"Through a Glass, Darkly: How the Christian Right is Reimagining History"

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Case forGUNS

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BLESSEDHow the CHRISTIAN RIGHTIs Reinventing U.S. HISTORY

Werner Herzog and theSecret Mainstream

RethinkingBLACKPOWER

by Scott Saul

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HARPERS MAGAZINE/DECEMBER 2006

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plain away American fun-damentalism. Those of usnot engaged personally oremotionally in the biggestpolitical and cultura lmovement of our times—those on the sidelines ofhistory—keep trying tocome up with theorieswith which to discreditthe evident allure of thispunishing yet oddly com-forting idea of a deity, thisstrange god. His invisiblehand is everywhere, sayHis citizen-theologians,caressing and fixing everyoutcome: Little League games, job searches, testscores, the spread of sexually transmitted dis-eases, the success or failure of terrorist attacks(also known as "signs"), victory or defeat in bat-tle, at the ballot box, in bed. Those unable to feelHis soothing touch at moments such as thesesnort at the notion of a god with the patience orthe prurience to monitor every tick and twitchof desire, a supreme being able to make a lion anda lamb cuddle but unable to abide two men kiss-ing. A divine love that speaks through hurri-canes. Who would worship such a god? His fol-lowers must be dupes, or saps, or fools, their faith

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How the Christian rightis reimagining U.S. history

By Jeff Sharlet

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illiterate, insane, or mis-informed, their strengthfleeting, hollow, an aber-ration. A burp in Ameri-can history. An unpleas-ant odor that will pass.

We don't like to con-sider the possibility thatthey are not newcomers topower but returnees, thatthe revivals that havebeen sweeping Americawith generational regular-ity since its inception arenot flare-ups but the nat-ural temperature of the na-tion. We can't conceiveof the possibility that the

dupes, the saps, the fools—the believers—havebeen with us from the very beginning, that theirstory about what America once was and shouldbe seems to some great portion of the popula-tion more compelling, more just, and more beau-tiful than the perfunctory processes of seculardemocracy. Thus we are at a loss to account forthis recurring American mood.

Is "fundamentalism" too limited a word for a be-lief system of such scope and intimacy? Lately,some scholars prefer "maximalism," a term meantto convey the movement's, ambition to conformevery aspect of society to God. In contemporary

Jeff Shari et is a Contributing Editor of Harper's Magazine. His last article for the magazine, "Soldiers of Christ: InsideAmerica's Most Powerful Megachurch," appeared in the May 2005 issue.

Illustrations by Christopher Serra E S S A Y 3 3

SECULARISTS KILLED THECHRISTIAN NATION AND TRIED TOHIDE THE BODY—SO BELIEVE THEFUNDAMENTALISTS, WHO WANT

TO RESURRECT IT

34 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / DECEMBER 2006

America—from the Cold War to the Iraq War,the period of the current incarnation's ascen-dancy—that means a culture born again in theimage of a Jesus strong but tender, a warrior whohates the carnage he must cause, a man-god or-dinary men will follow. These are days of the

- sword, literally; affluent members of the move-ment gift one another with real blades craftedto medieval standards, a fad inspired by a best-selling book called Wild at Heart. Ail j a r g o n , t h e n ,

“maximalism" isn't had, an unintended tribute toMaximus, the fighting hero of Gladiator, which is

a film celebrated inChristian manhoodguides as almostsupplemental scrip-ture. But I think"fundamentalism"coined in 1920 asself-designation bythose ready to do"battle royal for thefundamentals,"hushed up now as

too crude for today's chevaliers—still strikes clos-est to the movement's desire for a story that nev-er changes, a story to redeem all that seems ran-dom, a rock upon which history can rise.

If the term "fundamentalism" endures, theclassic means of explaining it away—class envy,sexual anxiety—do not, We cannot, like H. L.Mencken, writing from the Scopes "monkey"trial of 1925, dismiss the Christian right as acarnival of backward buffoons jealous of moder-nity's privileges. We cannot, like the Washing-ton Post, in 1993, explain away the movementas "largely poor, uneducated and easy to com-mand." We cannot, like the writer TheodorAdorn°, a refugee from Nazi Germany who satsquinting in the white light of L.A., unhappilyscribbling notes about angry radio preachers,attribute radical religion—nascent fascism?—to Freudian yearning for a father figure.

