Those lawmakers seeking guidance on immigration policy can turn to a study guide titled “What the Bible Says about Our Illegal Immigration Problem.” Citing the story of the Tower of Babel, Drollinger maintains that the Bible requires “the nations” to be kept separate through “borders and boundaries,” and that “God’s Word says He frowns on illegal immigrants.”35 It’s a curious message to bring to a room full of agribusiness people, many of whom rely critically on cheap, often undocumented labor from “other nations.”
Drollinger’s Bible is a source of political theory as well as political advocacy, although it does not turn out to be a democratic political theory. One of Drollinger’s frequently used words, and perhaps a central concept of his political theory, is “kingship.” He even turns it into a verb phrase, as in “kinging,” or getting ready “to king.” “Why is reaching ‘kings and those who are in authority’ so important?” he asks in his book. “Political leaders and political Capitols represent the hubs of power, influence, communications, and transportation, with influence reaching into the countryside. Winning leaders for Christ and planting churches in these focal points makes sense for the practical reason of greater efficiency, effectiveness, and impact on the nation as a whole.”
Drollinger’s antidemocratic political theory, and in particular his obsession with kings, is revealing of the relationship between the Christian nationalist movement and President Trump. “It is God that raises up a king,” Trump evangelical advisor Paula White declared in a TV interview about her longstanding relationship with the president. After Trump won, Franklin Graham, son of the late Billy Graham and one of Trump’s most trusted evangelical advisors, declared, “God’s hand intervened.” In 2019 he announced a “special day of prayer for the President, Donald J. Trump”; the initiative was cosigned by more than 250 pastors and faith leaders. Other evangelical leaders, including David Barton, have called Trump “God’s candidate” or “God’s guy.” Even former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said God “wanted Trump to become president.” Noting Trump’s propensity for vulgarity and name-calling, Christian TV personality Mary Colbert declared defiantly, “My Jesus was a name-caller. So get over the name-calling!” Addressing her viewers, she said, “You have to line up with what God wants.”
Whether by design or—more likely—the unfortunate accident of character, Trump seems pleased to play the role that his followers have assigned him. He is obliging them by behaving like a monarch—or, some might say, a mad king. Meetings with cabinet members have consisted of members praising him one by one and even thanking God for his leadership. Meetings with business leaders have had a similar tone. Trump continues to praise himself and then turns around and models the same sucking-up behavior in his relations with despots like the leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-un, Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Russian president Vladimir Putin. Trump demands military parades, threatens to punish his critics, refuses to cooperate with government investigations, and claims he is above the law.
The Trump family, too, appears to have gotten in on the act of modeling monarchical behavior. Like royal families of yore, they make little distinction between the public purse and their private interest. The Trump sons travel the world conducting Trump Organization business on the taxpayer’s dime, while son-in-law Jared Kushner has bought and sold as much as $147 million of real estate and other assets since joining the White House. Meanwhile, foreign political leaders and representatives pay for expensive rooms and hold lavish events at the Trump International Hotel. In a democracy answering to the rule of law, such corrupt and nepotistic practices would register as major scandals. In a monarchy, or pseudo-monarchy, however, they are merely business as usual.
For Drollinger and his fellow travelers, in any case, Trump’s king-like behavior seems far from troublesome. On the contrary, it may satisfy their craving for a certain type of political leadership. When God sends a ruler to save the nation, He doesn’t mess around; He sends a kingly king. And kings don’t have to follow the rules.
Dinner is a plate of chicken and steak, washed down with soda, iced tea, or chocolate milk. At the table in front of us, I spot five men with holstered guns. At least some of them appear to be sheriffs. Other guests are perusing Drollinger’s books and study guides that are handed out at the back of the tent.
