Conservatives Without Conscience (17 page)

Who are these people? In 2004 the Pew Trust sponsored a two-day seminar for leading journalists, calling the gathering “Toward an Understanding of Religion and American Public Life.” Religion historian Mark Noll, an evangelical who has authored several books on the subject, led a discussion about contemporary evangelicals. He explained their core religious beliefs, and noted that these religious commitments by themselves have not resulted in a cohesive, institutionally compact, or clearly demarcated group of Christians. There is, in real
ity, a large network of churches, voluntary societies, books and periodicals, and personal connections, as well as varying levels of belief and practice that fall under the evangelical label.
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Noll pointed out that although certain Supreme Court rulings had caused evangelicals to become increasingly politically active,
Roe v. Wade
had been the tipping point. Before
Roe,
evangelicals were no more political than Billy Graham, thus either apolitical or unobtrusively political, and not active in politics. After
Roe,
self-appointed leaders within the evangelical movement became militant activists. “Baptists [ministers] Jerry Falwell and Timothy LaHaye, and the lay psychologist James Dobson, entered politics with a vengeance during the 1970s and 1980s,” said Noll. They “created the new religious right and have made conservative evangelical support so important for the Republican Party since the campaigns of Ronald Reagan.” Pat Robertson’s 1988 presidential campaign, albeit unsuccessful in even coming close to getting the Republican nomination, further politicized a large segment of the evangelical community, Noll added.

Noll candidly acknowledged the authoritarian nature of evangelicals. Speaking as an evangelical and a historian of evangelicalism, he noted its incompatibly with the give-and-take of politics because of the rigidity of its beliefs. Noll said he wants evangelicals to learn “new ways of being present in the public space without believing that [they] have to
dominate
the public space” (emphasis in original transcript). Evangelical Christianity, he explained, is an intolerant religion, unable to say “your religion is fine with you; my religion is fine with me.” Rather “evangelical religion is offensive. It claims forthrightly that there is one, and only one, way to God,” and that is their way. The world has evolved, and Noll realized that evangelicals, so far, have not.
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Several attendees at the Pew conference referred to the work of a University of North Carolina sociologist, Christian Smith, who has studied how rank-and-file evangelicals think. One conferee said of Smith’s work that it showed that the rank-and-file is “a lot nicer than their leaders!”
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Smith’s work supports the notion that the religious
right’s political thinking and behavior may be less than uniform, and that the leaders of the Christian right do not necessarily speak for evangelicals as a whole.
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While this may be true of the segment of the population investigated by Smith and his collaborators, their sample appears unrepresentative.
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In the end, I found that the observations of Mark Noll—who deals with a wide array of evangelical brothers and sisters, day in and day out—as well as those of politically attuned observers such as Cal Thomas, a conservative syndicated columnist and Fox News commentator, and former president Jimmy Carter seemed more insightful and revelatory. All of these individuals have been critical of Christians in politics while remaining true to their faiths.
*

Cal Thomas, a conservative Christian who once served as vice president of communications for Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, has joined journalist and evangelical minister Ed Dobson in making “a strong case for the church to lay down its impotent weapons of political activism.”
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Based on his experience at the heart of Christian right politics, Thomas said he believes that all the evangelical energy now devoted to politics could be better directed toward living and sharing the gospel. He has concluded that neither “our individual or collective cultural problems can be altered exclusively, or even mainly, through the political process.” Thomas found that “the marriage of religion and politics almost always compromises the gospel,” for “[p]olitics is all about compromise.” The conflation of church and state has resulted in the church’s getting “its theological pocket picked.” “Whenever the
church cozies up to political power,” he continued, “it loses sight of its all-important mission to change the world from the inside-out.”
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Not surprisingly, Thomas does not approve of the political tactics employed by Christian conservatives. For example, when fund-raising, “they identify an enemy: homosexuals, abortionists, Democrats, or ‘liberals’ in general,” he explained. Then, these enemies are accused, falsely, of being out to “get us” or “impose their morality on the rest of us or destroy the country.” An action plan is offered—“We will oppose the enemies and ensure that they do not take over America”—and a plea for funds follows.
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The focus is inevitably negative, and often the claims are outrageous, such as Pat Robertson’s claim that God wanted him “to help usher in the Second Coming.” Robertson denied making such a statement, and when Thomas produced a copy of the fund-raising letter in question, he was immediately vilified. Thomas noted that Robertson and others “must constantly have enemies, conspiracies, and opponents as well as play the role of righteous victim in order to get people to send in money.” Understandably, Thomas is troubled by the irony that the Bible calls on Christians to love their enemies, “whether they be homosexuals, abortionists, Democrats, or liberals.”
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Former president Jimmy Carter speaks with unique insight about mixing politics and religion. In
Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis,
Carter wrote that this nation’s leaders once “extolled state and local autonomy, attempted to control deficit spending, avoided foreign adventurism, minimized long-term peacekeeping commitments, preserved the separation of church and state, and protected civil liberties and personal privacy.” However, today’s leaders—he does not mention Christian conservatives because it is obvious to whom he is referring—have placed far more divisive issues at the center of their platform: “abortion, the death penalty, science versus religion, women’s rights, the separation of religion and politics, homosexuality.” These debates, he noted, have divided the nation and threatened America’s
traditional values. Carter said he believes the most important factor in that divisiveness is that “fundamentalists have become increasingly influential in both religion and government, and have managed to change the nuance and subtleties of historic debate into black-and-white rigidities and the personal derogation of those who dare to disagree.” He added, “Narrowly defined theological beliefs have been adopted as the rigid agenda of a political party.”
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The former president went on to describe religious fundamentalists based on his personal observations and experiences. (Carter appeared to use the term “fundamentalists” as including highly conservative evangelicals.) He said that, invariably, “fundamentalist movements are led by authoritarian males who consider themselves to be superior to others and, within religious groups, have an overwhelming commitment to subjugate women and to dominate their fellow believers.” He found that these people believe the past is better than the present; they draw clear distinctions between themselves, as true believers, and others; they are “militant in fighting against any challenges to their beliefs”; and they are “often angry” and sometimes resort “to verbal or even physical abuse against those who interfere with the implementation of their agenda.” Carter summarized the characteristics of fundamentalism as “rigidity, domination, and exclusion,”
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a description that would apply equally to the authoritarian personalities introduced in the last chapter.

