As Fitzgerald starts to explain the importance of the upcoming elections in North Carolina, however, she becomes more animated. She loosens her grip on the bureaucratic rhetoric and swiftly banishes the specter of the Johnson Amendment. There are three congressional districts in North Carolina in play, all currently held by Republicans, she says. One of them happens to be right here in Unionville. In fact, it is more than likely that’s why this meeting is being held here in the first place, and not on the other side of Charlotte. “If we lose those three seats to progressives—I’m using a term to describe people who don’t hold our values—then the whole Congress could be lost,” warns Fitzgerald.
The Republican Party candidate in one of those districts, Mark Harris, a pastor who served as president of the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina, is right here with us, as it happens, in a blue jacket, red tie, and talk-show hair. Earlier in the election season Harris drew national attention for sermons in which he argued that God’s straightforward message for women is that they should “submit” to their husbands.5 His race is very tight. In the coming months, after Harris supposedly wins by a whisker, his campaign will become embroiled in broadly reported allegations of election fraud. But in this room he is hailed as the kind of godly political leadership America truly needs.
Later in the day Harris comes up on the stage to address the assembled crowd. It is a campaign speech all right, although it sounds a lot like a sermon—which is unsurprising, given that Harris is also a preacher. “The greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion,” he says, paraphrasing a speech by Mother Teresa. “The mother who is thinking of abortion should be helped to understand that she is to give until it hurts. Her plans, her free time, to respect the life of her child.” He declares, “We are reminded time and again that God wants us to deliver his word in a straight and unapologetic way.” From the stage, he urges pastors to get their congregations registered to vote. He promises to deliver a “church video” in time for Sunday. In this briefing, there is no easy place to draw the line between preacher and politician, just as there is no space between church and political party.
Mark Harris’s views may seem far from the mainstream. An hour away from here, after all, sits the third-largest banking capital of the United States, surely powered by many women enjoying egalitarian partnerships and voluntary parenthood. Yet Harris’s outlook is far from the fringe within Christian nationalist circles, and it reflects something central to the current politics of North Carolina.
Looking only at the top line, this is a purple state. Trump won by three points in 2016, but Obama carried it before that, and Democrats recently managed to capture the governorship. But, thanks to aggressive gerrymandering, or what Faith & Freedom Coalition president Ralph Reed has proudly termed “the Republican reapportionment advantage,” ten of thirteen of the state’s congressional representatives were Republican as of 2016. And Republicans dominate the state legislature and the courts.
But these weren’t just any old Republicans. The hard right controls the party here, and that means they control the state, too. Over the past several years the Republican-controlled state government has enacted laws that restrict access to reproductive care, broaden the ability of taxpayer-subsidized organizations to discriminate on the basis of their religion, and strip public education of critical funding.
The red tide in the state capital really has one godfather, and his name is Art Pope. A wealthy businessman from the retail sector with a libertarian political vision, Pope decided some years ago to seek control of the state government. He invested millions of dollars in political think tanks, funded fellowships, and flooded campaign coffers. Payday has been sweet to Pope and his super-wealthy, hyper-conservative friends. North Carolina has advanced an agenda that includes the privatization of schools and lowering of the state’s income and corporate tax rates.
Today, North Carolina is one of the states most affected by the self-inflicted reduction of Medicaid funding. Its public school system has been deflated by the expansion of fiscally unaccountable charter networks, many of which are run by big GOP donors. Koch brothers money speaks loudly in North Carolina, too, now rivaling Pope’s for influence, and the state can be ranked alongside Wisconsin and Texas as a model of plutocratic governance. In purely demographic terms, North Carolina is almost exactly balanced between Democratic and Republican voters. In power politics, however, it represents the fusion of money and religion that supplies the foundation of the Christian nationalist movement.
In demographic terms, it is also fair to say that North Carolina is a religious state, but it would not be accurate to suppose that its faith is uniformly conservative. Indeed, North Carolina is the site of a large and fairly active progressive political movement that draws much of its strength from liberal Christianity. Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II, the leader of progressive religious voices, initiated “Moral Mondays” protests to draw attention to issues of economic equality and social justice. He is a member of the Red Letter Christians, a group committed to “combining Jesus and justice.” Yet the religion that dominates in North Carolina hardly reflects the diversity of religion among its people.
The faction of Republicans that are in control is so radical that, in 2013, fourteen North Carolina legislators put forward a bill, known as the Rowan County Defense of Religion Act, that declared that states are free to make laws they choose regarding religion. The U.S. Constitution’s church-state separation provision, they claimed, only applied to the federal government. Think of it as a new nullification provision, only aimed directly at the First Amendment. The bill would have allowed, say, public schools to insist that principals prove they had been “born again.” It could have mandated that candidates for public office prove weekly church attendance and that all public meetings begin with prayers that infidels will come to know the Lord.
In 2013, even in North Carolina, this bill was never going to pass, and it was promptly referred to the Committee for Rules, Calendar, and Operations, which is where wacky bills are sent to die. But passing the bill wasn’t the point of the exercise. The sponsors put it forward because they believed—rightly—that this kind of posturing is just the way to gain popularity among the right-wing evangelical base and win power in North Carolina.
