The new Helms School of Government at Liberty University … [will] train young people to enter public service with a Christian worldview and a bold passion to confront a liberal-oriented culture. Students will spend weekends and summers working hand-in-hand with pastors and staff members of evangelical churches all over America, registering voters in the churches and neighborhoods along with educating parishioners.
—Jerry Falwell1
I’m confused. Exactly who is this “they” that the Religious Right keeps saying has hijacked the country?
The Religious Right keeps bragging about how they are responsible for electing the Congress (and elected the last president, and will elect the next). They take credit for getting many conservative federal judges appointed. They claim they are electing mayors, state legislators, and governors across the country. So who exactly is passing the laws we all live under?
And who are the consumers of the cultural products the Religious Right constantly criticizes? Who do they think is watching Desperate Housewives, going to see Maid in Manhattan, buying Cosmopolitan, and downloading Janet Jackson’s half-second of nipple? At the mall, who do they think is giving their 13-year-olds money to buy belly shirts, iPods, and cell phones?
America’s most popular recreations include NASCAR races, TV wrestling, and poker. All involve beer and half-undressed pretty girls. Fans for these events are disproportionately from blue, conservative, religious states.
And pornography: The Right keeps complaining that we’re “flooded” with it. Yes, there are 50 million Americans consuming porn—and they aren’t all Al Gore and Michael Moore. So who are these 50 million people? When the Right complains that hotels are making a fortune selling in-room porn, who do they think stays in those hotel rooms in Topeka, Provo, and Memphis?
The Religious Right has masterfully portrayed itself as the voice of the sex-sober majority being oppressed by the sex-crazed minority. They demand sympathy and righteous indignation about the way “children,” “families,” “tradition,” “morals,” “values,” and “decency” are under attack. They have gotten the government and media to support them as defenders of America’s wholesomeness—against some mythical, incredibly powerful (and immoral) “them.”
But the Right is like the kid who kills his parents and asks for mercy because he’s an orphan. Somehow, they neglect to mention that it’s the consumer choices and other preferences of their own constituents that are the so-called problem. It is average, working-class and middle-class Republican voters in Charleston, Abilene, and Spokane who are watching porn, having affairs, buying vibrators, going to strip clubs, and keeping Sex and the City on the air. People may tell pollsters and even politicians that they want more “decent” programs and products. But that’s not what these people are discussing, buying, and watching. Religious people, conservative people, “decent” people demand, and get, Gilmore Girls, a Hitachi magic wand, Kim Kardashian, Jenna Jameson, a lap dance.
The Right portrays America as under siege by a dangerous ideology, a villainous intelligence, which simply doesn’t exist. But not only isn’t it evil, it isn’t out there. It’s the ordinary, everyday decision-making of its own people. And they make the same choices people around the world make whenever they have a chance.
Unfortunately, the idea of a tangible satanic force that must be battled out in the world is familiar to tens of millions of fundamentalist and evangelical Christians. At various times, the group said to embody this Evil has been identified as pagans, Jews, Muslims, Catholics, Mormons, and communists. These days they’re homosexuals, liberals, and pornographers.
To the Right, these three symbolize choice. Valuing pleasure. The rejection of fear of Evil. A loss of group control over individual impulse.
The Religious Right plays to the literalist expectation of Evil exquisitely; for example, look at its portrayal of less than civilized, less than adult, conscienceless, seductive homosexuals. Somehow, this group of six or seven million people, with no guns, two congressmen, and Ellen DeGeneres, is positioned as a threat to the most powerful country in the history of the world. This narrative is a brilliant political accomplishment.
What exactly is this “homosexual agenda” from which the Christian Right is protecting you and me? The idea that same-gender marriage hurts “traditional” marriage is staggeringly silly. “Honey, I’m sorry I had an affair, but you know how those gays are undermining our marriages … ” Our government has cut funding for student loans, alternative fuels research, grandma’s medication, poor people’s birth control, and job retraining. But the Christian Right says the real danger we face is a bunch of men and women who want to marry each other instead of, uh, each other.
Here are just four recent ways in which organized religion, far from being marginalized by a godless culture, actually has a central seat at the table of political power and policy making.
Since it’s legal to participate in religion, and legal to participate in politics, inevitably some people do both. As long as this is done on a personal level, the Republic is not endangered: Go ahead and believe in the Rapture (a more common American belief than Evolution) and vote for Joe or Sam. No problem.
There is, however, the issue of taxes—billions of dollars of taxes. The IRS exempts approved churches from paying taxes. The income of church-owned operations—from bakeries, parking lots, hotels, farms, and so on—is over $150 billion annually (that’s way more than the budget of the entire state of California). In exchange for this exemption, the government asks for two things:
For this, many religious leaders and followers feel persecuted. On top of this multi-billion-dollar giveaway, they demand the right to influence elections organizationally. Remember, every member of a church is free to vote as she or he wishes, to contribute money to candidates, to write letters to newspapers and congressmembers.
On the annual Pulpit Freedom Sunday (next scheduled for October 7, 2012), pastors across the country are encouraged to explicitly endorse candidates from their pulpits during church services. This civil disobedience is designed to goad the IRS into challenging some church’s tax-exempt status; the idea is that this enforcement will be so unpopular that the federal law barring electioneering from the pulpit will be overturned.
“Contrary to the misunderstandings of many, tax-exempt status is not a ‘gift’ or ‘subsidy’ bestowed by the government,” according to the Alliance Defense Fund and its senior legal counsel, Erik Stanley.2
This clearly demonstrates mainstream religion’s sense of entitlement rather than its marginalization. The Church believes it is owed tax exemptions worth billions of dollars and the right to elect candidates. And the political issues on which The Church demands to speak? Not poverty, not air pollution, not mass transit: reproductive rights, sex education, adult entertainment, the rights of sexual minorities, contraception. See a pattern?
