The Family (43 page)

W
E KEEP TRYING TO
explain away American fundamentalism. That is, those of us not engaged personally or emotionally in the biggest political and cultural movement of our times—those on the sidelines of history—keep trying to come up with theories to discredit the evident allure of this punishing yet oddly comforting idea of a deity, this strange god. His invisible hand is everywhere, say His citizen-theologians, caressing and fixing every outcome: Little League games, job searches, test scores, the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, the success or failure of terrorists, victory or defeat in battle, at the ballot box, in bed. Those unable to feel His soothing touch at moments such as these snort at the notion of a God with the patience or the prurience to monitor every tick and twitch of desire, a supreme being able to make a lion and a lamb cuddle but unable to abide two men kissing. A divine love that speaks through hurricanes. Who would worship such a god? His followers, we try to reassure ourselves, must be dupes, or saps, or fools, their faith illiterate, insane, or misinformed, their strength fleeting, hollow, an aberration.

We don’t like to consider the possibility that they are not newcomers to power but returnees, that the revivals that have been sweeping the nation with generational regularity since its inception are not flare-ups but the natural temperature fluctuations of American empire. We can’t accept the possibility that those we dismiss as dupes, or saps, or fools—the believers—have been with us from the very beginning, that their story about what America once was and should be seems to some great portion of the population more compelling, more just, and more beautiful than the perfunctory processes of secular democracy. Thus we are at a loss to account for this recurring American mood. The classic means of explaining it away—class envy, sexual anxiety—do not suffice. We cannot, like H. L. Mencken writing from the Scopes “monkey” trial of 1925, dismiss the Christian Right as a carnival of backward buffoons resentful of modernity’s privileges. We cannot, like the
Washington Post
in 1993, explain away the movement as “largely poor, uneducated, and easy to command.” We cannot, like the writer Theodor Adorno, a refugee from Nazi Germany, attribute America’s radical religion—nascent fascism?—to Freudian yearning for a father figure.

No, God isn’t dead; Freud and Marx are. The old theories have failed. The new Christ, fifty years ago no more than a corollary to American power, twenty-five years ago at its vanguard, is now at the very center. His followers are not anxiously awaiting his return at the rapture; he’s here right now. They’re not envious of the middle class, they are the middle class. They’re not looking for a hero to lead them; they’re building biblical households, every man endowed with “headship” over his own family. They don’t silence sex; they promise sacred sex to those who couple properly—orgasms, according to a bit of fundamentalist folklore passed between young singles, “600 percent” more intense for those who wait than those experienced by secular lovers.

Intensity! That’s what one finds within the ranks of the American believers. “This thing is real!” declare our nation’s fundamentalist pastors. It’s all coming together: the sacred and the profane, God’s time and straight time, what theologians and graduates of the new fundamentalist prep schools might call
kairos
and
chronos
, the mystical and the mundane. American fundamentalism—not a political party, not a denomination, not a uniform ideology but a manifold
movement
—is moving in every direction all at once, claiming the earth for God’s kingdom, “in the world but not of it” and yet just loving it to death, anyway. It feels fabulous, this faith, it tingles in all the right places.

Those of us who find ourselves suddenly (or so it seems) at the dried-out margins keep telling ourselves that this country is still a democracy, and that democracy still means “moderation,” private religion and a public square safe for “civil society.” The fundamentalist Christ is not, we tell ourselves, the real Christ. He’s an imposter, a faker, a fraud recently perpetrated on the good-hearted but gullible American masses by cynical men, manipulators, profiteers, a cabal of televangelists. Why? Greed. Anger. Fundamentalists are bitter, an eminent divine of academe opined at a gathering of worthies convened in 2005 by Boston’s PBS affiliate, because they feel neglected by the Ivies. Perhaps more dialogue between Cambridge and Lynchburg, Virginia, home of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, will heal us all.

Rationalism itself has been colonized by fundamentalism, remade in the image of the seductive but strict logic of a prime mover that sets things in motion, not just at the beginning but always. The cause behind every effect, says fundamentalist science, is God. Even the inexorable facts of math are subject to his decree, as explained in homeschooling texts such as
Mathematics: Is God Silent?
Two plus two is four because God says so. If he chose, it could just as easily be five.

