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The Christian Right: History through a Glass, Darkly
Via NY Transfer News Collective All the News that Doesn't Fit
sent by Tim Murphy (activ-l)
Harpers Magazine - Dec, 2006 (posted Jan 10, 2007)
http://www.harpers.org/ThroughAGlassDarkly-12838838.html
Through a Glass, Darkly
How the Christian right is reimagining U.S. history
By Jeff Sharlet
We keep trying to explain away American fundamentalism. Those of us not
engaged personally or emotionally in the biggest political and cultural
movement of our timesthose on the sidelines of historykeep trying to come
up with theories with which to discredit the evident allure of this
punishing yet oddly comforting idea of a deity, this strange god. His
invisible hand is everywhere, say His citizen-theologians, caressing and
fixing every outcome: Little League games, job searches, test scores, the
spread of sexually transmitted diseases, the success or failure of terrorist
attacks (also known as signs), victory or defeat in battle, at the ballot
box, in bed. Those unable to feel His soothing touch at moments such as
these snort at the notion of a god with the patience or the prurience to
monitor every tick and twitch of desire, a supreme being able to make a lion
and a lamb cuddle but unable to abide two men kissing. A divine love that
speaks through hurricanes. Who would worship such a god? His followers must
be dupes, or saps, or fools, their faith illiterate, insane, or misinformed,
their strength fleeting, hollow, an aberration. A burp in American history.
An unpleasant odor that will pass.
We dont like to consider the possibility that they are not newcomers to
power but returnees, that the revivals that have been sweeping America with
generational regularity since its inception are not flare-ups but the
natural temperature of the nation. We cant conceive of the possibility that
the dupes, the saps, the foolsthe believershave been with us from the very
beginning, that their story about what America once was and should be seems
to some great portion of the population more compelling, more just, and more
beautiful than the perfunctory processes of secular democracy. Thus we are
at a loss to account for this recurring American mood.
Is fundamentalism too limited a word for a belief system of such scope and
intimacy? Lately, some scholars prefer maximalism, a term meant to convey
the movements ambition to conform every aspect of society to God. In
contemporary Americafrom the Cold War to the Iraq War, the period of the
current incarnations ascendancythat means a culture born again in the
image of a Jesus strong but tender, a warrior who hates the carnage he must
cause, a man-god ordinary men will follow. These are days of the sword,
literally; affluent members of the movement gift one another with real
blades crafted to medieval standards, a fad inspired by a bestselling book
called Wild at Heart. As jargon, then, maximalism isnt bad, an unintended
tribute to Maximus, the fighting hero of Gladiator, which is a film
celebrated in Christian manhood guides as almost supplemental scripture. But
I think fundamentalismcoined in 1920 as self-designation by those ready
to do battle royal for the fundamentals, hushed up now as too crude for
todays chevaliersstill strikes closest to the movements desire for a
story that never changes, a story to redeem all that seems random, a rock
upon which history can rise.
If the term fundamentalism endures, the classic means of explaining it
awayclass envy, sexual anxietydo not. We cannot, like H. L. Mencken,
writing from the Scopes monkey trial of 1925, dismiss the Christian right
as a carnival of backward buffoons jealous of modernitys privileges. We
cannot, like the Washington Post, in 1993, explain away the movement as
largely poor, uneducated and easy to command. We cannot, like the writer
Theodor Adorno, a refugee from Nazi Germany who sat squinting in the white
light of L.A., unhappily scribbling notes about angry radio preachers,
attribute radical religionnascent fascism?to Freudian yearning for a
father figure.
The old theories have failed. The new Christ, fifty years ago no more than a
corollary to American power, twenty-five years ago at its vanguard, is now
at the very center. His followers are not anxiously awaiting his return at
the Rapture; hes here right now. Theyre not envious of the middle class;
they are the middle class. Theyre not looking for a hero to lead them;
theyre building biblical households, every man endowed with headship over
his own family. They dont silence sex; they promise sacred sex to those who
couple properlyorgasms more intense for young Christians who wait than
those experienced by secular lovers.
Intensity! Thats what one finds within the ranks of the American believers.
This thing is real! declare our nations pastors. Its all coming
together: the sacred and the profane, Gods time and straight time, what
theologians and graduates of the new fundamentalist prep schools might call
kairos and chronos, the mystical and the mundane. American
fundamentalismnot a political party, not a denomination, not a uniform
ideology, but a manifold movementis moving in every direction all at once,
claiming the earth for Gods kingdom, in the world but not of it and yet
just loving it to death anyway.
The Christian nation of which the movement dreams, a government of those
chosen by God but democratically elected by a people who freely accept His
will as their own, is a far country. The nation they seek does not, at the
moment, exist; perhaps it could in the future. More important to
fundamentalism is the belief that it did exist in the American past, not in
the history we learn in public school and from PBS and in newsmagazine cover
stories on the Founders but in another story, one more biblical, one more
mythic and more true. Secularism hides this story, killed the Christian
nation, and tried to dispose of the body. Fundamentalism wants to resurrect
it, and doing so requires revision: fundamentalists, looking backward, see a
different history, remade in the image of the seductive but strict logic of
a prime mover that sets things in motion. The cause behind every effect,
says fundamentalist science, is God. Even the inexorable facts of math are
subject to His decree, as explained in homeschooling texts such as
Mathematics: Is God Silent? Two plus two is four because God says so. If He
chose, it could just as easily be five.
It would be clichi to quote Orwell here were it not for the fact that
fundamentalist intellectuals do so with even greater frequency than those of
the left. At a rally to expose the myth of church/state separation I
attended this spring, Orwell was quoted at me four times, most emphatically
by William J. Federer, an encyclopedic compiler of quotations whose
Americas God and Countrya collection of apparently theocentric bons mots
distilled from the Founders and other great men for use in speeches,
papers, [and] debateshas sold half a million copies. Those who control
the past, Federer said, quoting Orwells 1984, control the future.
History, the practical theology of the movement, reveals destiny.
Federer, a tall, lean, oaken-voiced man, loved talking about history as
revelation, nodding along gently to his own lectures. He wore a gray suit, a
red tie marred by a stain, and an American flag pin in his lapel. He looked
like a congressman, which was what hed wanted to be: he was a two-time
G.O.P. candidate for former House minority leader Dick Gephardts St. Louis
seat. He lost both times, but the movement considers him a winnerin 2000,
he faced Gephardt in one of the nations most expensive congressional races,
forcing him to spend down his war chest. Federer considered this a
providential outcome.
Federer and I were riding together in a white school bus full of Christians
from around the country to pray at the site on which the Danbury,
Connecticut, First Baptist Church once stood. It was in an 1802 letter to
the Danbury Baptists that Thomas Jefferson first used the phrase wall of
separation, three words upon which the battle over whether the United
States is to be a Christian nation or a cosmopolitan one turns. Federer,
leaning over the back of his seat as several pastors bent their ears toward
his story, wanted me to understand that what Jeffersonnotorious deist and
author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedomhad really meant to
promote was a one-way wall, designed to protect the church from the state,
not the other way around. Jefferson, Federer told me, was a believer; like
all the Founders, he knew that there could be no government without God. Why
hadnt I been taught this? Because I was a victim of godless public schools.
Those who control the present, Federer continued his quotation of 1984,
control the past. He paused and stared at me to make sure I understood
the equation. Orson Welles wrote that, he said.
The first pillar of American fundamentalism is Jesus Christ; the second is
history; and in the fundamentalist mind the two are converging.
Fundamentalism considers itself a faith of basic truths unaltered (if not
always acknowledged) since their transmission from Heaven, first through the
Bible and second through what they see as American scripture, divinely
inspired, devoutly intendedthe Declaration of Independence, the
Constitution, and the often overlooked Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which
declared religion necessary to good government and thus to be encouraged
through schools. Well into the nineteenth century, most American
schoolchildren learned their ABCs from The New-England Primer, which begins
with In Adams Fall/We sinned alland continues on to Spiritual Milk for
American Babes, Drawn out of the Breasts of both Testaments. In 1836,
McGuffeys Eclectic Readers began to displace the Primer, selling some 122
million copies of lessons such as The Bible the Best of Classics and
Religion the only Basis of Society during the following century.
It wasnt until the 1930s, the most irreligious decade in American history,
that public education veered away from biblical indoctrination so thoroughly
that within a few decades most Americans wrongly believed that the
nationalism of manifest destinyitself thinly veiled Calvinismrather than
open piety was the American educational tradition. The movement now sees
that to reclaim America for God, it must first reclaim that tradition for
Him, and so it is producing a flood of educational texts with which to wash
away the stains of secular history.
Such chronicles are written primarily for the homeschoolers and the
fundamentalist academies that together account for at least 2 million of the
nations children, an expanding population that buys more than half a
billion dollars of educational materials annually. Who, knowing the facts
of our history, asks the epigraph to the 2000 edition of The American
Republic for Christian Schools, a junior-high textbook, can doubt that the
United States of America has been a thought in the mind of God from all
eternity? So that I would know the facts, I undertook my own course of
homeschooling. In addition to The American Republic, I read the two-volume
teachers edition of United States History for Christian Schools,
appropriate for eleventh graders, as well as Economics for Christian
Schools, and I walked the streets of Brooklyn listening to an eighteen-tape
lecture series on America up to 1865 created for Christian college students
by Rousas John Rushdoony, the late theologian who helped launch Christian
homeschooling and revived the idea of reading American history through a
providential lens. [1]I was down by the waterfront, pausing to scribble a
note on Alexis de TocquevilleRushdoony argues that de Tocqueville was
really a fundamentalist Christian disguised as a Frenchmanwhen a
white-and-blue police van rolled up behind me and squawked its siren. There
were four officers inside.
What are you writing? the driver asked. The other three leaned toward the
window.
Notes, I said, tapping my headphones.
Okay. Whatcha listening to?
I said I didnt think I had to tell him.
This is a high-security area, he said. On the other side of a barbed-wire
fence, he said, was a Coast Guard storage facility for deadly chemicals.
Somebody blow that up and boom, bye-bye Brooklyn. Note-taking in the
vicinity might be a problem. So, I gotta ask again, whatcha listening to?
How to explainto the cop who had just clued me in on the ripest terrorist
target in Brooklynthat I was listening to a Christian jihadi lecture on how
democracy as practiced in America was defiance of Gods intentions, how God
gave to the United States the irresistible blessings of biblical
capitalism unknown to Europe, and how we have vandalized this with vulgar
regulations, how God loves the righteous who fight in His name?
Like this: American history.
Providence would have been a better word. I was unschooling myself, Bill
Apelian, director of Bob Jones Universitys BJU Press, explained. What
seemed to me a self-directed course of study was, in fact, the replacement
of my secular education with a curriculum guided by God. When BJU Press, one
of the biggest Christian educational publishers, started out thirty years
ago, science was their most popular subject, and it could be summed up in
one word: created. Now American history is on the rise. We call it
Heritage Studies, Apelian said, and explained its growing centrality:
History is Gods working in man.
