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 Editor’s Note: As innocents in Israel, Palestine, and Lebanon died Tuesday night, more than 3500 delegates from around the America gathered in D.C. for the “Night to Honor Israel” banquet, a fundraiser for Christians United For Israel (CUFI), which is composed of pro-Israel-anti-Palestine fundamentalist Christian churches. Delegates heard from an A-List line-up, including likely presidential candidate Sen. Sam Brownback (D-KS), Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA), the Israeli Ambassador to the UN, Daniel Ayalon, and former presidential candidate Gary Bauer. For some reason, Sen. Joe Lieberman couldn’t make it this year.
In the midst what the Republican talking point machine has dubbed World War 3, those of us who aren’t enamored of the idea would do well to consider the enemies of peace in our own backyard…
How You Going to Keep the Down on the Farm After they’ve Seen Armageddon?
“My faith frees me. Frees me to put the problem of the moment in proper perspective. Frees me to make decisions that others might not like. Frees me to do the right thing, even though it may not poll well. Frees me to enjoy life and not worry about what comes next. - George W. Bush, A Charge to Keep
Matthew 17:15
“ Lord have mercy on my son; for he is a lunatick, and sore vexed: for oftimes he falleth into the fire, and oft into water.”
I was taught (forced) to read the Bible as a book about how dangerous and absurd it is not to believe in God – and not just any God, but the One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic God – the only true route to heaven. If it sounds exclusive, it is. God is very strict about this, and that’s why he made it his first commandment. A Muslim leading an exemplary and virtuous life – say, volunteering his spare time changing bedpans in a Catholic leper colony– will get no ticket to paradise. And vice versa, naturally. That same Muslim believes that there is only one God and His name is Allah; if he doubts that, there’ll be no seventy-two black-eyed virgins for him. Nor for you.
Among theologians, this is known as henotheism, which means my God is bigger than your God. Fundamentalists – think of Homer Simpson’s neighbor Ned Flanders without all the God-diddly-diddly-doos – believe that while you may be an outwardly good person, if you worship the wrong God, or no God at all, you’re an infidel – “Godless.” in Ann Coulter’s dizzy discourse. Worse yet, if you worship the right God in the wrong way, you’re a heretic and likely to be possessed by demons. So say the Neddites.
This pathology thrives in the words and deeds of Major General Jerry Boykin, the Bush Administration’s Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence (well skip the irony). While speaking on the war in Iraq, in uniform, on the altar of fundamentalist churches all across the Red States during the presidential campaign of 2004, Boykin told his worshipful audiences, “Our God is stronger than their God, and so we will prevail.”
If that comment strikes you as unnecessarily henotheistic, that’s because it is. He has a well-rehearsed litany of Jesus the Warrior remarks so strident that under any other administration he’d be cashiered out of the army quicker than he could say. “The devil made me do it.”
Since the Age of the Enlightenment, rational self-interest has steadily supplanted the so-called will of God in civic affairs. Most of us expected this central piece of modernity to last forever, but we were wrong. Among theologians, this is known as henotheism, which means my God is bigger than your God. Fundamentalists – think of Homer Simpson’s neighbor Ned Flanders without all the God-diddly-diddly-doos – believe that while you may be an outwardly good person, if you worship the wrong God, or no God at all, you’re an infidel – “Godless.” in Ann Coulter’s dizzy discourse. Worse yet, if you worship the right God in the wrong way, you’re a heretic and likely to be possessed by demons. So say the Neddites.
According to promotional materials for a fundamentalist ministers’ Christian triumphalism confab at Ft. Bragg, NC in 2004 sponsored by General Boykin and the Southern Baptist Convention (who describes Boykin as a devout Christian, strongly supportive the FAITH outreach program. The FAITH program is an "evangelism strategy" used by Southern Baptist Convention at home and abroad.)
