There hasn’t been that much news of the oppressed Christian minority, the few and the angry – that besieged minority constantly battling powerful elites – since Justice Sunday back in the spring of 2005 when Senate leader Bill Frist spoke of aligning all “people of faith” against Democrats and liberals. The idea was that this powerless group of outsiders, Christians in America and conservative Republicans, had to take back the nation from the secularists who had hijacked it and said the government should have nothing to do with God and just make sure we’re safe and things run smoothly. They just couldn’t let this stand. They seemed to think the Founding Fathers were a religious lot, even if the Founding Fathers didn’t says so (see Gary Wills’ new book, Head and Heart: American Christianities, reviewed by Tim Rutten in the LA Times here – the founders were of a “liberality of spirit which must forever and properly remain a scandal to the rank and file of professing American Christians”). We had to get back to where they said we had been, even if it seems we hadn’t been there. They’re not big on details.
Since then Senator Frist – the doctor who diagnosed the brain dead woman from edited videotapes and proclaimed on the Senate floor that she was just fine – is long gone. And the atheists are getting all uppity, what with all their new bestselling books – and they even have a cool new logo. Something is up. Is the oppressed Christian minority losing its hard-earned but tenuous clout?
With the religious right – even if the stale joke is that they are neither – it is time, right now, to reassert their relevancy and move their agenda forward. There are nine white men who would really like the Republican nomination and get the chance to be the next president, and there is a lever the religious right has in its hands in that particular matter – sheer numbers. Thirty or forty percent of Republicans identify themselves as “values voters” – they say they have actual values and say no one else does – and as a bloc they can determine just which of the white guys gets the nod. In mid-October there was the Family Research Council’s “Values Voter Summit” and all nine had to appear and satisfy the crowd (here’s Mitt Romney’s effort to satisfy them). Nothing has been decided yet, even if one candidate, that amiable Huckabee fellow, is an ordained Baptist minister. Huckabee has been careful to remind everyone of an often overlooked fact – “When our founding fathers put their signatures on the Declaration of Independence, those fifty-six brave people, most of whom, by the way, were clergymen, they said that we have certain inalienable rights given to us by our creator, and among these, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, life being one of them. I still believe that.”
So we are a Christian nation, after all, founded by clergymen. The news item also added this, dryly – “Only one of the fifty-six was an active clergyman, and that was John Witherspoon. Witherspoon was a Presbyterian minister and president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University).”
Oops. Luckily his audience is not big on details. After all, they do have a bit of a problem with the concept of majority and minority, generally.
And according Frank Rich in the New York Times of Sunday, October 28, they’re having a bit a of a problem with the values thing too – they seem to like the guy who doesn’t share their values, Rudy Giuliani. In August 2001, Rich had written this column – Giuliani would never be president. Giuliani had been banished from Gracie Mansion after dumping his second wife for Judith Nathan and was a lame-duck mayor who had been living for two months with a gay couple. It should have been over then. And now Giuliani seems to be the front-runner in the Republican pack six years later. Go figure –
When Rudy’s candidacy started to show legs, pundits and family values activists alike assumed that ignorant voters knew only his 9/11 video reel and not his personal history or his stands on issues. “Americans do not yet realize how far outside of the mainstream of conservative thought that Mayor Giuliani’s social views really are,” declared Tony Perkins, the Family Research Council leader, in February. But despite Rudy’s fleeting stabs at fudging his views, they are well known now, and still he leads in national polls of Republican voters and is neck and neck with Fred Thompson in the Bible Belt sanctuary of South Carolina.
But there are reasons for this –
One is that 9/11 and terrorism fears trump everything. Another is that the rest of the field is weak. But the most obvious explanation is the one that Washington resists because it contradicts the city’s long-running story line. Namely, that the political clout ritualistically ascribed to Mr. Perkins, James Dobson of Focus on the Family, Gary Bauer of American Values and their ilk is a sham.
These guys really don’t matter? That’s the thesis –
These self-promoting values hacks don’t speak for the American mainstream. They don’t speak for the Republican Party. They no longer speak for many evangelical ministers and their flocks. The emperors of morality have in fact had no clothes for some time. Should Rudy Giuliani end up doing a victory dance at the Republican convention, it will be on their graves.
