The Family (44 page)

It is
character,
in the nineteenth-century, British Empire sense of the word, that drives American fundamentalism’s engagement with the past. History matters not for its progression of “fact, fact, fact,” Michael McHugh, one of the pioneers of modern fundamentalist education told me, but for “key personalities.” In Francis Schaeffer’s telling of U.S. history, for instance, John Witherspoon—the only pastor to have signed the Declaration of Independence—looms as large as Thomas Jefferson, because it was Witherspoon who infused the founding with the idea of
Lex Rex,
“law is king” (divine law, that is), derived from the fiercest Protestant reformers of the seventeenth century, men who considered John Calvin’s Geneva too gentle for God. In the movement’s history, key men are often those such as Witherspoon or Schaeffer himself, intellectuals and activists who shape ideas. But in the movement’s telling of American history, key personalities are often soldiers, such as General Douglas MacArthur. After the war, McHugh explained, MacArthur ruled Japan “according to Christian principles” for five years. “To what end?” I asked. Japan is hardly any more Christian for this divine intervention. “The Japanese people did capture a vision,” McHugh said. Not the whole Christian deal but one of its essential foundations: “MacArthur set the stage for free enterprise,” he explained. With Japan committed to capitalism, the United States was free to turn its attention toward the Soviet Union. The general’s providential flanking maneuver, you might say, helped America win the Cold War.2

But one needn’t be a flag officer to be used by God. Another favorite of Christian history is Sergeant Alvin York, a farmer from Pall Mall, Tennessee, who in World War I turned his trigger finger over to God and became perhaps the greatest Christian sniper of the twentieth century.

“God uses ordinary people,” McHugh explained. Anyone might be a key personality. The proper study of history includes the student as a main character, an approach he described as
relational,
a buzzword in contemporary fundamentalism that denotes a sort of pulsing circuit of energy between, say, pleasant Betty Johnson, your churchy neighbor, and the awesome realm of supernatural events in which her real life occurs. There, Jesus is as real to Betty as she is to you, and so are Sergeant York, General MacArthur, and even George Washington, who, as “father of our nation,” is almost a fourth member of the Holy Trinity, a mind bender made possible through God’s math.

You may have seen his ghostly form, along with that of Abraham Lincoln, flanking an image of George W. Bush deep in prayer in a lithograph widely distributed by the Presidential Prayer Team, a five-year-old outfit that claims to have organized nearly 3 million prayer warriors on the president’s behalf. The Prayer Team claims to transcend ideology because it will pray for the president whether he or she is a Republican or a Democrat. That is, it will always pray for authority. Its reverence built upon American fundamentalism’s imagined history, the Prayer Team has neatly rewritten not only America’s democratic tradition but also traditional Christianity, replacing both with an amalgamation of elite and populist fundamentalism. The legacy of Abram Vereide echoes in the Prayer Team’s belief that the right relationship of citizen to leader is both spiritual and submissive, an idea it has dilated from the prayer cells of elites to its 3-million-strong “small group” approach to authoritarian religion. The populist twist is the promise that the citizen is not the victim of such disguised politics but, potentially, their star. In a similar image pasted onto five hundred billboards around the country, an ethereal Washington kneels in prayer with an anonymous soldier in desert fatigues—just another everyday hero. That could be you, the key man theory of fundamentalist history proposes. It’s like the Rapture, when the saved shall rise together, but it’s happening right now: George Washington and Betty Johnson and you, floating up toward victory with arms entwined, key personalities in Christian history.

O
NE AFTERNOON IN
2005, I found in my mail an unsolicited copy of the “Vision Forum Family Catalog,” a glossy, handsomely produced, eighty-eight-page publication featuring an array of books, videos, and toys for “The Biblical Family Now and Forever.” Considered the intellectual vanguard of the homeschooling movement by the other fundamentalist publishers with whom I’d spoken, Vision Forum is nonetheless just one of any number of providers for the fundamentalist lifestyle and hardly the largest. But its catalog is as perfect and polished a distillation as I’ve found of the romance of American fundamentalism, the almost sexual tension of its contradictions: its reverence for both rebellion and authority, democracy and theocracy, blood and innocence. The edition I received was titled “A Line in the Sand,” in tribute to the Alamo. There, in 1836, faced with near-certain annihilation at the hands of the Mexican army, the Anglo rebel Lieutenant Colonel William Barret Travis rallied his doomed men by drawing said line with his sword and challenging them to cross it. All who did so, he said, would prove their preparedness “to give their lives in freedom’s cause.”

