by Chris Hedges
The pain, the dislocation, alienation, suffering and despair that led millions of Americans into the movement are real. Many Americans are striking back at a culture they blame for the debacle of their lives. The democratic traditions and the values of the Enlightenment, they believe, have betrayed them. They speak of numbness, an inability to feel pain or joy or love, a vast emptiness, a frightening loneliness and loss of control. The rational, liberal world of personal freedoms and choice lured many of these people into one snake pit after another. And liberal democratic society, for most, stood by passively as their communities, families and lives splintered and self-destructed.
These believers have abandoned, in this despair, their trust and belief in the world of science, law and rationality. They eschew personal choice and freedom. They have replaced the world that has failed them with a new, glorious world filled with prophets and mystical signs. They believe in a creator who performs miracles for them, speaks directly to them and guides their lives, as well as the destiny of America. They are utopians who have found rigid, clearly defined moral edicts, rights and wrongs, to guide them in life and in politics. And they are terrified of losing this new, mystical world of signs, wonders and moral certitude, of returning to the old world of despair. They see criticism of their belief system, whether from scientists or judges, as vicious attempts by Satan to lure them back into the morass. The split in America, rather than simply economic, is between those who embrace reason, who function in the real world of cause and effect, and those who, numbed by isolation and despair, now seek meaning in a mythical world of intuition, a world that is no longer reality-based, a world of magic.
Those in the movement now fight, fueled by the rage of the dispossessed, to crush and silence the reality-based world. The dominionist movement is the response of people trapped in a deformed, fragmented and disoriented culture that has become callous and unforgiving, a culture that has too often failed to provide the belonging, care and purpose that make life bearable, a culture that, as many in the movement like to say, has become “a culture of death.” The new utopians are not always wrong in their critique of American society. But what they have set out to create is far, far worse than what we endure. What is happening in America is revolutionary. A group of religious utopians, with the sympathy and support of tens of millions of Americans, are slowly dismantling democratic institutions to establish a religious tyranny, the springboard to an American fascism.
CHAPTER TWO
The Culture of Despair
They attacked liberalism because it seemed to them the principal premise of modern society; everything they dreaded seemed to spring from it: the bourgeois life, Manchesterism, materialism, parliament and the parties, the lack of political leadership. Even more, they sensed in liberalism the source of all their inner sufferings. Theirs was a resentment of loneliness; their one desire was for a new faith, a new community of believers, a world with fixed standards and no doubts, a new national religion that would bind all Germans together. All this, liberalism denied. Hence, they hated liberalism, blamed it for making outcasts of them, for uprooting them from their imaginary past, and from their faith.
—Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology1
Stories of rage are first stories of despair.
Jeniece Learned stands 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 has an easy smile and a thick mane of black, shoulder-length hair. She is carrying a booklet called Ringing in a Culture of Life. The booklet has the schedule of the two-day event she is attending organized by the Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation. The event, says the booklet, is “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 wears a gold Star of David around her neck with a Christian cross inset 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 Jr., asked if there were any “postabortive” women present. Learned runs a small pregnancy counseling clinic called Pregnancy Services of Western Pennsylvania in Sharon, where she tries to talk young girls and women, most of them poor, out of abortions. She speaks in local public schools, promoting sexual abstinence rather than birth control as the only acceptable form of contraception. And in the fight against abortion and in her conversion, she has found a structure, purpose and meaning that previously eluded her.
Her life, before she was saved, was chaotic and painful. Her childhood was stolen from her. She says she was sexually abused by a family member. Her father left her mother when Learned was 12. She says her mother periodically woke her 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.
“There was a lot of fighting,” she says. “I remember my dad hitting my mom one time and him going to jail. I don’t have a lot of memories, mind you, before eighth grade because of the sexual abuse. When my dad divorced my mom, he divorced us, too.”
Learned said she repressed and contained her emotions. She remembers sitting bewildered at a meal with the family member who had molested her the night before and wondering why he treated her with ice-cold disdain. Her younger sister, who was sexually abused by another member of the family, eventually committed suicide as an adult, something Learned also considered. Suicide seemed, as she grew into adulthood, a release, the only road out of the hell of her existence.