“Southern Baptist pastors will be given unprecedented access to the military base while being recruited for the denomination's ‘Super FAITH Force Multiplier’…join a group of warriors at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg, NC. Major General William G. 'Jerry' Boykin has personally invited you and a select group of other FAITH Pastors. You will go with General Boykin and Green Beret instructors to places where no civilians and few soldiers ever go.
"THE PURPOSE OF THE GATHERING? It is believed by you, me and others that we must find a group of men who are warriors of FAITH, pastors who have the guts to lead this nation to Christ and revival!" Several references to live fire/real bullets are made in reference to the demonstrations that General Boykin has arranged.
This naturally makes the rest of us wonder exactly what they’re planning, and how euphemistically they use the term “warrior.” It’s a trope that turns up again and again in everything from youth ministries (Warriors for Christ) to anti-gay, get-straight-with-Jesus campaigns (Faith Warriors). There’s little if any discussion of the Prince of Peace. For fundamentalists, Jesus is a war god. But who’s the enemy?
Both modern fundamentalists and primitive henotheists worship God as if He were a sports team. Loyalty means everything. One can’t expect to be a Baal worshipper today and a Yaweh homie tomorrow. God(s) wouldn’t stand for it. True believers are brand loyal – not wishy-washy semi-adherents of one God or another, but fevered fans who would rather be put to death than wear some other supreme being’s colors.
There’s a good reason for this intensely jingoistic worship – the presumed primacy of one’s God is more than ample reason to raid your infidel neighbors, steal their treasure, and enslave the ones you don’t butcher alive. It went on all the time for the authors of the Bible. It still does; in fact, as you read this, it’s happening all over the world, just because somebody’s God thought it as a swell idea.
Numbers 25:17 18
“Harass the Mid'ianites, and smite them; : for they have harassed you with their wiles, with which they beguiled you in the matter of Pe'or, and in the matter of Cozbi, the daughter of the prince of Mid'ian, their sister, who was slain on the day of the plague on account of Pe'or."
The Midianites were descended from Midia the third son of Abraham, a real loser by accounts, the Neal Bush of the clan. But still, harassing your relatives, and smiting them, no matter how annoying they are, is way over the top.
But you can always count on God to up the ante; what’s he got to lose? In this case, he instructed Moses and Israelites to kill all the Mid’ianites except the virgins and the girl children, who were “theirs to take” and sell into slavery. The story itself has all the dramaturgy of a violent video game until you add the part about how Moses, after he was run out of Egypt for murder, lived among the Mid’ianites for many years as a welcomed guest of Jethro, the Midi’anite high priest. Midia was Moses’s home away from home. And he betrayed it.
Moses was married to Jethro’s daughter and seemed to be enjoying life in exile. But, he got the God itch, and in the end, his personal feelings toward the Midia’nites and his family meant nothing. After he slayed and enslaved the entire Midian nation on God’s behalf, God then threatened to slay Moses’ half-Midian son because he wasn’t circumcised. Moses’ wife ended the dispute by performing the act with a sharp rock, and then cast the severed foreskin at Moses’ feet. As the Neddites like to say, God will have his way.
This isn’t a rant for or against faith. Faith is a good thing, and faith is bad thing. Like it or not, we all have at least a tincture. Faith is playing the lottery, or expecting that the person you set up housekeeping with in your twenties will be the same person you’ll want around in your seventies. Faith is buying another goldfish after the last three took a swirlie ride to the river. Faith is adopting children and loving them as your own. Faith is giving people the benefit of the doubt – such as believing doctors will keep you healthy, despite all the evidence to the contrary. We have faith that the building contractor will arrive when he said he would, and do the job for the agreed-upon price – again with little real-world experience to support this belief. And we all have faith that this time next year, things will be better, though they seldom are. Faith keeps us going and without it the world might grind to a stop.
So I’m all for faith. And faith in God can be harmless. Under the right circumstances, it’s even helpful. From the beginning of time the poor everywhere – and historically, humanity has been overwhelmingly poor – have relied upon their faith to survive; the sick and oppressed turn to God because there is no one else. So while I don’t share it, my opinion of religious faith is if comforts those without my good fortune, who am I to denigrate?
