One of Ahmanson’s most significant political investments was in the career of Marvin Olasky, a man of multiple conversions, who was instrumental in creating George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign theme of “compassionate conservatism.” The Yale graduate joined the Communist Party USA in the early 1970s, a bizarre attachment at a time when the Communist Party was thoroughly discredited and had dwindled to a tiny gaggle. Then Olasky was suddenly drawn to evangelical Christianity, and he abandoned his Jewish background to join Rushdoony’s ultraconservative Presbyterian Church in America. While toiling in obscurity during the 1980s as a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin, Olasky sparked a relationship with Ahmanson. (Afflicted with Tourette’s syndrome, Ahmanson was studying for a master’s degree in linguistics.) Olasky’s first book, Turning Point: A Christian Worldview Declaration, was published by Ahmanson’s privately held philanthropic entity, the Fieldstead Institute, and coauthored by Fieldstead’s director, Herbert Schlossberg. Even though theological scholars and reviewers generally ignored the book, it helped promote Olasky within Washington’s conservative circles, and in 1989 he was offered a well-paying Bradley Foundation stipend as a resident scholar at the Heritage Foundation.
In 1992, Olasky wrote The Tragedy of American Compassion, an argument for transferring government social welfare programs to the church, which he claimed was the traditional and most effective approach until the New Deal—the very policy Rushdoony and his acolytes had long advocated. In this work, Olasky cited his “conservative Christian” friend Howard Ahmanson as proof that faith can cure poverty, describing how Ahmanson “found that poverty around the world is a spiritual as well as a material problem—most poor people don’t have faith that they and their situations can change.” Eventually, Ahmanson funded four of Olasky’s books.
In 1993, The Tragedy of American Compassion earned Olasky an invitation from Republican strategist Karl Rove to meet with an evangelical Christian running for governor of Texas—George W. Bush. The following year, after the Republicans gained control of the Congress, the new speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, gave every Republican member a copy of Olasky’s book. The political thinker whom the Los Angeles Times dubbed an “unlikely guru” became a key advisor to Governor Bush, packaging for him the politics of “compassionate conservatism.” During the brutal Republican primaries of 2000, the ex-Jew Olasky slammed Jewish neoconservative supporters of Bush’s chief competitor, Senator John McCain, smearing them as educated atheists who worshiped the “religion of Zeus.” When the newly inaugurated President Bush signed an executive order to create a White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in January 2001, Olasky was standing by his side, beaming with pride as the new president turned his brainchild into government policy.
Another figure on the religious right who owes his success to Ahmanson is Bruce Chapman, a former Reagan administration official and founder of the Seattle think tank Discovery Institute, a bastion for the intelligent design movement, which seeks to debunk Darwin’s theory of evolution with scientific-sounding arguments. Americans United for Separation of Church and State calls Discovery “the most effective and politically savvy group pushing a religious agenda in America’s public school science classes.”
President Reagan appointed Chapman, a conservative Republican former secretary of state from Washington State, to a succession of posts: director of the Census Bureau, deputy assistant in the White House Office of Planning, and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in Vienna, a post that included the highly sensitive job of representing the United States to the International Atomic Energy Agency. After the Reagan administration and a stint at the conservative Hudson Institute, Chapman founded the Discovery Institute in 1990. Ahmanson gave him $1.5 million in seed money to create its Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture, the institute’s “intelligent design” wing, devoted to spreading a version of creationism that argues that only God could have fashioned the intricacy of life on earth. In 2003, Ahmanson granted $2.8 million to develop Discovery’s “Wedge Strategy,” which focused on attacking the theory of evolution through stealth political tactics and “cultural confrontation.” Dozens of well-heeled research fellows, directors, and advisors, almost all boasting advanced degrees from respectable universities, were hired. With these credentialed cadres, Discovery has sought to burnish “intelligent design” with the gloss of scientific legitimacy that scriptural literalist creationism never enjoyed. Chapman’s Catholicism has also proved useful in helping to evangelize for the cause.
