by Chris Hedges
The emphasis on personal renewal and commitment to Christ—the staple message of evangelists such as Billy Graham and Luis Palau—is an anachronism to the new class. While speakers demand that followers give their lives to Christ, and while the born-again experience is considered the dividing line between believers and nonbelievers, the conversion experience is no longer the dominant theme pounded home from the pulpit or across the airwaves. It has been replaced by the rhetoric of war, the demands of a warrior God who promises blood and vengeance, and by the rhetoric of persecution, by the belief that there are sinister forces that seek the destruction of believers. It has also been replaced by a conspicuous and unapologetic infatuation with wealth, power and fame. As the movement has shifted away from the focus on personal salvation to a focus on power, it has incorporated into its theology the values, or lack of them, of a flagrant consumer society.
The strangest alliance, on the surface, is with Israeli Jews. After all, the movement generally teaches that Jews who do not convert are damned and will be destroyed in the fiery, apocalyptic ending of the world. It is early on Sunday morning in a ballroom on the second floor of the Hilton Hotel. The Israel Ministry of Tourism is hosting a breakfast. Several hundred people are seated at round tables with baskets of bread, fruit plates and silver pitchers of coffee. Waiters are serving plates of scrambled eggs and creamed spinach. Nearly everyone is white. On the platform is a huge picture of the Dome of the Rock, the spot where the Temple will be rebuilt to herald the Second Coming. Some 700,000 Christian tourists visit Israel each year, and with the steep decline in overall tourism, they have become a valued source of revenue in Israel.
Dominionists preach that Israel must rule the biblical land in order for Christ to return. The belief that Jews who do not convert will be killed is unmentioned at the breakfast. The featured speakers include Avraham Hirschsohn, the new Israeli minister of tourism; and Michael Medved, a cultural conservative and a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host. Medved is one of the most prominent Jewish defenders of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ and of the radical Christian Right. He wears a yarmulke and is warmly greeted by the crowd.
“A more Christian America is good for the Jews,” he says. “This is obvious. Take a look at this support for Israel. A more Christian America is good for America, something Jewish people need to be more cognizant about and acknowledge. A more Jewish community is good for the Christians, not just because of the existence of allies, but because a more Jewish community is less seduced by secularism.”
A former left-wing radical, who in later life embraced Orthodox Judaism, he lambastes other Jews for their hostility to Christianity.
“When you see Jews who are part of the attack on Christmas,” he says, “you know they have rejected their own faith.”
He ticks off causes in which both Jewish and Christian people have been active, including the call for prayer in schools and the fight against abortion (although abortion is legal in Israel). He defends his Jewish integrity by saying he does not believe in the Rapture. But this is more than a religious alliance. It is a political alliance. It unites messianic Christians with right-wing messianic Jews, who believe God has anointed them to expand their dominion throughout the Middle East at the expense of the Arab majority.
This is soon made clear by the next speaker, Glenn Plummer, a black minister from Detroit who is active in the Republican Party. It is his role—I suspect because his status as an inner-city black minister makes expression of such sentiments “all right”—to unleash the audience’s vituperative hate against Muslims. He says he knows about Muslims because “I come from Detroit, where the biggest mosque in America is. It didn’t take 9/11 to show me there is a global battle going on for the souls of men. . . . When Islam comes into a place it is intent on taking over everything, not only government, but the business, the neighborhoods, everything.”
The Christian writer Kay Arthur, who can barely contain her tears when speaking of the Jews and Israel, assures those in the room that, although she loves America, if she had to choose between America and Israel, “I would stand with Israel, stand with Israel as a daughter of the King of Kings, stand according to the word of God.” She goes on to quote at length from the Book of Revelation, repeating many of the familiar passages that inspire the movement, and speaks of Jesus seated in a throne floating about Jerusalem as believers are raptured up toward him in the sky. The fate of unreconstructed Jews, including—one would assume—those hosting the breakfast, is omitted.
A popular radio host, Janet Parshall, who also leads tours to the Holy Land, speaks to the group of her dialogue with the Lord about taking tourists to a place where there are suicide bombings and attacks.
“ ‘God, the Holy Land has terrorists,’ I said. But God said, ‘Janet, you’re from Washington DC,’ ” a quote that elicited laughter.
Hirschsohn, Israel’s minister of tourism, says to the gathering: “You stood with us for the last four years when nobody else would. Thank you.”
“The Bible tells us the Lord spoke to Abraham in the land where today American troops are defending freedom,” he says. He announces that the Israeli tourism ministry will build a “pilgrim center” for Christian tourists in the Galilee.
The charred remains of Israeli Public Bus 19 are in the neighboring convention hall. The bus, owned by a Christian Zionist group called the Jerusalem Connection, was blown up by Palestinian suicide bombers in January 2004. The president of the organization, retired U.S. Brigadier General James Hutchens, according to information from the group, “looks at the conflict in Israel within a biblical context.” Bus 19 has, since the group acquired it, been displayed around the world, including in The Hague and in numerous “Remember Israel” rallies in the United States. On a table next to the bus, a seated Jerusalem Connection official hands out pamphlets reading, “Bring Bus #19 To Your Community!”
