The context of the Vietnam War made the cultural changes of the 1960s and 1970s all the worse as far as many Americans were concerned. The perceived association with military defeat was indeed fatal to the chances of a successful progressive liberalism in appealing to wider sections of the American mainstream. The Christian Right, like the Right in general, was deeply committed to anti-Communism, opposing the second Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START II), demanding higher military spending and a tough antiradical strategy in Central America, supporting Ronald Reagan’s “evil empire” rhetoric, and also supporting Taiwan against “Red China.”104 And this “anti-Communism” formed part of a wider complex of hard-line nationalist attitudes; for politicians associated with the Christian Right, like my friends in Troy, Alabama, also bitterly opposed the abandonment of American rule over the Panama Canal Zone and demanded the toughest possible policies against Iran.105 Since 9/11, the United States has not suffered a military defeat on the scale of Vietnam, but if, as seems likely, by 2025 China overtakes America to become the greatest economic power in the world, this could in its own way be an even more shattering blow to American middle class pride and self-confidence.
One of Jerry Falwell’s most publicized campaigns was entitled “I Love America.” The meetings, propaganda, and rhetoric of the Christian Right have always been suffused with nationalism and national symbolism. One evangelical pastor with an apocalyptic bent and considerable influence on the Right, retired Colonel Robert Thieme of Houston, became famous for wearing his old military uniform in the pulpit.106 This tendency helps strengthen nationalist hatred of Europe in particular. According to conservative commentator Robert D. Novak, writing of Bush administration supporters in 2003, “these Bush backers see the President under worldwide attack as a Christian, particularly in a Europe where atheism is on the rise and religion in decline.”107
The radical nationalism of the religious Right naturally emerged particularly strongly after 9/11 and fused with religious hostility to Islam as a religion. Bush himself was bitterly criticized by sections of the religious Right for his speech of September 17, 2001, at the Islamic Center in Washington, DC, praising Islam as a “religion of peace.”108 Franklin Graham, son of the Reverend Billy Graham, called Islam “very evil and wicked, violent and not of the same God.” Jerry Falwell described Mohammed as a terrorist—remarks from which Bush officially distanced himself and the administration.109 The influential millenarian Hal Lindsey (author of the best-selling book in American history after the Bible) produced a strikingly hate-filled work that combined Christian and radical Israeli sources to vilify Islam in general.110 The effect of this on the outside world has been severe.111 Given the violent edge to extreme Rightist thought and behavior (in Europe as well as the United States), there is real reason to fear that such propaganda could pave the way for pogroms against Muslims in parts of America, if—God forbid—the country should suffer another catastrophic terrorist attack.
In their identification of the Christian religion with the nation, the fundamentalist wings of the American evangelical churches are now unique in Western Christendom (except for Northern Ireland, from which much of their tradition is ultimately derived). The Catholic Church, as noted, is universal by nature. The national Protestant churches of Western Europe have, since 1945, been strongly committed to internationalism. Even in England, it is several decades since the Anglican Church was last described as “the Conservative Party at prayer”; whereas in Texas, according to Larry McMurtry, “a flavorless Protestantism seems to have yielded super-patriotism as a by-product.”112
The American “mainline” Protestant churches, like their European equivalents, with which they are linked in the World Council of Churches and other international organizations, have come to adopt generally liberal and internationalist positions. To find a Western parallel for the instinctive nationalism of some of the evangelicals, one would once again have to go back to Europe before 1939, or even before 1914. In Eastern Christendom, the Orthodox churches are often very closely identified with their respective nationalisms, and often indeed with chauvinist positions, but quite unlike in America, these have historically been state churches.