Sipping chocolate milk, I watch attendees work the room. Between the “Hallelujahs” and “Praise the Lords,” wealthy growers and other agriculture-minded entrepreneurs trade business cards and discuss partnership opportunities. Funders of the event even included some banks. It isn’t obvious that they all believe in Drollinger’s version of the Bible, but it seems safe to assume that—like the leaders of South Pacific nations appealing to the club associated with the U.S. president’s golden touch—they are betting that an affiliation with Capitol Ministries will help their bottom lines.
Like Steve Taylor, whose family’s business practices have come under scrutiny for its temporary labor contracts, many of the agribusiness kings here have treated their workers as other peoples’ problems, leaning on taxpayers to pick up the tab for laborers’ medical care, food stamps, or other social services even as they cozy up to a religious leader who argues that the government has no business providing such services. But we’re not here in Tulare to think about the needs of the working poor. If your aim is to rise in the ranks of—or obtain favors from—a future theocratic administration, it behooves you now to get in with the in-club. It’s that power of the network, more than any lessons in Scripture, that Capitol Ministries delivers.
I decide it’s time to head for the exit. Strolling out of the dusty fairground, past the vast exhibition halls full of tractors and fertilizer displays, it strikes me that the theology of the evening is all but inseparable from a certain form of life. It is the string that ties together a bundle of costumes, assumptions, business dealings, and political favors. It is the latest form of a certain political and social vision that entitles a select few to work the earth with other people’s hands.
Many Americans still mistakenly believe that leaders of the religious right confine their attention to a few hot-button concerns and that if we could just find “common ground” on, say, abortion, the hostilities would cease. The religion I found in Tulare, however, is mostly about money and power. The speakers on Drollinger’s stage declare their intention to dominate every aspect of life in America, from government to education to the economy, in accordance with their religious “principles.” The real issue at the Capitol Ministries fund-raiser is that the proponents of this antidemocratic vision no longer seem to feel the need to disguise their ambitions. They, too, are getting ready to king.
CHAPTER 3
Inventing Abortion
The most popular origin story of Christian nationalism today, shared by many critics and supporters alike, explains that the movement was born one day in 1973, when the Supreme Court unilaterally shredded Christian morality and made abortion “on demand” a constitutional right. At that instant, the story goes, the flock of believers arose in protest and threw their support to the party of “Life” now known as the Republican Party. The implication is that the movement, in its current form, finds its principal motivation in the desire to protect fetuses against the women who would refuse to carry them to term.
This story is worse than myth. It is false as history and incorrect as analysis. Christian nationalism drew its inspiration from a set of concerns that long predated the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade and had little to do with abortion. The movement settled on abortion as its litmus test sometime after that decision for reasons that had more to do with politics than embryos. It then set about changing the religion of many people in the country in order to serve its new political ambitions. From the beginning, the “abortion issue” has never been just about abortion. It has also been about dividing and uniting to mobilize votes for the sake of amassing political power.
I spot a young woman I’ll call Megan in a placard-wielding group near the corner of Constitution and Fifteenth Street. Wearing a gray knitted pom-pom hat over light brown curls, she is marching with other members of a pro-life group at her college, where she majors in English. I first met her several years ago at a gathering of young antiabortion activists, where she was taking copious notes on a laptop plastered with stickers: “Cru,” “A Child Not a Choice.” Finding her here, though unanticipated, is not terribly surprising. With her cheery disposition and uncomplicated certainty of her views, Megan seems to embody the ideal that Phyllis Schlafly, a godmother of the antiabortion movement and founder of the conservative interest group the Eagle Forum, famously advertised in the title of one of her books: The Power of the Positive Woman.
