by Jeff Sharlet
Fundamentalists don’t want to do away with the Constitution; they just want to abolish its ambiguities. How? By finding certainties between its lines. There is nothing literalist or originalist about the fundamentalist approach to the Constitution; the right way to read it, they believe, is the way they study scripture, alert not just to reason but also to magic. They read it like Daniel the Israelite, taken into bondage in Babylon, interpreting the king’s dreams. Fundamentalists see themselves as being in bondage to secularism, liberalism. To them secularism is an unimaginative regime that looks at the words of the Constitution and sees only ink, not a divinely inspired, “God-breathed” document in the manner of 2 Timothy 3:16 (“All scripture is God-breathed”). The very term constitution is derived, so the thinking goes, from the biblical covenant. Which means, of course, that it belongs to the faithful. If they are like Daniel, the captive interpreting the king’s dream, they are also like his captor, King Nebuchadnezzar. They are both victim and oppressor, the prophet and the power, interpreting their own dream as evidence of the Father’s intentions.
This book, C Street, isn’t about a piece of real estate in Washington. It’s not about the Family, or Officers’ Christian Fellowship, or even the murderous potential of American culture wars waged by proxy overseas. It’s about the Idea, as Abram put it, the monolithic vision of fundamentalism always threatening to subsume the many lowercased ideas that constitute democracy. In Uganda we see the Idea verging on murder, in the military we see it gathering force, at C Street we encounter its enduring corruption. Let’s briefly consider a more complicated example, one preferred by the C Streeters themselves: William Wilberforce, a politician who was never troubled by questions about his personal failings.
That was because he had none, or at least none that bothered his evangelical admirers. He was as much of a saint in his personal life as he was in Parliament, where, in 1807, after two decades of effort, he led to victory the legislative fight to abolish the slave trade. Responding to a reporter’s questions about the Family, John Hart, director of communications for Sen. Coburn, declared Wilberforce’s prayer group, the Clapham Fellowship, “a model for ‘The Family.’ Ignoring the prominence of Wilberforce to a group like ‘The Family’ would be like writing a story about the Catholic Church but leaving out the Pope.”
In fact, there’s very little mention of Wilberforce in the 592 boxes of the Family’s papers stored at the Billy Graham Center Archives. His influence is a late addition, part of the proliferation of Wilberforce-themed entities and initiatives within conservative evangelicalism since the movement’s recognition that it had been, for the most part, on the wrong side of the struggle of another “saint,” Martin Luther King Jr. Wilberforce, a long-dead upper-class white man—and an evangelical Christian—is the movement’s redemption. MLK? Just a late entry in a struggle practically invented by Wilberforce, goes the thinking.
Eric Metaxas, the bestselling author of a conservative biography of Wilberforce called Amazing Grace (unrelated, says Metaxas, to the 2006 Hollywood hagiography of the same title), told me that, without Wilberforce, there’d be no concept of social justice in Western civilization—that nobody had seriously dreamed of freeing the slaves before God gave the notion to “the nightingale of the House of Commons,” as Wilberforce was known for his beautiful singing voice.
Leaving aside the millions of slaves to whom the idea may have occurred, Metaxas and Wilberforce’s contemporary admirers—Sen. Brownback told me he wept when he first read another Wilberforce biography, and Rep. Frank Wolf says he keeps a life-size poster of Wilberforce on his office door—mostly ignore the deep and often radical abolitionist tradition, both religious and secular, to which Wilberforce was a late arrival. That’s not all they leave aside. When I asked Metaxas about Wilberforce’s opposition to the first successful slave revolt in history, the Haitian Revolution, he said that wasn’t part of his story. When I asked about Wilberforce’s opposition to the rights of working people, he said that part hadn’t interested him.