It is the same spirit that seems to move Mark Harris to double down on his extreme social conservatism in Unionville. Glancing around at the nodding heads in the crowd, I get a sense of how it works. Beyond the relentless, binary, life-or-death messaging, what Harris and his fellow pastor-politicians offer is a pathway to involvement. There is an undercurrent of rage that flows among the flower-bedecked tables here, and Harris seems to offer his listeners a way to channel it into a kind of political therapy. Here the anxieties over shifting gender roles and the resentments over fading economic privilege are transmuted into personal salvation—and political gold. Setting aside the big money, the key to hard-right Republican power in this state is an army of volunteer activists, people with the time and energy to canvass voters, run for minor political offices, and do whatever it takes to save the country from “the humanists” and “the homosexual agenda” and take it back for God.
When the group breaks for a lunch of barbecue, baked beans, and coleslaw, Chris and I wander outside to check out a red-and-blue “Values Bus”—the FRC claims to operate two of them—that is parked in front of the church. Sizable and eye-catching, it has been repurposed as a mobile get-out-the-vote unit.
The side of the bus bears the enlarged signatures of identical twin brothers Jason and David Benham, two of the featured speakers at today’s event. They are accompanied by their father, Philip “Flip” Benham, a longtime antiabortion activist and associate of Tony Perkins, who takes in their presentation with pride. Popular draws on the right-wing speaking circuit for their farm-boy-wholesome looks and lightly competitive banter, Jason and David are former minor-league baseball players turned real estate entrepreneurs. In
2014 they attracted national attention when the media outlet Right Wing Watch reported that David spoke with conservative radio host Janet Mefferd and warned against “homosexuality and its agenda that is attacking the nation.”6 He also claimed that “demonic ideologies” are taking hold in colleges and public schools. In the flare-ups that followed, the Benhams’ anticipated reality television series on HGTV was scrapped. Not to be outdone, their father, Flip Benham, went on television to back Judge Roy Moore in his Senate race in Alabama in order to beat back allegations of child molestation leveled against the judge.
Along with its crew of firebrand speakers, the Values Buses cross the country delivering hundreds of thousands of “voter guides.” The voter guides are one of the essential tools of the movement. They are everywhere in the Unionville church. A voter guide created by the North Carolina Family Policy Council has been placed at every seat, and piles of them are dispersed throughout the fellowship hall, including a table in the middle of the room that holds thousands of them in neat stacks, ready to be loaded into the trunks of pastors’ cars.
“Take as many voter guides as you can, as you believe you can use effectively, giving one to every member of your church and then beyond,” says John Rustin, president of the North Carolina Family Policy Council. “We survey all the candidates, over four hundred candidates, running for U.S. House, the North Carolina Senate, the North Carolina House, the North Carolina Supreme Court, and the North Carolina Court of appeals.” Rustin directs the audience to the organization’s voter guide website. “Type in your name and address and it will generate a personalized guide specifically for you … Those are provided free of charge!”
Voter guides escape IRS limitations on campaigning for candidates on the theory that they offer voters a nonpartisan assessment of where the candidates stand on key issues. However, every voter guide I come across here has a pretty unambiguous message. The candidates from one party are in favor of “life.” Candidates from the other party apparently favor death. One party’s candidates support “religious freedom.” The other party’s candidates presumably endorse religious tyranny.
A glance at the Values Buses’ schedules indicates that the FRC’s presence in this swing district in North Carolina is far from accidental. The itineraries match the Republican Party’s geographical needs with some precision. Later in the month, Values Buses will hit congressional swing districts in Dallas, Houston, and Oceanside, California. Along the way, the buses will make stops in states with hot Senate races: Florida, Tennessee, Montana, and Missouri.
After lunch, we head back into the building, and I notice a display case offering a dozen-odd different pocket-sized tracts for free: The Truth About Hell; The Truth About Abortion; The Truth About Mormonism; The Da Vinci Con. I pick up a pamphlet with the curious title New International perVersion. It turns out to be a screed against the New International Version (NIV) of the Bible, a 1978 effort to make the Bible more comprehensible. There are reportedly tens of millions of copies of the NIV in circulation, including the one covered in supple black leather that Chris handed to me earlier today and I’m carrying with me now. According to the pamphlet, “The NIV perverts Jesus Christ into Lucifer.”
Chris notices the pamphlet and leans toward me. “Some people revere the King James version like they were the precise words of, say, Paul, written in English rather than Greek,” he says, “as opposed to a translation that has been updated as we make advances in the field of translation and scholarship. I think it’s about familiarity and fear. People memorized those specific words when they were children, and now, if those words change, the fear is everything else might be up for grabs.”
The greatest terrors of translation, in Chris’s view, have to do with sex. New words could mean a new gender order. “In Romans there’s a woman named Junia, whom Paul said was outstanding among the apostles,” he explains. “Many early writers believed that she was indeed a woman. At some point, though, there was this thought that ‘apostle’ wasn’t a role women should have, and you see a masculine form of the name, ‘Junias,’ start to appear. Some translations highlight this tension in the footnotes, but others don’t mention it. She just became a man.”
