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Photo from MikeDaisey.com The Radical Christian Right Is Built on Suburban Despair[26 January 2007] Millions of Americans live trapped in soulless exurbs which lack any kind of community, leaving them feeling isolated and vulnerable. Without alternatives for their social despair, they flock to demagogues promising revenge and a mythical utopia.
By Chris HedgesAlterNet The engine that drives the radical Christian Right in the United States, the most dangerous mass movement in American history, is not religiosity, but despair. It is a movement built on the growing personal and economic despair of tens of millions of Americans, who watched helplessly as their communities were plunged into poverty by the flight of manufacturing jobs, their families and neighborhoods torn apart by neglect and indifference, and who eventually lost hope that America was a place where they had a future. This despair crosses economic boundaries, of course, enveloping many in the middle class who live trapped in huge, soulless exurbs where, lacking any form of community rituals or centers, they also feel deeply isolated, vulnerable and lonely. Those in despair are the most easily manipulated by demagogues, who promise a fantastic utopia, whether it is a worker’s paradise, fraternite-egalite-liberte, or the second coming of Jesus Christ. Those in despair search desperately for a solution, the warm embrace of a community to replace the one they lost, a sense of purpose and meaning in life, the assurance they are protected, loved and worthwhile. During the past two years of work on the book American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, I kept encountering this deadly despair. Driving down a highway lined with gas stations, fast food restaurants and dollar stores I often got vertigo, forgetting for a moment if I was in Detroit or Kansas City or Cleveland. There are parts of the United States, including whole sections of former manufacturing centers such as Ohio, that resemble the developing world, with boarded up storefronts, dilapidated houses, pot-hole streets and crumbling schools. The end of the world is no longer an abstraction to many Americans. Jeniece Learned is typical of many in the movement. She stood, when I met her, amid a crowd of earnest-looking men and women, many with small gold crosses in the lapels of their jackets or around their necks, in a hotel lobby in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. She had an easy smile and a thick mane of black, shoulder length hair. She was carrying a booklet called “Ringing in a Culture of Life.” The booklet had the schedule of the two day event she is attending organized by The Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation. The event was “dedicated to the 46 million children who have died from legal abortions since 1973 and the mothers and fathers who mourn their loss.” Learned, who drove five hours from a town outside of Youngstown, Ohio was raised Jewish. She wore a gold Star of David around her neck with a Christian cross inserted in the middle of the design. She stood up in one of the morning sessions, attended by about 300 people, most of them women, when the speaker, Alveda King, niece of Dr. Martin Luther King, asked if there were any “post-abortive” women present. Learned ran a small pregnancy counseling clinic called Pregnancy Services of Western Pennsylvania in Sharon, where she attempted to talk young girls and women, most of them poor, out of abortions. She spoke in local public schools, promoting sexual abstinence, rather than birth control, as the only acceptable form of contraception. And she had found in the fight against abortion, and in her conversion, a structure, purpose and meaning that previously eluded her. The battle against abortion is one of the Christian Rights’s most effective recruiting tools. It plays on the guilt and shame of woman who had the abortions, accusing them of committing murder, and promising redemption and atonement in the “Christian” struggle to make abortion illegal, in the fight for life against “the culture of death.” Her life, before she was saved, was, like many in this mass movement, chaotic and painful. Her childhood was stolen from her. She was sexually abused by a close family member. Her mother periodically woke Learned and her younger sister and two younger brothers in the middle of the night to flee landlords who wanted back rent. The children were bundled into the car and driven in darkness to a strange apartment in another town. Her mother worked nights and weekends as a bartender. Learned, the oldest, often had to run the home. Her younger sister, who was sexually abused by another member of the family, eventually committed suicide as an adult, something Learned also considered. As a teenager she had an abortion. She was taking classes at Pacific Christian College several years later when she saw an anti-abortion film called The Silent Scream. “You see in this movie this baby backing up trying to get away from this suction tube,” she said. “And, its mouth is open and it is like this baby is screaming. I flipped out. It was at that moment that God just took this veil that I had over my eyes for the last eight years. I couldn’t breathe. I was hyperventilating. I ran outside. One of the girls followed me from Living Alternative. And she said, ‘Did you commit your life to Christ?’ And I said, ‘I did.’ And she said, ‘Did you ask for your forgiveness of sins?’ And I said, ‘I did.’ And she goes, ‘Does that mean all your sins, or does that mean some of them?’ And I said, ‘I guess it means all of them.’ So she said, ‘Basically, you are thinking God hasn’t forgiven you for your abortion because that is a worse sin than any of your other sins that you have done.’” The film brought her into the fight to make abortion illegal. Her activism became atonement for her own abortion. She struggled with depression after she gave birth to her daughter Rachel. When she came home from the hospital she was unable to care for her infant. She thought she saw an 8-year-old boy standing next to her bed. It was, she is sure, the image of the son she had murdered. “I started crying and asking God over and over again to forgive me,” she says. “I had murdered His child. I asked Him to forgive me over and over again. It was just incredible. I was possessed. On the fourth day I remember hearing God’s voice. ‘I have your baby, now get up!’ It was the most incredibly freeing and peaceful moment. I got up and I showered and I ate. I just knew it was God’s voice.” In the United States we have turned our backs on the working class, with much of the worst assaults, such as NAFTA and welfare reform, pushed though during President Clinton’s Democratic administration. We stand passively and watch an equally pernicious assault on the middle class. Anything that can be put on software, from architecture to engineering to finance, will soon be handed to workers overseas who will be paid a third what their American counterparts receive and who will, like some 45 million Americans, have no access to health insurance or benefits. There has been, along with the creation of an American oligarchy, a steady Weimarization of the American working class. The top one percent of American households have more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined. This figure alone should terrify all who care about our democracy. As Plutarch reminded us “an imbalance between the rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.” The stories believers such as Learned told me of their lives before they found Christ were heart breaking. These chronicles were about terrible pain, severe financial difficulties, struggles with addictions or childhood sexual or physical abuse, profound alienation and often thoughts about suicide. They were chronicles without hope. The real world, the world of facts and dispassionate intellectual inquiry, the world where all events, news and information were not filtered through this comforting ideological prism, the world where they were left out to dry, abandoned by a government hostage to corporations and willing to tolerate obscene corporate profits, betrayed them. They hated this world. And they willingly walked out on this world for the mythical world offered by these radical preachers, a world of magic, a world where God had a divine plan for them and intervened on a daily basis to protect them and perform miracles in their lives. The rage many expressed to me towards those who challenge this belief system, to those of us who do not accept that everything in the world came into being during a single week 6,000 years ago because it says so in the Bible, was a rage born of fear, the fear of being plunged back into a reality-based world where these magical props would no longer exist, where they would once again be adrift, abandoned and alone. The danger of this theology of despair is that it says that nothing in the world is worth saving. It rejoices in cataclysmic destruction. It welcomes the frightening advance of global warming, the spiraling wars and violence in the Middle East and the poverty and neglect that have blighted American urban and rural landscapes as encouraging signs that the end of the world is close at hand. Believers, of course, clinging to this magical belief, which is a bizarre form of spiritual Darwinism, will be raptured upwards while the rest of us will be tormented with horrors by a warrior Christ and finally extinguished. This obsession with apocalyptic violence is an obsession with revenge. It is what the world, and we who still believe it is worth saving, deserve. Those who lead the movement give their followers a moral license to direct this rage and yearning for violence against all those who refuse to submit to the movement, from liberals, to “secular humanists,” to “nominal Christians,” to intellectuals, to gays and lesbians, to Muslims. These radicals, from James Dobson to Pat Robertson, call for a theocratic state that will, if it comes to pass, bear within it many of the traits of classical fascism. All radical movements need a crisis or a prolonged period of instability to achieve power. And we are not in a period of crisis now. But another catastrophic terrorist attack on American soil, a series of huge environmental disasters or an economic meltdown will hand to these radicals the opening they seek. Manipulating our fear and anxiety, promising to make us safe and secure, giving us the assurance that they can vanquish the forces that mean to do us harm, these radicals, many of whom have achieved powerful positions in the Executive and legislative branches of government, as well as the military, will ask us only to surrender our rights, to pass them the unlimited power they need to battle the forces of darkness. They will have behind them tens of millions of angry, disenfranchised Americans longing for revenge and yearning for a mythical utopia, Americans who embraced a theology of despair because we offered them nothing else. * * * Chris Hedges, a graduate of Harvard Divinity School and former Pulitzer-prize winning foreign correspondent for The New York Times, is the author of American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. * * * AlterNet is an award-winning news magazine and online community that creates original journalism and amplifies the best of dozens of other independent media sources. Find more AlterNet content at www.alternet.org. 