“That part” was one of Wilberforce’s guiding passions: he was for the abolition of slavery, but ardently and explicitly opposed to “democratical principles.” Chuck Colson, the Watergate felon born again through the intervention of the Family as a Christian Right leader, told me that it was for this that he most admired Wilberforce: “There were very few that stood against the Enlightenment,” he says, but Wilberforce was one of the boldest. Throughout Wilberforce’s life, writes Adam Hochschild in his history of British abolitionism, Bury the Chains, he supported “all the era’s repressive measures, arguing in favor of a law that provided three-month jail terms for anything remotely resembling labor organizing, which he thought ‘a general disease in our society.’ ” Freedom of speech or even of belief did not interest him. His Society for Carrying into Effect His Majesty’s Proclamation Against Vice and Immorality arranged to have a British publisher of Tom Paine’s jailed because of Paine’s atheism. His support for the so-called Gagging Acts of 1795 was crucial to their passage. “Went to Pitt’s,” he wrote in his diary, of a visit to his friend William Pitt the Younger, the prime minister, “to look over the Sedition Bill—altered it much for the better by enlarging.” The result was a law that banned meetings of more than fifty people, joined by a law that made criticism of the government punishable by seven years in prison. The laws were intended to squash “mad-headed professors of equality and liberty,” as Wilberforce put it, and they worked, setting the abolition movement back by years.
The story preferred by Wilberforce’s admirers today is the same as the simple one told in the song “Amazing Grace,” written by a mentor of Wilberforce’s, a repentant slave trader named John Newton, and Amazing Grace the movie, bankrolled by a fundamentalist billionaire with a dream of Christianizing pop culture. The feckless son of a wealthy merchant, a twenty-one-year-old Wilberforce bought his seat in Parliament in 1780 at the cost of roughly eight pounds per vote. “The first year that I was in Parliament,” he’d recollect, “I did nothing…. My own distinction was my darling object.” He sought it through socializing. He was an ardent gambler, a nimble flatterer, charming but chaste and thus welcomed into the salons of the day by both women and men. The revolutionary novelist Madame de Staël, no friend to Wilberforce’s conservatism, called him “the wittiest man in England.” He had the build of an elf and the hair of an owl. Masculinity framed the face of a pudgy boy: dark brows above, a cleft chin below, and in between, flushed lips, chubby cheeks, and a friendly squash for a nose. His fingers were long, his legs were short, and his shortsighted eyes were kindly, if wincing. His stomach was given to grumbling, but his voice—that’s almost the whole story right there. Untrained but lovely, in song or in speech it was one of the greatest weapons in the arsenal of abolition. He could and did speak against slavery for three hours, and even his opponents would listen. The biographer Boswell, witness to one of Wilberforce’s first campaign speeches, delivered outdoors in a hailstorm, reported that the little man’s words pummeled back the wind and made a space in which a country crowd stood rapt for an hour. “I saw what seemed a mere shrimp mount upon the table; but as I listened, he grew, and grew, until the shrimp became a whale.”
Not long after his twenty-fifth birthday came the beginning of what his traditionally Anglican mother would call his “perversion”: his conversion from a proper Protestant into a zealous evangelical Christian. The catalyst was a long carriage ride in the company of his former school headmaster. The two whiled away the hours reading an earnest treatise on religion that made a great impression. Thereafter, a new note began creeping into Wilberforce’s diary, until then dedicated to observations such as “jolly good party.” Now there were sterner points made: there’d been too much laughter at a christening, he’d note, or a distasteful dance at the opera. A second trip with the headmaster, to a Swiss spa, led to an immersion in the New Testament, followed by a rejection of theater and novels. (His Clapham Fellowship would later attempt to save Shak
espeare by editing out all that was unwholesome.) His diary soon proved insufficient for the depth of his sentiments, and it was paralleled by a more secret journal, a ledger of rhetorical self-flagellation: “shame”; “pride”; “my dangerous state”; “blindness”; “hatred”; “miserable”; “blind”; “naked”; “vain”; “punishment”; “fear”; “callous”; “wretched”; “tremble”; “coldness”; “darkness.”
His salvation was, well, his salvation. The conservative evangelicalism of his day, like ours, emphasized personal transformation and the value of setting an example for Christian living. But in practice it all too often took as its proof-texts acts of control, the imposition of one’s alleged grace on others. Saving someone else allowed the believer to avoid what John of the Cross called “the dark night of the soul.” For a brief moment in an otherwise unbothered life, Wilberforce had contemplated doubt and had encountered faith not as a matter of certainty but as a great and sometimes troubling mystery. That didn’t feel good. So he turned his new obsession with sin and its amelioration outward.
