Michelle Goldberg: Kingdom Coming

What follows are quotes from Michelle Goldberg's book, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (WW Norton).

On megachurches (pp. 58-59):

All over America, megachurches -- generally defined as churches with more than two thousand members -- are multiplying. There were about 10 such churches in 1970. Today there are upward of 880. Such churches still represent only 1 percent of American congregations, but they're growing as older churches atrophy. John N. Vaughn, founder of the research and consultancy firm Church Growth Today, has estimated that a new megachurch opens its doors every two days.

These churches are usually located on the sprawling edges of cities, in the new exurban developments that almost totally lack for public space -- squares, parks, promenades, or even, in some places, sidewalks. With their endless procession of warehouselike chain stores and garish profusion of primary-colored logos, the exurbs are the purest of ecosystems for consumer capitalism. Yet the brutal, impersonal utilitarianism of the strip mall and office park architecture -- its perversely ascetic refusal to make a single concession to aesthetics -- recalls the Stalinist monstrosities imposed on Communist countries. The banality is aggressive and disorienting. Driving though many of these places in states from Pennsylvania to Colorado, I've experienced more than a few moments of vertiginous panic wherer I literally could not remember where I was.

Because most exurbs are so new, none of the residents grew up in them; everyone is from somewhere else and there are few places for them to meet. In such locales, megachurches fill the spiritual and social void, providing atomized residents instant community. Besides worship services, they offer dinners and parties, family counseling and summer camp, even sports leagues, gyms, and weight-loss programs. There's a McDonald's inside the Brentwood Baptist Church in Houston, and a Starbucks in the Covenant Celebration Church in Tacoma, Washington. The congregations are often organized into small groups of people who monitor one another's spiritual progress, developing intimate relationships in the process. [ . . . ]

Walk into a megachurch during the height of a Sunday service and you'll see staid suburbanites bouncing and swaying as strobe lights strafe the air and bombastic anthems crescendo; for a secular urbanite, the closest comparison is the dizzy ecstasy of a rock concert or the dawn communion of an all-night dance club. The preacher usually tells everyone to greet their neighbors, and worshippers of every race and age turn toward one another an dexchange blessings with radiant smiles. Nowhere else in America is so indiscriminately welcoming.

On a visit to a megachurch (p. 69):

Overall, the feeling in Alltel was more saccharine than sulphurous, but the cozy unity inside depended on the enemy without. Christian nationalism, like most militant ideologies, can exist only in opposition to something. Its sense of righteousness depends on feeling besieged, no matter how much power it amasses. Conservatives control almost the entire federal government, along with an enormous Christian counterculture, but go to any right-wing gathering, and you'll hear speaker after speaker talk about being under attack, about yearning to "take the country back," about the necessity of fighting ever harder.

Needing to see their foe as equal to their hatred, they exaggerate its strength. So gay people become a threat to the most important thing conservatives have -- their families. In standing up to that threat, they see themselves as heroes. Their loathing is transformed into virtue.

On the Jewish question (p. 72):

Like racism, overt anti-Semitism has become unacceptable in most evangelical circles, supplanted by philo-Semitism and passionate Zionism. Partly, this is due to the right's identification with Israel's fight against Islamic terrorism, but more important is the enormous influence of premillenial dispensationalism, a major strain within American evangelical Christianity. Dispensationalists -- a category that includes most prominent evangelical leaders -- believe that the return of Jews to Israel and the restoration of Jewish sovereignty over the Temple Mount is a precondition for the rapture, the apocalypse, and the return of Christ.

That doesn't mean that anti-Jewish sentiment has disappeared from the Christian right. The dispensationalist scenario, after all, includes apocalyptic warfare in Israel and the violent death of most of the world's Jews. (In the Left Behind series, only those Jews who atone for the "specific national sin" of "[r]ejecting the messiahship of Jesus" are saved.) Fundamentalist Christians will say that they're simply proclaiming the frightful truth, but much of their literature dwells on the details of Jewish torment with disquieting relish.

In addition, the language that the right uses to describe its enemies echoes all the tropes of classic anti-Semitism. The day after the 2004 election, the right-wing magazine Human Events posted a pseudosatirical piece on its Web site called "Declaration of Expulsion: A Modest Proposal."

Goldberg then compares a quote from that piece to one by Hans Oberlindober, a Nazi writing in 1937.

On revealed science (p. 96):

"I make no apology for the fact that I start with the revealed word of God as the basis of my thinking," Ham told the audience. "That's my starting point, my axiom. . . . But if you go to the public schools, where they deny God has anything to do with reality, then it's man who determines truth." Talking about science without reference to God is inherently anti-Christian, he said. "You're either for Christ or against him."