One of the reasons to bring the bus, the pamphlet says, is that “for Christians, you will increase in stature, appreciation and acceptance by Jews.”
An Egyptian woman, a Christian who is manning a booth near the bus that advertises Christian broadcasts to the Arab world, is periodically reduced to tears by enraged conventioneers who, after visiting the bus, tell her Arabs are “terrorists.”
Onlookers climb onto a platform alongside the bus to peer within. Its sides are scorched black, center doors twisted, steel frame bent and shattered. Bus 19 has been adorned with banners bearing biblical quotations, including: “I will plant Israel in their own land, never again to be uprooted from the land I have given them” (Amos 9:15); “And I will bless those who bless you. And whoever curses you I will curse” (Genesis 12:3), and “Those who say come, let us destroy them as a nation, that the name of Israel be remembered no more. . . . They form an alliance against God” (Psalm 83:4–5).
There are cards of condolences from American schoolchildren, flowers on the flooring of the bus, and at the base of the raised platform large photos and biographies of those killed in the attack. A poster reads: “When Palestinians love their children, more than they hate Israel, then there will be peace in Palestine.” The poster shows six photos of children holding weapons or strapped with explosives.
“Over 50 public transportation buses just like this one have been bombed in Israel,” reads another sign. “In three and a half years, suicide bombers have killed more than 975 people in Israel. They are represented here.”
But some of the Israelis in the hall are uncomfortable with the Bus 19 display. They are telling conventioneers, whom they are trying to get to visit Israel, that the bus represents an old phase in the conflict, and that Israel is now moving toward peace. One Israeli is Marina, who has long, blond hair, a brown shirt, and knee-high leather boots. She immigrated to Israel from Holland and lives on a cooperative mango farm near the Sea of Galilee. She says she is “embarrassed” to be at the convention. “These people are anti-Semitic,” she says, speaking softly as conventioneers move past the l
arge Israeli display space. She is unhappy with the bigotry toward Muslims expressed by the speakers. When asked why the ministry is here, she answers curtly: “money.”
“No one else visits Israel,” she says.
In this version of the Christian Gospel, the exploitation and abuse of other human beings is a good. Homosexuality is an evil. And this global, heartless system of economic rationalism has morphed in the rhetoric of the Christian Right into a test of faith. The ideology it espouses is a radical evil, an ideology of death. It calls for wanton destruction, destruction of human beings, of the environment, of communities and neighborhoods, of labor unions, of a free press, of Iraqis, Palestinians or others in the Middle East who would deny us oil fields and hegemony, of federal regulatory agencies, social welfare programs, public education—in short, the destruction of all people and programs that stand in the way of a Christian America and its God-given right to dominate the rest of the planet. The movement offers, in return, the absurd but seductive promise that those who are right with God will rise to become spiritual and material oligarchs. They will become the new class. Those who are not right with God, be they poor or Muslim or unsaved, deserve what they get. In the rational world none of this makes sense. But believers have been removed from a reality-based world. They believe that through Jesus all is possible. 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. Since believers see themselves as becoming empowered through faith, the gross injustices and repression that could well boomerang back on most of them are of little concern. They assuage their consciences with the small acts of charity they or their churches dole out to the homeless or the mission fields. The emotion-filled religious spectacles and spiritual bromides compensate for the emptiness of their lives. They are energized by hate campaigns against gays or Muslims or liberals or immigrants. They walk willingly into a totalitarian prison they are helping to construct. They yearn for it. They work for it with passion, self-sacrifice and a blinding self-righteousness. “Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty,” Simone Weil wrote in Gravity and Grace. And it is the duty of the Christian foot soldiers to bring about the Christian utopia. When it is finished, when all have been stripped of legal and social protection, it will be too late to resist. This is the genius of totalitarian movements. They convince the masses to agitate for their own incarceration.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Crusade
One of the most striking traits of the inner life of a crowd is the feeling of being persecuted, a peculiar angry sensitiveness and irritability directed against those it has once and forever nominated as enemies. These can behave in any manner, harsh or conciliatory, cold or sympathetic, severe or mild—whatever they do will be interpreted as springing from an unshakable malevolence, a premeditated intention to destroy the crowd, openly or by stealth.
—Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power1
Pastor Russell Johnson stands against the backdrop of a huge American flag with the Christian cross superimposed on the Stars and Stripes. He calls his Christian warriors to battle. He invokes the legacy of the civil-rights movement, speaking of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks. He talks of embattled Christians in America. A war of values and morals, of decency and goodness pitted against forces of darkness and evil, has enveloped the country, and he issues a strident call to arms. He calls Ohio “the tip of the spear to turn back the nation.
“We’re on the beaches of Normandy, and we can see the pillbox entrenchments of academic and media liberalism,” he says. “We’ll take back our country for Christ.”