In 1786 he carried a bill to relieve the suffering of women convicted of murdering their husbands by replacing the punishment of burning with hanging. But the noose, too, chafed him; not its rub but its inefficiency. It killed, but it did not prevent. Wilberforce went to the root cause, proposing a society in favor of “the ancient censorship,” with himself “the guardian of the religion and morals of the people.” It’s this Wilberforce, the champion of what he called the Reformation of Manners, a program for not just a God-led government but also a God-led society at every level, who would become the model for modern fundamentalism. A man who had found God, struggled briefly, and then concluded, with Hobbit-like satisfaction, that the Lord shared the precise concerns of his class and time, tsk-tsked over the same plays Wilberforce did, perused the same papers Wilberforce read with a sharp eye for vulgarity, and, most important, wished all to be happy in their station. For Wilberforce, the idea that God loved everyone just as they were was a mandate for preservation of the class system. Spiritual equality before God, which he believed in, did not mean the same thing as worldly equality, which he decidedly did not. Amazing Grace, the movie, depicts Wilberforce as having been great friends with Olaudah Equiano, a freed slave who wrote a bestselling autobiography. However, there’s no evidence they ever met, or that Equiano, a brilliant abolitionist, would have accepted Wilberforce’s terms had they done so. Freed slaves, Wilberforce believed, were to become “a grateful peasantry.” The English poor, meanwhile, should be thankful “that their more lowly path has been allotted to them by the hand of God; that is their part… contentedly to bear its inconveniences.”
And yet, for all his failings, Wilberforce did something great, something worthy of the attachment of “Amazing Grace” to his memory: he played an essential part in the abolition of the slave trade. He didn’t invent social justice, and he didn’t lead the abolitionist movement. He simply but crucially gave it a voice in Parliament. The abolitionists needed a front man. “He must never be morbid,” wrote R. Coupland, his 1923 biographer. “He must not pile up the horrors…. It must be impossible… to deride him in London drawing rooms as an obscure crank, a wild man from beyond the pale.” He must be upper-class, but not aristocratic; not an eccentric. He could be Christian, but he must move among the swells. He must be popular. He must be witty, but not too clever. Not a prophet but a promoter.
That is what the abolitionist movement needed then, and that is all fundamentalism values now. Today’s champions of Wilberforce, those who look to him for a model of the Christian politician, ignore not only the strategists and the writers and the radicals, in thought and in action, who made Wilberforce’s fine speeches possible, but also the most visible evidence of the democracy from which the idea of abolition gained its power, the masses of petitions that forced Parliament’s hand. In Wilberforce’s time, he brought up the rear of the abolition movement, poking and prodding respectable society to catch up before Britain’s slaves caught up with those of Haiti’s and took their freedom rather than accepting it from their betters. For today’s fundamentalists, Wilberforce, not the slaves, is the point. The most notable scene in Amazing Grace featuring Thomas Clarkson, the abolitionist who drew Wilberforce to the cause, depicts Wilberforce bravely rejecting Clarkson’s appeal to seek allies among the French revolutionaries. Lest viewers feel the temptation themselves, an ominous cello and several screeching violins stand in for the warnings of the British arch-reactionary Edmund Burke, the most eloquent opponent of democracy in history and, like Wilberforce, a hero today of fundamentalist intellectuals. Thus abolition, a fight for freedom, is recast as a warning against freedom’s excesses and even as a tribute to a different kind of obedience, to divine authority. The same natural law that forbade slavery required that the poor be poor, the corollary of which, of course, was that the privileged were made by God for the very sake of privilege. They might do great and generous things with their privilege, as Wilberforce did, or they might do stingy and cruel things with their privilege, as Wilberforce also did, but either way the principle was the same. Serve God. Accept your station. Starve doubt, feed freedom.
Feed it what, exactly? All the uncertainties of creation, the endless arguments that are the noise of democracy.
