he has won more than 30 other significant awards.
The "C" Word By Bill Zide t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Tuesday 13 June 2006
No, not that word.
Once upon a time there were real "Conservatives." They believed in fiscal and political responsibility. They expounded on the virtues of getting government out of people's lives. They talked about caution with regard to the use of military force and foreign intervention. They even promoted a policy of governmental accountability. Many of these people existed in the Republican Party. They might have been off track, behind the curve possibly, or at times deluded, but most tended to be civil, honorable and sincere. They were more often than not the necessary loyal opposition.
Now, "Conservative" has become a particularly dirty word. Worse yet, it seems to be heading toward becoming totally meaningless altogether. Once, the root of the word "Conservative" was "conserve," a word that implied caution and preservation. Now, it seems that this new brand of "Neo-" or "Theo-Conservative" that populates the rank and file of the current GOP leadership has put the "con" back into "conservative." They are more about being against things than being for anything real or substantive. It's all about the "Con": Conceal. Conceit. Concoct. Condescend. Congest. Confabulate. Confederacy. Contradictory. Conformity. Confound. Confrontational. Confused. Conglomerates. Conjecture. Conquest. Conflagration. Conflict. Condemn. Convicted. Con-men. Consolidation. Conspiracy. Consume. Contorted. Contrivance. Control. And, always, always - Contributions.
Interestingly, the "cons" missing from their agenda and concept of the world include: Concern. Contraception. Constitution. Consistency. Conscience. Contriteness. And, always, always - Consequences.
If you are a moderate Republican (a nearly extinct breed) you must be built of stern stuff or simply be a certified masochist. They hate you. No, really really hate you. You are a RINO (Republican in name only). Even though your values are the values of such other "RINOs" as Eisenhower, Teddy Roosevelt and Lincoln. You are not really a Republican. They need you to hold the seats that no conservative can win, but don't confuse practicality for love. And, should you ever dare to contradict the will of the Right (a rare thing in these days of the lock-step GOP), then you are a traitor (their words, not mine). If you dare to stand up and call them out on a lie, a contradiction, a crime or even treason - you are the criminal. They will call you disgruntled or crazy. And in extreme cases, they will risk national security itself to get back at you. Welcome to the new world order of the GOP.
The Party of Ideas
The Right is always telling us they are the party of ideas. And they are. The problem is that most of their ideas are from the 19th century. For instance, they are awfully fond of Social Darwinism, (although not actual Evolution theory because that involves science). This is a theory that generally believes nature decides who succeeds in business and society, so people always get what they deserve. Essentially, it suggests what we see around us is simply a result of the natural order of things. Natural economic and social selection decides who prospers and who is relegated to a life of menial subsistence. Yet, the fittest to survive are inevitably always rich, privileged and connected. That's just how things work out apparently. Of course, it isn't nature that cares about the color of your skin, or attacks your religion or relegates women to subservient positions regardless of their skills. That takes deliberate action and a system created to those purposes. Still, by the logic of the Right, slavery could be perfectly justifiable, just like keeping women from voting.
The Right tells its constituency that it's about Guns, God and Gays. Always claiming that "they" (Progressives, terrorists or possibly aliens) will repeal the 2nd Amendment and take away our hunting rifles (useful to say in order to get people fired up, even if it's not true or possible). They want to protect the 1st Amendment right to worship freely as long as they get to decide who you worship. Naturally this would involve getting rid of the Establishment Clause within the First Amendment. Should we ever lose track of what they really want, the Theo-Cons keep reminding us we are a "Christian country" even if the facts, Constitution, founding fathers and reality say otherwise.
As for homosexuals, these people have a dangerous agenda that includes serving honorably in the military, monogamous marriage with legal benefits, and raising children. A dangerous agenda to be sure, that apparently threatens the American way of life. Clearly, they must be stopped before they decorate and renovate any more houses, or win any more medals. If we don't stop them, this country will be exactly the same as it is now, only with good color coordination, designer furniture and more organic vegetables.
