Stealing Jesus: how fundamentalism betrays Christianity

by Bruce Bawer

  For Robertson, indeed, the single great enemy is "globalism"—the notion (characterized by him as liberal wickedness) that Americans should care not only about their fellow countrymen but also about people beyond their borders. He says that many universities seek "to indoctrinate a new generation of Americans into the globalist and nonstatist mode of thinking. That means creating educational structures for thought modification (read that, 'thought control') and accepting idealistic theories that will lead inevitably to revolutionary activism." (The parenthetic reference to "thought control," by the way, is Robertson's, not mine.) Yet what is Jesus' parable of the good Samaritan if not a brief for what Robertson calls globalism? Jesus' message is that we should not regard borders—whether between individuals or families or nations—as limits on our love for our fellow human beings. Plainly, a large part of what makes "globalist" thinking dangerous in Robertson's eyes is that in most foreign nations nowadays, fundamentalist Christians wield far less power than they do here. Western Europe, he laments, has essentially abandoned Christianity, while Japan is a non-Christian country that does not share "our values." For these reasons, he sees an increasingly united Europe and an increasingly powerful Japan as menaces to America. For the same reasons, he inveighs against one-world government, which, he says, would only be a Utopian "counterfeit of the millennial government that Christ will establish."

  Jesus taught his listeners not to attend overmuch to the sins of others but to love other people and to look rather into the sins of their own hearts. Robertson turns this teaching completely around. When we become Christians, he says, we see our own sins and recognize them as forgiven, and then (that little matter having been taken care of) turn to "see the sins of others—our relatives and friends who are not saved, indeed, the whole world." This is typical of legalistic Christian thinking: The moment you join the club, you're "saved," and thus permitted—indeed, encouraged—to turn your attention from the condition of your own soul to whatever you may choose to perceive as the sins of those around you.

  For Robertson, of course, Protestant fundamentalists are the only true Christians. In The New Millennium, he defines Protestant fundamentalists as "those who actually believe the Bible is the Word of God and that it contains truth which must be believed and followed." Eventually, he says, "the believers will stand firmly astride the fallen and crumbling ruins of the secular colossus." In Robertson's view, plainly, a major part of the reward for "believers" is that one day they will joyfully and triumphantly walk over the battered and bloodied remains of fallen nonbelievers. We are a long way here from the parable of the good Samaritan.

  As the liberal lobbying group People for the American Way noted in a 1996 press release, Ralph Reed has said that "We believe in a separation between church and state that is complete and inviolable," while Robertson has described separation of church and state as "a lie of the left" that "we're not going to take . . . anymore." Reed has consistently maintained that the Christian Coalition does not seek to force its members' beliefs upon others; Robertson, by contrast, complains that "our government has officially insulted Almighty God and has effectively taken away from all public school children any opportunity for even the slightest acknowledgment of God's existence"—his point plainly being that it is part of the American government's job to introduce schoolchildren to religion. Which of our founding fathers would ever have agreed that public schools should indoctrinate children in this or that faith tradition? Robertson actually claims that the Supreme Court's decisions on compulsory school prayer and other such issues called down upon the United States "the wrath of God." As evidence for this, he cites a series of national tragedies: the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the 1969 stock market plunge, the rise in oil prices and U.S. trade deficit of the early 1970s, President Nixon's resignation, the Iranian hostage crisis, and so forth. Of course, American history before 1963 was at least equally crowded with unfortunate events; but Robertson counts on the fact that his readers, by and large, will not realize that. He also counts on his followers' image of the Almighty being close enough to his own that they will believe God induced Lee Harvey Oswald to kill Kennedy in order to punish the nation—and with the expectation, of course, that in the fullness of time Pat Robertson would come along and explain to America exactly what it had done to anger its Creator.

