Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free

by Charles P. Pierce

  Anyway, he has a good run of it until Jesus comes back to earth and does a lot of bloody slaying and dismembering in and around the village of Megiddo, which has had enough trouble. (Jesus, it seems, has developed a talent for disemboweling people in the years since he left town.) The plot is preposterous. The characters all speak as though they learned English from the Ostrogoths. And the series is a genuine publishing phenomenon, selling tens of millions of copies.

  It has sold so well and so widely that Time put the authors on the cover, and the article inside the magazine did not find it at all necessary to point out that (a) Jenkins and LaHaye are peddling a fringe interpretation of Scripture rejected by most scholars; and (b) the whole scenario is absurd, no matter how many people believe it. Thousands of people ascending bodily to heaven? Antichrists from the UN with names like James Bond villains? Jesus chopping folks up in the sand? To call this medieval is to insult Thomas Aquinas; this is the kind of thing dreamed up by religious lunatics, dying of thirst in a cave in the Sinai.

  Yes, the old Roman Catholics once sold off their saints piecemeal, and sometimes the saint’s finger you bought turned out to be a pig’s knuckle, but the vendors of holy relics were absolute pikers compared with those who traffic in the notion of an embattled elect surrounded by a scornful world. Because nothing sells in the modern Christian marketplace like the notion that Christians are beset on all sides by powerful forces desperately in need of a good disemboweling, it was inevitable that religious marketing would flow into the country’s politics. And religion has been sold there solely as a product.

  Mr. Madison saw this coming. Political religion always has been a sucker’s game for marks and prayerful mama’s boys, an ever vain search for a nonexistent pea hidden beneath the swindler’s overturned chalices. It exchanges the loaves and fish for the rigged wheel and the marked deck. It speaks not in tongues but in euphemisms. A politician discussing his religion now refers to himself as a “person of faith,” which tells you more about the politician’s balls than it does about his soul. He doesn’t have enough of the former to call himself “religious,” because that leads to the question of which religion and why he chooses to follow it and not one of the dozens of others, or none of them at all.

  Such questions cause actual thought to break out, something that all modern politicians endeavor to avoid. So a politician becomes a “person of faith,” and good for him. So is the fan in the bleachers who roots for the Red Sox and so is the guy in Oregon who’s looking for Sasquatch. Torquemada was a person of faith. So were Marx and Lenin. So is almost any atheist. In its essential cowardice, the phrase means nothing. It’s a slogan. A sales pitch.

  Consider the sad case of David Kuo, born-twice victim of his own sanctified bunco game. In his memoir, Tempting Faith, Kuo vividly describes his career as the last of the suckers. Kuo came to Washington to work for the second Bush administration on “faith-based” initiatives. The government would divert public money to religious charities, which were presumed to do a better job of confronting the nation’s social problems. An Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives would even be established within the executive branch, Mr. Madison thereby having been told exactly where he could stick his Remonstrance.

  Kuo was sincere. At least on the surface, this was a God-drunk administration. There was regular Bible study. The staff came from evangelical diploma mills, and like hired like. (According to a questionnaire obtained by the Washington Post, applicants to the Department of Justice were routinely asked whether they believed in God.) Kuo assumed his bosses were sincere as well, at least until it became plain to him that the program had a lot more of Boss Tweed than Beatitude to it. Kuo writes:

  Every other White House office was up and running. The faith-based initiative still operated out of the nearly vacant transition offices. Three days later, a Tuesday, Karl Rove summoned [Don] Willett [a former Bush aide who initially shepherded the program] to his office to announce that the entire faith-based initiative would be rolled out the following Monday. Willett asked just how—without a director, office, or plan—the president could do that. Rove looked at him, took a deep breath, and said, ‘I don’t know. Just get me a fucking faith-based thing. Got it?’”

  A fucking faith-based thing.

  And why not? “Faith-based” is another dishonest term for a dishonest time. It’s a word for people too cowardly to call themselves religious and it is beloved by politicians too cowardly to debate something as substantial as faith. It was eagerly adopted by Idiot America, which is too lazy to do either one, because it conforms to the Three Great Premises. It’s a cheap salesman’s term of art, something you’d use to pitch a television program or a breakfast cereal. It even sounds like an additive—“faith-based”—an artificial flavoring to make crude biases taste of bread and wine. It’s camouflage under which religion is sold like smuggled goods in places where it doesn’t belong.

  To call something “faith-based” for the purposes of hiding the clearly sectarian character of what you’re actually talking about is to admit that there really is no difference between what went on at Lourdes and what went on at Roswell. In truth, the United States of America can be said to be “faith-based,” and one of the primary articles of that faith is that religion—in all its forms—should be kept out of the country’s secular institutions, both for religion’s own good and for the good of the institutions in question. Mr. Madison knew it in his bones. To invite religion into government is to invite discord and to establish the tyranny of the righteous. Now, today, in Idiot America, where everything is a marketplace, to sell religion through government is to invite discord and to establish the tyranny of fraud. The transaction becomes just another fucking faith-based thing.