Rich suggests it’s that Elmer Gantry thing (see also others from Jimmy Swaggart to Jim Bakker) –
The Ted Haggard revelations were in that tawdry tradition, and so was the news that the Christian Coalition’s front man, Ralph Reed, looked forward, as he put it, to “humping in corporate accounts” in collaboration with the now-jailed K Street lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Their fall from grace was synergistically augmented by their scandal-prone family-values allies on Capitol Hill. Even now, the virulent marriage defender David Vitter retains his Senate seat despite having confessed to unspecified sins after his name surfaced in bordello scandals in both Washington and New Orleans.
Also staying put in the Senate is Larry Craig, who, consciously or not, is calling the whole moral brigade’s bluff. After he was busted in the Minneapolis airport, Republicans insisted he undergo an ethics committee investigation on the assumption that he’d disappear before they could conduct it. Now they will have to make good on their word.
But the most significant explanation of what is happening, as Rich sees it, is that “a new generation of evangelical leaders have themselves steadily tacked a different course from the Dobson crowd.” Could that be? There is that CBS News poll – evangelicals, like most other Americans, are more interested in hearing from presidential candidates about the war in Iraq and health care than about any other issues. Abortion and same-sex marriage were at the bottom of the list and fighting poverty outpolled abortion as a personal priority by a 3-to-2 margin.
Would Jesus weep? Would Jesus cry? Didn’t Jesus once argue that the poor should suffer the consequences of their sinful folly with these famous words – “Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?” That was actually someone else, but the Dobson crowd isn’t big on details.
Well, there was that Values Voter Summit - but in a survey of participants to determine which issue would be “most important” in choosing a presidential candidate, Rich notes that the summit’s organizers didn’t even think to list the war, health care or fighting poverty. Those were not offered as options. Maybe Jesus was kidding about such things.
And then there was the survey of presidential preferences that weekend –
Rudy Giuliani came in next to last (behind Tom Tancredo, ahead of John McCain) in the field of nine candidates, earning only 1.85 percent of the vote. By contrast, among white evangelicals nationwide in the CBS News poll, he was in a statistical dead heat for first place with Fred Thompson; indeed, Mr. Giuliani’s 26 percent among evangelicals nearly matches his showing among all Republican voters. The discrepancy between the CBS poll and the summit survey leaves you wondering who exactly follows Dr. Dobson and Mr. Perkins beyond the ticket buyers who showed up for their media circus last weekend at the Washington Hilton.
Okay, CBS must have found a bunch of “phony evangelicals” – much like Rush Limbaugh found those “phony soldiers” who think the wrong thing. There’s a pattern here.
Dobson is NOT happy about Giuliani dong so well – Rich says it reminds him of Dobson’s 2005 condemnation of SpongeBob SquarePants for appearing in that “pro-homosexual video” (also discussed in these pages at the time in The Business of Business, as Dobson was after Wells Fargo Bank for not being with him on that issue). And Dobson is threatening to takes his voters to a third party. It’s just that it might not matter.
But it’s all bluster –
If they really believed uncompromisingly in their issues and principles, they would have long since endorsed either Sam Brownback, the zealous Kansas senator fond of using fetus photos as political props, or Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor who spent 15 years as a Baptist preacher, calls abortion a “holocaust” and believes in intelligent design rather than evolution.
But they don’t want to back a loser. Then they’d have no power at all. And they’d get no money from the sincere and self-righteous rubes. It’s a trap. They walked into it –
“You have absolutely nothing to fear from me,” Rudy disingenuously told the assembled at the Values Voter Summit last weekend. Actually, there’s plenty for everyone to fear from a Giuliani presidency, starting with the mad neocon bombers shaping his apocalyptic policy toward Iran. But that’s another story. Whichever candidate or party lands in the White House, this much is certain: Inauguration Day 2009 is at the very least Armageddon for the reigning ayatollahs of the American right.
Richard Einhorn says if only –
I truly wish this were so, that we didn’t have to worry about the theocrats amongst us. But I don’t believe it for a second. The “intelligent design” creationism movement, despite taking a huge hit from the outcome of the Kitzmiller trial, has regrouped. Its new strategy is very simple and dangerous: Rather than advocate directly for creationism, they have designed and are selling a bad biology textbook that makes all sorts of specious critiques of Darwin and evolution. Get it? While you can insist that schools obey the law and not establish religion, it is very difficult to design a law that keeps schools from purchasing, and using, a terrible, error-filled textbook.
Furthermore, as far as I know, no viable candidate for the presidency has come out in favor of a rollback - I would prefer elimination - of the “faith-based” government handouts to political operatives in priestly vestments such as Chuck Colson.