But, put the sandal on the other foot and the Bible isn’t nearly as generous:
2nd Peter 3:3
"Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts.
As with all cults, differences of opinion equal evil because faith is conflated with apocryphal and apocalyptic knowledge. And this is where it all starts teetering on the rails.
It’s important to note that this is not true all fundamentalists, but certainly of the vast majority. The most excellent Ole Anthony and the Trinity Foundation of Dallas Texas, have made a ministry of exposing charlatans and hypocrites among the ranks of the country’s best-known pastors. They call him Ole Antichrist, which he takes no small pride in. Religious freedom is an organizing principle in America, and for that reason we’re psychologically shaped to think of faith in positive terms. And as with guns and free speech, most are used for good, but not all.
The Age of Reason taught civilization that there is no special knowledge beyond what can be deduced through trial and error. It’s a small thing, really. Somebody just had to think of it – like movable type. People often re-invent their flashes of insight as prophesy and epiphanies, but they’re almost always the pay-off for thinking hard and long about something. Even for people who don’t realize it. When the outcome has practical application – the wheel, the light bulb, liberal democracy, a stop sign at the corner – then civilization inches forward.
Religion, no matter how convincing, always leads back to faith. If we feed money into a slot machine all night because we’re absolutely certain that it will eventually pay off, and in the morning we leave the Indian reservation with a maxed-out Visa card and a pocketful of drink tokens, that’s a consequence of faith. Borrowing money to buy real estate in the 1980s because its value was “never going down,” that was faith too. And voting on a black box machine with no paper trail is an example of how foolhardy and dangerous faith can be.
Faith has has always had its dark side. According to Genesis 34:1 and 2, Shechem, the son of Hamor the Hivite, encountered Dinah, the daughter of Leah, while she was out for a stroll (the Hivites are not to be confused with the Horites or the Hittites, who were also tribes in the land of Canaan, none of whom took seriously Abraham’s deed to the land, especially the part where it was signed by God.). Anyway, Shechem “defiled Dinah” when she was on her way to “meet with the daughters of the land.”
A lot of defilement went on back then; many men actually considered it a legitimate way to meet women. When he was caught, Shechem admitted to the rape and offered to marry Dinah. This was in accordance with Mosaic law, which the Hivites were not adherents to, but it beat going to war.
The Israelites agreed to this arrangement only after Shechem and all the male Hivites agreed to be circumcised. Buying Dinah as a wife, which is essentially what Sechem offered, was one thing, but this could be a deal-killer. Probably his dad, Hamor, offered to pay for the wedding party instead, maybe get a big-name band to play, and throw in a flock of sheep. But no dice, the sons of Jacob were tough negotiators. They decreed that there would be much dick-cutting or no mazeltov, and a then big dust-up, to boot, during which somebody was bound to get hurt much worse than a trimmed prepuce. So the Hivites conceded, and Mohel sharpened his knife two hundred times that day.
Three nights after the mass Bris, the Hivites were at home with bags of frozen peas in their laps, drinking beer, giving each other disbelieving looks, and shivering with cold sweats from a bad infection in the last place you want one. Suddenly the Israelites swept down upon them, swords drawn, and shred the rest of their bodies. Then they rounded up the Hivite women and children and sold them into bondage. This a good example of bad faith, yet God raised no objection. It’s an all-too-familiar Biblical story.
I have a keen appreciation for the poetic justice Shechem the rapist suffered, but not his whole tribe. The God I was raised on would never be party to such deceit and carnage. Vengeance on innocents has never been a mainstream Christian concept until now. Modern fundamentalists take strength and encouragement from such Bible stories; they steel them to do what their faith tells must be done.
With its focus on war, and enthusiasm for the death penalty and torture, the Christianity of George W. Bush clearly presumes special knowledge, operating under strictly enforced sumptuary “family values.” By design, these values don’t leave room for scrutiny, so as a Neddite passes from simple faith into dangerous delusion, it often takes all his passion to keep his beliefs afloat. Eventually, everything is framed in a religious glow, his biases all confirmed by his mythology, and self-righteous henotheism rules the day.