My unschooling continued. I read the works of Rushdoonys most influential
student, the late Francis Schaeffer, an American whose Swiss mountain
retreat, LAbri (The Shelter), served as a Christian madrasah at which a
generation of fundamentalist intellectuals studied an American past
Christian in memory. And I read Schaeffers disciples: Tim LaHaye, who,
besides coauthoring the hugely popular Left Behind series of novels, has
published an equally fantastical work about history called Mind Siege. And
David Barton, the president of a history ministry called WallBuilders (as
in, to keep the heathen out). And Charles Colson, who, in titles such as How
Now Shall We Live? (a play on Schaeffers How Should We Then Live? The Rise
and Decline of Western Thought and Culture) and Against the Night: Living in
the New Dark Ages, searches from Plato to the American Founders to fellow
Watergate felon G. Gordon Liddy for the essence of the Christian
worldview, a vision of an American future so entirely Christ-filtered that
beside it theocracythe clumsy governance of priestly bureaucratsseems a
modest ambition. Theocentric is the preferred term, Randall Terry, another
Schaeffer disciple who went on to found Operation Rescue, told me. That
means you view the world in His terms. Theocentrists dont believe man can
create law. Man can only embrace or reject law.
History matters not just for its progression of fact, fact, fact, Michael
McHugh, a pioneer of fundamentalist education, told me, but for key
personalities. In Francis Schaeffers telling of U.S. history, for
instance, John Witherspoonthe only pastor to have signed the Declaration of
Independencelooms as large as Thomas Jefferson, because it was Witherspoon
who infused the founding with the idea of Lex Rex, law is king (divine
law, that is), derived from the fiercest Protestant reformers of the
seventeenth century, men who considered John Calvins Geneva too gentle for
God. Key personalities are often soldiers, such as General Douglas
MacArthur. After the war, McHugh explained, MacArthur ruled Japan according
to Christian principles for five years. To what end? I asked. Japan is
hardly any more Christian for this divine intervention. The Japanese people
did capture a vision, McHugh said. Not the whole Christian deal, but one of
its essential foundations. MacArthur set the stage for free enterprise, he
explained. With Japan committed to capitalism, the United States was free to
turn its attention toward the Soviet Union. The generals providential
flanking maneuver, you might say, helped America win the Cold War.
But one neednt be a flag officer to be used by God. Another favorite of
Christian history, said McHugh, was Sergeant Alvin York, a farmer from Pall
Mall, Tennessee, who in World War I turned his trigger finger over to God
and became perhaps the greatest Christian sniper of the twentieth century.
God uses ordinary people, McHugh said. Anyone might be a key personality.
The proper study of history, he explained, includes the student as a main
character, an approach he described as relational, a buzzword in
contemporary fundamentalism that denotes a sort of pulsing circuit of energy
between, say, pleasant Betty Johnson, your churchy neighbor, and the awesome
realm of supernatural events in which her real life occurs. There, Jesus is
as real to Betty as she is to you, and so is Sergeant York, General
MacArthur, and even George Washington, who, as father of our nation, is
almost a fourth member of the Holy Trinity, a mindbender made possible
through Gods math.
You may have seen his ghostly form, along with that of Abraham Lincoln,
flanking an image of George W. Bush deep in prayer in a lithograph
distributed by the Presidential Prayer Team, a five-year-old outfit that
claims to have organized nearly 3 million prayer warriors on the presidents
behalf. To wit:
In a similar image pasted onto billboards by a group called American
Destiny, a rouge-cheeked Washington kneels in prayer with an anonymous
soldier in fatiguesjust another everyday hero. That could be you, the
key-man theory of fundamentalist history proposes. Its like the Rapture,
when the saved shall rise together, but its happening right now: George
Washington and Betty Johnson and you, floating up toward victory with arms
intertwined, key personalities in Christian history.
One afternoon last year I found in my mail an unsolicited copy of The
Vision Forum Family Catalog, a glossy, handsomely produced,
eighty-eight-page publication featuring an array of books, videos, and toys
for The Biblical Family Now and Forever. This catalogue, I think, is as
perfect and polished a distillation as Ive found of the romance of American
fundamentalism, the almost sexual tension of its contradictions: its
reverence for both rebellion and authority, democracy and theocracy, blood
and innocence. The edition I received was titled A Line in the Sand, in
tribute to the Alamo. There, in 1836, faced with near-certain annihilation
at the hands of the Mexican army, the Anglo rebel Lieutenant Colonel William
Barret Travis rallied his doomed men by drawing said line with his sword and
challenging them to cross it. All who did so, he said, would prove their
preparedness to give their lives in freedoms cause.
A boy of about eight enacts the scene on the catalogues cover. He is
dark-eyed, big-eared, and dimple-chinned, and hes dressed in an idyllic
costume only a romantic could imagine Lieutenant Colonel Travis wearing so
close to his apocalyptic enda white planters hat, a Confederate gray,
double-breasted jacket, a bow tie of black ribbon, a red sash, and shiny
black fetish boots, spread wide. The young rebel seems to have been
Photoshopped in front of the Alamo at unlikely scale: he towers over a dark
wooden door, as big as an eight-year-old boys imagination.
Named one of twenty reasons there is hope for America [2] by The Church
Report magazine and considered by the other fundamentalist publishers I
spoke to as the intellectual vanguard of the movement, Vision Forum is
nonetheless just one of any number of providers for the fundamentalist
lifestyle, and hardly the biggest. But it is closer than any other to the
ideas of Rousas John Rushdoony, whose eighteen-tape lecture series I had, in
fact, ordered from Vision Forum. Rushdoony wrote two books in the early
1960sThe Messianic Character of American Education and Intellectual
Schizophreniawhich laid the right cornerstone of modern homeschooling. With
the alternative educational universe of homeschooling and private
evangelical academies came the formalization of Christianized American
history, and thus the basis for the contemporary movements broadest claims:
that the nation was conceived of as Christian, that separation of church and
state is either a myth altogether (Christian historian David Bartons
position, endorsed by a number of congressmen) or meant only to prevent a
single denomination from prevailing, a perspective that fundamentalists
consider a fair compromise with the anxieties of unbelievers.
Rushdoony took the vague sentiments of early twentieth-century
fundamentalism and found sources for them in American history, creating an
intellectual foundation for the movements political ambitions. [3] He
derived from the past not just a quaint hero worship but also a deep
knowledge of historys losers, forgotten Americansminor political figures
such as John Winthrop and Timothy Dwight and all the soldiers who fought
first for God, then country, the rugged men of the past who carried the
theocratic strand through from the beginning. The Christian conservatives of
his day, Rushdoony believed, had let themselves be bound by secularism. They
railed against its tyranny, but addressed themselves only to issues set
aside by secularism as moralthe best minds of a fundamentalist generation
burned themselves to furious cinders battling nothing more than naughty
movies and heavy petting. Rushdoony did not believe in such skirmishes. He
wanted a war, and he summoned the spirits of history to the struggle at
hand.
A strict Calvinist influenced by his upbringing in the Armenian Presbyterian
Church, Rushdoonys own mentor had been a Dutch theologian named Cornelius
Van Til. Van Til borrowed from a turn-of-the-century theologian turned Dutch
prime minister named Abraham Kuyper the idea of presuppositionalism, which
maintains that everybody approaches the world with set assumptions, thus
ruling out the possibility of neutrality and a classically liberal state;
and that since Christian presuppositions acknowledge themselves as such
(unlike liberalisms, which are deliberately ahistorical), every aspect of
governance should be conducted in the light of revealed truths. There is
not a square inch in the whole domain of our human experience, declared
Kuyper, over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry Mine!
Rushdoony saw in the theologians European project of health care and
schools and even a market conformed to biblical law a foreshadowing of the
city upon a hill prophesied for America by John Winthrop in 1630. He
thought most modern Americans would see this as well, if only they
understood that Scripture was the source of the nations idealism and that
capitalism, rather than Kuypers socialism, was the means of attaining the
mythical city. He spoke of his fondness for John F. Kennedys rhetoric, for
instance, in which he heard echoes of America as a redeemer nation,
invoking Christian nationalism as a high-minded justification for the Cold
War. Gods work must truly be our own, declared Kennedy, and Rushdoony
must have smiled sadly. Theyve lost the theology, Rushdoony would lecture
ten years after Kennedys death, but they havent lost the faith.
When Federer and I reached the overgrown foundation stones of Danbury
Baptist, which sit on a grassy hill sprinkled with pale violets, we gathered
in a circle with a crowd of pastors and activists from around the country.
The events organizer was Dave Daubenmire, head of a fundamentalist
history ministry called Minutemen United and a former high school football
coach from Ohio whod done battle with the ACLU over his insistence on
praying with his players. Still a regional outfit, the Minutemen had managed
to wrangle some respectable B-list activists. [4] In attendance were the
Reverend Rob Schenck, a Jewish convert to evangelicalism who runs a Capitol
Hill ministry for politicians called Faith and Action, and the Reverend Flip
Benham, head of Operation Save America, also known as Operation Rescue. He
was the man who baptized Norma McCorveyJane Roeinto fundamentalism. For
the rally, hed worn vintage white-and-brown wingtips, symbols of his
commitment to pre-1947 America1947 being the year when the Supreme Court
first codified Jeffersons wall of separation, in a case involving
government funds for parochial schools.
Providential historians are divided on the question of whether it was this
decision, Everson v. Board of Education, or FDRs socialistic New Deal that
led God to remove His protection from the nation. Operation Save Americas
number two, Pastor Rusty Thomas of Waco, Texas, favors the less
controversial New Deal school of thought. God, Rusty told me, always gave
us a left hook of judgment, then He gave us a right cross of revival. But
when the left hook of the Great Depression came, goes the economic theory of
fundamentalism, Americans turned to government as their savior instead of
God. So we got another left hook. Kennedys assassination, he explained.
Then another left hook: Vietnam. Still we didnt learn. So God kept throwing
punches, said Rusty: crack, AIDS, global warming, September 11, 2,500
flag-draped coffins shipped home from Iraq and more on the way.
Rusty began the days preaching, pacing back and forth between Danbury
Baptists foundation stones. He looked like an exclamation pointtiny feet
in thin-soled black leather shoes, almost dwarfish legs, and a powerful
torso barely contained by a jacket of double-breasted gray houndstooth. But
he had one of the most nuanced preaching voices Ive ever heard, a soft rasp
that seemed to come straight from a broken heart. We are here to start a
gentle revolution, he whispered. To reclaim the godly heritage. He
sounded sad, for his sin and minewe were all guilty of turning our backs on
the lessons of history. But then he growled up to a full fury that made even
the flaxen-haired pastor beside me literally blink before leaning forward
into Rustys thunder.
And when you go to war in your land Rusty recited from the Book of
Numbersand make no mistake about it, we are in a war
Amen! hollered Reverend Flip.
And when you go to war in your land, continued Rusty, against an
adversary who oppresses youand here he interrupted himself. How many
besides me are vexed by what is happening in the United States of America
today?
The crowd, shedding jackets and coats beneath a wan but warm spring sun,
murmured amens.
Your soul is vexed, Rusty moaned. Then he cried out: We are under
oppression!
AMEN! responded the crowd, rising up to match Rustys increased volume.
