Goodhair Perry vs. the Mormons

James Moore writes about Rick's Perry Tales Huffington Post 10/17/2011, and more specifically on the anti-Mormon campaign directed at Mitt Romney by Perry, his other Republican rivals and conservative Protestant leaders. Moore assumes based on circumstantial evidence that Perry is supportive of the anti-Mormon campaign:

In the south, it is not a secret that evangelical Christians view Mormonism with a wary eye. According to a 2007 survey by the Pew Center, 57 percent of voters identifying themselves as Christians don't think of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints as being a part of traditional Christendom. Consequently, logic suggests they might not vote for a person of that faith.

And Rick Perry is not going to ignore those numbers or that logic. The reason the Texas governor informally launched his campaign at a gigantic prayer rally with evangelical southern Christians was to let all of them know that he came from their tribe. He might as well have been telling them, "Vote for me. I'm not a Mormon," which, in a fairly obvious manner, is exactly what he accomplished. Perry did not denounce Mitt Romney's religious belief system but he knew there were others to do that important political work.

Moore also reminds us that the emphasis on anti-Mormon agitation by Republicans and conservative Protestants the last several years intensifies the significance of religion in Republican politics: "The argument that a person's faith ought not to play a role in the debate in the public square falls apart if a Muslim candidate enters the race; consequently, it is of relevance to the Republicans when they look to their nominee".

Moore doesn't claim to have "smoking gun" proof of Perry's involvement in that aspect of his campaign. But I agree that it's a safe assumption. Perry would clearly distance himself and tell his supporters to knock it off if he weren't in approval of it. On the other hand, Sarah Posner looks critically at a claim of a more direct link in The David Lane Effect Religion Dispatches 10/17/2011, and finds it wanting. But she's looking very specifically at the anti-Mormon messaging. She agrees that, with or without explicit anti-Mormonism, the Perry campaign is pushing hard on the idea that only a conservative Protestant Christian is fit to be President:

Yes, the anti-Mormonism is front and center [in the Republican Party]. But the problem with these Christian right players backing Perry is not just their anti-Mormonism, it's their demand that evangelicalism is a pre-requisite for the White House. That's the clear message the Perry campaign has authorized.

Tags: christian right, republican party, rick perry, sarah posner

Dominionist Christians in their context, for better or worse

Christian dominionists like to control their own marketing. And despite supposedly being bold in their witness for Jesus, they don't want to let their little lights shine before the unbelievers (Democrats, non-Christians, Catholics, most Protestants). It's not exactly timidity. They know that can't justify their positions in terms that most Americans and most Christians in the US or anywhere would support. So they mealy-mouth a lot.

Al Bundy - Christian dominionist theologian?

Our stumbling press is willing to facilitate the mealy-mouthing, since that's largely what our star pundits generally do anyway. So there's a discussions going on now in places that actually deal realistically with the Christian Right, like Talk to Action and Religion Dispatches, as to what the correct way to talk about the dominionists is. I understand why serious journalists and scholars like to be careful about their terminology. For scholars in particular, their work involves making careful distinctions.

This piece from Religion Dispatches is an especially good one on the topic, Beyond Alarmism and Denial in the Dominionism Debate by Sarah Posner and Anthea Butler 08/29/2011. They make an essential point in reference to the Christian Right in general and the Pentecostal New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), a group that suddenly came to new (and to them unwelcome) public attention with Rick Perry's big prayer rally:

... theological disagreements among these folks are largely inconsequential from a broad political perspective; the overarching Christian nation ideology, along with opposition to secularism, LGBT rights and abortion rights, and favoring public prayer and Ten Commandments and so forth are unifying.

But the idea that the NAR in particular — as opposed to the broader apparatus and movement the religious right has built over four decades — is somehow, in a vacuum, more powerful, or more authoritarian, or more threatening to democracy is a view that is far too narrow, ahistorical, and uninformed. [my emphasis]

What makes Posner's and Butler's piece especially good is the way they describe the networks of relationships that participants in neo-Pentecostal groups experience and how the influence of the leadership enters into that experience. As Posner puts it, this is a "crucial point here that I think is frequently overlooked by some people who focus too hard on the NAR rhetoric without contextualizing it: how people actually live and experience these movements." Their description doesn't minimize the ugly side of the neo-Pentecostal experience. It puts it in its actual context as lived by its believers.

Butler slips in a kind of disclaimer that I've seen several times lately in similar articles by people who actually know the Christian Right. She says the lack of decent research by mainstream reporters "has also led to a whole cottage industry of those who write about dominionism, the NAR, and other theocratic movements from the opposite perspective: It’s taking over everything." Now, I'm willing to believe there are people exaggerating one aspect or another of this phenomenon. But who is she talking about? I've seen this kind of comment several times lately without those guilty ones supposedly doing this being referenced, linked or specified. Without knowing who they are talking about, this kind of comment isn't helpful. In fact, it sounds suspiciously like knee-jerk rhetoric to reassure the un-assurable that the speaker/writer isn't one of those stereotypical libruls who supposedly hates "people of faith" and their faiths, too.

But, as I said, Butler's and Posner's description of the neo-Pentecostal lived experience is an exceptionally good summary. Butler:

... there are streams of people crossing each other, and what is happening can have a multiplicity of meanings. That is how to think about the NAR, dominionism, all of these movements that people are involved in. In evangelical and Pentecostal churches, most people have a home church they identify with, but you have a favorite pastor or evangelist that you listen to occasionally. Studying scripture means you don't just read the Bible, you read devotional books, and books designed to help your spiritual walk or the church broadly construed. That is the problem with focusing in only on NAR and dominionism. If you don't know the everyday context of how people, churches, and organizations deal with these broad-based movements, it can sound like a vast conspiracy theory.

People who are in that web don't often recognize differences, or they don’t care about them. They care about their spiritual lives, and that's what keeps these movements going. They can go from one meeting to the next if they have the funds to do so, and the highs are good. Who doesn’t want to go to a meeting that feeds your soul where you meet like-minded people?

