Fear of Nature

 Hedges, Chris.  American Fascists:  The Christian Right and the War on America.  Simon and Schuster, NY, NY.  2006.

-   One of the questions that comes out of this book is, “are fanatically religious people clinically crazy?”  Eric Fromm’s The Sane Society comes to mind.  Just because a lot of people believe something, doesn’t make it sane or even reasonable.  Nazism and Southern slave culture come to mind.  What are the dangers of fanaticism, on both a personal/psychological level, as well as on the social/political level? 

-   My own personal answer to this question is that fanaticism represents a devolution of the human mind.  Fanaticism is the denial of the healthy tension that comes from the natural plurality of experience.  It therefore signifies the atrophy and arrest of human emotional development.  Our desperate need to belong to a group too often outcompetes our ability to think critically, to question the status quo.  But when the beliefs of the group are objectively untrue, and they also result in the oppression and destruction of countless cultures, then our responsibility to think critically must cause us to think and act outside the status quo. 

-   I read this book at the same time as Harari’s Sapiens.  Both leave us with the question:  why do we believe in crazy stuff??...especially when those beliefs result in such destruction/oppression, most often of the Other.  At this present day, why does anyone NEED to believe that a middle eastern carpenter from 2,000 years ago is the son of God?  The Inquisition, the Crusades, the Genocide of the people of the Americas, the child abuse of the modern Catholic Church, the denial of evolution and our place in the ecology of planet, the biblical creed to dominate nature, resulting in the destruction of our home...these all seem reason enough to step outside the group, and reconsider one’s allegiance to the social/historical construct called Christianity. 

Ch 1. Faith 

(1) “Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance.  If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them…We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right to not tolerate the intolerant,” (Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies).

(2) We took the Bible seriously and therefore could not take it literally. [growing up in the Presbyterian Church in small town upstate NY].

(4) A literal reading of the Bible means reinstitution of slavery coupled with the understanding that the slavemaster has the right to beat his slave without mercy since “the slave is his money” (Exodus 21:21).  Children who strike or curse a parent are to be executed (Exodus 21:15,17).  Those who pay homage to another god “shall be utterly destroyed” (Exodus 22:20).  Menstruating women are to be considered unclean, and all they touch while menstruating becomes unclean (Leviticus 21:17-21).  Blashphemers shall be executed (Leviticus 24:16)…Women throughout the Bible are subservient to men, often without legal rights, and men are free to sell their daughters into sexual bondage (Exodus 21:7-11).

-  See Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible, David Plotz; War in the Hebrew Bible: A Study in the Ethics of Violence, Susan Niditch; Harlot by the Side of the Road: Forbidden Tales of the Bible, J Kirsh; The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monothesim, R Schwartz.

(5) There is enough hatred, bigotry, and lust for violence in the pages of the Bible to satisfy anyone bent on justifying cruelty and violence.  Religion, as H. Reinhold Niebuhr said, is a good thing for good people and a bad thing for bad people.

-  Ie Conservative Xians can justify anti women’s rights, anti-underserved community rights, support for war against any non-Xian people, etc..

(6) This literature [anti women, anti gay, violence against ‘others’] in the biblical canon keeps alive the virus of hatred, whether dormant or active, and the possibility of apocalyptic terror in the name of God.  And the steady refusal by churches to challenge the canonical authority of these passages means these churches share some of the blame.  “Unless the churches, Protestant and Catholic alike, come together on this, they will continue to make it legitimate to believe in the end as a time when there will be no non Christians or infidels,” theologian Richard Fenn wrote.  “Silent complicity with apocalyptic rhetoric soon becomes collusion with plans for religiously inspired genocide.- BUT…Conservative Xians and White Supremacists want violent conflict.  Not understanding this is a mistake made by many politicians and media. 

- ie “Nobody wants to see more death, not you, not me, not anybody,” Mayor Ted Wheeler after deadly shooting in Portland, Aug 30th, 2020.

- This is not entirely true.  Some people are yearning for the violent 2nd coming, for images of Revelation.  They are showing up to protests of social unrest with semi automatic weapons and walking the streets, posing themselves as “protectors of property.”  They are looking to kill.  They are mostly white supremacists, though they will not call themselves that, and they can no longer stand seeing people of color walking the streets, demanding the rights that our constitution, and common sense morals, is supposed to grant them.  Some people do not want peace.  They want war.  They are bored with the relatively peaceful status quo, and appalled at the secular direction of modern society.  And the most dangerous aspect of this is that the President of the U.S. is stoking their hatred.  He is energizing their sophomoric tribalism, their racism.  He is a bully on the schoolyard, and in response to people dying, he is saying, literally, “you haven’t seen anything yet.”