Non-fundamentalists Christians read the Bible metaphorically, as it was written. To get past the censors, the Bible was styled in the patois of the enslaved and oppressed. For instance, end time scripture tends to denounce Babylon, when in reality, the writer probably literally meant Moab, or Chaldea, or Antioch or Rome – depending upon when it was written, and when it was read.
The names Shechem and Dinah are cities not people, and it’s the story of the battle between their tribes. In the end, the Israelites aligned with and came to the aid of a Semitic tribe that had been beaten by a non-Semitic tribe. It was war, pure ethno-centrism, tribalism, henotheism – Red States versus Blue States. Fundamentalist Christianity carries on this proud tradition today. All fundamentalist religions do; the dark nature of the beast is to feed man’s primal instinct to be clannishly separate and unequal.
In the American context, religious faith means Christian faith. There are so few adherents of the other myriad world faiths living in the United States that if you lumped them together in a national census, even in the aggregate they barely amount to a respectable “Other.”
Catholics are still the largest monolithic religion in America, but they’ve lost nearly as much ground as the fundamentalists have gained in the past fifty years, and are quickly being overtaken.
Protestantism is the big tent of belief and fills the Christian spectrum from upper east-side Episcopalians to snake-handling tongue-speakers; it also includes layer upon layer of left/right political sub-strata that range from ultra-progressive Unitarian Universalists to the racist Christian Identity Movement.
Protestantism’s largest identifiable group by far is the Southern Baptist Convention, a fundamentalist organization in the tradition of Oral Roberts, Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, and Pat Robertson, the premier techno-pastors, and the so-called “wealth ministries.” It used to be Jesus Saves; now it’s Jesus Makes Bank.
Unlike most faiths, Christianity is a proselytizer, and Job#1 for fundamentalists is to bring souls to Jesus. They view the world as a series of “mission fields,” ripe for the planting of Jesus’ seed. America’s Red States are not a good mission field; it would be like planting beans in the middle of somebody else’s corn. Which in itself is a Biblical abomination, the chapter and verse of which escape me. Much of the country west of Pennsylvania and south of Illinois, is full-up with fundamentalists, so there’s no new work for preachers there.
A good mission field is where the word of the Lord God has not yet taken root, such as America’s Blue States. There’s no shortage of Christian churches there, never has been. Religion is why the Pilgrims came to New England and grew democracy from Calvin's rule that lay church officials should be chosen by voice vote. That was going on four-hundred years ago; now the Blue States are lousy with Lutherans, Episcopalians, Congregationalists, Catholics – you name it. But from a fundamentalist perspective, they aren’t saved, they’ve yet to meet Jesus, aren’t filled with the Holy Spirit, and are helplessly, uselessly nescient of God’s plans for them; deservedly, they’re all are damned to eternal hell, to tread forever in the lake of fire.
Fundamentalists disdain Catholics and liberal Protestants as being in league with Satan, ostensibly because they don’t preach “The Word,” but there’s often a left-right political dynamic in play as well. The Neddites tend to mingle their politics with religion, including American flags on the altar, coded political advice from the pulpit, General Boykin, and George W. Bush’s Christian Warrior delusion. If it were a purely theological problem, we could all live happily ever after with the special knowledge versus faith debate. But it isn’t theology; it’s theocracy. When God gives special providence over your nation, then caution and thoughtfulness mean a lack of faith. When Jesus tosses you the keys, you don’t worry about the gas mileage, you just want to know how far and fast that damned chariot will fly.
Christian fundamentalism, the majority constituency within the larger framework of Evangelicalism, has grown since it inception in the mid-nineteenth century with John Nelson Darby and the Dispensationalists, a branch of millennialism. From cadged- together verses in Revelations and the book of Daniel, Darby dreamed up a doomsday eschatology that binds all fundamentalists together regardless of their philosophical nuances and timeline disputes. They all believe in the end of the world the way children believe in Santa Claus.