“My grandfather committed suicide, close family members tried suicide,” she says. “In my family, there was no hope. The only way to solve problems when they got bad was to end your life.
“My family put the ‘dys’ in ‘function,’ ” she adds. “I had relatives switching husbands and wives with other couples. I am so thankful that God moved me 3,000 miles away. I am so thankful He pulled me out of that. Because I am so glad my children . . . you know, when I was pregnant with my daughter, I said, ‘God, just break the chains . . . just break the chains.’ And He has. My children have no idea about the dysfunction I lived through. I really truly believe that Satan got a hold of my family early on. I feel like Satan had this huge grip.”
The instability and abuse, the constant moving, saw her retreat into herself. By the time she graduated she had attended three high schools. She was an angry young woman. At 15 she became pregnant. She had an abortion, using the name of her school bus driver to get into the clinic.
“Between being sexually abused, my parents being divorced, my mom being gone all the time, my brothers giving my mom such a hard time, my mother was always in a bad mood,” she says. “I was criticized and put down a lot. I was never good enough. Things were never good enough. The only time I got love was when my mom was taking me to these photo shoots and beauty pageants, and really pushing modeling. And the only time I got love from my mom is when I would win beauty pageants.”
Learned moved out of the house before she was 18, drifted and ended up in Beverly Hills, working nights in a strip club wearing a leotard and French corset. At one point she was homeless and called a family member for a place to stay. On the ride over, driving her 1968 Volkswagen Beetle, she thought of veering it over the edge of the raised highway. On the second night at the house, the family member came into her room and tried to molest her. She fled to a friend’s apartment. It was not long after that she married her husband Rod and found Jesus, but the trauma of her past continued to plague her.
“I started having some major sexual dysfunctions,” she says. “A lot of flashbacks were coming back. A lot of memories t
hat I did not remember were coming back. I was really struggling. And here I am newly married. I didn’t want any part of it. There would be times when Rod and I would try to be intimate and I would just fall apart. And he didn’t know what to do.”
She was taking classes at Pacific Christian College when she and Rod were living in Orange County. During a chapel service an antiabortion group, Living Alternative, showed a film called The Silent Scream.
“You see in this movie this baby backing up trying to get away from this suction tube,” she says. “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 Rachel. When she came home from the hospital she was unable to care for her infant. She thought she saw an eight-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.”
The combination of abuse, shame and guilt, as well as the depression and despair, marked a period of her life that she wants to forget. The certitude of her new life is a comfort. It is a life of moral absolutes. It is a battle against a culture she despises. Its rigidity—its sanctification of hatred for those who would “murder” the unborn or contaminate America with the godless creed of secular humanism—brings with it feelings of righteousness and virtue. Her faith gives her an emotional grounding and a vent for her anger. Embracing the Christian community means destroying competing communities. The power of her yearning for inclusion, for those who surrender to Jesus, is matched by the power of her destructive fury. She is fighting for something good and against something evil, and it is an evil she knows intimately.
The stories many in this movement tell are stories of failure—personal, communal and sometimes economic. They are stories of public and private institutions that are increasingly distant and irrelevant, stories of loneliness and abuse. Isolation, the plague of the modern industrial society, has torn apart networks of extended families and communities. It has empowered this new movement of dreamers, who bombard the airwaves with an idealistic and religious utopianism that promises, through apocalyptic purification, to eradicate the old, sinful world and fill the resulting emptiness with a new world where time stops and all problems are solved. The movement promises to 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. It provides moral clarity. It also promises to exterminate, in one final, apocalyptic battle, the forces many of these people blame for their despair. Learned, through her faith, put her life back together. And she waits, like many believers, for a day when the forces that nearly destroyed her life are vanquished and rendered impotent.
