Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Which they are currently doing in Iraq and Afghanistan. W backed off
on calling it a crusade but that's what he really meant. It might be
more difficult making the transition to doing it at home to people like
us but that doesn't mean its not a goal. I have a hard time separating
teh christian theme of the Republican party from the pugnacious
foreign policy toward the 'axis of others'.
  

    
>Christians have a long history of massacre, genocide, and general
unpleasantness.<

It may have just a tiny bit to do with the species involved.  

From some of the earlier posts, one would think that Christians
invented that historic, durable, ubiquitous human vice/virtue:
hypocrisy.  
  

    
Well, the reason for Michelle's book and for this topic is that this
particular group of devinely inspired hypocrites have at least
partially taken control of the U.S. government and have designs on the
rest of it.  

Yes, similar criticisms could be made of other groups of fanatics who
think or thought God or History or some other force is on their side,
but that simply underlines the dangers of fanaticism.  

Speaking as an old hippy, I will say that whatever their other flaws,
hippies do not have a long history of massacre, genocide, and general
unpleasantness. Unless you count their fashion sense among the last
categry, or so my daughter would chime in if she were awake.

I will say that for me one of the most refreshing things about
Michelle's book was its straightforward sense that Christian
nationalists are *the enemey.*  And yup, I've had many nice experiences
over the years with sincere non-theocratic Christians, but that
doesn't change that fact one bit.  These folks really are the modern
descendants of the Christians who kept the western world convulsed with
war and slaughter for a milennia.  Other Christians are simply people
who believe a crock of shit, but I would say no different about members
of any other religious group.

If there is a God or an animating spirit to the universe, and as an
old hippy I of course think there probably is, I doubt if She would
have made herself in any image that would make much sense to humans. 
Unless it's Ganesh.  A God with an elephant's head might have appealed
to Her sense of humor ("haha, let's see what I can get these people to
worship!").
  

    <scribbled by gerry Wed 30 Aug 06 07:33>
  

    
> ... Christian nationalists are *the enemey.*

I've thought about this for a while, and it occurs to me that a
better, more descriptive label is needed.  I mean, in the case of the
USA, I understand the group of people being described, and I agree
thatthey are the enemy, i.e., enemy of freedom and democracy.  If they
hadtheir way, ours would be a fundamentalist theocracy not too
muchunlike that of Iran.

There was a discussion here a while back with Ramón Sender Barayón
(who happens to be <rabar> on The WELL) about his book, _A Death in
Zamora_ (see <inkwell.vue.210>).  The book chronicles Sender's journey
of discovery regarding the murder of his mother by Franco's fascists in
Spain.  Before reading the book, I had only a vague awareness of that
chapter of Spain's history, perhaps because it was largely eclipsed by
that of Nazi Germany.  But in the case of Franco's Spain, it was a very
religious movement, and the Church was definitely complicit, much more
so than with Germany, IMO.

On the other hand, there are others in the world who could be called
Christian nationalists who are nothing like that.  I'm thinking of
Christian nations, such as Denmark, where there's no hint of the sort
religious fascism that sullied Spain.  There are Christian Democratic
political parties in various nations that, while perhaps somewhat right
of center on some areas, are advocates for labor, social justice, and
other causes that would be regarded as fiercely leftist here in the
USA.

Even in this country, there are nationalists who are Christian and who
want no part of the group Michelle Goldberg calls Christian
nationalists.  See, for example, http://www.christiandemocrats.org/

> Other Christians are simply people who believe a crock of shit...

With all due respect, Mark, I think that is simply a gross
oversimplification.  But I understand what you're saying.
  

    
Well, I'm using "Christian nationalists" in the specific sense
Michelle uses it in her book.  She had a problem in figuring out how to
describe the phenomenon because these groups actually call themselves
a variety of different things (for example Restorationists) and she
needed a catch all terms for people who favored a theocratic Christian
government in America.

So I'm not over-simplifying, I'm just using the term specifically as
Michelle uses it, not to refer to all Christians who happen to also be,
in some sense, nationalists.
  

    
And oh, right, re: the "crock of shit" comment, sorry.  "People who
believe in comforting and/or scary fairy tales" might have been more
polite.  I'm sorry, but I'm a post-Enlightenment guy, and that's the
way I see it.  I actually do have a spiritual outlook on life, but I
think of all religions as concretized dross -- the residue left behind
when the insight leaves.
  

    
But enough about me, even though it's one of my favorite subjects.

Michelle, I know that in coming up with the term "Christian
nationalists" you were looking for a way to define these groups in
terms of their aims rather than getting drawn into the sometimes
baffling divisions and sub-divisions among right-wing Christians.