When the Republican National Convention came to New York City in 2004, my friend Ann decided she wanted to join the hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who took to the streets in protest. Ann, like most of the marchers, wasn’t an activist or even a terribly political person. Much of the dissent stemmed from anger with the decision of the Republican Party—traditionally not very friendly to urban concerns—to invade Manhattan on the last weekend of summer. Ann’s position was more principled. A liberal on nearly every issue, she’s a conservative at heart, her politics shaped as much by the rural hollow in which she was raised as by her subsequent life of wandering among artists and academics. She grew up in a house her father, a stubborn apostate from his family’s Mennonite tradition, built by hand, with a foundation of stones young Ann and her sister hauled up from a stream. They weren’t hippies, Ann would say, they were hicks, and proud of it, commonsense people from a commonsense corner of the country where Mennonites and Amish set the pace of political thinking. Of course, Ann had moved on; for instance, her Mennonite relatives would likely not approve of her kitschy Jesus paint-by-number collection. But there was an earnestness in those paintings, in their carefully filled-in shadows and their patchwork skies, which was why, when Ann decided to become a political protester for the day, she turned to her collection for a sign to carry. Something a little subtler than “Down with this” or “Up with that.” She settled on a thoughtful Christ in red and white robes, the kind of calm divine she knew from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania—a fine antidote, she believed, to the hyped-up, militarized Jesus then looming over the Republican Party. She taped a necklace of twine to the back and wore her quiet Christ like a sandwich board.
Hmm. Too quiet, maybe. He had to say something. But what?
I’d admired the picture in her office before (we both worked in a university religious studies department at the time, Ann as an administrator and I as the department’s token journalist), but where Ann saw the serenity of a Mennonite Jesus, I saw the oy vey of a Jewish carpenter. We’d discuss this, Ann and I, surrounded by people who could read scripture in its original languages, bending our minds instead toward the interpretation of a work of paint-by-number art. The answer, Ann concluded, was part Mennonite, part Jewish, common sense with a yidishe kop:
Ann is just over five feet tall, with short, wild red-blond hair, big blue eyes, and arched eyebrows when she’s riled—which she was by her decision to get political, or religious, or religiously political, or whatever it meant to carry that sign out into a city on lockdown, with hundreds of thousands of protesters filling the street like a slow-moving river clogged with timber, police and press rolling everyone along. Ann had outfitted herself in a black
blouse and black pajama pants and black sneakers, a ninja canvas for her head-in-his-hands Jesus, praised and applauded as we moved in and out of the river, a little band of us—the religious studies department, nerds, not activists—dipping in and stepping out to observe and wax academic on the ritual of crowds. Ann with her sign was a walking altar. She was short enough that most people had to bow a little to read the sign, which they did because, after all, it was Jesus. “What’s this,” they’d say, wondering if they’d come upon a thumper, a distributor of tracts, or a “counter-protester.” “What’s this—‘That’s not what I meant’—Oh, I know what you mean!” Photojournalists clicked and snapped, urging her to strike a pose. Who knows how many readers of El País or Le Monde or the Hindustan Times briefly saw the face of dissent in America as a redheaded ninja pixie proclaiming the virtues of a paint-by-number Jesus?
But Ann wasn’t really the face of dissent, she was a liberal New Yorker with a funny line, a bit of wit, and a twist that put her somewhere off to the side of the great, earnest divide between believing and unbelieving America—off to the side, where so many of us live, far from conviction of any kind. We are an uncertain nation, restless, our unsettled identities borne out by the annual polls that show Americans shifting and sliding between denominations and religions. These surveys neglect other matters of ultimate concern—there really is more than one ultimate, paradoxical as it sounds. They neglect the many affections of an enchanted nation where interventionist angels and flickering flying saucers occupy the hearts and minds of a clear majority. Not just the rubes. A majority of us—Methodists and Catholics and born-again evangelicals—believe in the supernatural or the supranatural, in invisible winged advisers on our shoulders and even wingless extraterrestrials high above. Count me even a city’s worth of Americans who do not embrace either ghosts and hauntings and presences, or reincarnations or higher powers, the demon-filled world of Tibetan Buddhism or the subtle spiritualities of yoga, or sports obsession, or Star magazine. Legitimately religious, all. God bless our pluralistic nation.
