The power of religion in America also played a critical part in preventing the establishment of any strong mass socialist tradition. Thus William Jennings Bryan and the Populists of the 1890s were bitter critics of American capitalism; but Bryan’s deeply held fundamentalist Protestantism made even the slightest tinge of ideological Marxism utterly alien to him.13
Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur wrote more than two centuries ago that “the American is a new man who acts on new principles.” Richard Hoftstadter wrote of America as “the country of those who fled from the past.” In the 1960s, George Grant wrote that “the United States is the only society on earth that has no traditions from before the age of progress,” and this was repeated approvingly by Seymour Martin Lipset in 1996.14 They are all quite wrong as far as this section of Americans is concerned.
Hard-line evangelical Protestants in the United States coined the name “fundamentalists” for themselves in the 1920s because of their desire for a return to what they viewed as the “fundamentals” of Christianity, including a literal, word-for-word belief in the Bible. Their origins were “reactionary” in the strict sense; they were reacting against key aspects of twentieth-century modernity.15 These religious elements form part of the wider world of American radical conservatism and radical nationalism, of which Richard Hofstadter wrote that “their political reactions express a profound if largely unconscious hatred of our society and its ways…The extreme right suffers not from the policies of this or that administration, but from what America has become in the 20th Century.”16
There were indeed certain elements of this tendency even in the American revolt against Britain, which has been seen as motivated partly by the hostility of “a provincial people, [who] regarded their style of living as not only good but of God” toward cosmopolitan, latitudinarian, and modernizing British rule.17 And from the very first days of the American colonies, the belief of the settlers that they were a people chosen by God was accompanied by an Old Testament belief that God was a “God of Warre.” The image of the ancient Israelites and their battles with their neighbors was used to justify wars against latter day “Amelekites,” whether Indians or French, and God was held to fight for the Americans in those wars.18
This body of belief is therefore one of the “huge political icebergs” of American life, which “move through time with massive stability, changing slowly and surviving in their essential form for many generations.”19 For several decades now, the evangelical and fundamentalist churches have been growing while the “mainline” Protestant churches have declined, a process symbolized in 1967 when membership in the churches of the Southern Baptist Convention overtook the Methodist Church, hitherto the largest Protestant church in the country.
Many American liberals have long been disappointed and also deeply puzzled by the Tea Parties and their antecedents; that is to say, by the way in which so many American workers and petty bourgeois have been led by conservative cultural affiliation to vote for right-wing Republicans. It is said, quite rightly, that the radical, unregulated capitalism espoused by these Republicans is often directly contrary to the economic interests of those same workers.20
To explain this political behavior, one must understand both the role of America’s civic nationalist creed, as described in the second chapter, and the fact that these voters belong to coherent and immensely strong religious and cultural worlds that are genuinely under attack as a result of social and cultural change. Historically speaking, the political importance of the religious factor is not peculiar to the United States. As long as religious adherence remained of great importance in certain Western European societies, it also had an effect on political allegiances in those countries—sometimes, unfortunately, in extremist directions. The tragicomic aspect of the situation of politically conservative American religious believers is that the radically laissez-faire capitalism that they support is not only undermining their economic world, but through the mass media and entertainment industries is also playing a central role in biting away at their moral universe.
Godly Republicans
Conservative religiosity plays a very important part in U.S. politics, and especially in the Republican Party. Its growth has caused part of the “southernization” of that party in recent decades. According to the Christian Coalition, the leading grassroots political organization of the American Christian Right, 29 senators out of 100 and 125 House members out of 435 voted 100 percent of the time in accordance with the Christian Coalition’s principles in 2001—in other words, more than one-quarter of the members of both houses of the U.S. Congress. Of these, 15 senators and 64 congressmen were from the Greater South, or just over half of the Christian conservative bloc in both cases (more than double the South’s percentage of the U.S. population as a whole).21
The influence of this segment of the U.S. population on the Bush administration, and its link to American nationalism, was well expressed in a Newsweek article in early 2003:
Every president invokes God and asks his blessing…But it has taken a war, and the prospect of more, to highlight a central fact: this president—this presidency—is the most resolutely “faith-based” in modern times, an enterprise founded, supported and guided by trust in the temporal and spiritual power of God. Money matters, as does military might. But the Bush administration is dedicated to the idea that there is an answer to societal problems here and to terrorism abroad: give everyone, everywhere, the freedom to find God, too …
Bible-believing Christians are Bush’s strongest backers, and turning them out next year in even greater numbers is the top priority of the president’s political adviser Karl Rove …The base is returning the favor. They are, by far, the strongest supporters of a war—unilateral if need be—to remove Saddam.22
With a view to this constituency, but also apparently reflecting his own beliefs, President Bush repeatedly cast the struggle against terrorism and America’s place in the world in explicitly religious terms. Not just the terrorists, but a range of other rivals of America were cast as “evil.” A religiously inspired messianic spirit colored even those passages where Bush was ostensibly speaking of secular and universal values. Bush himself was reported as seeing himself as an instrument of divine providence.23
The statement that “if you are not with us you are against us,” so endlessly repeated by the president and other officials, was originally Christ’s, and has been repeated by American preachers and politicians down the centuries.24 This religious element in Bush’s thought fed into wider patterns of American moral absolutism, and produced statements like Bush’s promise to “rid the world of evil,” and the insane title of a book on terrorism by his former speechwriter, “An End to Evil.”25
Addressing Congress, Bush declared that “the course of this war is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.” The whole address was permeated with a form of religious nationalism. Bush took words from a hymn, “There’s Power in the Blood,” to refer to the “power, wonder-working power” of “the goodness and idealism and faith of the American people”—words that in the hymn are used of the lamb, Jesus Christ.26 The identification of the nation with Christ himself (whether suffering or victorious) has a long tradition in the nationalism of Poland, Serbia, and certain other countries, but it is a striking image to find in the mouth of a president of the United States, the supposed embodiment of all that is modern, at the start of the twenty-first century.