Everyone, said Ham, views reality through a pair of metaphorical glasses. "You've either got on God's word glasses, or man's word," he said. There's no way to take the glasses off, to achieve objectivity. The question becomes which lens you're going to trust. "The Bible gives us an account of history to enable us to have the right presuppositions to know the right way of thinking in every area," he said. "Ain't it exciting being a Christian? We have the history to explain the universe!"

About Lynne Cheney's 1996 book, Telling the Truth (pp. 102-103):

Cheney's book abounds in examples of the havoc postmodern ideas have wrought in American life. At the outset, she wrote of how the "author of a textbook for future teachers urges skepticism for the idea that the people now known as American Indians came to this hemisphere across the Bering land bridge. Indian myths do not tell this story, she writes. Moreover, she observes, the scientific account has nothing 'except logic' to recommend it."

It would be hard to make up a better analogy to the intelligenct design movement. Like the guilt-ridden lefties they revile, conservatives are demanding official skepticism for an idea accepted among the vast majority of scientists because it conflicts with religious myth, and attacking those who would uphold traditional standards as anti-Christian bigots. This pattern doesn't just apply to evolution -- it marks the Christian nationalists' entire relationship to reality. The right has a host of pet pseudoscientific theories that buttress its biblical worldview. They include reparative therapy to "cure" homosexuality; a mythical link between abortion and breast cancer; "post-abortion syndrome," a psychiatric disorder that exists almost exclusively in pro-life lore; and the efficacy of abstinence-only education, an entire cottage industry of scientific distortion.

On the power of truth, e.g. in Iraq (p. 105):

But neither Shirley nor Michael Johnson had any doubt that evolution isn't true. I asked why they thought mainstream scientists were misrepresenting the research. "Once truth leaks out, its powerful," Johnson said. "So you've got to cloud, you've got to make sure there's a lot of layers of lies and cover-ups in order to keep confusion reigning and misrepresentation occurring."

Why would scientists want to be so duplicitous? Johnson answered with an analogy. "You see this principle worked out at times, like with the Iraq war." Adopting a whiny, mock-outraged voice, he said, "'There's all these people dying every day! My gosh, we've got to get out of there!'"

His voice returning to normal, he said that, in fact, "there's been the least amount of casualties in the history of warfare. This is world-war terrorism, they're shipping people in from all over the place, insurgents they're called, to go against the coalition of armies -- and there's another thing, some of the politicians will try to convince people we're going this war alone, that this is unilateral war. No. We have about thirty-three, thirty-four countries that have joined us. . . . Why do people play with figures like that?

It's because they have something to protect," he concluded. "They don't like the idea that America is setting up democracy and becoming more powerful in the world."

You can't argue with that kind of logic.

Quotes abstinence educator Pam Stenzel (pp. 135-136):

At Reclaiming America for Christ, Stenzel told her audience about a conversation she'd had with a skeptical businessman on an airplane. The man had asked about abstinence education's success rate -- a question she regarded as risible. "What he's asking," she said, "is does it work. You know what? Doesn't matter. Cause guess what. My job is not to keep teenagers from having sex. The public schools' job should not be to keep teens from having sex."

Then her voice rose and turned angry as she shouted, "Our job should be to tell kids the truth!"

"People of God," she cried, "can I beg you, to commit yourself to truth, not what works! To truth! I don't care if it works, because at the end of the day I'm not answering to you, I'm answerng to God!"

Later in the same talk, she explained further why what "works" isn't what's important -- and gave some insight into what she means by "truth." "Let me tell you something, people of God, that is radical, and I can only say it here," she said. "AIDS is not the enemy. HPV and a hysterectomy at twenty is not the enemy. An unplanned pregnancy is not the enemy. My child believing that they can shake their fist in the face of a holy God and sin without consequence, and my child spending eternity separated from God, is the enemy. I will not teach my child that they can sin safely."

Quotes David Hager, appointed by Bush to the FDA's Reproductive Health Advisory Committee, where he worked to keep the "morning after" pill perscription only (p. 152):

"I argued from a scientific perspective, and God took that information, and he used it through this minority report to influence the decision," Hager said. "Once again, what Satan meant for evil, God turned into good."

But Hager almost certainly wasn't arguing from a scientific perspective. He was using scientific language to rationalize an evangelical Christian position. He was doing exactly what Ned Ryun teaches his charges at Generation Joshua: taking "a firm, solid biblical worldview" and translating it into "terms that the other side accepts."

People like Ryun have a perfect right to use this rhetorical strategy, disturbing as it may be to those who don't share their agenda. Yet when the United States government works this way, it turns all nonevangelical Americans into "the other side." The nonreligious are no longer even part of the debate, because the arguments and rationales presented in public are a sham. Only believers are privy to the real reasons that the administration does what it does. The Department of Health and Human Services operates like a giant crisis pregnancy center, deceiving in the name of some higher good.