That ideal lives on in the movement leaders today, including Penny Young Nance, president and CEO of Concerned Women for America, who made waves in recent years with her opposition to the Disney movie Frozen (it’s anti-male)1 and, more recently, the “weaponization” of the #MeToo movement.2 Glamorous and effusive, she is true to the title of her recent book, Feisty and Feminine: A Rallying Cry for Conservative Women. “We expect to devote considerable resources to this effort, and we expect to win,” said Nance, commenting on the appointment of prolife Supreme Court justices. “Our happy warrior/activist ladies relish the fight and shine in these historic moments.”3
Like other young activists at the march today, Megan is being groomed for glory in the conservative movement. As a convivial high school student, she was inspired by a friend to join a local chapter of Students for Life of America. Over a summer Megan attended the Young America’s Foundation’s National Conservative Student Conference in Washington, D.C., where, along with some 1,000 other students, she learned from speakers like Dinesh D’Souza and Ben Shapiro about the importance of traditional values, free markets, and the left’s assault on free speech.
Megan, like other “student leaders” at the event, also received media coaching, including tips on crafting op-eds and appearing on camera. She hopes her networking will soon pay off in the form of a post-graduation internship at a right-wing policy organization. The Heritage Foundation, for instance, offers subsidized housing and free lunch—a sweet gig for an English major. “When I was younger, I never imagined I could be on TV,” Megan says with confidence. “Now I know I can.”
As I’m chatting with Megan, Jeanne Mancini, president of March for Life, takes the stage and the crowd erupts in a roar of joy. “Jeanne! Jeanne!” Megan’s voice joins the collective thunder. Mancini previously worked for the Family Research Council, and before that on behalf of the Catholic Church.
Speaker after speaker follow onstage to condemn abortion and offer messages of praise for “the most pro-life president in history!” With the exception of Congresswoman Jaime Herrera Beutler, whose mother is white and father is Mexican American, every speaker at the 2018 March for Life rally program appears to be white.4
Donald Trump at last appears on a giant television screen live via satellite from the White House Rose Garden. The crowd greets the supersize image with enthusiasm, and it is clear that many believe that God, acting through the pro-life movement, put Trump in the White House. The president declares that the marchers are “a truly remarkable group” and then runs through a list of his own amazing achievements in office. “On the National Day of Prayer, I signed an executive order to protect religious liberty,” he says. He is referring to a declaration that, as Rob Boston, senior advisor for Americans United for the Separation of Church and State aptly put it, amounts to “one more attempt … to redefine religious freedom to mean the freedom to discriminate against those who do not share our religious belief.” The crowd bursts into applause, and Trump nods his head, smiling. “Very proud of that.”
I watch Megan watching Trump. It’s as if I can see the lines of power traced in her eyes. But when I ask her what she makes of the fact that Protestants by and large did not oppose abortion rights fifty years ago, and neither did many Republicans, she gives me a blank look. “Christianity is pro-life,” she says with certainty. “Republicans are the party of life.”
The annual scene on the mall, though familiar enough by now to count as reaffirmation rather than protest, serves mainly to drive home the brute fact that, for Republican politicians, abortion demagoguery is the path to power in America. Donald Trump clearly grasped that fact. Most of the people here, like most of the people catching snippets of the event on the evening news, take for granted that it is the way things have always been.
Except that it isn’t.
In the late 1970s a curious combination of religious and political activists assembled to ponder the strategy of a new political movement, sometimes by letter or phone, and sometimes in conference rooms or at a hotel in Lynchburg, Virginia. Some of the more vocal members of the group included Southern Baptist pastor Jerry Falwell; conservative activists Ed McAteer and Paul Weyrich; Nixon appointee Howard Phillips; attorney Alan P. Dye; and Robert J. Billings, an educator and organizer who would later serve as Ronald Reagan’s liaison to the Christian right.
This was an angry group of men. “We are radicals who want to change the existing power structure. We are not conservatives in the sense that conservative means accepting the status quo,” Paul Weyrich said. “We want change—we are the forces of change.”5 They were angry at liberals, who threatened to undermine national security with their unforgivable softness on communism; they were angry at the establishment conservatives, the Rockefeller Republicans, for siding with the liberals and taking down their hero, Barry Goldwater; they were angry about the rising tide of feminism, which they saw as a menace to the social order; and about the civil rights movement and the danger it posed to segregation, especially in education. One thing that they were not particularly angry about, at least at the start of their discussions, was the matter of abortion rights.