While neoconservatives are not religious fundamentalists, Carter said he believes that they hold related views. He had observed firsthand how neoconservatives evolved from criticizing his foreign policy—when he attempted to “impose liberalization and democratization” on other countries—to embracing his goals but to achieving them by employing very different means. Carter sought to spread democracy through diplomacy, while the neoconservatives “now seem to embrace aggressive and unilateral intervention in foreign affairs, especially to advance U.S. military and political influence in the Middle East.”
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A long-tenured Sunday school teacher, Carter also adroitly uses his King James Bible to show how conservative Christians quote selectively from scripture to attack homosexuals and women, to oppose the separation of church and state, and to support other issues on their political agenda. Carter demonstrated that the Bible actually supports a much kinder, more loving, and more progressive ethos, but in the end, he said, he believes Bible quoting in politics is fruitless. “There is no need to argue about such matters, because it is human nature to be both selective and subjective in deriving the most convenient meaning by careful choices from the 30,400 or so biblical verses.”
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Former senator John Danforth of Missouri (who served from 1976 until 1995) is an ordained Episcopal minister and a partisan Republican, and has made points similar to those of Jimmy Carter. Danforth has been called a “right-wing zealot in moderate’s clothing.”
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Certainly he was to the right of Goldwater on the issue of abortion when they were colleagues in the Senate. Danforth cosponsored a proposed amendment to the Constitution that would guarantee legal protection to unborn children and overturn
Roe v. Wade.
Even he believes that conservative Christians have crossed the line.

Danforth wrote an op-ed for the
New York Times
in response to the insistence of Christian conservatives that the federal government intervene to save the life of Terri Schiavo. Speaking on behalf of mainstream Christians, Danforth observed, “When, on television, we see a person in a persistent vegetative state, one who will never recover, we believe that allowing the natural and merciful end to her ordeal is more loving than imposing government power to keep her hooked up to a feeding tube.” He went on to describe in some detail (a selection of his statements are quoted and bulleted below) how conservative Christians operate and the impact they are having at the national level:

• [C]onservative Christians have presented themselves as representing the one authentic Christian perspective on politics…
  [when] equally devout [mainstream] Christians come to very different conclusions.
  
• Many conservative Christians approach politics with a certainty that they know God’s truth, and that they can advance the kingdom of God through governmental action. So they have developed a political agenda that they believe advances God’s kingdom.
  
• In the [past] decade…American politics has been characterized by two phenomena: the increased activism of the Christian right, especially in the Republican Party, and the collapse of bipartisan collegiality. [It is not] a stretch to suggest a relationship between the two.
  
• [Mainstream Christians] reject the notion that religion should present a series of wedge issues useful at election time for energizing a political base. [Rather they] believe it is God’s work to practice humility, to wear tolerance on our sleeves, to reach out to those with whom we disagree, and to overcome the meanness we see in today’s politics.
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Religious Authoritarianism

When Christian conservatives take their religious beliefs into the political arena, they also carry their authoritarianism with them. Studies (cited earlier in a footnote) show that the “acceptance of traditional religious beliefs appear to have more to do with having a personality rich in authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, and conventionalism, than with the beliefs per se.”
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Bob Altemeyer offers a convincing explanation for why right-wing authoritarians are characteristically religious. Authoritarian parents transfer their beliefs to children through religious instruction. Christian conservatives tend to emanate from strict religious backgrounds, and often prevent their children from being exposed to broader and different views by sending them to schools with
like-thinking children, or by home schooling them. This, in turn, results in an authoritarian outlook that remains strong during adolescence—the period when authoritarian personalities are formed and then taken into adult life.

Christian conservatives’ primary tool in reinforcing authoritarianism is preaching fear, and no one does so more consistently than the head of the Christian Coalition, Pat Robertson. I met Robertson in 1982, when he invited me to appear on his television program,
The 700 Club,
the ostensible reason being to promote my recently published book,
Lost Honor.
I was told that his Christian Broadcasting Network reached over one hundred million homes, and that
The 700 Club
had a large following. While authors do not pass up such opportunities, I knew the book was not exactly normal fare for his audience, and I had little doubt that I was being checked out, for it was subtly suggested there was a place for me in this politically active Christian world. For my part, I certainly gave no sign that I was interested in the politics of Christian conservatism, for I had long believed that both religion and politics suffer when they are mixed. Robertson was a congenial and engaging host who wears his Cheshire cat grin both on and off camera. Even back in 1982 it was apparent that CBN was a substantial operation that was likely to grow, for viewers kept sending Robertson money. I was given a tour and saw a small army opening mail to retrieve five dollars here and five hundred dollars there, which arrived daily by the truckload. In the end, all that came of my appearance on
The 700 Club
was that Pat Robertson, of whom I had been only vaguely aware, was now on my radar. I have now been observing him for over two decades.