  ON the steps of courthouses, people speak in low tones, head down. They cling to what they’re saying as though all of it is secret. Every word. Every syllable. Every diphthong. Every letter. The people on the steps hold all of them close because, once they get inside, everything will come out. Every secret will be revealed. The top step of the courthouse staircase is the last place where anything is private anymore. Inside the courtroom, everything belongs to the world—even, and most dangerously, the truth.

  It’s a warm day running toward spring in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. Lawyers and their clients mill around on the sidewalk, in the shade of ancient trees. There are not many people this morning, not enough of them to get in anybody’s way. It’s a slow Monday at the federal district court. Upstairs, the windows are open in the judge’s chambers and there’s hardly any noise from the street below. In many ways, the judge is grateful for the quiet.

  “I’m an optimist,” Judge John E. Jones III explains. “I really am. I think the system ultimately works the way it’s supposed to work. What’s the old adage? If it doesn’t kill you, it makes you stronger. I really believe that. And although this is a very imperfect system in many ways, at the end of the day, I think it works pretty well.”

  He’s a peppery, open man, as far from the stereotypically monkish and imperial federal judge as can be imagined. (The New Yorker was to describe him as looking like a cross between Robert Mitchum and William Holden, which is a bit much. Gig Young, maybe.) His grandfather came to Pennsylvania from Wales at the age of eight, taking a job as a “breaker boy,” picking the useless rock out of bins of anthracite in the coal mines of northeastern Pennsylvania. Farsighted and ambitious, he worked his way out of the mines and became a civil engineer, investing his salary back into the coal industry and becoming wealthy enough to buy up some contiguous farm property in and around Orwigsburg, in Schuylkill County.

  In the 1940s and 1950s, the anthracite business collapsed, and the Jones family business changed radically. They turned their farm property into a series of five public golf courses. They caught a market on the rise. Golf was being liberated from the restricted country clubs of the privileged and thrown open to the postwar suburban masses, in no small part thanks to the arrival on the national scene o
f Latrobe, Pennsylvania’s own Arnold Palmer. The golf courses, not the coal, helped put John Jones through Dickinson College and law school.

  His father died at forty-nine, of heart disease. (“He got some bad genes,” Jones says.) Jones’s first job in the law was as a clerk in the Schuylkill County courthouse. “In the first six months,” he recalls, “I had this germ of an idea. I thought, ‘Gee, I’d like to do this.’ That’s not unusual. A lot of lawyers want to become judges. So, I held that thought.”

  He built a successful law practice, but he also developed a taste for politics. A lifelong Republican, Jones ran unsuccessfully for a congressional seat in the 1990s and ultimately took a job in the administration of Governor Tom Ridge, a rising star in national Republican circles. “At that point, I sort of tucked that whole thing about being a judge away,” Jones says.

  However, in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, Bush appointed Ridge the first director of the Department of Homeland Security. Ridge recommended Jones, who was then working as a public defender, for a federal judgeship that had opened up in the Middle District of Pennsylvania. His confirmation sailed through. For three years, Jones sat on cases large and small. In 2004, he began to take note of a controversy in the small town of Dover, in the southern part of the state.

  It is an area of rolling hills with valleys like deep green bowls between them, planted thick with wheat, apples, and odd religion. The Amish still drive their buggies here, trying to live their lives while avoiding the relentless attempts by tourists to turn those simple lives into a horse-drawn diorama. (The movie Witness, in which Harrison Ford plays a detective who hides from crooked cops in an Amish community, was filmed nearby.) The Ephrata Cloister, a splinter group of the German Baptist Brethren, ascetic and strictly segregated by sex, established itself near Lancaster under the leadership of Conrad Beissel. (Beissel was an authentic religious crank. There were rumors that he trafficked with the Rosicrucians and, yes, the Masons.) Ephrata developed its own liturgy and sacred music. The community nursed the wounded of both sides after the battle of Gettysburg. When Beissel died, the Cloister began to die as well. While the Amish try to hold to their faith and avoid becoming a living museum, a museum is all that’s left of the Ephrata Cloister.

  Both the Amish and the people of Ephrata espoused religions that were in the secular world but not of it. Religion has always been in the air of the place. In October 2004, a firestorm erupted that engulfed Dover and, eventually, the courtroom of Judge John E. Jones III. The Amish and the inhabitants of Ephrata might have had the right idea all along.

  That month, the Dover school board proposed to change the biology textbook used in the town’s high school. The town itself was undergoing great changes: there had been an influx of new people into the area, and there also had been an explosion in the number of evangelical Protestant churches. A volatile demographic mix was brewing.

  This made Dover no different in its local politics from thousands of other small towns that were being devoured by urban sprawl. There were fights over taxes and land use that pitted the older residents of the community against the newly arrived suburbanites. In 2001, three new conservative members were elected to the school board, having run on their opposition to an expensive proposal to renovate the town’s old high school building. Once on the board, however, the new members began to lard their remarks with a conspicuous religiosity that unnerved the others. There was talk about the morality of Dover’s students. There was talk of bringing back classroom prayer and, eventually, of teaching creationism in biology classes. The conservatives also seemed to have their own idea of how to best renovate the high school.

