The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power

by Jeff Sharlet

  Those of us who find ourselves suddenly (or so it seems) at the dried-out margins keep telling ourselves that this country is still a democracy, and that democracy still means “moderation,” private religion and a public square safe for “civil society.” The fundamentalist Christ is not, we tell ourselves, the real Christ. He’s an imposter, a faker, a fraud recently perpetrated on the good-hearted but gullible American masses by cynical men, manipulators, profiteers, a cabal of televangelists. Why? Greed. Anger. Fundamentalists are bitter, an eminent divine of academe opined at a gathering of worthies convened in 2005 by Boston’s PBS affiliate, because they feel neglected by the Ivies. Perhaps more dialogue between Cambridge and Lynchburg, Virginia, home of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, will heal us all.

  Rationalism itself has been colonized by fundamentalism, remade in the image of the seductive but strict logic of a prime mover that sets things in motion, not just at the beginning but always. The cause behind every effect, says fundamentalist science, is God. Even the inexorable facts of math are subject to his decree, as explained in homeschooling texts such as Mathematics: Is God Silent? Two plus two is four because God says so. If he chose, it could just as easily be five.

  It would be cliché to quote George Orwell here were it not for the fact that fundamentalist intellectuals do so with even greater frequency than those of the Left. At a rally to expose the “myth” of church/state separation in the spring of 2006, Orwell was quoted at me four times, most emphatically by William J. Federer, a compiler of quotations whose America’s God and Country—a collection of seemingly theocratic bon mots distilled from the founders and other great men “for use in speeches, papers, [and] debates”—has sold half a million copies. “Those who control the past,” Federer quoted Orwell’s 1984, “control the future.”

  Federer, a tall, lean, oaken-voiced man, loved talking about history as revelation, nodding along gently to his own lectures. He wore a gray suit, a red tie marred by a stain, and an American flag pin in his lapel. He looked like a congressman. He’d twice run for former House minority leader Dick Gephardt’s St. Louis seat. He lost both times, but the movement considers him a winner—in 2000, he faced Gephardt in the nation’s third most expensive congressional race, forcing him to spend down his war chest and default on promises to fellow Democrats, a move that led to Gephardt’s fall.

  Federer and I were riding together in a white school bus full of Christians from around the country to pray at the site on which the Danbury, Connecticut, First Baptist Church once stood. It was in an 1802 letter to this church that Thomas Jefferson coined the phrase “wall of separation,” three words upon which the battle over whether the United States is to be a Christian nation turns. Federer, leaning over the back of his seat as several pastors bent their ears toward his story, wanted me to understand that what Jefferson—notorious deist and author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom—had really meant to promote was a “one-way wall,” designed to protect the church from the state, not the other way around. Jefferson, Federer told me, was a believer; like all the Founders, he knew that there could be no government without God. Why hadn’t I been taught this? Because I was a victim of godless public schools.

  “Those who control the present,” Federer continued darkly, “control the past.” He paused and stared at me to make sure I understood the equation. “Orson Welles wrote that,” he said.

  Welles, Orwell, who cares? Federer wasn’t talking tactics or, for that matter, even history; he was talking revolution, past, present, and future.

  THE FIRST PILLAR of American fundamentalism is Jesus Christ; the second is history, and in the fundamentalist mind the two are converging. Fundamentalism considers itself a faith of basic truths unaltered (if not always acknowledged) since their transmission from heaven, first through the Bible and second through what they see as American scripture, divinely inspired, devoutly intended: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the often overlooked Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which declared “religion” necessary to “good government” and thus to be encouraged through schools. Well into the nineteenth century, most American schoolchildren learned their ABCs from The New-England Primer, which begins with “In Adam’s Fall, we sinned all” and continues on to “Spiritual Milk for American Babes, Drawn out of the Breasts of Both Testaments.” In 1836, McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers began to displace the Primer, selling some 122 million copies of lessons such as “The Bible the Best of Classics” and “Religion the Only Basis of Society” during the following century.