The bill of grievances was hard: Are we not in mourning? Rusty asked,
repeating the question and drawing it out as the women among us closed their
eyes and said, plain and simple, Yes. Are we not in mournnnning? he
moaned. As terrorism strikes us from without, corruptions from within?
Yes, said the women, the men seemingly shamed into silence. How many know
were losing our children? Yes. Our marriages are failing! YES.
Pastor Rusty, in fact, was a single fatherof ten, the youngest of whom is
named Torah. Liz, his wife of twenty years, died last year from lymphoma, on
the verge of what seemed like recovery. Reverend Flip had chronicled online
her long fight, a roller coaster of remission and relapse, so that the
familys prayer partnersactivists and Christian radio listeners across the
countrycould help fight for her survival. Goodnight for now, sweet
sister, Flip wrote when they failed. Well see you in the morning.
Theres going to have to be a great fundamental shift, Rusty preached near
the end of his sermon. Not just in society but among the believers. There is
a mothering church, he said, and a fatherhood church, separate but equal
aspects of God. The mother church nurtures and holds a child when hes done
wrong; the father church is the church of discipline. The mother church
feeds the poor, comforts the dying, attempting to remind nations of
righteous behavior. But to Rusty the lesson of American historythe lesson
of Valley Forge and Shiloh; Khe Sanh and Baghdad; Dallas, 1963; Roe v. Wade,
1973; Manhattan, 2001is clear: this nation is too far gone to be redeemed
by mercy alone. It is the father churchs time.
The father church, to Rusty, was the Old Testament church, and he had begun
the days rally with a command from the Hebrew Bible. Then shall you sound
an alarm with a trumpet that you may be remembered before the Lord your
God, he had recited, and you SHOUThe replaced the future tense of the
biblical shall with his own present-tense bellowto be saved from your
enemy! He had turned to the man standing behind him, a wiry, goateed
musician in a brown bomber jacket. So brother, Rusty had called, his voice
now joyful, let it rip, potato chip! At which the slender man had blown
his horn.
The days appointed born-again Baal Tokea, the Master of the Blast, was
named Lane Medcalf, and his instrument was a three-foot-long spiral hewn
from the head of ram: a shofar, a Jewish trumpet, generally reservedsince
the destruction of the Temple 1,936 years agofor Rosh Hashanah and Yom
Kippur. But once upon a time its blast signaled Joshuas assault on Jericho,
the first battle for the Promised Land.
Medcalf had borrowed his shofar from his bosss wife, also a Christian.
Medcalf was an artificial-flavor compounder, less than a chemist but more
than a factory worker. He had been saved since he was a teenager, but lately
he had become engrossed in Jewish history. Fifty-three, he was slender and
sleight in the shoulders, cautious but earnest about his words. The shofar
was for warfare, he explained. Its still a weapon of warfare, but for
fighting demonic influence. Medcalfs shofar blasts that day, for instance,
were intended to slay the invisible demons that had once surrounded Supreme
Court Justice Hugo Black, author of the Everson v. Board of Education
decision, in 1947.
Hugo got a little skewed, he told me. Black himself had not been evil,
Medcalf explained, just overwhelmed by Satan, who whispered in his ear. I
was toldhere Medcalfs voice dropped a notethat he was a former Ku Klux
Klan member. (This is true. He was also a Protestant, and his decision was
in keeping with that periods fundamentalist animus toward Catholic
schools.) Medcalf had also been told, he continued, that in the mid-1950s
there had been another Supreme Court decision, he couldnt remember the
name, that forced children to go to school where they didnt want to go.
This also is technically trueMedcalf may have been referring to Brown v.
Board of Education, the 1954 decision that overturned official school
segregation, leading to busing and the formation of private, all-white
evangelical academies.
It was Brown, along with two decisions in the early 1960s striking down
school prayer, that led to fundamentalisms embrace of history as a
redeeming creed. Catholics already had a system for educating their children
religiously. Fundamentalists began to build one, and the bricks of its
construction were the prooftexts of an alternate Christian nation: a letter
by John Jay, the first chief justice of the Supreme Court, on the biblical
justifications for Americas wars; President James Garfields Gilded Age
pleas for more pious men in high office; even, eventually, the speeches of
Martin Luther King Jr., claimed now from megachurch pulpits across the
country as a martyr of fundamentalism.
Medcalf was part of the generation for whom King was a hero rather than a
villain. When he was a kid, his older brother joined a Christian youth band,
and when he played his guitar kids prayed out loud, free-form, with their
hands in the air and their whole bodies swaying, while girls flocked to him.
I had never seen Christianity like that before, Medcalf remembered. He
wanted to join the band. He learned keyboards and the drums. Suddenly, I
could understand the Bible. The Holy Spirit got up on me. Man!
When he was fifteen, he accepted Jesus. When he was sixteen the girl he was
in love with accepted his invitation to a Bible study meeting, and later he
married her. Church was no longer a place you went to; it was an
experience you consumed, and you wanted as much as you could get. You wore
your jeans to worship and grew your hair long. You called yourself a Jesus
Freak and you called Jesus a revolutionary. You listened to groups like The
Way and Love Song and the All Saved Freak Band, and you read rags like Right
On! and The Fish and The Hollywood Free Paper. Truckin for Jesus,
Medcalf remembered. Solid stuff, man.
Medcalf suddenly looked sad. He blinked, as if holding back tears. What had
gone wrong?
We sold ourselves, he said, his voice nearly a whisper. He meant it
literally: albums and T-shirts, bumper stickers. Commercialism killed
Christian rock and roll. We lost our teeth. In 1973, the Supreme Court
handed down Roe v. Wade. It happened on our watch, man, Medcalf said. The
Jesus Freaks had failed. They had lived for today and forgotten tomorrow,
and then it had slipped away from them.
To get it back, Medcalf said, the movement must go backward. Not to the
1960s but to before. It needs a foundation, he explained, eternal truths.
These were to be found in two places: the Bible and the Constitution.
While we were talking, Reverend Flip had begun to preach. He told the crowd
about a recent victory hed scored in North Carolina, where hed led 700
prayer warriors to a school-board meeting to protest the formation of a
Gay-Straight Alliance club in a local high school. The preachers preached,
the singers sang, the prayers prayed, and the theology of the church became
biography in the streets! Flip said. The school board shut down the club.
Flip said this was what Jesus wanted. He even did an impression: Cry to
me, he said in his best bass God voice; the prayers of the righteous will
be answered.
Medcalf smiled and applauded gently. He told me how his prayers had changed
when he started studying history and blowing the shofar. I was praying for
God to restore America back to its roots one day when I had what I guess you
would call a supernatural experience. The Holy Spirit caused me to weep and
cry, enabling me to have a broken heart. Please come back, I prayed. It
was just so intense. It worked: Things have started changing. He said the
appointments of Samuel Alito and John Roberts to the Supreme Court were
probably the result of Gods intervention. They may be the men God was
waiting for, the right tools for the job of restoration. They may be under
an anointing.
This is the secret of Christian history. It doesnt require great
menMedcalf considered Bushs 2000 election an answer to prayer, but he
was under no delusions about the presidents natural abilitiesonly willing
men, ready to be anointed. Bush was one; Medcalf was another. Medcalf
submitted to Bushs authority according to Romans 13:1, a key verse of
American fundamentalismthe powers that be are ordained of Godbut both
submitted equally to Gods guiding hand. To Medcalf this results in a
democracy more radical than any dreamed of in the 1960s. In the flow of
secular time, Medcalf is a nebbish from Connecticut, mixing beakers full of
artificial flavors. But in Christian time, he is a herald, blowing his
shofar back to 1947, calling the key men of our Christian nations history
to battle.
In the pantheon of fundamentalist history, the man revered above all others
is General Stonewall Jackson of the Confederacy, perhaps the most brilliant
military commander in American history and certainly the most pious. United
States History for Christian Schools devotes more space to Jackson, Soldier
of the Cross, and the revivals he led among his troops in the midst of the
Civil War, than to either Robert E. Lee or Ulysses S. Grant; Practical
Homeschooling magazine offers instructions for making Stonewall costumes out
of gray sweatsuits with which one can celebrate his birthday, a
homeschooling fun day. The Vision Forum catalogue offers for men a
military biography and for the ladies a collection of Jacksons letters to
his wife; both books extol his strategic and romantic achievements as
corollaries to his unparalleled love of God.
Fundamentalists even celebrate the Confederate hero as an early civil rights
visionary, dedicated to teaching slaves to read so that they could learn
their Bible lessons. For fundamentalist admirers, that is enough; this fall
saw the publication of Stonewall Jackson: The Black Mans Friend, by Richard
G. Williams, a regular contributor to the conservative Washington Times.
Jackson fought not to defend slavery, argues another biographer, but for
religious freedom; he believed the North had usurped the moral jurisdiction
of God. The North seemed to be striving to alter basic American
structures, writes James I. Robertson Jr. Such activity flew in the face
of Gods preordained notion of what America should be.
Jacksons popularity with fundamentalists represents the triumph of the
Christian history that Rousas John Rushdoony dreamed of when he discovered,
during the early 1960s, the forgotten works of the theologian Robert Lewis
Dabney, including Life and Campaigns of Lieut.- Gen. Thomas J. Jackson
(Stonewall Jackson). Dabney had served under Jackson, but, more important,
he was a theologian in the tradition of John Calvinthat is, he believed
deeply in a God who worked through chosen individualsand he wrote the
generals life in biblical terms. Rushdoony imagined the story as
transcending its Confederate origins, and so helped make it a founding text
of the nascent homeschooling movement. [5]
In 2003, Vision Forum sponsored a national essay contest and awarded first
prize to a pretty, freckle-faced young woman named Amanda Freeborn for her
essay, How Stonewall Jackson Demonstrated a Biblical Vision of Manhood.
There is a name, writes Freeborn,
that casts upon the screen of our imaginations the image of the
personification of godly manhood. That name is Stonewall Jackson. . . . His
life was a testimony to the world of what God can do through a man
consecrated to his purposes.
Freeborn goes on to admire Jacksons reverence for authority and his
commitment to prayerin battle, wrote a fighting pastor who knew him,
Jackson would give up the reins of his horse to lift up his hands towards
heaven. And she admires his Job-like acceptance of sufferingin civilian
life he was shy, inept, and so physically fragile that he spent much his
time investigating ascetic diets and taking the waters at miracle spas
around the country. With his wife, Anna, he loved to dance secret polkas
when no one else was watching, but he felt so out of place in society that
he was deathly afraid of public speaking. Absent enemy fire, he did not know
how to take a stand. He watched John Brown hang with his own eyes and
marveled at the strength of the mans Christian conviction. And yet when his
own time to fight came, he proved just as devoted. Draw the sword, he told
his students at the Virginia Military Institute, and throw away the
scabbard. In All Things for Good: The Steadfast Fidelity of Stonewall
Jackson, fundamentalist historian J. Steven Wilkins opens a chapter on
Jacksons belief in the black flag of no quarter for the enemy with a
quotation: Shoot them all, I do not wish them to be brave. The only path
to peace, he believed, was total war.