Darby broke history up into epochs, or “dispensations,” the first of which produced Mosaic Law, wherein God extended salvation to the Jews through the observance of his commandments. Fundamentalists regard the First Dispensation as the basis for modern civil society. The Second Dispensation, according the Darby, was the birth of Christ, which triggered the age of Grace, and officially made Christians the apples of God’s eye – to the exclusion of everyone else, especially the Jews. Even though Christ didn’t believe this for a moment. When asked if his grace was meant for the Gentiles, Jesus said:
Matthew 7:6
Give not that which is holy to the dogs, nor cast your pearls before the swine, lest they trample them with their feet, and turning round rend you. .
Say what? Says Jesus.
Matthew 15:26
But he answering said, It is not well to take the bread of the children and cast it to the dogs.
1 Peter 4:3
For the time past [is] sufficient [for us] to have wrought the will of the Gentiles, walking in lasciviousness, lusts, wine-drinking, revels, drinkings, and unhallowed idolatries.
I love that about us, and denaturing Jesus’ Jewishness was an invention of St. Paul’s for a simple reason: he was getting nowhere with converting Jews. So, like any good street corner Bible waver, Paul, nee Saul, the nasty Pharisee, found a new mission field – the aimless, pagan Gentiles. And he was a hit.
Darby’s Final Dispensation includes the return of the Diaspora Jews to Israel, and finally, the return of Jesus, and his thousand-year reign on earth. Dispenastionalism preaches that simply because miracles happened two thousand years ago, you can’t expect them now. And while parents once had the authority under Mosaic Law to stone disobedient children to death, and a man could have as many wives as he could afford – ditto with slaves, we should be less severe and rapacious now. According the dispensationalists, Christianity used to be charismatic – speaking in tongues and writhing on the floor like burning bacon, working their demons out for everyone to watch was common practice. But that’s over too. Obstetricians and bankers don’t play that. Real estate tycoons and police officers don’t wiggle and worm at church. The demons still attack, but fundamenatalists don’t dance and holler; they pray the shit out of them bad boys instead. The preacher and choir put on the show; the congregation sings and prays.
Dispensationalism is a facile mythology of the past two millennia; it’s a recondite historicism that cooks the Bible’s hundreds of irreconcilable contradictions into God’s Plan; it molds the Biblically ridiculous into the theologically sublime, and absolutely irresistible to the Neddite hunger for the supernatural. Televangelist Jack Van Impe’s “End Times” are a jumped-up version of Hegel and Fukuyama’s Ends of History; where they envision liberal democracy saving humankind from itself, the fundamentalists expect a literal savior in the form of Jesus Christ to come busting in on a fast cloud.
The so-called Great Awakening (fundamentalists believe that we are currently engaged in the Second Great Awakening) occurred around 1840, and bore the Temperance Movement. Fundamentalists denounced drinking and smoking as anathema to clean Christian living. Their Biblical sourcing on alcohol prohibition related to Noah and his tribe of reprobate sons. It’s lewd and specious at best, culture-killing at worst. Archaeologists recently uncovered jugs of alcoholic brew dating back to the 7000 BC in China; many anthropologists believe that hunter gather societies became agrarian primarily to grow the ingredients for wine and beer. God knows they drank enough of it in the Bible.
If fundamentalists don’t want to drink, that’s fine. Fun is wasted on them anyway. The problem is that they don’t want anyone else drinking either. Most literature and music is useless to them, so Neddites don’t want you reading Salinger or Voltaire, or listening to Debussy or Marilyn Manson. If they could, they’d put it all of popular culture in a big pile, douse it with gasoline, and send it to hell.
Neddites claim to be extant from “the world,” which means the rest of us and our cultural lives, but nevertheless, they spend considerable time and energy telling the world what to do and think. In fact, that’s the plan, and it’s in full motion.