On science under Bush (p. 153):

The Bush administration's elevation of the Medical Institute for Social Health into a new scientific establishment has echoes in Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism. She wrote of how totalitarian movements created "paraprofessional" associations of teachers, doctors, lawyers, and the like, which mimicked ordinary professional groups in order to erode their legitimacy and eventually replace them. [ . . . ]

The American status quo -- a system that worked, imperfectly but consistently, according to certain rational rules and respect for certain empirical realities -- is decomposing. The individual lies or small curtailments of freedom that we've seen so far are not as troubling as the larger phenomenon of a government run according to ideological fictions. If the Christian nationalists have their way, after all, it won't just be the Department of Health and Human Services that works this way. The movement's leaders have much bigger prizes in mind.

On to the courts (pp. 155-157):

Having won control of two branches of the federal government, Christian nationalists view the courts as the last intolerable obstacle to their palingenetic dream. Believing America to be a Christian nation, they see any ruling that contradicts their theology as de facto unconstitutional, and its enforcement tyrannical. They're convinced that they must destroy the judiciary's power to liberate themselves. A series of outrages -- the Lawrence v. Texas decision, Terri Schiavo's death, the filibuster of Bush's judicial nominees -- has stoked their sense of crisis.

The entire Christian nationalist agenda ultimately hinges on conquering the courts. A remade judiciary could let state governments criminalize abortion and gay sex. It could sanction the reinstitution of school prayer and the teaching of creationism and permit the ever greater Christianization of the country's social services. It could intervene on the right's behalf in situations like the Schiavo case. It could intrude into the most intimate corners of Americans' private lives.

To take just one example, if the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, it would undermine the ruling Roe was based on, Griswold v. Connecticut. That 1965 decision, which struck down bans on birth control for married women (extended to unmarried women in 1972's Eisenstadt v. Baird), was the first to infer a right to privacy from the constitution. If the court ruled that no constitutional right to privacy exists, states would again have the latitude to make contraception illegal. [ . . . ]

Some Christian nationalists seem to hope that the end of Griswold would open the door to the criminalization of all kinds of biblically incorrect sex. In 2003, Rick Santorum told the Associated Press, [ . . . ]

Note what Santorum was objecting to. Not just abortion, or polygamy, or even adultery, but the right to consensual sex within your home. If people do not have that right, then the potential for Christian nationalist intrusion into people's personal lives would be limitless.

On training the leaders of tomorrow (p. 173):

Farris teaches constitutional law at Patrick Henry and, via the Internet, to thousands of homeschooled teenagers. "My purpose, when I teach kids constitutional law, is to make them mad," he said. "I want them to see what the truth is, and I want them to see what the Supreme Court and the Congress have done to them."

Once Farris's students learn about judicial tyranny, he said, they want to know what they can do about it. "And I say, 'You in the first row need to be appointed to the Supreme Court, and you in the second row need to be in the Senate to confirm him, and you in the third row need to be the president of the Unitd States to nominate him.' That's frankly why I started Patrick Henry College, because I'm sick and tired of having to lobby people that I helped get elected. I want to train them from scratch to believe in the principles of freedom, how can we expect anything other than slavery?"

A couple of comments on all this. First, we're not talking about your grandparents' -- well, my grandparents', anyway -- fundamentalism. That was a recidivist movement, an attempt to get back to basics, which unfortunately gained its authority by insisting on the literal truth of the Bible. For the most part, that movement sought to withdraw from secular society, not to reform or revolutionize it. This builds on the old fundamentalism, but what's new is the social, economic and political aspirations of nationalism. The message isn't let's be better Christians. It's we are a Christian nation, we deserve the trappings of nationhood, and one of those is political power. It's not clear how deeply this level of consciousness has spread, but it's clearly there in the leaders Goldberg quotes. It's also not clear how many current followers of those leaders will break ranks when they see what that power does. It's worth mentioning that the most prominently political Christian right minister here in Wichita recently got thrown out of his church precisely because of his political activism.

Another thing is that the unification of right-wing movements in different churches -- protestants, catholics, and even on some issues jews and muslims -- is a very fragile thing. What these groups have in common is little more than shared prejudices and paranoias, plus a sense of political ambition. However, given power, their differences should come quickly to the fore, breaking them up again. Separation of church and state is not just a secular doctrine; it's self-defense for every minority faith, which in the US is necessarily all of them. So it seems to me that the political movement Goldberg describes is bound to fail, and mostly of its own successes. This is what always happens when a political culture becomes so weak and confused that it allows manifestly bad ideas to be implemented. The Bush presidency is rife with examples -- their failures, in fact, are merely cases where we managed to avoid further disasters.

posted 2006-12-12