Whenever I talk about the growing power of the evangelical right
with friends, they always ask the same question: What can we do?
Usually I reply with a joke: Keep a bag packed and your passport
current. I don’t really mean it, but my anxiety is genuine.
It’s one thing to have a government that shows contempt
for civil liberties; America has survived such men before. It’s
quite another to have a mass movement—the largest and most
powerful mass movement in the nation—rise up in opposition
to the rights of its fellow citizens. The Constitution protects
minorities, but that protection is not absolute; with a sufficiently
sympathetic or apathetic majority, a tightly organized faction
can get around it.
The mass movement I’ve described aims to supplant Enlightenment
rationalism with what it calls the “Christian worldview.”
The phrase is based on the conviction that true Christianity must
govern every aspect of public and private life, and that all—government,
science, history and culture—must be understood according
to the dictates of scripture. There are biblically correct positions
on every issue, from gay marriage to income tax rates, and only
those with the right worldview can discern them. This is Christianity
as a total ideology—I call it Christian nationalism. It’s
an ideology adhered to by millions of Americans, some of whom
are very powerful. It’s what drives a great many of the
fights over religion, science, sex and pluralism now dividing
communities all over the country.
I am not suggesting that religious tyranny is imminent
in the United States. Our democracy is eroding and some of our
rights are disappearing, but for most people, including those
most opposed to the Christian nationalist agenda, life will most
likely go on pretty much as normal for the foreseeable future.
Thus for those who value secular society, apprehending the threat
of Christian nationalism is tricky. It’s like being a lobster
in a pot, with the water heating up so slowly that you don’t
notice the moment at which it starts to kill you.
If current trends continue, we will see ever-increasing division
and acrimony in our politics. That’s partly because, as
Christian nationalism spreads, secularism is spreading as well,
while moderate Christianity is in decline. According to the City
University of New York Graduate Center’s comprehensive American
religious identification survey, the percentage of Americans who
identify as Christians has actually fallen in recent years, from
86 percent in 1990 to 77 percent in 2001. The survey found that
the largest growth, in both absolute and percentage terms, was
among those who don’t subscribe to any religion. Their numbers
more than doubled, from 14.3 million in 1990,when they constituted
8 percent of the population, to 29.4 million in 2001,when they
made up 14 percent. “The top three ‘gainers’
in America’s vast religious marketplace appear to be Evangelical
Christians, those describing themselves as Non-Denominational
Christians and those who profess no religion,” the survey
found. (The percentage of other religious minorities remained
small, totaling less than 4 percent of the population).
Kingdom
Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism
Across the United States, religious activists are organizing to
establish an American theocracy. A frightening look inside the
growing right-wing movement.
By Michelle Goldberg
--
A teenage modern dance troupe dressed all in black took their
places on the stage of the First Baptist Church of Pleasant Grove,
a suburb of Birmingham, Alabama. Two dancers, donning black overcoats,
crossed their arms menacingly. As a Christian pop ballad swelled
on the speakers, a boy wearing judicial robes walked out. Holding
a Ten Commandments tablet that seemed to be made of cardboard,
he was playing former Alabama Supreme Court justice Roy Moore.
The trench-coated thugs approached him, miming a violent rebuke
and forcing him to the other end of the stage, sans Commandments.
There, a cluster of dancers impersonating liberal
activists waved signs with slogans like "No Moore!"
and "Keep God Out!! No God in Court." The boy Moore
danced a harangue, first lurching toward his tormentors and then
cringing back in outrage before breaking through their line to
lunge for his monument. But the dancers in trench coats -- agents
of atheism -- got hold of it first and took it away, leaving him
abject on the floor. As the song's uplifting chorus played --
"After you've done all you can, you just stand" -- a
dancer in a white robe, playing either an angel or God himself,
came forward and helped the Moore character to his feet.