(8) “There lives more faith in honest doubt, than in half the creeds,” Alfred North Tennyson.

(8) We are saved in the end by faith – faith that life is not meaningless and random, that there is a purpose to human existence, and that in the midst of this morally neutral universe the tiny, seemingly insignificant acts of compassion and blind human kindness, especially to those labeled our enemies and strangers, sustain the divine spark, which is love.  We are not fully human if we live alone.  These small acts of compassion – for they can never be organized and institutionalized as can hate – have a power that lives after us.  Human kindness is deeply subversive to totalitarian creeds, which seek to thwart all compassion toward those deemed unworthy of moral consideration, those branded as internal or external enemies.  These acts recognize and affirm the humanity of others, others who may be condemned as agents of Satan.  Those who sacrifice for others, especially at great cost, who place compassion and tolerance above ideology and creeds, and who reject absolutes, especially moral absolutes, stand as constant witnesses in our lives to this love, even long after they are gone.

-  Does there have to be “a purpose” to life, a “reason” for living?

-  What does “living alone” mean in a global world?  Is social media an adequate community? 

-  the “other” as agents of Satan.

-  moral absolutes…the sophomoric need to cling to and reify ideological certainties

(9) Those who claim to know what life means play God…They remove the anxiety of moral choice, the fundamental anxiety of human existence.  This is part of their attraction.  They give us rules by which we live.  But once we hand over this anxiety and accept their authority, we become enslaved and they become our idols.  And idols, as the Bible never ceases to tell us, destroy us.

-  see essay “Paradox and Equilibrium” on this site, for a look into the anxiety of moral choice, how we tend to emotionally avoid the tension of critical thinking.

-  (1) removing the anxiety of free choice/critical thinking and (2) keeping with tradition/tribal beliefs, ie ‘belonging,’ as the two main factors for religious fanaticism.

-  Fanatic belief as mental and emotional weakness.  Not having the fortitude and natural born confidence to consider ‘otherness.’

(10) Dominionism takes its name from Genesis 1:26-31, in which God gives humans dominion over all creation.  This movement, small in number but influential, departs from traditional evangelicalism.  Dominionists now control at least six national TV networks, each reaching tens of millions of homes, and virtually all of the nation’s more than 2,000 religious radio stations, as well as denominations such as the Southern Baptist Convention.  Dominionism seeks to redefine traditional democratic and Christian terms and concepts to fit an ideology that calls on the radical church to take political power.  It shares many prominent features with classical fascist movements.

(11) Dominionism…teaches that American Christians have been mandated by God to make America a Christian state.  It has roots in the theocracy of John Calvin in the 1500s as its political model. 

(12) Under Christian dominion, America will no longer will no longer be a sinful and fallen nation but one in which the 10 commandments form the basis of our legal system, creationism and Christian values form the basis of our educational system, and the media and the government proclaim the Good News to one and all.  Labor unions, civil rights laws and public schools will be abolished.  Women will be removed from the workforce to stay at home, and all those deemed insufficiently Christian will be denied citizenship.

-  public schools will be abolished…see Betsy DeVos [U.S. secretary of education, appointed by Trump] and her family’s connection to major conservative Christian political fund raisers. 

-  See Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism is Un-American, Seidel.

(12) The racist and brutal intolerance of the intellectual godfathers of today’s Christian Reconstructionism is a chilling reminder of the movement’s lust for repression.  The Institutes of Biblical Law by R.J. Rushdoony, written in 1973, is the most important book for the dominionist movement.  Rushdoony calls for a Christian society that is harsh, unforgiving, and violent.  His work draws heavily on the calls for a repressive theocratic society laid out by Calvin in Insitutes of Christian Religion, first published in 1536, and one of the most important works of the Protestant Reformation.  Christians are, Rushdoony argues, the new chosen people of God and are called to do what Adam and Eve failed to do: create a godly, Christian state. 

-  See Williams, David R., Wilderness Lost: The Religious Origins of the American Mind and Turner, F.  Beyond Geography: The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness.

