update: for the quick, Zen approach to this post, scroll to the end, to "fun facts, widely ignored, about Sarah Palin's faith". Consider the political explosiveness of Palin's religious associations. Then, reflect on the fact that my research colleague and I wrote extensively on the issue in the weeks before the November 4th. That illustrates the depth of the problem.
Who is the rider ? Who is the horse ? Is the very frame misleading ?
I've heard this sort of thing before:
"The GOP is run by rich folks, and basically looks after their class interests; low taxes, no estate taxes, helping out business. However, there are not enough rich folks to elect a president, even if you count the toadies, the hangers-on, the wanna-bes and the folks who think they're rich but aren't. So the party has to use the religious right as its actual voters, and this group includes a fair number of folks who AREN'T rich.
To gather this group in, the GOP promises, but doesn't deliver..."
When a claim, that there exists some sharp distinction between the Christian right and the Republican Party, can win such enthusiastic backing on the biggest democratic/progressive activist website in America we've got a lot to learn.
Anyone asserting that the GOP is dominated by secular republicans who manipulate rank and file Christian conservatives but never deliver on their promises has simply not been paying attention.
Unless American liberals and progressive pay attention to the Christian right and learn how the movement advances its agenda the left will in two, four, or six years from now be blindsided, in a tiresome repetition of a pattern that has repeated over and over again, in 1980, 1992 and 2000 most notably, by a movement that seemingly comes out of nowhere, in successive political storms whose waves wash each time farther up the beach, to dominate the national political agenda.
As unpleasant as the George W. Bush years have been, the next time will be worse. Guaranteed. Unless the left can learn to pay attention.
You see, to begin with there's no need for rich republicans to con lower income Christian conservatives, because the driving ideology behind the Christian right, as a movement, has been by design created as extremely friendly to elite business and financial interests.
One of the core tenets on the hard Christian right is that government redistribution of wealth is the fast road to godless communism, viewed as ultimately satanic and probably engineered by a secret Jewish cabal. Understand that and you'll be well on the way to understanding politicians such as Sarah Palin.
You can call that ideology a 'con' and, indeed, it certainly has been marketed to lower and middle class Americans. But the financial backers who financed the marketing of that ideology were for the most part not secular.
The ideology now dominant in the GOP has been crafted by elite financial interests, sure: people such as the Hunt brothers, the Coors family, the Koch family, Howard Ahmanson, the Prince family and the Devos clan... on and on it goes: religious ideologues all.
These key funders of the Christian right, who bankrolled the infrastructure, the Heritage Institute and all the other organizations which sprang up in the 1970s and 1980s and drove the Christian right as a movement, they were deeply religious. They were (and are) opposed to the Enlightenment and to pluralistic democracy. They want to institute a Christian theocracy and return the political order to the time when church and state were melded, the time of the divine right of kings.
The Christian right began an inter-party war to take over the GOP back in the 1980's, initially in Texas, California and a few other carefully chosen battleground states. By the time when Newt Gingrich and his cohort swept into Congress and the Senate in the 1992 powered by the stealth campaigns of the politicized Christian right, by the Christian coalition and similar groups, the movement had come to consume much of the GOP.
The inter-party war was written about at the time, as shocked old-guard Goldwater Republicans were driven, hounded and hooted from party caucuses, in Texas and elsewhere, by mobs of Christian conservative activists who had come, it seemed, out of nowhere, in force to take over the GOP precinct by precinct and county by county.
Careful, methodical research on the influence of the Christian right in the GOP exists. This is not speculation on my part.
The new Christian right: below, in a new 10 minute documentary video, I examine, in the context of its heavily anti-Semitic undertone, the New Apostolic Reformation's recently launched program encouraging and equipping Christians to begin taking control of business and finance: "The Seven Mountains Mandate" (or "7M Mandate").
As it has gained political power and influence the Christian right has held back from forcing through the sort of legal and government changes that could produce a real backlash from the left. Indeed, the approach of advancing theocracy by increment, through cleverly crafted laws and initiatives, has worked amazingly well - so well that Americans on the left don't perceive the Christian right as having achieved or gained anything at all.
