The Islamic fundys really aren't a threat to the US.

These fundys are!

Review of Kingdom Coming (2007)
Keith Parsons

Review: Michelle Goldberg. 2006. Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian 
Nationalism. New York: W. W. Norton. 253 pp.

Soon after the U.S. entered the Second World War, the War Department 
commissioned prominent director Frank Capra (It's a Wonderful Life; Mr. Smith 
Goes to Washington) to do a propaganda film explaining and justifying America's 
participation in the conflict. He made Why We Fight, a classic of the genre. 
Eschewing maudlin appeals to patriotism or overwrought rhetoric, Capra had the 
brilliant idea of using the Axis leaders' own tools against them. German, 
Italian, and Japanese propaganda films provided him with his most luridly 
compelling images. Scenes of Hitler in his screeching, foaming rants and 
Mussolini posing and posturing were far more damning than any censure, however 
eloquent, Capra could have dished out.

Michelle Goldberg has mastered Capra's technique. She lets the leaders of 
America's growing Christo-fascist movement speak for themselves. We hear them 
proclaiming that doctors who perform abortions should be subject to the death 
penalty. Homosexuality would also be a death-penalty offense, though first- 
time offenders might be shown mercy and merely subjected to public humiliation. 
Strict Old Testament law in all of its ferocity is to be imposed. Goldberg 
quotes (p. 177) Michael Schwartz, chief of staff to U.S. Senator Tom Coburn 
(Republican, of course, from Oklahoma), saying of liberal judges "I don't want 
to impeach judges. I want to impale them!" Such views are expressions of 
"Christian reconstructionist" theology, a militantly theocratic creed 
propagated by ultrafundamentalist theologian the late R.J. Rushdoony. Hard-line 
reconstructionists constitute an American Taliban and openly advocate making 
the Bible the basis of a shari'a-type religious law that would trump all 
considerations of rights or personal liberty.

Strict reconstructionists are considered extreme even within the religious 
right, yet, as Goldberg documents, an offshoot of reconstructionist theology, 
dominionism, is a political philosophy that is rapidly gaining ground 
among "mainstream" right-wing Christians. Dominionism, or
Christian Nationalism 
as Goldberg calls it, openly advocates theocracy--or "theonomy"
as some of its 
proponents call it. That is, according to this creed, government at all levels 
and all of society's leading institutions should be under fundamentalist 
Christian control. Other religions will be "recognized," but
Christianity will 
have official and approved status. Non-Christians will inevitably be reduced to 
second-class citizens. But, surely, aren't these views also considered extreme, 
and aren't they advocated only by a tiny, insignificant minority?

No longer. Many leading representatives of the religious right have been more 
or less open about their advocacy of theocracy. Statements issued by some 
individuals and organizations retain a fig leaf of vagueness, just enough 
wiggle room to permit plausible deniability if pinned down. For instance in its 
2004 platform the Republican Party of Texas made theocratic noises, but managed 
to commit itself to nothing definite: "[T]he United States of America is a 
Christian nation, and the public acknowledgement of God is undeniable in our 
history. Our nation was founded on fundamental Judeo-Christian principles based 
on the Holy Bible (quoted, p. 27)." Others give full-throated voice to 
theocracy: "We must remove all humanists [i.e., nonfundamentalists] from public 
office and replace them with pro-moral [i.e., Christian fundamentalist] 
political leaders," says Tim LaHaye, coauthor of the Left Behind books (quoted, 
p. 39). George Grant, former executive director of D. James Kennedy's Coral 
Ridge Ministries wrote:

Christians have an obligation a mandate, a commission, a holy responsibility to 
reclaim the land for Jesus Christ--to have dominion in civil structures, just 
as in every other aspect of life and godliness. But it is dominion we are 
after. Not just a voice. It is dominion we are after. Not just influence. It is 
dominion we are after. Not just equal time. It is dominion we are after. World 
conquest. That's what Christ has commissioned us to accomplish.... Thus, 
Christian politics has as its primary intent the conquest of the land--of men, 
families, institutions, courts, and governments for the Kingdom of Christ 
(quoted, p. 41). 