The old theories have failed. The newChrist, fifty years ago no more than a corollaryto American power, twenty-five years ago atits vanguard, is now at the very center. His fol-lowers are not anxiously awaiting his return atthe Rapture; he's here right now. They're notenvious of the middle class; they are the mid-dle class. They're not looking for a hero tolead them; they're building biblical house-holds, every man endowed with "headship"over his own family. They don't silence sex;they promise sacred sex to those who coupleproperly—orgasms more intense for youngChristians who wait than those experiencedby secular lovers,

Intensity! That's what one finds within theranks of the American believers. "This thing is

real!" declare our nation's pastors. It's all com-ing together: the sacred and the profane, God'stime and straight time, what theologians andgraduates of the new fundamentalist prepschools might call "kairos" and "chronos," themystical and the mundane. American funda-mentalism—not a political party, not a denom-ination, not a uniform ideology, but a manifoldmovement—is moving in every direction all atonce, claiming the earth for God's kingdom,"in the world but not of it" and yet just lovingit to death anyway.

The Christian nation of which the movementdreams, a government of those chosen by Godbut democratically elected by a people who freelyaccept His will as their own, is a far country. Thenation they seek does not, at the moment, exist;perhaps it could in the future. More importantto fundamentalism is the belief that it did exist inthe American past, not in the history we learn inpublic school and from PBS and in newsmagazinecover stories on the Founders but in another sto-ry, o n elm o r e b i b li c a l, one more mythic and more

true. Secularism hides this story, killed the Chris-tian nation, and tried to dispose of the body. Fun-damentalism wants to resurrect it, and doing so re-quires revision: fundamentalists, looking backward,see a different history, remade in the image of theseductive but strict logic of a prime mover that setsthings in motion. The cause behind every effect,says fundamentalist science, is God. Even the in-exorable facts of math are subject to His decree,as explained in homeschooling texts such as Math-ematics: Is God Silent? Two plus two is four

because God says so. If He chose, itcould just as easily be fie.

It would be cliche to quote Orwell here were

it not for the fact that fundamentalist intellec-tuals do so with even greater frequency thanthose of the left. At a rally to expose the "myth"of church/state separation I attended this spring,Orwell was quoted at me four times, most em-phatically by William J. Federer, an encyclope-dic compiler of quotations whose America's Godand Country—a collection of apparently theo-centric bons mots distilled from the Foundersand other great men "for use in speeches, pa-pers, [and] debates"—has sold half a millioncopies. "Those who control the past," Federersaid, quoting Orwell's 1984, "control the future."History, the practical theology of the movement,reveals destiny.

Federer, a tall, lean, oaken-voiced man,loved talking about history as revelation, nod-ding along gently to his own lectures. He worea gray suit, a red tie marred by a stain, and anAmerican flag pin in his lapel. He looked like acongressman, which was what he'd wanted tobe: he was a two-time G.O.P. candidate for for-

mer House minority leader Dick Gephardt's St.Louis seat. He lost both times, but the move-ment considers him a winner—in 2000, hefaced Gephardt in one of the nation's most ex-pensive congressional races, forcing him tospend down his war chest. Federer consideredthis a providential outcome.

Federer and I were riding together in a whiteschool bus full of Christians from around thecountry to pray at the site on which the Dan-bury, Connecticut, First Baptist Church oncestood. It was in an 1802 letter to the DanburyBaptists that Thomas Jefferson first used thephrase "wall of separation," three words uponwhich the battle over whether the United

States is to be a Christian nation or a cos-mopolitan one turns. Federer, leaning over theback of his seat as several pastors bent theirears toward his story, wanted me to understandthat what Jefferson—notorious deist and au-thor of the Virginia Statute for Religious Free-dom—had really meant to promote was a "one-way wall," designed to protect the church fromthe state, not the other way around. Jefferson,Federer told me, was a believer; like all theFounders, he knew that there could be no gov-ernment without God. Why hadn't I beentaught this? Because I was a victim of godlesspublic schools.

"Those who control the present," Federer con-tinued his quotation of 1984, "control the past."

He paused and stared at me to make sureI understood the equation. "OrsonWelles wrote that," he said.

he first pillar of American fundamentalismis Jesus Christ; the second is history; and in thefundamentalist mind the two are converging.Fundamentalism considers itself a faith of basictruths unaltered (if not always acknowledged)since their transmission from Heaven, firstthrough the Bible and second through whatthey see as American scripture, divinely in-spired, devoutly intended—the Declaration ofIndependence, the Constitution, and the oftenoverlooked Northwest Ordinance of 1787,

which declared "religion" necessary to "goodgovernment" and thus to be encouraged throughschools. Well into the nineteenth century, mostAmerican schoolchildren learned their ABCsfrom The New-England Primer, which beginswith "In Adam's Fall/We sinned all"—and con-tinues on to "Spiritual Milk for American Babes,Drawn out of the Breasts of both Testaments."In 1836, McGuffey's Eclectic Readers began todisplace the Primer, selling some 122 millioncopies of lessons such as "The Bible the Best ofClassics" and "Religion the only Basis of Soci-ety" during the following century.