Call it the boiled frog strategy.
The claim that rich, secular republicans manipulate and pull a bait and switch on lower-income Christian conservative rubes was probably an old one when it was put forth, back in 2004, by Tom Frank in What's The Matter With Kansas, a superbly styled work that was simply wrong.
Anyone who believes the American Christian right has gotten nowhere, achieved no gains, over the last several decades has simply not been paying close enough attention and the fact that John McCain is not president-elect today has much to do with his inattention to the Christian right as well.
McCain didn't get the Christian Right. He lost. Twice.
A case can be made that John McCain would have beat George W. Bush in the 2000 election but for one critical difference:
Senator McCain then was almost a decade young, with broad crossover appeal and a vastly stronger claim to being a 'maverick'. But McCain believed that he could almost single handedly wrest the GOP back from the Christian right's culture warriors who had come to dominate and reshape the party.
George W. Bush understood the influence the Christian right had developed in the GOP. His role during his father's presidential administration had been as an ambassador to the movement which was less than fully enthusiastic about the presidency of George Bush Sr. The younger Bush had been born-agained in the presence of evangelist Arthur Blessit, whose life project at the time was to drag a huge cross, on wheels no less, around the globe, mile by tedious mile.
George W. Bush understood the Christian right. John McCain did not in 2000 and eight years later McCain still didn't seem to get the movement.
In the 2000 GOP primaries John McCain, over and over again in high profile public addresses, lambasted leaders such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell as "agents of intolerance".
What happened ?
The Christian right backed Bush. McCain lost.
Afterward, John McCain apparently reconsidered the role of the Christian right in the GOP. He choked down his principles and set out to build bridges with the movement, in expectation of a future presidential run.
McCain worked at this for several years. Diligently. Eventually, Jerry Falwell and other top leaders of the Christian right allowed McCain to appear together with Falwell and other top Christian conservative leaders, the sort of public co-endorsement that McCain had proclaimed back in the 2000 primaries that he would NEVER engage in.
John McCain went on to a protracted courtship of Texas megachurch pastor John Hagee, and in early 2008 Hagee finally relented and granted John McCain a political endorsement.
But here, again, John McCain was handicapped by his thin understanding of the Christian right. McCain could have found other leaders in the movement who had smoother edges than Hagee but who would have served the same approximate political function.
A successful experiment: paying attention brings political results
In the spring of 2008, scores of organizations on the American left proceeded to try to split John McCain and John Hagee. As a solitary individual I was the one who succeeded and the reason was in the end elementary. I had studied and been writing on John Hagee for about a year and a half, and I bothered to listen to John Hagee's sermons.
It was that simple:
I listened to lots of Hagee sermons and that's how I found the "God sent Hitler" Hagee statement that I put into a three minute and forty second video which made its way onto Olbermann and then got broadcast, literally, around the world.
Renouncing John Hagee's political endorsement hurt John McCain's shaky entente with Christian conservatives. McCain's need to shore up his base, which McCain himself publicly said in the 2008 general election was on the Christian right, influenced his surprise pick of Sarah Palin.
Palin, as it turned out, had higher negatives than the McCain campaign had anticipated.
As much as anything John McCain's presidential bid was undone by his ignorance of the Christian right movement and by McCain's general ignorance of how the movement has used politicized religion to further its agenda.
Sarah Palin just wasn't yet ready. Had McCain chosen another politician from the Christian right a as vice presidential running mate, Sarah Palin probably would have made a bid for Congress or, more likely, the Senate. In that position she would have had time to learn a bit about the world outside of Alaska - that Africa was not a country for example.
So here we are with the happier outcome of Barack Obama as president elect.
As for the gains of the Christian right over the past eight years of George W. Bush's presidency, I'll say this; there's a huge amount of journalism to do just catching up. I've put a number of disturbing stories on hold to focus instead on national presidential politics and I hope to have a chance to catch up on the theocratic creep under Bush that's advanced quite far in some US states and on some national fronts... to almost no notice whatsoever.
