Christian Right's Ideology Seeps Into US Left ?

Posted by Bruce Wilson at 9:09 AM on May 6, 2007.

Fake American history is now being taught in hundreds of American public high schools.

yawn... whatever...

Millions of Americans now believe that the true nature of the United States, and the intent of the founders of American government, has been subverted by "secularists" and "secularism", and the actual, central role secularism has played in the success of American Democracy seems on the verge of being forgotten, by America's politicians even...

zzzzzz......

Mikey Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation asserts right wing evangelical Christians are getting control of the US military. Weinstein was a lawyer in the Reagan Administration and is an Air Force Academy graduate.

OK, are you awake now ?

That's a troubling assertion, yup.

See, the Christian right doesn't have to be in the majority, or even close to it, to dominate America. Numbers are good, sure, but the long term strategy of Christian nationalism doesn't require numbers and instead relies on organization, discipline, and persistence.

How did the Christian right install dozens of its partisans in Congress, in the 1994 GOP takeover ? How did Oklahoma GOP Senator James Inhofe, who believes Global Warming is a hoax deployed by a vast shadowy conspiracy to create a "Satanic" "One World Order" through the United Nations, come to head the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and help block action on Global Warming for the better part of a decade ?

***

Political Attention Deficit Disorder ?

Why did so few on the left notice that the Bush Administration was packing the federal bureaucracy with partisan religious ideologues such as Monica Goodling ?

Cringefully few on the US left, even among those who prided themselves on having a high degree of political literacy, were hip to Bush's installation of Pat Robertson's Regent University cadres in the federal government ( not to mention graduates of Liberty University and Patrick Henry College, or Mormon partisans, or activists trained by Ron Luce... on and on ) and so perhaps it's silly for me to even get into the ways the Christian right exerts influence by promoting its ideology.

But, that effort is critical, and I'm going to try anyway because...

Christian nationalism is probably the driving ideology of the Christian right, and that ideology rests on fake history.

Fake History Now Taught In Hundreds Of US High Schools

The very notion that demonstrably fake history is being taught at ( at least, and the actual numbers of likely higher ) hundreds of American high schools seems noteworthy to me:

Totalitarian regimes rewrite history, for political reasons.

So, why aren't more people up in arms about this ? You got me.

Fake History, and the myth that the United States was founded originally as a "Christian Nation", is now being taught in hundreds of schools across America. Please click here to help Talk To Action Fight Fake History

Why is history so important ?

Enter Frederick Clarkson, from a recent Public Eye piece entitled History is Powerful - Why the Christian Right Distorts History and Why it Matters:

The notion that America was founded as a Christian nation is a central animating element of the ideology of the Christian Right. It touches every aspect of life and culture in this, one of the most successful and powerful political movements in American history. The idea that America's supposed Christian identity has somehow been wrongly taken, and must somehow be restored, permeates the psychology and vision of the entire movement. No understanding of the Christian Right is remotely adequate without this foundational concept.

But the Christian nationalist narrative has a fatal flaw: it is based on revisionist history that does not stand up under scrutiny. The bad news is that to true believers, it does not have to stand up to the facts of history to be a powerful and animating part of the once and future Christian nation. Indeed, through a growing cottage industry of Christian revisionist books and lectures now dominating the curricula of home schools and many private Christian academies, Christian nationalism becomes a central feature of the political identity of children growing up in the movement. The contest for control of the narrative of American history is well underway. (emphasis mine)

Example #1

About a week ago, hundreds of thousands of Turkish citizens demonstrated in support of secular Turkish government.

Over the course of the last year, Frederick Clarkson and I have been writing on the extent to which American national political and religious leaders no longer seem to really understand what the principle of secularism in government means, or how central secular government was to the success of American democracy.

Talk To Action even has an entire website topic category called "Demonizing Secularism", with approaching 50 posts on the subject (here's posts #31-#46 ) that demonstrate just how far the religious right's perverted, demonized definition of secularism has seeped into mainstream American political discourse.

Consider: massive rallies in Turkey, just staged in support of the principle of secular government. Meanwhile, many Americans, even the nation's leaders, no longer seem to understand what secularism means.

That may be improving, slowly. We'll see...

Example #2

The Bible In Public Schools: the Spread Of Christian Nationalist Ideology On The American Left.

A few weeks ago, I posted a popular, recommended diary on the Daily Kos which contained my critique about a Time Magazine cover story advocating for Bible classes in public schools.

