C Street

by Jeff Sharlet

  The nation is watching as Sanford spins his tale. Folksy, yet pointed. The bear is a reminder that even God’s creation has its dangers; the young couple who helped the governor an example of the best kind of charity, face to face; the wise old man at the waterfall—well, in the years to come, after everybody has read the memoir that will propel Sanford to the presidency, On the Trail, there will be disagreement over who that magical old man was. Some will say he was just a wise old man reminding the governor of natural law, the impossibility of social engineering, the truth of the invisible hand. But there will be many others who’ll insist he was the Holy Spirit, setting Sanford on his special path. Sanford will never offer his opinion, just that wry expression and toothy smile we’ll all come to love.

  What changed in Mark Sanford? What transformed him from an able, even charming Republican politician to this gentle prophet, calling the nation back to the virtues of risk, generosity, contemplation, and enterprise? That’s the first question from the press, of course.

  Sanford apologizes for keeping everybody in the dark for a few days. “Leadership’s about listening,” he says. “But as much as I love talkin’ to, and listenin’ to, and just, just bein’ with y’all, a leader, sometimes he’s got to get away from the voice of the crowd just so he can separate out what he wants from what God wants.” The governor settles in on the theme; it’s clear there’s something important he needs to say here. “You know, it’s easy to mistake your own will for God’s will. When you’re surrounded by noise, people, you get into listening to yourself. And if you aren’t careful, you start thinking the self has all the answers. That’s something I’ve learned. But it doesn’t. The self is the world, it’s—desires, pride. And the biggest self of self is indeed self. But leaders must be called to higher things. You know, I’ll tell you why I went out into the woods, there, the wilderness. It was because I want to listen to God, to what he has to say.” Then Sanford reaches over and claps a hand on the shoulder of Cubby Culbertson. “I want to thank this man,” Sanford says. “He’s, he’s a—a spiritual giant, I’d call him.” The truth is, Sanford says, that he and Jenny had gone through a rough patch in their marriage, which was strained by political pressures, but Cubby and a group of guys up in Washington—“believe it or not, a Christian Bible study”—had kept them “moving forward.”

  “Moving forward”—that, he says, is what being on the trail was all about. Moving forward without leaving anyone behind. “Not just ‘no child,’ ” Sanford says, his broad, bony hands spreading out to encompass the whole room. “All of us. What I know now is that we all have to move forward together, to get on that trail and just—”

  Sanford pauses. Never a Bible thumper, he’s probably worrying that what he’s about to say will be misconstrued. It won’t. There’s no presumption in his words. History, his supporters will say, would provide the evidence of his anointing. But this early summer day in Columbia, Sanford just smiles, his big eyes looking out from TV screens all over the land, and speaks the truth of his power: “Just let God show us the way.”

  What if we had? What if Sanford hadn’t confessed, and C Street had continued to cover for him? Imagine the book he might have written. It might even have been a good book, had he poured the passion of his tractor letters into it. And then how far would it really have been to the White House? He might have gotten there by 2012, or 2016, with Obama having been crippled by Afghanistan or drowned in oil or defeated by some other bad turn, or maybe simply followed at the end of two happy terms by a Democrat who couldn’t compete with Sanford’s folksy charm.

  Or maybe it’s not Sanford but somebody else. Sam Brownback, his conservative credentials unsurpassable and yet able to appeal to centrists and even liberals with his humanitarian concern for Africa. “The Wilberforce Republican,” the Economist has called him, after the British parliamentarian who helped lead the fight to abolish the slave trade.

  Or maybe it’ll be John Thune, a man in the Ensign model—tall, square-jawed, not overly burdened by deep thoughts. An amiable face for a fundamentalist politics of economic deregulation and social control. A student of Doug Coe’s. Or Rep. Mike Pence, of Indiana, third-ranking Republican in the House, a former right-wing radio host with White House eyes. Or maybe it’s not a C Streeter at all but one of the self-made heroes of populist fundamentalism: Mike Huckabee, from Arkansas, or even Sarah Palin. Huckabee the squirrel hunter and Palin the winking, wisecracking moose skinner are too tacky for the C Street style; both of them are outsiders who barged their way onto the national stage, to the consternation of establishment figures. But would they govern that differently than a Sanford or a Brownback or a Thune?

