In April, Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee, hired an openly gay man, Richard Grenell, to serve as his campaign’s national-security spokesman. The next day, Fischer launched a public attack on Grenell, a Republican foreign-policy expert who had previously worked as the spokesman for John Bolton, President George W. Bush’s Ambassador to the United Nations. Fischer had no argument with Grenell’s political views, which are consistently hawkish. The problem was his sex life: gay men, Fischer said, have “random, frequent, and anonymous sexual encounters—that becomes a significant issue when we talk about appointing somebody to a post as sensitive as the spokesman for national security.” After other conservative pundits took up Fischer’s cause, Grenell resigned from the Romney campaign. The resulting controversy has helped make gay rights one of the defining social issues of the 2012 campaign.
The one-story concrete building where Fischer works is indistinguishable from neighboring offices occupied by dentists, except that its front entrance features a statue of a fetus enshrined in a heart and a shoulder-high stone tablet inscribed with the Ten Commandments. Inside, plaques bearing the words “In God We Trust” underscore that this is the national headquarters of the American Family Association, a nonprofit advocacy group. A “pro-family ministry” founded in 1977, it promotes Bible-based social conservatism and criticizes what it regards as sinful popular culture.
Like much of the religious right, the A.F.A. was losing traction until Barack Obama was elected President, in 2008. His victory galvanized the group. Its leaders saw Obama as a radical proponent of godless socialism. According to a former employee, staff members at the Tupelo office passed around an image of Obama’s face blended with that of Adolf Hitler, against a backdrop of a swastika. The former employee, who found the image disrespectful, recalls, “Things really took a turn. They were no longer civil about the opposition. The goal became to defeat Obama.” In 2009, the A.F.A. hired Fischer as its director of issue analysis and as the host of “Focal Point,” which is broadcast from a studio across the street.
The American Family Association’s radio network comprises two hundred stations in thirty-five states, and Fischer’s program reaches more than a million listeners a day. That’s a fraction of Rush Limbaugh’s audience, but as large as that of Rachel Maddow or Chris Matthews, on MSNBC. Until recently, Fischer’s rising popularity escaped notice in the mainstream media, in part because his show is broadcast primarily on stations in the Southeast and the Midwest, including small cities such as Tullahoma, Tennessee, and Piggott, Arkansas. But his program is part of a parallel media universe that provides news and commentary, on everything from science to American history, from a perspective that is far to the right of Fox News.
christofascism
Southwestern missionary agencies and Christian lay leaders willingly lent oil businesses their expertise. Robert G. LeTourneau was not an oilman of Lyman Stewart’s ilk, but as an engineer of earth-moving and oil-drilling machinery he made just as vital a contribution to the evolution of southwestern oil culture. Like Stewart, LeTourneau believed that the Lord’s return was near and that the only way to prepare for it was to study prophecy, defend the fundamentals of the faith, and adopt better strategies of business and evangelistic outreach to penetrate the darkest corners of the secular world. LeTourneau’s technocratic faith also demanded a global vision. In the early 1950s LeTourneau brokered a deal with Cameron Townsend, the founding director of Wycliffe Bible Translators, and Peru president Manuel Odria to help complete the Trans-Andean Highway in exchange for a million acres of uncultivated land. Odria hoped this project would give the Peruvian subsidiaries of Mobil Oil and Gulf Oil access to the country’s petroleum reserves; Townsend hoped that it would facilitate expanded missionary efforts into the Amazonian jungles. The plan suited LeTourneau too. He transformed the uncultivated land into Tournavista, a community of natives and missionaries that carried out his plan for a “free” and self-sustaining economy that might be used as a model of capitalism for “third world” societies. And so, in return for their knowledge of undeveloped regions targeted for drilling, oil-friendly evangelicals of LeTourneau’s stature received financial help (and government support) needed to build beacons of Christian democracy abroad.
American Exceptionalism should not be part of any Christian’s theology or thinking. If we have anything more than others or that which privileges us over others who have less, we should use that power as an opportunity to serve those who are less fortunate. Ready to take on American Exceptionalism? You might want to pack a parachute… Randy Woodley ☀
So to those who insist that America be a Christian nation, I ask: Is this truly what you want? Do you want the I-was-hungry-and-you-gave-me-something-to-eat of Matthew 25? Do you want the Sermon on the Mount? Do you want to shine God’s light in the darkness? Your behavior says no. Your shouts against generosity say no. Your penchant for oppressive culture says no. Your willingness to shower wealth on the few while the many suffer says no. Your hostility to freedom says no. So stop pretending. At least be as honest as the hedge fund manager who paid himself $8 billion last year. It’s “all about the Benjamins,” not the Gospel. It’s about stifling any freedom but your own. It’s about imposing your cultural preferences on others. It’s about turning your fears and appetites into law. It’s about you, not about Jesus Christ. That’s the nature of politics, of course: one “you” versus another “you.” That’s fine, and it’s why we formed a democracy, so that our various interests could compete fairly. Just spare us the religious posturing. If America became a Christian nation, doing what Jesus did, you would be aghast. Tom Ehrich ☀
So how do we reconcile these two seemingly contradictory facts: that the Christian Right wants a moral establishment, a coercive vision of government, with its libertarian framework? Here I would draw a crucial distinction between libertarianism and anti-statism. Members of the Christian Right are decidedly not radical individualists of the Age of Aquarius. But they are opposed to the state insofar as it represents a secularism that they despise. The state as it is currently constituted is seen as the greatest barrier to their Protestant moral establishment. Now, obviously, many Christian Right leaders celebrate unregulated capitalism—“free enterprise”—to the degree that they fit well within the Republican Party, which would give corporations a freer reign than they already enjoy. This holds true even in the wake of the recent destructive financial collapse that is so obviously the result of giving free reign to finance, the most powerful sector of corporate America. This tendency needs better historical explanation than I can give in this blog post. But it does not take away from the fact that libertarianism is not anti-statism, and that the Christian Right, and thus much of American conservatism, holds to the latter, not the former. Liberty and Order: Or, the Perplexities of American Conservatism ☀
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