Harper's has just posted online my cover story from the December, 2006 issue, "Through a Glass, Darkly: How the Christian Right is Reimagining American History." Since the magazine is postdated, the piece actually arrived in subscribers' mailboxes the second week of November, after the big Democratic win. As is usual when one publishes in Harper's, I was asked to be a guest on a bunch of radio shows. Almost without fail the first or second question was, "Isn't the Christian Right a spent force in American life?"
I don't think so. The death of the Christian Right has been prematurely declared with cyclic regularity ever since the Scopes trial of 1925. They weren't dead then, nor was the movement dead even at the height of the New Deal, when it identified organized labor as a main enemy and began organizing to lobby conservative congressmen, an effort that resulted in Taft-Hartley in 1947 and the destruction of progressive labor. They weren't dead in '64, when they couldn't push Goldwater over the finish line, and they weren't dead in '74, when Billy Graham's pal Nixon revealed his dirty tricks. They keep on ticking.
But some things do change. One of them is American fundamentalism's development over the last couple of decades of a more thorough "worldview," an intellectual framework with which to train new generations of fundamentalists who'll believe that history has always been on their side. Below, some excerpts from the story (or you can read the whole thing at Harper's)...
One small paragraph about a video of Pentagon flag officers testifying for the Christian Right group Christian Embassy made the most news, prompting further reporting from The Washington Post, network news, and the activists at the Military Religious Freedom Organization. I'm glad they're on the case, but I think the more important ideas are those about Christian conservatism's deep roots in American history and the narrative force it brings to its account of what America is and should be. That's the stuff that isn't going away just because we have a Democratic congress. To wit:
We keep trying to explain away American fundamentalism. Those of us not engaged personally or emotionally in the biggest political and cultural movement of our times—those on the sidelines of history—keep trying to come up with theories with which to discredit the evident allure of this punishing yet oddly comforting idea of a deity, this strange god. His invisible hand is everywhere, say His citizen-theologians, caressing and fixing every outcome: Little League games, job searches, test scores, the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, the success or failure of terrorist attacks (also known as “signs”), victory or defeat in battle, at the ballot box, in bed. Those unable to feel His soothing touch at moments such as these snort at the notion of a god with the patience or the prurience to monitor every tick and twitch of desire, a supreme being able to make a lion and a lamb cuddle but unable to abide two men kissing. A divine love that speaks through hurricanes. Who would worship such a god? His followers must be dupes, or saps, or fools, their faith illiterate, insane, or misinformed, their strength fleeting, hollow, an aberration. A burp in American history. An unpleasant odor that will pass.
We don’t like to consider the possibility that they are not newcomers to power but returnees, that the revivals that have been sweeping America with generational regularity since its inception are not flare-ups but the natural temperature of the nation. We can’t conceive of the possibility that the dupes, the saps, the fools—the believers—have been with us from the very beginning, that their story about what America once was and should be seems to some great portion of the population more compelling, more just, and more beautiful than the perfunctory processes of secular democracy. Thus we are at a loss to account for this recurring American mood.
I spent a couple of months reading history textbooks produced for the booming Christian school and home school market, a billion dollar a year industry. I also spoke to the producers of these textbooks:
History matters not just for its progression of “fact, fact, fact,” Michael McHugh, a pioneer of fundamentalist education, told me, but for “key personalities.” In Francis Schaeffer’s telling of U.S. history, for instance, John Witherspoon—the only pastor to have signed the Declaration of Independence—looms as large as Thomas Jefferson, because it was Witherspoon who infused the founding with the idea of “Lex Rex,” “law is king” (divine law, that is), derived from the fiercest Protestant reformers of the seventeenth century, men who considered John Calvin’s Geneva too gentle for God. Key personalities are often soldiers, such as General Douglas MacArthur. After the war, McHugh explained, MacArthur ruled Japan “according to Christian principles” for five years. “To what end?” I asked. Japan is hardly any more Christian for this divine intervention. “The Japanese people did capture a vision,” McHugh said. Not the whole Christian deal, but one of its essential foundations. “MacArthur set the stage for free enterprise,” he explained. With Japan committed to capitalism, the United States was free to turn its attention toward the Soviet Union. The general’s providential flanking maneuver, you might say, helped America win the Cold War.
But one needn’t be a flag officer to be used by God. Another favorite of Christian history, said McHugh, was Sergeant Alvin York, a farmer from Pall Mall, Tennessee, who in World War I turned his trigger finger over to God and became perhaps the greatest Christian sniper of the twentieth century.
