Conservatives Without Conscience

by John W. Dean

  [Mainstream Christians] reject the notion that religion should present a series of wedge issues useful at election time for energizing a political base. [Rather they] believe it is God’s work to practice humility, to wear tolerance on our sleeves, to reach out to those with whom we disagree, and to overcome the meanness we see in today’s politics.[67]

  Religious Authoritarianism

  When Christian conservatives take their religious beliefs into the political arena, they also carry their authoritarianism with them. Studies (cited earlier in a footnote) show that the “acceptance of traditional religious beliefs appear to have more to do with having a personality rich in authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, and conventionalism, than with the beliefs per se.”[68] Bob Altemeyer offers a convincing explanation for why right-wing authoritarians are characteristically religious. Authoritarian parents transfer their beliefs to children through religious instruction. Christian conservatives tend to emanate from strict religious backgrounds, and often prevent their children from being exposed to broader and different views by sending them to schools with like-thinking children, or by home schooling them. This, in turn, results in an authoritarian outlook that remains strong during adolescence—the period when authoritarian personalities are formed and then taken into adult life.

  Christian conservatives’ primary tool in reinforcing authoritarianism is preaching fear, and no one does so more consistently than the head of the Christian Coalition, Pat Robertson. I met Robertson in 1982, when he invited me to appear on his television program, The 700 Club, the ostensible reason being to promote my recently published book, Lost Honor. I was told that his Christian Broadcasting Network reached over one hundred million homes, and that The 700 Club had a large following. While authors do not pass up such opportunities, I knew the book was not exactly normal fare for his audience, and I had little doubt that I was being checked out, for it was subtly suggested there was a place for me in this politically active Christian world. For my part, I certainly gave no sign that I was interested in the politics of Christian conservatism, for I had long believed that both religion and politics suffer when they are mixed. Robertson was a congenial and engaging host who wears his Cheshire cat grin both on and off camera. Even back in 1982 it was apparent that CBN was a substantial operation that was likely to grow, for viewers kept sending Robertson money. I was given a tour and saw a small army opening mail to retrieve five dollars here and five hundred dollars there, which arrived daily by the truckload. In the end, all that came of my appearance on The 700 Club was that Pat Robertson, of whom I had been only vaguely aware, was now on my radar. I have now been observing him for over two decades.

  The Americans United for Separation of Church and State has also long been monitoring Robertson’s assorted publications and The 700 Club. In 1996 Robert Boston, assistant director of communications for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, published The Most Dangerous Man in America? Pat Robertson and the Rise of the Christian Coalition. From this account, and from my own knowledge, Robertson seems to possess all the key characteristics of a Double High authoritarian.[*]

  According to Boston, Robertson’s domineering personality was apparent from the earliest days of his born-again experience, when he headed off to a month-long religious retreat in Canada while his wife was seven months pregnant. Despite the fact that she had another small child to care for and the family was desperately poor, Robertson insisted on taking the trip. Later, when he went to purchase the UHF television station that would become the base of his operation, “with considerable bluster, Robertson confronted the owner…with the announcement, ‘I’m Pat Robertson. God has sent me here to buy your television station.’”[69] Since 1987, Robertson has been calling for the government to assassinate foreign leaders he does not like. For example, he has said, “I know it sounds somewhat Machiavellian and evil, to think that you could send a squad in to take out somebody like Osama bin Laden, or to take out the head of North Korea. But isn’t it better to do something like that, to take out Milosevic, to take out Saddam Hussein, rather than to spend billions and billions of dollars on a war that harms innocent civilians and destroys the infrastructure of a country? It would just seem so much more practical to have that flexibility.”[70]