It wasn't until the 1930s, the most irreligiousdecade in American history, that public educa-tion veered away from biblical indoctrination so

ESSAY 3 5

36 HARPER'S MAGAZINE I DECEMBER 2006

thoroughly that with in a few decades mostAmericans wrongly believed that the national-ism of manifest destiny—itself thinly veiledCalvinism—rather than open piety was theAmerican educational tradition. The movementnow sees that to reclaim America for God, itmust first reclaim that tradition for Him, and soit is producing a flood of educational texts withwhich to wash away the stains of secular history.

Such chronicles are written .p r i c a a r i l y f o r t h e

homeschoolers and the fundamentalist academiesthat together account for at least 2 million of thenation's children, an expanding population thatbuys more than half a billion dollars of educa-tional materials annually. "Who, knowing thefacts of our history," asks the epigraph to the 2000edition of The American Republic for ChristianSchools, a junior-high textbook, "can doubt that theUnited States of America has been a thought inthe mind of God from all eternity?" So that I wouldknow the facts, I undertook my own course ofhomeschooling. In addition to The American Re-public, I read the two-volume teacher's edition ofUnited States History for Christian Schools, appro-priate for eleventh graders, as well as Economics forChristian Schools, and I walked the streets of Brook-lyn listening to an eighteen-tape lecture series onAmerica up to 1865 created for Christian collegestudents by Rousas John Rushdoony, the late the-ologian who helped launch Christian home-schooling and revived the idea of reading Amer-ican history through a providential len&I I wasdown by the waterfront, pausing to scribble a noteon Alexis de Tocqueville—Rushdoony argues thatde Tocqueville was really a fundamentalist Chris-tian disguised as a Frenchman—when a white-and-blue police van rolled up behind me andsquawked its siren. There were four officers inside.

"What are you writing?" the driver asked. Theother three leaned toward the window.

"Notes," I said, tapping my headphones."Okay. Whatcha 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 aCoast Guard storage facility for deadly chemi-cals. "Somebody blow that up and boom, bye-bye Brooklyn." Note-taking in the vicinity mightbe a problem. "So, I gotta ask again, whatcha lis-tening to?"

How to explain—to the cop who had justclued me in on the ripest terrorist target inBrooklyn—that I was listening to a Christianjihadi lecture on how democracy as practicedin America was defiance of God's intentions,

1 For instance, the "Protestant wind" with which, ac-cording to the eleventh-grade text, God helped the Britishdefeat the Spanish Armada so that the New Worldwould not be overly settled by agents of the Vatican.

how God gave to the United States the "irre-sistible blessings" of biblical capitalism un-known to Europe, and how we have vandalizedthis with vulgar regulations, how God loves therighteous who fight in His name?

Like this: "American history.""Providence" would have been a better word. I

was "unschooling" myself, Bill Apelian, director ofBob Jones University's BJU Press, explained. Whatseemed to me a self-directed course of study was,in fact, the replacement of my secular educationwith a curriculum guided by God, When BJUPress, one of the biggest Christian educationalpublishers, started out thirty years ago, sciencewas their most popular subject, and it could besummed up in one word: "created." Now Ameri-can history is on the rise. "We call it HeritageStudies," Apelian said, and explained its growingcentrality: "History is God's working in man."

My unschooling continued, I read the worksof Rushdoony's most influential student, thelate Francis Schaeffer, an American whoseSwiss Mountain retreat, L'Abri ("The Shelter"),served as a Christian madrasah at which a gen-eration of fundamentalist intellectuals studiedan American past "Christian in memory." AndI read Schaeffer's disciples: Tim LaHaye, who,besides coauthoring the hugely popular Left Be-hind series of novels, has published an equallyfantastical work about history called Mind Siege.And David Barton, the president of a historyministry called WallBuiIders (as in, to keep theheathen out). And Charles Colson, who, in ti-tles such as How Now Shall We Live? (a play onSchaeffer's How Should We Then Live? The Riseand Decline of Western Thought and Culture) andAgainst the Night: Living in the New Dark Ages,searches from Plato to the American Foundersto fellow Watergate felon G. Gordon Liddy forthe essence of the Christian "worldview," a vi-sion of an American future so entirely Christ-filtered that beside it "theocracy"—the clumsygovernance of priestly bureaucrats—seems amodest ambition. "Theocentric" is the preferredterm, Randall Terry, another Schaeffer disciplewho went on to found Operation Rescue, toldme. "That means you view the world in Histerms. Theocentrists don't believe man can cre-ate law. Man can only embrace or reject law."