  “As somebody who used to be involved in politics,” Judge Jones muses, “I tell everyone there’s an overarching lesson here and that’s that you can’t take your eyes off the ball. I can’t imagine that these guys and gals campaigned on a strictly religious platform. I don’t think they did.”

  School board dissension got uglier in 2003, when a maintenance man took down a mural painted by a former student that depicted the evolutionary process leading from hominids to humans. It had been hanging in the high school for five years. The groundskeeper took the painting home and burned it because, he said, it had offended his faith. Besides, his granddaughter was about to enter high school and he didn’t want her exposed to, well, the exposed. The humans in the mural had been naked, after all.

  His punishment by the reconstituted school board was mild, if he was punished at all, which to this day seems unclear. Bertha Spahr was a science teacher at the high school. She told Gordy Slack, the author of The Battle Over the Meaning of Everything, an examination of the controversy, that a board member confessed to her that he’d watched the painting burn. Something was running amok on the Dover school board. Then, a year after the mural was destroyed, everything came together in what would become one extremely noisy, extremely prolonged—and, ultimately, extremely expensive—event.

  Over the summer of 2004, it became clear that the board was preparing to change the biology curriculum. The previous textbook would be abandoned because, as one board member put it, it had been “laced with Darwinism.” The school board was laying the groundwork to teach creationism in its public schools. Controversy flared. The ACLU threatened to bring a lawsuit. Rather than back off, as the summer ground along, the members of the school board pushing creationism changed tactics. They replaced “creationism” with “intelligent design.” They stopped proposing that the previous textbook be abandoned. Rather, they said, they would agree to purchase the new edition of the standard text as long as they could also purchase a book called Of Pandas and People: The Central Question of Biological Origins, which argued for intelligent design. On this, they were adamant.

  They lost one vote, but wrangled a compromise in which Of Pandas and People would be available for “reference” in the classrooms. Then, in October 2004, the board passed a resolution mandating that intelligent design be mentioned in the classroom. Two members of the board quit. A month later, the board announced that science teachers would be required to read a statement promoting ID and criticizing the theory of evolution to all incoming biology students. The statement read, in part:

  Because Darwin’s Theory is a theory, it continues to be tested as new evidence is discovered. The Theory is not a fact…. Intelligent Design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin’s view. The reference book, Of Pandas and People, is available for students who might be interested in gaining an understanding of what Intelligent Design actually involves.

  The science teachers, led by Bertha Spahr, went up the wall. Even the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based idea mill dedicated to the promotion of faith-based science, thought the Dover school board had pushed too far.

  The town split down the middle. School board meetings degenerated into dockside hooleys. Two more board members gave up and quit. “The town,” writes Gordy Slack, “had divided into warring camps.” Which was not surprising at all. The whole controversy had left religion, if it ever truly was religious at all, and entered the realm of politics, which meant it had entered the marketplace. Once that happened, the Three Great Premises of Idiot America were engaged.

  They were engaged because intelligent design is not science, but a sales technique, developed to respond to a specific need in the political marketplace. (In this, intelligent design is to creationism what “faith-based” is to “religious.”) This is of a piece with everything that has gone on since creationism won the battle but lost the war in the Scopes trial. Ever since creationism fell into public ridicule and scientific obsolescence, there have been efforts to rebrand it, gussying it up with scientific filigree to sneak it past the gimlet eye built into the First Amendment and the finely calibrated bullshit detectors of the federal courts.

  In the 1980s, there was an attempt to sell the notion of “creation science” as an alternative to evolution. In 1982, creation science suffered a blow in the case of McLean v. Arkansas; f
ive years later, the state of Louisiana tried it again and got slapped down, hard, by the U.S. Supreme Court. In Edwards v. Aguillard, the court determined that “creation science” was religion in sheep’s clothing and, hence, violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment. The decision was based partly on what had come to be known as the “Lemon test.”

  In 1971, in the case of Lemon v. Kurtzman, the Supreme Court fashioned a three-part test to determine whether governmental funding of private-school programs violated the First Amendment. The program had to have a legitimate secular purpose. It could not have “the primary effect of advancing or inhibiting religion.” And it could not entangle the government excessively with religion. Any program that fails any part of the test is unconstitutional. The Aguillard decision made teaching creationism—or, more specifically, “creation science”—in the public schools illegal. This put a considerable crimp in Christian right’s marketing strategy and, almost immediately, another attempt at rebranding was under way. Aguillard forced, Gordy Slack writes, with no little irony, creation science’s “evolution into a new species.” The new brand name was “intelligent design.”

  The rebranding was brilliant. On the surface, intelligent design accepts science, even praises it. It simply posits that, at the end of the day—or, more accurately, at the beginning of the day—there was a guiding intelligence behind creation, an intelligence that ID proponents even decline to label “God.” Proponents cite various lacunae in Darwin’s work as evidence. They speak in the language of democratic inquiry; having created the “controversy,” they then ask “only” that schools be granted the right to “teach the controversy.” Their papers and books are mild, couched in the language of science, if not in its most basic principles. How, after all, can anyone develop an experiment to falsify the existence of a guiding intelligence?