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  10

  THE CHOIRBOY

  It's clear why Robertson chose Ralph Reed to serve as the Christian Coalition's public face in the mainstream media. The slight, boyish Reed, with his wide-eyed choirboy countenance, would seem to have been born to disarm mainstream Americans and to remind Christian Coalition members of their favorite young preacher or youth leader. Indeed, at first glance Reed—who grew up in Miami and at a tender age became, in his own words, a "political junkie"—looks very much like a high-school student council president, his earnest, wholesome appearance, perfect posture, and ubiquitous blue business suit only reinforcing the image of an eager boy playing grown-up; he would appear to embody a bright-eyed, squeaky-clean type of American youth that was once portrayed in movies by the likes of Mickey Rooney and Jimmy Lydon.

  Yet Reed's innocuous, unworldly appearance is utterly deceptive— for when he opens his mouth, he proves to be as adept as anyone on Capitol Hill at political "spin." Addressing the Christian Coalition, he can make the right pious noises about uncompromisable ideals; speaking with politicians, he can compromise with the best of them; appearing on network TV, he can make the Religious Right agenda sound decent, modest, reasonable. He is as slick as they come. Yet his effectiveness is blunted by the fact that he ultimately stands for nothing. Though Christian Coalition members tolerated his leadership for eight years, many have been at best lukewarm about him, sensing—and distrusting—the very pragmatism and inside-the-Beltway savvy that helped win the Coalition clout in official Washington.

  One mark of Reed's pragmatism is the dramatic contrast between many of his public statements and many of Robertson's. There have always, of course, been shades of difference between the rhetoric that pressure-group leaders direct at nonmembers and the rhetoric they direct at members. But Reed and Robertson took these differences to schizophrenic lengths. Reading their statements on the same subjects, one might never have known that one of them worked at the time for the other. If Robertson reflects the extreme social, political, and theological views of many legalistic Christians, Reed presents an equally clear picture of the moderate image of legalistic Christianity that its political leaders seek to cultivate among mainstream readers.

  The subtitle of Reed's book—How Christians Are Changing the Soul of American Politics—is typical of his "spin." We may pass over the implication here that the only real Christians are those who seek to change America under Reed's and Robertson's direction and may simply observe that if these Christians have indeed changed the soul of American politics, they have done so by introducing into it not a long-needed spirit of Christian fellowship but unchristian rancor, disinformation, and scare tactics. They have done so on such an immense scale, moreover, that they have managed to make American politics even uglier than it was before. Indeed, though Reed makes conspicuous use of such words as Christian and soul, and though he strains to convince non—Religious Right readers that his movement's agenda derives from universal and enduring Christian values, Active Faith makes it clear that Reed has the soul of a consummate political strategist for whom Christian principle always takes a backseat to strategic considerations.

  One slippery thing that Reed does is to shift continually between employing terms like religious, Christian, "people of faith," and "faith community" in their broadest sense—using Christian, that is, to describe members of all Christian groups, and using the other terms to describe people of all faiths—and employing these terms in the usual legalistic Christian way, to refer only to fundamentalists and conservative evangelical Christians. Reed moves back and forth between these two ways of speaking as it suits his purposes. When he wants to
make a point about how devout Americans are, he says that the overwhelming majority are churchgoing Christians (in saying this, of course, he is including people whom most legalistic Protestants would not consider true Christians). Likewise, when he wants to show that "people of faith" have always played a role in American politics, he focuses on liberals like Rauschenbusch and Fosdick (and even FDR!), whose beliefs would most certainly not qualify them as Christians in the eyes of legalistic Protestants. In the same way, when Reed wishes to suggest that Religious Right members are more affluent and educated than some people think, he cites poll results craftily: "Surveys show that religious conservatives are not the boobs some think they are. The average committed Christian who attends church regularly is a forty-year-old woman who has attended college, is married with children, and whose household income of $40,000 is one-third above the national average." Of course Reed is here equating "committed Christian" with "religious conservative."