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Comments
This article was just written last week? It feels like it was written about 3 years ago. What about all the talk that was made in the November election about how many evangelicals were actually abandoning the Christian Right and more were voting Democrat, were pro-minimum wage increases, and pro-environment.
Articles like this one were written ad nauseum: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15566654/site/newsweek/
And yet, there’s an article being written in 2007 trying to scare urban blue staters into believing that the Christian Right is “the most dangerous movement in American history?” Please.
All this article seems is like a regurgitation of things Thomas Frank wrote about years ago in “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” combined with a Michael Moore sledgehammer-like alarmism.
What’s worse is the writer’s descriptions of the midwest as a horrible, soulless hellhole with “gas stations, fast food restaurants and dollar stores.” If seeing stuff like this makes you get “vertigo”, maybe it’s time to take a trip outside of Greenwich Village a little more then.
What a piece of condescending garbage. And this is coming from a self-proclaimed liberal from Los Angeles.
Comment by Ryan from Santa Monica, Ca — January 26, 2007 @ 1:23 am
articles like this upset me. i understand why people write these types of things. however, there are many, many believers out there who are adamently AGAINST the views of the “Christian Right” as well as their tatics and opinions. it can come off extreme and circus-like, but please remember that there are believers, christians (whatever title your comfortable with) that are very concerned with the status of this world on the same levels as “liberal non-believers.” just because they have microphones and interviews doesn’t mean that they speak for all christians.
Comment by Rick from Coatesville, PA — January 26, 2007 @ 8:23 am
despair is not a cause of anything, it is an effect, and in the case of the belief religions, christianity, and islam, primarily, this effect comes from the fear of living in the unknown mystery of being that is consciousness, and trying to nail erything down into a structure of belief. wont work, hence the despair. suffer more, util you get the fact that you have to go beyond your concepts, is the only way out….. enjoy
Comment by ana ma roopa from india — January 26, 2007 @ 11:05 am
<em>“These radicals, from James Dobson to Pat Robertson, call for a theocratic state that will, if it comes to pass, bear within it many of the traits of classical fascism.”</em>
Um, would you mind citing a source for this? I have never heard of Pat Robertson or James Dobson calling for a theocracy.
If you’re going to engage in fear-mongering, you could at least keep up the appearance of integrity.
Comment by Brad Anders — January 26, 2007 @ 1:25 pm
Um, would you mind even trying a google search? Fourth google search down for “Pat Robertson Theocratic State” leads us to this gem from way back in 1995
“It is therefore not surprising that Ralph Reed, Pat Robertson’s choice as executive director of the Christian Coalition, should have announced in May 1990 a theocratic goal for America: “What Christians have got to do is take back this country. I honestly believe that in my lifetime we will see a country once again governed by Christians and Christian values.”
It should also be no surprise that Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition, aided by James Dobson, president of Focus on the Family, is now demanding a litmus test for all Republican presidential candidates. According to the May 15, 1995, issue of Time magazine, Ralph Reed “warned that a presidential candidate who did not oppose abortions would not be acceptable to conservative Christians.” To under, score this point, James Dobson wrote to Republican National Committee chair Haley Barbour: “Remember, 43 percent of your voters last November came from evangelical Christians…. Losing only 5 percent of them could prove fatal in 1996.”“
Now, Pat didn’t actually SAY the words, Ralph Reed did. So I guess you have us there. But somehow I don’t think Pat has gotten any more liberal or secular in the past 12 years.