All of the groups are enmeshed in a symbiotic web. These evangelists', apostles’, and leaders’ messages are the commodity, and you have to buy the books, conferences, and other materials in order to get the blessings. I know that will seem distasteful and a caricature to some, but these events are well-attended, and at a hundred bucks a person, revenues from book and DVD sales. Conferences and meetings like Lou Engles’ The Call are not just prayer meetings, they are Christian marketplaces, with all sorts of spiritual wares being sold. [my emphasis]

Posner amplifies that description:

... if you’ve ever been to a neo-Pentecostal conference or revival you’ve seen this sort of thing. And as [Carlton] Pearson's biography clearly demonstrates, if you give up that central idea that there is a hell (and hence a Satan), you'll be banished from not only friendships, but the lucrative ministries that Pearson himself helped to create.

All that said, there are different ways that people experience this, or faith healings, or other performances you find in these environments. Not everyone is in lockstep, when you sit down and talk with them. I remember vividly the 2007 event at Gimenez's church in Virginia Beach—this was before John Gimenez passed away—and there was quite a lineup of different preachers (I mean entrepreneurs)! I remember Lou Engle was on what I might, looking back, call a prophecy bender: rocking, as he does, and really doing an extended sequence on some dream he had about Jerusalem. People were wandering out of the sanctuary, as I did, and I was chatting with a woman in the hall. She commented about she hadn't seen him preach in a while. And she seemed pretty unimpressed with this one.

I point this out only to emphasize how these individual players do not necessarily always enrapture the audience; I've seen this at various events. On the other hand, I've seen others, like Rod Parsley and Kenneth Copeland, have the audience eating out of their hands (and also putting money in their hands).

These events are, like I said, performances that are carefully staged and mapped out; there may be a series of speakers who seem like they are reacting spontaneously to what's happening, moved by the holy spirit. But it's carefully orchestrated, along with mesmerizing music, for maximum impact. It's big business.

However, I suspect this ability to understand and empathize with rank-and-file participants may also contribute to the temptation to downplay that nuttiness and cultish aspects of these movements. Posner, for instance, expresses misgivings that some (unnamed) "people have been distracted by focusing too much on bizarre statements Perry’s prayer friends made (the Statue of Liberty is a demonic idol, Oprah is the harlot of Babylon, and so forth)."

But this stuff is also standard fare in the neo-Pentecostal subculture. I just clicked on the website of Charisma, a leading Pentecostal magazine, and found this article on the front page: J. Lee Grady, Unraveling the Power of Witchcraft—One Warlock at a Time 09/07/2011. Ole Jaylee apparently believes literally in the ability of witches and warlocks to magically affect people:

Just a year ago, Victor Hugo Perez Vargas was a leader in Peru’s vast but secretive occult movement. His strange ability to curse people and cause accidents seemed to be increasing. He was being mentored by a well-known satanist master and he attended witchcraft conferences. ...

Victor, who is 36, was drawn into this occultism as a teenager in the city of Moyobamba, where friends convinced him to have sex with dogs in order to receive supernatural power. Witches told him to do this so he could hear better and see in the spiritual realm. After the perverse initiation rites, he began to hear voices—and he discovered his ability to kill people with his words.

I'm sorry. People who can swallow tales about warlocks causing accidents by cursing and initiation rites involving dog-fucking are just superstitious and gullible. If it hurts their feelings to see or read someone saying that, then they just need to grow up. Ole Jaylee has his head stuck in the 19th century:

Victor’s transformation showed me how the Holy Spirit is working in Peru, where occultism has been a tradition ever since ancient Incas sacrificed children on altars to their sun god. Today, occultists from Africa, Europe and the United States attend witchcraft gatherings in Peru because they consider the country a central power center for New Age energy.

He goes on to describe an exorcism allegedly performed on the warlock's girlfriend, a description evidencing less critical thinking ability than the average illiterate backwoods hick can muster.

He goes on to describe his conversion to a brand of Christianity evidently as superstitious as the most dim-witted occultist. "I had a vision of the feet of Jesus," the redeemed and exorcised former warlock says. It reminds me of an episode of the old TV series Married...With Children in which Al Bundy has a vision of God's shoes and starts to manufacture and market them, only to later to discover they were the shoes a deceased fellow shoe salesman had invented and had never been able to sell, either.

And Pentecostalists like Jaylee often track in National Inquirer fantasies like this:

Observers say witchcraft is growing in Peru today, and human sacrifice still occurs—although it is rarely reported. (Several weeks ago, a girl’s dismembered body was found in Mayobamba.) Teresa Gomez believes this is all a last-ditch effort by satanic forces.

"These satanists want to take over the nation of Peru," she says. "Witches come here because there was so much blood sacrifice during the Inca times." She also noted that poor families, especially in jungle areas, have been known to sell their children to be sacrificed in occult rituals.

Substitute "Jews" for "poor families" and you've got the bad old medieval (and later) "blood libel" about Jews sacrificing Christian babies. This is a mean, superstitious, and militant ignorant brand of Christianity. I don't see any good reason for other Christians, journalists, scholars, Democratic politicians or anyone else who's not crouching in a corner trembling in fear of flying demons and witches' curses to treat this kind of nonsense as anything other than a sad, degenerate brand of religion that will certainly do most participants more harm than good.

Ole Jaylee is at least not so mired in the 16th century he doesn't have a Twitter account, where you can read confessions like this: "I hope this doesn't disappoint anyone...but I like Easy Listening music. It calms me." I don't know, Jaylee, sounds like you've got one of them thar Guy Lombardo demons or something. You'd better lock yourself in a room and listen to Christian contemporary for 24 hours straight. It may not git rid of yore Easy Listenin' demon, but it will strip you brain badly enough that you're unlikely to be able to hurt anybody. Also not be able to write your silly column.

Tags: anthea butler, christian dominionism, christian right, pentecostalism, sarah posner

Christian Dominionism is getting too influential for even mainstream reporters to ignore

The Christian dominionists are in a position that clearly makes them uncomfortable. They've had decades in which they could talk theocracy to their followers but the Establishment press would tip-toe around looking at their actual religious beliefs and their direct implications for democratic government. There are at least some signs their ability to fly under the radar of attention from those, including, other Christians who don't share their Christian Right worldview is diminishing significantly.