  It wasn’t until the 1930s, the most irreligious decade in American history, that public education veered away from biblical indoctrination so thoroughly that within a few decades most Americans wrongly believed that nationalistic manifest destiny—itself thinly veiled Calvinism—rather than open piety was the American educational tradition. The fundamentalist movement sees that to reclaim America for God, it must first reclaim that tradition, and so it is producing a flood of educational texts with which to wash away the stains of secular history.

  Such chronicles are written primarily for the homeschoolers and the fundamentalist academies that as of this writing together account for as much as 10 percent or more of the nation’s children, an expanding population that buys a billion dollars’ worth of educational materials annually. These pupils are known by many within the movement as “Generation Joshua,” in honor of the biblical hero who marched seven times around Jericho before slaughtering “every living thing in it.” The Home School Legal Defense Association has lately been attempting to organize Generation Joshua into “GenJ” political action clubs for teens modeled, claims the association, on a scheme for Christian governance conceived of by Alexander Hamilton shortly before Aaron Burr shot him dead in a duel. Set up by congressional district, the clubs study “America’s Godly heritage,” write letters to the editor, and register older siblings as voters. They adopt thrilling names such as Joshua’s Arrows of Nashville, Tennessee, or Operation Impact of Los Gatos, California, or the GenJ Hot Rockin’ Awesomes of Purcellville, Virginia.

  “Who, knowing the facts of our history,” asks the epigraph to the 2000 edition of The American Republic for Christian Schools, a junior high–level textbook, “can doubt that the United States of America has been a thought in the mind of God from all eternity?”1 So that I would know the facts, I undertook my own course of homeschooling: in addition to The American Republic, I read the two-volume teacher’s edition of United States History for Christian Schools, appropriate for eleventh-graders, and the accompanying Economics for Christian Schools,* and I walked the streets of Brooklyn listening to an eighteen-tape lecture series on America up to 1865 created for a Christian college by the late Rousas John Rushdoony, the theologian who helped launch Christian homeschooling and revived the idea of reading American history through a providential lens.† I was down by the waterfront, pausing to scribble a note on Alexis de Tocqueville—Rushdoony argues that de Tocqueville was really a fundamentalist Christian disguised as a Frenchman—when a white and blue police van rolled up behind me and squawked its siren. There were four officers inside.

  “What are you writing?” the driver asked. The other three leaned toward the window.

  “Notes,” I said, tapping my headphones.

  “Okay. What are you listening to?”

  I said I didn’t think I had to tell him.

  “This is a high-security area,” he said. On the other side of a barbed-wire fence, he said, was a Coast Guard storage facility for deadly chemicals. “Somebody blow that up and boom, bye-bye Brooklyn.” Note taking in the vicinity might be a problem. “So, I gotta ask again, what are you listening to?”

  How to explain—to the cop who had just clued me in on the ripest terrorist target in Brooklyn—that I was listening to a Christian jihadi lecture on how democracy as practiced in America was defiance of God’s intentions, how God gave to the United States the “irresistible blessings” of biblical capitalism unk
nown to Europe, and how we have vandalized this with vulgar regulations, how God loves the righteous who fight in His name?

  Like this: “American history.”

  Providence would have been a better word. I was “unschooling” myself, Bill Apelian, the director of Bob Jones University Press, explained. What seemed to me a self-directed course of study was, in fact, the replacement of my secular assumptions with a curriculum guided by God. When BJU Press, one of the biggest fundamentalist educational publishers, started out thirty years ago, science was its most popular subject, and it could be summed up in one word: created. Now, American history is on the rise. “We call it Heritage Studies,” Apelian said, and explained its growing centrality: “History is God’s working in man.”