Today, writes Freeborn,
Mr. Jacksons life stands as a witness to a new generation of what God can
and desires to do in each of His children. Let us rise up and follow the
shining example of this stern soldier, loving husband, devoted church
officer, and Christ-like man.
Civil War buffs study his military maneuvers and wonder whether, had he not
been mistaken for a Yankee and shot by his own men in 1863, he might have
outflanked the Union Army and fought the North to a standstill. But Freeborn
chooses as case study not a Civil War battle but his first victory as a
lowly lieutenant out of West Point. Sent to the Mexican War, he defied an
order to retreat, fought the Mexican cavalry alone with one artillery piece,
won, and was promoted, later commended by General Winfield Scott, commander
of the U.S. forces, for the way in which [he] slaughtered those poor
Mexicans.
Many of the poor Mexicans Jackson slaughtered were civilians. After his
small victory had helped clear the way for the American advance, Jackson
received orders to turn his guns on Mexico City residents attempting to flee
the oncoming U.S. army. He did so without hesitationmowing them down as
they sought to surrender.
What are we to make of this murder? Secular historians attribute this
atrocity to Jacksons military disciplinehe simply obeyed orders. But
fundamentalists see in that discipline, that willingness to kill innocents,
confirmation of Romans 13:1: For there is no power but of God: the powers
that be are ordained of God. Obeying ones superiors, according to this
logic, is an act of devotion to the God above them.
But waitfundamentalists also praise the heroism that resulted from his
defiance of orders to retreat, his rout of the Mexican cavalry so
miraculousits said that a cannonball bounced between his legs as he stood
fastthat it seems to fundamentalist biographers proof that he was anointed
by God. Is this hypocrisy on the part of his fans? Not exactly.
Key men always obey orders, but they follow the command of the highest
authority. Jacksons amazing victory is taken as evidence that God was with
himthat God overrode the orders of his earthly commanders. And yet the
civilian dead that resulted from Jacksons subsequent obedience of those
very same earthly commanders are also signs of Gods guiding hand. The
providential God sees everything; that such a tragedy was allowed to occur
must be evidence of a greater plan. One of fundamentalist historys favorite
proofs comes not from Scripture itself but from Ben Franklins paraphrase at
the Constitutional Convention: And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground
without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?
To put it in political terms, the contradictory legend of Stonewall
Jacksonrebellion and reverence, rage and orderresults in the synthesis of
self-destructive patriotism embraced by contemporary fundamentalism. The
most striking example is a short video on faith and diplomacy made in the
aftermath of September 11, 2001, by Christian Embassy, a behind-the-scenes
ministry for government and military elites. It almost seems to endorse
deliberate negligence of duty. Dan Cooper, an undersecretary of veterans
affairs, announces that his weekly prayer sessions are more important than
doing the job. Major General Jack Catton says that he sees his position as
an adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff as a wonderful opportunity to
evangelize men and women setting defense policy. My first priority is my
faith, he says. I think its a huge impact. . . . You have many men and
women who are seeking Gods counsel and wisdom as they advise the Chairman
[of the Joint Chiefs] and the Secretary of Defense. Brigadier General Bob
Caslen puts it in sensual terms: Were the aroma of Jesus Christ. Theres
a joyous disregard for democracy in these sentiments, for its demands and
its compromises, that in its darkest manifestation becomes the overlooked
piety at the heart of the old logic of Vietnam, lately applied to Iraq: In
order to save the village, we must destroy it.
On the Danbury village green Pastor Rusty gripped my arm and pulled me
close, tears streaming from hazel eyes as he confessed that he had betrayed
God. The rally had migrated from the hilltop to the towns center, an
historic patch of grass next to a redbrick parking garage. A stage had been
erected, and on it a series of preachers sermonized about God and American
history for a small crowd of parents and children sitting on blankets and in
lawn chairs. Rusty and I talked back by the literature tables. He had
something he wanted to explain. He had neglected the twin sins, he said, the
two wicked acts that fundamentalists believe to be the collective
responsibility of the entire society in which they occur. Child
sacrificeby which he meant abortionand sodomy. Any nation that condoned
those behaviors? That did not challenge them, that did not prevent them from
happening? It will be reduced to rubble.
He shook his head, eyes squeezed shut. The church had allowed women to
murder their children and men through sodomy to damn themselves and all
their brothers. It was his fault more than theirs because he knew the
blueprint of Gods Word. He had pored over the Bible and the Constitution
and the Mayflower Compact, had memorized choice words from John Adams and
John Witherspoon and Patrick Henry, Jeremiah and Nehemiah and John the
Revelator. Scripture and American history are in agreement, he had found:
beneath God, family, and church is the state, with only one simple
responsibility: The symbol of the state is a sword. Not a spoon, feeding
the poor, not a teaching instrument to educate our young. Rusty stepped
back, fists clenched. And the sword is an instrument of death! he yelled.
He twitched his Italian loafers in a preacher two-step. He shook out his
neck like a boxer. Then sorrow slumped his shoulders. He had failed to wield
the sword. He had failed the widows and orphans. He had failed his brothers
lost to sodomy. Theres nobody clean in this, he whispered.
Grief, not arrogance, translates the promise of salvationwhosoever shall
lose his life for my sake shall find itinto a battle cry. Guilt, not
pride, builds the most zealous discipline. Obedience is my greatest
weapon, the rallys organizer, Coach Dave, told me at the end of the day.
He took off his Minutemen United baseball cap, navy blue with a red cross,
and ran his hand through his gray hair. In obedience, he said, he found
strength. I imagined him lecturing his former football team. Obedience, he
continued, was a gift from God; but you needed the Holy Spirit to open it.
The Holy Spirit of God is like the software, he said.
He tried to explain. We may need another 9/11, he declared slowly, a
teacher reciting a lesson, to bring about a full spiritual revival. He
must have seen my surprise. Now, you dont get that, do you? I admitted
that I did not. Well, he continued, historys horrors are just like God
spanking a child. Thats a perfect example of where you need the software
to understand what I just said, or else youre gonna say, Coach, you mean
He spanks us by killing people? You need the software. Whats the software?
Well, its history. You gotta understand what history is. Its collective.
Are you getting the software? Collective. History.
I got it. Fundamentalism embraces its mythic past; our more comfortable,
liberal histories declare their own myths simply a matter of record. The
imagination with which we, the levelheaded masses, view the demigod Founders
and the Civil War, the Good Fight against Hitler and the American tragedy
of Vietnam (the tragedy is always ours alone), is almost as deeply mystical
as that of fundamentalisms, thickened by destiny, blind to all that does
not square with the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a nation.
There are occasional attempts at recovering these near-invisible pieces,
peoples history and national apologies and HBO specials about
embarrassing missteps in the march of progress, usually related to race and
inevitably restored to forward motion by the courage of some key man of
liberalism: Jackie Robinson at first base, 1947; Rosa Parks on the bus,
1955; Muhammad Ali refusing to fight in Vietnam. But such interventions are
not much different than fundamentalisms addition of Martin Luther King to
its pantheon; they are attempts to persuade ourselves that the big We of
nationalism was better than the little people of history actually were.
The actual past no more serves the imagination of secularism than that of
fundamentalism. Liberals like to point out that many of the Founders were
not, in fact, Christian but rather deists or downright unbelievers.
Fundamentalists respond by trotting out the Founders most pious words, of
which there are many (Franklin proposing prayer at the Constitutional
Convention; Washington thanking God for His direct hand in revolutionary
victories; etc., etc.). Liberals shoot back with the Founders Enlightenment
writings, and note their dependence on John Locke; fundamentalists respond
that Locke helped the Carolinas write a theocentric constitution. But
fundamentalist historians can also point, accurately, to the subsequent
instances of overlooked religious influence in American historynot just
Sergeant Yorks Christian trigger finger and Stonewall Jacksons tragic
example but also the religious roots of abolitionism, the divine
justification used to convert or kill Native Americans, the violent piety of
presidentsnot just Bush and Reagan but also Lincoln and McKinley and Wilson
and even sweet Jimmy Carter, the first born-again president, led by God and
Zbigniew Brzezinski to funnel anti-Communist dollars to the bloodthirsty
Salvadoran regime.
The dupes, the saps, and the foolsthe believersprefer their re-enchanted
past, alive to the dark magic with which all histories are constructed. For
them Americas past merely charts Gods love, its meanings revealed to His
key men, presidents and generals, preachers and a goy with a shofar. The
rest of us are simply not part of the dream. Fundamentalism is writing us
out of history.
Notes
1. For instance, the Protestant wind with which, according to the
eleventh-grade text, God helped the British defeat the Spanish Armada so
that the New World would not be overly settled by agents of the Vatican.
2. Although much of the catalogue is given over to educational materials for
Christian homeschoolers, the back of the book is dedicated to equipping
ones son with the sort of toys that will allow him to rebuild a culture of
courageous boyhood. Hats, for instanceleather Civil War kepis, coonskin
caps, and, for $95, a life-size replica of a fifteenth-century knights
helmet among them. An $18 video titled Putting on the Whole Armor of God
asks, Boys, are you ready for warfare? Young Christian soldiers may choose
from a variety of actual weapons, ranging from a scaled-down version of the
blade wielded by William Wallace, of Braveheart fame (which, at 41/4 feet
long, is still a lot of knife for a kid) to a 321/2-inch Confederate
officers saber. It is history at knifepointa theology of arms.
3. Rushdoony is best known as the founder of Christian Reconstructionism, a
politically defunct school of thought that drifted so far to the right that
it dropped off the edge of the world. Most notably, Rushdoony proposed the
death penalty for an ever-expanding subset of sinners, starting with gay men
and growing to include blasphemers and badly behaved children. Such
sentiments have since made him a bogeyman of the left, but also a convenient
scapegoat for fundamentalist apologists. Recently, First Things, a journal
for academically pedigreed religious conservatives, published an essay
titled Theocracy! Theocracy! Theocracy! in which journalist Ross Douthat,
eyes rolling, dismisses the fears of the anti-theocrat left by propping up
Rushdoony as a fringe lunatic, only to knock him down along with leftist
critiques that focus on his angriest notions. That reading of Rushdoonyby
liberal critics and conservative apologistsmisses what matters about his
revival of providential history.
4. Minutemen United should not be confused with the anti-immigrant Minutemen
militias. Coach Daves outfit is every bit as militaristic in its
rhetoricone Minutemen project is called Polished Shaftbut it is
educational in its operations, offering, for instance, instruction in
Americas godly heritage for schoolteachers.
5. Although Rushdoony was a bigot and a partisan of the South, his
commitment to states rights was not racial but religious: he recognized
that the Constitution fully separates church and state only at the federal
level. Thus a Christian nation could be built state legislature by state
legislature, an approach that has since become the main strategy of
Christian conservative organizations, which replicate themselves state by
state to do battle with better-known but more cumbersome liberal
organizations.
[Jeff Sharlet is a Contributing Editor of Harpers Magazine. His last article
for the magazine, Soldiers of Christ: Inside Americas Most Powerful
Megachurch, appeared in the May 2005 issue.]