It would be cliché to quote George Orwell here were it not for the fact that fundamentalist intellectuals do so with even greater frequency than those of the Left. At a rally to expose the “myth” of church/state separation in the spring of 2006, Orwell was quoted at me four times, most emphatically by William J. Federer, a compiler of quotations whose
America’s God and Country
—a collection of seemingly theocratic bon mots distilled from the founders and other great men “for use in speeches, papers, [and] debates”—has sold half a million copies. “Those who control the past,” Federer quoted Orwell’s
1984
, “control the future.”

Federer, a tall, lean, oaken-voiced man, loved talking about history as revelation, nodding along gently to his own lectures. He wore a gray suit, a red tie marred by a stain, and an American flag pin in his lapel. He looked like a congressman. He’d twice run for former House minority leader Dick Gephardt’s St. Louis seat. He lost both times, but the movement considers him a winner—in 2000, he faced Gephardt in the nation’s third most expensive congressional race, forcing him to spend down his war chest and default on promises to fellow Democrats, a move that led to Gephardt’s fall.

Federer and I were riding together in a white school bus full of Christians from around the country to pray at the site on which the Danbury, Connecticut, First Baptist Church once stood. It was in an 1802 letter to this church that Thomas Jefferson coined the phrase “wall of separation,” three words upon which the battle over whether the United States is to be a Christian nation turns. Federer, leaning over the back of his seat as several pastors bent their ears toward his story, wanted me to understand that what Jefferson—notorious deist and author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom—had really meant to promote was a “one-way wall,” designed to protect the church from the state, not the other way around. Jefferson, Federer told me, was a believer; like all the Founders, he knew that there could be no government without God. Why hadn’t I been taught this? Because I was a victim of godless public schools.

“Those who control the
present
,” Federer continued darkly, “control the past.” He paused and stared at me to make sure I understood the equation. “Orson Welles wrote that,” he said.

Welles, Orwell, who cares? Federer wasn’t talking tactics or, for that matter, even history; he was talking revolution, past, present, and future.

T
HE FIRST PILLAR
of American fundamentalism is Jesus Christ; the second is history, and in the fundamentalist mind the two are converging. Fundamentalism considers itself a faith of basic truths unaltered (if not always acknowledged) since their transmission from heaven, first through the Bible and second through what they see as American scripture, divinely inspired, devoutly intended: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the often overlooked Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which declared “religion” necessary to “good government” and thus to be encouraged through schools. Well into the nineteenth century, most American schoolchildren learned their ABCs from
The New-England Primer
, which begins with “In Adam’s Fall, we sinned all” and continues on to “Spiritual Milk for American Babes, Drawn out of the Breasts of Both Testaments.” In 1836,
McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers
began to displace the
Primer
, selling some 122 million copies of lessons such as “The Bible the Best of Classics” and “Religion the Only Basis of Society” during the following century.

It wasn’t until the 1930s, the most irreligious decade in American history, that public education veered away from biblical indoctrination so thoroughly that within a few decades most Americans wrongly believed that nationalistic manifest destiny—itself thinly veiled Calvinism—rather than open piety was the American educational tradition. The fundamentalist movement sees that to reclaim America for God, it must first reclaim that tradition, and so it is producing a flood of educational texts with which to wash away the stains of secular history.

Such chronicles are written primarily for the homeschoolers and the fundamentalist academies that as of this writing together account for as much as 10 percent or more of the nation’s children, an expanding population that buys a billion dollars’ worth of educational materials annually. These pupils are known by many within the movement as “Generation Joshua,” in honor of the biblical hero who marched seven times around Jericho before slaughtering “every living thing in it.” The Home School Legal Defense Association has lately been attempting to organize Generation Joshua into “GenJ” political action clubs for teens modeled, claims the association, on a scheme for Christian governance conceived of by Alexander Hamilton shortly before Aaron Burr shot him dead in a duel. Set up by congressional district, the clubs study “America’s Godly heritage,” write letters to the editor, and register older siblings as voters. They adopt thrilling names such as Joshua’s Arrows of Nashville, Tennessee, or Operation Impact of Los Gatos, California, or the GenJ Hot Rockin’ Awesomes of Purcellville, Virginia.