I will freely admit that if you asked me to tell you the different
between a "funadementalist" and an "evangelical" I would start looking
very uneasy.  Do you think it's worth learning the fine distinctions
between the various right-wing sects, and if so can you recommend any
books or resources that would help people figure it all out?
  

    

> I
> think of all religions as concretized dross -- the residue left behind
> when the insight leaves.

The ones that aren't that way typically don't make the news.

>  different between a "funadementalist" and an "evangelical" 

There are people, albeit not the majority, that could be called the
'evangelical left', http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangelical_left
I'm curious how such people fit in, if they do, to the groups
we've been discussing.
  

    
> 'evangelical left'

Former President Jimmy Carter might fall under that category.
I sai "might" because some separate "born-again" from
"evangelical," while others lump them together.
  

    
Wow, it's getting hard to keep up with this discussion -- luckily I'll
be staying in one place for the next week and should be online a lot
more. A couple responses:

First, I really don't expect a theocratic fascist state like Gilead to
emerge anytime soon, and I think widespread Christian nationalist
violence is pretty unlikely unless there's some wider breakdown in the
social order triggered by a terrorist attack of similar catastrophe.
What I tried to describe in the book is something more subtle and
insidious -- a slow process by which reality and rationality are
replaced by a version of revelation and in government decision -making,
and an increasingly bellicose, state-subsidized Christian supremacism
in public life. It's been a challenge to try and bring attention to
trends I consider alarming without being alarmist. 

We now live in a country where, thanks to the faith-based initiative,
some taxpayer-funded jobs explicitly refuse to hire non-Christians.
Pro-life groups get grants to teach abstinence classes in public
schools, where they tell students that sex with a condemn is as
dangerous as Russian roulette.  Right-wing Christian radio hosts are
appointed to American delegations to UN conferences, where they team up
with Iranian and Saudi delegates to block agreements on women's
rights. Aggressive evangelical proselytizing of subordinates is
tolerated in the military. Does this mean America is a theocracy? No --
most people are living their lives as they normally do, and the
Christian right is still far from hegemonic. But it does have much more
power than I think we should be comfortable with.

Btw, I just returned from Cincinnati, and outside the city I visited a
huge, state-of-the art creation museum that's set to open next year.
It has a planetarium, where visitors can learn how starlight makes it
to the earth in 6000 years, because that's the age of the universe.
Most of the place was under construction an doff limits, but I did see
a pretty impressive animatronic display of dinosaurs and people living
together in some kind of rainforest, replete with real turtles swimming
in a pond. It struck me that in the past, I'd only ever seen museums
of untrue things in authoritarian countries (and even then, they were
more grounded in reality than this was). Pretty soon, I suspect, when
public schools try to take kids to the real science museum, irate
fundamentalists will demand a visit to Answers in Genesis for
"balance." Again, this doesn't auger theocracy, but it does represent a
real challenge to any kind of agreed-upon notion of reality, and
without that, social cohesion isn't easy. 

As to the question of whether there are important distinctions between
fundamentalists, evangelicals and others, there certainly are. One can
be an evangelical -- see Jimmy Carter or Jim Wallis --without being a
fundamentalist. Actually, Randall Balmer, an  evangelical professor at
Columbia, has a new book out attacking the religious right from both a
political and a theological perspective.  It's called "Thy Kingdom
Come." If you're interested in some of the political implications of
different kinds of Christianity, it's worth reading Gary Willis's book
"Under God."   
  

    
"it does represent a real challenge to any kind of agreed-upon notion
of reality, and without that, social cohesion isn't easy."

Word.
  

    
I was thinking about this topic on the drive home today - it occurred
to me that 'theocracy' is code for 'anarchy for believers, fascism for
everybody else' - after all, if you're a believer, God *already* tells
you what to do.  So the only people who need governing are the godless
heathens....
  

    
I guess my question is what is a non-dogmatic liberal supposed to do.
Intellectual trench warfare of various guises seems, increasingly to
me, an ineffectual approach. I've seen wonderfully creative efforts
here on the Well to get dogmatists to stand back and take a more
critical view of things. There's rarely a noticeable impact.
Torch-bearing conviction quickly squelches any skeptical thoughts. 

Not that we should stop trying. I continue to put in my two-cents
worth here and there. But it may be we're dealing with processes that
are largely inscrutable for us at the moment. If one of the factors
that has led to the rise of the Christian right is the way our urban
landscapes have evolved over the last 50 years, then what other
environmental factors are in play? Or what neurological and biological
factors? These things really aren't that well understood.

The story we tell ourselves that it's about competing political agents
and ideologies may be somewhat mythological itself. In other words,
they aren't as strongly causal as people like to think. To say
political agents and ideologies are only epiphenomena is probably too
strong, but there is good reason to think they only represent a
fraction of the processes involved, most of which we're only beginning
to get a glimpse of, like with Jared Diamond's book, "Guns, Germs and
Steel."
  