Weyrich was “the man perhaps with the broadest vision,” according to his fellow conservative activist Richard Viguerie. “I can think of no one who better symbolizes or is more important to the conservative movement.”6 In matters of religion, Weyrich was personally conservative: he abandoned the Roman Catholic Church, which he believed had become too liberal, for the Melkite Greek Catholic Church after the Second Vatican Council. But his politics weren’t necessarily centered on religion. He formed his political creed as a twenty-something in the Barry Goldwater uprising of 1964, and it consisted of visceral anticommunism, economic libertarianism, and a distrust of the civil rights movement. Jimmy Carter’s famous religiosity did nothing to redeem him in Weyrich’s eyes. Indeed, in 1978 and 1979, Weyrich’s immediate priority was to make sure that Carter would be a one-term president.7
Weyrich began to identify himself in the late 1970s with a movement whose name Richard Viguerie put on the title of his 1980 manifesto: The New Right: We’re Ready to Lead.8 Weyrich came to be known as the “evil genius” of the movement9—or sometimes “the Lenin of social conservatism”10—and Viguerie, who is considered the pioneer of political direct mail, came to be known as its “funding father.”11
From the beginning, the New Right sought radical change. They would establish themselves “first as the opposition, then the alternative, finally the government,” according to Conservative Caucus chair Howard Phillips.12 “We will not try to reform the existing institutions. We only intend to weaken them and eventually destroy them,” said Weyrich protégé Eric Heubeck, writing for the Free Congress Foundation. “We will maintain a constant barrage of criticism against the Left. We will attack the very legitimacy of the Left. We will not give them a moment’s rest …
We will use guerrilla tactics to undermine the legitimacy of the dominant regime.”13
Weyrich went on to call for a constitutional convention in hopes of producing a form of government more congenial to conservatism. “I don’t want everybody to vote,” he said at a gathering in the fall of 1980. “As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”14 Richard Viguerie emphatically endorsed Weyrich’s radicalism, which in turn led both men to adopt a kind of experimental pragmatism in pursuing their ends. “One of the major differences in this group of new conservatives was that we weren’t afraid to try even when there was only a 20 per cent chance of success,” Viguerie wrote. “We knew that if you expected to hit a lot of home runs, you had to expect to strike out a lot.”15
At the core of the concerns of the New Right was the perception that American capitalism was under dire threat from mortal enemies—some of them internal, some external, most of them communist. “Liberal national defense policies have resulted in the United States, long the world’s strongest military power, falling behind Soviet Russia in every major area of conventional and strategic weaponry,” wrote Viguerie.16
Activist Phyllis Schlafly shared Viguerie’s obsession with the communist menace. In the 1950s she wrote, “The plain facts are that Communism is advancing over the surface of the globe with such rapidity that if it continues at the same rate for the next thirteen years that it has been advancing during the past thirteen years, America will be Communist by 1970.”17 But Schlafly also gave voice to another motivating concern of the emerging right-wing consensus: the specter of feminism. Schlafly rose to prominence in her campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment. The feminist movement, she asserted, “is the most destructive element in our society.”18
For Weyrich and his fellow political operatives, the rise of the civil rights movement presented a historic opportunity to advance their own agenda. From Reconstruction through the 1960s, southern whites had been a critical part of the Democratic Party coalition. Their support had been essential in realizing the New Deal, although it burdened the progressive legislation of the period with racist policies. When Democrats took the lead in civil rights, however, the southern white population was suddenly in play. Nixon famously committed the Republican Party to the “Southern Strategy”—that is, appealing to the southern, white, formerly Democratic popular vote through populism, racism, and nativism. This in turn created a tension with the Republican Party’s other base, the so-called Rockefeller Republicans, who consisted, on balance, of economic conservatives with largely moderate social views.
The Power Worshippers Page 7