The specifically Anglo-American lineage of this mode of thought, and its implications for views of the rest of the world, were well set out by a puritan minister during the English Civil War of the mid-seventeenth century: “All people are cursed or blessed according as they do or do not join their strength and give their best assistance to the Lord’s people against their enemies.”27
As the neoconservative intellectual Norman Podhoretz wrote before the Iraq War:
One h
ears that Bush, who entered the White House without a clear sense of what he wanted to do there, now feels that there was a purpose behind his election all along; as a born-again Christian, it is said, he believes that he was chosen by God to eradicate the evil of terrorism from the world. I think it is a plausible rumor, and I would even guess that in his heart of hearts, Bush identifies more in this respect with Ronald Reagan—the President who rid the world of the “evil empire”—than with his own father, who never finished the job he started in taking on Saddam Hussein.28
An American patriotic artist best known for his popular “paintings of heroic firemen and policemen superimposed over images of Americana and faith” was encouraged by the White House to produce a painting of George Bush at prayer while leaning on a podium. At his side are Lincoln and Washington, each also praying, and with a hand on George Bush’s shoulder.29 Bush himself has written of his “belief in a divine plan that supersedes all human plans.”30
According to Bob Woodward, “the President was casting his vision and that of the country in the grand vision of God’s master plan.”31 As a sympathetic Christian writer, Stephen Manfield, notes, Bush was one of the very few American presidents “to have undergone a profound religious transformation as an adult”:
He was already engineering a religious renovation of the executive branch when the country suffered a traumatic terrorist attack that placed religion unashamedly at the center of American political and social life. The secular state seemed to recede for a time. Congressional leaders sang hymns on the Capitol steps and even introduced legislation to adopt “God Bless America” as the official national hymn.
What followed was a freer rein for religion in American society. Bush seemed to embody it. He prayed publicly and spoke of faith, divine destiny, and the nation’s religious heritage more than he ever had. Aides found him face down on the floor in prayer in the Oval Office. It became known that he refused to eat sweets while American troops were in Iraq, a partial fast seldom reported of an American president. And he framed America’s challenges in nearly biblical language. Saddam is an evildoer. He has to go. There must be a new day in the Middle East. Isaac and Ishmael must shake hands in peace.32
At home, this tendency caused considerable alarm among secularist Americans and contributed to the growing cultural–political rift in American society. Fundamentalist religiosity has become an integral part of the radicalization of the Right in the United States, and the tendency to demonize political opponents as traitors and enemies of God and America.33 In turn, the secularization of the American Left, and their espousal of a culturally progressive agenda, has destroyed the ability of economic progressives to appeal to a very large part of the American masses. This alienation of the Left from religion was not true in America before the 1940s. Had it been, American history would have been very different. For even in the depths of the Great Depression, Roosevelt could not have been elected on the basis of a party that espoused gay marriage and abortion. The assumption among American liberals is that like European societies, American society has been culturally transformed over the eight decades since. In fact, large parts of it have not been so transformed. Nor indeed has most of the world become less religious, even if forms of religion have changed. Increasingly, the “disenchantment of the world” appears to apply in fact mainly to Europe.
In the rest of the developed world, the strength of American fundamentalism has contributed a new element to fear and distrust of the United States. In the past, these feelings were concentrated mainly on the Left, and were concerned with American capitalism, imperialism, and militarism. But while these tendencies were often portrayed as wicked, they were not seen as inherently irrational, as far as the motives and interests of the American elites were concerned.