In the community of fundamentalists, there are pre-millenarists, post-millenarists, and amillenailists, but don’t study those distinctions too closely; it’s fundamentalist inside baseball, and interesting only as an example of textual discord among people who claim to follow The Word. The same people who can divine from the Bible the when, where, why, and the how of the end of the world can’t even agree on the order of events. The same people who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible can’t decide exactly what it’s being infallible about.
Another nasty flavor of fundamentalism is Christian Reconstructionism, which arose out of conservative Presbyterianism in the early 1970s. Followers believe that those places dominated by sin, such as the Blue States, must be “reconstructed” or made holy according to God’s word. This sect gives Margret Atwood and me bad dreams.
Reconstructionism is also known as Dominion Theology, and Theonomy from the Greek for God’s law. Reconstructionists are the scariest in captivity because they believe that their Godly calling is to literally bring whole societies to Jesus, like the Borg. If history is a reliable witness, they’ll use politics and money to get most of us, then sealed boxcars for the rest. This right is derived from Genesis Chapter 1:26:
"Then God said, 'Let us make man in our image, in our likeness and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth and over all the creatures that move along the ground.'"
Most Christians interpret this verse as meaning God gave mankind a top berth in the food chain. Dominion theologians, however, read it as a command to Christians to bring all societies around the world under the rule of God. Their plan for world domination , as Austin Powers as it sounds, is to seize control of the United States through peaceful and legal means, relying heavily upon our cultural tolerance for all religious beliefs and money-driven political campaigns, no matter how wacky or dangerous. Of course, when and if they truly do take hold, the first civil liberty to be quashed will be religious freedom. Everybody else’s.
With the help of friendly politicians already in place, Christian schools and colleges across the country are preparing young fundamentalists to become the “leaders of tomorrow.” Patrick Henry College and other like-minded institutions of fundamentalist learning are guaranteed 20% of all federal internships by the Bush Administration. That’s one in five. According to the Christian Coalition, 40% of the US Congress – that’s 226 republicans and 5 Democrats – are cooperative legislators who vote its way at least 80% of the time.
The larger issue is that all fundamentalists reduce spirituality to a big expensive blood chilling and spilling game of Dungeons and Dragons. Factoids are spun from fiction as fundamentalists predict the future without ever leaving the past. They are, as many before them have been, convinced that years ending in 00 hold significant power, and years ending 000 mean that the end is nigh. The problem for the rest of us that when war and profit are in the offing, prophesy can easily become self-fulfilling. Leading up to the year 2000 – recall the dreaded Y2K – the FBI considered the threat from Christian fundamentalists to be sufficiently grave to warrant its own special task force called Operation Megiddo.
What’s most telling is that the Neddites believe that Jesus can’t return without the Battle of Armegeddon, which they regard as the focal event for the beginning of end of the world when sinners will get what’s good for them. And it’s not the glorified hypocrites among them who should be worried, people such as Jim Bakker, Robert Tilton, Jimmy Swaggart, William Bennett, Don Clowers, Pat Robertson, Reverend Ike, TD Jakes, Bennie Hinn, and Rush Limbaugh – or even the nameless philanderer or embezzler you see at church every Sunday – because if you’re in the club, you’re saved no matter what. You got the Holy Ghost in your heart cowboy, so party on. It’s everyone else who will suffer the plague of boils and locusts, floods and earthquakes, and who’ll drown forever in the great unquenchable lake of fire that will destroy the world and everybody’s 401(K).
The Tribulation, as these troubled times are called, are the anti-Christ’s cold, soulless seven-year dominion – our just deserts for not listening and never praying, for dancing and not going to church, for being gay, for having an abortion, or merely for regarding any of these as matters of personal preference. We’re all looking at low-quality dungeon-time with the 666 Beast, and the fundamentalists take comfort and satisfaction from this special knowledge, this imminent future that awaits us, but not them.
For their part, they’re on a mission to warn us, to get us saved and right with Jesus. So when the Apocalypse hits the fan and we still aren’t on board with the Lord, they’ll wallow in their vindication, eternally unsympathetic and self-righteous.