We settle into our seats for the after-lunch program featuring Lieutenant General (ret.) William Boykin. Boykin is a living legend at events like these, an old warrior with an affable manner best known as the commander of the raid depicted in Black Hawk Down. Boykin seems willing to say out loud things that usually don’t come out until the bottle is nearly empty. But to view Boykin’s influence as marginal would be to underestimate the role he has played in nurturing Christian nationalist networks in the military and among “disaster relief” NGOs working abroad.
Boykin starts off with a lengthy reminiscence about “the longest day of my life,” the eighteen-hour firefight that ended with “fifteen of my men brought back dead.” Referring to President Bill Clinton, who authorized the raid, Boykin says, “We were sent in there to do this job by a man who was a philanderer. As far as I’m concerned, and I will tell you right now, he was a lowlife. Because he didn’t understand the concept of integrity. He didn’t understand that a vow is a vow. Like when you stand before God and you say, ‘I’ll honor and respect this woman I’m about to marry till death do I part.’ That’s why elections matter.”
“Go on, brother,” says the square-jawed young pastor seated just behind me. The roomful of Trump loyalists nod their heads with righteous certitude. Chris scribbles a note and passes it to me: “Do they have no sense of irony?”
Boykin pivots from adultery to communism, which he seems to think remains the greatest threat to our nation today. One of his friends in the audience, on cue, holds up a book with a red cover titled The Naked Communist. “If you want to understand what’s going on in America right now,” Boykin says, “you need to read that book right there.”
The Naked Communist, by W. Cleon Skousen, was first published in 1958. Skousen was one of the founders of the National Center for Constitutional Studies, a conservative Mormon group that holds seminars across the country and promotes “a bizarre version of American history,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.7 Skousen was much-admired by the catastrophist Glenn Beck, who aggressively promoted Skousen’s ideas on his TV show and wrote a foreword to one of his books. Skousen’s teachings are also disseminated through a network of Arizona-based, taxpayer-funded charter schools, Heritage Academy, whose curriculum is suffused with ideological “principles,” such as the notion that “free market and minimal government best supports prosperity.” Textbooks in Heritage Academy’s mandatory American government class have included the claim that the U.S. Constitution is based on “biblical principles” and asserted that “God” destroyed a French fleet that threatened the American colonies.8 The Heritage Academy network, along with state officials, has been sued over alleged misuse of public money.9 And yet the network remains a favorite within Arizona’s “school choice” movement. In early 2019 the deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Education participated in a “School Choice Week” celebration at a Heritage Academy campus.
In spite of his affinity for fringe figures like Skousen, Boykin’s career has taken him close to the heart of American military power. He served at the Central Intelligence Agency as deputy director of special activities and was made deputy director for operations, readiness, and mobilization on the army staff. In 2003 he was appointed deputy undersecretary for intelligence and war fighting. In that capacity he worked with contractors with strong links to dominionist groups, who believe that Christians should seek to occupy all positions of power in government and society.10
One group that Boykin was closely involved with, Humanitarian International Services Group (HISG), led by a man named Kay Hiramine, received government contracts for work in disaster relief, emergency management, and intelligence gathering. Boykin “used his position not only to pay Hiramine and his missionaries to spy, but also to create work for his fundamentalist fr
iends,” according to the journalist Sarah Jones writing for the Wall of Separation Blog, a publication of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.11
An aid worker and missionary, Hiramine had “used shipments of clothing to disguise smuggled Bibles,” Jones writes. But even before that, Hiramine worked for the late C. Peter Wagner, serving for a time as the executive director of the Wagner Institute for Practical Ministry. Wagner, a former professor of “church growth” at Fuller Theological Seminary who authored more than seventy books and founded various ministries, is widely referred to as the godfather of dominionist ideology.
In his 2008 book Dominion! How Kingdom Action Can Change the World, Wagner explains that God has commanded true Christians to gain control of the “seven molders” or “mountains” of culture and influence, or seven areas of civilization, including government, business, education, the media, the arts and entertainment, family, and religion. “Apostles,” he says, have a “responsibility for taking dominion” over “whatever molder of culture or subdivision God has placed them in,” which he casts as “taking dominion back from Satan.”12 Although Wagner is not a household name outside of Christian nationalist circles, his work is broadly influential within it.
Boykin’s focus on “Kingdom action” has never wavered. He is presently the FRC’s executive vice president and is a frequent guest on Tony Perkins’s radio show, Washington Watch. The organization he founded, Kingdom Warriors, promises to “help believers in Christ to understand the concept of spiritual warfare.” Boykin told an interviewer, “We’re in a spiritual battle every single day and we wish to help equip them to fight this spiritual war that we’re in.”13 He is on the council of POTUS Shield, a prayer initiative of “Warriors, Worshippers and Watchmen” supporting the Trump presidency.14 “Points of discussion” on the POTUS Shield website include, “The Church & Kingdom Trump & Resistance Changing the Laws—The the [sic] Supreme & Federal Court System Abortion Turning back Globalization Israel & Jerusalem Space Force and dominance.”
The Power Worshippers Page 3
