Dobson's Choice

Cross-posted at The Right's Field.

First things first: can we please stop referring to the Council for National Policy as "secretive"? The CNP is the most publicity-seeking "secret" organization on the planet. It's made up of prima-donna religious right leaders who enjoy their public positions of political influence; if it were truly clandestine it wouldn't be alerting the national media every time it has a significant meeting.

So the CNP is considering backing a third party candidate if Rudy Giuliani wins the nomination. Again, it's no secret that the group has been casting around for candidates for some time now: back in February, for instance, it was deliberating over whether to throw its support behind a Christian conservative in the GOP primary -- Huckabee, or Brownback, or South Carolina governor Mark Sanford. Christian Right heavyweight Paul Weyrich described the Council as "split 50-50" over whether to unite behind a second-tier candidate, or to just split up according to individual dictates of conscience and calculation. The discussions ended without consensus, and the CNP's main movers have mostly sat out the primary race since then, which should tell us something about how much all this talk really means.

The problem was with the notion of backing a horse that couldn't win. And if the Council wasn't willing to support a second tier candidate in the primary, why would it be willing to take the much longer odds of organizing behind a third party candidate in the general?

There's no denying the seriousness of the dilemma facing Christian conservatives. Their influence within the GOP is fading fast; they've never been much more than cheap foot soldiers to a party run by a business lobby with little interest in social issues either way. If they allow the Republicans to nominate a pro-choice candidate, and fail to challenge the decision, they stand to lose much of what remains of their political credibility. But at the same time, they hardly seem to be spoiling for a fight. It's true that they could throw the election to the Democrats by winning only a couple of percentage points next November. But what will that win them? Do they really want proof that all they can draw is a couple points? It could make them look every bit as marginal as Ralph Nader.

This is indeed a dangerous moment for the Republican party. It seems that the party is calculating that its mass support, once built on the backs of the anti-abortion movement, can now be drawn from the legend of perpetual war. Over the long run, I suspect that's not likely to be a winning strategy. But in the very short term, understand that, for the "secretive" CNP, the decision to support a third-party candidacy will not come easily, and it very well might not come at all.

Labels: 2008, Council for National Policy, fundamentalists, Presidential election

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 10:38 AM 2 comments

  History Makes the Baby Jesus Cry

I haven't read any of this yet, so I can't vouch for it in any meaningful sense, but Liars for Jesus looks like an interesting effort to debunk, in detail, the religious right's peculiar revisionist version of American history.

Of course, the frustrating thing about this sort of exercise is that the burden of proof isn't on us -- it's up to the revisionists to prove that their claims are correct. But they don't roll that way. So, a little reminder of the truth is nice now and then, and here's hoping this turns out to be a good one.

h/t: Five Before Chaos

Labels: five before chaos, fundamentalists

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 11:12 AM 0 comments

  Religious Right Abandoning Mitt for Fred?

Another good post by Dayton, who looks at evidence that religious conservatives (or at least their leaders), after an initial flirtation with Mitt Romney, are beginning to move into Fred Thompson's camp.

Labels: 2008, Fred Thompson, fundamentalists, Mitt Romney, Presidential election

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 2:30 PM 0 comments

  God: "Don't Come Crying to Me"

Cliff Schecter's blog brings us this charming video from the American Family Association, who should win some kind of prize for it. It takes a special skill to exploit tragedy so crassly.

Labels: American Family Association, fundamentalists

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 3:48 PM 2 comments

  Sometimes They Parody Themselves

Via Andrew Sullivan... it's time for "macho Christianity":

There is a new trend in religion: macho Christianity — a movement started by men who say traditional church services are just too feminine and sissy.

Who are these manly men who will save Christianity from the ladies? These men are GodMen:

Men need movements like GodMen because Christians have been taught about a Jesus who's too nice to be real, said life coach and Christian radio show host Paul Coughlin. The leaders of GodMen contend that church, as most men know it, has gotten too sissy.

"A meek and mild Jesus… eventually is a bore," he said.

All right, first thing: your job title is "life coach." That's macho?

According to the article, the GodMen are, in part, a response to interior decorating issues:

"What we're saying is that… we've been taught the loving guy, the beautiful guy… When we walk into a church, we see ferns. We're not used to that. We want something that shows the masculine side as well," [founder Brad] Stine said.

Presumably macho Christians prefer macho plants. Something in a ficus, maybe. A butch ficus.

We're told that the GodMen are inspired by the story of Jesus storming the temple to kick moneychanging ass. Christian rightists seem to refer to this story a lot. It's the one thing in the New Testament that helps validate their dangerously high anger levels.