“Who, knowing the facts of our history,” asks the epigraph to the 2000 edition of
The American Republic for Christian Schools
, a junior high–level textbook, “can doubt that the United States of America has been a thought in the mind of God from all eternity?”
¹
So that I would know the facts, I undertook my own course of homeschooling: in addition to
The American Republic
, I read the two-volume teacher’s edition of
United States History for Christian Schools
, appropriate for eleventh-graders, and the accompanying
Economics for Christian Schools,
*
and I walked the streets of Brooklyn listening to an eighteen-tape lecture series on America up to 1865 created for a Christian college by the late Rousas John Rushdoony, the theologian who helped launch Christian homeschooling and revived the idea of reading American history through a providential lens.
†
I was down by the waterfront, pausing to scribble a note on Alexis de Tocqueville—Rushdoony argues that de Tocqueville was really a fundamentalist Christian disguised as a Frenchman—when a white and blue police van rolled up behind me and squawked its siren. There were four officers inside.

“What are you writing?” the driver asked. The other three leaned toward the window.

“Notes,” I said, tapping my headphones.

“Okay. What are you listening to?”

I said I didn’t think I had to tell him.

“This is a high-security area,” he said. On the other side of a barbed-wire fence, he said, was a Coast Guard storage facility for deadly chemicals. “Somebody blow that up and boom, bye-bye Brooklyn.” Note taking in the vicinity might be a problem. “So, I gotta ask again, what are you listening to?”

How to explain—to the cop who had just clued me in on the ripest terrorist target in Brooklyn—that I was listening to a Christian jihadi lecture on how democracy as practiced in America was defiance of God’s intentions, how God gave to the United States the “irresistible blessings” of biblical capitalism unknown to Europe, and how we have vandalized this with vulgar regulations, how God loves the righteous who fight in His name?

Like this: “American history.”

Providence
would have been a better word. I was “unschooling” myself, Bill Apelian, the director of Bob Jones University Press, explained. What seemed to me a self-directed course of study was, in fact, the replacement of my secular assumptions with a curriculum guided by God. When BJU Press, one of the biggest fundamentalist educational publishers, started out thirty years ago, science was its most popular subject, and it could be summed up in one word:
created.
Now, American history is on the rise. “We call it Heritage Studies,” Apelian said, and explained its growing centrality: “History
is
God’s working in man.”

My unschooling continued. I read Rushdoony’s most influential contemporary, the late Francis Schaeffer, an American whose Swiss mountain retreat, L’Abri (The Shelter), served as a Christian madrassa at which a generation of fundamentalist intellectuals studied a reenchanted American past, “Christian at least in memory.” And I read Schaeffer’s disciples. Tim LaHaye, who besides coauthoring the hugely popular
Left Behind
series of novels has published an equally fantastical work of history called
Mind Siege
. (“The leading authorities of Secular Humanism may be pictured as a baseball team,” writes LaHaye, with John Dewey as pitcher, Margaret Sanger in centerfield, Bertrand Russell at third, and Isaac Asimov at first). And David Barton, the president of a history ministry called WallBuilders (as in, to keep the heathen out); and Chuck Colson, who searches from the Greeks to the American founders to fellow Watergate felon G. Gordon Liddy for the essence of the Christian worldview, a vision of an American future so entirely Christ-filtered that beside it
theocracy
—the clumsy governance of priestly bureaucrats, disdained by Schaeffer and Colson—seems a modest ambition.
Theocentric
is the preferred term, Randall Terry, the Schaeffer disciple who went on to found Operation Rescue, one of the galvanizing forces of the anti-abortion movement, told me. “That means you view the world in His terms. Theocentrists, we don’t believe man can create law. Man can only embrace or reject law.” The study of history for fundamentalists is a process of divining that law, and to that end the theocentric worldview collapses the past into one great parable—Colson, for instance, studies the Roman Empire for insight into the expansion of America’s—applicable at all stages of learning.