Grant's former boss, D. James Kennedy is even more ambitious; he wants to 
repeal the Enlightenment, reverse the Renaissance, and trash the classical 
heritage of Greece and Rome:

Clearly the Enlightenment in France was another expression of the Renaissance's 
bearing bitter fruit. Had they known their historical models, the men and women 
of the Enlightenment could have had a preview of the coming attractions by 
simply looking back at the fruits of secular ideology in ancient times. In 
Greece and Rome, as well as in the succession of wars and disasters ever after, 
they could have had a portrait of the ghastly results their vision has produced 
(quoted, p. 43). 

Kennedy's model of good government is John Calvin's theocracy in 16th Century 
Geneva.

So, why have Christian fundamentalists ratcheted up their truculence and 
stridency to such a degree? One of their own has been president for the last 
six and a half years, and has funneled billions of dollars of taxpayer money to 
fundamentalist organizations through his "faith-based
initiatives." The U.S. 
Senate is rife with characters like Senators Jim Inhofe, Tom Coburn, Jim 
DeMint, David Vitter, Larry Craig, Bill Frist, John Cornyn, and Sam Brownback, 
who either are fundamentalists or are fellow travelers eager to toe the line of 
organizations like Focus on the Family and the Eagle Forum. The House is even 
worse. The Supreme Court has the Roberts/Scalia/Alito/Thomas clique, one 
justice short of an automatic hard-right majority. Despite some setbacks in the 
2006 election (true believers Rick Santorum and Tom DeLay were lost from 
Congress), haven't things been going their way for some time?

But even to pose such a question is to grossly underestimate the religious 
right's boundless self-pity and consuming sense of victimization. Two events in 
particular seem to have piqued its paranoia: The court-mandated eviction of 
"Roy's Rock," Judge Roy Moore's 2.6 ton Ten Commandments
monument, from the 
Montgomery judicial building, and the court-ordered removal of Terry Schiavo's 
feeding tubes. These events precipitated an eruption of rage and invective from 
fundamentalists and reinforced their palpably absurd but passionate conviction 
that Christians are persecuted in this country, particularly at the hands of 
"liberal, activist judges."

Goldberg is an investigative journalist who spent a great deal of time getting 
to know some of the religious right activists and attending their conferences 
and gatherings. She found many of them to be personally affable and cordial, 
but, she notes, when she was a reporter assigned to the Middle East, she 
observed a similar phenomenon: People, all warmth and smiles, would invite you 
into their homes and serve you tea but the next day would cheerfully send a 
suicide bomber to blow up people like you. Likewise, when the cameras are 
rolling, Pat Robertson can turn on the good ol' boy charm and the "aw,
shucks" 
grin that would make you think he was Andy Griffith. But, Goldberg makes clear, 
these are not nice people. Their easygoing demeanor masks deep and virulent 
hatreds and crusading zeal. They are self-righteous and confident to a degree 
that is possible only for those who have achieved the sublime certainty and 
clarity of the fanatic.

Although she spent a lot of time with her subjects, Goldberg admits that she 
never really understood them. Small wonder. To Goldberg, or to anyone who has 
absorbed the secular, liberal ideas and rational ideals derived from the 
Enlightenment, the fundamentalists will be largely incomprehensible. They live 
in a universe that they have created, a universe separate from and parallel to 
the one that the rest of us live in. The hippies' counterculture of the sixties 
was nothing compared to the fundamentalist counterculture of today. 
Megachurches have now become communities within the community, complete with 
coffee shops, gyms, bookstores, and boutiques. Public schools, those dens of 
iniquity where evolution and secular humanism are inculcated, can be avoided 
altogether, and children can be home-schooled with a curriculum based 
on "Christian" values. When they reach college age, there are
institutions like 
Regent University and Patrick Henry College. When they finish college, they can 
marry another fundamentalist and settle into a sterile McMansion neighborhood 
populated by like-minded folk. In short, a fundamentalist can now go 
practically from cradle to grave without having to be exposed to conflicting 
ideas or having to learn to live with people different from themselves.