Rick Perry's prayer event this summer which was backed by the leading lights of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), the reactionary, screamingly superstitious Pentecostal trend that is theoretically a loose unity of individual churches but in fact is a stealth denomination, may have been some kind of tipping point. Michelle Bachmann's early prominence in the Republican Presidential race also helps focus attention when she says things like this:

She hailed the tea party as being common-sense Americans who understand government shouldn't spend more than it takes in, know they're taxed enough already and want government to abide by the Constitution.

"I don't know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians. We've had an earthquake; we've had a hurricane. He said, 'Are you going to start listening to me here?' Listen to the American people because the American people are roaring right now. They know government is on a morbid obesity diet and we've got to rein in the spending." (Adam Smith, Michele Bachmann rally draws over 1,000 in Sarasota, but some prefer Rick Perry St. Petersburg Times (08/29/2011)

That superstitious comment drew wider press attention, and her campaign issued a statement that it was a joke. But it's only funny if you more-or-less believe that God literally speaks through the weather, a view largely restricted to Christian fundamentalists in the US and the occasional New Ager. It actually seems even more disturbing to me if it was meant to be a joke, given it was Hurricane Irene weekend. Either way, it's an example of how it's becoming at least marginally more difficult for politicians to talk one way to Christian Right audiences and then try to deny the plain English meaning of what's they've said in other contexts. They've been able to get a way with with a great deal of impunity for the last three decades.

Sarah Posner, who is not given to being starry-eyed about such things, writes hopefully but cautiously in Political Reporters Start Reading Religious Right Books Religion Dispatches 08/29/2011:

There's a somewhat refreshing development taking place in political reporting. Not only reporters are noticing that Republican candidates coalesce with religious right leaders, but they are also discovering a crucial truth about the movement: that its followers aren't just motivated by opposition to abortion and LGBT rights. They are motivated by something more fundamental, a reimagined "truth" about what America is (and isn't) and how a "biblical worldview" should guide politics and policymaking.

The Christian Right generally shares Ron Paul's hardline Christian dominionist views, which Adele Stan accurately describes as "anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-black, anti-senior-citizen, anti-equality, anti-education, pro-communist-witch-hunt." (5 Reasons Progressives Should Treat Ron Paul with Extreme Caution -- 'Cuddly' Libertarian Has Some Very Dark Politics Alternet 08/26/2011) There are many different variations, of course. The NAR types consider Southern Baptists and Mormons to be part of churches controlled by demons. But those diversities shouldn't detract us from the remarkable degree of political agreement on basic reactionary political goals.

Far from letting their little lights shine, advocates of Christian dominionism are very anxious to not have it discussed frankly in public. They claim to have wanted to "put God back into the public square." They've at least put their own reactionary version of Christianity into the "public square." But they don't seem happy to have direct exchanges with critics.

Bachmann and dominionism by Richard Weikart McClatchy Newspapers 08/17/2011 is an example of the nothing-to-see-here-move-right-along type of Christian Right defense. This style fits in well with the white people's whine so popular among segregationists and the Christian Right, two heavily overlapping categories. We hear a version of it every year in whining about the non-existent "war on Christmas," an old anti-Semitic complaint. Rachel Tabachnick in WaPo's On Faith Columnist Calls NAR 'Previously Unknown Group' Despite 49 Articles by NAR Apostle Talk to Action 08/29/2011 explains that Weikart "Weikart is a senior fellow of the [creationist, anti-science] Center for Science and Culture of the Discovery Institute and author of 'From Darwin to Hitler.'"

Posner and Julie Ingersoll at Religion Dispatches and Tabachnick and Chip Berlet at Talk to Action are some of the best sources on Christian dominionism.

Tags: christian dominionism, christian right, rachel tabachnick, sarah posner

Public policies and religious arguments for and against them (2 of 2)

Continuing my comments on the discussion between Digby and Sarah Posner from Part 1 yesterday: The parts of their formulations I find problematic are these. Posner: "the debate about the role of government should rooted in policy, not theology." Digby: "using the Bible as the basis of any political argument is antithetical to enlightened democracy."

Okay, I'm an Enlightenment nostalgic of sorts. So I would rather that public debates be framed in terms of values and effects that were rooted in the material world and not directly referenced to religious concepts as such. But that's not the world we live in.

If we look at only the post-Second World War period, it's a fact that important parts of what we think of as liberal activism in the United States were based on religious understandings of social values. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a trained philosopher and a Christian minister, and described his program for civil rights in explicitly religious terms. George McGovern was a Methodist minister. Jimmy Carter was and is even now a very religious Baptist (though no longer Southern Baptist) layperson. Cesar Chavez understood his organizing for farmworkers and the poor in Catholic Christian terms. Jerry Brown is a former Jesuit seminarian who studied Zen Buddhism seriously, worked with Mother Teresa in her hospice services in India, and was heavily influenced by the late Christian philosopher Ivan Illich. Some of the key early activists for legalizing abortion in the 1960s were religious people concerned over the deadly realities of back-alley abortions.

Most Christians are not theocrats. Up until they got heavy into the white private school market after desegregation in the South, the Southern Baptists made a big deal of the principle of the separation of church and state, not least because they didn't want Catholic schools getting any public funds. Even the Catholic Church in the Second Vatican Council adopted the views of the American theologian John Courtney Murray that embraced modern democratic notions of freedom of religion, though the Church would still prefer Catholicism to be officially adopted as state religion.

And anyone with an adult notion of Christianity - and, yes, I'm passing a negative judgment on Christian fundamentalism in saying this - can understand that the Christian Bible doesn't provide a legislative guide book for particular laws. And they, like most other adults, can understand that there is a difference between personal morality and what law allows. A person can consider smoking cigarettes morally wrong but still make practical judgments about public policy based on what is a legitimate health-related public concern and discuss it with other citizens on that basis. Someone can consider abortion morally wrong and chose not to have it for themselves, but still recognize that public policy has to be dicatated by medical realities on the physical survivability of a fetus outside its mother's body, which hasn't changed since Roe v. Wade in 1973.