It seems all the "ideas" of the Right are based on two basic principles which define them to their core: Fear and Entitlement. We have seen how they propagate fear to justify their actions and abuses. But, in a sense it goes deeper than that. They are about the fear of change, progress and responsibility. If they accept change and progress then it involves giving up some of what they have taken for themselves. And, if they accept responsibility it means having to act accordingly and care about the effects of their actions on others. As the Party of the rich and connected, there has always been a sense of entitlement built into the GOP and right-wing mentality. There has to be, to justify the inherently lofty and privileged status they have created for themselves. In the last thirty years they have cleverly extended this sense of entitlement by telling Theo-Cons that they are entitled to power because they are the "right Christians" and to Neo-Cons by offering them a big piece of the pie. Almost everyone loves being told they are special, chosen and entitled. Religion has often served in this way, specifically in old Christian Europe and in many parts of the Muslim East. However, all the religious wars in Europe caused modern Europeans to abandon true state-sanctioned religion. Yet, here in America it's back. Their actions, however, seem in contrast to many of the actual teachings of Christ. Many of these "Christians" aren't about turning the other cheek and helping the less fortunate, but more about self-righteousness and demagoguery.
So, out of these two aspects of Fear and Entitlement, all the "ideas" of the Right flow. Social Security "Reform" is an attempt to rid the country of a program that insures the survival of some of the least amongst us. They would like to do it in the open, but it is by far one of the most successful and popular programs in the history of the country. George W. Bush's bold failure in trying to cover this intent by claiming it was in serious solvency trouble and creating "private accounts" shows the depths to which they will sink to achieve its dissolution. Neither of these things were true, but by trying to claim Social Security was an investment program, when it's actually an insurance program, shows you what they are really after - the money they feel entitled to.
Tax giveaways to the rich and large corporations are the traditional standby of the Right and are cleverly disguised as "Tax Reform" or "Tax Cuts," when they are in fact really Deficit-Financed Revenue Giveaways and redistributions to those who already have most of the country's capital. The end result and intent is to under-fund the government and social programs, thus weakening it at all levels. This creates what amounts to, as some have dubbed it, a centralized Kleptocracy, where those who can take will take all they can. There is no accountability or real oversight, and government comes to serve corporations and the established wealth. This is the GOP's Corporate Ownership Society (which they try to call an "ownership society" except the owner is ultimately a company or bank rather than an individual). All this leads to the majority of the country's wealth and resources being controlled by the largest corporations and richest individuals.
American Oligarchy
In other words George W. Bush, the Radical GOP Right and their cohorts are in the process of trying to turn the United States into a Latin American Oligarchy. Before one dismisses this theory, consider that many of the countries in Latin America were controlled by old European colonial families (much like the Bushes here) who were heavily involved in corporations connected with the state and originally aided by religion (in Latin America's case, the Catholic church). This triumvirate of interests creates a government of the few wealthy land-owning elite over the many (often indigenous) poor. Most of the keen "ideas" and plans of the Regressive Right seem to add up to waging war on the middle class, by decreasing or stagnating wages, reducing educational opportunities, increasing survival costs while reducing social supports. The Oligarchies of Latin America tended to have small middle classes, but a very large source of cheap and vulnerable - often unskilled - labor. They didn't have much of a social support structure or freedom of speech. They, like Bush and the GOP, worked steadfastly against unions and the rights of workers, always favoring management instead. This is essentially a Plantation Culture - or what has been also been referred to as "Plantation Capitalism," which was also the original culture of the American Antebellum South: a culture that more and more centralizes wealth and power in the hands of the few, while making the bulk of the population dependent on them to survive. So, while many in Latin America are trying to break through centuries of stagnation and oppression, we seem strangely headed the other way.
Naturally in this country the corporate and government structure is built into a large standing military, what the enlightened Republican President (and former General) Eisenhower dubbed "The Military Industrial-Complex." As Chalmers Johnson has eloquently pointed out, this permanent structure of corporations, military and government guarantees lucrative contracts and profits for those involved in making weapons and supplying the military. So, as war becomes incredibly profitable, it becomes inevitable that we are going to see a lot more of it. You can't buy more weapons and ammunition or build more bases and landing strips unless you are using them and developing new ones. Now, there are real threats, but when anything is this profitable, you start finding more reasons for war and making up new ones if you need to. The Cold War may be over, but the smaller hot wars across the globe may be even better business. Why even develop new sources of energy and promote conservation when you can get oil and a lucrative war too? The Soviet Union as boogieman has been successfully replaced by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda in a new "war" that can never end.
