Last week, Al Gore delivered his most timely, and perhaps most daring, speech for MoveOn. In explaining the Christian right's threat to democracy, Gore highlighted the strain of political Calvinism that has infused the movement with a relentless will to power:
I think it is truly important to expose the fundamental flaw in the arguments of these zealots. The unifying theme now being pushed by this coalition is actually an American heresy-a highly developed political philosophy that is fundamentally at odds with the founding principles of the United States of America.
We began as a nation with a clear formulation of the basic relationship between God, our rights as individuals, the government we created to secure those rights, and the prerequisites for any power exercised by our government.
Gary Bauer was one of the first to attempt push-back against Gore, writing in a mass email to his supporters last week,
And who are these Americans whom Gore hysterically screams at, Kerry blames for his defeat, that the media compares to Nazis, and that Senator Harry Reid imagines run the Republican Party? They are simply those of us who think marriage is between a man and a woman and that “under God” ought to remain in the Pledge of Allegiance.
Channeling Nixon, Bauer paints his supporters as the humble, silent majority, the "good people" terrorized by Stonewall drag queens and militant secularist freaks. All real Americans want is for the nattering nabobs of negativism to shut-up while they slurp perpetually filled-up cups of weak coffee at Waffle House, Bauer suggests. But while Bauer claims to speak for Peoria, he might as well be speaking for Pretoria.
Let's recall the Terri Schiavo affair for a second. America was bombarded with interview after interview with the supposed "religious leaders" crusading to prolong the life of a woman with the mental capacity of a celery stalk. They included an unknown, baby-faced lawyer, David Gibbs, who, like an evangelical Eddie Haskell, called reporters "sir" during interviews. Then there was Randall Terry, the beleaguered, bankrupted leader of the defunct Operation Rescue. And finally, there were those weird Friar Tuck guys whose constituency consists of a mailing list of about 10 people. This freak-show had the audacity to claim it represented the sentiments of Main Street USA.
The American public rejected Schiavo's saviors as they did the Elian Gonzalez fanatics. Like Elian, most Americans saw Schiavo as a pathetic tragedy, not a martyr. And with the Republicans' ill-conceived special bill to save Schiavo, the GOP was reborn in the eyes of the public as the party of governmental tyranny. Rebuked by the majority they habitually claim to represent, the Christian right retreated. The moment was a little like the aftermath of the Scopes Monkey Trial, when evangelicals unfortunately became the laughingstock of a rapidly changing American mainstream.
The Christian right's persecution complex swelled and its leadership grew increasingly extreme. I witnessed this siege mentality during the "Judicial War on Faith Conference" last month, where a bevy of speakers, including top GOP staffers and movement icons, called for the "mass impeachment" of judges. Some openly suggested judicial assassinations might also be apt. Imbued with a mixture of arrogance and spite, the Christian right went off the deep end.
In this month's Harpers, Chris Hedges says what many have been too afraid to declare in public: the Christian right is a fascist movement (Sorry, Harpers has no web edition). Hedges is a veteran war reporter who has spent his career in countries where violent right-wing extremists succesfully fomented chaos through domestic terror, most notably Serbia under Miloshevic and Israel post-Oslo. He explained his thesis on the Christian right to me long before I went to the "War on Faith" conference and I reacted with skepticism. After the conference, however, while I still quibbled with his use of the term "fascists," the overall theme of his argument began to resonate.
The National Review's Stanley Kurtz responded to Hedges with a column laced with ad hominem attacks on anyone daring to suggest the Christian right has theocratic intentions. Kurtz writes in an over-heated, satirical style, mimicking the language of academics who have discussed theocratic Dominionism, or Christian Reconstructionism, to make them seem like wild-eyed consiracy theorists. His thesis?
By quoting a pathetic Dominionist extremist’s desperate efforts to prove his own influence, clever liberals can now argue that the ultimate goal of all conservative Christians is the re-institution of slavery, and execution for blasphemers and witches.
I've never heard any "clever liberals" argue that. Though Christian Reconstructionists do advocate the death penalty for all sorts of heathens (Kurtz cleverly avoids mentioning abortion doctors, whom that "pathetic Dominionist" Sen. Tom Coburn wants executed), as I said before, in the real world, influential Dominionists like D. James Kennedy would be satisfied with a theocracy-lite in which gays and religious minorities are legally marginalized and churches are part and parcel of the state. This radical transformation of government is already coming about before our eyes.
What's so sad about Kurtz's apologia -- besides his refuses to marshal a single fact in his argument -- is that he is attempting an argument at all. Like my man James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal, Kurtz doesn't seem to view the Christian right as anything other than a convenient political utility to the once top-heavy GOP. But how would Kurtz react if the Christian right's agenda came to pass? Would he welcome book-banning in public libraries? How about a complete ban on abortion and on gays from teaching in public schools? Does Kurtz believe, like Pat Robertson, that the judiciary is more of a threat to America than Al Qaeda? Too many conservatives (if there are any true conservatives left) cynically refuse to acknowledge the danger of their alliance with an avowedly theocratic movement.
As Karen Armstrong and many others explained at the "Examining the Real Agenda of the Religious Far-Right" conference in New York last weekend (which Kurtz flippantly mocked), the battle between the Christian right and advocates of church/state separation is not necessarily a left/right ideological conflict. The conflict is, in fact, only one theatre in a worldwide battle between fundamentalism and the Enlightenment. In this context, the Dominionist wing of the Christian right probably has more in common with Hamas than they do with the staff of William Buckley's National Review. But as conference speakers Frederick Clarkson and Chip Berlet correctly pointed out, the Democratic party, and by extension, the left, has struggled to make this argument. Instead, it has substituted perjoratives like "the radical religious right" for actual ideas.
Now that seems to changing. Just read Al Gore's speech or Hedges' article. Whether or not you agree with their choice of rhetoric, their argument is hard to dispute: the struggle for America's future is not a conflict between political parties, but between two ideologies. One values individual freedom, the other, clerical authoritarianism. True conservatives should choose sides more carefully.