With God on Their Side“This book shows what happens when we allow anti-intellectualism, paranoia, and reactionary thinking to dominate our democracy. With God on Our Side is call to arms to battle those forces who want to return America to the dark ages.” --Janeane Garofalo "A riveting account of the radical right's assault on science and family planning." --Ms. Magazine FROM THE INTRODUCTION: Four short years and a political lifetime ago, George W. Bush lost the 2000 popular election by more than half a million votes and assumed the leadership of a divided nation. He was expected then, by both the left and the right, to govern from the center. He promised to work closely with Republicans and Democrats “to heal whatever wounds may exist” from the bruising recounts and unprecedented electoral intervention by the Supreme Court. The conciliatory tone that he struck in those early days was consistent with that of his general election campaign, where Bush had stumped for improving public schools and aiding charities, and that of his nominating convention, where he offered up to the nation a vision of a new Republican Party, one characterized by compassion and multiculturalism, where Christian right leaders were exiled from the state in favor of his Latino nephew George P. Bush and African American general Colin Powell. Four years ago, the Christian right was in an equally tenuous position. Its standard bearer, the Christian Coalition, was under investigation by the IRS and the Federal Election Commission, and many of its state chapters were in a state of collapse. Its lead organizers were fleeing so fast that one former field director called the organization “defunct.” Groups such as the Family Research Council and Concerned Women for America, undergoing their own leadership transitions, had not yet risen to take the coalition’s place. The movement had staked its influence on the drive to impeach Bill Clinton, and after that effort collapsed, its leaders projected a palpable sense of gloom. Paul Weyrich, the man who had inspired Jerry Falwell to build a “moral majority” in America, wrote a Dear Friend letter that resounded with defeat. “I no longer believe that there is a moral majority,” he wrote in February 1999. “I do not believe that a majority of Americans actually shares our values….We got our people elected. But that did not result in the adoption of our agenda.” He said the right had lost the culture war, and that instead of becoming more godly, America was becoming “an ever-wider sewer.” He encouraged activists to give up, to quarantine themselves from this infectious immorality, “to drop out of this culture, and find places…where we can live godly, righteous and sober lives.” Weyrich’s letter sparked enormous controversy on the Christian right. But in light of a booming Christian home schooling movement and rising enrollment in fundamentalist Christian colleges, many saw his letter as the harbinger of a new evangelical separatism, marked by a retreat from public life. At the close of Bush’s first term in office, all this has changed. The Christian right has more political power than at any point in its history, and Bush has governed from the far right. He has antagonized much of the world and a broad swath of the American people by launching a bold policy of preemptive war; by flouting international treaties on global warming, arms, and war crimes; and by invading Iraq despite global opposition. He has cemented a profoundly elite economic agenda, giving away hundreds of billions of tax dollars to corporations and the wealthy while undermining labor unions and relaxing laws monitoring public lands, environmental pollutants, and media ownership….He amassed a record deficit conservatively estimated to exceed $500 billion and then threatened social program austerity. So how has George W. Bush managed to pamper the corporate elite, leave 2.5 million Americans jobless, trash the environment, reduce public services, and still maintain an electoral majority? This is not only a question about the political future of George W. Bush—it is a question about the future of American political life. For many analysts, this question was decisively answered by 9/ We can see a second, far more permanent answer to this question in the president’s intense devotion to his evangelical conservative supporters, whom he has decisively reenergized as a political force. Corporate donors may fill GOP coffers, but evangelicals are the party’s institutional grass roots, its believers, its get-out-the-vote ground troops, as important to the Republicans as organized labor and African Americans are, combined, to the Democrats. Bush knows, and Christian right leaders know, that he couldn’t have been elected without them. Though white evangelicals constitute only about 25 percent of the national population, this highly motivated voting bloc made up 40 percent of Bush’s electorate in 2000, an amount he hopes to boost in 2004. When that number is combined with the most religiously observant Catholics, the total comes to 51 percent of all Bush votes in 2000. The Christian right is not just another special interest group, like the NRA. This is Bush’s base. For the president, maintaining fealty from religious conservatives is a first principle. And to this end he has happily ceded huge swaths of his domestic and international policy to this lobby, from abortion and sex education to gay rights, social services, court appointments, and medical research. He has even used his global AIDS initiative, his foreign aid policy, and his war on terror to please religious radicals. To be sure, the Christian right has periodically gained national influence in recent decades, successfully blocking the Equal Rights Amendment for women in the 1970s, shaping Reagan’s social agenda in the 1980s, and pushing anti-abortion and antigay initiatives through state legislatures in the 1990s. But Bush’s own, very public born-again Christianity, combined with the political machinations of his brilliant political advisor Karl Rove, have conspired to provide Christian fundamentalists with an unprecedented level of influence on this White House and on government social policy. Bush often cloaks his “faith-based” approach to governance in rhetoric about how religion has been wrongly banished from the public square, the idea, in the president’s words, that “we’re still fighting old attitudes, habits, and rules that discriminate against religious groups for no good purpose.” But he isn’t really interested in faith in general. The president didn’t flick an eyelash when the National Council of Churches and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops opposed his war on Iraq. He didn’t listen when the Council on American-Islamic Relations filed a suit challenging the constitutionality of the Patriot Act. When the Union for Reform Judaism announced that an antigay marriage amendment would “defile the constitution,” the president took no notice. Nor did Bush respond to a joint call, signed by fifty prominent Christian leaders…for policies to promote “quality health care, decent housing, and a living income” for the poor. His is not an embrace of spirituality or ethics broadly speaking, or of faith as an important voice among many in the national debate. It is, instead, an embrace of right-wing Christian fundamentalism. |
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