Christian Nation (6 page)

I reflected how different this was from the Catholic Church of my childhood, holding fast to the old hymns and refusing to make any expedient accommodation to contemporary sensibilities. What we saw that day, in contrast, was religion finely and completely attuned to every nuance and preference of contemporary American popular culture—attuned, that is, in terms of experience and presentation. Content, as we found out, was another thing altogether.

The sanctuary stood at the center of a complex that included several schoolrooms, a library (which contained mostly religious DVDs and few books), a senior center, and a kindergarten, among other facilities. This church seemed to loom large in the life of the bride’s family. The church, our friend Jim said, had given back the sense of community that this suburb had been missing. He also had called it a “Bible-believing church,” but he didn’t elaborate.

At the dinner after the ceremony, the three of us were seated with the sister of the bride, who was slightly older than we were and worked at an accounting firm. Sanjay was talking about
You and I
and happened to mention that the first group attracted to the website were yogis.

“Oh,” the sister said, suddenly looking troubled. “And that was … well, ok?”

“Oh, yes,” said Sanjay. “Really perfect. They got it immediately.”

“But … well,” she asked, “aren’t yoga people, you know, atheists?”

Sanjay, who had been polite but clearly bored, suddenly looked interested.

“Well, some are, I suppose. But no more or less, I would think, than the general population. Why do you ask?”

“I don’t think so,” the sister said. “I mean, yoga is a religion, an atheistic religion, so that means that yogis don’t believe in God. In our church, we believe that yoga is one of the ways that Satan recruits souls.”

I had rarely seen Sanjay at a loss for words. He looked genuinely confused.

“Sue, with all respect to your church, I have to tell you that is not right. You can be a Christian or a Buddhist or a Muslim and still do yoga. It is true that it emerged from the Hindu tradition and that there is a spiritual dimension in addition to the physical practice. But many devout religious people do yoga. And,” he added, attempting to lighten the mood, “I have done yoga since I was ten, and have never encountered Satan.”

“You cannot know that. Satan doesn’t announce himself, you know. And anything that calls itself a spiritual practice that doesn’t have Jesus at its center is … well, you know, an illusion.”

Sanjay was just about to say something conciliatory when Emilie, who had drunk too much wine, jumped in.

“And I suppose your church teaches that evolution is also an illusion?”

“No,” she answered, “not an illusion but a theory that is incorrect because it conflicts with the Bible. We’re a Bible-believing church. The Bible is pretty clear about creation. But even if you don’t believe the Bible, there are so many problems with evolution that many eminent scientists don’t believe it, you know. Surely you understand that much.”

Emilie opened her mouth, but nothing came out.

The sister, sensing success, went on.

“Last year our church did a field trip to Kentucky to visit the Creation Museum. It was awesome. It explained the right way to understand fossils and about all the evidence for the flood, and showed how man and the dinosaurs coexisted with all the rest of God’s creation. You’ve got to go, really. You’d never think the same way about it if you went. There’s just so much nonsense you hear from the mainstream media—it’s really important for people like you to be exposed to both sides of the story. Oh, and there was a fantastic exhibit at a nearby museum proving the existence of hell. So clever. They put microphones down some abandoned oil wells in Texas and recorded the screams of the damned. Terrifying. You really should go.”

I could tell that Emilie was on the verge of saying something she would regret, so I interrupted and changed the subject. Sanjay clearly wished to probe and explore the woman’s beliefs and views, but with one look I warned him off. He looked very thoughtful during the rest of the dinner.

In the car on the way back, Sanjay was animated and clearly fascinated by the experience. I was driving, and Emilie was in the back, with a hangover.

Sanjay was looking down at his Palm Treo. “Amazing. Did you know,” he asked, “that 84 percent of Americans believe that Jesus is the son of God, 80 percent believe in the Day of Judgment and in miracles, 50 percent believe in angels, and 40 percent believe in the literal truth of the Bible? Fifty-five percent say God created humans in their present form, and only 13 percent believe in evolution without divine guidance.”

“Impossible,” said Emilie. “I don’t know anybody who believes in angels or who doesn’t accept evolution. Who are these people?”

“Those numbers are true, I am afraid,” continued Sanjay. “I am looking at the latest Gallup Poll. It says that 25 percent of Americans describe themselves as evangelicals and 40 percent self-describe as born-again Christians—40 percent. I had no idea.”

“So what?” asked Emilie. “I mean, these people say ‘I believe this, I believe that.’ I’m supposed to care? Why? I mean, these people cannot get the small stuff right. Did you see on the news that Miss South Carolina said on TV that she thought Europe was a country and she had never heard of Hungary? Unbelievable. So if they can’t get the small stuff right, why should I care about what they believe about the really big stuff, like creation and infinity and the universe? It’s absurd. Why do we pay attention to these people?”

“I am not sure, but I found the weekend very interesting,” Sanjay answered. “Those people are not what I thought fundamentalists were like. We were not in the Deep South or a stereotypical ‘red state.’ We were in Pennsylvania. And the family. Well, they did not appear to be unreasonable people. But the sister at dinner …”

“Wasn’t that a scream?” Emilie interrupted. “When she started explaining to you why yoga was satanic … oh my God, it was classic, classic. Sanjay, dear, it’s not often that I’ve seen you at a total loss for words. And she’s an accountant. What an idiot. Unbelievable. My head hurts.”

