Conservatives Without Conscience (34 page)

50.
Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, “Bush’s Gains Broad-Based: Religion and the Presidential Vote (December 6, 2004) at http://people-press.org/commentary/pdf/103.pdf.

51.
Special Report, “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet,”
The Economist
(June 23, 2005).

52.
Joel Rogers, “Devolve This!,”
The Nation
(August 30–September 6, 2004), 20.

53.
Mark Noll explained evangelicalism as the “belief that lives need to be changed”; the “belief that all spiritual truth” is found in the Bible; dedication to active lives in service of God, or to “evangelism” (spreading the good news) and “mission” (taking the gospel to other societies); and conviction that Christ’s death on the cross provided reconciliation between a holy god and sinful human beings. See Ethics & Public Policy Center, “Center Conversations: Understanding American Evangelicals, A Conversation with Mark Noll and Jay Tolson” (June 2004) at http://www.eppc.org/publications/pubID.2115/pub_detail.asp.

54.
Ethics & Public Policy Center, “Center Conversations,” 18.

55.
Ibid.

56.
Christian Smith,
Christian America? What Evangelicals Really Want
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 3.

57.
Smith polled over twenty-five hundred church-going Protestants in a 1996 telephone survey that he reproduces in the book. He acknowledged the weakness of this type of polling, and the results are now dated. Nonetheless, the surveys have some rather alarming findings. For example, a survey focusing on the South revealed that 87 percent of self-identified evangelicals believed that the United States was founded “as a Christian nation”; 92 percent saw “a serious breakdown of American society”; 68 percent believed “morals should be based on an absolute, unchanging standard”; 69 percent disagreed with the notion that religion is a private matter “to be kept out of public debates over social and political issues”; 55 percent believed “Christian morality should be the law of the land even though not all Americans are Christians”; 68 percent believed the “federal government should promote traditional values in our society”; and 77 percent believed “the mass media is hostile to [evangelical] moral and spiritual values.” (Ibid., 200.) In a survey of religious identity and influence, only 35 percent of the evangelicals
disagreed
with the statement “Everyone should have the right to live by their own morality, even when it is not Christian morality.” This, of course, suggested that as many as 65 percent of evangelicals wanted to tell others, regardless of their beliefs, how to lead their lives. (Ibid., 201.) This poll also showed that 90 percent of the evangelicals believed “Public school instruction should include Christian views of science and history,” i.e., intelligent design and creationism. (Ibid. 204.) A more encouraging result was in the Religious Right Survey (a nationwide poll of over a thousand conducted by Gallup in 1996) that re
vealed that only 4 percent of all polled, including evangelicals, admired David Duke, who was then running for the U.S. Senate in Louisiana.
     Smith and his collaborators also interviewed evangelicals face-to-face from select locations, but it was a very small sample that had not been selected randomly; in addition, these kinds of interviews are not always as candid as anonymous responses. In short, this is not a scientifically representative selection of all evangelicals, but rather a largely anecdotal collection of information gathered from evangelicals willing to talk with sociologists. As another social scientist, familiar with this work, explained, “The sampling procedure is critical, since Smith says his interviews tell us what evangelicals really think and want. That is a big claim and it means he has to have a representative sample. The evidence strongly suggests he does not. This team apparently did two studies using face-to-face interviews. One involved 130 church-going Protestants in six different locations around the U.S., and the second involved 187 evangelicals and others in 23 states. Neither of these is a national sample. If you look at the map in the book, you can see that most of the interviewees (in the second, larger study) came from places near large universities. You can even guess the academic affiliation of many of the sociologists involved by looking at the map. One consequence is that the Deep South, which has the largest concentration of evangelicals in the country, is pretty underrepresented. One might well find that evangelicals who live in university communities have higher educational attainments, etc., than other evangelicals. A second issue is how the researchers found the particular evangelicals in their locale to interview. We aren’t told, but in the Acknowledgments Smith thanks the pastors who ‘in many cases’ granted the researchers access to the interviewees. So it is quite plausible that the investigators contacted the pastors of conservative Protestant churches in their area, and the pastors selected—at least to some extent—the evangelicals to be interviewed. That makes it potentially a very biased and misleading sample.”

58.
Cal Thomas and Ed Dobson,
Blinded by Might: Can the Religious Right Save America?
(Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1999), 191.

59.
Ibid., 52, 58, 59.

60.
Ibid., 54.

61.
Ibid., 55, 56.

62.
Jimmy Carter,
Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), 2–3.

63.
Ibid., 34–35.

64.
Ibid., 100–101.

65.
Ibid., 88.

66.
Paul Jalsevac, “Bush Appoints a Pro-Lifer to the UN,”
The Interim
(July 2004) at http://www.theinterim.com/2004/july/17bushappoints.html.

67.
John C. Danforth, “Onward, Moderate Christian Soldiers,”
New York Times
(June 17, 2005), A-27.

68.
Bob Altemeyer,
The Authoritarian Specter
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 147.

69.
Robert Boston,
The Most Dangerous Man in America? Pat Robertson and the Rise of the Christian Coalition
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1996), 25.

70.
Americans United for Separation of Church and State, “Religious Leader Approves of Sending ‘Squads’ to ‘Take Out’ Foreign Leaders” at http://www.au.org/site/News2?JServSessionIdr005=1uj2ym0jp3.app5b&abbr=pr& page=NewsArticle&id=6179&news_iv_ctrl=1477.