The "narrative" of the story comes from a visit I made to Danbury, Connecticut. It was to the First Baptist Church of Danbury that Thomas Jefferson wrote his famous letter declaring a "wall of separation" between church and state, so it was to Danbury last spring that a group of fundamentalisat pastors from around the country traveled last spring to perform a sort of exorcism of secular history:
Providential historians are divided on the question of whether it was this decision, Everson v. Board of Education, or FDR’s socialistic New Deal that led God to remove His protection from the nation. Operation Save America’s number two, Pastor Rusty Thomas of Waco, Texas, favors the less controversial New Deal school of thought. God, Rusty told me, “always gave us a left hook of judgment, then He gave us a right cross of revival.” But when the left hook of the Great Depression came, goes the economic theory of fundamentalism, Americans turned to government as their savior instead of God. “So we got another left hook.” Kennedy’s assassination, he explained. Then another left hook: Vietnam. Still we didn’t learn. So God kept throwing punches, said Rusty: crack, AIDS, global warming, September 11, 2,500 flag-draped coffins shipped home from Iraq and more on the way.
Rusty began the day’s preaching, pacing back and forth between Danbury Baptist’s foundation stones. He looked like an exclamation point—tiny feet in thin-soled black leather shoes, almost dwarfish legs, and a powerful torso barely contained by a jacket of double-breasted gray houndstooth. But he had one of the most nuanced preaching voices I’ve ever heard, a soft rasp that seemed to come straight from a broken heart. “We are here to start a gentle revolution,” he whispered. “To reclaim the godly heritage.” He sounded sad, for his sin and mine—we were all guilty of turning our backs on the lessons of history. But then he growled up to a full fury that made even the flaxen-haired pastor beside me literally blink before leaning forward into Rusty’s thunder.
“‘And when you go to war in your land’”— Rusty recited from the Book of Numbers—“and make no mistake about it, we are in a war—”
“Amen!” hollered Reverend Flip.
“‘And when you go to war in your land,’” continued Rusty, “‘against an adversary who oppresses you’”—and here he interrupted himself. “How many besides me are vexed by what is happening in the United States of America today?”
The crowd, shedding jackets and coats beneath a wan but warm spring sun, murmured amens.
“Your soul is vexed,” Rusty moaned. Then he cried out: “We are under oppression!”
“AMEN!” responded the crowd, rising up to match Rusty’s increased volume. The bill of grievances was hard: “Are we not in mourning?” Rusty asked, repeating the question and drawing it out as the women among us closed their eyes and said, plain and simple, Yes. “Are we not in mournnnning?” he moaned. “As terrorism strikes us from without, corruptions from within?” Yes, said the women, the men seemingly shamed into silence. “How many know we’re losing our children?” Yes. “Our marriages are failing!” YES.
Pastor Rusty, in fact, was a single father—of ten, the youngest of whom is named Torah. Liz, his wife of twenty years, died last year from lymphoma, on the verge of what seemed like recovery. Reverend Flip had chronicled online her long fight, a roller coaster of remission and relapse, so that the family’s prayer partners—activists and Christian radio listeners across the country—could help fight for her survival. “Goodnight for now, sweet sister,” Flip wrote when they failed. “We’ll see you in the morning.”
“There’s going to have to be a great fundamental shift,” Rusty preached near the end of his sermon. Not just in society but among the believers. There is a “mothering” church, he said, and a “fatherhood” church, separate but equal aspects of God. The mother church nurtures and holds a child when he’s done wrong; the father church is the church of discipline. The mother church feeds the poor, comforts the dying, attempting to remind nations of righteous behavior. But to Rusty the lesson of American history—the lesson of Valley Forge and Shiloh; Khe Sanh and Baghdad; Dallas, 1963; Roe v. Wade, 1973; Manhattan, 2001—is clear: this nation is too far gone to be redeemed by mercy alone. It is the father church’s time.
The whole story -- it's about 8,500 words -- is now free online at Harper's. It's a long read, and probably of more interest to history geeks than ordinary souls, but I think it's time for liberal/left activists to move beyond caricature of the Christian Right if there's to be a real response to what I'd argue is their increasingly strong longterm vision.
(SERIOUS history geeks may want to wait for the version that'll appear in my history of elite fundamentalism, from the Great Awakening to the 21st century, forthcoming from HarperCollins in the fall. But that one'll cost ya.)