  My unschooling continued. I read Rushdoony’s most influential contemporary, the late Francis Schaeffer, an American whose Swiss mountain retreat, L’Abri (The Shelter), served as a Christian madrassa at which a generation of fundamentalist intellectuals studied a reenchanted American past, “Christian at least in memory.” And I read Schaeffer’s disciples. Tim LaHaye, who besides coauthoring the hugely popular Left Behind series of novels has published an equally fantastical work of history called Mind Siege. (“The leading authorities of Secular Humanism may be pictured as a baseball team,” writes LaHaye, with John Dewey as pitcher, Margaret Sanger in centerfield, Bertrand Russell at third, and Isaac Asimov at first). And David Barton, the president of a history ministry called WallBuilders (as in, to keep the heathen out); and Chuck Colson, who searches from the Greeks to the American founders to fellow Watergate felon G. Gordon Liddy for the essence of the Christian worldview, a vision of an American future so entirely Christ-filtered that beside it theocracy—the clumsy governance of priestly bureaucrats, disdained by Schaeffer and Colson—seems a modest ambition. Theocentric is the preferred term, Randall Terry, the Schaeffer disciple who went on to found Operation Rescue, one of the galvanizing forces of the anti-abortion movement, told me. “That means you view the world in His terms. Theocentrists, we don’t believe man can create law. Man can only embrace or reject law.” The study of history for fundamentalists is a process of divining that law, and to that end the theocentric worldview collapses the past into one great parable—Colson, for instance, studies the Roman Empire for insight into the expansion of America’s—applicable at all stages of learning.

  It is character, in the nineteenth-century, British Empire sense of the word, that drives American fundamentalism’s engagement with the past. History matters not for its progression of “fact, fact, fact,” Michael McHugh, one of the pioneers of modern fundamentalist education told me, but for “key personalities.” In Francis Schaeffer’s telling of U.S. history, for instance, John Witherspoon—the only pastor to have signed the Declaration of Independence—looms as large as Thomas Jefferson, because it was Witherspoon who infused the founding with the idea of Lex Rex, “law is king” (divine law, that is), derived from the fiercest Protestant reformers of the seventeenth century, men who considered John Calvin’s Geneva too gentle for God. In the movement’s history, key men are often those such as Witherspoon or Schaeffer himself, intellectuals and activists who shape ideas. But in the movement’s telling of American history, key personalities are often soldiers, such as General Douglas MacArthur. After the war, McHugh explained, MacArthur ruled Japan “according to Christian principles” for five years. “To what end?” I asked. Japan is hardly any more Christian for this divine intervention. “The Japanese people did capture a vision,” McHugh said. Not the whole Christian deal but one of its essential foundations: “MacArthur set the stage for free enterprise,” he explained. With Japan committed to capitalism, the United States was free to turn its attention toward the Soviet Union. The general’s providential flanking maneuver, you might say, helped America win the Cold War.2

  But one needn’t be a flag officer to be used by God. Another favorite of Christian history is Sergeant Alvin York, a farmer from Pall Mall, Tennessee, who in World War I turned his trigger finger over to God and became perhaps the greatest Christian sniper of the twentieth century.

  “God uses ordinary people,” McHugh explained. Anyone might be a key personality. The proper study of history includes the student as a main character, an approach he described as relational, a buzzword in contemporary fundamentalism that denotes a sort of pulsing circuit of energy between, say, pleasant Betty Johnson, your churchy neighbor, and the awesome realm of supernatural events in which her real life occurs. There, Jesus is as real to Betty as she is to you, and so are Sergeant York, General MacArthur, and even George Washington, who, as “father of our nation,” is almost a fourth member of the Holy Trinity, a mind bender made possible through God’s math.

