The covert kingdom ...Thy will be done, on earth as
it is in Texas
*By Joe Bageant*
Online Journal Contributing Writer
May 17, 2004
*Joe Bageant is a senior editor at the Primedia History Group and writes
from Winchester, Virginia. He may be contacted at
http://mail2web.com/cgi-bin/redir.asp?lid=0&newsite=http://www.bageantjb@netscape.net.
Not long ago I pulled my car up alongside a tiny wooden church in the woods, a
stark white frame box my family built in 1840. And as always, an honest-to-god
chill went through me, for the ancestral ghosts presumably hovering over the
graves there. From the wide open front door the Pentecostal preacher's message
echoed from within the plain wooden walls: "Thank you Gawd for giving us
strawng leaders like President [sic] Bush during this crieeesis. Praise you
Lord and guide him in this battle with Satan's Muslim armies."
If I had chosen to go back down the road a mile or so to the sprawling new
Bible Baptist church-complete with school facilities, professional sound system
and in-house television production-I could have heard approximately the same
exhortation. Usually offered at the end of a prayer for sons and daughters of
members in the congregation serving in Iraq, it can be heard in any of the
thousands upon thousands of praise temples across our republic.
After a lifetime of identity conflict, I have come to accept that, blood-wise,
if not politically or spiritually, these are my people. And as a leftist it is
very clear to me these days why urban liberals not only fail to understand
these people, but do not even know they exist, other than as some general lump
of ignorant, intolerant voters called "the religious right," or the
"Christian Right," or "neocon Christians." But until
progressives come to understand what these people read, hear, are told and
deeply believe, we cannot understand American politics, much less be effective.
Given fundamentalist Christianity's inherent cultural isolation, it is nearly
impossible for most enlightened Americans to imagine, in honest human terms,
what fundamentalist Americans believe, let alone understand why we should all
care.
For liberals to examine the current fundamentalist phenomenon in America is to
accept some hard truths. For starters, we libs are even more embattled than
most of us choose to believe. Any significant liberal and progressive support
is limited to a few urban pockets on each coast and along the upper edge of the
Midwestern tier states. Most of the rest of the nation, the much vaunted
heartland, is the dominion of the conservative and charismatic Christian.
Turf-wise, it's pretty much their country, which is to say it presently belongs
to George W. Bush for some valid reasons. Remember: He did not have to steal
the entire election, just a little piece of it in Florida.
Evangelical born-again Christians of one stripe or another were then, and are
now, 40 percent of the electorate, and they support Bush 3-1. And as long as
their clergy and their worst instincts tell them to, they will keep on voting
for him, or someone like him, regardless of what we view as his arrogant folly
and sub-intelligence. Forget about changing their minds. These Christians do
not read the same books we do, they do not get their information from anything
remotely resembling reasonably balanced sources, and, in fact, consider even
CBS and NBC super-liberal networks of porn and the Devil's lies. Given how
fundamentalists see the modern world, they may as well be living in Iraq or
Syria, with whom they share approximately the same Bronze Age religious tenets.
They believe in God, Rumsfeld's Holy War and their absolute duty as God's
chosen nation to kick Muslim ass up one side and down the other. In other
words, just because millions of Christians appear to be dangerously nuts does
not mean they are marginal.
Having been born into a Southern Pentacostal/Baptist family of many
generations, and living in this fundamentalist social landscape means that I
gaze into the maw of neocon Christianity daily. Hell, sometimes hourly.
My brother is a fundamentalist preacher, as are a couple of my nephews, as were
many of my ancestors going back to god-knows-when. My entire family is
born-again; their lives are completely focused inside their own religious
community, and on the time when Jesus returns to earth-Armageddon and The
Rapture.
Only another liberal born into a fundamentalist clan can understand what a
strange, sometimes downright hellish family circumstance it is-how such a
family can love you deeply, yet despise everything you believe in, see you as a
humanist instrument of Satan, and still be right there for you when your back
goes out or a divorce shatters your life. As a socialist and a half-assed lefty
activist, obviously I do not find much conversational fat to chew around the
Thanksgiving table. Politically and spiritually, we may be said to be dire
enemies. Love and loathing coexist side by side. There is talk, but no
communication. In fact, there are times when it all has science fiction
overtones . . . times when it seems we are speaking to one another through an
unearthly veil, wherein each party knows it is speaking to an alien. There is a
sort of high eerie mental whine in the air. This is the sound of mutually
incomprehensible worlds hurtling toward destiny, passing with great
psychological friction, obvious to all, yet acknowledged by none.