And the reality of American politics today is that the Republican Party endorses theocratic ideas in practice, though they insist on redefining the English language based on their marketing priorities on a given day and don't like to be called on it. The Democrats have to counter that in ways that disrupt the moral and religious claims of the fundis. The ad trashing Rand Paul over Aqua Buddha as a "heathen idol" didn't seem to work too well. (Although I admit I enjoyed that one!)

The reality of American Christianity today, too, is that most Christians don't want fanatical fundis smearing the Christian brand, either. It's a genuine religious scandal that the most solid block of torture supporters were regular church-going conservative evangelicals. If they believe the general Christian theology that God took human form as a Jewish holy man who was tortured to death by the Romans, then they should worry that the first thing they experience in the next life will be Jesus getting in their face and saying, "What the hell did you think you were doing calling yourself a Christian and supporting torture?" And "hell" in that context would sound a bit more serious than a casual swear word.

Sarah Posner and others are right to call so-called "Christian left" figures like Wallis to account for their lack of support for women's rights on abortion. But both secular Democrats and religious ones needed to disrupt the Christian Right messaging. Including with arguments over the Bible and theology, when appropriate.

Gene Lyons on Facebook recommends this piece by Andrew Sullivan addressing this broad topic: Heightening The Republican Contradictions, Ctd The Lift 06/06/2011. (Standard disclaimer: Sullivan has never to my knowledge fessed up to his disgraceful smearing of domestic critics of the Cheney-Bush Administration's War on Terror and the foreign invasions that went along with it.) It's a decent brief critique of Christian nationalism, though he doesn't use that term. And he has some thought-provoking observations: "The structure of modern America is therefore anti-Christian. Its worship of wealth and fame as the greatest of all things - yes, Palin comes instantly to mind - is the antithesis of Christianity."

Tags: christian left, digby, heather parton, sarah posner, andrew sullivan

Public policies and religious arguments for and against them (1 of 2)

Digby (Hullabaloo) and Sarah Posner (Religion Distpaches) had an interesting exchange about what is sometimes call the "religious left" in these posts:

Digby, Paul Ryan refuses a Bible 06/04/2011

Posner, Paul Ryan's Bible, Jim Wallis', Or None of the Above? 06/06/2011

Digby, A Justified Scold 06/06/2011

And a related post by Digby, False Idols 06/04/2011

The discussion is over Digby's Schadenfreude over Paul Ryan being embarassed at a religion-and-politics conference by a liberal activist trying to give him a Bible with passages in the Gospel of Luke highlighted relating to social concerns. Posner uses it as a taking-off point to remind us that the self-described "religious left" including leaders like Jim Wallis of Soujourners that have tried to offer a political counter to the Christian Right have been pretty disappointing to liberal activists:

As I argued last year, writing about liberal-leaning religious groups countering Glenn Beck's attack on social justice, the debate about the role of government should rooted in policy, not theology. As Peter Laarman has noted in these pages, in support of a robust defense of government, liberal and moderate Christian leaders "know in their heart of hearts that only government can take strong and decisive action to end poverty and mass suffering, but they are in some degree of denial about it, in part because. ... They, too, rather fancy the idea of an independent sphere for private faith-based charities - they mostly go along, after all, with the horrendously obfuscatory and constitutionally dubious Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.

Since the discussion covers both general concepts like applying the Bible and Christian theology to public issues to more concrete experiences in recent years with "common ground" efforts to reduce unplanned pregnancies running aground on the Christian Right's lack of interest and the anti-gay, anti-choice, anti-women's-rights positions of some "Christian left" figures like Jim Wallis, it's hard to say how much I'm agreeing or disagreeing with either of them.

Here is how I framed the issue in a comment to the second of Digby's posts cited above:

Sarah Posner's concluding sentence in that post is, "When you wave a Bible in someone's face, just remember that someone can wave one in yours, too."

I'm not much for literal Bible-waving, myself. But the Christian Right isn't going to stop waving their Bibles figuratively and literally in the faces of Democrats and mainstream Christians. And there has to be pushback in moral and religious terms to disrupt those messages.

What's wrong with liberals agreeing with Wallis on Medicare and disagreeing with him on women's rights? People can make moral, religious and practical arguments on the liberal side of both issues.

Honest religious arguments have their limits, because any honest believer would have a problem claiming that they knew for sure how God would want them to vote on a particular legislative bill or political candidate. But the Christian Right aren't making honest religious arguments when they lie to young women in their fake "pregnancy counseling" clinics about abortion. They're just lying to people who made the mistake of trusting them for honest medical advice. The public policy on how to deal with that kind of fraud may be complicated. But I have no trouble arguing on moral and religious grounds that that's just wrong.

And since the fundis are going to keep making their arguments in the "public square" (as they like to call it), I don't see how either secular liberals or Christians who don't support hate-mongering or torture or lying to pregnant teenagers in the name of Jesus can just avoid trying to counter the religious elements of those arguments. People can make religious arguments for or against a policy like the water torture, aka, waterboarding, without insisting on it as a purely religious policy.

Tags: christian left, digby, heather parton, sarah posner

Republican Party conspiracy theories

Peter King's witch hunt hearings on Islamunofascistoliberalism are a reminder that the Republican Party is now a welcoming home to a number of crackpot conspiracy theories. Sarah Posner provides a primer on the anti-Muslim conspiracy theories current popular with the Republican right - and is there anything but the right remaining in the Republican Party? - in Welcome to the Shari'ah Conspiracy Theory Industry How the American right demonizes Islam for political gain Religion Dispatches 03/08/2011.

Alexander Zaitchik summarizes his research on the conspiracies that flow freely from Glenn Beck's feverish mind to his mouth to his FOX News audience in
Fringe Mormon Group Makes Myths with Glenn Beck’s Help Intelligence Report Spring 2011.

The invaluable Gene Lyons muses about the latter in Scrooge ain't broke and neither is the government Salon 03/09/2011:

Maybe instead of playing budgetary chicken with congressional Republicans, the White House should search carnival side shows and TV shopping channels for a Democratic Glenn Beck. Any glib pitchman could outline a Republican scheme to sabotage the U.S. economy to gain political power far more plausible than Beck's shaggy-dog conspiracies.