That weekend in Pennsylvania is what first got Sanjay interested in the evangelical movement and eventually in its quest for political power. Would something else have triggered the same interest, or would he and I have had completely different lives if our friend had married someone else or if Sanjay hadn’t gone to the wedding? A frivolous thought. Coincidence and randomness create opportunity and choices, and our lives then take a path determined by the opportunities we take and the choices we make.

Within days I realized that Sanjay had become fascinated by the mega-church phenomenon, by the theology of fundamentalist Christianity, and by the rapid rise of the Christian right to the pinnacle of political power. Running
You and I
at that point was not really a full-time job, and Sanjay immersed himself in the topic and spoke of little else. It was not, at the time, a topic of great interest to me. In fact, as I immersed myself in my work and had my eyes opened to the worlds of business and finance, Sanjay’s preoccupation seemed to me to be more than a little quirky. I had the sense that, after years of academics, I was finally learning how the world really worked. The people with whom I spent my days were what we pretentiously called at the time “players,” and San—despite his success with
You and I
—seemed to have taken a turn back to a world of abstraction, theory, and academic speculation. Despite our closeness, I occasionally was tempted to see Sanjay as an artifact of my past life as opposed to a major part of my current life—a view that Emilie did nothing to discourage.

It is painful for me to realize how far things already had progressed by 2005. Even Sanjay didn’t have the full picture at the time. After the 2004 election, not only were the president of the United States, the Speaker of the House, numerous cabinet members, and other senior federal officials born-again Christians, but
forty-two out of a hundred
US senators were entirely supportive of the Christian right agenda, holding ratings of 100 percent from the Christian Coalition. Extreme fundamentalist Christians entered the US Senate, including Tom Coburn of Oklahoma (calling for the death penalty for abortion doctors) and Jim DeMint (wanting to ban gays and unmarried pregnant women from teaching in public schools). Fundamentalist Christian theology was already driving our federal policy on medical research (with the ban on stem cell research), sex education (which the government decreed should focus exclusively on the promotion of abstinence), and US foreign policy in the Middle East (where an important driver of US policy was the need to have Jerusalem in the hands of the Jews in order to satisfy a biblical condition to the second coming of Christ). The federal government was channeling billions in taxpayer funds to faith-based organizations—nearly all evangelical. And, perhaps most significantly and least noticed, much of the legislation that would eventually implement the theocratic program, including the Constitution Restoration Act (preventing federal courts from hearing church/state separation cases) and the Houses of Worship Free Speech Restoration Act (allowing tax-exempt churches to engage in partisan political activity), had already been introduced in Congress, ultimately failing to become law but attracting significant pluralities. We had already been given, unknowingly, a preview of what was to follow.

M
UCH LATER,
WHEN
working for New York governor Bloomberg, I read a lot about revolutions. Revolutions are rarely if ever majoritarian but instead are usually propelled by a small group that is disciplined and fanatical to which a passive majority then acquiesces. Incredibly, by 2005 the first phase of the Christian revolution was already over, yet few people other than its proponents understood at the time that this had happened. The small band of fanatics, headed by James Dobson, Tony Perkins, and Doug Coe, among others, inspired by Rousas J. Rushdoony and funded by Howard Ahmanson, Jr., had succeeded in bringing their brand of fundamentalist Christianity from the fringes of American life to the very heart of political power. A theology that had been intolerable to mainstream Christianity before had achieved legitimacy. In 1981 Gary North had written that “to smooth the transition to Christian political leadership … Christians must begin to organize politically within the present party structure, and they must begin to infiltrate the existing institutional order.” This was, they were clear, to be a revolution from within. Twenty-five years later, evangelicals, through carefully incremental political work at the precinct, county, and state level, had seized control of the Republican Party. It was a movement that was at once cultural and political, and it was the largest such movement in the country by far. All that by 2005.

Very few people at the time noticed what had happened. There were, admittedly, many moderate Republicans who fully understood this takeover of one of our two major political parties, without, of course, anticipating its eventual implications. But the general public was largely blind to the enormous role that religion was playing in politics, in part because evangelical Republican candidates used a veiled code in their communications with the faithful, what political pros referred to as “dog-whistle politics” for its ability to arouse the faithful while passing undetected by others.

As a result, the rest of America still associated the word “Christian” with benign mainstream Protestant denominations and Roman Catholicism, which had no theocratic tendencies and for whom the dominionist, reconstructionist, and similar theologies were heretical and abhorrent. Non-fundamentalist Christians thought that John F. Kennedy had disposed of the issue of religious belief and politics when he said: “I am not the Catholic candidate for president. I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for president who also happens to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters—and the church does not speak for me.” But the world had changed. Now, when it came to politics, “Christian” meant something very different.

By 2005, Christian fundamentalism, self-identified by various types of congregations referring to themselves as “Bible-believing churches,” had migrated from the Deep South to northern suburbia, where loss of community and empty consumerism had left a void that the evangelicals were all too ready to fill. They filled the void not with a traditional Protestantism but with a dumbed-down Christianity where “faith” was not a private embrace of the mysteries inherent in the human condition but a requirement for complete dogmatic credulity—where the ultimate measure of devotion and religiosity was the willingness to dismiss empirical reality and profess absolute belief in bold and improbable lies (such as the coexistence of man and dinosaurs), and where the primary values were not the dignity and integrity of the individual and the realization by that individual of the whole and spiritual self but total submission by the individual to biblical law and Godly authority. And perhaps most tragically, what had migrated north was a redefined Christianity in which the singular voice of Christ called the faithful not to modesty, charity, meekness, love, and social justice but to a theological imperative for the accumulation of wealth and political power in order to establish Christian dominion over the country.