The Growing Threat of Right-Wing Christians
Whether she’s attending a Ten Commandments conference or joining Tony Perkins’ conference calls to listen in on what D.C. agenda will be passed on to congregations, [Michelle] Goldberg’s reporting offers insight into a movement that has reshaped the nation’s political and cultural landscape. Goldberg did not go undercover, nor wear any disguise. Rather, she simply showed up, listened and learned. And what she has learned is definitely alarming.
No reasonable person would dispute that the freedom of religion is a bedrock principle of our great nation. After all, America was founded by people searching for the right to worship as they saw fit. Who would have thought, then, that some 350 years later, this country would be in thrall to those still believe in freedom of religion- the freedom of all Americans to be subjected to the narrow religious strictures of a zealous minority of Evangelical Christians. Though there is little reporting done on this reality in the mainstream media, there is a small, committed, and well-connected group of Evangelical zealots who are hard at work trying to remake our country into something that closely reflects their narrow morality and religious beliefs. If you’re not afraid of what’s being done in the name of God and Country, you should be.
In the Department of Health and Human Services, the people they hired to formulate sex education policy, at both the national and international level, didn’t come from the American Medical Association or the big medical schools. They’re coming from places like the Medical Institute for Sexual Health, which is this Christian Nationalist medical group. [The group says it is a “nonprofit scientific, educational organization to confront the global epidemics of non-marital pregnancy.”]
One of the earlier stories I did for Salon was on the UNFPA (United Nations Population Fund) which does family planning, but they don’t do abortion, mostly safe childcare and reproductive health through clinics all over the world. Congress had appropriated $35 million to the UNFPA. There’s this group called the Population Research Institute — another one of these parallel institutions. They’re radically anti-family planning and claim that population control policies are part of this “one-world conspiracy” to cull the population of the faithful so that the “one-world government” can more easily assert its control. On the website it said that not only is overpopulation a myth, but all the people on Earth could live comfortably in the state of Texas. I did this story in 2002. I still had this naive idea that this kind of thing would remain marginal.
But what’s amazing is that Population Research Institution went on to testify before Congress saying that the UNFPA promotes forced abortions in China. These kinds of accusations start echoing up the ladder to the point where Bush froze the UNFPA funding. This despite the fact that the State Department had already sent a delegation to China to investigate and said there was nothing to these accusations at all.
Yes, all’s fair in love and war…and to these zealots, that exactly what this is- a war. They see themselves as front-line warriors, fighting for righteous, morality, and the gospel of Jesus Christ. Just as in any war, truth is often the first casualty. Truth is whatever serves their ultimate goal, and if they have to make up “facts” out of whole cloth, then that’s what needs to be done. After all, what would Jesus do? He’d no doubt be kicking butt and taking names.
Truth? That’s something you can worry about once you’ve won the war.
Christian Nationalism is a political ideology separate from evangelicals. Evangelicals are about 30 percent of the American population. Christian Nationalism is a subset of 10-15 percent. It’s less a religion than it is an ideology about the way America should be governed. It has this whole revisionist history claiming that America was founded as a Christian nation, that the separation of church and state is a fraud perpetrated by seculars. What follows from that are ideas about Christianization of institutions in American life, and that the courts have vastly overstepped their authority in the enforcement of the separation of church and state.
In other words, the Christian version of Sharia is a reasonable, attainable, and altogether proper goal for these folks. Of course, what they fail to realize- or simply ignore outright- is that not only is freedom OF religion and important American value, but so is freedom FROM religion. The Founding Fathers envisioned a nation in which Americans could worship as they chose…or not, if that is their choice. Nothing in their vision accounted for a society in which intolerant, zealous, self-righteous Christianity was the law of the land.
My…we HAVE come full circle, haven’t we??
If you think this movement hasn’t begun to creep into everyday life, you’re obviously not paying attention:
The words that they use for that is “religious freedom in hiring rights.” Religious groups have been able to get government checks for a long time. But they used to have to abide by 1956 civil rights law which has an exemption for religious groups. So, if you’re a church you can prefer Christians, mosques can prefer Muslims, but the catch has always been that if you’re contracting with the government, then you have to abide by the same civil rights laws as everybody else. Bush, by executive order, overturned that so that government-funded charities are no longer bound by the laws. Now, there is job training, drug treatment and preschool programs that are totally separate. The job is 100-percent taxpayer funded, but they can say in the help-wanted ad, “Christians only.”
Bush wanted to get the Salvation Army aboard the faith-based initiatives. The Salvation Army then brought in a consultant to Christianize certain divisions. He asked the human resources director at the Salvation Army headquarters, Maureen Schmidt, whether one of the human resource staffers at the social services division, Margaret Geissman, was Jewish, because she had a “Jewish sounding name.” Schmidt told him that she wasn’t. So then he went to her and said, “I want a list of homosexuals who work there.”
She said no. She’s a really conservative lady, but she was totally appalled and refused to do it.
And it’s even more demonstrably impacted the conduct of political affairs:
It’s not all of the megachurches, but it is many of them. There’s different kinds of connections. New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Ted Haggard is the pastor there. He has a call with the White House every single week. Other churches are networked in through the Family Research Council in D.C. It’s run by Tony Perkins who has these conference calls that I actually got the number for and started listening in on. All these pastors call in and Perkins basically updates them on his latest conversations with the White House and the congressional leadership. He tells them what kind of issues he needs to focus their congregations on. So he would say you need to have your congregants write to their senators about abolishing the filibuster or about confirming a certain judge. He’s literally relaying marching orders from Washington, D.C.
These are the people that Our Glorious and Benevolent Leader is pandering to. Though they constitute nowhere near a majority of the American population, they are exceedingly well-financed and organized. They have a long-term perspective, and they are in this battle for the long haul. They’re also arrogant, self-righteous, and self-absorbed enough to feel that they are the Chosen Ones, and thereful morally and ideological superior to mere unbelieving mortals.
While those of us on the Left pursue large, noticeable victories, these Right-wing zealots are contents to nibble around the margins, because they know that, while achieving their goals may take longer, they will achieve significant and long-lasting victories without attracting much attention in the mainstream media. They are the “tortoise” to the Left’s “hare”.
We’re going to wake up one morning to discover that all those things that we thought were “rights” have been eliminated by religious zealots who care for nothing except the furtherance of their own narrow agenda.
There’s one abortion clinic in Mississippi right now and Operation Rescue is planning to close it down. In parts of the country, doctors are living under constant terrorist threat and it’s a daily battle. If you’re in other parts of the country, you can be completely unaware of it. I keep hearing from people on the coasts who say, well, I’m sure the pendulum will swing back. But my sense is that, for instance, gay people who are living in conservative states or Jews who are living in places where there aren’t a lot of other Jews, definitely feel something is going on and it’s affecting them on a day to day basis.
You may not notice anything today, tomorrow, or perhaps even the day after. One day, though, we will awaken to discover that this nation, whose freedoms we cherish, is a vastly different and much less free place…and guess what? Y’all made this possible by voting Republican….
STILL glad you voted Republican?