The “Wedge Strategy” produced a string of victories, including a 2002 decision by the Ohio Board of Education to adopt science standards that allow students to examine criticisms of evolution, but then it hit a wall. In 2005, the strategy received a stinging rebuke in a federal court in Dover, Pennsylvania. There John Jones, a Republican judge appointed by President George W. Bush, ruled in favor of parents who sued the school board after it ordered teachers to read students a statement introducing intelligent design in ninth-grade biology class. In his decision, Judge Jones accused the defendants of harboring ulterior religious motives and of “breathtaking inanity” in their attempt to push the teaching of what he called “creationism relabeled.”
“It is ironic that several of these individuals,” Judge Jones stated, “who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the I.D. [intelligent design] policy.” Yet if Jones had known the origins of intelligent design, he might not have seemed so shocked by the schemes of its proponents. Under Reconstructionist rules of engagement, lying, deception, and stealth are considered legitimate tactics and are even encouraged. There is no requirement for Christians to be truthful “in acts of war,” Rushdoony wrote. “Spying is legitimate, as are deceptive tactics.”
Indeed, deception has proved essential to the success of the Ahmansons’ campaign to undermine mainline churches. The National Council of Churches—the governing body of the mainline Episcopal, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches—is one of America’s most effective progressive institutions. During the past fifty years, the NCC has advanced civil rights, environmentalism, and peace movements. The NCC’s symbolism as a liberal bulwark made it a natural target. Progressive Methodist minister Andrew Weaver explained three years before his death in 2008, “NCC church members’ influence is disproportionate to their numbers, and [they] include remarkably high numbers of leaders in politics, business, and culture. . . . A hostile takeover of these churches would represent a massive shift in American culture, power and wealth for a relatively small investment.”
In 1981, when the Reagan administration ratcheted up military support for anti-Communist juntas in Central America, a group of anti-Communist Democratic operatives and right-wing moneymen responded by organizing a Washington think tank called the Institute for Religion and Democracy (IRD) to mount an “inside-outside” attack on the mainline churches’ social activism. In short order, the new outfit shopped material to the mainstream press alleging that the NCC was diverting collection plate donations to Communist guerrillas. In 1982, this propaganda and pressure translated into two devastating and false reports in Reader’s Digest and on CBS’s 60 Minutes about NCC’s purported Communist links. (Twenty years later, 60 Minutes producer Don Hewitt described the broadcast on the NCC as the greatest regret of his long and illustrious career. “The next morning I got a congratulatory phone call from every redneck bishop in America and I thought, ‘Oh my God, we must have done something wrong last night and I think we probably did,’” Hewitt told CNN’s Larry King in 2002.)
In the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, the IRD changed tactics, replacing Communism with homosexuality as its wedge issue. The group’s shift of focus from the red menace to the lavender one was made possible by hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from the Ahmansons throughout the 1990s and by a grant of over $1 million in 2000 and 2001—the same ye
ar Roberta Ahmanson told me she was “inveigled” into joining the IRD’s board of directors.
The Ahmansons’ money was promptly funneled into a smear campaign against the Rt. Rev. Eugene Robinson, the first openly gay man ever consecrated as a bishop by the Episcopal Church. The IRD cranked up its Mighty Wurlitzer to full blast in August 2004, generating a column by Weekly Standard editor Fred Barnes titled “The Gay Bishop’s Links.” Barnes, who neglected to mention his membership on the IRD’s board of directors in his column for the neoconservative magazine, falsely alleged that the website of a gay youth group Robinson founded contained links to “a pornographic website,” and he claimed without independent sourcing that Robinson “put his hands on” a Vermont man “inappropriately” during a church meeting “several years ago.” The IRD circulated the column to various cable news networks, but only Fox News (which also employed Barnes as a regular pundit and host of a talk show) agreed to broadcast it.