Millenarians and Nationalists
Of the American evangelicals, significant numbers also hold millenarian beliefs that have frightening implications for their attitudes both to the outside world and to U.S. politics. In 1977 the number of American premillennialists alone was conservatively estimated at eight million. Premillennialists believe in Christ’s bodily return before his thousand-year earthly reign; postmillennialists (a majority of the “mainline” Protestant churches) believe in his return only after the millennium has already been established by the power of God working through his people. This is a distinction with crucial implications for attitudes to politics, history, and the possibility and desirability of Christians seeking to bring about positive social change in this life.113 The great majority of the leaders of the Christian Right have been premillennialists, and often from a more extreme variant of this belief known as dispensationalism. In 1987, 63 percent of Southern Baptist pastors declared themselves premillenarian.114
A very much larger number of Americans have some belief in “prophecy”: that the Bible—and especially the book of Daniel and the Revelations of St John—provides accurate predictions of future events.115 This is indicated by the popularity of millenarian religious fiction, such as Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth (28 million copies sold by 1990), or more recently, the “Rapture” series of Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. To date, this series has sold more than 40 million copies, putting Harry Potter to shame and making it by a long stretch the most successful series in the history of American print fiction. LaHaye was a cofounder (with Jerry Falwell) of the Moral Majority, the pioneering Christian Rightist group that laid the foundation for the later and much more successful Christian Coalition.116
These readership figures demonstrate once again a profound distance between a considerable part of the American population and modernity as the rest of the world understands it, as well as the rationalist and universalist principles of the American Creed. For not only is this tradition deeply and explicitly hostile to the Enlightenment and to any rational basis for human discourse or American national unity, it cultivates a form of insane paranoia toward much of the outside world in general. Thus The End of the Age, a novel by Pat Robertson, features a conspiracy between a Hilary Clintonesque first lady and a Muslim billionaire to make the antichrist president of the United States. The antichrist has a French surname, and was possessed by Satan, in the form of the Hindu god Shiva, while serving with the Peace Corps in India.117
As China overtakes the United States, it can be expected that more and more such fantasies will focus on China as the new version of the beast from the apocalypse. Chinese observers of my acquaintance for their part look on American fundamentalism with a mixture of contempt, satisfaction, bewilderment, and fear. The contempt and satisfaction come from the fact that they see the antiscientific and antirational elements in these religious ideologies as undermining America’s educational, scientific, and economic lead, and helping China not just to overtake America economically, but to present itself to the world as the new image and standard of successful modernity. The bewilderment and fear come from an inability to understand how developments like those in America can be happening in a modern country, and a fear as to what policies the United States might adopt in the future if such forces become dominant in a U.S. administration.
American apocalyptic literature is not encouraging in regard to future attitudes toward China, since it is utterly, shockingly ruthless in its treatment of the unsaved—in other words, the vast mass of humanity. In accordance with one strand in prophetic belief, the “Rapture” series begins with God’s selected being taken up to heaven in an instant, and dwells lovingly on the immense casualty rates that result as pilotless planes and driverless cars crash all over the world—with most of the
victims presumably going to hell.118
The moral tone of such attitudes has real consequences for how these believers think about the world today. Thus I remember the words of my “born again” landlady during a stay in Washington, DC, in 1996–1997. When challenged that the Bible cannot be literally God’s word, for in this case sections of the books of Exodus and Joshua in particular would make God guilty of ordering genocide, she replied, in honey-sweet tones, “but don’t you see, if those people had been wiped out 3,000 years ago as God ordered, we wouldn’t have all these problems in the Middle East today.” Some millenarian language achieves a kind of pornography of hatred in its description of the fate of the damned, especially those from nations hostile to the United States.119
As these words suggest, one of the most important effects of millenarian thinking in the religious conservative camp in recent years has been to help cement the alliance of this camp with hard-liners in Israel—a subject that will be explored in chapter 6. This has become one of the most important practical connections between this sector of American culture and aspects of contemporary American nationalism. In the context of American nationalism, of particular interest is “dominion” or “reconstruction” theology—a relatively minor current in itself, but one that has been of great influence in the thinking of leading figures in the Christian Right like Pat Robertson and Michele Bachmann.