Even though I didn't say in the post that I was categorically opposed to Bible classes in public schools, lots of people seemed to assume I was, and a counter-diary, which hit the recommended list popped up to argue for Bible classes in schools. I was surprised the issue was so contentious on this forum.

Based on numbers of recommenders, about 1/2 of Daily Kos members thought Bible classes in public schools were a good thing and that I was being unfair to Time Magazine and to Time's senior religion correspondent, Dave Van Biema.

So, the following week, I did another recommended diary entitled "Christian Nationalism Has You By The ____ and You Don't Even Know It".

In that post, I wrote:

the troubling aspect of the controversy, for me, concerned the apparent ability of Time's cover story to short circuit the basic logical skepticism, or so it seemed, of many members from one of the leading US left/progressive community websites on the Internet. The illogic of Time's cover story should have provoked skepticism at least and the fact that the story got a substantial amount of support in the progressive/liberal political activist community is exhibit "A" in my case that Christian nationalist precepts are starting to get their hooks into the heads of people on the American left

Time's op-ed in favor of Bible classes in public schools employed a favorite argument of Christian nationalism ; majority religious preferences rule and if religious minorities don't like the promotion of partisan religious values in schools or elsewhere in the public sphere, tough. Time's article expresses this plainly ; 60% of Americans favor Bible classes in public schools. But I can assure you this ; people in the Indian River School District of Southern Delaware who, in 2005 or 2006, harassed a Jewish family from its home of 18 years, to flee the area amidst death threats, did not think they were being unreasonable but, rather, that the family which fled was out of line for complaining about Christian sectarian displays of religious beliefs in public schools. Christian nationalism works best when it is implicit, part of our background mental assumptions.

One of the hallmarks of good PR and propaganda is that it becomes unnoticeable as ideas sink into our mental landscape to shape our perceptions and even come to seem commonsensical.

That sure was a controversial post even though I said upfront that Christian nationalist ideas had seeped into my head too.

Later, I found proof that was really the case, because I came across this fine critique of Time's article, by Tim Mitchell, which my writing had apparently inspired, that made points about Time's/Van Biema's argument that hadn't occurred to me and which seemed painfully obvious in retrospect. Tim Mitchell's analysis hammered home the point, to me ; Christian nationalist ideology has spread a lot farther than most, me included, realize.

Here's a sample of the arguments Mitchell makes:

As Van Biema himself asserts, America is an overwhelmingly Christian country, with churches outnumbering schools and government buildings in community after community. Ergo, there are plenty of places where the Bible could be taught and the Ten Commandments and nativity creches could be displayed with nary a legal challenge. According to the 2006 article that appeared in The New Yorker, The Good Book Business, the Bible itself has spawned an extremely lucrative niche publishing industry. Not only is the Bible is the best selling book of the year, every year, but that the amount spent annually on Bibles has been estimated at more than a half a billion dollars. Studies have shown that 91 percent of Americans own at least one Bible, and that the average household owns four....

[ Mitchell proceeds to list the seemingly endless roster of specialized Bibles, Bible magazines, audio Bibles.... ]

In light of such over-representation, the argument that public schools should be teaching the Bible in an environment where institutions openly devoted to the Christian faith are in abundance and where the Bible is a consistent bestselling book available in multiple demographic-specific editions is completely ridiculous. Moreover, churches are already tax-exempt; to burden taxpayer funded, secular institutions such as public schools with teaching about the Bible (something that churches already do) will only take time and money away from other subjects that schools should be providing (something that churches don't do). Perhaps the best way this could be handled is to remove the tax-exempt status of churches in communities where Bible classes are taught in public schools, since its clear that the public schools are being used to provide a service that churches are not and therefore they should not be allowed to use their failure as a tax shelter. But I digress

The real problem with teaching the Bible in public schools is that by only emphasizing the holy writings of one religion and no other, the school gives the student the impression that Christianity is the ONLY religion worthy of recognition and adherence. Even if the Bible classes are offered only as an elective choice in public schools, the fact that students would have no other religious text to choose from as a subject of study will nevertheless impact how the students view the world around them.

In the end, the controversy over Bible classes in public schools suggests to me that the notion of America as a "Christian nation" has begun to seep in to the minds of people across the US political spectrum, mine included, and that it is seeping, in diffuse form, into the minds of people on the US left.

Tagged as: bible

Bruce Wilson writes for Talk To Action, a blog specializing in faith and politics.