Although a panel of bishops investigating the charges discredited Barnes’s smear, it helped widen the rift within the Episcopal Church and divide it from its global affiliates. In May 2007, eleven ultraconservative congregations from Northern Virginia bolted from the Episcopal Church and joined forces with the Anglican Church of Nigeria, led by the demagogic Archbishop Peter Akinola. In a country where more than 50 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, Akinola has managed to grow his congregation while replacing traditional church concerns about social justice with hysteria about homosexuality. Akinola spent much of 2006 lobbying Nigeria’s legislature to pass a bill meting out five-year prison terms to any gay people who dared to gather—or even touch one another—in public.
As the IRD pressed its exploitation of homosexuality to divide Episcopal congregations, it initiated a parallel campaign accusing the mainline Presbyterian Church of anti-Semitism for its protests against Israel’s continued illegal occupation of Palestinian land. The IRD complemented this new tactic by mailing out 100,000 copies of Likudnik Israeli historian Ephraim Karsh’s tract “Islamic Imperialism” to pastors. With this tactic, at an expense of $1.5 million, the Christian right raised Islamophobia as its new wedge for the post-9/11, post-Bush era.
For Ahmanson, the quest to transform the United States into Calvin’s elitist “church of the elect,” or what Rushdoony called a “spiritual aristocracy,” is not solely a political endeavor. Before Ahmanson and his wife were galvanized into funding conservative advocacy groups, mainline church schisms, and far-right moral crusades, they had been paralyzed by their own social handicaps and unresolved psychological issues. Emotional fulfillment was unattainable for the Ahmansons until they embraced Rushdoony’s inverted vision of free will: “The flight from freedom is always first of all the flight from God, who created man to be responsible and to exercise dominion over the earth under him. The choice is always God or slavery.” By exchanging free will for Reconstructionist mandates—by “doing what God wants him to do,” as Roberta Ahmanson told me her husband does—Ahmanson ironically experienced his first sense of liberation.
Ahmanson’s identification with Tolkien’s hero, Frodo, illuminates his sensibility. Both Frodo and Ahmanson were socially withdrawn boys who lost their parents at an early age. Just as Frodo found the childless Bilbo Baggins to nurture him, teach him Elvish, and pass along to him the One Ring that would ultimately have to be destroyed to save the world, Ahmanson found Rushdoony. Like Frodo, who gained a sense of camaraderie from the Fellowship of the Ring that was formed to protect him, Ahmanson gathered around himself a wife, a social network, and a community by throwing down the gauntlet against an evil secularism. Without the drama that flowed from their respective missions to save civilization, Frodo and Ahmanson would have never fulfilled many of their most basic needs.
In brief, written responses to questions I e-mailed to Howard Ahmanson, he attempted to show his independence and demonstrate his own reasoning by placing special emphasis on his disagreement with Rushdoony’s opinion that homosexuals should be executed. “Due to my association with Rushdoony, reporters have often assumed that I agree with him in all applications of the penalties of the Old Testament Law, particularly the stoning of homosexuals,” Ahmanson wrote. “My vision for homosexuals is life, not death, not death by stoning or any other form of execution, not a long, lingering, painful death from AIDS, not a violent death by assault, and not a tragic death by suicide. My understanding of Christianity is that we are all broken, in need of healing and restoration. So far as I can tell, the only hope for our healing is through faith in Jesus Christ and the power of his resurrection from the dead.”
For crisis-wracked individuals such as Ahmanson, radical Christian conservatism is more than politics and more than a style. As Ahmanson readily admits, it makes possible his psychological survival in the whirlwind of an increasingly chaotic society. “We are all broken,” as he told me.
Ahmanson confirms Erich Fromm’s insight, stated in the introduction to this book, that authoritarian ideology and practice can be compared to the workings of neurotic symptoms and that “Such symptoms result from unbearable psychological conditions and at the same time offer a solution that makes life possible.”