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The Christian Right: History through a Glass, Darkly
Via NY Transfer News Collective All the News that Doesn't Fit
sent by Tim Murphy (activ-l)
Harpers Magazine - Dec, 2006 (posted Jan 10, 2007)
http://www.harpers.org/ThroughAGlassDarkly-12838838.html
Through a Glass, Darkly
How the Christian right is reimagining U.S. history
By Jeff Sharlet
We keep trying to explain away American fundamentalism. Those of us not
engaged personally or emotionally in the biggest political and cultural
movement of our timesthose on the sidelines of historykeep trying to come
up with theories with which to discredit the evident allure of this
punishing yet oddly comforting idea of a deity, this strange god. His
invisible hand is everywhere, say His citizen-theologians, caressing and
fixing every outcome: Little League games, job searches, test scores, the
spread of sexually transmitted diseases, the success or failure of terrorist
attacks (also known as signs), victory or defeat in battle, at the ballot
box, in bed. Those unable to feel His soothing touch at moments such as
these snort at the notion of a god with the patience or the prurience to
monitor every tick and twitch of desire, a supreme being able to make a lion
and a lamb cuddle but unable to abide two men kissing. A divine love that
speaks through hurricanes. Who would worship such a god? His followers must
be dupes, or saps, or fools, their faith illiterate, insane, or misinformed,
their strength fleeting, hollow, an aberration. A burp in American history.
An unpleasant odor that will pass.
We dont like to consider the possibility that they are not newcomers to
power but returnees, that the revivals that have been sweeping America with
generational regularity since its inception are not flare-ups but the
natural temperature of the nation. We cant conceive of the possibility that
the dupes, the saps, the foolsthe believershave been with us from the very
beginning, that their story about what America once was and should be seems
to some great portion of the population more compelling, more just, and more
beautiful than the perfunctory processes of secular democracy. Thus we are
at a loss to account for this recurring American mood.
Is fundamentalism too limited a word for a belief system of such scope and
intimacy? Lately, some scholars prefer maximalism, a term meant to convey
the movements ambition to conform every aspect of society to God. In
contemporary Americafrom the Cold War to the Iraq War, the period of the
current incarnations ascendancythat means a culture born again in the
image of a Jesus strong but tender, a warrior who hates the carnage he must
cause, a man-god ordinary men will follow. These are days of the sword,
literally; affluent members of the movement gift one another with real
blades crafted to medieval standards, a fad inspired by a bestselling book
called Wild at Heart. As jargon, then, maximalism isnt bad, an unintended
tribute to Maximus, the fighting hero of Gladiator, which is a film
celebrated in Christian manhood guides as almost supplemental scripture. But
I think fundamentalismcoined in 1920 as self-designation by those ready
to do battle royal for the fundamentals, hushed up now as too crude for
todays chevaliersstill strikes closest to the movements desire for a
story that never changes, a story to redeem all that seems random, a rock
upon which history can rise.
If the term fundamentalism endures, the classic means of explaining it
awayclass envy, sexual anxietydo not. We cannot, like H. L. Mencken,
writing from the Scopes monkey trial of 1925, dismiss the Christian right
as a carnival of backward buffoons jealous of modernitys privileges. We
cannot, like the Washington Post, in 1993, explain away the movement as
largely poor, uneducated and easy to command. We cannot, like the writer
Theodor Adorno, a refugee from Nazi Germany who sat squinting in the white
light of L.A., unhappily scribbling notes about angry radio preachers,
attribute radical religionnascent fascism?to Freudian yearning for a
father figure.
The old theories have failed. The new Christ, fifty years ago no more than a
corollary to American power, twenty-five years ago at its vanguard, is now
at the very center. His followers are not anxiously awaiting his return at
the Rapture; hes here right now. Theyre not envious of the middle class;
they are the middle class. Theyre not looking for a hero to lead them;
theyre building biblical households, every man endowed with headship over
his own family. They dont silence sex; they promise sacred sex to those who
couple properlyorgasms more intense for young Christians who wait than
those experienced by secular lovers.
Intensity! Thats what one finds within the ranks of the American believers.
This thing is real! declare our nations pastors. Its all coming
together: the sacred and the profane, Gods time and straight time, what
theologians and graduates of the new fundamentalist prep schools might call
kairos and chronos, the mystical and the mundane. American
fundamentalismnot a political party, not a denomination, not a uniform
ideology, but a manifold movementis moving in every direction all at once,
claiming the earth for Gods kingdom, in the world but not of it and yet
just loving it to death anyway.
The Christian nation of which the movement dreams, a government of those
chosen by God but democratically elected by a people who freely accept His
will as their own, is a far country. The nation they seek does not, at the
moment, exist; perhaps it could in the future. More important to
fundamentalism is the belief that it did exist in the American past, not in
the history we learn in public school and from PBS and in newsmagazine cover
stories on the Founders but in another story, one more biblical, one more
mythic and more true. Secularism hides this story, killed the Christian
nation, and tried to dispose of the body. Fundamentalism wants to resurrect
it, and doing so requires revision: fundamentalists, looking backward, see a
different history, remade in the image of the seductive but strict logic of
a prime mover that sets things in motion. The cause behind every effect,
says fundamentalist science, is God. Even the inexorable facts of math are
subject to His decree, as explained in homeschooling texts such as
Mathematics: Is God Silent? Two plus two is four because God says so. If He
chose, it could just as easily be five.
It would be clichi to quote Orwell here were it not for the fact that
fundamentalist intellectuals do so with even greater frequency than those of
the left. At a rally to expose the myth of church/state separation I
attended this spring, Orwell was quoted at me four times, most emphatically
by William J. Federer, an encyclopedic compiler of quotations whose
Americas God and Countrya collection of apparently theocentric bons mots
distilled from the Founders and other great men for use in speeches,
papers, [and] debateshas sold half a million copies. Those who control
the past, Federer said, quoting Orwells 1984, control the future.
History, the practical theology of the movement, reveals destiny.
Federer, a tall, lean, oaken-voiced man, loved talking about history as
revelation, nodding along gently to his own lectures. He wore a gray suit, a
red tie marred by a stain, and an American flag pin in his lapel. He looked
like a congressman, which was what hed wanted to be: he was a two-time
G.O.P. candidate for former House minority leader Dick Gephardts St. Louis
seat. He lost both times, but the movement considers him a winnerin 2000,
he faced Gephardt in one of the nations most expensive congressional races,
forcing him to spend down his war chest. Federer considered this a
providential outcome.
Federer and I were riding together in a white school bus full of Christians
from around the country to pray at the site on which the Danbury,
Connecticut, First Baptist Church once stood. It was in an 1802 letter to
the Danbury Baptists that Thomas Jefferson first used the phrase wall of
separation, three words upon which the battle over whether the United
States is to be a Christian nation or a cosmopolitan one turns. Federer,
leaning over the back of his seat as several pastors bent their ears toward
his story, wanted me to understand that what Jeffersonnotorious deist and
author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedomhad really meant to
promote was a one-way wall, designed to protect the church from the state,
not the other way around. Jefferson, Federer told me, was a believer; like
all the Founders, he knew that there could be no government without God. Why
hadnt I been taught this? Because I was a victim of godless public schools.
Those who control the present, Federer continued his quotation of 1984,
control the past. He paused and stared at me to make sure I understood
the equation. Orson Welles wrote that, he said.
The first pillar of American fundamentalism is Jesus Christ; the second is
history; and in the fundamentalist mind the two are converging.
Fundamentalism considers itself a faith of basic truths unaltered (if not
always acknowledged) since their transmission from Heaven, first through the
Bible and second through what they see as American scripture, divinely
inspired, devoutly intendedthe Declaration of Independence, the
Constitution, and the often overlooked Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which
declared religion necessary to good government and thus to be encouraged
through schools. Well into the nineteenth century, most American
schoolchildren learned their ABCs from The New-England Primer, which begins
with In Adams Fall/We sinned alland continues on to Spiritual Milk for
American Babes, Drawn out of the Breasts of both Testaments. In 1836,
McGuffeys Eclectic Readers began to displace the Primer, selling some 122
million copies of lessons such as The Bible the Best of Classics and
Religion the only Basis of Society during the following century.
It wasnt until the 1930s, the most irreligious decade in American history,
that public education veered away from biblical indoctrination so thoroughly
that within a few decades most Americans wrongly believed that the
nationalism of manifest destinyitself thinly veiled Calvinismrather than
open piety was the American educational tradition. The movement now sees
that to reclaim America for God, it must first reclaim that tradition for
Him, and so it is producing a flood of educational texts with which to wash
away the stains of secular history.
Such chronicles are written primarily for the homeschoolers and the
fundamentalist academies that together account for at least 2 million of the
nations children, an expanding population that buys more than half a
billion dollars of educational materials annually. Who, knowing the facts
of our history, asks the epigraph to the 2000 edition of The American
Republic for Christian Schools, a junior-high textbook, can doubt that the
United States of America has been a thought in the mind of God from all
eternity? So that I would know the facts, I undertook my own course of
homeschooling. In addition to The American Republic, I read the two-volume
teachers edition of United States History for Christian Schools,
appropriate for eleventh graders, as well as Economics for Christian
Schools, and I walked the streets of Brooklyn listening to an eighteen-tape
lecture series on America up to 1865 created for Christian college students
by Rousas John Rushdoony, the late theologian who helped launch Christian
homeschooling and revived the idea of reading American history through a
providential lens. [1]I was down by the waterfront, pausing to scribble a
note on Alexis de TocquevilleRushdoony argues that de Tocqueville was
really a fundamentalist Christian disguised as a Frenchmanwhen a
white-and-blue police van rolled up behind me and squawked its siren. There
were four officers inside.
What are you writing? the driver asked. The other three leaned toward the
window.
Notes, I said, tapping my headphones.
Okay. Whatcha listening to?
I said I didnt think I had to tell him.
This is a high-security area, he said. On the other side of a barbed-wire
fence, he said, was a Coast Guard storage facility for deadly chemicals.
Somebody blow that up and boom, bye-bye Brooklyn. Note-taking in the
vicinity might be a problem. So, I gotta ask again, whatcha listening to?
How to explainto the cop who had just clued me in on the ripest terrorist
target in Brooklynthat I was listening to a Christian jihadi lecture on how
democracy as practiced in America was defiance of Gods intentions, how God
gave to the United States the irresistible blessings of biblical
capitalism unknown to Europe, and how we have vandalized this with vulgar
regulations, how God loves the righteous who fight in His name?
Like this: American history.
Providence would have been a better word. I was unschooling myself, Bill
Apelian, director of Bob Jones Universitys BJU Press, explained. What
seemed to me a self-directed course of study was, in fact, the replacement
of my secular education with a curriculum guided by God. When BJU Press, one
of the biggest Christian educational publishers, started out thirty years
ago, science was their most popular subject, and it could be summed up in
one word: created. Now American history is on the rise. We call it
Heritage Studies, Apelian said, and explained its growing centrality:
History is Gods working in man.
