A Very Undead Christian Right

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Susan Jacoby

A Very Undead Christian Right

We are hearing a great deal about the emergence of America into a “post-Christian right” era—meaning, essentially, that liberal religious believers are going to take back the rubric of religion from ultra-conservative fundamentalists. I am all for that. I prefer liberal Baptists like former President Jimmy Carter, who believes in the separation of church and state, to anti-secular Baptist fundamentalists like Mike Huckabee. But it is a dangerous delusion, based on wishful thinking, to underestimate the organized, well-financed strength of Christian fundamentalism and its profound anti-rational influence on every aspect of American culture.

A few years ago, I was invited to speak on secular thought in American history at Eastern Kentucky University—an engagement I welcomed because I love the opportunity to show students in the Bible Belt that secularists and atheists don’t have horns. What ensued was one of the more humiliating evenings in my life on the lecture circuit. About 75 students filed into a hall to hear me, while at least 500 lined up for a speaker sponsored by the Campus Crusade for Christ. That lecturer was a self-described “recovering pedophile,” talking about how he had disciplined himself to keep his hands off little children by accepting Christ as his savior. Yes, the college audience preferred a pedophile to me—someone whose seditious activities are limited to spreading the word about the Enlightenment ideals of America’s founders.

I tell this story not to elicit sympathy but to make a point about the long-term effort that has gone into the promotion of anti-rational forms of religion. The Campus Crusade is actually an old organization, founded in the early fifties by a southern California businessman named Bill Bright. Its evangelical efforts only began to gain real traction—in universities inside and outside the Bible Belt—in the late 1960s, when the “crusaders” began appealing to young men and women disillusioned with drugs and the sexual revolution.

The group, which had only 109 employees in 1960, is now a proselytizing international organization with more than 27.000 paid staff members and 225,000 volunteers. On campuses today, as I discovered, one of the Crusade’s activities is deliberate “counterprogramming” against secularist speakers, including scientists defending evolution. College freethought groups, as well as traditional campus religious organizations associated with mainstream denominations, have nothing like the financing available to powerful right-wing religious recruiter of the young.

Many pundits today mistakenly talk about the politicization of right-wing religion as if it were a relatively recent phenomenon that began with the election of Ronald Reagan and has reached its apotheosis under George W. Bush. But the resurgence of right-wing fundamentalism dates from what I call “the Other Sixties,”—the cultural reaction against all of the social upheavals on the left, including the civil rights, the anti-Vietnam war, feminist and gay rights movements—that are generally associated with “the Sixties.”

Richard Nixon was the first Republican to understand that conservative religious believers, including fundamentalist Protestants and Roman Catholics who opposed the reforms initiated by that great religious leader, Pope John XXIII, could form a new base for the GOP.

During the 1968 campaign, Dick and Pat Nixon did bother to not call on Reinhold Niebuhr, the most prominent liberal Protestant theologian in America, but they did make a well-publicized appearance at one of Billy Graham’s “crusades.” At the inauguration, Graham returned the favor by offering thanks to a God who “hast permitted Richard Nixon to lead us at this momentous hour of history.” The Protestant followers of evangelists like Graham were ripe for the political alliance with conservative Catholics that would emerge after the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion.

During this period, religious conservatives in the South created a new kindergarten-through-college system of right-wing Protestant schools—first in response to public school desegregation and later as a means of making sure that their children would be educated without secular ideas like evolution. Many warriors of today’s Christian right are graduates of these schools. They hold positions of power at all levels of government, education and business and their children (and grandchildren) are active in organizations like the Campus Crusade.

These people are not going away and it will take more than than an energized religious left to hold them in check—however the 2008 presidential election turns out. I am disturbed not by the efforts of liberal evangelicals to reclaim the good name of religion but by their suggestion that all liberal political candidates justify their policies in terms of faith.
To overcome the political power of the Christian right, what is needed today is not a “return to religion” on the left but an alliance of moderate religious believers with unapologetic secularists on the most important social issues of our day. Together, we can restrain the harmful political influence of the religious right. But if liberal religious believers try to marginalize secularists, particularly within the Democratic Party, the religious right will be the real winner.

This essay is adapted from "On Faith" panelist Susan Jacoby’s newly published book, "The Age of American Unreason" (Pantheon). Read an excerpt.



Posted by Susan Jacoby on February 12, 2008 8:20 AM

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