(13) Traditional fundamentalism shares many of the darker traits of the new movement – such as blind obedience to a male hierarchy that often claims to speak for God, intolerance toward non-believers, and disdain for rational, intellectual inquiry.

-  See Lakoff’s Moral Politics for the “strict male authority” model of conservatives.

(18) “The language and symbols of an authentic American fascism would, of course, have little to do with the original European models,” Robert O. Paxton wrote in Anotomy of Fascism:  “Hitler and Mussolini, after all, had not tried to seem exotic to their fellow citizens.  No swastikas in an American fascism, but Stars and Stripes and Christian crosses.  No fascist salute, but mass recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance.  These symbols contain no whiff of fascism in themselves, but an American fascism would transform them into obligatory litmus tests for detecting the internal enemy.”

-  Ie, no kneeling for the national anthem!! Even to raise awareness of racial injustice.

-  “under God,” added to Pledge of Allegiance by Eisenhower in 1954.

(18) There are at least 70 million evangelicals in the U.S. – about 25 percent of the population – attending more than 200,000 churches.  Polls indicate that about 40 percent of respondents believe in the Bible as the “actual word of God” and that it is “to be taken literally, word for word.”  Applied to the county’s total population, this proportion would place the numbers of believers at about 100 million.  These polls also suggest that about 84 percent of Americans accept that Jesus is the son of God; 80 percent of respondents say that they believe they will stand before God on the Day of Judgment.  The same percentage of respondents say God works miracles, and half say they think angels exists.  Almost a third of all respondents say they believe in the Rapture.

(19) In a 2004 study, the political scientist John Green identifies those he calls “traditional evangelicals.”  This group, which Green estimates at 12.6 percent of the population, comes “closest to the ‘religious right’ widely discussed in the media.”  It is overwhelmingly Republican; it is openly hostile to democratic pluralism, and it champions totalitarian policies, such as denying homosexuals the same rights as other Americans, and amending the Constitution to make America a ‘Christian nation”…but the potency of this radical movement far exceeds their numbers.  Radical social movements, as Crane Brinton wrote in The Anatomy of Revolution, are almost always tiny, although they use tools of modern propaganda to create the illusion of a mass following.

-  We allow the few fanatics to gain power because we like the spectacle of the hero image.  See Morris Berman and G. Lakoff.

(21) Dominionists wait only for a fiscal, social, or political crisis, a moment of upheaval in the form of an economic meltdown or another terrorist strike on American soil, to move to reconfigure the political system.

            - ie, The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein.

(23) The Bush administration has already diverted billions of dollars of taxpayer money from secular and governmental social organizations to faith-based organizations.

-  “faith based” means of course, the Christian faith, but they can’t call it “Christian based.”

-  See With God on Their Side: George W Bush and the Christian Right, E. Kaplan.

(24) It is perhaps telling that our closest allies in the United Nations on issues dealing with reproductive rights, one of the few issues where we cooperate with other nations, are Islamic states such as Iran.  But then the Christian Right and radical Islamists, although locked in a holy war, increasingly mirror each other.  They share the same obsessions.  They do not tolerate others forms of belief or disbelief.  They are at war with artistic and cultural expression.  The seek to silence the media.  They call for the subjugation of women.  They promote severe sexual repression, and they seek to express themselves through violence.

(24) Kenneth Blackwell, a stalwart of the Christian Right, was secretary of state for Ohio as well as co-chair of the state’s committee to re-elect G.W. Bush in 2004…He handled all complaints of irregularities.  He attempted to get the state to hand over all election polling to Diebold Election Systems, a subsidiary of Diebold Incorporated, a firm that makes electronic voting machines and has close ties with the Bush administration…Odell (CEO of Diebold) and other Diebold execs and board members of and donors to the Republican party.

-  Just another example of how the world of private economy and public government policy (which is supposed to be non partisan) are often not far apart from each other.  Like Cheney overseeing policies that allow Halliburton to increase its wealth multiple times over during his vice presidency.

(26) Followers in the movement are locked within closed systems of information and indoctrination that cater to their hates and prejudices.  Tens of millions of Maericans rely exclusively on Christian broadcasters for their news, health, entertainment, and devotional programs…These believers are encased in a hermetic world…Evolution is not taught…America, they are told, was founded as a Christian nation…Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, Pat Robertson’s Regent University, and a host of others such as Patrick Henry Univeristy.  They are taught, in short, to obey.  They are discouraged from critical analysis, questioning, and independent thought.  And they believe, by the time they are done, a host of myths designed to destroy the open, pluralist society. 