  You may have seen his ghostly form, along with that of Abraham Lincoln, flanking an image of George W. Bush deep in prayer in a lithograph widely distributed by the Presidential Prayer Team, a five-year-old outfit that claims to have organized nearly 3 million prayer warriors on the president’s behalf. The Prayer Team claims to transcend ideology because it will pray for the president whether he or she is a Republican or a Democrat. That is, it will always pray for authority. Its reverence built upon American fundamentalism’s imagined history, the Prayer Team has neatly rewritten not only America’s democratic tradition but also traditional Christianity, replacing both with an amalgamation of elite and populist fundamentalism. The legacy of Abram Vereide echoes in the Prayer Team’s belief that the right relationship of citizen to leader is both spiritual and submissive, an idea it has dilated from the prayer cells of elites to its 3-million-strong “small group” approach to authoritarian religion. The populist twist is the promise that the citizen is not the victim of such disguised politics but, potentially, their star. In a similar image pasted onto five hundred billboards around the country, an ethereal Washington kneels in prayer with an anonymous soldier in desert fatigues—just another everyday hero. That could be you, the key man theory of fundamentalist history proposes. It’s like the Rapture, when the saved shall rise together, but it’s happening right now: George Washington and Betty Johnson and you, floating up toward victory with arms entwined, key personalities in Christian history.

  ONE AFTERNOON IN 2005, I found in my mail an unsolicited copy of the “Vision Forum Family Catalog,” a glossy, handsomely produced, eighty-eight-page publication featuring an array of books, videos, and toys for “The Biblical Family Now and Forever.” Considered the intellectual vanguard of the homeschooling movement by the other fundamentalist publishers with whom I’d spoken, Vision Forum is nonetheless just one of any number of providers for the fundamentalist lifestyle and hardly the largest. But its catalog is as perfect and polished a distillation as I’ve found of the romance of American fundamentalism, the almost sexual tension of its contradictions: its reverence for both rebellion and authority, democracy and theocracy, blood and innocence. The edition I received was titled “A Line in the Sand,” in tribute to the Alamo. There, in 1836, faced with near-certain annihilation at the hands of the Mexican army, the Anglo rebel Lieutenant Colonel William Barret Travis rallied his doomed men by drawing said line with his sword and challenging them to cross it. All who did so, he said, would prove their preparedness “to give their lives in freedom’s cause.”

  A boy of about eight enacts the scene on the catalog’s cover. He is dark-eyed, big-eared, and dimple-chinned, and he’s dressed in an idyllic costume only a romantic could imagine Colonel Travis wearing so close to his apocalyptic end: a white straw planter’s hat, a Confederate gray, double-breasted shell jacket, a bow tie of black ribbon, a red sash, khaki jodhpurs, and shiny black fetish boots, spread wide. The young rebel seems to have been photoshopped in front of the Alamo at unlikely scale: he towers over a dark wooden door, as big as an eight-year-old boy’s imagination.

  Much of the catalog is given over to educational materials for Christian homeschoolers, but the back of the book is dedicated to equipping one’s son with the sort of toys t
hat will allow him to “rebuild a culture of courageous boyhood.” Hats, for instance—leather Civil War kepis, coonskin caps, and a ninety-five-dollar life-size replica of a fifteenth-century knight’s helmet among them. An eighteen-dollar video titled Putting on the Whole Armor of God asks, “Boys, are you ready for warfare?” Young Christian soldiers may choose from a variety of actual weapons, ranging from a scaled-down version of the blade wielded by William Wallace, of Braveheart fame (which at four and a quarter feet long is still a lot of knife for a kid) to a thirty-two-and-a-half-inch Confederate officer’s saber. It is history at knifepoint; a theology of arms.

  Not all of the toys are made for literal battle. For thirty dollars you can buy your boy an “Estwing Professional Rock Hammer,” identical to those used by creationist paleontologists to prove that dinosaurs coexisted with Adam and Eve. For thirty-eight dollars you can acquire a “stellarscope” that functions as a pocket-sized planetarium for understanding God’s heavens. I was tempted to buy my nephew an “Ancient Roman Coin Kit,” which includes “ten genuine ancient Roman coins with accumulated dirt” and tools and instructions for cleaning and identifying them. “They will captivate you,” “Line in the Sand” promises. “Were they held by a third-century Christian? A martyr?”