They demand to participate in the highest possible way in America’s War on Sex.
… nor shall anyone be excluded from holding office on account of his religious sentiments, provided he acknowledge the existence of a Supreme Being.
—Texas Constitution, Article 1, Section 4
Says Deana Pollard, law professor at Texas Southern University’s Thurgood Marshall School of Law, “In this case, we do have a constitution that’s unconstitutional.”3
Concerned Women for America (CWA) claims to be the country’s largest public policy women’s organization. Their mission is “bringing Biblical principles into all levels of public policy, focusing on six core issues: the family, the sanctity of human life, religious liberty, education, pornography and national sovereignty.”4
In the world real, that translates to criminalizing abortion, eliminating comprehensive sex education, censoring pornography, reducing church-state separation, and eliminating all adult entertainment. Apart from their retro interest in “national sovereignty,” this is the exact agenda of the War On Sex—by “bringing Biblical principles into public policy.”
So how are they doing this? Consider one of their typical fundraisers, held May 26, 2011. Hosted by Virginia’s attorney general, the event is a troubling mix of the state’s political and religious power elite. The invited guests included the governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state, and congressmembers, not to mention various candidates for elected office. CWA doesn’t hide its religious agenda at all; the bottom of the invitation features a quote from Corinthians.5
In 2005, the Constitution Restoration Act was introduced in both the House and Senate. A pet project of those advancing Dominionism, it would have limited the power of the federal judiciary specifically in religious liberty cases. The bill also stated that judges or other court officials who listen to cases that meet these criteria are to be impeached and convicted. Just what America needs—more divisive exemptions for religious issues from the laws of our country.
“The acknowledgment of God is not a legitimate subject of review by federal courts,” says one of the bill’s authors—Roy Moore, the same judge who lost his job for putting religion above the law (see Chapter 13).
* * *
The Right is correct about one thing. The American family and American community are, today, spinning out of control. But it isn’t because of the Axis of Moral Evil—homosexuals, liberals, and pornographers. Rather, it’s the unintended consequence of a wildly advanced capitalist system, which gives spending money and privacy to teens, while sending jobs overseas, overworking two parents who can’t afford health care, geographically dispersing families, and increasing our grandparents’ life spans while decreasing their dignity. It’s a socio-political-economic system that values computer networking over intimate connecting.
Our alienation and sense of powerlessness is the unfortunate result of getting what Americans said we wanted—more and better gadgets with which to avoid reality, more low-density housing in car-dependent suburbs, more guarantees of physical security, and more certainty about the most uncertain anxieties of human existence—no matter how deadening our jobs, how unhealthy our environment, how corrupt our politics, how meaningless our entertainment, or how atomized our families and relationships. Americans have asked for lives that require less thinking, and we’ve been handed them. At a soul-searing price.
We ought to be sympathetic about the fear, grief, and resentment of people watching their lives and communities spinning out of control, and their kids spinning away from them. Men and women across America are brokenhearted. And the primary political group addressing this heartbreak is the Religious Right. Unfortunately, they do it in a fundamentally disempowering way. They say, “Let’s give in to our fear, let’s restrict our choices and disown our rights, let’s attempt to control everything and everyone else.” Sexuality—messy, idiosyncratic, unpredictable, transgressive—is high on the agenda of what needs controlling.
They don’t encourage us to grow up and face our own role in creating lives we fear and resent. But as the only political group discussing heartbreak and isolation, they attract listeners, listeners who become disciples. And so although Christians damn the very activities the public values—soft-core entertainment, hard-core stimulation—the public somehow feels comforted. When the Right talks about an idealized, wholesome past that never existed, that’s code for wanting to address how frightened and lonely people feel now. That makes people feel acknowledged. They then want to say “yes” to whatever solution is proposed, even the loss of dignity, freedom, and adulthood that is the core of the Religious Right’s program.
So when the Religious Right hyperventilates, sputters, rages, and prophesies doom regarding premarital sex, extramarital sex, non-marital sex, and pornography, abortion, Grey’s Anatomy, STDs, and dildos, they’re talking about themselves but blaming a “them.” People who feel powerless are cheering this war on “them,” even though it’s ultimately a war on themselves. But people who feel powerless and ashamed of their own sexuality can’t possibly stand up for themselves in this battle. They will continue to cheer Sarah Palin, Rick Santorum, Sam Brownback, James Dobson, Richard Land, and Brent Bozell as they demonize porn and Fox TV—even while voters buy porn and watch Fox. And manipulated by these cynical leaders, the same voters will continue to spit on the American Civil Liberties Union while it protects their rights to buy porn and watch Fox.
There’s a good chance that the Christian Right will continue scoring serious victories. They actually could criminalize abortion, restrict porn, abolish strip clubs, eliminate gay adoptions, purge and re-closet homosexuals, and make adultery and premarital sex excruciatingly frightening and costly.
But no government and no religion can eliminate the desire for sex, for sexual experimentation, for the taboo, the naughty, the novel, the intense. See the most recent century of Western civilization. Read the last century of science fiction: No matter how dystopian the fictional society, no one can stop people from somehow creating erotic entertainment and pleasure outside the bounds of whatever is considered “decent.”
We know that many notable figures on the Right—including Rudy Giuliani, Jimmy Swaggart, Bill O’Reilly, Strom Thurmond, Robert Livingston, David Vitter, Laura Schlessinger, John Ensign, Carl Paladino, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mark Sanford, and Newt Gingrich—have participated in extramarital affairs, visits with prostitutes, and sexual harassment. Who would they say is the “them” who’s hijacking the country?