Seems like everyone’s predicting the imminent implosion of modern christianism. And yes, it does look that way, doesn’t it? Despite the wide variety of clinical-level personality disorders on display amongst the current Republican candidates, the so-called “religious” right can’t find the particular flavor of lunacy that makes them get all hard. Call it electile dysfunction.
And too there was that other article in the Sunday Times on the same subject – something about an evangelical crackup –
Just three years ago, the leaders of the conservative Christian political movement could almost see the Promised Land. White evangelical Protestants looked like perhaps the most potent voting bloc in America. They turned out for President George W. Bush in record numbers, supporting him for re-election by a ratio of four to one. Republican strategists predicted that religious traditionalists would help bring about an era of dominance for their party. Spokesmen for the Christian conservative movement warned of the wrath of “values voters.” James C. Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, was poised to play kingmaker in 2008, at least in the Republican primary. And thanks to President Bush, the Supreme Court appeared just one vote away from answering the prayers of evangelical activists by overturning Roe v. Wade.
Today the movement shows signs of coming apart beneath its leaders. It is not merely that none of the 2008 Republican front-runners come close to measuring up to President Bush in the eyes of the evangelical faithful, although it would be hard to find a cast of characters more ill fit for those shoes: a lapsed-Catholic big-city mayor; a Massachusetts Mormon; a church-skipping Hollywood character actor; and a political renegade known for crossing swords with the Rev. Pat Robertson and the Rev. Jerry Falwell. Nor is the problem simply that the Democratic presidential front-runners - Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Senator Barack Obama and former Senator John Edwards - sound like a bunch of tent-revival Bible thumpers compared with the Republicans.
Maybe they really are a minority after all, and here’s the problem in a nutshell –
The phenomenon of theologically conservative Christians plunging into political activism on the right is, historically speaking, something of an anomaly. Most evangelicals shrugged off abortion as a Catholic issue until after the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. But in the wake of the ban on public-school prayer, the sexual revolution and the exodus to the suburbs that filled the new megachurches, protecting the unborn became the rallying cry of a new movement to uphold the traditional family. Now another confluence of factors is threatening to tear the movement apart. The extraordinary evangelical love affair with Bush has ended, for many, in heartbreak over the Iraq war and what they see as his meager domestic accomplishments. That disappointment, in turn, has sharpened latent divisions within the evangelical world - over the evangelical alliance with the Republican Party, among approaches to ministry and theology, and between the generations.
Ah, theocracy will not reign. And anyway, there is one huge generational gap –
For the conservative Christian leadership, what is most worrisome about the evangelical disappointment with President Bush is that it coincides with a widening philosophical rift. Ever since they broke with the mainline Protestant churches nearly 100 years ago, the hallmark of evangelicals’ theology has been a vision of modern society as a sinking ship, sliding toward depravity and sin. For evangelicals, the altar call was the only life raft - a chance to accept Jesus Christ, rebirth and salvation. Falwell, Dobson and their generation saw their political activism as essentially defensive, fighting to keep traditional moral codes in place so their children could have a chance at the raft.
But many younger evangelicals - and some old-timers - take a less fatalistic view. For them, the born-again experience of accepting Jesus is just the beginning. What follows is a long-term process of “spiritual formation” that involves applying his teachings in the here and now. They do not see society as a moribund vessel. They talk more about a biblical imperative to fix up the ship by contributing to the betterment of their communities and the world. They support traditional charities but also public policies that address health care, race, poverty and the environment.
It seems the young folks take Jesus at his word – they decided Jesus wasn’t kidding about all that kindness and love stuff.
Still, that’s a theological fine point and Einhorn is worried about the whole business of theological imperatives – what God has commanded us to do. The religious right loves authority, just as any conservative loves custom and tradition and compliance with the directives of one’s betters, the rich and powerful – even if not God, precisely, only God’s chosen (they used to be called kings). That’s why he is worried about what is wished for on the right – hoping we are “one terrorist attack away from dramatically increased authoritarianism.” Then people would do what they should.
His view –
Anyone in fall 2007 who thinks Christianism’s been beaten back to the margins of American cultural and political life simply doesn’t understand who these people are, what they’ve been doing for some 82 years, and how far they have advanced over the past 8 years. It is a sad truth that the fight against American Christianism will continue for a very long time to come. The mere absence, at present, of a viable national presidential candidate for ‘08 who supports their theocratic agenda isn’t even a tiny victory but simply a statistical blip.
It’s all about obeying the master – authoritarianism is authoritarianism, no matter how you slice it. That’s not going away, and they have Rudy. Whether God is involved is a quibble.