My unschooling continued. I read the works of Rushdoonys most influential
student, the late Francis Schaeffer, an American whose Swiss mountain
retreat, LAbri (The Shelter), served as a Christian madrasah at which a
generation of fundamentalist intellectuals studied an American past
Christian in memory. And I read Schaeffers disciples: Tim LaHaye, who,
besides coauthoring the hugely popular Left Behind series of novels, has
published an equally fantastical work about history called Mind Siege. And
David Barton, the president of a history ministry called WallBuilders (as
in, to keep the heathen out). And Charles Colson, who, in titles such as How
Now Shall We Live? (a play on Schaeffers How Should We Then Live? The Rise
and Decline of Western Thought and Culture) and Against the Night: Living in
the New Dark Ages, searches from Plato to the American Founders to fellow
Watergate felon G. Gordon Liddy for the essence of the Christian
worldview, a vision of an American future so entirely Christ-filtered that
beside it theocracythe clumsy governance of priestly bureaucratsseems a
modest ambition. Theocentric is the preferred term, Randall Terry, another
Schaeffer disciple who went on to found Operation Rescue, told me. That
means you view the world in His terms. Theocentrists dont believe man can
create law. Man can only embrace or reject law.
History matters not just for its progression of fact, fact, fact, Michael
McHugh, a pioneer of fundamentalist education, told me, but for key
personalities. In Francis Schaeffers telling of U.S. history, for
instance, John Witherspoonthe only pastor to have signed the Declaration of
Independencelooms as large as Thomas Jefferson, because it was Witherspoon
who infused the founding with the idea of Lex Rex, law is king (divine
law, that is), derived from the fiercest Protestant reformers of the
seventeenth century, men who considered John Calvins Geneva too gentle for
God. Key personalities are often soldiers, such as General Douglas
MacArthur. After the war, McHugh explained, MacArthur ruled Japan according
to Christian principles for five years. To what end? I asked. Japan is
hardly any more Christian for this divine intervention. The Japanese people
did capture a vision, McHugh said. Not the whole Christian deal, but one of
its essential foundations. MacArthur set the stage for free enterprise, he
explained. With Japan committed to capitalism, the United States was free to
turn its attention toward the Soviet Union. The generals providential
flanking maneuver, you might say, helped America win the Cold War.
But one neednt be a flag officer to be used by God. Another favorite of
Christian history, said McHugh, was Sergeant Alvin York, a farmer from Pall
Mall, Tennessee, who in World War I turned his trigger finger over to God
and became perhaps the greatest Christian sniper of the twentieth century.
God uses ordinary people, McHugh said. Anyone might be a key personality.
The proper study of history, he explained, includes the student as a main
character, an approach he described as relational, a buzzword in
contemporary fundamentalism that denotes a sort of pulsing circuit of energy
between, say, pleasant Betty Johnson, your churchy neighbor, and the awesome
realm of supernatural events in which her real life occurs. There, Jesus is
as real to Betty as she is to you, and so is Sergeant York, General
MacArthur, and even George Washington, who, as father of our nation, is
almost a fourth member of the Holy Trinity, a mindbender made possible
through Gods math.
You may have seen his ghostly form, along with that of Abraham Lincoln,
flanking an image of George W. Bush deep in prayer in a lithograph
distributed by the Presidential Prayer Team, a five-year-old outfit that
claims to have organized nearly 3 million prayer warriors on the presidents
behalf. To wit:
In a similar image pasted onto billboards by a group called American
Destiny, a rouge-cheeked Washington kneels in prayer with an anonymous
soldier in fatiguesjust another everyday hero. That could be you, the
key-man theory of fundamentalist history proposes. Its like the Rapture,
when the saved shall rise together, but its happening right now: George
Washington and Betty Johnson and you, floating up toward victory with arms
intertwined, key personalities in Christian history.
One afternoon last year I found in my mail an unsolicited copy of The
Vision Forum Family Catalog, a glossy, handsomely produced,
eighty-eight-page publication featuring an array of books, videos, and toys
for The Biblical Family Now and Forever. This catalogue, I think, is as
perfect and polished a distillation as Ive found of the romance of American
fundamentalism, the almost sexual tension of its contradictions: its
reverence for both rebellion and authority, democracy and theocracy, blood
and innocence. The edition I received was titled A Line in the Sand, in
tribute to the Alamo. There, in 1836, faced with near-certain annihilation
at the hands of the Mexican army, the Anglo rebel Lieutenant Colonel William
Barret Travis rallied his doomed men by drawing said line with his sword and
challenging them to cross it. All who did so, he said, would prove their
preparedness to give their lives in freedoms cause.
A boy of about eight enacts the scene on the catalogues cover. He is
dark-eyed, big-eared, and dimple-chinned, and hes dressed in an idyllic
costume only a romantic could imagine Lieutenant Colonel Travis wearing so
close to his apocalyptic enda white planters hat, a Confederate gray,
double-breasted jacket, a bow tie of black ribbon, a red sash, and shiny
black fetish boots, spread wide. The young rebel seems to have been
Photoshopped in front of the Alamo at unlikely scale: he towers over a dark
wooden door, as big as an eight-year-old boys imagination.
Named one of twenty reasons there is hope for America [2] by The Church
Report magazine and considered by the other fundamentalist publishers I
spoke to as the intellectual vanguard of the movement, Vision Forum is
nonetheless just one of any number of providers for the fundamentalist
lifestyle, and hardly the biggest. But it is closer than any other to the
ideas of Rousas John Rushdoony, whose eighteen-tape lecture series I had, in
fact, ordered from Vision Forum. Rushdoony wrote two books in the early
1960sThe Messianic Character of American Education and Intellectual
Schizophreniawhich laid the right cornerstone of modern homeschooling. With
the alternative educational universe of homeschooling and private
evangelical academies came the formalization of Christianized American
history, and thus the basis for the contemporary movements broadest claims:
that the nation was conceived of as Christian, that separation of church and
state is either a myth altogether (Christian historian David Bartons
position, endorsed by a number of congressmen) or meant only to prevent a
single denomination from prevailing, a perspective that fundamentalists
consider a fair compromise with the anxieties of unbelievers.
Rushdoony took the vague sentiments of early twentieth-century
fundamentalism and found sources for them in American history, creating an
intellectual foundation for the movements political ambitions. [3] He
derived from the past not just a quaint hero worship but also a deep
knowledge of historys losers, forgotten Americansminor political figures
such as John Winthrop and Timothy Dwight and all the soldiers who fought
first for God, then country, the rugged men of the past who carried the
theocratic strand through from the beginning. The Christian conservatives of
his day, Rushdoony believed, had let themselves be bound by secularism. They
railed against its tyranny, but addressed themselves only to issues set
aside by secularism as moralthe best minds of a fundamentalist generation
burned themselves to furious cinders battling nothing more than naughty
movies and heavy petting. Rushdoony did not believe in such skirmishes. He
wanted a war, and he summoned the spirits of history to the struggle at
hand.
A strict Calvinist influenced by his upbringing in the Armenian Presbyterian
Church, Rushdoonys own mentor had been a Dutch theologian named Cornelius
Van Til. Van Til borrowed from a turn-of-the-century theologian turned Dutch
prime minister named Abraham Kuyper the idea of presuppositionalism, which
maintains that everybody approaches the world with set assumptions, thus
ruling out the possibility of neutrality and a classically liberal state;
and that since Christian presuppositions acknowledge themselves as such
(unlike liberalisms, which are deliberately ahistorical), every aspect of
governance should be conducted in the light of revealed truths. There is
not a square inch in the whole domain of our human experience, declared
Kuyper, over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry Mine!
Rushdoony saw in the theologians European project of health care and
schools and even a market conformed to biblical law a foreshadowing of the
city upon a hill prophesied for America by John Winthrop in 1630. He
thought most modern Americans would see this as well, if only they
understood that Scripture was the source of the nations idealism and that
capitalism, rather than Kuypers socialism, was the means of attaining the
mythical city. He spoke of his fondness for John F. Kennedys rhetoric, for
instance, in which he heard echoes of America as a redeemer nation,
invoking Christian nationalism as a high-minded justification for the Cold
War. Gods work must truly be our own, declared Kennedy, and Rushdoony
must have smiled sadly. Theyve lost the theology, Rushdoony would lecture
ten years after Kennedys death, but they havent lost the faith.
When Federer and I reached the overgrown foundation stones of Danbury
Baptist, which sit on a grassy hill sprinkled with pale violets, we gathered
in a circle with a crowd of pastors and activists from around the country.
The events organizer was Dave Daubenmire, head of a fundamentalist
history ministry called Minutemen United and a former high school football
coach from Ohio whod done battle with the ACLU over his insistence on
praying with his players. Still a regional outfit, the Minutemen had managed
to wrangle some respectable B-list activists. [4] In attendance were the
Reverend Rob Schenck, a Jewish convert to evangelicalism who runs a Capitol
Hill ministry for politicians called Faith and Action, and the Reverend Flip
Benham, head of Operation Save America, also known as Operation Rescue. He
was the man who baptized Norma McCorveyJane Roeinto fundamentalism. For
the rally, hed worn vintage white-and-brown wingtips, symbols of his
commitment to pre-1947 America1947 being the year when the Supreme Court
first codified Jeffersons wall of separation, in a case involving
government funds for parochial schools.
Providential historians are divided on the question of whether it was this
decision, Everson v. Board of Education, or FDRs socialistic New Deal that
led God to remove His protection from the nation. Operation Save Americas
number two, Pastor Rusty Thomas of Waco, Texas, favors the less
controversial New Deal school of thought. God, Rusty told me, always gave
us a left hook of judgment, then He gave us a right cross of revival. But
when the left hook of the Great Depression came, goes the economic theory of
fundamentalism, Americans turned to government as their savior instead of
God. So we got another left hook. Kennedys assassination, he explained.
Then another left hook: Vietnam. Still we didnt learn. So God kept throwing
punches, said Rusty: crack, AIDS, global warming, September 11, 2,500
flag-draped coffins shipped home from Iraq and more on the way.
Rusty began the days preaching, pacing back and forth between Danbury
Baptists foundation stones. He looked like an exclamation pointtiny feet
in thin-soled black leather shoes, almost dwarfish legs, and a powerful
torso barely contained by a jacket of double-breasted gray houndstooth. But
he had one of the most nuanced preaching voices Ive ever heard, a soft rasp
that seemed to come straight from a broken heart. We are here to start a
gentle revolution, he whispered. To reclaim the godly heritage. He
sounded sad, for his sin and minewe were all guilty of turning our backs on
the lessons of history. But then he growled up to a full fury that made even
the flaxen-haired pastor beside me literally blink before leaning forward
into Rustys thunder.
And when you go to war in your land Rusty recited from the Book of
Numbersand make no mistake about it, we are in a war
Amen! hollered Reverend Flip.
And when you go to war in your land, continued Rusty, against an
adversary who oppresses youand here he interrupted himself. How many
besides me are vexed by what is happening in the United States of America
today?
The crowd, shedding jackets and coats beneath a wan but warm spring sun,
murmured amens.
Your soul is vexed, Rusty moaned. Then he cried out: We are under
oppression!
AMEN! responded the crowd, rising up to match Rustys increased volume.