  The names don’t really matter. The fundamentalist threat to American democracy isn’t a person, a politician whose defeat would put the matter to rest once and for all. It’s an idea. In its most modest shape it’s the question posed by a future air force officer: “Who are we to question why God builds up nations?”—imperial narcissism so blind that the questioner believes his fatalistic acceptance of his own power is a form of humility. In its bluntest expression it’s the “government by God” preached at C Street. In its most awful, it is the “God-led politics” of Uganda, the nightmare scenario of fundamentalism in power.

  And yet the idea—Abraham Vereide used to capitalize that word, the Idea—is most effective and most enduring when it’s pursued not as a doctrine, not with a manifesto in hand, but as a kind of continuity. Maybe patience is a better term, the unsung virtue of the American Right that has allowed it to endure through liberal and conservative seasons, transforming the nation not so much through grand programs as by tiny steps, one proposal leading to the next, often at the state level or even lower.

  For instance, a fight by congressional conservatives to roll back democratically supported gun laws in the District of Columbia (an effort in which Brownback and Ensign were both active) went national when the Supreme Court issued a ruling that could block cities from taking guns off their streets. Meanwhile, several states have passed laws ensuring that gun owners can carry concealed weapons into churches. Sometimes the process moves in from the margins, such as the case of the 2010 Utah law that effectively criminalizes miscarriage, leaving it to prosecutors to decide whether a woman’s miscarriage was “intentional.” The spectrum of possibility moves rightward, so that one day a milder anti–reproductive rights initiative that once would have seemed outlandish, such as requiring women to review ultrasound images of their fetuses before getting an abortion, starts to seem like a compromise. How many steps would it take to get from a conscience clause allowing pharmacists to refuse prescriptions for birth control—possible under the Workplace Religious Freedom Act, not yet passed but supported by members of both parties—to a mainstream discussion of making contraception unavailable altogether, a goal spoken of seriously by an increasing number of fundamentalist politicians?

  It’s not just sex. The Idea is bigger than its many manifestations. It’s a current more than an agenda, a river into which all the tributaries of the Right find their way eventually. Tea Party candidates are mocked for zany ideas like the abolition of the Department of Education, as if they were proposing to strip an amendment from the Constitution. Most of us forget, or never knew, that the Department of Education—like the Department of Energy, another target for demolition—was a creation of the Carter administration. What has been done can be undone, and it’s not just Tea Partiers who want to see the federal government shrunk to the size that it can be drowned in a bathtub, as the conservative leader Grover Norquist has put it. For Norquist, that shrinkage is a secular ambition; for C Streeters like Brownback and Thune, it’s a spiritual goal. Business might applaud the decommissioning of the Environmental Protection Agency or the radical rollback of worker safety laws or the end of the minimum wage for economic reasons, but political fundamentalists see deregulation as a moral crusade, one that will restore to citizens the ability to choose between right and wrong. What good is t
he concept of sin, they ask, if there’s a safety net to catch you when you fall?

  And what good is virtue if it’s not freely chosen? That question leads elite fundamentalists to celebrate the outcome of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the 2010 Supreme Court case in which the Court’s conservative justices decided that the First Amendment protects the political speech of corporations, allowing them to flood money into the elections. Several months later, in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, the Court ruled that even peaceful advocacy—what David Bahati calls “promotion”—for an organization the government deems a threat can be prosecuted as terrorism itself. The ruling marks “the first time [the Supreme Court] has permitted the government to make it a crime to advocate lawful, nonviolent activity.” One needn’t be a spokesman for Al-Qaeda, or even just poor, confused Mark Siljander to cross the line—under this ruling, say legal scholars, former president Jimmy Carter could be prosecuted for monitoring elections in Lebanon. For that matter, it’s possible that I could be prosecuted for saying it was wrong for the United States to help Sri Lanka massacre its Tamil minority, and if you repeated that notion on a blog, you could be marked a terrorist, too.