  As with most Double Highs, Robertson does not view women as equals. On one occasion he proclaimed, “There’s never been a woman Grandmaster chess player. And if, you know, once you get one, then I’ll buy some of the feminism, but until that point,” he was having nothing to do with the female mind.[*] He contemporaneously issued a fund-raising letter declaring that the “feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.”[71] Robertson has an unequivocal view of a woman’s true role: “The woman should be in submission to the man,” he declared flatly. On racial equality, Robertson remains silent. His father, Willis Robertson, who served fourteen years in the House of Representatives and twenty in the Senate, made a career of blocking civil rights legislation. He was one of nineteen senators to sign the infamous Southern Manifesto criticizing the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. Pat, a bit less blatantly, “supported the apartheid government in South Africa until the very end.”[72]

  The most compelling evidence of his desire for personal power is his bid to become president of the United States. After purportedly being told by God, “I want you to run for president,” Robertson launched a somewhat less than heavenly campaign, but one certainly befitting a Double High. Boston reported that only days after he announced his candidacy, the “Wall Street Journal broke a story reporting that Robertson had been lying about the date of his wedding for years in an effort to conceal that his wife was more than seven months pregnant when the ceremony occurred.”[73] Robertson managed to sidestep the matter, though, excusing his own premarital sexual activity because it took place before he was born again. Robertson faced a similar criticism regarding inconsistent claims about his IQ, which at various times was announced as 159, then 139, and then 135, and many wondered how this Yale Law School graduate had been unable to pass the bar exam. When he lost his presidential bid—badly—Robertson formed what has become the most important of the religious right’s organizations, the Christian Coalition. He operated largely behind the scenes, hiring the less controversial Ralph Reed to run day-to-day operations. But Robertson’s desire for personal power has never waned, and with the Christian Coalition claiming millions of members and almost two thousand state and local branches, he now has a chokehold on the Republican Party.

  Robertson again achieved dubious notoriety as a result of the statement he made about Ariel Sharon, shortly after Israel’s prime minister suffered a stroke. Robertson told his 700 Club viewers that the “prophet Joel makes it very clear that God has enmity against those who ‘divide my land.’ God considers [Israel] to be his.” Robertson insisted that Sharon’s withdrawal of troops and settlers from the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank “was dividing God’s land. And I would say woe unto any prime minister of Israel who takes a similar course to appease the EU, the United Nations, or the United States of America. God says, ‘This land belongs to me. You better leave it alone.’”[74] His remarks were met with understandable outrage. Time magazine, among others, suggested that Robertson issue an apology because he was undermining the efforts of a group of evangelicals who were planning to build a $50 million Evangelical Heritage Center on the Sea of Galilee. Israel has agreed to provide the land and infrastructure for the project, with the funding and the center’s details left to the evangelicals. Time explained that it is potentially a highly lucrative deal for both Israel and the evangelicals, for it is anticipated that the center will host as many as a million visitors a year, who will generate $1.5 billion in revenues.[75] Robertson apologized.

  Although Robertson has long supp
orted Israel, he has a history of making anti-Semitic remarks. “In Robertson’s evangelical end-time scenario, Jews are simply pawns who help usher in the second coming of Christ,” Robert Boston wrote. Robertson “believes that a mass conversion of Jews to Christianity will occur before Jesus returns to usher in the end of the world. In Robertson’s view, the creation of Israel was a necessary component in this eschatological drama.”[76] Robertson’s anti-Semitism surfaced in his New World Order book. In typical Robertson—and Double High Authoritarian—fashion, he has claimed on one occasion that the book was ghosted, and on another that he wrote it himself. Whichever the case, he has never disavowed the book’s contents. It is a bizarre tale of conspiracy, in which Robertson claims there is a secret plot afoot by the Freemasons, the Illuminati, the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Affairs, the Federal Reserve, and unidentified European bankers to create a world government under the United Nations. This new government will be taken over by the Antichrist, resulting in Armageddon, with half the world’s population being eliminated. The book made the New York Times best-seller list. Michael Lind wrote a two-part review of it in the New York Review of Books exposing the book’s anti-Semitic sources, which put Robertson on the defensive, and without explanation for his anti-Semitism. Maybe the most suitable review of New World Order was from Joe Queenan in the Wall Street Journal:

  The New World Order is a predictable compendium of the lunatic fringe’s greatest hits…. Mr. Robertson weaves a wild tale of international and extraterrestrial conspiracies, involving everyone from deposed Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza to Alger Hiss to Woodrow Wilson—an unwitting tool of Satan, whose role in the establishment of the Federal Reserve eventually resulted in the nation’s abdication to the most Machiavellian creature of all time: Paul Volcker…. Still, as paranoid pinheads with a deep distrust of democracy go, he’s a bit of a disappointment…. Where, for example, is the stuff about JFK’s secret meeting with Martin Borman in the Bermuda Triangle? Where is the stuff about extraterrestrials visiting the Mayans and telling them to give the Spear of Longinus to Elvis?[77]

  To dismiss Pat Robertson as a loony crank, however, would be a mistake, for he takes his mission all too seriously. Realizing that he is never going to be the president of the United States himself, nor ever fully control a president regardless of how much assistance Christian conservatives provide to get a leader of their choice elected, he exercises his considerable influence in negative ways. He and his followers can block candidates for Republican nominations at the local, state, and national level, and no issue is more important in their filtering process than a candidate’s position on judicial nominations, especially at the federal level. Of late, Robertson has focused much of his energy on the federal courts, and on the Supreme Court in particular. There is no question about his goals, which he has detailed in Courting Disaster: How the Supreme Court Is Usurping the Power of Congress and the People (2004), a cooperative writing effort with the lawyers at his American Center for Law and Justice—a sister organization he created that litigates continuously to expand the reach of religion and chip away at the wall separating church and state. The book castigates every Supreme Court decision that the Christian right does not like—those that are preventing it from imposing its religiosity on others—and was clearly written with the 2004 presidential election in mind. After describing doom and gloom, Robertson said, “[T]hings simply cannot continue as they are. Either they will get better or immeasurably worse, and in either case those who believe in the founding vision of this nation cannot afford to be passive any longer.” If George W. Bush is reelected and conservatives get more seats in Congress, said Robertson, “we may be able to accomplish some of our more important goals.” At the top of that list are “two and perhaps three” seats on the Supreme Court.[78] His prayers are being answered.

  Packing Federal Courts with Judges Who Will Do God’s Work

  The agenda of Christian conservatives is, relatively speaking, limited, and they believe much of it can be accomplished through the federal courts. Broadly speaking, they want to control the right of women to have abortions; to ban all forms of gay marriage; to prevent the teaching of safe sex in schools; to encourage home schooling; to ban the use of contraceptives; to halt stem cell research with human embryos; to stop the teaching of evolution and/or to start the teaching of intelligent design; to bring God into the public square and eliminate the separation of church and state; to overturn the legality of living wills; to control the sexual content of cable and network television, radio, and the Internet; and to eliminate an “activist” judiciary that limits or impinges on their agenda, by placing God-fearing judges on the bench who will promote their sincerely held beliefs.

  Because they do not want to lose the support of evangelicals, or to see them withdraw from politics as their parents or grandparents did in the 1920s, Republicans must take this agenda seriously. Reagan and Bush I gave promises but failed to fully deliver; Bush II, who became one of them, has delivered. An unspoken quid pro quo has developed for their support. Republicans appoint judges and justices whose views are compatible with Christian conservatives to do what neither Congress nor the president can accomplish: to make the agenda of Christian conservatives into the law of the land. Thus the effort that began under Reagan, and was continued by Bush I, has been most aggressively pursued by Bush II, who has undertaken a deliberate and concerted effort to pack the federal judiciary with conservative judges from top to bottom. Bush II has been more successful with lower courts than with the Supreme Court, with only two appointments, but that, too, may change soon, given the age and health of several of the justices.