Fundamentalism launched its first large-scale moral values campaign in Massachusetts, in 1692. History remembers it as the Salem Witch Trials, based on the Spanish Inquisition. This is when Christian fundamentalism first flexed its political muscles in America.
That witch trials eventually got out of hand, and fundamentalism retreated from the public sphere for a couple centuries until the 1840s when, in response to most of America being soused all the time (largely because the water was undrinkable), it took up the holy sledge hammer to bust every cask of rum in the land. But Prohibition didn’t happen over night. Individual towns and counties around the country “went dry” and many others passed Torquemada-esque laws regulating the days and hours during which alcohol may be consumed.
Then, in 1920, fundamentalism successfully foisted alcohol prohibition upon post-Great War America by the Volstead Act and the 18th Amendment to the Constitution, which made intoxicating libations illegal. It did not, however, put much of a damper on the Roaring 20s.
Prohibition came about in no small part through the coast-to-coast sermonizing of radio preachers Aime Semple McPherson (who later staged her own kidnapping for reasons unknown – but a boyfriend and an abortion were rumored to have been involved), and Billy Sunday, a former baseball player, strict fundamentalist, anti-evolutionist, and Prohibitionist. Finally, after an endorsement from Herbert Hoover, the most failed President in American history until now, Prohibition became known as “The Noble Experiment” – which gives you some idea of how harebrained it was from the outset. Whenever something is labeled noble, it’s likely there’s another opinion out there not shared by the powers-that-be. Ask the Noble Savage about that next time you’re playing the slots with Bill Bennett. Prohibition lasted until 1933 when the 21st Amendment to the Constitution ended it. But fundamentalism’s infamous contributions to the American republic didn’t end with this self-corrected Constitutional mistake.
More than seventy years later, the damage that the ignoble experiment leveled on American society remains – under Prohibition organized crime blossomed from your not-so-bright, de-centralized street punks and XYY-types into a multi-billion dollar, international enterprise. Along the way, it corrupted law enforcement and filled every new prison before it was built. People drink now more per capita now than they did before alcohol was made illegal, so it had the opposite desired effect – which is often the case with social engineering, especially when its enacting legislation defines and regulates “moral values.” As the poet Todd Snider says, “People love drugs. They’re bigger than Rush Limbaugh.”
On the upside, Prohibition re-introduced a healthy disrespect for unjust laws, which has always been a saving force in American politics.
Despite its history of disastrous forays into public policy, Christian fundamentalism thrived. For many years after Prohibition ended officially in 1934, until 1978, the Neddites cut themselves off from electoral politics, and what it calls, the world. The World means people and institutions outside the fundamentalist faith who, when they get a moment, choose to read the newspaper or a book rather than pray. Fundamentalists are isolated from this reality, choosing instead to create their own odd, Tolkien-meets-Tim- Lahaye reality.
Over the past thirty years, the fundamentalist faithful have grown in numbers, strength, resources, and political savvy. Ronald Reagan was the first presidential candidate to tap the anxious and eager power of the Moral Majority. And although the organization self-destructed from innate corruption and tax dodgery in the 1990s, on September 12, 2001, as a guest on Pat Robertson’s 700 Club, the Rev. Jerry Falwell blamed, “the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians...the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen, the terrorist acts of September 11, 2001." Robertson gave Jerry a big me-too on that point.
In November 2004, buoyed by inexplicable and presumably miraculous re-election of George W. Bush, Jerry Falwell resurrected the Moral Majority – which is exactly the kind of up-from-the-ashes, roll away the stone story that the faithful adore. Sixty-five million people, identify themselves as Christian fundamentalists in Amrerica, and they include, according to Karl Rove, the 12% of the voters who won the presidency for his boss in 2004. Bob Jones III, of Bob Jones University, wrote President Bush the day after the election, telling him: "In your re-election, God has graciously granted America – though she doesn't deserve it – a reprieve from the agenda of paganism.”