  The real dream of American fundamentalism isn’t just a paring down of government, a return to the days of Coolidge and Harding. It’s a transformation into something new, something that has never existed before. Consider one small program that might be up for expansion in the future: Fugitive Safe Surrender. As originally implemented in 2007, the program moved the apparatus of the legal system out of the courthouse and into a local megachurch for four days. The event would be preceded by an advertising blitz advising fugitives to turn themselves in not to a police station but to the church; implicit was the promise of special consideration for those who came to the law by way of a house of the Lord. At one such event, in Akron, Ohio, which I attended, participants passed through metal detectors into a gymnasium, where, to the sound of piped-in instrumental gospel music, they were given the option of speaking first to a sheriff’s deputy in light riot gear or a pastor: a man with a gun, or a man with a Bible.

  For those who chose neither, the four-day church-court would be followed by a massive sweep, with marshals rolling through America’s inner cities in armored vehicles and kicking down doors like they were back in Baghdad. “Kind of a yin to the yang,” explained the program’s creator, U.S. Marshal Pete Elliott. “Look, if people surrendered at the police department, we wouldn’t have to do this. But they don’t. And why don’t they? Because they don’t trust people like me. So I went back to the institution in my life that I trust the most. The church! If we brought the whole justice center out and put it in a church, people will turn themselves in.”

  Fugitive Safe Surrender falls under the auspices of faith-based initiatives, a program many mistakenly believe was left behind with the Bush presidency. The real genius of Bush’s faith program—rooted in decades of smaller-scale Family-led experiments with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, prisons, and education—was its creation of permanent offices throughout government with mandates to seek ways to channel secular funding into faith-based initiatives. Some of these are universally admired, while others are questionable; a few, like Fugitive Safe Surrender, seem to have simply dispensed with the First Amendment. At its strongest, this apparatus is an engine for the privatization of public funds into religious hands; at its weakest, it’s a patronage machine.

  Either way, it’s been institutionalized.

  As has its parallel movement in the military. We’ve already gone far beyond the problem of a few rogue officers. And as the line moves, so do those who’d rather be out in front of it. If Gen. Petraeus, with his endorsement of Christian command manuals, and Gen. Caslen, with his “aroma of Jesus Christ,” are at the center, who else is out there on the front lines of the fundamentalist advance along with Col. Young? Are there senior commanders who share the newly mainstream idea of “religious freedom” as a mission statement for invasion? It’s a vision that extends not just to Iraq but to the Sudan, the Philippines, Syria, and Venezuela, all nations targeted for liberation from radical Islam in the imaginations of leading conservatives like some of the politicians named above. How many little wars might the United States be fighting by 2016 or 2020?

  “We could never afford it,” say the skeptics. That’s the good news: we’re too poor to fulfill fundamentalism’s imperial ambitions. Instead, fundamentalism will have to settle for fighting a war of attrition at home, wearing down one of the movement’s most hated enemies, secular education, school by school. The “liberal” side of the dream is represented by Dennis Bakke, a friend of the Family, a former energy tycoon, and current leader of the for-profit charter school movement, who suggests that churches subsidize the salaries of missionary teachers in public schools. The more radical vision is the end of public schooling altogether.

  Suppose it could be done—not all at once but gradually, through budget crises (not hard to imagine) that lead schools into public-private partnerships with whoever’s ready with funding. That is, churches, with pledges of strict separation, of course. Then again, the Bush-era decision to allow recipients of federal money to discriminate based on religion still stands, its revocation one of Obama’s broken promises. And bus route by bus route, teacher by teacher, America’s experiment with public education—little more than a century old in its modern form—winds down to an end.