James Dobson is another psychologist who grasps this phenomenon, but he approaches it from a diametrically opposite angle. Through his mega-ministry, Focus on the Family, which has been handsomely funded by Ahmanson through its California front, the Capitol Resource Institute, Dobson has cultivated his movement’s culture of personal crisis and exploited it to become far and away the Christian right’s most influential leader. Through his unparalleled influence, Dobson and his minions gained the keys to the Republican kingdom in 2008. Although Dobson speaks of a return to traditional values, he is a new type of figure. His background as a trained child psychologist, rather than as a theologian or preacher, reflects the dominant character of the Christian right, and his rise reveals the little-understood transformation of the movement.
CHAPTER 5
THE PERSONAL CRISIS INDUSTRY
Constructed in the shadow of the snow-capped Rocky Mountains, and above the sprawling city of Colorado Springs, Colorado, the campus of Focus on the Family offers a breathtaking view. Inside the eighty-one-acre compound, cheery employees greet visitors to take them on the official tour, ambling across neatly trimmed grass lawns to one of many lavishly furnished, Mission-style office buildings.
Each weekday at the same time, James Dobson is escorted into his radio studio deep in the recesses of the campus’s central building by a platoon of grim armed guards who accompany him everywhere he goes. Visitors are invited to watch from behind two thick panes of plate glass in an adjacent room as Dobson and his co-host, John Fuller, prepare the daily broadcast. Then Dobson’s nasal voice is beamed out to one of the largest radio audiences in America and to tens of millions of people across the globe.
James Dobson moved Focus on the Family to Colorado Springs from Pomona, California, in 1991. Half of his original employees followed him to his new mountain kingdom in a caravan of seventy moving trucks, lured by the promise of affordable housing, good schools, and the chance to remain part of one of the evangelical movement’s fastest-growing ministries. Dobson and his business-savvy lieutenants, meanwhile, were attracted by the city’s low taxes and cheap land—a promised land in which to build a divinely inspired empire.
The fact that the population of Colorado Springs was nearly all white was an additional draw.
According to Dobson’s one-time co-host and former senior vice president of Focus on the Family, Gil Alexander-Moegerle, Dobson was repelled by Pomona’s flourishing racial diversity. “His complaint was that nonwhites brought with them cultural ideas and religious ideas foreign to the traditional American view of life which Jim [Dobson] defined as Western and Christian,” Alexander-Moegerle wrote in his searing tell-all memoir, James Dobson’s War on America. “He clearly wished for an America that was just like him.”
Dobson recently resigned his
position as chairman of Focus on the Family, turning the largely administrative role over to a former executive from defense contractor Nothrup Grumman, Air Force Lt. Gen. Patrick P. Caruana. The move was merely cosmetic, however, as Dobson remains in firm control of his organization, hosting Focus on the Family radio as he has since the mid-1970s. Since Dobson’s arrival in Colorado Springs, the following of his radio shows has ballooned to 6 to 10 million weekly listeners, who donate over $150 million a year to Focus. Dobson’s daily radio broadcast is now the third most popular show in the country, just behind those of Rush Limbaugh and Paul Harvey. Together with Dobson’s newsletters, Focus media reach more than 200 million people worldwide, from the Americas to Africa. After the Republican victories in the 2004 campaign (top Republican political strategists credited Dobson with helping to reelect George W. Bush as president and keep far-right Republicans in control of the Congress), Dobson was given a direct political line to the White House; he was even invited to a personal meeting with the President on U.S.-Iran policy.
With an approval rating of 73 percent among evangelicals—more than 25 points higher than that of the gaffe-prone Reverend Pat Robertson—Dobson is today acknowledged within the highest echelons of the Republican Party as the most influential leader of the Christian right. And with large parts of the Republican Party, especially its nominating wing, in the grip of his movement, he is therefore one of the most powerful men in America.
“He has gained the stature of a pope in the Middle Ages, the ability to direct the masses politically one way or the other in the name of the Almighty,” said Scott Fagerstrom, former religion reporter of the conservative Orange County Register, in 1997. “And, unfortunately, the masses don’t question him.” Dobson’s authority over the movement, and the movement’s somnambulistic veneration of him, have intensified so much since Fagerstrom’s observation that it sometimes seems as though Dobson is leading a cult.
Republican Gomorrah Page 5