Posner's article calls attention to one of the stranger aspect of the scary-Muslims-are-coming-to-git-us conspiracy theory, the idea that Muslim jihadists are in cahoots with the left, however they conceive that term:

[Andrew] McCarthy [of National Review], author of the books The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America and How Obama Embraces Islam’s Sharia Agenda, links both President Obama and the American left to this supposed plot, claiming that they share collectivist goals. He told Andrew Breitbart’s Big Journalism in 2010 that "Islamists" and "leftists" share totalitarian goals, "totalitarian in the sense that they want to control every aspect of the individual’s life, and [are] virulently opposed to capitalism and individual liberty," adding that "even though they [Obama and Saudi King Abdullah] part company on the details of what they would transform it into, they both need to topple American constitutional republicanism in order to install their utopias."

Since the hard right sees "the left" - in which they include President Obama, of course - as anti-American and their enemies, this is largely about creating sort of unified theory of political evil to lump together "the left" and Muslim jihadists. While visions of the Black Panthers from the 1960s haunt their fantasies, what most American rightwingers call "the left" is really today's Democratic Party.

For people who want to be scammed by something this kooky to begin with, facts won't make any immediate difference. But here in the real world, it's absurd. In terms of ideology, Democrats in general and in particular people who see themselves as liberal or progressive Democrats have little at all in common with Muslim jihadists who support theocracy, oppose anything that looks like democracy or freedom of speech and press, oppose basic human rights for women and promote anti-Semitism. Not even the bitterest American critic of US foreign policy wants to be blown up by a terrorist bomber or plane hijacker acting in the name of what by any normal definitions is a rightwing political and religious ideology. And, to my knowledge, there aren't any cases in the US or Europe where groups that understand themselves as "left" have actively cooperated with Muslim jihadists.

Republicans oppose Muslim terrorism and, as Peter King is reminding us this week, hate Muslims and Islam much more generally. Simple patriotism and nationalism are involved. Political Christianism is all-but-universally accepted as an ideology in the Republican Party. And both history and "pro-Israel" Christian Zionist ideology make overt anti-Semitism far more problematic than promoting fear and hatred of Muslims. Still, there's a large religious (mainly Christian) component of the American Right's targeting of Islam and Islamism.

Muslim jihadist ideology as we know it today is ultra-conservative both in politics and within the Islamic religion. Less extreme forms of political Islam, from Hosni Mubarak's former ruling ideology to that of the ruling Islamist party in Turkey to the right's current bogeyman, the Muslim Brotherhood in its varied current incarnations tend toward conservative ideas: mixing politics and religion, a restrictive attitude toward women's rights, etc.

The Cheney-Bush Administration consistently voted with Muslim countries and the Vatican on family-planning programs in the UN, because Republicans like conservative Muslims and the Vatican don't want to promote abortion or birth control, and are dubious about the enhancements of women's status that accompany both. On issues of women's rights and other "culture war" issues in the American sense, Islamists are conspicuously conservative.

I'm not making a mirror-image point, i.e., "See? Its the Republicans who are in bed with Islamic extremists!" I'm just pointing out the reality that in terms of American politics, actual Islamism to the extent that it exists is political isolated from both Republicans and Democrats and from fringe groups of the left and the right. And on a broader scale, these are conservative movements. Reality still counts for something, even if you wouldn't think so from watching FOX News.

Tags: christian right, conspiracy theories, glenn beck, radical right, sarah posner

Philosophy and the Huck (aka, Mike Huckabee)

It's kind of painful to think of using the term "philosophy" in connection with Christian fundamentalism. George W. Bush unintentionally illustrated why in his famous response to a dorky question in a Republican Presidential debate on who his favorite philosopher is, "the Lord Jesus Christ." I'm not sure, but that may have made Shrub Bush the first person in history to consider Jesus a philosopher.

John Maynard Keynes once observed that businessmen often p[ride themselves on having derived all their ideas about economics from practical experience, when in reality they are the intellectual slaves of some long-dead economist. American Christian fundamentalists are not a very philosophically inclined bunch - not that any other significant group in the US is, either. But their religious thinking is actually influenced by a school of thought called Scottish Common Sense philosophy, of whom the most famous were George Campbell (1719-1796) and Thomas Reid (1710-1796). You can read a bit more about the general concept in this article by Alexander Broadie of the University of Glasgow.

Like Keynes' practical businessmen, today's Christianists are often running off some philosophy that looks much more like a brand of Social Darwinism than anything coming out of the Gospels. Even though they claim to what they call Darwinism, better know to most people as the science of biology.

Mike Huckabee's recent statement about Obama having been raised in Kenya sounds like a garbled version the claims of Dinesh D'Souza's frivolous book about Obama's alleged anti-colonial obsessions: Sarah Posner, Huckabee on Obama vs. "Average Americans" Religion Dispatches 03/02/2011. As Sarah Posner explains:

The reference to the Brits is by now a storyline that has reached fever pitch among conservatives: as part of the standard personalizing of the Oval Office by new presidents, Obama returned a bust of Winston Churchill -- which was on loan to former President Bush by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair -- and replaced it with a bust of his own choosing, of that notorious un-American figure... wait for it... Abraham Lincoln. [my emphasis]

The American President replaces the bust of a foreigner (Churchill) with one of the American all-but-universally regarded as the greatest President (Lincoln): and conservatives see this as sinister? The Huck's excuse for a clarifying statement included this: "The Governor would however like to know more about where President Obama's liberal policies come from and what else the President plans to do to this country -- as do most Americans."

Between free-market zealots, neoconservatives who believe in the Leo Straussian doctrine of governing by deception, and Christian fundis, more and more of what Republicans say sounds like one thing in American English and another in RepublicanSpeak. Blue Texan (Mike Huckabee a Victim of Epistemic Closure Firedoglake 03/02/2011) thinks the Huck has fallen victim to a philosophical disease. But it's one that is epidemic among his fellow Republicans: "this Obama/Mau Mau talk is perfectly mainstream in right-wing circles, and fruitloops everywhere else. Ditto death panels, the socialist conspiracy behind climate change, and the looming threat of Sharia law being imposed in the US."