The problem is that it is the poor and young who always get stuck fighting those wars. Patriotism is always the best device to recruit them. After all, it's what got poor white farm boys in the South to fight for and defend the land and wealth of rich white plantation owners during the Civil War. The very slavery that kept them poor (by keeping their own wages down and reducing the available paying jobs) was something they came to champion, because they were told they were better than the slaves because at least they weren't black. So, they fought to preserve a system that in the end kept them poor. They too were told it was about "values" and what they were "entitled" to as Americans. There is a certain dark genius to it that Karl Rove could appreciate and steal from. He may not be original, but he knows what works. Thomas Frank explains in his book just how Kansas has embraced a political path that is slowly destroying its own economy and infrastructure. Yet, they continue down that road to oblivion and even hope to take the rest of the country with them.
Some would argue that since many of these people believe in the "End of Days" scenario they think they see in the Book of Revelation, oblivion may be exactly what they seek. They feel they will be saved, and that this has to happen so that they can meet their maker. So, they work hard to help it along.
So, in this day and age, a "Conservative" has little to do with what was once "Conservatism." Instead, it has been successfully replaced by a self-destructive ideology that is a hybrid of Corporate Plantation Capitalism and Religious Extremism that now rules the GOP. So, now with the Right firmly in charge we take the Great Leap Backwards from a multi-cultural democracy based on checks and balances, to Corporate-Religious Oligarchy promoting a great leap backward.
Whenever I talk about the growing power of the evangelical right with friends, they always ask the same question: What can we do? Usually I reply with a joke: Keep a bag packed and your passport current.
I don't really mean it, but my anxiety is genuine. It's one thing to have a government that shows contempt for civil liberties; America has survived such men before. It's quite another to have a mass movement -- the largest and most powerful mass movement in the nation -- rise up in opposition to the rights of its fellow citizens. The Constitution protects minorities, but that protection is not absolute; with a sufficiently sympathetic or apathetic majority, a tightly organized faction can get around it.
The mass movement I've described aims to supplant Enlightenment rationalism with what it calls the "Christian worldview." The phrase is based on the conviction that true Christianity must govern every aspect of public and private life, and that all -- government, science, history and culture -- must be understood according to the dictates of scripture. There are biblically correct positions on every issue, from gay marriage to income tax rates, and only those with the right worldview can discern them. This is Christianity as a total ideology -- I call it Christian nationalism. It's an ideology adhered to by millions of Americans, some of whom are very powerful. It's what drives a great many of the fights over religion, science, sex and pluralism now dividing communities all over the country.
I am not suggesting that religious tyranny is imminent in the United States. Our democracy is eroding and some of our rights are disappearing, but for most people, including those most opposed to the Christian nationalist agenda, life will most likely go on pretty much as normal for the foreseeable future. Thus for those who value secular society, apprehending the threat of Christian nationalism is tricky. It's like being a lobster in a pot, with the water heating up so slowly that you don't notice the moment at which it starts to kill you.
If current trends continue, we will see ever-increasing division and acrimony in our politics. That's partly because, as Christian nationalism spreads, secularism is spreading as well, while moderate Christianity is in decline. According to the City University of New York Graduate Center's comprehensive American religious identification survey, the percentage of Americans who identify as Christians has actually fallen in recent years, from 86 percent in 1990 to 77 percent in 2001. The survey found that the largest growth, in both absolute and percentage terms, was among those who don't subscribe to any religion. Their numbers more than doubled, from 14.3 million in 1990, when they constituted 8 percent of the population, to 29.4 million in 2001, when they made up 14 percent.
"The top three 'gainers' in America's vast religious marketplace appear to be Evangelical Christians, those describing themselves as Non-Denominational Christians and those who profess no religion," the survey found. (The percentage of other religious minorities remained small, totaling less than 4 percent of the population).
This is a recipe for polarization. As Christian nationalism becomes more militant, secularists and religious minorities will mobilize in opposition, ratcheting up the hostility. Thus we're likely to see a shrinking middle ground, with both camps increasingly viewing each other across a chasm of mutual incomprehension and contempt.
In the coming years, we will probably see the curtailment of the civil rights that gay people, women and religious minorities have won in the last few decades. With two Bush appointees on the Supreme Court, abortion rights will be narrowed; if the president gets a third, it could mean the end of Roe v. Wade. Expect increasing drives to ban gay people from being adoptive or foster parents, as well as attempts to fire gay schoolteachers. Evangelical leaders are encouraging their flocks to be alert to signs of homosexuality in their kids, which will lead to a growing number of gay teenagers forced into "reparative therapy" designed to turn them straight. (Focus on the Family urges parents to consider seeking help for boys as young as five if they show a "tendency to cry easily, be less athletic, and dislike the roughhousing that other boys enjoy.")