  Reed lumps nonlegalistic Christians in with legalists, in short, when he wants to make the statistics on his constituency more impressive to a general readership. Yet when he wishes to validate his movement's political views, he uses Christian and other terms in a narrow sense, implying a connection between essential Christian belief and his movement's politics. For example, he speaks of "the Christian view of homosexual practices" as if all Christians held the same view about those "practices." Similarly, Reed writes that when he attended a 1988 Republican Party precinct caucus in Atlanta, "the party establishment had reacted to this influx of religious folk with all the horror of a country club invaded by yahoos." The implication here is that the country-club types were not "religious folk"; yet surely most members of the Republican Party establishment in Atlanta in 1988 were Christians of one kind or another.

  The political writer Michael Lind has commented shrewdly on Reed's use of terms like "Christian conservatives," "pro-family voters," and "people of faith" as labels for his constituency. "The purpose of the term 'Christian conservative,'" notes Lind, "is to pass off the narrow, and often bizarre, political-moral agenda of the tiny minority of Americans who are far-right Protestant evangelicals as the agenda of the substantial number of Americans who are both Christian (in one or another tradition) and conservative (usually in a rather vague and moderate way)." Indeed, the groups whom Reed labels pro-family, people of faith, and Christian conservatives constitute a far smaller subset than all people who are pro-family (who, after all, is against the family?), all people who subscribe to some faith (does Reed's "faith community" include Hindus, whose religion Robertson considers satanic?), and all who identify themselves as both Christian and conservative.

  According to Reed, the Christian Coalition accepts that one can be both Christian and liberal. Yet Reed also suggests that because they are liberal on certain issues, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton can't possibly be real Christians. Reed protects himself by making these charges indirectly; he cites a remark by Dinesh D'Souza to the effect that, by 1980, President Carter "was viewed as a dangerous apostate" and adds that "for some evangelicals and Roman Catholics, Bill Clinton is another Jimmy Carter, someone who accedes to a pro-abortion and liberal social agenda and promotes it beneath the veneer of Scripture." Reed's point is clear: If you're a liberal, your Christianity can't be real but is only a "veneer." Routinely, Reed uses views on abortion and homosexuality as a litmus test for true spirituality. Liberals, Reed maintains, "have learned to mask their retreat [from Christian morality] with the rhetoric of values and spirituality. While embracing the counterculture and the radicalism of feminists and gay rights activists, the Democrats maintain the facade of the traditional morality that was their hallmark from Jefferson to Bryan." This closing flourish is absurd, for Thomas Jefferson—who was far less of a traditional moralist by the standards of his time than any prominent Democrat is today by the standards of our time—would unquestionably have been appalled by Bryan's attempt at Dayton to squelch public education in the name of religion. In suggesting that both Carter and Clinton are phonies—people who say they're Baptists but really aren't—Reed is echoing a sentiment common in legalistic churches: namely, that liberal Baptists aren't real Baptists, nontraditional Catholics aren't real Catholics, and so on. Yet Reed perversely attempts to take the sting off this charge by referring to Jimmy Carter and John Anderson as "two of the most devout Christians in the history of recent politics."

  Reed's rhetorical shell game with words like Christian is not an isolated tactic. For though the Christian Coalition presents itself as being devoted to Christian values, it has engaged in some of the most sweep-ingly dishonest political practices on display in America today. For instance, the Christian Coalition gained much of its power through the use of "stealth tactics": telling candidates for local elections not to advertise their Christian Coalition connection. So strongly identified are stealth tactics with the Christian Coalition that Reed spends an entire chapter trying to deny (in the face of mountains of proof to the contrary) that the organization has used such tactics. With equal brazenness, he describes the Christian Coalition's notorious voter guides as examples of "voter education literature" that are "studiously nonpartisan" in that they merely outline candidates' positions. Yet every politician in the United States knows that those voter guides, which are distributed in churches by the million on the Sunday before Election Day, are designed to shift votes to the Christian Coalition's preferred candidates, and that, to this end, they calculatedly omit some issues and routinely misrepresent candidates' positions on others. (For instance, the Christian Coalition asked many 1996 candidates for their views on a ban on "semi-automatic firearms," but represented those views on voter guides as positions on "firearms"—which can be understood, of course, to mean hunting rifles.) In August 1996 the Federal Election Commission condemned these guides as political propaganda, not educational tools, and declared that the Christian Coalition, by issuing them, endangers its status as a tax-exempt nonpolitical organization.