Bush promised the fundamentalists conservative policies, laws, judges, and justices who will overturn Roe v.Wade. Conversely, he also threatened them with “Massachusetts-style gay marriage” if John Kerry were elected. So they voted in droves.
The fundamentalist get-out-the-vote effort, called “I Vote Values” edged victories for Bush in all eleven states where the gay marriage question was on the ballot. It also created a fait accompli in the other twenty-nine Red States where the question of whether “God hates Fags” isn’t even worthy of a dinner table debate, much less putting it to a vote. Still, the other 88% of the people who voted that day hold very different views.
America faces incalculable deficits, rising poverty and infant mortality rates, unaffordable health care, under-funded education, and more people in prison than any nation on earth. And let’s not forget the Iraq War and terrorism. But our most recent presidential election was decided on the question of gay civil unions. How, in the 21st century, can that be? It’s simple, if you’re a fundamentalist.
Leviticus 20:13
And if a man lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall certainly be put to death; their blood is upon them.
And there you are. It’s no more complicated than that. There are people – a lot of people, nearly a quarter of the population – who not only willingly, but with righteous indignation, deny their fellow citizens basic civil rights based on the how they read the Bible. This is the first mark of a Puritan, a witch burner, a Prohibitionist, a fundamentalist, a Neddite.
On the basis of a 5000 year old admonition written by pelt-wearing primitives scratching out “God’s Word” on dried animal skins with the tips of burned sticks, all the other reasons a democracy might choose to re-elect or oust an incumbent president were trumped, all the other needs and desires voters brought to the polls were nullified by a radical religious minority praying hard for the end of the world. That’s not the trait of a healthy democracy, that’s a symptom of a growing theocracy.
Put some Dockers on those ancient Bible-writing man-beasts, take away their hides and sticks and give them laptops and web pages – but leave in place the same narrow, fearful values, the fatalistic demon-filled occult beliefs, the grocery list of intolerable abominations – and you have a fundamentalist.
According to fundamentalist belief, their intolerance is not only inspired, but required by God; in fact, the Bible angrily mentions “abomination” one-hundred and fifty-five times. Christian fundamentalists ignore the bits about not eating crawdads and pulled pork, and focus instead on true abominations, such cross-dressing:
Deuteronomy 22:5
There shall not be a man's apparel on a woman, neither shall a man put on a woman's clothing; for whoever doeth so is an abomination to Jehovah thy God.
It’s hard for most of to believe that God really cares what you wear. Is a kilt an abomination? And most of us are open-minded to believe that no matter how baggy-assed and pilly pant suits are, they’re really not worthy of a stoning.
And then there’s the abominable vermin:
Leviticus 11:42
Whatever goeth on the belly, and whatever goeth on all four, and all that have a great many feet, of every manner of crawling thing which crawleth on the earth -- these ye shall not eat; for they are an abomination.
Deuteronomy 12:31
And thou shalt not bring an abomination into thy house, lest thou be a cursed thing like it.
Which all neatly explains the astounding success of bug exterminator-turned politician US Representative Tom Delay (R-TX), the former-now-indicted House Minority Leader known as “The Hammer” – but who really needs the Bible to tell you that snakes are scary and cockroaches icky?
And what about being a big bullshitter?
Proverbs 12:22
Lying lips are an abomination to Jehovah; but they that deal truly are his delight.
Where’s that leave Bush and Cheney?
And what the hell is this?
Proverbs 20:10
Divers weights, divers measures, even both of them are abomination to Jehovah.
Fundamentalists believe that the Bible is the Word of God, both “actual and factual,” and thus they live by it. Or at least claim to. What that means for the rest of us, is up to us.
Despite our Constitution’s safety net of checks and balances, the two-party system isn’t specifically designed for power sharing; in the hands of the self-righteous it’s become a winner-take-all, zero sum game. A small political majority has easily acquired lopsided political power. So, in a modern, pluralistic, liberal democracy, the meta-questions are: how much faith can we put in other people’s delusions, and how tolerant of intolerance can we afford to be?
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