Christian nationalist symbolism and ideology will increasingly pervade public life. In addition to the war on evolution, there will be campaigns to teach Christian nationalist history in public schools. An elective course developed by the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools, a right-wing evangelical group, is already being offered by more than 300 school districts in 36 states. The influence of Christian nationalism in public schools, colleges, courts, social services and doctors' offices will deform American life, rendering it ever more pinched, mean, and divided.
There's still a long way, though, between this damaged version of democracy and real theocracy. Tremendous crises would have to shred what's left of the American consensus before religious fascism becomes a possibility. That means that secularists and liberals shouldn't get hysterical, but they also shouldn't be complacent.
Christian nationalism is still constrained by the Constitution, the courts, and by a passionate democratic (and occasionally Democratic) opposition. It's also limited by capitalism. Many corporations are happy to see their political allies harness the rage and passion of the Christian right's foot soldiers, but the culture industry is averse to government censorship. Nor is homophobia good for business, since many companies need to both recruit qualified gay employees and market to gay customers. Biotech firms are not going to want to hire graduates without a thorough understanding of evolution, so economic pressure will militate against creationism's invading a critical mass of the public schools.
Taking the land
It would take a national disaster, or several of them, for all these bulwarks to crumble and for Christian nationalists to truly "take the land," as Michael Farris, president of the evangelical Patrick Henry College, put it. Historically, totalitarian movements have been able to seize state power only when existing authorities prove unable to deal with catastrophic challenges -- economic meltdown, security failures, military defeat -- and people lose their faith in the legitimacy of the system.
Such calamities are certainly conceivable in America -- Hurricane Katrina's aftermath offered a terrifying glimpse of how quickly order can collapse. If terrorists successfully strike again, we'd probably see significant curtailment of liberal dissenters' free speech rights, coupled with mounting right-wing belligerence, both religious and secular.
The breakdown in the system could also be subtler. Many experts have warned that America's debt is unsustainable and that economic crisis could be on the horizon. If there is a hard landing -- due to an oil shock, a burst housing bubble, a sharp decline in the value of the dollar, or some other crisis -- interest rates would shoot up, leaving many people unable to pay their floating-rate mortgages and credit card bills. Repossessions and bankruptcies would follow. The resulting anger could fuel radical populist movements of either the left or the right -- more likely the right, since it has a far stronger ideological infrastructure in place in most of America.
Military disaster may also exacerbate such disaffection. America's war in Iraq seems nearly certain to come to an ignominious end. The real victims of failure there will be Iraqi, but many Americans will feel embittered, humiliated and sympathetic to the stab-in-the-back rhetoric peddled by the right to explain how Bush's venture has gone so horribly wrong. It was the defeat in World War I, after all, that created the conditions for fascism to grow in Germany.
Perhaps America will be lucky, however, and muddle through its looming problems. In that case, Christian nationalism will continue to be a powerful and growing influence in American politics, although its expansion will happen more fitfully and gradually.
The country's demographics are on the movement's side. Megachurch culture is spreading. The exurbs where religious conservatism thrives are the fastest growing parts of America; in 2004, 97 of the country's 100 fastest-growing counties voted Republican. The disconnection of the exurbs is a large part of what makes the spread of Christian nationalism's fictitious reality possible, because there is very little to conflict with it.
A movement that constitutes its members' entire social world has a grip that's hard to break. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt put it this way: "Social atomization and extreme individualization preceded the mass movements which, much more easily and earlier than they did the sociable, non-individualistic members of the traditional parties, attracted the completely unorganized, the typical 'nonjoiners' who for individualistic reasons always had refused to recognize social links or obligations."
America's ragged divides
Those who want to fight Christian nationalism will need a long-term and multifaceted strategy. I see it as having three parts -- electoral reform to give urban areas fair representation in the federal government, grassroots organizing to help people fight Christian nationalism on the ground and a media campaign to raise public awareness about the movement's real agenda.
My ideas are not about reconciliation or healing. It would be good if a leader stepped forward who could recognize the grievances of both sides, broker some sort of truce, and mend America's ragged divides. The anxieties that underlay Christian nationalism's appeal -- fears about social breakdown, marital instability and cultural decline -- are real. They should be acknowledged and, whenever possible, addressed. But as long as the movement aims at the destruction of secular society and the political enforcement of its theology, it has to be battled, not comforted and appeased.