-  Fanaticism and fundamentalism as the end of thought.

(29) These carefully cultivated feelings of persecution foster a permanent state of crisis, a deep paranoia and fear, and they make it easier to all for violence – always, of course, as a form of self-defense. 

(29) After leading American troops into battle against a Somalian warlord, General William Boykin announced [2003]: “I knew my God was bigger than his.  I knew that my God was a real God and his God was an idol.”  General Boykin belongs to a small group called the Faith Force Multiplier, whose members apply military principles to evangelism in a manifesto summoning arriors “to the spiritual warfare of souls.”  Boykin, rather than being reprimanded for his inflammatory rhetoric, was promoted to the position of deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence.  He believes America is engaged in a holy war as a Christian nation battling Satan and that America’s Muslim adversaries will be defeated “only if we come against them in the name of Jesus.”

(29) War is the final aesthetic of the movement.

(30) The use of elaborate spectacle to channel and shape the passions of mass followers is a staple of totalitarian movements.  It gives to young adherents the raw material for their interior lives, for love and hate, joy and sorrow, excitement and belonging.  It imparts the illusion of personal empowerment.  It creates comradeship and solidarity…It gives meaning and purpose to life, turning a mundane existence into an epic battle against forces of darkeness…And it is very hard for the voices of moderation to compete, for these spectacles work to shut down individual conscience and reflection.  They give adherents a permissiveness, a rhetorical license to engage in acts of violence that are normally taboo in a democratic society.  It becomes permissible to hate.  The crowds are wrapped in the seductive language of violence, which soon enough leads to acts of real violence.

-  “moderation,” by definition, is less powerful emotionally, than fanaticism.  See Berman’s “Wandering Gods” for the power of vertical, hierarchical belief systems.

-  The spectacle of fanaticism – appeals to the often irrational and emotional need for tribal belonging in a modern world fragmented by the over-information of globalism.

-  The seductive language of violence originates from biblical revelation

-  “mundane existence” happens when you leave the natural occurring diversity of nature.  Violence against nature leads to the violence against “other,” be it women or black and brown and yellow or Muslim, etc.

(31) Apocalyptic visions inspire genocidal killers who glorify violence as the mechanism that will lead to the end of history.  Such visions nourished the butchers who led the Inquisition and the Crusades, as well as the Conquistadors who swept through the Americas hastily converting en masse native populations and then exterminating them.  The Puritans, who hoped to create a theologic state, believed that Satan ruled the wilderness surrounding their settlements. They believed that God had called them to cast Satan out of the Wilderness to create a promised land.  That divine command sanctioned the removal or slaughter of Native Americans.  This hubris fed the deadly doctrine of Manifest Destiny.  Similar apocalyptic visions of a world cleansed through violence and extermination nourished the Nazis, the Stalinists who consigned tens of thousands of Ukranians to starvation and death, the torturers in the clandestine prisons in Argentina during the Dirty War, and the Serbian thugs with heavy machine guns and wraparound sunglasses who stood over the bodies of Muslims they had slain in the smoking ruins of Bosnian villages.

-  See Perry Miller’s Errand into the Wilderness for Puritan world in America.  And F Turner’s Beyond Geography: The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness.  And D.R. Williams’ Wilderness Lost: the Religious Origins of the American Mind.

-  See R. Slotkin’s Regeneration Through Violence for “cleansed through violence.”

(31) The ecstatic belief in the cleansing power of apocalyptic violence does not recognize the right of the victims to self-preservation or self-defense. 

-  “Ecstatic” from the Greek ex-stasis, “out of body, place, position.”  The mystical magical ecstasy of violence…sacred violence.

(33) The paradox of tolerance.

-  Ie, “very hard for the voices of moderation to compete,” (pg 30), and “We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right to not tolerate the intolerant,” (pg 1).

(35) Radical Christian dominionists [have]…an inability to cope with ambiguity, doubt, and uncertainty…It condemns self-criticism and debate as apostasy.  It places a premium on action and finds its final aesthetic in war and apocalyptic violence.

-  See Berman’s Wandering God, and essay “Paradox and Equilibrium” on this site.