A boy of about eight enacts the scene on the catalog’s cover. He is dark-eyed, big-eared, and dimple-chinned, and he’s dressed in an idyllic costume only a romantic could imagine Colonel Travis wearing so close to his apocalyptic end: a white straw planter’s hat, a Confederate gray, double-breasted shell jacket, a bow tie of black ribbon, a red sash, khaki jodhpurs, and shiny black fetish boots, spread wide. The young rebel seems to have been photoshopped in front of the Alamo at unlikely scale: he towers over a dark wooden door, as big as an eight-year-old boy’s imagination.

Much of the catalog is given over to educational materials for Christian homeschoolers, but the back of the book is dedicated to equipping one’s son with the sort of toys that will allow him to “rebuild a culture of courageous boyhood.” Hats, for instance—leather Civil War kepis, coonskin caps, and a ninety-five-dollar life-size replica of a fifteenth-century knight’s helmet among them. An eighteen-dollar video titled
Putting on the Whole Armor of God
asks, “Boys, are you ready for warfare?” Young Christian soldiers may choose from a variety of actual weapons, ranging from a scaled-down version of the blade wielded by William Wallace, of
Braveheart
fame (which at four and a quarter feet long is still a lot of knife for a kid) to a thirty-two-and-a-half-inch Confederate officer’s saber. It is history at knifepoint; a theology of arms.

Not all of the toys are made for literal battle. For thirty dollars you can buy your boy an “Estwing Professional Rock Hammer,” identical to those used by creationist paleontologists to prove that dinosaurs coexisted with Adam and Eve. For thirty-eight dollars you can acquire a “stellarscope” that functions as a pocket-sized planetarium for understanding God’s heavens. I was tempted to buy my nephew an “Ancient Roman Coin Kit,” which includes “ten genuine ancient Roman coins with accumulated dirt” and tools and instructions for cleaning and identifying them. “They will captivate you,” “Line in the Sand” promises. “Were they held by a third-century Christian? A martyr?”

Martyrdom, real and metaphorical, is something of a family concern at Vision Forum. Founder Douglas W. Phillips’s father, Howard, is a Harvard graduate, a veteran of the Nixon administration, and a Jewish convert to evangelicalism, all marks of a fine pedigree within elite Christian conservative culture. Moreover, Phillips was one of the small group that “discovered” Jerry Falwell, recruiting the Virginian to lead the Moral Majority in 1979. And yet Phillips’s commitment to the intellectually dense ideas of Rousas John Rushdoony, considered too difficult and too extreme by many within the movement, led to internal exile within the populist front of American fundamentalism.

In the past few years, though, Phillips has regained a measure of his former influence. Ideas once considered too heady for a movement that defined itself through televangelists are now taught in elite colleges and universities such as Patrick Henry, Liberty, and Regent—institutions funded by the millions those TV preachers raised from the masses—as well as in the most august of Bible schools and Christian colleges, Wheaton, Westmont, Moody, and Biola, invigorated by a new generation of book-hungry homeschoolers. The anti-intellectualism that shaped the fundamentalism of the twentieth century has been replaced by a feverish thirst for intellectual legitimacy—to be achieved, however, not on terms set by secularism but by the Christian Right’s very own eggheads, come in from the cold.

They’ve brought with them the anxiety of a besieged minority. They’ve lent to the angry mob ethos of the Moral Majority—now defunct, displaced by countless divisions and battalions, a united front in place of a single army—the cachet of an avant-garde, with all the attendant wounded pride of a misunderstood genius.