Sarah Posner translates the Churchill business into American English for us:

But there's a lot more embedded in Huckabee's comment about Obama's "view of the Brits" and the supposed snub of returning the Churchill bust. First, in suggesting that Obama is anti-imperialist, Huckabee intimates that the president, in what conservatives frame as a civilizational war between the west and the rest, doesn't embrace the superiority of western civilization (which can also be read as Obama doesn't embrace "American exceptionalism.")

Second, and probably even more important, for an evangelical and Christian Zionist like Huckabee, Churchill is a figure of enormous symbolic power. In this scenario, Obama is an appeaser like Chamberlain -- whether it's on Iran's nuclear ambitions, or in failing to address the "Holocaust" of abortion -- Churchill is an Esther-like figure who finally intervened for the Jews (much as Christian Zionists see themselves as protecting Israel from Iran) in a Holocaust (much as ardent anti-choice crusaders see themselves protecting fetuses from what they attempt to portray as genocide). [my emphasis]

She goes on to frame this as "winking and nodding to his base." It looks to me more like an increasingly cult-like alternative political language among the Christian Republican White People's Party.

Tags: christian fundamentalism, christian right, christianism, mike huckabee, sarah posner

Saga of the White Princess: Babies and preachers and kooks, oh my!

James Fallows at his Atlantic blog has a couple of good posts about the White Princess' speech Wednesday evening. His impression was that she was giving red meat to the base but using a sneering, being-nasty-with-a-smile attitude that is typically for Republican pundits and radio talkers but doesn't play so well with everyone else: Sarah Palin 09/04/08 and A word more on Palin and the riskiness of mockery 09/04/08.

For those of us who don't spend hours daily listening to Republican hate radio, Billmon explains the OxyContin connection of all those shots at Obama having been a "community organizer" in Why the repeated attacks on "community organizers"? 09/03/08.

This focus group of independents didn't respond very positively to the White Princess' address: Free Press voter panel reacts to Palin's speech Detroit Free Press 09/03/08.

Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby in his post of 09/04/08 takes the national press and liberal opinion writers to task for failing to understand or tell people how blatantly Palin was lying about her reform history. Especially on the fabled "bridge to nowhere".

He doesn't phrase it exactly this way. But he's making the point that the Dems could learn a lot from the Republicans' willingness to fight attacks on their candidates. They could especially learn something from the Republicans' willingness to fight the press explicitly. Bill and Hillary Clinton are the only two leading Democrats that have done that effectively over a long term.

Anyone who watches TV journalism with a minimum of critical thought can see that it's really bad, very often. The Democratic Party has largely allowed criticism of "the media" to be framed by the Republicans' endless campaign against the so-called "liberal media", which is really not much more than a paranoid conspiracy theory. There is a developed and coherent liberal criticism of the media having to do with corporate ownership, lack of basic accuracy, poor analysis and obsession with gossip and trivia. But the Dems are letting the Republicans frame the problem as Liberal Press "elitism".

One issue on which I disagree with Somberby is whether Bristol Palin's pregnancy is important politically in some way. It is. It gets to both the rigid, completely unrealistic ideology that the James Dobsons and Sarah Palins of the world want to impose on everyone else. And also at the screaming double-standard so many of them practice when it comes to themselves and their families. The rules are for the hoi polloi, not for important Republican white folks, in their way of thinking.

Fpr more on this, see The Elephant in the Room by Dana Goldstein American Prospect Online 09/03/08 and Perspectives On Bristol Palin: Notes From A Sexologist by Logan Levkoff Huffington Post 09/02/08.

Goldstein observes:

Though the religious right promotes abstinence-only sex education, vows of chastity, and dances at which prepubescent girls pledge their virginity to dad, conservatives do live in 21st-century America, just like the rest of us. They know teen sex happens. They just also happen to believe, against all common sense, that it can be eradicated.

The truth is, conservatives are more familiar with teen parenthood than are secular liberals. On the whole, red states have higher teen pregnancy and birth rates than blue states. In Texas, the state with the highest teen birth rate, 63 out of every 1,000 young women aged 15 to 19 has had a baby. California has the lowest teen birth rate; only 39 of every 1,000 15- to 19-year-old girls there have carried a pregnancy to term. Alaska, where Bristol Palin grew up, has a typical teen birth rate of about 42.

Even though the Bristol pregnancy story has more tabloid appeal, the more serious questions have to do with the White Princess' conduct in office and abuse of power. And with just how deep they are with the most hardline Christianists and white supremacist crackpots grouped with the Alaskan Independence Party and the Constitution Party and with some of the more disturbing and cultlike elements in their Pentecostal churches. See Dobson and the Religious Right Rally for McCain/Palin by Frederick Clarkson TalktoAction blog 09/04/08 and Palin's Church May Have Shaped Controversial Worldview by Nico Pitney and Sam Stein Huffington Post 09/02/08.

This is an area where liberals need to be careful about falling into the double-reverse game the rightwingers like to play. The American liberal position is that people should be free to worship God - or not - in the way they please without getting arrested for it or discriminated against in employment or civil rights because of it. Liberals also believe in the basic democratic concept of separation of church and state.

But all that is very different than saying religion doesn't matter. Liberals as a matter of public policy aren't concerned about what theory of angels people hold. But in politics, if a candidate is involved with a cult that is taking orders from angels to impose drastic measures on the public, liberals would be out of our minds not to be concerned about it. So would conservatives for that matter, but I'm not going to go there for now.

Clarkson warns us that, once again, the endless talk about how the Christian Right is going to fade away into the sunset inside the Republican Party is, as Joe Conason predicted in his book It Can Happen Here, still alive and kicking and may even have more clout than ever:

It was not so long ago that pundits were busy telling us that the Religious Right is dead, dying or irrelevant. The selection of Sarah Palin is proof, in case anyone actually needed any, that the Religious Right remains at the center and at the top of American public life.