Moreover, outside the Left, a majority of Europeans looked on these tendencies with relative indifference, since none of them are alien to the history of modern Europe’s relations with the rest of the world. Furthermore, most of the targets of American policy—Communists in the past, Muslim extremists more recently—were also seen by most Europeans as enemies. And of course, the populations of the developed world are becoming more and more dominated by a basically American popular culture.
But this was and is secular American popular culture. American fundamentalist Protestant missionaries have made considerable inroads among the poor of Latin America and Africa, but have gotten nowhere at all in the centers of the developed world, and among America’s key allies. America as civilizational empire and America’s thesis about itself and the world are represented by secular American culture: America as the embodiment of successful modernity. The radical religious element in American nationalism is something new, and deeply disquieting to many non-Americans.
Moral Panics
Although the Southern and Northern churches divided bitterly over slavery (with abolition becoming a great crusade for parts of northeastern Protestantism), after the Civil War the Southern churches were also closely associated with some of the northern and so-called mainline Protestant churches of the United States in certain moral crusades. These movements frequently reflected a desire to preserve the cultural dominance of the old “core” Protestant populations in the small towns and countryside over the new Catholic and Jewish populations of the great cities, and hostility to “aliens” in general.
The consequent anxieties often took the form of concern over sexual promiscuity, especially when linked to drugs, drunkenness, and venereal disease, and in the South, fed into perennial fears concerning the blacks.34 Since the 1970s, this tradition has been revived in the Christian Right’s crusade against abortion. As in the past, this is a real moral issue in itself, which has helped perpetuate the alliance between Southern and heartland Protestant conservatives and Catholic conservatives. It also acts both as a metaphor for wider anxieties and as a rallying cry for a wider political mobilization against a wider set of political and cultural enemies.
As with such past panics, it is also closely associated with fears of national decadence leading to national weakness. This is reflected most directly and traditionally in religious terms by the fear that if such wickedness continues, God will either abandon or smite America—a suggestion made directly by Christian Right leader Jerry Falwell after 9/11, which he attributed to God’s punishment of America for its sins, including abortion and homosexuality. Michele Bachmann attributed Hurricane Irene in August 2011 to God’s desire to send a message to the American people.
These recurrent cultural “panics” with ethnic and racial overtones have been chronicled by James A. Morone in his book, Hellfire Nation.35 Thus starting in 1909, a panic swept Protestant America concerning a supposed huge growth in the number of brothels, with alien “white slavers” roaming the countryside to seduce and even abduct innocent white rural maidens.
Much of the language of this particular panic was anti-Semitic, with anti-Chinese, anti-Catholic (“Secrets of the Convent”), and anti-French feelings playing a secondary role: in the words of McClure’s magazine, “Out of the racial scum of Europe has come for unnumbered years the Jewish kaftan, leading the miserable Jewish girl to her doom.” Now, with the help of urban “Tammany Hall” Irish and other politicians, they had set their sights on American womanhood. In an effort to target two ethnoreligious enemies with one slur, it was alleged that sometimes these Jewish white-slavers dressed as Catholic priests! It was claimed as established fact that 60,000 American girls were lured or kidnapped into brothels every year, and that a similar number of prostitutes perished annually—a fantastic exaggeration.
These fears were closely linked to paranoia about the white race committing “race suicide” through decadence, birth control, and so on, and being overwhelmed by the yellow and brown tide. The result of this movement was the closure of most of America’s red light districts, and the Mann Act on transporting women across state lines for immoral purposes, a means of harassment and oppression of blacks for decades thereafter.36
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br /> The most powerful of these movements was for the prohibition of alcohol. The passage of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1920 (greatly helped by wartime hysteria) was the greatest victory for the old core Protestant groups over the Catholic immigrants (Irish saloon keepers and German brewers); the decadent, cocktail-sipping East Coast elites; and the forces of social, cultural, and demographic change. Later, Prohibition became in practice—or rather lack of practice—their greatest defeat. It has been called “a Kulturkampf between two opposing religious-cultural lifestyles.”37
Of course, it must be recognized that, as in the case of other such movements like the present one against drugs, Prohibition targeted a real problem of “inner city” alcoholism, leading in turn to unemployment, child abuse, and so on—and it may have had some real success in reducing these abuses.38 This leads Michael Kazin to identify the Prohibition movement as in part at least a socially progressive movement.39 It also marked a great difference between American and European populism in the strong role of women in its leadership—something that it shares with the contemporary Tea Parties.
Prohibition was also linked not only to anti-immigrant feeling, but also to concerns about social modernization as America emerged (according to the census of 1920) as an urban-majority country.
But such genuine concerns—then as now—have also been mixed up with much darker emotions. Morone quotes the temperance crusader Alphonse Ava Hopkins, in words the anti-European tone of which have echoed down to our own day:
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