  Reed responded by repeating the outrageous claim that the guides are nonpartisan and objective.

  Reed's basic thesis in Active Faith is simple. He claims that liberals object to Religious Right political activities on the grounds that religious Americans have no business working for laws that reflect their beliefs. Reed argues that religion does have a place in American politics and always has. The difference, he says, is that earlier American political movements by "people of faith" were liberal—he goes on at length about abolitionism and the Social Gospel—whereas the current influx of religion into politics is overwhelmingly a conservative phenomenon.

  This thesis is disingenuous: Few people of any political stripe would dispute that religion has always motivated some people to be involved in politics, and few would deny such people's right to vote their convictions. The principal concern that many Americans have about people on the Religious Right is not that they are motivated by religion but that they seek, in the name of religion, to pass laws that restrict other people's civil rights and preserve social and economic injustice; by contrast, members of such religion-inspired political movements as abolitionism and the Social Gospel always strove to secure other people's civil rights and to improve their social or economic status.

  In defending his argument that the Religious Right should be involved in politics, Reed quotes the abolitionist preacher Theodore Parker to the effect that "the curve of the moral universe is long, but it leads toward justice." It is astonishing for Reed to quote Parker, not only because Parker was a Unitarian (a fact that Reed calculatedly omits) but also because Parker's words reflect the widespread nineteenth-century American confidence in social and moral progress, which is utterly at odds with the dispensationalist belief that the world is in a steady moral decline toward the Great Tribulation. For Reed to quote from Parker, then, is both to risk angering his constituents and to make mainline Protestant readers think that those constituents are much closer to them theologically than is the case. Indeed, Reed's use of Parker to
defend the Religious Right is a historical outrage—for today's Christian Coalition loyalists are as hostile to the struggles for social justice by Parker's spiritual heirs as their spiritual (and, in many cases, biological) ancestors were to Parker's own efforts in the same direction.

  Reed even has the audacity to measure the Social Gospel against his own movement's notions of Christian orthodoxy. "The Social Gospel," he writes, "was a radical movement even as it retained many traditional Christian tenets, such as a belief in a sovereign, all-powerful God; the imminent millennial return of Christ; and the power of prayer." It is outrageous for Reed to oppose the Social Gospel's "radicalism" to "traditional Christian tenets": The Social Gospel was radical precisely because it flowed out of the Gospels. Reed is careful to distort Rauschenbusch's theology—to omit it, in effect—and he plainly does so because if he didn't, he would have to deal with the thorny question of whether Rauschenbusch's religion is a legitimate form of Christianity or not. Nonlegalistic Christians would say that it is; most legalistic Christians would say that it isn't. Reed also devotes several pages to an attempt to suggest that some continuity exists between his movement and Martin Luther King's. But it's ultimately clear that he regards King and others as strategic and tactical models, not as moral teachers, and that Reed himself is a purely political creature for whom morality is a concept to be manipulated to strategic ends.

  "If America has a national political tradition," Reed insists, "it is that of religious activism firmly rooted in millennialism." He cites Rauschenbusch and King as examples. But they were postmillennialists, not premillennialists; in their view, the millennium would come about through growing Christian love and service. In any case, their focus was not on the millennium but on their calling to live out the gospel message. It should be remembered that while Rauschenbusch was working to help the poor, his premillennialist contemporaries were condemning people to hell in God's name. They showed little concern about the living conditions of the poor, and they enthusiastically envisioned the lake of fire into which God would cast those whose beliefs differed from their own. It was these premillennialists, not Rauschenbusch, who were the spiritual ancestors of today's Religious Right.