Learned lives in the nation’s rust belt. The flight of manufacturing jobs has turned most of the old steel mill towns around her into wastelands of poverty and urban decay. The days when steelworkers could make middle-class salaries are a distant and cherished memory. She lives amid America’s vast and growing class of dispossessed, tens of millions of working poor, 30 million of whom make less than $8.70 an hour, the official poverty level for a family of four. Most economists contend that it takes at least twice this rate of pay to provide basic necessities to a family. These low-wage jobs, which come without benefits or job security, have meant billions in profits for the corporations that no longer feel the pressure or the need to take care of their workers. Learned and her neighbors have watched helplessly as jobs are automated or outsourced. After 1970, when manufacturers closed huge plants and moved them abroad, the real earning power of wages for men, who once could bring in enough income for their households, stopped rising. Economics professors Peter Gottschalk of Boston College and Sheldon Danziger of the University of Michigan found that about half of those whose family income ranked in the bottom 20 percent in 1968 were in the same group in 1991. Of those who moved up, nearly three-quarters still remained below the median income.2
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.3 There has been a loss of nearly 3 million manufacturing jobs nationwide since mid-2000.4 The forced retreat by workers into the service sector, into jobs that pay little more than the minimum wage, has left many households desperate. Laborers in the steel mills and manufacturing plants once made an average of $51,000 annually. Those who have moved into the service sector now make $16,000 in the leisure and hospitality sector, $33,000 in health care, or $39,000 in construction. In 2004, average employee compensation in the United States fell for the first time in 14 years.5 Between 2000 and 2004, Ohio lost a quarter of a million jobs. Cleveland became the nation’s poorest big city, and young people are fleeing the state in massive numbers to find work.
The bleakness of life in Ohio exposes the myth peddled by the Christian Right about the American heartland: that here alone are family values and piety cherished, nurtured and protected. 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 Democrat and have kept the evangelicals at bay. The lowest divorce rates tend to be found in blue states as well as in the Northeast and upper Midwest. 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 divorces per 1,000 married people, compared with 10.8 in Kentucky, 11.1 in Mississippi and 12.7 in Arkansas.6
Couples in former manufacturing states such as Ohio have to find two jobs to survive. The economic catastrophe has been accompanied by the erosion in federal and state assistance programs, the cutting of funds to elementary and secondary education, the reduction in assistance to women through the Women, Infants and Children Supplemental Nutrition Program, along with reductions in programs such as Head Start and federal programs to assist low-income families, elderly people, and people with disabilities who once turned to the government for rental assistance.7 Federal abandonment of the destitute came at a time when these communities most needed support. As the years passed and the future began to look as bleak as the present, this despair morphed into rage. Learned has watched families unravel under the pressure. Domestic violence, alcoholism and drug abuse run like plagues through the depressed pockets around her community. And Ohio, seething, has more white nationalist groups than any state in the Midwest (73), according to the Center for New Community in Chicago.8
It is hard to argue that Learned, or any other convert, is typical. The movement cuts across class and economic lines
. Not all who fall into despair turn to the Christian Right. Learned focuses her life on the fight against abortion rather than on campaigns to elect Christian candidates. She is not particularly political. But she knows intimately the despair that is the fuel of the movement. While this despair manifests itself in many ways and produces many varied reactions and belief systems, it shares a common feeling of loss, of abandonment, of deep pessimism about the future. When despair is this profound, the desperate begin to seek miracles. It is easier, indeed understandable, to look for hope and comfort in the mystical hand of God. It is easier to believe that destiny has been preordained and that the faithful will be blessed, even if they have to go through hard times. Christian conservatism has allowed Learned to redirect her anger, an anger many around her share, at those who have failed to heed the word of God. She believes, like 36 percent of all respondents according to a Gallup poll, that the world is soon coming to an end.9 She has read and accepts as prophetic the 12-volume Left Behind series of apocalyptic Christian novels by Timothy LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins that has sold more than 60 million copies. The manufacturing and industrial world around her has already seen its apocalypse. The hulks of old plants loom, giant rusted dinosaurs along the roadside. The labor and pain and sacrifice of a lifetime of toil have left workers bereft, impoverished and living in urban squalor and neglect. The world has crashed and burned for them. Another apocalypse, one that will lift Christians out of this morass, seems a welcome relief.
