by Bruce Bawer
In a demonstration of frankness about legalistic Christianity that is rare in the 1990s, a New York Times article quoted a British Christian lecturer as saying that "the assumptions of fundamentalism are so preposterous, alike in theory and practice, I am not altogether surprised when I call to mind my experiences in America twenty-five years ago. It was pitifully manifest then that both the science and theology of many of those who posed as authorities were half a century behind the times. But one would have hoped the intervening years would have opened their eyes." That article, and that quotation, appeared in the Times on July 11, 1925, in an article headlined "Europe Is Amazed by the Scopes Trial." The difference between 1925 and the late 1990s is that New York newspaper editors and reporters in those days were mostly modernist Christians who felt no qualms about publishing honest critical commentary on fundamentalism; as Christians, they took their faith seriously and recognized fundamentalism as a threat to its essentials. Today the powers that be at publications like the Times tend to be secular people who, fearful that they might be branded as anti-Christian, hesitate to criticize anything that goes by the name of religion in anything but muted terms.
When Michael Lind published an expose of Pat Robertson's anti-Semitism in a 1995 issue of the New York Review of Books, the only remarkable thing was that no one had done it earlier. Lind's article created a sensation in the political and intellectual community and throughout the mainstream media. What had Lind done? Simply this: He had read Robertson's books. They had been best-sellers, had been read (or at least purchased) by plenty of ordinary Americans on the Religious Right—but apparently no major media or political or intellectual figure had bothered to read them. None of these people, apparently, was sufficiently interested in seeing what was on the mind of the paramount leader of the most powerful single constituency in American politics today.
In the same way, programs like 60 Minutes, PrimeTime Live, and Dateline NBC investigate all kinds of corporate scams and small-scale con artists, but a phenomenon as widespread, as politically influential, and as socially destructive as legalistic Christianity goes scandalously unexamined. Consider the 60 Minutes episode broadcast on Easter Sunday 1996, which featured a segment on the Mormons. Given the series' history of vigorous investigative reporting and exposes, and given the fact that the Mormon Church had recently been engaged in strenuous efforts to kill gay-straight high-school student clubs in Utah and same-sex marriage in Hawaii, one might have expected the segment to touch on these stories. Certainly one assumed that some reference would be made to the church's notoriously brutal intolerance for nonconformity and dissent, its long-standing policy of suppressing the truth about its own dubious origins, and perhaps even the fact that of all major American religious institutions, the Mormon Church is the single most difficult one to grow up in if you're gay. Yet none of these things was mentioned. The segment was a total puff piece, celebrating the wealth, vibrancy, and expansion of the Mormon Church, now the seventh-largest religious body in the United States and one of the fastest-growing churches in the world.
To be sure, some attention was paid to peculiar Mormon traditions such as the wearing of "sacred undergarments," which supposedly protect one from harm. And Mike Wallace did (respectfully) ask Gordon Hinckley, the head of the church, about the fact that blacks had only recently been allowed to become priests. "That's behind us," Hinckley replied affably. "Don't look at these little fits of history." Wallace seemed happy to oblige. Throughout the segment, the two men's interaction was utterly congenial. The story concluded with an exchange about life after death: In a ringing tone of assurance, Hinckley mentioned his "hope of heaven"; Wallace replied haltingly that "I haven't been able to persuade myself" as to heaven's reality; Hinckley rejoined amiably, "Then you haven't thought about it long enough." Both men laughed, as did the several others (all men) who were present. Such is the mainstream media's view of the religious state of the nation: Either you're a secular overclass atheist, like Wallace, or you believe in sacred undergarments. It was dismaying that 60 Minutes, which week after week intrepidly discloses the petty crimes of small-town merchants, was unwilling to do anything short of a stunningly laudatory profile of the huge, powerful Mormon Church—which, in my view, merits far more serious attention from national TV journalists than does some neighborhood realtor or muffler shop.
Behind the scenes, of course, many people in the media will acknowledge that they recognize what a danger legalistic Christianity represents. But on-screen and on the printed page, they pretend to believe that religion, except when it takes the form of David Koresh— type cults, is an unqualifiedly positive force in American life. They refuse to acknowledge the extent to which the so-called Christian values touted by Religious Right leaders are not Christian at all, and to which the agendas of such groups as the Christian Coalition are based not on the gospel but on their members' own prejudices and antagonisms. To be sure, there is often a tone of condescension in the media toward legalistic Christians; but at the same time there is a tacit implication that, good or bad, this is authentic religion and that nonlegalistic faiths and believers are just watered-down versions of the real thing. In taking such positions, the media have performed a criminal disservice to America—and to real Christianity.
One evening in the fall of 1996 I was at a friend's book party at a New York bookstore when I ran into a longtime acquaintance, a brilliant critic who told me about the biography she had recently finished writing. She wanted to know what I thought about the fact that her editor, a devout Roman Catholic, had cut from her manuscript a reference to "these secular times." "These aren't secular times," he had told her bluntly. She had been surprised. What, she asked, did I think?