The performance ended to enthusiastic applause
from a crowd that included many Alabama judges and politicians,
as well as Roy Moore himself, a gaunt man with a courtly manner
and the wrath of Leviticus in his eyes. Moore has become a hero
to those determined to remake the United States into an explicitly
Christian nation. That reconstructionist dream lies at the red-hot
center of our current culture wars, investing the symbolic fight
over the Ten Commandments -- a fight whose outcome seems irrelevant
to most peoples' lives -- with an apocalyptic urgency.
“Michelle Goldberg has done the impossible.
She's written a serious, scathing, eye-opening expose of the ongoing
takeover of our country by rightwing Christians– and somehow
managed to make it witty, funny, and humane. If it were satire,
Kingdom Coming would be hilarious. Unfortunately, it's
all true – things are even worse than you thought. Read
it while you can!”
–Katha
Pollitt, columnist, The Nation ; author, Virginity or Death!
: And Other Social and Political Issues of Our Time
“America’s theocrats have to be seen, heard, and read
to be believed. Not all of us have the acute senses, stamina,
guts and intelligence to uncover these forces of unreason and
tyranny directly, so we rely on scouts. Michelle Goldberg is one
of our indispensable scouts, and Kingdom Coming is a
brave and important book. If you cherish plurality and reason,
read it to get the bad news—and to restore your faith in
journalism.”
–Todd
Gitlin, Professor of Journalism, Columbia University, and
author of The Intellectuals and the Flag
“Michelle Goldberg ventured into the heartland of American
fundamentalist extremism -- and returned to warn us of the authoritarian
ambitions that lie behind the moralistic posturing of the religious
right. Every patriot who still cherishes the freedoms we
inherited from the nation’s founders should read her book.”
–
Joe Conason, author of The Hunting of the President, Big Lies,
and The Raw Deal
“Michelle Goldberg takes us on an
eye-opening journey through the Christian right grass- roots,
from the evolution battles in Dover, Pennsylvania to Roy’s
Rock in Alabama and beyond. Along the way, she makes a devastating
case that underlying this movement’s campaigns against abortion
or gay marriage is a tremendous will to power, an ambition to
achieve Christian domination of our public life and laws. Kingdom
Coming offers a stark warning that our democracy is under
attack from within.”
–Esther
Kaplan, author of With God on Their Side: George W. Bush and
the Christian Right
“Kingdom Coming reveals
just how thoroughly our national discourse has been corrupted
by the mad work of religious literalists. Goldberg demonstrates
— elegantly and persuasively— that tens of millions
of our neighbors are working each day to obliterate the separation
between church and state, to supplant scientific rationality with
Iron Age fantasies, and to achieve a Christian theocracy in the
21st century. This is a terrifying and necessary book.”
“A chilling and lucid investigation
into the rise of Christian extremism in America, as well as a
how-to guide for thinking Americans who wish to preserve their
civil liberties against the coming onslaught. An important book.”
“Tocqueville said in 1840, 'Various forms of religious madness
are quite common in the United States.' Michelle Goldberg
demonstrates that various forms of religious madness are still
quite common. Tocqueville thought that American democracy could
contain the danger. Can it still? Only with an effort. That is
Michelle Goldberg's well-illustrated and eloquently expressed
point, and she is right to make that point, and we had better
pay attention.”
– Paul
Berman, author of Terror and Liberalism and Power and the
Idealists
“Michelle Goldberg provides a critical
wake up call for all Americans about a coalition of right wing
Christian conservative groups determined to remake the United
States into a Christian nation ruled by their conception of
Jesus' will. Every American who cherishes religious freedom, civil
liberties and the separation of church and state must read Kingdom
Coming.”
–Abraham
H. Foxman, National Director, Anti-Defamation League; author,
Never Again? The Threat of the New Anti-Semitism
“Michelle Goldberg takes us on a superbly reported inside
tour of the far-out Christian Right, distinguished by its contempt
for democracy in this world in the hope of total victory over
nonbelievers in the world to come. This book should scare every
American who cherishes our secular Constitution and its separation
of church and state. ”
–Susan
Jacoby, author of Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism