by Chris Hedges
“These are the people who set up the shows,” Simmons says. “This is a good way to see everybody. It is like the gathering of one big family. We have flown in to network.”
This is the apotheosis of capitalism, the divine sanction of the free market, of unhindered profit and the most rapacious cruelties of globalization. Corporations, rapidly turning America into an oligarchy, have little interest in Christian ethics, or anybody’s ethics. They know what they have to do, as the titans of the industry remind us, for their stockholders. They are content to increase profit at the expense of those who demand fair wages, health benefits, safe working conditions and pensions. This new oligarchic class is creating a global marketplace where all workers, to compete, will have to become like workers in dictatorships such as China: denied rights, their wages dictated to them by the state, and forbidden from organizing or striking. America once attempted to pull workers abroad up to American levels, to foster the building of foreign labor unions, to challenge the abuse of workers in factories that flood the American market with cheap goods. But this new class seeks to reduce the American working class to the levels of this global serfdom. After all, anything that drains corporate coffers is a loss of freedom—the God-given American freedom to exploit other human beings to make money. The marriage of this gospel of prosperity with raw, global capitalism, and the flaunting of the wealth and privilege it brings, are supposedly blessed and championed by Jesus Christ. Compassion is relegated to private, individual acts of charity or left to churches. The callousness of the ideology, the notion that it in any way reflects the message of the gospels, which were preoccupied with the poor and the outcasts, illustrates how the new class has twisted Christian scripture to serve America’s god of capitalism and discredited the Enlightenment values we once prized.
The Convention Center, located next door, is a huge, curvy glass structure with gleaming towers. The exhibition hall on the first floor has plush, blue carpeting and 320 display booths. At the far end of the hall lie the twisted remains of an Israeli bus blown up by Palestinian suicide bombers in Jerusalem. The Israeli Ministry of Tourism has the largest display space in the hall. The Christian Law Center, organized to remove “activist judges” in the courts, has people handing out yardsticks of gum. At a booth featuring Valerie Saxion’s book The Gospel of Health, they are mixing raspberry shakes in blenders. A Virginia Web design company in another booth offers “church Web sites the way God intended.” A bearded man dressed as a biblical prophet promotes tours to the Holy Land. Numerous antiabortion booths are staffed by women, who, it often turns out, had multiple abortions before finding Christ. There are fringe groups such as Jews for Jesus and Accuracy in Media, which is passing out a report with the title American Troops Cheer Attacks on U.S. Media.
Rows of palm trees are visible through banks of windows, and on the upper floors are technical workshops, such as “Finding God in Hollywood,” as well as luncheons. One seminar is entitled “Taking Over Cities for Christ: The Thousand-Day Plan.” In the parking lot outside the center is a pickup truck with large hand-painted panels covered with antigay slogans. There is a round red circle with a line through the center superimposed on the faces of two men kissing. “Stop the Insanity” is painted across the top. I walk outside after surveying the hall and pick up one of the pamphlets in a metal box on the side of the truck. “PROTECT YOUR FAMILY & FRIENDS FROM THE DANGERS OF . . . HOMOSEXUALITY: THE TRUTH!” the pamphlet says. It lists “the facts about homosexuality they refuse to teach in Public Schools or report on the Evening News!” including “because of unsanitary sexual practices, homosexuals carry the bulk of all bowel disease in America” and “homosexuals average 500 sexual partners in their short lifetime.”
The opening session is held on the third floor, a large room with a round stage surrounded on three sides with rows of folding chairs. The hall is dimly lit. There are a few thousand people. Large television screens are suspended from the ceilings, and the platform in front of us has a podium and a grand piano. The host, Bob Lepine, cohost of the radio show Family Life Today, broadcast from Little Rock, Arkansas, is a round-faced man with an easy smile. He begins the session by showing himself in a video wandering the beaches near Anaheim asking surfers and stray Californians, some of whom clearly spent the night sleeping on the beach, what “NRB” means. No one knows, but the guesses evoke laughter from the hall.
“One of the fun things about coming here . . . I was thinking about the old days, you know, when we used to go to Washington to the Sheraton in February, and it’s cold, and now we come here and it’s warm, and you get to go to the beach and see weird people,” he quips. He explains that the evening is sponsored by the Family Research Council and introduces its president, Tony Perkins, who, he notes, “was responsible for the covenant marriage law that got passed in Louisiana,” a law that made it harder for couples to divorce.
Perkins is typical of the new class of insider-cum-outsiders. He organized the rallies, broadcast around the nation to church audiences, known as “Justice Sunday,” which featured an array of politicians such as Senate majority leader Bill Frist, all pounding home one central theme: the Democrats are at war with “people of faith.” The Democrats used the filibuster, viewers were told, to block judicial appointees who were people of faith. Perkins works for James Dobson, who founded the Family Research Council, the lobbying arm of his Focus on the Family empire. Dobson has said the Supreme Court’s legalization of abortion with Roe v. Wade unleashed “the biggest Holocaust in world history” and has compared the “black-robed men” on the Supreme Court to “the men in white robes, the Ku Klux Klan.”2
Justice Sunday was part of a strategy devised more than two decades ago by Woody Jenkins, Perkins’s political mentor. Jenkins and some 50 conservative men gathered in May 1981 at the northern Virginia home of direct-mail pioneer Richard Viguerie to plot the growth of their movement following Ronald Reagan’s presidential victory. They formed the Council for National Policy (CNP), a secretive, right-wing organization that brought together dominionists such as R. J. Rushdoony, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell with right-wing industrialists willing to fund them, such as Amway founder Richard DeVos Sr. and beer baron Joseph Coors. As DeVos quipped, the CNP “brings together the doers with the donors.”3
Jenkins, then a Louisiana state lawmaker, became the CNP’s first executive director. He told a Newsweek reporter: “One day before the end of this century, the Council will be so influential that no president, regardless of party or philosophy, will be able to ignore us or our concerns or shut us out of the highest levels of government.”4
In 1999, Texas Governor George W. Bush addressed the group as he launched his bid for the presidency. The media were barred from the event. But those who wrote about the meeting afterward said that Bush, who refused to release a public transcript of his speech, promised to only appoint antiabortion judges if he was elected. The group, which meets three times a year in secret, brings together radical Christian activists, right-wing Republican politicians and wealthy patrons willing to fund the movement. During Bush’s presidency, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld have attended CNP meetings.5
Perkins, like other leaders in the movement, has troubling associations with white supremacy groups. They work hard now to distance themselves from these relationships, often quoting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and drawing parallels between their movement and the civil-rights movement. But during the 1996 Senate campaign of Woody Jenkins, Perkins, who was Jenkins’s campaign manager, signed an $82,500 check to the head of the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke, to acquire Duke’s phone bank list.6 And as late as 2001, Perkins spoke at a fund-raiser for the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white nationalist group that has called blacks “a retrograde species of humanity” on its Web site.7
The ties by Christian Right leaders such as Perkins with racist groups highlight the long ties between right-wing fundamentalists and American racist organizations, including the Klan, which had a chaplain assigned
to each chapter. During the Depression, when many on the right and in corporate America were openly flirting with fascism, fundamentalist preachers such as Gerald B. Winrod and Gerald L. K. Smith fused national and Christian symbols to advocate the country’s first crude form of Christo-fascism. Smith, who openly admired the Nazis, founded a group called the Christian Nationalist Crusade, whose magazine was The Cross and the Flag. The movement proclaimed that “Christian character is the basis of all real Americanism.”8
By the late 1950s these radical Christians had drifted to the fiercely anticommunist John Birch Society. Many of the ideas championed by today’s dominionists—the bizarre conspiracy theories, the calls for unrestrained capitalism, the war against “liberal” organizations such as the mainstream media and groups such as the ACLU, along with the calls to dismantle federal agencies that deal with housing or education—are drawn from the ideology of this rabid anticommunist enclave. Timothy LaHaye used to run John Birch Society training seminars in California. And Nelson Bunker Hunt, a member of the John Birch Society’s national council, worked with LaHaye to help found the CNP.9
A baritone voice booms throughout the arena as we watch video images of the nation’s capital: “America’s culture was hijacked by a secular movement determined to redefine society, from religious freedom to the right to life. These radicals were doing their best to destroy two centuries of traditional values, and no one seemed to be able to stop them until now.”
“Will Congress undo 200 years of tradition?” the video asks ominously. “Not on our watch.”
“This is about calling Christians across this nation to action,” Perkins says in the video. “As one who spent nearly a decade in political office and even longer as a minister of the Gospel, I see [the Family Research Council] as a bridge between Christians and between government. Spanning a gulf that has been created by judicial decisions that have taken away the rich soil of this nation, that is this historical soil of Christianity, and by those whose misguided theology have caused Christians to abandon the public square, leaving a cavernous void in public policy. As this bridge, the Family Research Council sends its team to Congress and into the White House on a daily basis, to advocate for family and for our faith.”
There was a brief attempt at resistance to the rule of National Religious Broadcasters by these dominionists. Wayne Pederson in 2002 was appointed to replace the group’s longtime president, Brandt Gustavson. “We get associated with the far Christian right and marginalized,” Pederson told a reporter for the Star Tribune in Minneapolis. “To me the important thing is to keep the focus on what’s important to us spiritually.”10 His effort to shift the organization’s focus away from politics saw the executive committee orchestrate his removal a few weeks later. He was replaced by Frank Wright, who had spent the previous eight years serving as the executive director of Kennedy’s Center for Christian Statesmanship, a Capitol Hill ministry that conducts training for politicians on how to “think biblically about their role in government.”
Wright, with white hair and a cold, hard demeanor, lacks the easy banter of Lepine or the comforting, bland good looks of Perkins. Wright lauds the transformation in Washington, saying that 130 members of the House of Representatives are “born again.” He tells a story, which elicits laughter and applause, of how during a late-night private tour of the capital, he and other pastors stopped and prayed over Hillary Clinton’s Senate floor desk.
Wright, like most speakers, begins by talking about his long marriage. It is a reminder that in Christ is stability, that the home and marriage are protected, that Christian men and women achieve bliss denied to others. The movement, he says, is the bulwark against chaos, against a return to lives spinning out of control.
“The Gospel changed not just my life, it changed my marriage to Ruth,” he says. “It changed my family. The Gospel changes families, and churches and communities and cities and nations. All of what we call Western civilization today, it has the shape that it has and the character that it has because the Gospel changes things.”
And then he warns his listeners about the enemies at the gate, saying that “calls for diversity and multiculturalism are nothing more than thinly veiled attacks on anyone who is willing or desirous or compelled to proclaim Christian truth. Today, calls for tolerance are often a subterfuge, because they’ll tolerate just about anything except Christian truth.”
The broadcasters’ association, he explains, is lobbying in Congress against hate-crime legislation, which, Wright explains to the audience, “is step one to defining what you do as against the law.” The broadcasters have worked to thwart the “fairness doctrine,” what he calls “the bane of Christian broadcasters.
“A bill was filed in the House of Representatives that would require any programming that was ‘controversial,’ quote unquote, in nature, to give equal time to opposing viewpoints,” he tells the crowd. “Now let me think about this . . . controversial things . . . the divinity of Christ, the virgin birth, the bodily Resurrection. Everything we teach is controversial to someone else. If we had to give equal time to every opposing viewpoint, there would be no time to proclaim the truth that we’ve been commanded to proclaim. So we will fight the ‘fairness doctrine’ tooth and nail. It could be the end of Christian broadcasting if we don’t.”
The preoccupation with legislation, the plethora of speakers who come from Christian lobbying groups based in the capital, attest to a movement that is increasingly as preoccupied with legislation as with saving souls. And those that do not deal with the nuts and bolts of legislation remind those present that there are forces out there that seek to destroy Christians. James MacDonald, an imposing man with a shaved head, runs a church in Arlington Heights, Illinois, and is heard regularly on 600 Christian radio outlets. He fires up the crowd.
“How many of you out there think ministering the Word is unpopular?” he asks, as a sea of hands shoots into the air.
“His eyes are like a flame of fire,” MacDonald says, quoting Revelation 19. “Out of his mouth goes a sharp sword, and with it he can strike the nations. He treads the wine press of the fierceness and wrath of the almighty God, and on his robe and on his thigh a name is written: King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Jesus commands all men everywhere to come to the knowledge of Him.”
He reminds us that “ages of faith are not marked by dialogue but by proclamation” and “there is power in the unapologetic proclamation of truth. There is power in it. This is a kingdom of power.” When he says the word “power,” he draws it out for emphasis. He tells the crowd to eschew the “persuasive words of human wisdom.” Truth, he says, does “not rest in the wisdom of men but the power of God.” And, in a lisping imitation of liberals, he mocks, amid laughter and applause, those who want to “share” and be sensitive to the needs of others.
His antics delight most of the crowd, but not all. Luis Palau, a close protégé of Billy Graham, is one of the few present at the convention who is uncomfortable with the naked and repeated calls for power. Palau is an affable man, an Argentine with a refreshing worldliness about him. He also represents a traditional evangelicalism that has been shunted aside, often ruthlessly, by this new class. His focus is on personal salvation, he says, not the seizing of political power. He refused to become involved in the referendum banning gay marriage in Oregon, where his organization is based, although he, like Graham, is no supporter of gay rights. But he bristles at the coarseness, the naked calls for a Christian state, and the anti-intellectualism. He, like Graham, shuns the movement’s caustic, biting humor that belittles homosexuals, those deemed effete intellectuals and those condemned as “secular humanists.” The emphasis on abortion and gay marriage to the exclusion of other issues worries him.
“There are some Christians who have gone overboard,” Palau says, choosing his words carefully as we talk. “The message has become a little distorted in states where they talk about change yet focus on only one issue. We need a fuller transformation. The great thing B
illy Graham did was to bring intellectualism back to fundamentalism.
“I don’t think it is wrong to want to see political change, especially in places like Latin America,” he says. “Something has to happen in politics. But it has to be based on convictions. We have to overcome the sense of despair. I worked in Latin America in the days when almost every country had a dictator. I dreamed, especially as a kid, of change, of freedom and justice. But I believe that change comes from personal conviction, from leading a more biblical lifestyle, not by Christianizing a nation. If we become called to Christ, we will build an effective nation through personal ethics. When you lead a life of purity, when you respect your wife and are good to your family, when you don’t waste money gambling and womanizing, you begin to work for better schools, for more protection and safety for your community. All change, historically, comes from the bottom up. And this means changing the masses from within.”
Palau sees his work as focused on the conversion of souls, who, once they become saved, will become a force for “structural, institutional change.” But this, he adds, “can take two or three generations.”