The chief candidate for that label within fundamentalism’s intellectual revival is the late Rushdoony, whose eighteen-tape American history lectures I had obtained from Vision Forum. Rushdoony is best known as the founder of Christian Reconstructionism, a politically defunct but subtly influential school of thought that drifted so far to the right that it dropped off the edge of the world, disavowed as “scary” even by Jerry Falwell. Most notably, Rushdoony proposed the death penalty for an ever-expanding subset of sinners, starting with gay men and growing to include blasphemers and badly behaved children. Such sentiments have made him a bogeyman of the Left but also a convenient scapegoat for fundamentalist apologists. Ralph Reed, for instance, the former head of the Christian Coalition, made a great show of attacking the ideas of Reconstructionism as misguided, not to mention bad public relations. More recently,
First Things
, a journal for academically pedigreed Christian conservatives, published an oddly skeptical antimanifesto titled “Theocracy! Theocracy! Theocracy!” in which a young journalist, Ross Douthat, eyes rolling, dismisses the fears of the “antitheocrat” Left by propping up Rushdoony as a fringe lunatic only to knock him down along with the liberal critiques that focus on his angriest notions. (Douthat was evidently unaware of
First Things
’s lengthy tribute to Rushdoony upon his death in 2001.) That reading of Rushdoony—by liberal critics and conservative apologists—misses what matters about his revival of providential history.
³

Rushdoony was a monster, but he wasn’t insane. His most violent positions were the result of fundamentalism’s requisite literalist reading of scripture, an approach that one senses rather bored him. A natural ideologue, he seemed drawn most emotionally not to the strict legal code of Leviticus but to the “strange fire” of its tenth chapter, the blasphemous tribute paid to God by priests lost in the aesthetics of devotion. Rushdoony would have had them killed for their presumption, which is exactly what God did. But I imagine Rushdoony sympathized with their misguided sentiments. His Reconstructionist movement fell apart when his son-in-law, an even more bloodthirsty theologian named Gary North, split with Rushdoony over what he saw as his father-in-law’s romantic insistence that the Constitution was an entirely God-breathed document, perverted by politicians, no doubt, but purely of heaven at its inception. North, who may actually be a psychopath—he favors stoning as a method of execution because it would double as a “community project”—was right on this one occasion.

Rushdoony was to the study of history what a holy warrior is to jihad, submitting his mind completely to God. He derived from the past not just a quaint hero worship but also a deep knowledge of history’s losers, forgotten Americans—minor political figures like John Witherspoon and major revivalists like Charles Grandison Finney and all the soldiers who fought first for God,
then
country, the rugged men of the past who carried the theocratic strand through from the beginning. The Christian conservatives of his day, Rushdoony believed, had let themselves be bound by secularism. They railed against its tyranny but addressed themselves only to issues set aside by secularism as “moral”; the best minds of a fundamentalist generation burned themselves to furious cinders battling nothing more than naughty movies and heavy petting. Rushdoony did not believe in such skirmishes. He wanted a war, and he summoned the spirits of history to the struggle at hand.

Two central Rushdoony ideas, disassociated from his name, have since been assimilated into the mainstream of Christian conservative thinking. One is Christian education: homeschooling and private Protestant academies, both of which he was among the first to advocate during the early 1960s. Among the chief champions of that educational movement today are John W. Whitehead, a constitutional lawyer who counts Rushdoony as one of his greatest influences, and the founders of two fundamentalist colleges, Patrick Henry and New St. Andrews, explicitly dedicated to training culture warriors according to the tenets of Rushdoony’s other major contribution to postwar fundamentalism: the revival of the American providential history that had been rusting since the nineteenth century, when no less a hero of the secular past than Daniel Webster declared history “a study of secondary causes that God uses and permits in order to fulfill his inscrutable decree.” During the intervening years, elite fundamentalists studied at elite universities (Rushdoony attended Berkeley), and the rest of the faithful went to public schools and perhaps a Bible college. Elites learned secular history; the rest rarely learned much history at all, a state of affairs that kept the movement divided. It was Rushdoony’s disdain for all things secular that cleared the course for the convergence in the last few decades of the two streams of fundamentalist culture, united across classes behind a vision of a “God-led” society.

A strict Calvinist influenced by his upbringing in the Armenian Presbyterian Church, Rushdoony found his way to the turn-of-the-century Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper and his idea of
presuppositionalism,
which maintains that (a) everybody approaches the world with assumptions, thus ruling out the possibility of neutrality and a classically liberal state; and (b) that since Christian presuppositions acknowledge themselves as such (unlike liberalism’s, which are deliberately ahistorical), every aspect of governance should be conducted in the light of its revealed truths. “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human experience,” declared Kuyper, “over which Christ, who is Sovereign over
all
, does not cry ‘Mine!’”
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