Wrapped in the Flag (28 page)

After that conversation, I paid more attention to my parents’ new “orthodox” Catholicism. It became apparent that they’d fused their Catholicism with their Birchism and created an anti-Communist, anti–big government, pro-business Jesus who gave men absolute dominion over the earth. This Jesus approved of “just war” and disapproved of “social justice.”

Before I’d been home another week, I understood that my parents’ ideas came directly from Robert Welch, who railed against the conversion of Christianity into “a so-called
social gospel
, that bypasses all questions of dogma with an indifference which is comfortable to both themselves and their parishioners; and which
social gospel
becomes in fact indistinguishable from advocacy of the welfare state by socialist politicians.”
⁸
Welch went on to charge that
“some [ministers] actually use their pulpits to preach outright Communism, often in very thin disguise if any, while having the hypocrisy as atheists to thank God in public for their progressive apostasy.”

It became more and more difficult to see where Mother and Dad’s politics stopped and their religion began. Or vice versa. Before long, there was no separation of church and state as long as the church was Christian and the state was, well, Christian too.

While my father maintained his Birch activities, my mother became the religious crusader in the family. For almost thirty years, she wrote and spoke in defense of “Holy Mother Church,” while fighting anything and everything that carried the slightest tinge of liberal Catholicism. She was unstoppable.

Mother believed that the dangerous ideas were part of secular humanism, a new and awful religion that put “self” at the center of all and used terms like “consciousness-raising” and “empowerment.”
⁹

Mother traced humanism’s many manifestations, including an unnamed liberal Catholic program for women that she called “a mass-indoctrination program.” One proof of the evil of that program was this: it incorporated materials “connected with the Communist American Civil Liberties Union.”
¹⁰
From the New Age movement of the 1970s, which she called “a dark and hostile agent,” to the “spider’s web” of the nuclear disarmament movement of the 1980s, Mother tackled any idea that deviated even one millimeter from what she called “orthodox” Catholicism.

Religious fervor prompted my parents to found and fund the Wanderer Forum Foundation in 1965. The foundation was a self-described “network of lay Catholics banded together to promote and defend Catholic teaching, and to infuse principles based on that teaching into the social consciousness of this nation.”
¹¹

Though Dad was Birching and Mother was churching, there was very little difference between them. Both wanted to dramatically change the United States by shrinking the federal government, eliminating all programs of the New Deal, gutting regulation, getting out of the United Nations, impeaching Earl Warren, and halting civil rights legislation. It went, almost without saying, that a strong military—complete with an awesome nuclear arsenal—was an essential part of their fight.

Equally important, especially to my mother, was fighting the new (and totally awful, ungodly, and liberal) feminist movement. She wrote several critiques of feminism’s impact on women religious. In her view, Catholic nuns
had been corrupted by the “corrosive effects of the feminist mentality with its emphasis on ‘self’ that have invaded many Religious communities.”
¹²
Like her friend Phyllis Schlafly, Mother believed that feminism was a “disease” and the cause of Eve’s original sin. As Karen Armstrong explains in her book
The Battle for God
, “The women’s liberation movement filled fundamentalist men and women alike with terror. . . . Ever since Eve disobeyed God and sought her own liberation, feminism had brought sin into the world and with it . . . all varieties of ugliness.”
¹³

No good Catholic woman could ever be a feminist or support the Equal Rights Amendment, being proposed in the 1970s. My mother, Phyllis Schlafly, and a host of other right-wing Christians saw the defeat of the ERA as an essential step to preserving the traditional role of women (inside the home) and stopping what they saw as the destruction of the family.
¹⁴

My parents viewed their personal efforts as a small part of a much larger battle: the ultimate battle between good and evil, between God and Satan. When they succeeded—when evil was destroyed and God was on his throne—America would be restored to its rightful place, a nation dedicated to Christ under Christian law.

My parents visualized the United States of America as a Catholic country—one much like Spain under Franco. Their fundamentalist friends, however, looked to biblical law—with its six-hundred-plus Old Testament regulations—as the inspiration for their Christian nation.

The first proponent of a biblical legal system for America was Rousas John Rushdoony, the leader of the Christian Reconstructionist Movement, and a personal friend of Robert Welch. Rushdoony admired the Birch Society but never became a member. “Welch always saw things in terms of conspiracy,” he explained, “and I always see things in terms of sin.”
¹⁵

In his magnum opus,
Institutes of Biblical Law
, published in 1973, Rushdoony described the Old Testament laws that would be the backbone of the new justice system in a Christian America, along with the punishments he envisioned for those who broke them. Criminals would be burned at the stake, stoned, and hanged, depending on their sins. The folks facing such punishment included gays, blasphemers, unchaste women, and incorrigible juvenile delinquents. Of course, doctors providing abortions and their patients would also be executed.
¹⁶

Rushdoony realized that it would take work to bring his vision for America to fruition, and he saw home schooling as the way to “train up a generation
of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then they will get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God.”
¹⁷
It was Rushdoony who first urged Christians to take “dominion over the land as the Bible commanded them to do.”
¹⁸

The evangelical leader Francis Schaeffer was reading Rushdoony and teaching others about his work. Schaeffer, as much as anyone, spread the idea that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and Christian principles had to be central in the government. It’s probably safe to say that Schaeffer was the catalyst for most of the fundamentalists who claimed to have been called by God to run for political office, usually as conservative Republicans.