And while I support liberal struggles for economic justice -- higher wages, universal health care, affordable education, and retirement security -- I don't think economic populism will do much to neutralize the religious right. Cultural interests are real interests, and many drives are stronger than material ones. As Arendt pointed out, totalitarian movements have always confounded observers who try to analyze them in terms of class.
Ultimately, a fight against Christian nationalist rule has to be a fight against the anti-urban bias built into the structure of our democracy. Because each state has two senators, the 7 percent of the population that live in the 17 least-populous states control more than a third of Congress's upper house. Conservative states are also overrepresented in the Electoral College.
According to Steven Hill of the Center for Voting and Democracy, the combined populations of Montana, Wyoming, Nevada, North and South Dakota, Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arizona, and Alaska equal that of New York and Massachusetts, but the former states have a total of nine more votes in the Electoral College (as well as over five times the votes in the Senate). In America, conservatives literally count for more.
Liberals should work to abolish the Electoral College and to even out the composition of the Senate, perhaps by splitting some of the country's larger states.(A campaign for statehood for New York City might be a place to start.) It will be a grueling, Herculean job. With conservatives already indulging in fantasies of victimization at the hands of a maniacal Northeastern elite, it will take a monumental movement to wrest power away from them. Such a movement will come into being only when enough people in the blue states stop internalizing right-wing jeers about how out of touch they are with "real Americans" and start getting angry at being ruled by reactionaries who are out of touch with them.
After all, the heartland has no claim to moral authority. The states whose voters are most obsessed with "moral values" have the highest divorce and teen pregnancy rates. The country's highest murder rates are in the South and the lowest are in New England. The five states with the best-ranked public schools in the country -- Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, New Jersey and Wisconsin -- are all progressive redoubts. The five states with the worst -- New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, Mississippi and Louisiana -- all went for Bush.
The canard that the culture wars are a fight between "elites" versus "regular Americans" belies a profound split between different kinds of ordinary Americans, all feeling threatened by the others' baffling and alien values. Ironically, however, by buying into right-wing elite-baiting, liberals start thinking like out-of-touch elites. Rather than reflecting on what kind of policies would make their own lives better, what kind of country they want to live in, and who they want to represent them -- and then figuring out how to win others to their vision -- progressives flail about for ideas and symbols that they hope will appeal to some imaginary heartland rube. That is condescending.
Focus on the local
One way for progressives to build a movement and fight Christian nationalism at the same time is to focus on local politics. For guidance, they need only look to the Christian Coalition: It wasn't until after Bill Clinton's election exiled the evangelical right from power in Washington that the Christian Coalition really developed its nationwide electoral apparatus.
The Christian right developed a talent for crafting state laws and amendments to serve as wedge issues, rallying their base, and forcing the other side to defend seemingly extreme positions. Campaigns to require parental consent for minors' abortions, for example, get overwhelming public support and put the pro-choice movement on the defensive while giving pro-lifers valuable political experience.
Liberals can use this strategy too. They can find issues to exploit the other side's radicalism, winning a few political victories and, just as important, marginalizing Christian nationalists in the eyes of their fellow citizens. Progressives could work to pass local and state laws, by ballot initiative wherever possible, denying public funds to any organization that discriminates on the basis of religion. Because so much faith-based funding is distributed through the states, such laws could put an end to at least some of the taxpayer-funded bias practiced by the Salvation Army and other religious charities. Right now, very few people know that, thanks to Bush, a faith-based outfit can take tax dollars and then explicitly refuse to hire Jews, Hindus, Buddhists or Muslims. The issue needs far more publicity, and a political fight -- or a series of them -- would provide it. Better still, the campaign would contribute to the creation of a grassroots infrastructure -- a network of people with political experience and a commitment to pluralism.
Progressives could also work on passing laws to mandate that pharmacists fill contraceptive prescriptions. (Such legislation has already been introduced in California, Missouri, New Jersey, Nevada, and West Virginia.) The commercials would practically write themselves. Imagine a harried couple talking with their doctor and deciding that they can't afford any more kids. The doctor writes a birth control prescription, the wife takes it to her pharmacist -- and he sends her away with a religious lecture. The campaign could use one of the most successful slogans that abortion rights advocates ever devised: "Who decides -- you or them?"