Most of the action is at the state level and that's by design;
The architects of the modern Christian right didn't want to control the federal government as it was, they wanted to destroy much of it, especially the New Deal and subsequent federal social programs.
The movement is well on its way to achieving that goal, and the vision is for a decentralized Christian theocracy in which most current federal functions are devolved to the states.
To his credit, Tom Frank has moved on since writing What's the Matter With Kansas, to a more accurate sense of the Christian right's agenda. The very title of Frank's new book, The Wrecking Crew, says a lot.
The activists on the Christian right have indeed been bent, as Frank's title indicates, on destroying federal government functions and on eroding public confidence that the federal government can effectively address national problems. Of course. Those activists think much of the federal government shouldn't exist in the first place.
Meanwhile there's a new storm rising on the Christian right, and I'm planning to co-author a book on the subject in coming months. To shockingly little notice, the Christian right has expanded outward to become an international and globally influential movement aggressively seeking political dominance in an astonishing number of countries around the world.
The ideology of that movement is if anything even more politically extreme than was the last incarnation of the Christian right, and the advance of the New Apostolic Reformation has been largely missed by secular Americans and the left. The dynamism and creativity of the movement is astounding and without any doubt it will power a new wave of political activists making a bid for power in two, four and six years from now.
Will American liberals and progressive be able to push past soporific claims that the Christian right is, as a movement, dead or that it never achieves any of its goals ?
They'll need more political sophistication, more knowledge and deeper insight than that if they are to hold on to the gains of the 2006 and 2008 elections.
The American right has, for decades, effectively used politicized religion to attack the American left. My feat of splitting John Hagee from John McCain was lucky but without real knowledge I wouldn't have had a chance. I didn't have preconceptions that Democratic Party operatives would be pounding at my door in search of any insights on how else to advance party aims through specialized knowledge of the Christian right but I was a bit taken aback that interest from the new activist political left was almost nonexistent as well.
Sarah Palin's two witch hunters get a collective yawn
In the two months following John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as a running mate I worked, together with a co-researcher, to document Sarah Palin's close ties to a newly emerging tendency on the Christian right known as the New Apostolic Reformation.
What was astounding about it was the staggering lack of curiousity, not just on the part of mainstream media but on the political left as well, both the Democratic Party and non-party activists, about Sarah Palin's religious ties.
In the days following McCain's pick, the Wasilla Assembly of God wiped two and a half years of audio and video from its church website - audio and video of sermons and events from 2004 through to late 2006.
That didn't seem to provoke much suspicion.
I managed to save some striking material but missed the prize. In late September video surfaced of an October 16, 2005 ceremony at the Wasilla Assembly of God church, in which Sarah Palin was blessed and anointed by three pastors including Thomas Muthee.
Fun facts, widely ignored, on Sarah Palin's faith
Thomas Muthee made his career on his claim to be able to cut crime and addiction by expelling 'territorial demons' and by hounding a 'witch' out of town.
Muthee had become an international celebrity, to millions, through a globally popular video which explained that magical method of 'transforming' society.
Sarah Palin borrowed, as Wasilla mayor, one of those videos, starring Muthee, on the magic demon and witch-fighting crime and addiction reduction program.
In fact, it turned out Palin was definitively tied to a second professed witch hunter, Mary Glazier.
That relationship was confirmed and one leader in the New Apostolic Reformation stated that Palin was currently active in Mary Glazier's spiritual warfare network.
Both Muthee and Palin were high-level leaders in the New Apostolic Reformation, which claims the Catholic church is under demon influence, that Catholic prayers don't go to heaven and that the Israeli Knesset is the 'mind of satan'.
I was at the time, and still am, convinced those facts could have been used to considerable political effect in the closing days of the election.
Here is a link to a dedicated Talk To Action page with the many stories and documentary videos published at Talk To Action in the last two months on Sarah Palin's churches and the New Apostolic Reformation movement
All of which is to say that while many political activists on the left, as individuals, have a fair degree of insight into the Christian right and politicized religion, its not clear that the collective understanding has advanced much if at all in the last eight years.