Johnson, who leads the Ohio Restoration Project, is on a 10-city tour in Ohio. The Christian group’s credo is “Pray, Serve, Engage.” The rallies across the state are thinly disguised campaign events for “Christian” candidates, such as Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, the Republican nominee for governor. But the speakers also pound home the message that Christians must protect the family, ban abortion, bring back school prayer and register voters who will create a Christian Ohio. There are voter registration cards available, and the few hundred people at the rally are urged to join the “Patriot Pastors”—some 2,000 Ohio pastors, each of whom has promised to recruit 100 new “Intercessors” or “Faithful Servants of Prayer” and 200 “Minutemen Volunteers” to work in the upcoming election. The goal of the movement is to register 300,000 new voters. Johnson has called for a monthly voter-registration Sunday where clergy will show a PowerPoint presentation on how to register, collect cards and send them directly to the office of the secretary of state. These new voters will, in a phrase repeated often at the rally, be like “salt and light for America.” They will stem the forces out to destroy them and the nation. They will return America to the Christian path—which, Johnson claims, was the intent and goal of the nation’s founders.
The fusion of Christian and national symbols marks a completion for those at the rally of America’s new state religion, a Christo-fascism. A choir sings rousing patriotic and Christian hymns while pictures of American troops fighting in Iraq flash on huge screens. There are moments of prayer and a somber honoring of the men and women in uniform, with all veterans in the room asked to stand. Looming above it all is a huge American flag with the Christian cross superimposed on it. On another wall is a flag with a superimposed George Washington, sword by his side, kneeling in prayer. Christian rallies like these are also being held in other states such as Texas and Pennsylvania.
Johnson warns about the “secular jihadists” who have “hijacked” America, removing public prayer from schools, the 10 Commandments and the Bible from public places. He accuses the public schools, which he says promote an ideology of secular humanism, of neglecting to teach that Hitler was “an avid evolutionist.” There can be no negotiation, no compromise, no deals cut with the enemy. And the enemy lives in your neighborhood, teaches in your schools and works in your office. The battle lines are being demarcated in the suburbs of Dayton and across America.
Johnson likens America’s predicament to that of Nazi Germany. He tells the gathering of about 400 supporters that church congregations in Germany would sing so that they could not hear the passing of trainloads of crying Jews headed for nearby concentration camps. He accuses Christians in America of leading “Neville Chamberlain lives,” referring to the British prime minister who naively signed a neutrality pact with Adolf Hitler. As Johnson speaks, pictures of Hitler and Chamberlain flash on the screens. If Christians do not begin to act, they will be next. They will be hauled off in freight cars like the Jews in Nazi Germany and murdered.
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. A moral obligation, Freud wrote, only increases with our affection for an individual. In this room, the commandment to “Love your neighbor as yourself” is twisted, in ways Freud could understand, to “Love your fellow Christians as yourself.” Loving one’s neighbor presupposes a bond, a shared sense of belonging, but it was a presupposition Freud pointed out was absurd. “If this grandiose commandment had run ‘love thy neighbor as thy neighbor loves thee,’ I should not take exception to it,” he wrote.2 Loving a stranger, Freud said, was counter to human nature: “If he is a stranger to me . . . it will be hard for me to love him.”3 And those outside the Christian community are effectively made strangers. They are no longer worthy of being loved. The distinction creates a world where there are only two types of people. There are godly men and women who advance Christian values, and there are nonbelievers—many of them liberal Christians—who peddle the filth and evil of secular humanism. This dividing line is nothing other than the distinct
ion between human and nonhuman, between the worthy and those unworthy of life, between saved and unsaved, between friend and foe.
In rallies like those in Johnson’s Ohio tour, friends, neighbors, colleagues and family members who do not conform to the ideology are gradually dehumanized. They are tainted with the despised characteristics inherent in the godless. This attack is waged in highly abstract terms, to negate the reality of concrete, specific and unique human characteristics, to deny the possibility of goodness in those who do not conform. Some human beings, the message goes, are no longer human beings. They are types. This new, exclusive community fosters rigidity, conformity and intolerance. In this new binary world segments of the human race are disqualified from moral and ethical consideration. And because fundamentalist followers live in a binary universe, they are incapable of seeing others as anything more than inverted reflections of themselves. If they seek to destroy nonbelievers to create a Christian America, then nonbelievers must be seeking to destroy them. This belief system negates the possibility of the ethical life. It fails to grasp that goodness must be sought outside the self and that the best defense against evil is to seek it within. 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 by grasping our own capacity for evil, our own darkness, that we hold our own capacity for evil at bay. When evil is purely external, then moral purification always entails the eradication of others.
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. And the passivity of many in America who do not acknowledge the danger of this rhetoric, and the moral fragmentation it inspires, lends itself to the pleasant fiction that these radicals are fundamentally decent, that they do not mean what they say, that they will never actually persecute homosexuals or nonbelievers or execute abortion providers. Such passivity only accelerates the probability of evil. Extremists never begin as extremists. They become extremists gradually. They move gingerly forward in an open society. They advance only so far as they fail to meet resistance. And no society is immune from this moral catastrophe.