  “The end.” That’s the fear secular critics of fundamentalism all too often focus on, as if fundamentalist politicians spend their days studying the numerology of Hebrew words instead of chipping away at banking regulations and thinking of ways to privatize Social Security, more strategies for untying the invisible hand of God’s economy. The political elites who implement the ideas of American fundamentalism are most often postmillennialists, not premillennialists, which is a theologically wonky way of saying they’re in no rush for the Rapture. They want to bring their God into this world, not usher in the next. Premillennialists, considered crass by the sophisticated fundamentalists of the Family, believe Christ will come back soon and rule for a thousand years. Postmillennialists insist that we need at least a thousand years of God-led government before we prove ourselves worthy of his return. Premillennialists are apocalyptic; postmillennialists are political, their faith not in what is to come but in what is, the “powers that be” of Romans 13 rather than the prophecy of Revelation.

  Apocalypse? This? Then one of the four beasts gave unto the seven angels seven golden vials full of the wrath of God, who liveth forever and ever. And the temple was filled with smoke from the glory of God and from his power, and no man was able to enter the temple until the seven plagues of the seven angels were fulfilled. Please. C Streeters, the Brownbacks and the Ensigns, the Wamps and the Pickerings, interchangeable placeholders—theirs is the power and the bureaucracy. Fundamentalism is a subtler religion than we realize; the end is just a metaphor for tomorrow, and today there’s still time for business as usual. Patience, not apocalypse, is the watchword of American fundamentalism. Not waiting for the Kingdom, but building it slowly, brick by brick, a foundation strong enough to endure any electoral tides.

  When Obama entered the White House, editorialists and newsweeklies and talking heads on television declared the age of culture war over. This resolution of hostilities came after some of the conflict’s nastiest battles during the 2008 campaign. Then again, pundits had decided in 2006 that the Democratic victories of that year were proof that the culture wars had come to an end. That message of Mission Accomplished was announced in 1996, too, when Bill Clinton was reelected—just two years after the sweeping victories of Christian Right–backed Republicans, which in turn came two years after the press declared the culture wars over in 1992.

  It’s an American tradition, declaring conflict a thing of the past. But the conflict continues because fundamentalism continues; because the Right didn’t wither up and blow away on January 20, 2009; because
the disarray of the Republican Party no more equals the end of American conservatism than it did in 1964, when Lyndon Johnson’s crushing defeat of Barry Goldwater laid the foundation for the decades of much harder Right politics that would follow LBJ’s departure. Beyond conservatism, the dream of fundamentalism’s elite, a new “social order,” as Doug Coe describes it, is an enduring one, the age-old dream of all-encompassing authority, Our Father not just in heaven but presiding over all of our daily affairs, from our government to our economy to our armed forces. That this dream can never be fully realized in a democracy, even one as flawed as ours, makes it no less dangerous.

  The threat isn’t theocracy, an idea nearly every fundamentalist denounces as the province of mullahs and the Middle Ages, but the conflation of democracy with authoritarianism. Not the jackbooted kind or even the iron fist within the velvet glove, but rather the “Father knows best” variety, trickle-down paternalism, the authority of the Father-God descending down upon us through his chosen, our servant leaders, men and even the occasional women who are to society as fundamentalists believe fathers should be to their families, both loving and stern.

  If “trickle-down,” in the context of paternalism, evokes the wrong kind of flow, consider the old bit of Reaganspeak a clue to the repurposing of language that is the real art of fundamentalism: democracy redefined as rule by a class of the anointed; religion reduced to the (mistaken) beliefs of other people; law a euphemism for scripture, and scripture itself not just malleable but liquid, easily poured into any vessel, a Sanford or a Palin, a Thune or a Pickering—fuel for the long march toward freedom, which is just another word for no questions asked. “Starve doubts, feed freedom,” as Abram Vereide put it shortly before he died.