Citation: http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1374/is_n4_v55/ai_17100253
Comment by Dave — January 26, 2007 @ 4:51 pm
TO “DAVE”
Ralph Reed didn’t say he wanted a “Theocracy”. He said he believes the country will be “once again governed by Christians and Christian values…” MEANING that it will be more like the county it was in the beginning, the country De Toqueville wrote about, amazed at its Christian character.
Anyway, the Christian fascist idea is more than passe, it’s stupid. Christians don’t cut the heads off infidels, they pray for them.
The writer not only needs to get out of Greenwich Village but needs to actually read the Bible and some pre-1965 history books. Divorcing modern American Christianity from the history of revival and renewal over the centuries is a fool’s game. Does the writer think the Christian renewal in Korea, for instance, is born of despair?
Libs, they are such sheep. Dude—read 1984 or Animal Farm again and put up your dukes against creeping socialism, not Jesus who heals the wounded and the broken-hearted. Christ heals. The most profound statement in all of history is Jesus Loves Me. That there is a God who loves, who woos, who heals, who sees all, knows all and loves us measley worms anyway, is the source of the good news of the gospel of His kingdom!
Despair? The only despair I sense is the despair of unbelief leaking from the writer’s own pen. Sorry guy, but Christ is real. Figure it out.
Comment by AIME from LA — January 27, 2007 @ 12:45 am
Stunning. Simply stunning. This should be read and discussed widely in the run up to our next elections. That said, we need have no fear of radical movements of any description if we just address the underlying issues and root cause. Our worst fears will come to pass if we continue to talk about Us and Them, Right and Left, Fascist and Communist, Christian and Unbeliever, pro-Life or pro-Choice. WE NEED TO PUT ASIDE WHAT DIVIDES US AND FOCUS ON WHAT UNITES US – if we all want a strong and democratic America we just have to get real about solving the problems and not sweeping them under the rug. I hope everyone who has responded can at least agree with that.
Comment by Anna from America — January 27, 2007 @ 11:05 am
To “AIME”
“He said he believes the country will be “once again governed by Christians and Christian values…” MEANING that it will be more like the county it was in the beginning, the country De Toqueville wrote about, amazed at its Christian character.”
First off, this country was founded on religious freedom. Jefferson spoke distinctly of a separation of church and state and this was, in my mind, what our country was in the beginning. THAT is the tradition I want to continue.
Your “Christian Values” are not necessarily MY values, or even the values of the majority. Certainly then those values shouldn’t take precedent over those of mine? If so, then you ARE talking about a theocracy. And you cannot argue that Pat Robertson and folks like him wouldn’t be just fine with that. Anyone who curses an entire city with the wrath of god because their school board votes down something that only a slim majority believe, is not someone who should be looked up to.
That’s my biggest problem with the phrase “Christian Values” - when its used as a sort of “We’re right and you’re wrong.” Believe it or not, those of us who are atheists have moral values too. And in some cases, I think those values are a lot less hypocritical than some of the well known proponents of “Christian” values. At least WE are not condemning homosexuality and drug use in front of the cameras and then paying for it in a hotel room the next night. At least we’re secure enough, and strong enough to stand up and proclaim what we are, and don’t have to hide behind an imaginary father figure our entire life because we’re afraid.
“Dude—read 1984 or Animal Farm again and put up your dukes against creeping socialism”
First off, you are confusing a secular government like we are discussing with a socialist one - so, your argument is baseless. A government can be free of religion and NOT be a socialist police state.
Second, the only difference between the “socialism” in 1984 and the Religious Right is that most of the people in 1984 KNEW they were in a bad place. The followers of the Religious Right are willful sheep, as opposed to cornered dogs. They’ve given you a God to believe in, just like Big Brother. They change the rules as they see fit, while those in power sometimes abuse and ignore those rules themselves. They name the enemies, whose names change from decade to decade, and urge you to do their bidding and help fight them. And so on, and so on.