The bill of grievances was hard: Are we not in mourning? Rusty asked,
repeating the question and drawing it out as the women among us closed their
eyes and said, plain and simple, Yes. Are we not in mournnnning? he
moaned. As terrorism strikes us from without, corruptions from within?
Yes, said the women, the men seemingly shamed into silence. How many know
were losing our children? Yes. Our marriages are failing! YES.
Pastor Rusty, in fact, was a single fatherof ten, the youngest of whom is
named Torah. Liz, his wife of twenty years, died last year from lymphoma, on
the verge of what seemed like recovery. Reverend Flip had chronicled online
her long fight, a roller coaster of remission and relapse, so that the
familys prayer partnersactivists and Christian radio listeners across the
countrycould help fight for her survival. Goodnight for now, sweet
sister, Flip wrote when they failed. Well see you in the morning.
Theres going to have to be a great fundamental shift, Rusty preached near
the end of his sermon. Not just in society but among the believers. There is
a mothering church, he said, and a fatherhood church, separate but equal
aspects of God. The mother church nurtures and holds a child when hes done
wrong; the father church is the church of discipline. The mother church
feeds the poor, comforts the dying, attempting to remind nations of
righteous behavior. But to Rusty the lesson of American historythe lesson
of Valley Forge and Shiloh; Khe Sanh and Baghdad; Dallas, 1963; Roe v. Wade,
1973; Manhattan, 2001is clear: this nation is too far gone to be redeemed
by mercy alone. It is the father churchs time.
The father church, to Rusty, was the Old Testament church, and he had begun
the days rally with a command from the Hebrew Bible. Then shall you sound
an alarm with a trumpet that you may be remembered before the Lord your
God, he had recited, and you SHOUThe replaced the future tense of the
biblical shall with his own present-tense bellowto be saved from your
enemy! He had turned to the man standing behind him, a wiry, goateed
musician in a brown bomber jacket. So brother, Rusty had called, his voice
now joyful, let it rip, potato chip! At which the slender man had blown
his horn.
The days appointed born-again Baal Tokea, the Master of the Blast, was
named Lane Medcalf, and his instrument was a three-foot-long spiral hewn
from the head of ram: a shofar, a Jewish trumpet, generally reservedsince
the destruction of the Temple 1,936 years agofor Rosh Hashanah and Yom
Kippur. But once upon a time its blast signaled Joshuas assault on Jericho,
the first battle for the Promised Land.
Medcalf had borrowed his shofar from his bosss wife, also a Christian.
Medcalf was an artificial-flavor compounder, less than a chemist but more
than a factory worker. He had been saved since he was a teenager, but lately
he had become engrossed in Jewish history. Fifty-three, he was slender and
sleight in the shoulders, cautious but earnest about his words. The shofar
was for warfare, he explained. Its still a weapon of warfare, but for
fighting demonic influence. Medcalfs shofar blasts that day, for instance,
were intended to slay the invisible demons that had once surrounded Supreme
Court Justice Hugo Black, author of the Everson v. Board of Education
decision, in 1947.
Hugo got a little skewed, he told me. Black himself had not been evil,
Medcalf explained, just overwhelmed by Satan, who whispered in his ear. I
was toldhere Medcalfs voice dropped a notethat he was a former Ku Klux
Klan member. (This is true. He was also a Protestant, and his decision was
in keeping with that periods fundamentalist animus toward Catholic
schools.) Medcalf had also been told, he continued, that in the mid-1950s
there had been another Supreme Court decision, he couldnt remember the
name, that forced children to go to school where they didnt want to go.
This also is technically trueMedcalf may have been referring to Brown v.
Board of Education, the 1954 decision that overturned official school
segregation, leading to busing and the formation of private, all-white
evangelical academies.
It was Brown, along with two decisions in the early 1960s striking down
school prayer, that led to fundamentalisms embrace of history as a
redeeming creed. Catholics already had a system for educating their children
religiously. Fundamentalists began to build one, and the bricks of its
construction were the prooftexts of an alternate Christian nation: a letter
by John Jay, the first chief justice of the Supreme Court, on the biblical
justifications for Americas wars; President James Garfields Gilded Age
pleas for more pious men in high office; even, eventually, the speeches of
Martin Luther King Jr., claimed now from megachurch pulpits across the
country as a martyr of fundamentalism.
Medcalf was part of the generation for whom King was a hero rather than a
villain. When he was a kid, his older brother joined a Christian youth band,
and when he played his guitar kids prayed out loud, free-form, with their
hands in the air and their whole bodies swaying, while girls flocked to him.
I had never seen Christianity like that before, Medcalf remembered. He
wanted to join the band. He learned keyboards and the drums. Suddenly, I
could understand the Bible. The Holy Spirit got up on me. Man!
When he was fifteen, he accepted Jesus. When he was sixteen the girl he was
in love with accepted his invitation to a Bible study meeting, and later he
married her. Church was no longer a place you went to; it was an
experience you consumed, and you wanted as much as you could get. You wore
your jeans to worship and grew your hair long. You called yourself a Jesus
Freak and you called Jesus a revolutionary. You listened to groups like The
Way and Love Song and the All Saved Freak Band, and you read rags like Right
On! and The Fish and The Hollywood Free Paper. Truckin for Jesus,
Medcalf remembered. Solid stuff, man.
Medcalf suddenly looked sad. He blinked, as if holding back tears. What had
gone wrong?
We sold ourselves, he said, his voice nearly a whisper. He meant it
literally: albums and T-shirts, bumper stickers. Commercialism killed
Christian rock and roll. We lost our teeth. In 1973, the Supreme Court
handed down Roe v. Wade. It happened on our watch, man, Medcalf said. The
Jesus Freaks had failed. They had lived for today and forgotten tomorrow,
and then it had slipped away from them.
To get it back, Medcalf said, the movement must go backward. Not to the
1960s but to before. It needs a foundation, he explained, eternal truths.
These were to be found in two places: the Bible and the Constitution.
While we were talking, Reverend Flip had begun to preach. He told the crowd
about a recent victory hed scored in North Carolina, where hed led 700
prayer warriors to a school-board meeting to protest the formation of a
Gay-Straight Alliance club in a local high school. The preachers preached,
the singers sang, the prayers prayed, and the theology of the church became
biography in the streets! Flip said. The school board shut down the club.
Flip said this was what Jesus wanted. He even did an impression: Cry to
me, he said in his best bass God voice; the prayers of the righteous will
be answered.
Medcalf smiled and applauded gently. He told me how his prayers had changed
when he started studying history and blowing the shofar. I was praying for
God to restore America back to its roots one day when I had what I guess you
would call a supernatural experience. The Holy Spirit caused me to weep and
cry, enabling me to have a broken heart. Please come back, I prayed. It
was just so intense. It worked: Things have started changing. He said the
appointments of Samuel Alito and John Roberts to the Supreme Court were
probably the result of Gods intervention. They may be the men God was
waiting for, the right tools for the job of restoration. They may be under
an anointing.
This is the secret of Christian history. It doesnt require great
menMedcalf considered Bushs 2000 election an answer to prayer, but he
was under no delusions about the presidents natural abilitiesonly willing
men, ready to be anointed. Bush was one; Medcalf was another. Medcalf
submitted to Bushs authority according to Romans 13:1, a key verse of
American fundamentalismthe powers that be are ordained of Godbut both
submitted equally to Gods guiding hand. To Medcalf this results in a
democracy more radical than any dreamed of in the 1960s. In the flow of
secular time, Medcalf is a nebbish from Connecticut, mixing beakers full of
artificial flavors. But in Christian time, he is a herald, blowing his
shofar back to 1947, calling the key men of our Christian nations history
to battle.
In the pantheon of fundamentalist history, the man revered above all others
is General Stonewall Jackson of the Confederacy, perhaps the most brilliant
military commander in American history and certainly the most pious. United
States History for Christian Schools devotes more space to Jackson, Soldier
of the Cross, and the revivals he led among his troops in the midst of the
Civil War, than to either Robert E. Lee or Ulysses S. Grant; Practical
Homeschooling magazine offers instructions for making Stonewall costumes out
of gray sweatsuits with which one can celebrate his birthday, a
homeschooling fun day. The Vision Forum catalogue offers for men a
military biography and for the ladies a collection of Jacksons letters to
his wife; both books extol his strategic and romantic achievements as
corollaries to his unparalleled love of God.
Fundamentalists even celebrate the Confederate hero as an early civil rights
visionary, dedicated to teaching slaves to read so that they could learn
their Bible lessons. For fundamentalist admirers, that is enough; this fall
saw the publication of Stonewall Jackson: The Black Mans Friend, by Richard
G. Williams, a regular contributor to the conservative Washington Times.
Jackson fought not to defend slavery, argues another biographer, but for
religious freedom; he believed the North had usurped the moral jurisdiction
of God. The North seemed to be striving to alter basic American
structures, writes James I. Robertson Jr. Such activity flew in the face
of Gods preordained notion of what America should be.
Jacksons popularity with fundamentalists represents the triumph of the
Christian history that Rousas John Rushdoony dreamed of when he discovered,
during the early 1960s, the forgotten works of the theologian Robert Lewis
Dabney, including Life and Campaigns of Lieut.- Gen. Thomas J. Jackson
(Stonewall Jackson). Dabney had served under Jackson, but, more important,
he was a theologian in the tradition of John Calvinthat is, he believed
deeply in a God who worked through chosen individualsand he wrote the
generals life in biblical terms. Rushdoony imagined the story as
transcending its Confederate origins, and so helped make it a founding text
of the nascent homeschooling movement. [5]
In 2003, Vision Forum sponsored a national essay contest and awarded first
prize to a pretty, freckle-faced young woman named Amanda Freeborn for her
essay, How Stonewall Jackson Demonstrated a Biblical Vision of Manhood.
There is a name, writes Freeborn,
that casts upon the screen of our imaginations the image of the
personification of godly manhood. That name is Stonewall Jackson. . . . His
life was a testimony to the world of what God can do through a man
consecrated to his purposes.
Freeborn goes on to admire Jacksons reverence for authority and his
commitment to prayerin battle, wrote a fighting pastor who knew him,
Jackson would give up the reins of his horse to lift up his hands towards
heaven. And she admires his Job-like acceptance of sufferingin civilian
life he was shy, inept, and so physically fragile that he spent much his
time investigating ascetic diets and taking the waters at miracle spas
around the country. With his wife, Anna, he loved to dance secret polkas
when no one else was watching, but he felt so out of place in society that
he was deathly afraid of public speaking. Absent enemy fire, he did not know
how to take a stand. He watched John Brown hang with his own eyes and
marveled at the strength of the mans Christian conviction. And yet when his
own time to fight came, he proved just as devoted. Draw the sword, he told
his students at the Virginia Military Institute, and throw away the
scabbard. In All Things for Good: The Steadfast Fidelity of Stonewall
Jackson, fundamentalist historian J. Steven Wilkins opens a chapter on
Jacksons belief in the black flag of no quarter for the enemy with a
quotation: Shoot them all, I do not wish them to be brave. The only path
to peace, he believed, was total war.