-  This inability is a sign of evolutionary regression, an arresting of the natural development of the human mind and human emotion, which can only develop through diversity and critical thought, and which decays in the hermetically sealed world of fanaticism and intolerance.

(36)  They are terrified of losing this new, mystical world of signs, wonders, and moral certitude, of returning to the old world of despair.

-  The incorrect psychological state of thinking that uncertainty is weakness and despair, and that false-certainty, pathological positivity is strength. 

-  See Too Much and Never Enough, M. Trump, on Trump’s “toxic positivity,” as an example.

Ch 2. The Culture of Despair

(41) The certitude of [a fundamentalist] life is a comfort.  It is a life of moral absolutes…Its rigidity brings with it feelings of righteousness and virtue.

(41) The [Christian Fundamentalist] movement promises to its followers what many never had: a stable home and family, a loving community, fixed moral standards, financial and personal success, and an abolition of uncertainty and doubt.  It offers a religious vision that will make fragmented, lost individuals whole. 

            - inauthentic wholeness and toxic positivity…positivity that is based in untruths.

(42) The loss of manufacturing jobs has dealt a body blow to the American middle class.  Manufacturing jobs accounted for 53 percent of the economy in 1965; by 1988, they accounted for 39 percent; by 2004, they accounted for 9 percent.  This is the first time since the industrial revolution that less than 10 percent of the American workforce is employed in manufacturing.

            - loss of quality uneducated jobs = despair = rise in fanatic movements

            - education increases the ability/willingness to doubt and critically think

(43) The so called red states, which vote republican and have large evangelical populations, have higher rates of murder, illegitimacy, and teenage births than the so called blue states, which vote democratic and have kept evangelicals at bay…The state with the lowest divorce rate is Massachusetts, a state singled out by televangelists because of its liberal politicians and legalization of same sex marriage.  In 2003, Massachusetts had a divorce rate of 5.7 per 1,000 married people, compared to 10.8 in Kentucky, 11.1 in Mississippi, and 12.7 in Arkansas.

(44) The 12 volume Left Behind series of apocalyptic Christian novels by Timothy LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins has sold than more 60 million copies. 

(45) In interview after interview, those in the movement spoke of desires for suicide before finding Jesus.  Even if the feelings were never acted upon, they indicate how terrible life had become before conversion.  Despair is the most powerful force driving people into the movement.

(49) This despair does not always rise out of severe want, the kind of want that plagues much of the developing world, or out of the immediate threat of war, but rather is the product of disconnectedness and loss of direction that comes from living in vast, soulless landscapes filled with strip malls and highways, where centers of existence and meaning have been obliterated.  It is a response to a national malaise.  This despair is created, perhaps more than any other force, the opening for these utopian visionaries.

- disconnectedness from Nature is the foundation.  Attempting “dominion over the earth” is the first and last step in complete existential disconnectedness and despair.

Ch 3.  Conversion

(55) They do not have to make moral choices.  They are made for them.  They submerge their individual personas into the single persona of the Christian crowd.

- Abandoning critical thought and moral tension because it’s too hard, which produces a less than human experience (see Paradox and Equilibrium essay on this site).

(56) [at a five day evangelical seminar led by D. James Kennedy in Florida] The most susceptible people, we are told at the seminar, are those in crisis: people in the midst of a divorce; those who have lost a job or are grieving for the death of a close friend or relative; those suffering addictions they cannot control, illness, or the trauma of emotional or physical abuse.  We are encouraged to target the vulnerable…It is easier to bring about a conversion when the person being proselytized is in a crisis.  Indeed, the goal of the conversion is to generate a sense of crisis by stressing that all who are unsaved are lost and in desperate need of help.

(70) Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation, which has over the years given nearly $6 million to church organizations.  The drive…to create a theocracy.

- Betsy DeVos is now the Secretary of Education under Trump, who seeks to privatize education, ie private Xian education.

Ch 4.  The Cult of Masculinity

 (80) There runs through the fundamentalist belief system a deep dread of ambiguity, disorder, and chaos.  Accordingly, the cult of masculinity keeps all ambiguity, especially sexual ambiguity, in check.  It fosters a world of binary opposites: God and man, saved and unsaved, the church and the world, Christianity and secular humanism, male and female.  These tidy pairings keep life from slipping back into a complicated nightmare.  Reality, thus defined, is made predictable and understandable, something deeply comforting to believers who have had trouble coping with the messiness of human existence.

- fear of diversity means fear of nature, the original place of diversity, ie, a “complicated nightmare.”

            - certainty = control, ie fantasies of domination (dominionism).

(83) The choice not to submit to the male head of the household, [James] Dobson makes clear, is a violation of God’s law.

            - see Lakoff’s Moral Politics for the “dominant father model” of American politics.

(85) “Freud believed that the inner tensions that we experience are by and large necessary tensions,” Mark Edmundson wrote, “not because they are enjoyable in themselves, but because the alternatives to them are so much worse.  For Freud, a healthy psyche is not always a psyche that feels good.”

            - uncomfortable tension over comfortable lethargy (thinking over non-thinking).

(86) “Their ticket to power is family values.  That’s the hook.  People are hungry for that.  But with this church family comes the imposition of an extreme male power structure.  First, they use this power structure to control the family, then the church, and finally the nation,” Susan F. Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell.

(87) The use of control and force is also designed to raise obedient, unquestioning, and fearful children, children who as adults will not be tempted to challenge powerful male figues.  These children are conditioned to rely on external authority for moral choice.  They obey out of fear and often repeat this pattern of fearful obedience as adults.  Refusal to submit to authority is heresy.  Raised in a home and a school where he or she is taught to see the world as one where the possibility of attack and danger lurks behind every crevice, the child learns to distrust outsiders. 

(88) The process makes possible a perpetuation of childhood.  It allows the adult to bask in the warm glow and magic of divine protection.

            - as in Paul Shepard’s arrested ontogeny.

(89) “Trained into conformity the child may well grow up into an adult who welcomes with relief the authoritarian demands of a totalitarian leader.  It is the welcome repetition of an old pattern that can followed without investment of a new emotional energy,” Meerlo, The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Through Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing.

Ch 5.  Persecution

(98) Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, a clinical psychologist, is president of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH).  He says he has treated more than 1,000 men who came to him with “unwanted homosexuality.”  He has written three books on the subject, including his most recent, A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality. 

(99) He argues that mothers who do not cede authority to the father, who do not represent to the boy that dad is the leader of the family, contribute to the child’s homosexuality.

(103) James Dobson likens the proponents of gay marriage to the Nazis.  He warns in his book Marriage Under Fire that sanctioning gay marriage is the first salvo by the gay movement to destroy the American family.

(106) When Pat Robertson was asked by Jerry Falwell if God had allowed the attacks on September 11…”I believe that the protection, the covering of God that has been on this great land of ours for so many years, had lifted on September 11, and allowed this thing to happen.  God apparently had good reasons for exposing the USA to such destruction, given the many sins that Americans have committed ever since the Roe v Wade court case and the Supreme Court’s decision to keep God out of schools..”

            - God allowed 9/11 attacks because of gay rights.  That’s a smart analysis!!!

Ch 6.  The War on Truth

(113) Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky. 

(115) The power of these non-reality based movements is that they appeal to our deepest held, most primitive prejudices, our classism, sexism, racism – perversions based on fear of complexity or change.

- these psychoses aren’t “primitive.”  They arise from the propaganda of modern nationalistic urges for power.

(116) The Supreme Court ruled in the 1987 Edwards v Aguillard case that creationism cannot be taught in public schools.

(116) Only 13 percent of respondents in a 2004 Gallup poll said life arose from the strictly natural process of evolution.  More than 38 percent believed God guided evolution, and 45 percent said the Genesis account of creation was a true story. 

(121) [Genesis] is a story hardly more credible than the fantasy of a child, but it fulfills a powerful emotional need.

            - in this way, Religion can arrest and deter mental development.

(128) The Creation Museum, standing with its imposing pillars, its sea of parking lots for school buses, 52 acres of groomed landscaping, pond, looping nature trails, animatronic dinosaurs, and ‘Christian’ paleontologists, presages a society where truth is banished.

Ch 7. The New Class

(130) Southern CA, along with Colorado Springs, is one of the epicenters of the radical movement.  Numerous television evangelists, including the disgraced Jimmy and Tammy Faye Baker, got their start in these huge, soulless exurbs.  These large developed tracts of housing are isolated, devoid of neighborhood gathering places, community rituals and routines, even of sidewalks.  The isolation, coupled with the long, lonely commutes in a car; the cold, impersonal world of the corporate office; and the banal, incessant chatter of talk radio and television create numbness and disorientation.  This destruction of community in one of the crucial factors that has led to the rise of the Christian Right.  The megachurches, which have prospered in these environments, have become surrogate communities, places where people can find clubs to pursue common interests, friends, a sense of belonging, and moral direction.  In these sprawling churches, which often look like shopping or convention centers, believers are reassured, told that affluence is blessed by God – a sign of their righteousness and the righteousness of their nation – and that in the embrace of the church, they have a place, a home. 

(132) ..the strange fusion between this new, flamboyant gospel of prosperity and America’s celebrity driven culture..

            - Gospel of Properity

(133) Anything that drains corporate coffers is a loss of freedom – the God given American freedom to exploit other human beings to make money.

(139) “calls for diversity and multiculturalism are nothing more than thinly veiled attacks on anyone who is willing or desirous or compelled to proclaim Christian truth.  Today, calls for tolerance are often a subterfuge, because they’ll tolerate just about anything except Christian truth,” Frank Wright, previous executive director of Kennedy Center for Christian Statesmanship.

-  Interesting logic…”they don’t tolerate our truth, therefore they are intolerant..”

-  anti diversity and anti multicultural

(142) Dominionists preach that Israel must rule the biblical land in order for Christ to return.                                                  

(146) It has become a Christian duty to embrace the exploitation of others, to build a Christian America where freedom means the freedom of the powerful to dominate the weak.

Ch 8.  The Crusade

(150) The rhetoric creates an atmosphere of being under siege.  It also imparts the warm glow of comradeship, the feeling that although outside these walls there is a dangerous, hostile world, here we are all brothers and sisters.  It is clear to whom Christians bear a moral obligation: to fellow Christians.  The world is divided into friends and enemies, neighbors and strangers.

(151) Fundamentalist followers live in a binary universe.

-  Manichaean Paranoia.  Us and Them.  And that’s it.  In this world, there is no diversity and plurality.  There is Good and Evil, Us and Them.

(151) When people come to believe that they are immune from evil, that there is no resemblance between themselves and those they define as the enemy, they will inevitably grow to embody the evil they claim to fight.  It is only be grasping our own capacity for evil, our won darkness, that we hold our own capacity for evil at bay.  When evil is always external, then moral purification always entails the eradication of others.

-  Fanaticism – religious, political, social

(151) This rhetoric of depersonalization creates a frightening moral fragmentation, an ability to act with compassion and justice toward those within the closed, Christian circle, yet allow others outside the circle to be abused, silenced, and stripped of their rights.

-  We have inherited primal, tribal brains (where small scale “us and them” is a good thing and a matter of survival), that have not yet evolved to emotionally function in a global world (where large scale “us and them” can result in the violent nuclear destruction of the planet).

(152) The Accelerated Christian Education curriculum, one of the country’s three major publishers of Christian text books, defines “liberal” in its schoolbooks as “referring to philosophy not supported by scripture” and “conservative” as “dedicated to the preserving of scriptural principles.”

(153) In texts published by Abeka, one of the big fundamentalist publishing houses, African religious beliefs are described as “false.”  Hinduism is “pagan” and “evil.”  The lack of Christian conversion among Africans is blamed on “Satan’s strong hold on these people,” according to a Bob Jones University Press history textbook for seventh graders.  Abeka’s high school world history textbook blames the poverty and political chaos in most of Africa on a lack of faith.  It skips over the repressive colonial European regimes that exploited the continent and decimated the population in countries such as the Congo, explaining:                                       

“For over a thousand years, there was no clear Christian witness in the vast heartland of Africa; the fear, idolatry, superstition, and witchcraft associated with animism (the belief that natural objects and forces are inhabited by mostly malignant spirits) prevented most Aficans from learning how to use nature for man’s benefit and thus develop high culture like that of other African Empires.” 

-  for seventh graders!!!!

Ch 9.  God: the Commercial

(174) The triviality of American popular culture, its emptiness and gossip, accelerates this destruction of critical thought.  It expands the void, the mindlessness that makes the magic, mythology, and irrationality of the Christian Right palatable.  Television, the movement’s primary medium, allows viewers to preoccupy themselves with context-free information…

Television lends itself perfectly to this world of signs and wonders, to the narcissism of national and religious self-exaltation. 