Palin is the most ostentatiously and authentically Religious Right major party candidate for national office in American history (with the possible exception of Jack Kemp.) Reagan was good, but he did not attend church (and it later turned out that he and Nancy consulted and astrologer on his daily schedule); Dan Quayle was good, but well, he was Quayle; George W. Bush seemed good (and from their point of view in some ways he was) but he is viewed as having betrayed the conservative movement and they are not shy about saying so. Richard Viguerie has a whole book about it titled "Betrayed." (And David Kuo's book could have very nearly had that title.) We also now know that much (but not all) of Bush's religious history was manufactured by his political inner circle.

Sarah Palin is, in the view of the Religious Right, the real deal. [my emphasis]

If I had to pick a must-read about the White Princess from the last couple of days, it would be The FundamentaList by Sarah Posner American Prospect Online 09/03/08. Posner gives us a glimpse of how crackpot a worldview people have in that corner of the political world:

The AIP -- whose founder, Joseph Vogler, once said, "The problem with you John Birchers is that you are too damn liberal!" -- is to the right of the Council on National Policy, itself founded by a group of Birchers. According to the watchdog group Political Research Associates, the John Birch Society's founder, Robert Welch, believed that "both the U.S. and Soviet governments are controlled by the same furtive conspiratorial cabal of internationalists, greedy bankers, and corrupt politicians. If left unexposed, the traitors inside the U.S. government would betray the country's sovereignty to the United Nations for a collectivist new world order managed by a "'one-world socialist government.'"

Vogler is also the one who declared, "The fires of hell are frozen glaciers compared to my hatred for the American government". And, speaking of Old Glory, "And I won't be buried under their damn flag." (Greg Sargent, TPM Election Central, Founder Of Group Palin Courted Professed "Hatred For The American Government"; Cursed "Damn Flag" 09/02/08).

Vogler is now deceased. He was killed in a plastic explosives deal gone bad: Remains of Alaska Separatist Are Identified New York Times 10/15/1994. The article doesn't say under which flag he was buried, if any.

The press is largely clueless, and many Democrats are apparently in denial, about how extremist today's Republican Party has become. We already have a President who claims the power to disregard any law or even Constitutional provision that he alone decides gets in the way of his "national security" prerogatives. McCain is at least as extreme. And Palin, from the available evidence, is considerably more extreme.

As Posner puts it, "The ardor of the Christian-right leadership says everything you need to know about Palin: She is an extremist who makes them confident of their access to and influence over a McCain administration."

Clarkson writes:

The Religious Right has built an extensive infrastructure of media, political organizations, institutions of higher learning including law schools -- and raised-up several generations of leaders who have found their way into their roles in public life.

Whatever else one may think of Sarah Palin: first as governor of Alaska and now the GOP nominee for Vice President -- she epitomizes this reality.

And if this headline doesn't give you the heebie-jeebies...: Bush Aides Schooling Palin In Foreign Policy. What's next? "Lessons from Dick Cheney's Staff on Operating on the Dark Side"?

Tags: authoritarianism, christian dominionism, christian right, christianism, radical right, republican party, sarah palin, sarah posner

Answered prayers

The Australian singer-songwriter Paul Kelly, who has a brilliant talent for creating elaborate images in a very few words, has a song called "Be Careful What You Pray For" that includes the lines:

Be careful what you pray for
You just might get it

That particular one is not exactly an original sentiment. It's just that when the thought comes into my head it's set to the tune of Kelly's song.

I thought of that today when that bold Maverick McCain started to take a tiny bit of the heat he deserves for embracing the support of radical cleric John Hagee, who Sarah Posner ably profiled in Pastor Strangelove The American Prospect 05/21/06.

The Republicans have worked hard since Nixon's Southern Strategy to appeal to white Christian fundamentalists, no small portion of whom were and are Southern segregationists. They succeeded. Now, white fundis are the hardcore base of their Party. The Maverick can't afford to tick them off in a general election. And John Hagee, despite being one of the nastiest bigots and snarling warmongers among Christianist leaders in the US, is too big of a star among the Party faithful for the Maverick to easily denounce him.

If the fundis didn't want the ugliest aspects of their theology - the anti-Semitism, the warmongering, the bloody-minded exclusivity, the anti-science fanaticism - to be held up to public scrutiny and debate in a political context, well, they should have been more careful what they prayed for. Mixing Church and State - or Church and Party, which to the authoritarian Republican Party is largely the same thing - is an involvement that goes both ways.

Tags: christian dominionism, christian fundamentalism, christian right, christianism, john hagee, mccain, sarah posner, republican party

The Republicans' leading theocrat on how women should do what they're told

Now that the Huck is a major national figure in the Christian Republican White People's Party, the Arkansas Blog at the Arkansas Times Web site is becoming a daily online stop for me.

In Did Pastor Huck Flub Marriage Question? 01/16/08, ABC's Justin Rood seems willing to believe that the Huck was in favor of dames doing what their husbands tell them to do before he was against it. Except the quote in Rood's article didn't say Huck was changing his mind, only restating it in "moderate" terms that those not hip to fundi lingo like "servant leadership" wouldn't get:

At a debate sponsored by Fox News last week, Huckabee, who has made his faith a central component to his campaign, was asked about his public endorsement of a controversial 1998 statement on family and marriage by the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), the organizing body of Southern Baptists.

The statement, which ran along with signatures from Huckabee, his wife and more than 100 other prominent figures, said that while "husband and wife are of equal worth before God," the wife "is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband[.]"

"Women voters in both parties harshly criticize that," Fox's Carl Cameron said to Huckabee. "Is that position politically viable in the general election of 2008, sir?"

"The point," Huckabee responded, "is that as wives submit themselves to the husbands, the husbands also submit themselves, and it's not a matter of one being somehow superior over the other."

Speaking of the Huck, Southerners often complain - and often with good reason - that Yankees have dumbass stereotypes of Southerners. But one reason for that impression is that Southerners like the Huck happily play to Hee-Haw! notions. As in the Huck's fond memories of eatin' fried squirrel:



Yeah, boy, we et us a lot of fried squirrel back in the good ole days.