A new media strategy
In conjunction with local initiatives, opponents of Christian nationalism need a new media strategy. Many people realize this. Fenton Communications, the agency that handles public relations for MoveOn, recently put together the Campaign to Defend the Constitution, a MoveOn-style grassroots group devoted to raising awareness about the religious right. With nearly 3.5 million members ready to be quickly mobilized to donate money, write letters or lobby politicians on behalf of progressive causes, MoveOn is the closest thing liberals have to the Christian Coalition, but its focus tends to be on economic justice, foreign policy and the environment rather than contentious social issues. The Campaign to Defend the Constitution intends to build a similar network to counter Christian nationalism wherever it appears.
Much of what media strategists need to do simply involves public education. Americans need to learn what Christian Reconstructionism means so that they can decide whether they approve of their congressmen consorting with theocrats. They need to realize that the Republican Party has become the stronghold of men who fundamentally oppose public education because they think women should school their kids themselves. (In It Takes a Family, Rick Santorum calls public education an "aberration" and predicts that home-schooling will flourish as "one viable option among many that will open up as we eliminate the heavy hand of the village elders' top-down control of education and allow a thousand parent-nurtured flowers to bloom.")
When it comes to the public relations fight against Christian nationalism, nothing is trickier than battles concerning public religious symbolism. Fights over crèches in public squares or Christmas hymns sung by school choirs are really about which aspects of the First Amendment should prevail -- its protection of free speech or its ban on the establishment of religion. In general, I think it's best to err on the side of freedom of expression. As in most First Amendment disputes, the answer to speech (or, in this case, symbolism) that makes religious minorities feel excluded or alienated is more speech -- menorahs, Buddhas, Diwali lights, symbols celebrating America's polyglot spiritualism.
There are no neat lines, no way to suck the venom out of these issues without capitulating completely. But one obvious step civil libertarians should take is a much more vocal stance in defense of evangelicals' free speech rights when they are unfairly curtailed. Although far less common than the Christian nationalists pretend, on a few occasions lawsuit-fearing officials have gone overboard in defending church/state separation, silencing religious speech that is protected by the First Amendment. (In one 2005 incident that got tremendous play in the right-wing press, a principal in Tennessee wouldn't allow a ten-year-old student to hold a Bible study during recess.) Such infringements should be fought for reasons both principled, because Christians have the same right to free speech as everyone else, and political, because these abuses generate a backlash that ultimately harms the cause of church/state separation.
The ACLU already does this, but few hear about it, because secularists lack the right's propaganda apparatus. Liberals need to create their own echo chamber to refute these kind of distortions while loudly supporting everyone's freedom of speech. Committed Christian nationalists won't be won over, but some of their would-be sympathizers might be inoculated against the claim that progressives want to extirpate their faith, making it harder for the right to frame every political dispute as part of a war against Jesus.
The challenge, finally, is to make reality matter again. If progressives can do that, perhaps America can be saved.
Fighting fundamentalism at home
Writing just after 9/11, Salman Rushdie eviscerated those on the left who rationalized the terrorist attacks as a regrettable explosion of understandable third world rage: "The fundamentalist seeks to bring down a great deal more than buildings," he wrote. "Such people are against, to offer just a brief list, freedom of speech, a multiparty political system, universal adult suffrage, accountable government, Jews, homosexuals, women's rights, pluralism, secularism, short skirts, dancing, beardlessness, evolution theory, sex."
Christian nationalists have no problem with beardlessness, but except for that, Rushdie could have been describing them.
It makes no sense to fight religious authoritarianism abroad while letting it take over at home. The grinding, brutal war between modern and medieval values has spread chaos, fear, and misery across our poor planet. Far worse than the conflicts we're experiencing today, however, would be a world torn between competing fundamentalisms. Our side, America's side, must be the side of freedom and Enlightenment, of liberation from stale constricting dogmas. It must be the side that elevates reason above the commands of holy books and human solidarity above religious supremacism. Otherwise, God help us all.
Reprinted from Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism by Michelle Goldberg. Copyright © 2006 by Michelle Goldberg. With permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA DEPARTMENT OF
ZOOLOGY
STATEMENT ON EVOLUTION
(Adopted by faculty on 25 April 2006)
Evolution is a fact. Evolutionary Theory is a Cornerstone of Biology
April 2006 May 2006 June 2006 July 2006 August 2006 August 2009