Today, writes Freeborn,
Mr. Jacksons life stands as a witness to a new generation of what God can
and desires to do in each of His children. Let us rise up and follow the
shining example of this stern soldier, loving husband, devoted church
officer, and Christ-like man.
Civil War buffs study his military maneuvers and wonder whether, had he not
been mistaken for a Yankee and shot by his own men in 1863, he might have
outflanked the Union Army and fought the North to a standstill. But Freeborn
chooses as case study not a Civil War battle but his first victory as a
lowly lieutenant out of West Point. Sent to the Mexican War, he defied an
order to retreat, fought the Mexican cavalry alone with one artillery piece,
won, and was promoted, later commended by General Winfield Scott, commander
of the U.S. forces, for the way in which [he] slaughtered those poor
Mexicans.
Many of the poor Mexicans Jackson slaughtered were civilians. After his
small victory had helped clear the way for the American advance, Jackson
received orders to turn his guns on Mexico City residents attempting to flee
the oncoming U.S. army. He did so without hesitationmowing them down as
they sought to surrender.
What are we to make of this murder? Secular historians attribute this
atrocity to Jacksons military disciplinehe simply obeyed orders. But
fundamentalists see in that discipline, that willingness to kill innocents,
confirmation of Romans 13:1: For there is no power but of God: the powers
that be are ordained of God. Obeying ones superiors, according to this
logic, is an act of devotion to the God above them.
But waitfundamentalists also praise the heroism that resulted from his
defiance of orders to retreat, his rout of the Mexican cavalry so
miraculousits said that a cannonball bounced between his legs as he stood
fastthat it seems to fundamentalist biographers proof that he was anointed
by God. Is this hypocrisy on the part of his fans? Not exactly.
Key men always obey orders, but they follow the command of the highest
authority. Jacksons amazing victory is taken as evidence that God was with
himthat God overrode the orders of his earthly commanders. And yet the
civilian dead that resulted from Jacksons subsequent obedience of those
very same earthly commanders are also signs of Gods guiding hand. The
providential God sees everything; that such a tragedy was allowed to occur
must be evidence of a greater plan. One of fundamentalist historys favorite
proofs comes not from Scripture itself but from Ben Franklins paraphrase at
the Constitutional Convention: And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground
without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?
To put it in political terms, the contradictory legend of Stonewall
Jacksonrebellion and reverence, rage and orderresults in the synthesis of
self-destructive patriotism embraced by contemporary fundamentalism. The
most striking example is a short video on faith and diplomacy made in the
aftermath of September 11, 2001, by Christian Embassy, a behind-the-scenes
ministry for government and military elites. It almost seems to endorse
deliberate negligence of duty. Dan Cooper, an undersecretary of veterans
affairs, announces that his weekly prayer sessions are more important than
doing the job. Major General Jack Catton says that he sees his position as
an adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff as a wonderful opportunity to
evangelize men and women setting defense policy. My first priority is my
faith, he says. I think its a huge impact. . . . You have many men and
women who are seeking Gods counsel and wisdom as they advise the Chairman
[of the Joint Chiefs] and the Secretary of Defense. Brigadier General Bob
Caslen puts it in sensual terms: Were the aroma of Jesus Christ. Theres
a joyous disregard for democracy in these sentiments, for its demands and
its compromises, that in its darkest manifestation becomes the overlooked
piety at the heart of the old logic of Vietnam, lately applied to Iraq: In
order to save the village, we must destroy it.
On the Danbury village green Pastor Rusty gripped my arm and pulled me
close, tears streaming from hazel eyes as he confessed that he had betrayed
God. The rally had migrated from the hilltop to the towns center, an
historic patch of grass next to a redbrick parking garage. A stage had been
erected, and on it a series of preachers sermonized about God and American
history for a small crowd of parents and children sitting on blankets and in
lawn chairs. Rusty and I talked back by the literature tables. He had
something he wanted to explain. He had neglected the twin sins, he said, the
two wicked acts that fundamentalists believe to be the collective
responsibility of the entire society in which they occur. Child
sacrificeby which he meant abortionand sodomy. Any nation that condoned
those behaviors? That did not challenge them, that did not prevent them from
happening? It will be reduced to rubble.
He shook his head, eyes squeezed shut. The church had allowed women to
murder their children and men through sodomy to damn themselves and all
their brothers. It was his fault more than theirs because he knew the
blueprint of Gods Word. He had pored over the Bible and the Constitution
and the Mayflower Compact, had memorized choice words from John Adams and
John Witherspoon and Patrick Henry, Jeremiah and Nehemiah and John the
Revelator. Scripture and American history are in agreement, he had found:
beneath God, family, and church is the state, with only one simple
responsibility: The symbol of the state is a sword. Not a spoon, feeding
the poor, not a teaching instrument to educate our young. Rusty stepped
back, fists clenched. And the sword is an instrument of death! he yelled.
He twitched his Italian loafers in a preacher two-step. He shook out his
neck like a boxer. Then sorrow slumped his shoulders. He had failed to wield
the sword. He had failed the widows and orphans. He had failed his brothers
lost to sodomy. Theres nobody clean in this, he whispered.
Grief, not arrogance, translates the promise of salvationwhosoever shall
lose his life for my sake shall find itinto a battle cry. Guilt, not
pride, builds the most zealous discipline. Obedience is my greatest
weapon, the rallys organizer, Coach Dave, told me at the end of the day.
He took off his Minutemen United baseball cap, navy blue with a red cross,
and ran his hand through his gray hair. In obedience, he said, he found
strength. I imagined him lecturing his former football team. Obedience, he
continued, was a gift from God; but you needed the Holy Spirit to open it.
The Holy Spirit of God is like the software, he said.
He tried to explain. We may need another 9/11, he declared slowly, a
teacher reciting a lesson, to bring about a full spiritual revival. He
must have seen my surprise. Now, you dont get that, do you? I admitted
that I did not. Well, he continued, historys horrors are just like God
spanking a child. Thats a perfect example of where you need the software
to understand what I just said, or else youre gonna say, Coach, you mean
He spanks us by killing people? You need the software. Whats the software?
Well, its history. You gotta understand what history is. Its collective.
Are you getting the software? Collective. History.
I got it. Fundamentalism embraces its mythic past; our more comfortable,
liberal histories declare their own myths simply a matter of record. The
imagination with which we, the levelheaded masses, view the demigod Founders
and the Civil War, the Good Fight against Hitler and the American tragedy
of Vietnam (the tragedy is always ours alone), is almost as deeply mystical
as that of fundamentalisms, thickened by destiny, blind to all that does
not square with the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a nation.
There are occasional attempts at recovering these near-invisible pieces,
peoples history and national apologies and HBO specials about
embarrassing missteps in the march of progress, usually related to race and
inevitably restored to forward motion by the courage of some key man of
liberalism: Jackie Robinson at first base, 1947; Rosa Parks on the bus,
1955; Muhammad Ali refusing to fight in Vietnam. But such interventions are
not much different than fundamentalisms addition of Martin Luther King to
its pantheon; they are attempts to persuade ourselves that the big We of
nationalism was better than the little people of history actually were.
The actual past no more serves the imagination of secularism than that of
fundamentalism. Liberals like to point out that many of the Founders were
not, in fact, Christian but rather deists or downright unbelievers.
Fundamentalists respond by trotting out the Founders most pious words, of
which there are many (Franklin proposing prayer at the Constitutional
Convention; Washington thanking God for His direct hand in revolutionary
victories; etc., etc.). Liberals shoot back with the Founders Enlightenment
writings, and note their dependence on John Locke; fundamentalists respond
that Locke helped the Carolinas write a theocentric constitution. But
fundamentalist historians can also point, accurately, to the subsequent
instances of overlooked religious influence in American historynot just
Sergeant Yorks Christian trigger finger and Stonewall Jacksons tragic
example but also the religious roots of abolitionism, the divine
justification used to convert or kill Native Americans, the violent piety of
presidentsnot just Bush and Reagan but also Lincoln and McKinley and Wilson
and even sweet Jimmy Carter, the first born-again president, led by God and
Zbigniew Brzezinski to funnel anti-Communist dollars to the bloodthirsty
Salvadoran regime.
The dupes, the saps, and the foolsthe believersprefer their re-enchanted
past, alive to the dark magic with which all histories are constructed. For
them Americas past merely charts Gods love, its meanings revealed to His
key men, presidents and generals, preachers and a goy with a shofar. The
rest of us are simply not part of the dream. Fundamentalism is writing us
out of history.
Notes
1. For instance, the Protestant wind with which, according to the
eleventh-grade text, God helped the British defeat the Spanish Armada so
that the New World would not be overly settled by agents of the Vatican.
2. Although much of the catalogue is given over to educational materials for
Christian homeschoolers, the back of the book is dedicated to equipping
ones son with the sort of toys that will allow him to rebuild a culture of
courageous boyhood. Hats, for instanceleather Civil War kepis, coonskin
caps, and, for $95, a life-size replica of a fifteenth-century knights
helmet among them. An $18 video titled Putting on the Whole Armor of God
asks, Boys, are you ready for warfare? Young Christian soldiers may choose
from a variety of actual weapons, ranging from a scaled-down version of the
blade wielded by William Wallace, of Braveheart fame (which, at 41/4 feet
long, is still a lot of knife for a kid) to a 321/2-inch Confederate
officers saber. It is history at knifepointa theology of arms.
3. Rushdoony is best known as the founder of Christian Reconstructionism, a
politically defunct school of thought that drifted so far to the right that
it dropped off the edge of the world. Most notably, Rushdoony proposed the
death penalty for an ever-expanding subset of sinners, starting with gay men
and growing to include blasphemers and badly behaved children. Such
sentiments have since made him a bogeyman of the left, but also a convenient
scapegoat for fundamentalist apologists. Recently, First Things, a journal
for academically pedigreed religious conservatives, published an essay
titled Theocracy! Theocracy! Theocracy! in which journalist Ross Douthat,
eyes rolling, dismisses the fears of the anti-theocrat left by propping up
Rushdoony as a fringe lunatic, only to knock him down along with leftist
critiques that focus on his angriest notions. That reading of Rushdoonyby
liberal critics and conservative apologistsmisses what matters about his
revival of providential history.
4. Minutemen United should not be confused with the anti-immigrant Minutemen
militias. Coach Daves outfit is every bit as militaristic in its
rhetoricone Minutemen project is called Polished Shaftbut it is
educational in its operations, offering, for instance, instruction in
Americas godly heritage for schoolteachers.
5. Although Rushdoony was a bigot and a partisan of the South, his
commitment to states rights was not racial but religious: he recognized
that the Constitution fully separates church and state only at the federal
level. Thus a Christian nation could be built state legislature by state
legislature, an approach that has since become the main strategy of
Christian conservative organizations, which replicate themselves state by
state to do battle with better-known but more cumbersome liberal
organizations.
[Jeff Sharlet is a Contributing Editor of Harpers Magazine. His last article
for the magazine, Soldiers of Christ: Inside Americas Most Powerful
Megachurch, appeared in the May 2005 issue.]
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