According to writer Max Blumenthal, Schaeffer was also responsible for creating the myth that Christians were “victims of persecution at the hands of a tyrannical secular elite not unlike the Romans who dragged Christians before teams of lions 2,000 years before. . . . To defend their supposedly threatened rights, Schaeffer suggested that Christians at least consider righteous violence as a last recourse.”
¹⁹

My parents admired Francis Schaeffer and his son, Frank, who had taken up his dad’s cause very publicly and very successfully as both a writer and a filmmaker. It was not uncommon for Mother to compare my behavior unfavorably to that of young Frank. “See how he honors his father, while you turn away from your parents,” she said.

Years later, Frank Schaeffer would publicly denounce his father’s movement. In his riveting memoir,
Crazy for God
, Frank wrote: “To our lasting discredit, Dad and I didn’t go public with our real opinions of the religious-right leaders we were in bed with. . . . We were on an ego-stroking roll. We kept our mouths shut.”
²⁰

For many years, until my early forties, I was a practicing Catholic, but to my parents, my church attendance alone was not enough. No matter what, I wasn’t devout enough or penitent enough or obedient enough. My mother and father had a high bar for approval, one I could never quite reach.

It would take me a long time, but eventually, in painful steps, I would stop trying.

Goldwater’s doomed candidacy was the political awakening for millions of young Americans thrilled by his promise of a campaign that was a “choice not an echo.” They did not go back to sleep when he lost. They would shift the tectonic plates of the two-party system . . . introduce the concept of ideology into American elections . . . and eventually elect a president
.

—G
LENN
G
ARVIN
¹

Early in 1964, a lot of University of Dallas students fell in love, but not with each other or with academics or entertainment. The new campus heartthrob was an old man—fifty-three years old, to be exact—with gray hair, a receding hairline, black eyebrows, and a real ten-gallon hat. Our hero—Barry Goldwater, the Republican senator from Arizona—had his sights set high: he planned to become the next president of the United States.

When Goldwater announced his candidacy, he promised to take on two things college students hated: regimentation and authority. “I believe we must now make a choice in this land and not continue drifting endlessly down and down for a time when all of us, our lives, our property, our hopes, and even our prayers will become just cogs in a vast government machine,” Goldwater said.
²

I certainly didn’t want to be another cog in the wheel, a prisoner of a huge, unwieldy federal bureaucracy. I objected to being shouldered with a huge tax burden because the government coddled those who were too lazy to work. Many of my friends felt the same way. After all, we were the hope of the nation; we were the future. As my brother put it, “We’re free, white, and [almost] twenty-one.”

Many of my friends—lovers of
Atlas Shrugged
and everything Ayn Rand—believed that the chains of collectivism had to be busted, once and for all. Failure to beat back the government tsunami would push great minds to follow John Galt—Rand’s fictional hero—into hiding, leaving America to crumble under the weight of socialism.

Rand preached that selfishness was a virtue. In her interview with Mike Wallace, she defended her idea that self-sacrifice, or altruism, is actually evil. She went on to explain that “a person who is weak is beyond love.”
³
According to Gregory Schneider, she believed that “caring about anyone beside yourself was evil.”
⁴

Her philosophy appealed to many young people who flocked to her speeches. One of her devotees, who became a member of her inner, inner circle—the “Collective”—was the young economist Alan Greenspan, who later became the chairman of the Federal Reserve.
⁵

Personally, I couldn’t abide Rand or her novel
Atlas Shrugged
. I started the over-500,000-word tome with every intention of reading all of it. When I realized that the book was both tedious and boring, I cut the process short. I turned to the last page: “He [John Galt] raised his hand and over the desolate earth. He traced in space the sign of the dollar.”
⁶

“That’s enough of that,” I told myself.

Though I wouldn’t know it for decades, I had famous company in the hating–
Atlas Shrugged
department. In 2003, I watched Bill Buckley talking with Charlie Rose on PBS. Responding to a question about Ayn Rand, Buckley said, “
Atlas Shrugged
is the biggest-selling novel of all time. I had to flog myself to read it.”
⁷

Still, Rand lover or no, I had been well-schooled in the horrors of thought control and indoctrination. I could look at the calendar: 1984 was only twenty years away, and time was “a-wastin’.”

For a lot of Americans, the presidential election of 1964 marked a critical juncture in our history. If Barry Goldwater did not win, freedom could not survive; our destruction under the boot of Communism would be inevitable.