[NYTr] Hedges: The Evangelical Rebellion

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

TruthDig - Dec 23, 2007
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20071223_the_evangelical_rebellion/


The Evangelical Rebellion

By Chris Hedges

The rise of Mike Huckabee as a presidential candidate represents a
seismic shift in the tactics, ideology and direction of the radical
Christian right. Huckabee may stumble and falter in later primaries,
but his right-wing Christian populism is here to stay. Huckabee
represents a new and potent force in American politics, and the neocons
and corporate elite, who once viewed the yahoos of the Christian right
as the useful idiots, are now confronted with the fact that they
themselves are the ones who have been taken for a ride. Members of the
Christian right, recruited into the Republican Party and manipulated to
vote against their own interests around the issues of abortion and
family values, are in rebellion. They are taking the party into new,
uncharted territory. And they presage, especially with looming economic
turmoil, the rise of a mass movement that could demolish what is left
of American democracy and set the stage for a Christian fascism.

The corporate establishment, whose plundering of the country created
fertile ground for a radical, right-wing backlash, is sounding the
alarm bells. It is scrambling to bolster Mitt Romney, who, like Rudy
Giuliani or Hillary Clinton, will continue to slash and burn on behalf
of corporate profits. Columnist George Will called Huckabee’s populism
“a comprehensive apostasy against core Republican beliefs.” He wrote
that Huckabee’s candidacy "broadly repudiates core Republican policies
such as free trade, low taxes, the essential legitimacy of America’s
corporate entities and the market system allocating wealth and
opportunity." National Review’s Rich Lowry wrote that "like [Howard]
Dean, his nomination would represent an act of suicide by his party."
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NjJiZDBjZWFiNmFmY2M1NDg2ZjM1Y2YwZjdjNzliMDg=#more

Huckabee spoke of this revolt on the "Today" show. "There’s a sense in
which all these years the evangelicals have been treated very kindly by
the Republican Party," he said. "They wanted us to be a part of it. And
then one day one of us actually runs and they say, 'Oh, my gosh, now
they’re serious.' They [evangelicals] don’t want to just show up and
vote, they actually would want to be a part of the discussion."

George Bush is a happy stooge of his corporate handlers. He blithely
enriches the oligarchy, defends a war that is the worst foreign policy
blunder in American history and callously denies medical benefits to
children. Huckabee is different. He has tapped into the rage and fury
of the working class, dispossessed and abandoned by the mainstream
Democrats and Republicans. And he refuses to make the ideology of the
Christian right, with its dark contempt for democratic traditions and
intolerance of nonbelievers, a handmaiden of the corporate
establishment. This makes him a much more lethal and radical political
force. 

The Christian right is the most potent and dangerous mass movement in
American history. It has been controlled and led, until now, by those
who submit to the demands of the corporate state. But the grass roots
are tired of being taken for rubes. They are tired of candidates, like
Bush or Bill Clinton, who roll out the same clichés about working men
and women every four years and then spend their terms enriching their
corporate backers. The majority of American citizens have spent the
last two decades watching their government services and benefits
vanish. They have seen their jobs go overseas and are watching as their
communities crumble and their houses are foreclosed. It is their kids
who are in Iraq and Afghanistan. The old guard in the Christian right,
the Pat Robertsons, who used their pulpits to deliver the votes of
naive followers to the corporatists, is a spent force. Huckabee’s
Christian populism represents the maturation of the movement. It
signals the rise of a truly radical, even revolutionary force in
American politics, of which Huckabee may be one of the tamer and less
frightening examples.

Hints of Huckabee’s bizarre worldview seep out now and then. Bob Vander
Plaats, Huckabee’s Iowa campaign manager, for example, when asked about
his candidate’s lack of foreign policy experience, told MSNBC: "Well, I
think Gov. Huckabee has a lot of resources that he goes to on national
security matters. Here’s a guy, a former pastor, who understands a
theological nature of this war as we’re fighting a radical religion in
Islam."