Goldberg details the particular obsessions of fundamentalists, like their 
fascination for abstinence and chastity programs, their continued evolution- 
bashing, and, of course, their particular bugaboo, gays and lesbians. I have a 
cartoon on my office door of a pompadoured, Bible-flailing character at the 
pulpit haranguing his flock about the "vile abomination" of two
men clasped 
together in the "animal heat of unnatural lust." Out in the
congregation, one 
pew-sitter whispers to another, "Yeah, you're right. He's definitely
gay." You 
would think that after the Ted Haggard and Larry Craig episodes, there would be 
at least some self-consciousness about expressions of homophobia, but 
imperviousness to shame or irony is part of the zealot thing.

The religious right has had some notable political successes, as when, in 2004, 
numerous states passed propositions outlawing gay marriages and civil unions. 
But, as Goldberg notes, the immediate danger posed by fundamentalist activism 
is cultural, not political. Their impact on particular issues, like gay rights, 
abortion, or stem cell research, is less deleterious than the subversion of 
rationality itself, which has been achieved to an alarming extent. The 
difference I have observed in my own lifetime is remarkable: I entered school 
in the immediate post-Sputnik era and grew up in a society where respect for 
science was automatic. The majority of people might have had a hard time 
distinguishing between a proton and a protein, but there was a pervasive sense 
that when it came to matters of fact there was no higher authority than the 
consensus of scientific communities. Perhaps we were too deferential; some 
shady characters like Werner von Braun were practically idolized.

Today, by contrast, scientific conclusions, even the best established, are 
routinely undermined and derided. Even the mainstream media feel that they have 
to offer "balance" on scientific issues by giving equal time to cranks and 
crackpots. Antiscience propaganda, promulgated by the religious right through 
its mouthpieces in the right-wing punditocracy, has radically politicized 
scientific issues. Instead of deference, scientists whose research opposes 
right-wing dogma can now expect to be censored, denied funding, pilloried in 
the right-wing media, or subjected to Congressional investigation. Here in my 
neighborhood, at NASA, a Bush administration appointed lackey and scientific 
ignoramus at one time had the power to censor the wording of NASA scientists 
when they said things that he judged uncongenial to the Bush base. The St. 
Louis Post-Dispatch recently reported that Dr. Julie Gerberding, Director of 
the Centers for Disease Control, was called to testify before Congress on the 
health effects of global warming, but found her comments censored by the Office 
of Management and Budget, which is run by politically appointed
"Brownies." 
(And they're doing a heckuva job!)

In the 1990s many academics, myself included, were worried about the attack on 
scientific rationality issuing from the postmodernist left. But the real danger 
to science comes from the right, as it always has. Of course, fundamentalist 
antipathy to evolution has been recognized for generations, but, as Chris 
Mooney showed in his 2005 book The Republican War on Science, and as Goldberg 
confirms, antievolutionism is only the tip of the iceberg. When the Food and 
Drug Administration's Reproductive Health Advisory Committee voted 23-4, on 
solid scientific grounds, to make the "morning after" pill
available without a 
prescription, hysterical abstinence advocates shrieked that this would make 
adolescents have more sex. As Goldberg notes (p. 151), the FDA already had a 
host of independent studies denying that canard, but in another exercise of 
politics over science, the FDA shamefully rejected the panel's advice and 
refused to allow emergency contraception to be sold over the counter.

The Lancet, the leading British medical journal, just reported extensive 
studies of the incidence of abortion worldwide. The findings, by the World 
Health Organization and the Guttmacher Institute, show unequivocally that 
abortion rates are lowest in countries that have safe, legal abortion and where 
women have ready access to contraception. The evidence for the connection 
between the availability of reliable contraception and the incidence of 
abortions is simply undeniable, yet, of course, zealots will deny it. What do 
you do when the evidence shows that if you really want to decrease the number 
of abortions, you should make sure that abortion safe and legal, make family 
planning a routine practice, and make contraception widely and easily 
available? You do what you always do when reality mugs your dogma: You deny the 
evidence, vilify and disparage those who present it, and get your media pundits 
and think tanks to start churning out lies and disinformation. It also helps to 
troll the backwaters of academe to find bitter and marginalized or 
ideologically compromised scientists who will add 
their "scientific" credentials to your denial of the evidence.