Between such times, I wait rather anxiously and strive for change, for relief
from what feels like an increased stifling of personal liberty, beauty, art,
and self-realization in America. They wait in spooky calmness for Jesus. They
believe that, until Jesus does arrive, our "satanic humanist state and
federal legal systems" should be replaced with pure "Biblical
Law." This belief is called CHRISTIAN RECONSTRUCTIONISM. Though it has
always been around in some form, it began expanding rapidly about 1973, with
the publication of R. J. Rushdoony's, Institutes of Biblical Law (Vallecito,
CA: Ross House Books, 1982).
Time out please . . . In a nod toward fairness and tolerance-begging the
question of whether liberals are required to tolerate the intolerant-I will say
this: fndamentalists are "good people." In daily life, they are
warm-hearted and generous to a fault. They live with feet on the ground (albeit
with eyes cast heavenward) and with genuine love and concern for their
neighbors. After spending 30 years in progressive western cities such as
Boulder, Colorado, and Eugene, Oregon, I would have to say that conservative
Christians actually do what liberals usually only talk about. They visit the
sick and the elderly, give generously of their time and money to help those in
need, and put unimaginable amounts of love and energy into their families, even
as Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh blare in the background. Their good works
extend internationally-were it not for American Christians, there would be
little health care on the African continent and other similar places. Okay, that's
the best I can do in showing due respect for the extreme Christian Right.
Now to get back to the Christian econstructionists . . .Christian
Reconstruction: Establishing a Savage Eden. Cristian Reconstruction is blunt
stuff, hard and unforgiving as a gravestone. Capital punishment, central to the
Reconstructionist ideal, calls for the death penalty in a wide range of crimes,
including abandonment of the faith, blasphemy, heresy, witchcraft, astrology,
adultery, sodomy, homosexuality, striking a parent, and ''unchastity before
marriage'' (but for women only.) Biblically correct methods of execution
include stoning, the sword, hanging, and burning. Stoning is preferred,
according to Gary North, the self-styled Reconstructionist economist, because
stones are plentiful and cheap. Biblical Law would also eliminate labor unions,
civil rights laws, and public schools. Leading Reconstruction theologian David
Chilton declares, "The Christian goal for the world is the universal
development of Biblical theocratic republics . . ." Incidentally, said
Republic of Jesus would not only be a legal hell, but an ecological one as
well-Reconstructionist doctrine calls for the scrapping of environmental
protection of all kinds, because there will be no need for this planet earth
once The Rapture occurs.
You may not have heard of Rushdoony or Chilton or North, but taken either
separately or together, they have influenced far more contemporary American
minds than Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal and Howard Zinn combined.
A moreover covert movement, although slightly more public of late, Christian
Reconstructionism has for decades exerted one hell of an influence through its
scores of books, publications and classes taught in colleges and universities.
Over the past 30 years Reconstructionist doctrine has permeated not only the
religious right, but mainstream churches as well, via the charismatic movement.
Its impact on politics and religion in this nation have been massive, with many
mainstream churches pushed rightward by pervasive Reconstructionism, without
even knowing it. Clearly the Methodist church down the street from my house
does not understand what it has become. Other mainstream churches with more
progressive leadership, simply flinch and bow to the Reconstructionists at every
turn. They have to, if they want to retain members these days. Further
complicating matters is that leading Recoconstruction thinkers, along with
their fellow travelers, the Dominionists, are all but invisible to
non-fundamentalist America. (I will spare you the agony of the endless
doctrinal hair-splitting that comes with making fundamentalist inctions of any
sort - I would not do that to a dog. But if you are disposed toward
self-punishment, you can take it upon yourself to learn the differences between
Dominionism, Petribulationism, Midtribulationism, and Posttribulationism,
Premillennialism, Millennialism.