    
I wonder if we might need some kind of summit, say Jim Wallis on one
side and Dr. Dobson (e.g.) on the other, along with some reps from
non-Christian faiths as well as nonbelievers, to hammer out what the
terms of engagement are/ought to be.  I think they might find some
common ground - as in no one should be converted at gunpoint or under
threat of legal sanctions, no one should be forced to sin against their
own religion, no one should be imprisoned strictly on the basis of
their beliefs, etc. Maybe some of the fears that exist on both sides
(there's a lot of what I call "camelonasophobia" around) could be
lessened a bit... ?
  

    
> <13> "Ideologies that answer deep existential needs are hugely powerful. 
> The Christian nationalists have one and their opponents largely do not.

That's still gnawing at me.  It's obviously true, and I don't see any way
around it.  While the left nominally prefers the Democratic party to the
Republican party, it does so without much enthusiasm or commitment, and
it's so fragmented that there's no platform the Democratic party could
adopt that would engender enthusiasm to match the advantage that the 
Republicans are reaping from the dynamic described here.  A charismatic 
leader might accomplish that, but the Republicans make sure any who might 
aspire to that role are already damaged goods by the time they get into 
that position, or they shoot themselves in the foot, like Gary Hart.

The phrase that occurs to me is "first principles" as in something that we 
need to get back to, but that's as far as I know to go with it for now.
  

    
>next week I'm going to Ohio to debate Phil Burress, the head of that
state's Focus on the Family affiliate and a driving force behind the
anti-gay marriage amendment there.  He's been married three times. 

Michelle, I'm sure there are more than a few of us here who are
thinkng "Boy, I would have loved to have seen that!"  Can you say
anything about how it went or what you learned from the experience?
  

    

Indeed, yes!

What gnaws at me are the subtlety and comprehensiveness of the movement, as
well as their development of a complete educational mileau, including a
creation museum.
  

    
If anyone is interested in hearing the Burress debate, a recording is
actually online here:
http://events.streamlogics.net/donordigital/aug29-06/index.asp . I
think I did ok, but it was actually pretty tricky, because Burress sat
next to me and lied in a far more brazen manner than I'd anticipated.
We each had eight minutes to give opening remarks, and here's part of
what I said: "Yesterday, at a press conference co-sponsored by Mr.
Burress, I heard Ken Blackwell" -- Ohio's GOP candidate for governor --
"say that my family belongs to the wrong religion. It was an event for
a new group called Clergy for Blackwell, and about fifteen pastors
were there to make political endorsements. There was a similar event in
Columbus, and Blackwell spoke there. At the press conference here,
they showed us a video of him. He was deflecting charges that he longs
for a theocracy, and he said he would fight for the rights of
unbelievers, because, I quote, they have the right to be wrong. "

I'd gotten the time and address of the press conference by calling
Burress's office, and I saw both him and his wife there. But at the
debate, Burress said he'd had nothing to do with putting it together
and that he'd just been an attendee.  It caught me off guard, and I
thought maybe I'd made a mistake, because it was hard for me to imagine
that he'd stand in front of 300 people and just lie. When I got back
to the house I was staying at, I reread the AP story where I'd first
heard about Clergy for Blackwell. "Monday's news conference is being
organized with the help of Cincinnati-based Citizens for Community
Values," it said. 

At another point during the debate, I mentioned that Burress is the
treasurer of Exodus International, an evangelical organization that
seeks to cure gay people of homosexuality. He shot back that I needed
to do more research, because Exodus isn't a religious organization. It
was such a bald untruth that I was left a bit discombobulated. I wish
I'd had Exodus's motto in front of me: "freedom from homosexuality
through the power of Jesus Christ." Since I didn't, I momentarily
wondered if maybe Exodus is technically secular or ecumenical or if
there was somehow some sense in which Burress was telling the truth. I
think I called him out on his deception, but I probably sounded a bit
unsure. 

There were some other moments like that when I desperately wanted a
laptop with an internet connection so we could settle matters. Overall,
though, I think it was useful -- there were something like 300 people
in the audience, and at least some of them said they'd learned a lot
about the religious right in their state. 

Actually, it's kind of amazing what people in Ohio didn't know. I met
with interfaith leaders who had never heard of Rod Parsley, a demagogic
faith-healing televangelist with a 12,000-member congregation who is
the state's most important Christian nationalist organizer. Even
Blackwell has much more of a reputation as a fiscal conservative than
as a theocon, so I'm hoping his pronouncement on the incorrectness of
some Ohioans religions will get more attention.  
 
  

    
I only started reading the book last night -- I had to special order
it at Kepler's. But I'm fascinated by it and by this discussion.
(Thanks, Elisabeth, for steering me here!)

