Christian Nation by Frederic C. Rich Read Free Book Online Page B

discourage.
    It is painful for me to realize how far things already had progressed by 2005. Even Sanjay didn’t have the full picture at the time. After the 2004 election, not only were the president of the United States, the Speaker of the House, numerous cabinet members, and other senior federal officials born-again Christians, but forty-two out of a hundred US senators were entirely supportive of the Christian right agenda, holding ratings of 100 percent from the Christian Coalition. Extreme fundamentalist Christians entered the US Senate, including Tom Coburn of Oklahoma (calling for the death penalty for abortion doctors) and Jim DeMint (wanting to ban gays and unmarried pregnant women from teaching in public schools). Fundamentalist Christian theology was already driving our federal policy on medical research (with the ban on stem cell research), sex education (which the government decreed should focus exclusively on the promotion of abstinence), and US foreign policy in the Middle East (where an important driver of US policy was the need to have Jerusalem in the hands of the Jews in order to satisfy a biblical condition to the second coming of Christ). The federal government was channeling billions in taxpayer funds to faith-based organizations—nearly all evangelical. And, perhaps most significantly and least noticed, much of the legislation that would eventually implement the theocratic program, including the Constitution Restoration Act (preventing federal courts from hearing church/state separation cases) and the Houses of Worship Free Speech Restoration Act (allowing tax-exempt churches to engage in partisan political activity), had already been introduced in Congress, ultimately failing to become law but attracting significant pluralities. We had already been given, unknowingly, a preview of what was to follow.

    M UCH LATER, WHEN working for New York governor Bloomberg, I read a lot about revolutions. Revolutions are rarely if ever majoritarian but instead are usually propelled by a small group that is disciplined and fanatical to which a passive majority then acquiesces. Incredibly, by 2005 the first phase of the Christian revolution was already over, yet few people other than its proponents understood at the time that this had happened. The small band of fanatics, headed by James Dobson, Tony Perkins, and Doug Coe, among others, inspired by Rousas J. Rushdoony and funded by Howard Ahmanson, Jr., had succeeded in bringing their brand of fundamentalist Christianity from the fringes of American life to the very heart of political power. A theology that had been intolerable to mainstream Christianity before had achieved legitimacy. In 1981 Gary North had written that “to smooth the transition to Christian political leadership … Christians must begin to organize politically within the present party structure, and they must begin to infiltrate the existing institutional order.” This was, they were clear, to be a revolution from within. Twenty-five years later, evangelicals, through carefully incremental political work at the precinct, county, and state level, had seized control of the Republican Party. It was a movement that was at once cultural and political, and it was the largest such movement in the country by far. All that by 2005.
    Very few people at the time noticed what had happened. There were, admittedly, many moderate Republicans who fully understood this takeover of one of our two major political parties, without, of course, anticipating its eventual implications. But the general public was largely blind to the enormous role that religion was playing in politics, in part because evangelical Republican candidates used a veiled code in their communications with the faithful, what political pros referred to as “dog-whistle politics” for its ability to arouse the faithful while passing undetected by others.
    As a result, the rest of America still associated the word “Christian” with benign