Blackberry Apocalypse
Nicholas Guyatt
London Review of Books
* American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America by Chris Hedges
Only a year ago, American evangelical Christians seemed more powerful than they had ever been. They had helped to re-elect George W. Bush in 2004, in spite of a rickety economy and the disastrous invasion of Iraq. They had waged a successful campaign in Washington to restrict access to late-term abortion. They had launched a series of ballot initiatives intended to prevent states or judges legalising gay marriage. And they had encouraged the Bush administration to appoint sympathetic justices to the Supreme Court. (In 2005, they secured their long-standing goal of a conservative majority on the court.) As the mid-term elections approached, worried liberals were warning that an American theocracy was just around the corner.
Then things started to unravel. When Americans went to the polls last November, both branches of Congress fell to the Democrats and the Republicans lost control of the House for the first time since Newt Gingrich’s triumph in 1994. Some of the religious right’s most loyal allies were vanquished. Tom DeLay, the former bug exterminator from Texas who had been a steadfast friend to evangelicals during his time as House majority leader, was dethroned in a corruption scandal before the election. The voters of Pennsylvania rejected Rick Santorum, perhaps the strongest voice for the evangelical agenda in the Senate, who had opposed gay marriage with unusual fervour. (In 2003, he told Associated Press that marriage should legitimate neither gay unions nor ‘man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be’.)
Meanwhile, one of the most powerful evangelical leaders in America, Reverend Ted Haggard of the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, was caught up in a sex scandal. Haggard was a trusted adviser to the president on social issues and had drawn plenty of attention from skittish liberal journalists. Days before the November elections, a male prostitute from Denver told the press that Pastor Ted (who is married with five children) had paid him for sex on numerous occasions during the previous three years. Haggard had spiced up their encounters by taking crystal meth, his accuser claimed. To the amazement of evangelicals, Haggard admitted that he was a ‘deceiver’ guilty of ‘sexual immorality’. (He also admitted that he’d bought the drugs, though not that he’d used them.) He was fired from New Life and retreated for a period of spiritual contemplation, claiming that he was ‘completely heterosexual’.
Things got worse. In May this year, Jerry Falwell, arguably the most influential evangelical of the last three decades, died suddenly of a heart attack in his office at Liberty University in Virginia. Falwell had founded Liberty in 1971 as a private religious college and it played an important role in nurturing Christian causes, from the pro-life movement to Bible prophecy. It was the more embarrassing, then, that a Liberty student was arrested at Falwell’s funeral with homemade bombs in his car. He told police he’d brought them just in case liberal protesters threatened the cortège.
Now, with Congress in the hands of the Democrats and the party’s leading presidential candidates raising record-breaking sums of money, Christian conservatives find themselves in an unenviable position. They don’t have a strong candidate for 2008 and aren’t keen on any of the Republican frontrunners. Rudy Giuliani was the mayor of New York City, Sodom to Las Vegas’s Gomorrah, and his Manichean view of the war on terror can’t make up for his pro-choice position or his other bracingly liberal views. (Giuliani camped out at a gay couple’s flat after he left his second wife and children in 2000, and he has made several public appearances in drag.) John McCain has shown himself to be unreliable on terror with his liberal-sounding objections to torture at Guantánamo and is too friendly to illegal immigrants. With Mitt Romney, it’s hard to know which is the more off-putting: that he served as governor of hippie Massachusetts or that he is a Mormon. Mike Huckabee, who was a Southern Baptist minister before he became governor of Arkansas, has cluttered his anti-abortion platform with liberal ideas about fighting poverty, protecting the environment and limiting the pay of corporate executives. Even the dark horse of the race, senator-turned-actor-turned-candidate Fred Thompson, has a liberal skeleton in his closet: his lobbying firm did work for pro-choice groups during the Clinton years. In 2000 and 2004, the religious right could rally behind a candidate who said, with apparent sincerity, that Jesus Christ had ‘changed my heart’. This time, the leading Republican candidates sound unconvincing when they court Christian conservatives – if they try to court them at all.