. . I recommend the writings of the British author and scholar George Monbiot,
who has put the entire maddening scheme of it all together-corporate
implications, governmental and sychological meaning-in a couple of excellent
books.) Fundamentalists such as my family have no idea how thoroughly they have
been orchestrated by Reconstructionists driven Christian media and other
innovations of the past few decades. They probably would not care now, even if
they knew. Like most of their tribe (dare we say class, in a nation that so
vehemently denies it has a class system?) they want to embrace some simple
foundational truth that will rationalize all the conflict and confusion of a
postmodern world. Some handbook that will neatly explain everything, make all
their difficult decisions for them. And among these classic American citizens,
prone toward religious zealotry since the Great Awakening of the 18th Century,
what rock could appear more dependable upon which to cling than the infallible
Holy Bible? From there it was a short step for Christian Reconstructionist
leaders to conclude that such magnificent infallibility should be enforced upon
all other people, in the same spirit as the Catholic Spanish Conquistidors or
the Arab Muslim Moors before them. It's an old, old story, a brutal one mankind
cannot seem to shake.
Christian Reconstruction strategists make clear in their writings that home
schooling and Christian academies have been and continue to create the Rightist
Christian cadres of the future, enabling them to place ever-increasing numbers
of believers in positions of governmental influence.
The training of Christian cadres is far more sophisticated than the average
liberal realizes. There now stretches a network of dozens of campuses across
the nation, each with its strange cultish atmosphere of smiling Christian pod
people, most of them clones of Jerry Fallwell's Liberty University in Lynchburg,
Virginia.
But how many outsiders know the depth and specificity of Reconstructionist
political indoctrination in these schools? For example, Patrick Henry College
in Purcellville, Virginia, a college exclusively for Christian homeschoolers,
offers programs in strategic government intelligence, legal training and
foreign policy, all with a strict, Bible-based "Christian worldview."
Patrick Henry is so heavily funded by the Christian right it can offer classes
below cost. In the Bush administration, 7 percent of all internships are handed
out to Patrick Henry students, along with many others distributed among similar
religious rightist colleges.
The Bush Administration also recruits from the faculties of these schools,
i.e., the appointments of right-wing Christian activist Kay Coles James, former
dean of the Pat Robertson School of Government, as director of the U.S. Office
of Personnel. What better position than the personnel office from which to
recruit more Fundamentalists? Scratch any of these supposed academics and you
will find a Christian Reconstructionist. I know because I have made the mistake
of inviting a few of these folks to cocktail parties. One university department
head told me he is moving to rural Mississippi where he can better recreate the
lifestyle of the antebellum South, and its "Confederate Christian
values." It gets real strange real quick. Lest the Christian
Reconstructionists be underestimated, remember that it was Reconstructionist
strategists whose "stealth ideology" managed the takeover of the
Republican Party in the early 1990s. That takeover now looks mild in light of
today's neocon Christian implantations in the White House, the Pentagon and the
Supreme Court and other federal entities. As much as liberals screech in protest,
few understand the depth and breadth of the Rightist Christian takeover
underway. They catch the scent but never behold the beast itself.
Yesterday I heard a liberal Washington-based political pundit on NPR say the
Radical Christian right's local and regional political action peak was a past
fixture of the Reagan era. I laughed out loud (it was a bitter laugh) and
wondered if he had ever driven 20 miles eastward on U.S. Route 50 into the
suburbs of Maryland, Virginia or West Virginia. The fellow on NPR was a perfect
example of the need for liberal pundits to get their heads out of their asses,
get outside the city, quit cruising the Internet and meet some Americans who do
not mirror their own humanist educations and backgrounds. If they did, they would
grasp the importance The Rapture has taken on in American national and
international politics. Despite the media's shallow interpretation of The
Rapture's significance, it is a hell of a lot more than just a couple hundred
million Left Behind books sold. The most significant thing about the Left
Behind series is that, although they are classified as "fiction,"
most fundamentalist readers I know accept the series as an absolute reality
soon coming to a godless planet near you. It helps to understand that everything
is literal in the Fundamentalist voter universe. I'll Fly Away, Oh Lordy (But
you won't.) Yes, when The Rapture comes Christians with the right credentials
will fly away. But you and I, dear reader, will probably be among those who
suffer a thousand-year plague of boils. So stock up on antibiotics, because
according to the "Rapture Index" it is damned near here. See for
yourself at http://mail2web.com/cgi-bin/redir.asp?lid=0&newsite=http://www.raptureready.com/.