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/mark-finkelstein/2007/12/19/huckabee-iowa-manager-were-fighting-radical-religion-islam

Robert Novak noted that Huckabee held a fundraiser last week at the
Houston home of Dr. Steven Hotze.  As Novak wrote, Hotze is "a leader
in the highly conservative Christian Reconstruction movement."
http://www.unionleader.com/columns.aspx/Opinion?channel=fe1d0db2-6b0f-459a-ad33-e0ad5ae9d650

Huckabee has close ties with the Christian Reconstructionist or
Dominionist branch of the Christian right. The Dominionist movement,
which seeks to cloak itself in the mantle of the Christian faith and
American patriotism, is small in numbers but influential. It departs
from traditional evangelicalism. It seeks to redefine traditional
democratic and Christian terms and concepts to fit an ideology that
calls on the radical church to take political power. It shares many
prominent features with classical fascist movements, at least as such
movements are defined by the scholar Robert O. Paxton, who sees fascism
as “a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with
community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory
cultures of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of
committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective
collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties
and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal
restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”

Dominionism, born out of Christian Reconstructionism, seeks to
politicize faith. It has, like all fascist movements, a belief in magic
along with leadership adoration and a strident call for moral and
physical supremacy of a master race, in this case American Christians.
It also has, like fascist movements, an ill-defined and shifting set of
beliefs, some of which contradict each other. Paxton argues that the
best way to understand authentic fascist movements, which he says exist
in all societies, including democracies, is to focus not on what they
say but on how they act, for, as he writes, some of the ideas that
underlie fascist movements “remain unstated and implicit in fascist
public language” and “many of them belong more to the realm of visceral
feelings than to the realm of reasoned propositions.”

Dominionism teaches that American Christians have been mandated by God
to make America a Christian state. A decades-long refusal by most
American fundamentalists to engage in politics at all following the
Scopes trial has been replaced by a call for Christian “dominion” over
the nation and, eventually, over the Earth itself. Dominionism preaches
that Jesus has called on Christians to actively build the kingdom of
God on Earth. America becomes, in this militant Biblicism, an agent of
God, and all political and intellectual opponents of America’s
Christian leaders are viewed, quite simply, as agents of Satan. Under
Christian dominion, America will no longer be a sinful and fallen
nation but one in which the Ten Commandments form the basis of our
legal system, in which creationism and “Christian values” form the
basis of our educational system, and the media and the government
proclaim the Good News to one and all. Labor unions, civil rights laws
and public schools will be abolished. Women will be removed from the
work force to stay at home, and all those deemed insufficiently
Christian will be denied citizenship. 

Baptist minister Rick Scarborough, founder of Vision America and a
self-described “Christocrat,” who attended the Texas fundraiser, has
endorsed Huckabee. Scarborough, along with holding other bizarre
stances, opposes the HPV (human papillomavirus) vaccine on grounds that
it interferes with God’s punishment of sexual license. And Huckabee,
who once advocated isolating AIDS patients from the general public and
opposed increased federal funding in the search for a cure, comes out
of this frightening mold. He justified his call to quarantine those
with AIDS because they could “pose a dangerous public health risk.”

"If the federal government is truly serious about doing something with
the AIDS virus, we need to take steps that would isolate the carriers
of this plague," Huckabee wrote. "It is difficult to understand the
public policy towards AIDS. It is the first time in the history of
civilization in which the carriers of a genuine plague have not been
isolated from the general population, and in which this deadly disease
for which there is no cure is being treated as a civil rights issue
instead of the true health crisis it represents."

Huckabee has publicly backed off from this extreme position, but he
remains deeply hostile to gays. He has used wit and humor to deflect
reporters from his radical views about marriage, abortion, damnation,
biblical law, creationism and the holy war he believes we are fighting
with Islam. But his stances represent a huge step, should they ever
become policy, toward a theocratic state and the death of our open
society. In the end, however, I do not blame Huckabee or the tens of
millions of hapless Christians -- 40 percent of the Republican
electorate -- who hear his words and rejoice. I blame the corporate
state, those who thought they could disempower and abuse the working
class, rape the country, build a rapacious oligarchy and never pay a
political price. 


[Chris Hedges, who graduated from seminary at Harvard Divinity School,
is the author of "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on
America."]