This theology is based on Genesis 1:26–29, in which God gives to Adam and Eve dominion over the Earth and all its plants and creatures. This has been taken as giving Christians dominion over the Earth, and has been used as an antienvironmentalist argument, since God has also given them the right of unlimited exploitation of the Earth’s resources. Since America is, in the general evangelical view, the world’s leading Christian nation, the implications for American power are also clear: “Our goal is world domination under Christ’s lordship, a ‘world takeover’ if you will…We are the shapers of world history.”120
These beliefs play their part in fuelling the tendency of the American Right to implacable nationalist moral absolutism, with a succession of foreign leaders from Hitler to Saddam Hussein identified as the antichrist or the antichrist’s servant (earlier, of course, the Vatican had often played this role). Because Satan is supposed to be deceitful and alluring, these leaders do not even have to be actively hostile. In these circles, Mikhail Gorbachev was widely identified with the antichrist precisely because of his popularity in the West. Both millenarian belief itself and the tendency of its American exponents to link it to hard-line U.S. foreign and security policies were given a tremendous boost by the cold war and the much wider image of the Soviet Union as an “empire of evil.” Since 9/11, the antichrist has naturally been identified as Muslim.121
Because the antichrist is supposed to extend his dominion over the whole earth, these beliefs fuse with nationalist ones in absolute, untrammeled American national sovereignty to produce a widespread and pathological hatred of the United Nations on the American Right, and the dark fantasies associated with these views—which are extraordinarily widespread in U.S. society, and by no means just in the Bible Belt.122 The European Union (EU) too can be made to play this apocalyptic role, for example, in the pages of the millenarian journal The Philadelphia Trumpet, which sees the EU as a new “Holy Roman Empire” under German rule.123 The Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations have also frequently been portrayed as agencies of the antichrist for world unification and domination.
President Kennedy was cast in the role of the antichrist by some millenarians in the South, and according to a Harris poll of 2010, 14 percent of Americans polled and 24 per cent of registered Republicans said that President Obama was or might be the antichrist.124 This poll has been widely criticized as exaggerated, but even if one were to halve the figure, it would still represent a significant proportion of (presumably) Republican voters. The belief in Obama as the antichrist has been linked to the constant rumors spread by Republicans that he is really Muslim.125 As already noted, this talk is in part a code for racial hatreds that cannot now be publicly expressed, but it also taps into ancient beliefs and paranoias among fundamentalist Christians. Millenarian belief is not chiefly or even most probably largely responsible for the hysterical hatred directed at President Obama by the Right, but it does seem to contribute to its ferocity.126
Millenarian beliefs also feed into a wider American “ecology of fear,” to use the phrase coined by Mike Davis for Los Angeles, and therefore a wider culture of national paranoia and aggression.127 As Paul Boyer points out in his magisterial book on this subject, the strength of millenarian feelings among a minority of Americans means that it has also had an effect on wider culture, feeding into Hollywood films like the “Omen” series, science fiction novels, and pop music.128
Often these fantasies have a racial edge—as with the antichrist fantasies about Obama. Thus in 1999 Jerry Falwell, the influential televangelist, millenarian, and Christian Right politician, warned his followers to prepare for possible chaos as a result of computer meltdown (a consequence of the so-called Y2K or Millennium Bug problem) by stocking up on essential supplies. These, he said, should include arms and ammunition, to protect the well-provided (the “careful virgins,” if you will) against the hungry and improvident others—and we can be pretty sure what colors he imagined those others were going to be. Drawing once again on “heartland” anti-immigrant and antiurban sentiments, much of apocalyptic literature is set amidst urban collapse and upheaval. Hal Lindsey, for his part, was possessed by pathological fear of the “Yellow Peril”—a fear that he has now transferred to Islam.129