I know intimately a lot of people who are Bush-voting self-proclaimed
Christians. I'm not sure how many of them fit into the core of
"Christian Nationalists" but I am certain some do.

On a recent visit to some of them, I was struck by the pervasiveness
of *fear* in their casual conversation. These people live in a sparsely
populated red state where there's a methamphetamine problem (they tell
me) but no other concrete crime issue. Yet their conversation was
heavily larded with lurid tales of random violence, and at one point
even turned to the topic of what one should do if approached by a
homicidal maniac on the street. 

An amateur psychologist like me doesn't have much trouble attributing
significance to this. These people have been scared out of their wits. 
They see the world as fraught with peril, themselves as beset by
enemies in all directions. I don't think they arrived at this on their
own. And it's here that I think Thomas Frank has a point. Somebody has
been drumming fear, fear, fear into their heads. Jesus is a drug to
counteract the fear. (Except that he doesn't, obviously, any more than
cocaine makes one omnipotent.)
  

    
That pervasive fear is what makes me fear (ahem, it's contagious) that
somebody's going to be driven to cross the line and start shooting. 
But I guess it's more likely that they'll just hole up and let the
state do it for them...?
  

    
>>> because Burress sat
next to me and lied in a far more brazen manner than I'd anticipated

It's really hard to counter that, because guys like that will lie
about anything and everything, which means you have to have Tom
Oliphant's knowledge and memory and Henry Rollins' attitude to keep up.
  

    
Fear is the theme of our times, for sure. But the main reason I
mention it in this context is to convey the idea, which comes across in
Michelle's book but is still hard for outsiders to grasp, that these
folks really feel that *they* are under attack from, among others, *us*
-- meaning rational humanists, intellectuals, children of the
Enlightenment. They are afraid of the openness we embrace, the
willingness to throw over old mores (especially sexual ones), the
disrespect for ideas they've been conditioned to view as not only
unquestionable but central to their understanding of the world. 

The farther one retreats from the real world (with its nuances and
uncertainties) into the comforting solidity of a manichean absolutism,
the more threatening the real world, and those who live in it, become.
There's a self-amplifying loop of fear -- of the other, of the self
(especially the sexual self), of intellectual curiosity. 

It's a short step from this basic psychological phenomenon to the
fantasy that your symbolic enemies (i.e., those who represent what you
fear) are your *real* enemies -- that they're out to destroy you and
what you believe. So when we secular types got prayer out of the public
schools, we thought that was the end of it. But to them it was just
one more step on the road to abolishing religion. We see the separation
of church and state as an end; they think it is merely a stage en
route to putting them in camps. This is crazy, of course, but it's a
fantasy that flourishes readily in the paranoid soil of an absolutist,
fact-denying worldview. Especially when it's encouraged by segments of
society that hope to harnass the resulting political energy.

The people I know who think this way are textbook examples of what the
existentialists called "bad faith," i.e., they want to disclaim all
moral responsibility for their actions and turn their lives over to
some external authority. Of course this impulse is a cornerstone of
totalitarianism. And it's hardly unique to Christians, or even to
religious folks. I've known union people whose whole life revolved
around what was good for the union. The Founders understood this and
counted on pluralism to check the excesses of any one absolutist
perspective. 

But this impulse can be harnessed by any politician cynical and
skilled enough to use it. There's a famous quote by Goering about
scaring the public into supporting any measures, however harsh. You
just keep repeating: "The [Jews/Catholics/Communists/secular
humanists/Islamo-fascists] are out to destroy us, and will do so, if we
don't destroy them first."

There are smart people who go this route, but their intelligence is
perverted to the cause of sophistry, rhetoric, gamesmanship -- anything
but open inquiry or an honest exchange of ideas. Most of the people in
this camp aren't terribly bright, and they don't trust -- they fear --
people who are. In some ways what is happening is a reflection of de
Tocqueville's concerns about the leveling of American society and its
resultant anti-intellectualism. 

Given all this, I'm pretty fearful myself. Michelle, what cause is
there (if any) for optimism?
  

    
Andrew, I agree with almost everything you said. But it can be put
simpler, if one is a member of the faithful:

'We are in a war between God and the Devil.  Anything that is not in
the service of God is in the service of the Devil.' 
Everything follows from that. 

The one thing I disagree with that you said ("Most of the people in
this camp aren't terribly bright...."):  There are many very bright
people in this camp.  They simply have given themselves over to FAITH.
That means they trust.  And therein lies the problem.  People who
CLAIM to speak for God are telling them how it is, and they are
believing them.  That is why this group is so ripe for exploitation,
both politically and monetarily.

And that is sad and frightening.
  

    
> We are in a war between God and the Devil.

...and the Devil has the trademark on "Godly".