71.
Boston,
The Most Dangerous Man in America?,
164.

72.
Ibid., 164, 165.

73.
Ibid., 39.

74.
Americans United for Separation of Church and State, “TV Preacher Pat Robertson Suggests God Removed Israeli Leader Sharon Because of Land Policies” (January 5, 2006) at http://www.au.org/site/News2?JServSessionIdr 006=94g6kp2dr2.app13a&abbr=pr&page=NewsArticle&id=7782&security=1002&news_iv_ctrl=1241.

75.
David Van Biema, “What Was Robertson Thinking? With a $50 million partnership hanging in the balance, Robertson tries to make amends for his insensitive comments toward Israel,”
Time
(January 13, 2006) at http://www.time.com/time/nation/printout/0,8816,1149156,00.html.

76.
Boston,
The Most Dangerous Man in America?,
39.

77.
Joe Queenan, “Bookshelf: New World Order Nut,”
Wall Street Journal
(December 31, 1991), A-5.

78.
Pat Robertson,
Courting Disaster: How the Supreme Court Is Usurping the Power of Congress and the People
(Nashville: Integrity Publishers, 2004), 236–37.

79.
Adam Nagourney, Richard W. Stevenson, and Neil A. Lewis, “Glum Democrats Can’t See Halting Bush on Courts,”
New York Times
(January 15, 2006), A-1.

80.
Robertson,
Courting Disaster,
258.

81.
Charles Colson and Nancy Pearcey, “Who holds these truths?,”
Christianity Today
(October 6, 1997), 144.

82.
For example, Mark Noll mentions Colson’s works when exploring the question “Is an Evangelical Intellectual Renaissance Underway,” in Mark A. Noll,
The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind
(Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1994), 223.

83.
Marbury v. Madison,
5 U.S. 147 (1803).

84.
See David E. Engdahl, “John Marshall’s ‘Jeffersonian’ Concept of Judicial Review,”
Duke Law Journal
(November 1992), 279, 284–89.

85.
Ibid. Professor Engdahl’s examination of often neglected data is the basis for the summary I have provided of pre-
Marbury
practices regarding judicial review.

86.
See Michael Stokes Paulsen, “The Most Dangerous Branch: Executive Power to Say What the Law Is,”
Georgetown Law Journal
(December 1994), 217, 259 n.159. Professor Paulsen argued that presidents do have the power to interpret the law.

87.
Lincoln historian Philip S. Paludan wrote, “Although clear evidence is lacking, it would not be surprising if Lincoln had put him up to it, for the president continued to believe that border-state challenges to slavery would deal a heavy blow to the rebellion.” Phillip Shaw Paludan,
The Presidency of Abraham Lincoln
at http://www.mrlincolnandfreedom.org/content_inside.asp?ID=56&subjectID=3.

Chapter 4: Troubling Politics and Policies

1.
Raymond Hernandez, “At King Event, Mrs. Clinton Denounces G.O.P. Leadership,”
New York Times
(January 18, 2006), A-1.

2.
David Maraniss and Michael Weisskopf,
Tell Newt to Shut Up!
(New York: Touchstone, 1996), 5.

3.
David Osborne, “Newt Gingrich: Shining King of the Post-Reagan Right,”
Mother Jones
(November 1, 1984) at http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/1984/11/osborne.html.

4.
Donald T. Critchlow, “When Republicans Become Revolutionaries.” In Julian E. Zelizer, ed.,
The American Congress
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 717.

5.
Osborne, “Newt Gingrich: Shining King of the Post-Reagan Right.”

6.
Critchlow, “When Republicans Become Revolutionaries.”

7.
Dan T. Carter,
From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, 1963–1994
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), 119.

8.
Ibid.

9.
Ibid.

10.
Evan Thomas, Holly Bailey, and Michael Isikoff, “The Exterminator: Expelled, Born Again. Tom DeLay’s Rise—and the Risks That Could End It,”
Newsweek
(October 17, 2005), 28.

11.
See “Texas Congressional Redistricting, Gerrymandering, Minority Vote Dilution, Equal Protection, First Amendment, Voting Rights Act,”
FindLaw
at http://supreme.lp.findlaw.com/supreme_court/docket/2005/March.html.

12.
John Ydstie, “Profile: The K Street Project and Tom DeLay,”
Weekend Edition,
National Public Radio (January 14, 2006) transcript.

13.
Lou Dubose and Jan Reid,
The Hammer: Tom DeLay: God, Money, and the Rise of the Republican Congress
(New York: Public Affairs, 2004), 64–65.

14.
John Samples, “Same as the Old Boss? Congressional Reforms under the Republicans.” In
The Republican Revolution 10 Years Later: Smaller Government or Business as Usual?
(Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2005), 23. Neither Samples nor the Cato Institute, which published this book, addresses Gingrich’s campaign to denigrate Congress. In fact, Gingrich is one of the book’s contributors. But the numbers speak for themselves, and Gingrich’s attacks on both members of Congress and the House of Representatives itself was certainly not a stealth campaign.

15.
See Republicans’ 1994 “Contract with America” at http://www.house.gov/house/Contract/CONTRACT.html.

16.
Dubose and Reid,
The Hammer,
87.

17.
Ibid., 88.

18.
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.,
The Cycles of American History
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, Mariner Book edition, 1986), vii.

19.
Lee H. Hamilton,
How Congress Works and Why You Should Care
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 47.

20.
John Samples, “Same as the Old Boss?,” 23–24.