(179) The popular Christian textbook America’s Providential History teaches that a Christian’s primary responsibility is to create material wealth.  God will oversee the increase and protection of natural resources.  The book belittles secular environmentalists, who see natural resources as fragile and limited, and says of those who hold these concerns that they “lack faith in God’s providence and consequently, men will find fewer natural resources…The Christian knows that the potential in God is unlimited and that there is no shortage of resources on God’s earth.”  The book blithely dismisses the threat of global warming and overpopulation, saying, “Christians know that God has made the earth sufficiently large with plenty of resources to accommodate all the people.”

(181) When fealty to an ideology becomes a litmus test for individual worth, tyranny follows. 

Ch 10.  Apocalyptic Violence

(183) This disdain for nature, balance, and harmony is part of the deadly, numbing assault against community.

(183) It is a theology of despair.  And for many, the apocalypse can’t happen soon enough.

-  Many WANT violence, as it’s a sign of the second coming

(183) The Left Behind series, written by Timothy LaHaye and Jetty Jenkins...are among the best selling novels in America with more than 62 million in print.

-  Eschatological excitement

(184) The horror of apocalyptic violence – the final aesthetic of the movement – at once frightens and thrills followers.  It feeds fantasies of revenge and empowerment.  It is an ominous remainder that failing to follow God’s commands will ensure their own eternal damnation.   

(197) “The [liberal] enemy may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the [conservative] paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry,” The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Richard Hofstadter. 

-  Conservatives are more organized and more pedantic because they are paranoid

-  Pedantic: excessively concerned with minor details and rules

-  Paranoid style: “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasies..”  ie, Trump toward Idiocracy

(199) “The American fascist would prefer not to use violence.  His method is to poison the channels of public information.  With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public, but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.

            “They claim to be superpatriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution.  They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesman for monopoly and vested interest.  Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjugation,” vice president Henry Wallace, 1944.

-  Liberals are more concerned with the plurality of issues, which is partially why it’s more difficult for them to organize, because it’s an endless complexity.  Conservatives, on the other hand are most concerned with power, which is easy to keep followers focused on, ie organized.  All issues are subsumed under what can best keep them in power.

-  See Lakoff: the Dominant Father model of conservative politics

(206) Humility before the unknowable, the acceptance that there is much will never understand, makes possible self-criticism, self-awareness, self-possession, and self-reflection.  They make possible compassion and acts of kindness.  They allow us to see ourselves in the stranger.

-  The Bible and Conservativism lifts the heavy burden of thinking, thereby making humans less than human.

-  See Paradox and Equilibrium essay on this website.  The human mind has evolved by tension, by critically investigating opposing sides of things, by sensing the immense plurality of the world. 

-  Fanaticism is the denial of this tension.  It therefore signifies the atrophy and arrest of human emotional development.

Conservative Christian forces in media and politics:

The Global Recordings Network: founded in LA, CA 1939.  Offices in 20 countries.

Christian Identity: White Supremacist movement originated in 1920s and 30s, as offshoot of British Israelism, promoting the belief of “lower races” from biblical literature.

Evangelism Explosion International, Coral Ridge, Florida.  Founded by D. James Kennedy.

Focus on the Family, James Dobson.

Family Research Council, James Dobson.

Moral Majority, Jerry Falwell Sr.

Center for Reclaiming America, Washington lobbying group.

Center for Christian Statesmanship, evangelizes members of Congress.

Promise Keepers, Colorado Springs. Male focused; wives should “be subservient to your husbands, as to the Lord,” Ephesians.

Love Won Out, to “cure” those who have “same sex attraction.”

National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH)

Creation Museum, Petersburg, Kentucky.

Answers in Genesis, Creationist group.

Traditional Values Coalition, Orange County, anti gay rights.

Council for National Policy – Rushdoony, Robertson, Falwell, DeVos, Coors, Timothy LaHaye, “brings together the doers with the donors,” (136). 

Council of Conservative Citizens – white nationalist group that has called blacks “a retrograde species of humanity” on its website.

John Birch Society, advocate of far right, limited government, fights w ACLU.  Timothy LaHaye and Nelson Bunker Hunt also helped found the CNP.   

Kennedy Center for Christian Statesmanship – Capitol Hill ministry that trains politicians on how to “think biblically about their role in government.”

Trinity Broadcasting Network, Costa Mesa, CA

Concerned Women of America, Beverly LaHaye