  Seven of the nine justices currently serving on the Supreme Court have been appointed by Republicans, but three of those seven are not nearly conservative enough to satisfy Christian conservatives. Many of them consider Justices John Paul Stevens (a Ford appointee), Anthony Kennedy (a Reagan appointee), and David Souter (a Bush I appointee) to be liberals. They are not, and, in fact, there is not a single true liberal on the high Court. Clinton appointed two moderates, Justices Ruth Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, because he did not wish to spend his political capital with the Senate on trying to get a liberal confirmed. While today’s Supreme Court is more conservative than any since before the New Deal, lower federal courts are more conservative than they have ever been. By the end of 2005 “about 60 percent of the federal appeals courts were appointed by Republican presidents,” and of “the 13 circuit courts of appeal, 9 have majorities of judges named by Republican presidents.”[79] It is at the federal appellate court level that most law is made, and with the exceptions of the Second Circuit (Connecticut, New York, and Vermont) and the Ninth Circuit (Arizona, Alaska, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Nevada, Montana, Oregon, and Washington), the federal circuits are more conservative than the Supreme Court. The Fourth Circuit (North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia), Fifth Circuit (Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas), and Eleventh Circuit (Alabama, Georgia, and Florida) especially have become strikingly so.

  By constitutional design the federal judiciary is authoritarian, with lower court judges bound to follow higher court rulings. Thus, any five conservatives on the Supreme Court can make the law of the land, because all lower federal judges are bound by their decisions. George Bush won the support of social conservatives in 2000 and 2004 by promising he would appoint justices who thought like Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, the most conservative members of the Supreme Court. Bush delivered with the nominations of Chief Justice John Roberts (who replaced the conservative William Rehnquist) and Associate Justice Samuel Alito (who replaced the moderate swing vote of Sandra Day O’Connor). Theoretically, citizens should have no concern about the political affiliation of judges whom they expect to rule fairly and objectively. As a practical matter, however, ideology does make a difference. One can now predict with a fair degree of certainty the outcome of a wide variety of legal rulings based on the party affiliation
of the judge, or judges, involved in the case. A partisan judiciary does not deliver justice, and conservative Republicans are again acting as authoritarians in packing the federal courts.

  As the federal judiciary becomes a legal phalanx of conservative judges, and as Congress becomes increasingly conservative, it is worth pondering what would happen if a liberal or progressive president won the White House in 2008, and refused to enforce a Supreme Court ruling. Hypothetically, say the ruling required prayer in all public proceedings or the posting of the Ten Commandments in all federal buildings. Say that liberal or progressive president claimed, “I have taken an oath that is as valid as that taken by members of the Court. The Court’s ruling violates the United States Constitution. The Court has no constitutional authority to require enforcement of such a ruling; therefore, I order the Justice Department and the federal marshals not to enforce it.” Needless to say, for a president to do so would be an extreme measure. Yet this is precisely what Pat Robertson and other Christian conservatives believe a conservative president should do, and that he should act as he sees the law, not as the high Court has seen it.[80] This, of course, is the way authoritarians think.

  If this scenario were just one of Pat Robertson’s more outrageous demands, it could be safely ignored. In fact, though, such thinking is widespread among Christian and social conservatives. For example, in 1997, Chuck Colson wrote in Christianity Today about his displeasure with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Boerne v. Flores, which held that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, passed by Congress to address the standard under which religious practices could be curtailed by government, was unconstitutional. Colson raised the question of who determines what the Constitution means: the Supreme Court, the Congress, or the president? Colson claimed that “contrary to what most Americans think, the Constitution does not give the Supreme Court final say on constitutional questions.” He further asserted that in 1803, in Marbury v. Madison, “the Court assumed the power of judicial review,” yet “three presidents have resisted Court orders: Thomas Jefferson refused to execute the Alien Imposition Act; [Andrew] Jackson spurned a Court order in a banking case; [and] Lincoln rejected the Dred Scott decision.”[81] Colson, like Robertson and others on the religious right, is seeking, in effect, to nullify Supreme Court decisions of which he does not approve. Because such arguments are being made increasingly in lengthy law journal articles, which are later cited by conservative judges, it is worth taking a look at conservative scholarship in this area, and Colson is considered a scholar by his contemporaries.[82]