I told her that I agreed with her editor. The great majority of Americans, I said, believe in God. Most go to church. In fact the percentage of churchgoing Americans was probably higher now than ever. She nodded; this information was hardly new to her and she didn't dispute it. Yet she, a secular Jew who lived in New York City, still seemed puzzled. She knew all these things were true, and yet somehow she couldn't accept that these were not secular times.
It was not difficult to understand why. We were having this conversation in a high-toned Madison Avenue bookstore. We were surrounded by shelves full of novels, histories, literary biographies, music criticism, and expensive coffee-table books full of travel photographs and art reproductions. If there was a single Bible there, or any other religious book, I didn't see it. Indeed, few places could have felt more removed from the world of legalistic Christianity—and more representative of the intensely secular corner of the world in which both the critic and I live.
It is, indeed, the same intensely secular corner of the world in which most of the nation's public intellectuals and influential media figures live. Few of these people are religious. Few are even close to people who are religious. Yes, they know that most middle Americans are churchgoers—but in some sense, they can't quite think of those middle Americans as being real, and can't take those people's religious beliefs seriously. Most of these intellectuals and media figures have had years of education at the best schools; most have social and professional lives that include some of the smartest people of our time; most enjoy a steady diet of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and sundry intellectual journals. Yet few have ever attended a service at a legalistic Protestant church or spoken for five minutes with a fundamentalist; few have ever glanced at a book by Dobson or Robertson. As a result, these people's picture of America is a highly distorted one.
Confront these educated urbanites with the fact of this distortion, moreover, and most of them will not be pleased. Truth to tell, they find comfort in the notion that these are "secular times." It makes them uneasy to think that millions of their fellow citizens believe that the Bible is inerrant and that Satan is a living being; they may also feel unsettled, frankly, by the very idea of the "dimension of depth."
I've mentioned the play Inherit the Wind, and its role
in establishing misapprehensions about legalistic Christianity. I might add that the play has been understood by many secular readers as implying that religion in general is a thing of the past. Even some of us who grew up in mainstream Protestant churches got accustomed early on to hearing teachers and other authority figures speak matter-of-factly about the contemporary era as "postreligious" or "post-Christian." Why do so many people speak this way? Either they genuinely don't know that most Americans nowadays are churchgoers, or they somehow simply can't take churchgoers seriously, can't think of them as people who really matter. In March 1995,1 was invited by a humanities foundation to participate in a private roundtable discussion in New York City about the future of American culture. Most of the other participants were upper-middle-class Ivy League graduates. During the meeting, a professor of medieval literature mentioned that the church remains an important social institution. A young stockbroker shook his head. "Who goes to church?" he asked. "Nobody. Maybe one percent of the population." Did he really mean one percent of the population? Or only one percent of the sort of people he knows and socializes with—the people that "matter"? In any case, the reactions of the others at the meeting made it clear that they shared the stockbroker's view. Such is the level of knowledge about religion in America today on the part of many powerfully placed secular Americans.
This attitude toward religion is routinely reflected in the writings of the secular liberal intellectuals who shape public debate on social and cultural issues. Consider Andrew Delbanco's 1995 book The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil. The title itself is remarkable, given that millions of Americans think of themselves as literally being accompanied by angels and stalked by demons. "When American culture began," writes Delbanco, a humanities professor at Columbia University, "this devil was an incandescent presence in most people's lives. . . . But by 1700 he was already losing his grip on the imagination—a process that has continued ever since and that has left us, in the words of the psychologist Henry Murray, with a Satan who is 'no more than a vestigial image.'" Later in his book Delbanco reiterates the point: "Few people still believe in what the British writer Ian McEwan has recently called 'a malign principle, a force in human affairs that periodically advances to dominate and destroy the lives of individuals or nations, then retreats to await the next occasion.'"
On the contrary, as we have seen, tens of millions of Americans do indeed believe in such a force. They are haunted by it. They call it Satan. In America today, Satan is constantly on the minds of more people than in any place at any time in history. When Delbanco describes contemporary Americans as being reluctant to speak of evil or to label people as evil, he could not be more mistaken. If he presented his book as a study of secular America, or of the small intellectual class to which he belongs, his observations would be correct and, in fact, highly perceptive. But he doesn't present the book in this way; his subtitle refers to "Americans," not American elites or the secular American overclass. It is as if America's tens of millions of legalistic Christians simply didn't exist. Delbanco quotes from scores of contemporary academic and literary works in an attempt to convey how today's writers treat the subject of evil, but he doesn't mention Hal Lindsey or Pat Robertson or Frank Peretti, each of whom has influenced popular conceptions of evil far more than all the writers Delbanco cites put together.
I do not mean to single out Delbanco, an exceedingly intelligent and gifted writer, for criticism; on the contrary, I offer him as an example of how liberal intellectuals of the first rank routinely leave legalistic Christians out of their picture of America, quite without realizing that they are doing so. Another example of this habit of mind is provided by the New York Times writer Richard Bernstein, who notes in his book Fragile Glory that "Like most children of the 1960s, I had read Camus and Gide, Sartre and Malraux, not to mention Hemingway and Fitzgerald." Of course, most American "children of the 1960s" never heard of most of these writers. Bernstein would doubtless explain that he was referring to the young people he grew up with, who attended Ivy League schools and went on to careers in government, media, higher education, or corporate boardrooms. This habit of mind has caused both the academy and the mainstream media, during the last generation, to offer an increasingly skewed picture of America, one in which there is no place for legalistic Christians except perhaps as a question mark somewhere near the edge.
