Consider Chris Houghton, who showed up at an Obama-attended Arizona VFW townhall event. African-American, clean-shaven, impeccably dressed, articulate, Hougton could have stepped right out of the pages of history, a civil rights activist marching, alongside Martin Luther King, Jr., on the road to Selma. Except for a few jarring details - Chris Hougton's pastor has publicly declared he is praying that Barack Obama will die, and Houghton showed up at the AZ townhall event, in opposition to Barack Obama's health care plan, slinging a semi-automatic assault rifle.
Yes, there are racists on the American right. It's undeniable. And, it wasn't a bad thing for Former President Jimmy Carter to call out the apparent racism demonstrated at "teabaggger" rallies around the nation. As Carter stated on NBC, "I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity against President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man."
Carter is right to call out the apparent racism. But we can't assume that all the teabagger anti-Obama animosity is driven by racism. And, we can't conflate the teabagger movement with the entire American right. That's a logical and conceptual error of the first magnitude - an error which could hurt Democratic Party prospects in 2010 and 2012.
Video clips of teabagger events show seas of overwhelmingly white faces but does that mean the entire US right, all GOP voters, or all opponents of government-managed health care are white ? Of course not.
As Samuel Rodriguez told his audience, on August 24, 2009 at Morningstar Ministries in North Carolina,
"The stereotypical media-exacerbated image of the angry white evangelical will be replaced by an evangelical movement that will reconcile uncompromised core values with compassion, truth with mercy, and righteousness with justice... we will mobilize a multi-ethnic kingdom culture presentation of the Gospel message. We will mobilize for cultural reformation - not just engagement. We will vociferously articulate, with love and compassion, that God is sovereign over man and government... we will mobilize to defend life, liberty, and our Judeo-Christian value system."
In the future, the Christian supremacist push for theocratic government will be increasingly multi-ethnic. While the American political left and mainstream media focus on racism-tinged teabagger events, organizers such as Samuel Rodriguez are building the post-racist American right. The project is far from completion but it has been underway for over a decade and already has born electoral fruit.
Rodriguez is President of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Council, an organization that purports to represent over ten million Hispanic evangelical and five million Hispanic charismatic Catholics. He formed the NHCLC in 2000 and by 2004 the NHCLC-represented voting bloc swung hard right, for George W. Bush. Then, in 2008, it swung towards Barack Obama.
What of 2010 and 2012 ? Well, Sammy Rodriguez is working to convince evangelical voters that opposition to gay marriage and legal abortion amounts to the new civil rights movement of our time. A secret weapon of the anti-gay marriage campaigns run in Florida, Arizona, and California during the 2008 election were minority evangelicals - Hispanic, African American and Asian Christians aggressively recruited into an effort that blindsided the gay activist community.
But the new rainbow right isn't wholly fixated on opposition to legal abortion and gay marriage. Far from it. In his Morningstar speech the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez plugged for free-market economics and inveighed against government run, or managed, health care.
While pundits and erstwhile students of the American Christian right continue to fixate on a dwindling group of well-known, aging, old-gaurd leaders such as Pat Robertson, James Dobson, and Tony Perkins, a whole new generation of leadership is fast moving to the fore.
Because these new leaders are energetic, hip, creative, flexible, enterprising, and media and culture-savvy, it's easy to forget that they're fundamentalists intent on Christian supremacy. And, it's easy to conflate the Christian right with the GOP but as Sammy Rodriguez told his Morningstar audience,
"We will not be held hostage the agenda of the donkey or the elephant. We will serve as advocates for the agenda of the lamb."
In practice that approach works out this way ; the Christian right won't surrender its dominant position in the GOP. Rather, it will infiltrate the Democratic Party. Indeed, that ideological takeover is well underway and Rodriguez is one of the point men.
It's easy to mistake Samuel Rodriguez as a progressive or moderate if one doesn't pay attention. But, Rodriguez is signed onto a new Christian right coalition headed by another emergent evangelical leader, Rick Joyner, who has advocated Christian theocratic rule that "may at first seem like totalitarianism" and would re-educate citizens in 'correct' decision making.
The new Christian right is also arising under the leadership of pastors usually associated with the traditional Christian right - such as John Hagee, whose church now boasts, as emphasized in a June 2009 San Antonio Express News story, "impressive diversity."
That "impressive diversity" is the Christian right's secret weapon in its bid to forge a new, theocratic Christian America:
A suddenly resurgent GOP is only one possibility for the near-term political future. But unless the secular American starts to pay closer attention it's very likely that American politics will come to be dominated by not one but "two Christian parties", waving their Bibles at each other in Congress, from opposing sides of the aisle.