Finally, in the context of American traditions of defeat and their link to paranoia and aggression, we must note the strong element of class resentment in the whole millenarian tradition. This was superbly analyzed by Norman Cohn in his famous book The Pursuit of the Millennium, in which he saw the millenarian cults of medieval and early modern Europe, with their dreams of an egalitarian kingdom of God and the obliteration of the unrighteous rulers and masters, as acting in some ways as precursors of Communism (and in some cases of modern anti-Semitism).130
Cohn and others failed to notice, however, that while they were analyzing 500-year-old cults, millenarian groups embodying the same tradition were still alive in the America of their own day. In the United States there is a very strong correlation between such beliefs and poverty, residence in the countryside and small towns, and, above all, lack of education.131 This, of course, fed into wider Southern and heartland resentments of the “East Coast elites,” and lower-class resentments of the elites in general, especially those widely identified as of “alien” origin, like bankers. Indeed, some historians have seen U.S. fundamentalism as a whole as a form of “opium of the people,” a process that diverts socioeconomic resentments into a form that is hostile to the culture of the elites but does not threaten their actual power.132
Again and again in millenarian fiction, wealthy, educated, and prestigious figures perish and go to hell because of their wicked lifestyles, while simple, ordinary, God-fearing believers are saved. Millenarian writers equally regularly excoriate American hedonism and consumer culture. As throughout history, American millenarianism is to a great extent a “religion of the disinherited,” a form of spiritual Socialism for people who are not able, for whatever reason, to be Socialist.133 According to Billy Graham, “Let me tell you something: when God gets ready to shake America, he may not take the PhD and the DD. God may choose a country boy. God may choose a shoe salesman like He did D. L. Moody…God may choose the man that nobody knows, a little nobody to shake America for Jesus Christ in this day.”134
Evangelical and especially millenarian preachers speak of the future kingdom of Christ on earth in terms that are strongly reminiscent of Karl Marx. It will be essentially a greatly improved America, stripped of poverty, sinfulness, and alien values: “much like the present life…but missing all the imperfections that have destroyed the full and t
rue meaning of life.” Christ’s reign will bring “labor, adventure, excitement, employment and engagement.” There is a very strong stress on the equality—including economic equality—of all believers in this future kingdom, in which all men will be kings.135
It would be quite wrong, though, to portray this segment of belief in America as purely the province of the poor and marginalized. On the contrary, as Paul Boyer, Grace Halsell, and other students of the subject have emphasized, it has considerable influence both among the regional elites of the South and West, and among the Republican national elites. The Pentecostalist faith, closely linked to millenarian belief, includes in its number John Ashcroft and a number of senior military officers. Pat Robertson, cofounder of the Christian Coalition, who has spoken of liberal America doing to evangelical Christians “what Nazi Germany did to the Jews,” is the son of a U.S. Senator, from a patrician Virginia family.136
The link between millenarianism and radical nationalism was exemplified by Lieutenant General William G. “Jerry” Boykin, a Pentecostalist believer appointed in 2003 as deputy under-secretary of defense for intelligence. A minor scandal blew up in that year when the content of some talks that General Boykin had given to Evangelical church groups in the United States made their way into the national media (President Bush eventually condemned General Boykin’s statements, but did not dismiss him from his post, one that, it may be noted, later involved a measure of responsibility for the intelligence-gathering strategy that contributed to the abuses at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere).
Among other things, General Boykin declared that America is a “Christian nation,” and that George Bush had been elevated to the presidency by a miracle—an idea with which many Democrats would agree, but not quite as General Boykin meant it. Of judgments by the U.S. Supreme Court of which he disapproved, he said, “don’t you worry about what these courts say. Our God reigns supreme.” He informed his listeners that in examining photographs of Mogadishu, where he served as a special forces officer, he found an unexplained black mark, which he explained as a manifestation of evil; and that there were actually two more planes taken over by terrorists on 9/11, but they were “thwarted by the hand of God.”137
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