Truth, of course, is the first casualty of war, and the Christian Nationalists 
most definitely think that they are at war with secular liberal elitists and 
their Enlightenment values. In the 1950s it was "Kill a Commie for
Christ," now 
it is "Lie for the Love of the Lord." It is remarkable how many of 
these "good Christians" are incredibly cool and fluent liars, as,
taking one 
example out of many, when they continue to spread the discredited allegation 
that having an abortion increases the risk of breast cancer. Maybe, though, 
they aren't really lying, but simply assuming a completely different conception 
of truth and how it is acquired. Sometimes comedians are more insightful than 
philosophers, and maybe Stephen Colbert is right when he says that the 
epistemic ideal of the far right is not truth, but "truthiness."
Truthiness is 
not an objective representation of reality, but is what you believe when your 
heart or your gut tells you it must be so. It is a kind of belief that is felt 
with a level of conviction that mere logic and evidence can never impart.

It is never more evident that fundamentalists are living in a parallel reality 
where reason has no place than when they are indulging in their bizarre 
apocalyptic "left behind" fantasies. These beliefs are so very
strange that 
outsiders may be excused if they are left wondering how any featherless biped 
could possibly be induced to hold them. Many Christian fundamentalists advocate 
an eschatology called "premillenial dispensationalism." According to this 
scenario, sometime in the near future (nobody knows exactly when, but soon) the 
"rapture" will occur and all "faithful" Christians (and
innocent babies) will 
be removed from the world. There will follow the period of 
the "tribulation" when the Antichrist emerges, and apocalyptic
war in Israel 
will result in the violent deaths of most of the world's Jews. Then Christ will 
return in glory, the Antichrist will be cast down, and there will be a 
thousand-year reign of peace and love. For the many millions of 
premillenialists this scenario is not metaphor; they really believe it. 
Further, it is not just harmless and silly fantasy, like New Agers going on 
about their past lives, but has issued in an aggressive "Christian
Zionist" 
movement that is trying to influence Middle Eastern policy. My only criticism 
of Goldberg's book is that I wish she had included more about these alarming 
goings-on.

But are Goldberg's warnings alarming, or merely alarmist? Many sophisticated 
readers might concede that the Christian Nationalists are every bit as extreme 
and bizarre as Goldberg indicates, but then ask "So what?" Anyone
who follows 
the news knows that the religious right is not having it all their way. The 
world is not their oyster. Most obviously, two of the movement's old lions, 
Jerry Falwell and D. James Kennedy, have recently "gone to their rewards." 
Goldberg herself in the epilogue to her book notes that many of the remaining 
fundamentalist icons have recently had hard falls. Tom DeLay is indicted and 
out of Congress. Roy Moore's run for governor of Alabama came to a sudden stop 
when he was clobbered in the GOP primary. Ralph Reed, former boy wonder of the 
Christian Coalition, was tarred in the Jack Abramoff scandal and couldn't even 
get elected lieutenant governor of Georgia. South Dakotans spanked the 
religious right hard when they rejected a ballot initiative that would have 
banned nearly all abortions. Mainstream Republicans may be turning against the 
religious extremists. Former House Majority Leader and hidebound conservative 
Dick Armey recently blasted James Dobson's Focus on the Family as "nasty 
bullies," and "a gang of thugs (quoted on p. 212)." Liberal
columnist Ellen 
Goodman recently noted dissension in the ranks of conservative Christians and 
opined that the religious right, as a coherent political movement, is showing 
signs of rigor mortis. So, why get alarmed with a movement that is noisy and 
obnoxious but apparently going nowhere?

The death of the religious right has been proclaimed many times before. Like 
any political movement, it has its ups and downs. Temporary defeats do not 
dismay them. How could they be dismayed when the Lord is on their side? They 
are motivated, they are organized, they are well-funded, and they are 
absolutely certain that the future is theirs. They are not going away, and we 
ignore them at our peril. Goldberg has therefore done us the sort of service 
that Frank Capra did; she has given us a beautifully crafted statement of why 
we fight. Of course, in the Second World War the fascists were in Germany, 
Italy, and Japan. Now they may be just down the road at your local megachurch, 
but the battle is the same: the conflict between a vision of human society as 
open, tolerant, and guided by scientific rationality and one of a society that 
is dominated by an authoritarian, exclusionist, superstitious ideology.

Copyright ©2007 Keith Parsons.
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