Part gimmick, part fanatical obsession, the index is a compilation of such
things as floods, interest rates, oil prices, global turmoil . . . As I write
this the index stands at 144, just one point below critical mass, when people
like us will be smitten under a sky filled with deliriously happy naked flying
Christians.
But to blow The Rapture off as amusing-if-scary fantasy is not being honest on
my part. Cheap glibness has always been my vice, so I must say this:
Personally, I've lived with The Rapture as the psychologically imprinted
backdrop of my entire life. In fact, my own father believed in it until the day
he died, and the last time I saw him alive we talked about The Rapture. And
when he asked me, "Will you be saved? Will you be there with me on
Canaan's shore after The Rapture?" I was forced to feign belief in it to
give a dying man inner solace. But that was the spiritual stuff of families,
and living and dying, religion in its rightful place, the way it is supposed to
be, personal and intimate-not political. Thus, until the advent of the
Reconstructionist Christian influence, I'd certainly never heard The Rapture
spoken about in the context of a Texan being selected by God to prepare its
way.
Now however, this apocalyptic belief, yearning really, drives an American
Christian polity in the service of a grave and unnerving agenda. *The
pseudo-scriptural has become an apocalyptic game plan for earthly political
action: To wit, the messiah can only return to earth after an apocalypse in
Israel called Armageddon, which the fundamentalists are promoting with all
their power so that The Rapture can take place. The first requirement was
establishment of the state of Israel. Done. The next is Israel's occupation of
the Middle East as a return of its "Biblical lands," which in the
Reconstructionist scheme of things, means more wars. These Christian
conservatives believe peace cannot ever lead to The Rapture, and indeed impedes
the 1,000-year Reign of Christ. So anyone promoting peace is an enemy, a tool
of Satan, hence the fundamentalist support for any and all wars Middle Eastern,
in which their own kids die a death often viewed by Christian parents as a holy
martyrdom of its own kind. "He (or she) died protecting this country's
Christian values." One hears it over and over from parents of those
killed.
The final scenario of the Rapture has the "saved" Christians settling
onto a cloud after the long float upward, from whence they watch a Rambo Jesus
wipe out the remnants of the human race. Then in a mop-up operation by God, the
Jews are also annihilated, excepting a few who convert to Christianity. The
Messiah returns to earth. End of story.
Incidentally, the Muslim version, I was surprised to learn recently, is almost
exactly the same, but with Muslims doing the cloud-sitting. If we are lucky as
a nation, this period in American history will be remembered as just another
very dark time we managed to get through. Otherwise, one shudders to think of
the logical outcome. No wonder the left is depressed. Meanwhile, our best
thinkers on the left ask us to consider our perpetual U.S. imperial war as a
fascist, military/corporate war, and indeed it is that too. But tens of
millions of hardworking, earnest American Christians see it as far more than
that. They see a war against all that is un-Biblical, the goal of which is
complete world conquest, or put in Christian terminology, "dominion."
They will have no less than the "inevitable victory God has promised his
new chosen people," according to the Recon masters of the covert kingdom.
Screw the Jews, they blew their chance. If perpetual war is what it will take,
then let it be perpetual. After all, perpetual war is exactly what the Bible promised.
Like it or not, this is the reality (or prevailing unreality) with which we are
faced.
The 2004 elections, regardless of outcome, will not change that. Nor will it
necessarily bring ever-tolerant liberals to openly acknowledge what is truly
happening in this country, the thing that has been building for a long, long
time-a holy war, a covert Christian jihad for control of America and the entire
world. Millions of Americans are under the spell of an extraordinarily
dangerous mass psychosis.
Pardon me, but religious tolerance be damned. Somebody had to say it.
Joe Bageant is a senior editor at the Primedia History Group and writes
from Winchester, Virginia. He may be contacted at http://mail2web.com/cgi-bin/redir.asp?lid=0&newsite=http://www.bageantjb@netscape.net.