I have absolutely NO problem with the Christian Faith. Faith does not work with me, I believe in what I can see, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t comprehend how some people need that. However, I cannot stand evangelicism, and the act of talking people into believing what someone else believes. This ultimately leads to one person or group holding power over others, which as we’ve seen over the millenia, can then be used to harm the followers, or other outsiders.
God is inside each of us because it IS us, and I don’t believe anyone can tell us how to interpret that spirituality.
Comment by Dave Sanders — January 27, 2007 @ 1:22 pm
— PopMatters sponsor —
Dear Dave:
Actually Jefferson did NOT speak of a separation of church and state as you think he did. He spoke of there being no one denomination that America backed; i.e. the Church of England. Congress printed Bibles in Jefferson’s time. Harvard, Dartmouth all the Ivy League schools were Christian schools. This is a Christian nation in its inception. Jefferson concieved of it this way—this is why he made such an articulate plea in our Declaration of Independence—that it was NOT a rebellion, because the Bible says “rebellion is as witchcraft”. It had to be a declaration of independence against a Tyrant who himself was opposing God. Dave, you don’t know history. I’ll get you the books. We’ll start with the letter Jefferson wrote in 1803 to a prominent pastor of his day where the phrase “separation” regarding Church and State is first used. But Jefferson used it to describe the fact that the country could not be backing one denomination over another, not that Government had nothing to do with morality or faith. Jefferson wrote that we are “endowed by our Creator certain inalienable rights”—this was the God of the Bible. No way around it.
I’ll give you C.S. Lewis’s response during the rise of Nazism to your idea that somehow you don’t adhere to “Christian values”.
Then what values do you adhere to? Nazi values? Moslem values?
If you believe that we should love one another as ourselves, that we should not murder (killing is not the same in God’s eyes as murder, btw), not steal, covet, commit adultery, etc., etc., then you believe in CHristan values.
However, if you believe we should behead our enemies, enslave our poor, punish the weak, murder the innocent, then yes, you have a different set of values. I’d be curious to see you get around the Ten Commandments. Waiting.
Comment by AIME from LA — January 28, 2007 @ 3:43 am
Are you saying morality can’t exist outside of religion? That’s (absolutely) ridiculous..
Comment by Adrian from Edinburgh — February 5, 2007 @ 9:21 am
AIME, you’re not wanted here. Can’t the silly Jesus freaks stick their right-wing blogs? Quoting your book of 2000 year old fairy tales contributes nothing to intelligent discourse. Ding ding ding game over! Jefferson was a deist, and the American revolution was a rebellion: thank goodness the world has had a few rebels with greater vision than your puny little mind is capable of, or we’d all still be living in the dark ages.
Ryan your argument is flimsy. You sound like someone faking being an “liberal from LA” as a ruse to criticize the article. A liberal from LA who didn’t partly agree with that characterization would be as rare as hen’s teeth, because it’s not particularly shrill. I also think it had a nicely humanistic touch by featuring the self-hating Jewish woman. If the tone seems condescending it’s only because the truth hurts. Almost every CONVERT to Taliban Christianity I know comes from some background of personal or familial failing: a recovered alcoholic, an abuse survivor, business failings. It’s time we stop saying “great, they found something to make them feel better” and get these people some therapy to deal with their feelings of weakness and inadequacy. I am a liberal and I will proudly admit I DO have a problem with the “christian faith” - just as I do all other other silly religions. We’ve seen the Earth from space. No mountains ranges spell out “God” or “Yahweh” or “Allah” or “Vishnu” The only hope for the survival of humanity - and it’s a longshot - is people stop believing this ridiculous drivel.
Fundies calling the rest of us sheeple - now that’s a joke.
Comment by Eric in Delaware — February 12, 2007 @ 11:06 pm
Sorry, this article was a little too hyperbolic to take seriously. It was good for a chuckle though. I look forward to future humor articles from Mr Hedges - perhaps more revealing satire pieces like this one.
Comment by mertz from Illinois — September 24, 2009 @ 3:58 pm