Owing to this ingrained blindness to legalistic America, nonlegalistic Christians and secular liberals at the highest levels of our serious mainstream culture are always being shocked—not only by the rise of the Moral Majority and then the Christian Coalition, but also by the popularity of Ronald Reagan (whose chances to win the presidency many secular and nonlegalistic Americans saw as nil) and by the sudden meteoric rise of Promise Keepers.
If many liberal intellectuals have routinely omitted legalistic Christians from their picture of American life, their right-wing counterparts have in recent years been engaged in a bizarre strategic alliance with those same Christians. Among the things that make it bizarre is that many of the most prominent right-wing intellectuals are urban secular Jewish neoconservatives with strong backgrounds in the arts and culture, while legalistic Christians tend to be anti-intellectual, anti-Semitic philistines who live in suburbs or rural areas and whose End Times theology happily looks forward to the conversion of some Jews and the eternal torture of the others. In spite of all these differences, Jewish neocons have supported legalistic Christianity for pragmatic reasons: They feel that political rights and social entitlements are expanding beyond reason, that culture (both high and popular) is being marred by liberal politicization, and that legalistic Christians are a necessary ally in resisting these trends.
In order to keep this alliance harmonious, Jewish neocons have even gone so far as to echo legalistic Christians' rhetoric to the effect that America is a "Christian nation" and their calls for laws and Constitutional amendments that would secure that identity. In a 1995 Wall Street Journal article defending "the Christian conservative movement," for instance, Irving Kristol, editor of The Public Interest and publisher of The National Interest, recalled how his son, the conservative-movement leader William Kristol, attended a Calvinist private school that had compulsory chapel. "The fairly large numbers of Jewish students simply went through the motions," wrote the elder Kristol, "understanding that a certain courtesy was owed the Christian majority of this country." Kristol implied that compulsory prayer in public schools would not be so bad, either. But no thoughtful person who takes religion seriously would want to be on either side of the kind of situation Kristol describes. What conscientious Jewish student would say prayers he didn't believe in? What Christian who took his or her prayers seriously would want to be surrounded at a prayer service by nonbelievers who were only pretending? This is a scenario designed to appeal to legalistic Christian sensibilities—for it's all about appearances, not about genuine religious belief and spiritual experience. It is a shared fondness for such appearances—those that reflect order, discipline, and "traditional values"—that has bound legalistic Christians and Jewish neocons in unholy alliance.
In late 1996, to be sure, there were some signs of serious rupture in this entente. When the magazine First Things, edited by the traditionalist Roman Catholic priest Richard John Neuhaus, published a symposium whose legalistic Protestant and Catholic participants suggested that the U.S. government had forfeited its legitimacy by supporting "un-Christian" policies, some neocons reacted with alarm. The historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, who is married to Irving Kristol, warned that such rhetoric on the part of conservatives would make them look "extremist"; the polemicist Midge Decter cautioned against the danger of "strengthening the devil's hand" through "reckless" rhetoric. These and other neocons seemed not to understand anything about the people they were dealing with. Himmelfarb is a historian, but if she knew more about the history of legalistic Christianity in America, she would know that these people's views are extremist; as for Decter,
she seems unaware that for most legalistic Christians, she—as a secular Jew—is herself very much of the Devil. In her writing, a reference to the Devil may be a rhetorical flourish, but in the views of many of her legalistic Christian associates, the Devil is a living creature whose deputies are everywhere this side of heaven and who seeks to deprive Christians of salvation. This controversy illuminates something that many people with connections to neoconservatism have warned about for years: the fact that the neocons, while vigorously defending legalistic Christians, have never taken religion very seriously (except as a social and moral force) and have thus not taken their allies' theologies very seriously. Indeed, on some level those neocons seem to have failed to recognize that their allies do indeed actually believe certain things and live by them. What they have further failed to realize is that people who believe and live by legalistic Christian theology are by definition extremists who feel that the state should be run according to God's law as they perceive it.
The First Things controversy came along shortly after the publication of a book entitled Dumbing Down: Essays on the Strip-Mining of American Culture, in which political and cultural conservatives took on various liberal targets. The book opened with several pages of excerpts from the popular press designed to show that "the national intelligence is plummeting" and that "something particularly bad is happening in this country right now" (italics in original). Among the excerpts was one from a New York Times article about a Lutheran pastor who, after observing a long line of people waiting to see the movie Batman at a shopping mall and deciding that "entertainment is really the medium of the day," began offering electric bands and dramatic skits at his church, which as a result grew into a megachurch with weekly attendance in the four figures. The editors' reason for including this excerpt is obvious: The megachurches (which are overwhelmingly legalistic in their orientation) exemplify the vulgarization, the "dumbing down," of American religion.