(Continued here.)
London Review of Books
* American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America by Chris Hedges
Only a year ago, American evangelical Christians seemed more powerful than they had ever been. They had helped to re-elect George W. Bush in 2004, in spite of a rickety economy and the disastrous invasion of Iraq. They had waged a successful campaign in Washington to restrict access to late-term abortion. They had launched a series of ballot initiatives intended to prevent states or judges legalising gay marriage. And they had encouraged the Bush administration to appoint sympathetic justices to the Supreme Court. (In 2005, they secured their long-standing goal of a conservative majority on the court.) As the mid-term elections approached, worried liberals were warning that an American theocracy was just around the corner.
Then things started to unravel. When Americans went to the polls last November, both branches of Congress fell to the Democrats and the Republicans lost control of the House for the first time since Newt Gingrich’s triumph in 1994. Some of the religious right’s most loyal allies were vanquished. Tom DeLay, the former bug exterminator from Texas who had been a steadfast friend to evangelicals during his time as House majority leader, was dethroned in a corruption scandal before the election. The voters of Pennsylvania rejected Rick Santorum, perhaps the strongest voice for the evangelical agenda in the Senate, who had opposed gay marriage with unusual fervour. (In 2003, he told Associated Press that marriage should legitimate neither gay unions nor ‘man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be’.)
Meanwhile, one of the most powerful evangelical leaders in America, Reverend Ted Haggard of the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, was caught up in a sex scandal. Haggard was a trusted adviser to the president on social issues and had drawn plenty of attention from skittish liberal journalists. Days before the November elections, a male prostitute from Denver told the press that Pastor Ted (who is married with five children) had paid him for sex on numerous occasions during the previous three years. Haggard had spiced up their encounters by taking crystal meth, his accuser claimed. To the amazement of evangelicals, Haggard admitted that he was a ‘deceiver’ guilty of ‘sexual immorality’. (He also admitted that he’d bought the drugs, though not that he’d used them.) He was fired from New Life and retreated for a period of spiritual contemplation, claiming that he was ‘completely heterosexual’.
Things got worse. In May this year, Jerry Falwell, arguably the most influential evangelical of the last three decades, died suddenly of a heart attack in his office at Liberty University in Virginia. Falwell had founded Liberty in 1971 as a private religious college and it played an important role in nurturing Christian causes, from the pro-life movement to Bible prophecy. It was the more embarrassing, then, that a Liberty student was arrested at Falwell’s funeral with homemade bombs in his car. He told police he’d brought them just in case liberal protesters threatened the cortège.
Now, with Congress in the hands of the Democrats and the party’s leading presidential candidates raising record-breaking sums of money, Christian conservatives find themselves in an unenviable position. They don’t have a strong candidate for 2008 and aren’t keen on any of the Republican frontrunners. Rudy Giuliani was the mayor of New York City, Sodom to Las Vegas’s Gomorrah, and his Manichean view of the war on terror can’t make up for his pro-choice position or his other bracingly liberal views. (Giuliani camped out at a gay couple’s flat after he left his second wife and children in 2000, and he has made several public appearances in drag.) John McCain has shown himself to be unreliable on terror with his liberal-sounding objections to torture at Guantánamo and is too friendly to illegal immigrants. With Mitt Romney, it’s hard to know which is the more off-putting: that he served as governor of hippie Massachusetts or that he is a Mormon. Mike Huckabee, who was a Southern Baptist minister before he became governor of Arkansas, has cluttered his anti-abortion platform with liberal ideas about fighting poverty, protecting the environment and limiting the pay of corporate executives. Even the dark horse of the race, senator-turned-actor-turned-candidate Fred Thompson, has a liberal skeleton in his closet: his lobbying firm did work for pro-choice groups during the Clinton years. In 2000 and 2004, the religious right could rally behind a candidate who said, with apparent sincerity, that Jesus Christ had ‘changed my heart’. This time, the leading Republican candidates sound unconvincing when they court Christian conservatives – if they try to court them at all.
(Continued here.)
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