There is a point to this cornpone nonsense, though. In some ways, being a Southern Baptist minister is particularly good training for being a candidate in today's Republican Party. Because since the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) takes a fundamentalist hard line on Protestant theology and "culture war" issues, a Baptist minister has to learn how to defend the SBC's often unpopular and even stigmatized positions while at the same time finessing them to people who don't share those positions.

That submissive wives quote above is an example of this. Saying, "The point is that as wives submit themselves to the husbands, the husbands also submit themselves, and it's not a matter of one being somehow superior over the other," could be taken by someone who wants to give the Huck a break - or who wants to sell him to other voters - to mean that husbands also are expected to submit themselves to their wives. But when the SBC statement, which caused a bit of a stink in the already thoroughly fundamentalist denomination when it was adopted 10 years ago, talks about the husband's "servant leadership", that says to the faithful that the husband is servant to God, and the wife is supposed to be servant to the husband who has the family-head franchise from God.

The Gomer Pyle act shouldn't mislead anyone, especially Democrats, about the Huck's theocratic orientation.

Max Brantley at Arkansas Blog ('Radical cleric' Mike Huckabee 01/16/08) notes:

Mike Huckabee's proposal Monday night to rewrite the U.S. Constitution in the words of his God got virtually no mention in mainstream media today. But it's all over the web, including this piece on Alternet. It won't go away because it captures the radical lurking behind the aw-shucks demeanor.

In time, web commentary will drive the conventional media to catch up. Also due for a catchup: The lightly mentioned reference to Huckabee's idea to block U.S. borders to legal immigrants from countries that have harbored terrorists. He invoked 9/11 in the process. Somebody must have enlightened him that the 9/11 attackers came from such allies as Saudi Arabia and likely drew support from people there. ...

His staff's response to the God gaffe was instructive. He was just reaching out to evangelicals in Michigan then. He'd worry about alienating other voters later. This is SO Huckabee. Say whatever is necessary moment. Worry about contradictions, flip-flops and other consequences later, when there's time to get a change-of-direction fart or constipation joke at the ready. (my emphasis)

He also links to this article on the Huck's new strategy adviser, James Pinkerton, New Huckabee Adviser Called For ‘A Cop In Front Of Every Mosque’ Just ‘For Safe Keeping’ Think Progress 01/16/08.

- In a 2005 column, Pinkerton advocated genocide in Iraq, writing that America can make "anti-American violence in Iraq end" by unleashing "the Shia Arab Muslims and the Kurds to finish the job, all the way to the bloody extreme."

- On Fox News in June 2006, Pinkerton complained about people who feel the "military needs to be carefully restrained with legal rules and procedures," exclaiming "I’d rather lose our civil liberties than lose the war."

- In December 2006, Pinkerton argued that "proximity to Mexico is at least partly to blame" for corruption in Texas.

- In September 2007, Pinkerton warned in the American Conservative of "Muslimization," concluding that "to keep the peace, we must separate our civilizations."

Brantley's own comment is "Wowza".

Can't you just feel the Christian love pouring off this Pinkerton guy? And can't you just picture Jesus hanging on the cross telling people, "We can't have any laws apply to our brave noble Roman soldiers like the ones who just nailed me up here. They have to have a free hand to protect us from Samaritan terrorists"? That must be in the Gospel of Cheney.

Brantley also links to the 01/16/08 installment of Sarah Posner's weekly FundamentaList at The American Prospect Online. She talks about how the Huck has developed a method of going around the senior radical clerics of the Christian Right and take his message directly to the Christian soldiers in the pews:

Although Huckabee has denied that he is a dominionist, it is the religious right's quest to Christianize government (and the GOP) that has driven the groundswell for his candidacy.

The ground troops in Huckabee’s populist march have been cultivated in mega-churches, through televangelism, and through a mass-marketed, consumer-style religion. These soldiers in "Huck’s army" consume the dominionist message, believe that they need to evangelize the country and the world, and believe that they are doing God’s work through their vote. Through a panoply of mediums - church, television, magazines, conferences, the Web, and even movies - they are activated on a daily basis to political action. Networks tying pastors to political activism propel the process; when Huckabee spoke at John Hagee's church in December, for example, he reached about 10,000 people, was promised an airing of the sermon on television, and potentially reached Hagee's network of thousands of pastors, and their own followings of thousands.

This viral marketing approach is what's rendering people like Focus on the Family's James Dobson, the Southern Baptist Convention's Richard Land, Family Research Council's Tony Perkins, and American Values' Gary Bauer - all leaders of the influential Arlington Group that has failed to coalesce around a candidate - largely irrelevant to Huckabee's remarkable success. And they are shell-shocked that the train has left the station without them. They are left standing on the platform, emasculated by Chuck Norris. (my emphasis)

If you like Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, you're gonna love Brother Huck.

Posner also alludes in her post to the idea that the Christian Right see the Huck as really one of them but see Dear Leader Bush as cynically using them. I think that notion needs to be qualified a bit. I don't know if God speaks to Bush as often as he does to the Huck. But from what we know in the public record, it seems that Bush's fundamentalist faith is sincere, though that hasn't removed other characteristics like the wealthy heir's sense of entitlement. And he has tried to follow a Christianist program because that's his personal orientation, not just because pollsters tell him that's what the Republican base wants.

But I don't doubt that a lot of fundamentalists may now be feeling that Bush was just playing them. Because many of them are looking for a sense of religious and personal fulfillment in the Christianist political program that it can never really deliver. But at the same time, their belief structure doesn't allow most of them to say, "Well, we tried Christianism under Bush and them results look pretty bad. So maybe we should go back to accepting the separation of church and state and stop equating the Christian religion to Republican partisan doctrine." So they have to conclude that the last dose wasn't enough, and that we need someone who will really, really push the Christianist agenda this time. And I think Posner is correct when she observes, "the prospect of a Huckabee presidency is a far greater threat to the separation of church and state than Bush's."

My favorite theory about these folks is that God really is speaking to them. But he's speaking in ancient Hebrew and they're coming up with some really bad translations.

Tags: authoritarianism, christian fundamentalism, christian right, christianism, max brantley, racism, sarah posner