I'm not religious myself, but it always seemed to me that one of the greatest things about Jesus, as with Gandhi and Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr., was his guts. Really, the most incredible kind of courage is the kind that would steel a person to face injustice armed only with truth and the fragility of the human body. Maybe the "life coach" thinks it's a "bore," but give me a nonviolent revolutionary over a fernophobic armchair warrior any day.

Though, in all fairness, nonviolence never sold boxer shorts.

Labels: Andrew Sullivan, fundamentalists, GodMen

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 11:56 AM 0 comments

  More on McCain and the Sociocons

From the AP: McCain Courting Religious Conservatives. More of what you've probably already heard about why the religious right doesn't like the Senator from Arizona. Repeat of the Dobson quote, which keeps coming up and must be doing a good amount of damage:

"I would not vote for John McCain under any circumstances," Dobson said last month on KCBI, a Dallas Christian radio station. "I pray that we won't get stuck with him."

And the latest formulation of the list of grievances:

[Conservative fundamentalists] are dubious about his opposition to a federal amendment to ban gay marriage. McCain opposes same-sex marriage, but says it should be regulated by the states.

_They still resent passages in the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, which Christian broadcasters say limit what they can tell voters before elections.

_And they question the sincerity of his overtures. McCain condemned evangelist leaders Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell as "agents of intolerance" during his 2000 run.

Hmm. Maybe the Senator should try flip-flopping more vigorously.

Oh, by the way, the article quotes our conservative-of-the-day Paul Weyrich on the second point:

McCain-Feingold "is a big stumbling block for all of us," Weyrich said.

What Weyrich is upset about, of course, is the limitation on his crowd's ability to run vicious, slandering, third-party attack ads during the final days of a campaign.

This, apparently, is one of the major political priorities of a group of people calling themselves "Christians."

Labels: 2008, fundamentalists, John McCain, Paul Weyrich, Presidential election, social conservatives

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 6:24 PM 0 comments

  The Rage and Despair of the Fundamentalists

Very interesting article by Chris Hedges at Alternet, on how "the radical Christian right is built on suburban despair." As Hedges explains, ordinary radical fundies are not stupid, just alienated and desperate:

[S]he 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."

[...]

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. [...]

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.

I've already quoted too much, but there's a lot more worth sharing. Go read it all.

(h/t: slacktivist)

Labels: abortion, Alternet, Chris Hedges, fundamentalists

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 2:27 PM 0 comments

  Let Me Lie to You

One of the projects I'll be undertaking here at a&s is a look at the history of evangelical Christians as a political force. Since I'm an agnostic ex-Catholic from the West Coast currently living in the Second Most Godless Neighborhood in Brooklyn*, I'll be approaching the subject without any particular claim to expertise - just an open mind and a reliance on good sources.

One of the best online sources of discussion about American evangelicalism is slacktivist, a blog by Fred Clark - himself an evangelical, and one of the most thoughtful observers of the subject I have found. Clark is engaged across a variety of subjects, but his ongoing deconstruction of the Left Behind novels is officially the Very Best Thing on the Internets.

His most recent LB post cites Mark Noll's classic The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind ("The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind..."). Noll's "epistle from a wounded lover" ponders

...a picture of an evangelical world almost completely adrift in using the mind for careful thought about the world.... [E]vangelicals -- bereft of self-criticism, intellectual subtlety, or an awareness of complexity -- are blown about by every wind of apocalyptic speculation and enslaved to the cruder spirits of populist science.

Evangelical thought was not always this way. In the mid-nineteenth century evangelical colleges helped foster a flourishing intellectual life, devoted to democratic principles and enthralled with the scientific revolution as exemplified by the work of Francis Bacon.

And then Darwin happened, and that's another story entirely.

Clark observes one of the organizing principles of the LB novels:

One of the stranger things about LB is the way the authors seem to think that their novel, their work of fiction, serves as "proof" of their [premillenial dispensationalist] claims. They seem to think it not only illustrates, but demonstrates, that faith conquers reason and that Scofield's notes are canonical rather than heretical. They've created a fictional reality in which their weird theories are true. In this fictional world, all who disagree appear as fools.

When you refuse to abide the common rules of defining reality, you're forced to create your own, and to push and push for your airless worldview against the threatening hegemony of intellectual honesty. Faith must conquer reason. This dynamic is at work as much within evangelical circles, as between evangelicals and others. There is no evangelical consensus on standards of truth, but there is an aggressive faction of mindless fundamentalists determined to impose its own truth on others, because to attempt anything less would be to concede the collapse of its entire worldview.

And thus, for now, fundamentalist evangelicals make perfect partners for a party that claims to make its own reality - and, no matter the facts, is determined always to stay the course.

*All statistics made up

(Paul)

Labels: evangelicals, fundamentalists, reality

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 4:09 PM 0 comments