History matters not just for its progression of"fact, fact, fact," Michael McHugh, a pioneer offundamentalist education, told me, but for "keypersonalities." In Francis Schaeffer's telling ofU.S. history, for instance, John Witherspoon—theonly pastor to have signed the Declaration of In-dependence—looms as large as Thomas Jeffer-son, because it was Witherspoon who infused thefounding with the idea of "Lex Rex," "law is king"(divine law, that is), derived from the fiercestProtestant reformers of the seventeenth century,

men who considered John Calvin's Geneva toogentle for God. Key personalities are often soldiers,such as General Douglas MacArthur. After thewar, McHugh explained, MacArthur ruled Japan‘'according to Christian principles" for five years."To what end?" I asked. Japan is hardly any moreChristian for this divine intervention. "The Japan-ese people did capture a vision," McHugh said. Notthe whole Christian deal, but one of its essentialfoundations. "MacArthur set the stage for freeenterprise," he explained. With Japan committedto capitalism, the United States was free to turnits attention toward the Soviet Union. The gen-eral's providential flanking maneuver, you mightsay, helped America win the Cold War.

But one needn't be a flag officer to be used byGod. Another favorite of Christian history, saidMcHugh, was Sergeant Alvin York, a farmer fromPall Mall, Tennessee, who in World War I turnedhis trigger finger over to God and became per-haps the greatest Christian sniper of the twenti-eth century.

"God uses ordinary people," McHugh said.Anyone might be a key personality. The properstudy of history, he explained, includes the stu-dent as a main character, an approach he de-scribed as "relational," a buzzword in contempo-rary fundamentalism that denotes a sort of pulsingcircuit of energy between, say, pleasant BettyJohnson, your churchy neighbor, and the awe-some realm of supernatural events in which herreal life occurs. There, Jesus is as real to Betty asshe is to you, and so is Sergeant York, GeneralMacArthur, and even George Washington, who,as father of our nation, is almost a fourth mem-ber of the Holy Trinity, a mindbender made pos-sible through God's math.

You may have seen his ghostly form, alongwith that of Abraham Lincoln, flanking an im-age of George W. Bush deep in prayer in a lith-ograph distributed by the Presidential PrayerTeam, a five-year-old outfit that claims to haveorganized nearly 3 million prayer warriors on thepresident's behalf. To wit:

In a similar image pasted onto billboards by agroup called American Destiny, a rouge-cheekedWashington kneels in prayer with an anonymoussoldier in fatigues—just another everyday hero.That could be you, the key-man theory of fun-damentalist history proposes. It's like the Rapture,

when the saved shall rise together, but it's hap-pening right now: George Washington and Bet-ty Johnson and you, floating up toward victory

with arms intertwined, key personali-ties in Christian history.

ne afternoon last year I found in my mailan unsolicited copy of "The Vision Forum Fami-ly Catalog," a glossy, handsomely produced, eighty-eight-page publication featuring an array of books,•videos, and toys for "The Biblical Family Nowand Forever." This catalogue, I think, is as perfectand polished a distil-lation as I've foundof the romance ofAmerican funda-mentalism, the al-most sexual tensionof its contradictions:its reverence for bothrebellion and au-thority, democracyand theocracy, bloodand innocence. Theedition I received was titled "A Line in the Sand,"in tribute to the Alamo. There, in 1836, faced withnear-certain annihilation at the hands of theMexican army, the Anglo rebel LieutenantColonel William Barret Travis rallied his doomedmen by drawing said line with his sword and chal-lenging them to cross it. All who did so, he said,would prove their preparedness "to give their livesin freedom's cause."

A boy of about eight enacts the scene on thecatalogue's cover. He is dark-eyed, big-eared, anddimple-chinned, and he's dressed in an idylliccostume only a romantic could imagine Lieu-tenant Colonel Travis wearing so close to hisapocalyptic end—a white planter's hat, a Con-federate gray, double-breasted jacket, a bow tie ofblack ribbon, a red sash, and shiny black fetishboots, spread wide. The young rebel seems tohave been Photoshopped in front of the Alamoat unlikely scale: he towers over a dark woodendoor, as big as an eight-year-old boy's imagination.

Named one of "twenty reasons there is hope forAmerica"2 b y T he C hu rc h R ep or t maga zi ne and

HISTORY MATTERS NOT JUST FORITS PROGRESSION OF "FACT, FACT,

FACT," ONE FUNDAMENTALISTEDUCATOR TOLD ME, BUT FOR

"KEY PERSONALITIES"

2 Although much of the catalogite is given over to educationalmaterials for Christian homeschoolers, the back of the bookis dedicated to equipping one's son with the sort of toysthat will allow him to "rebuild a culture of courageous boy-hood." Hats, for instance—leather Civil War kepis, coon-skin caps, and, for $95, a life-size replica of a fifteenth-century knight's helmet among them. An $18 video titled"Putting on the Whole Armor of God" asks, "Boys, are youready for warfare?" Young Christian soldiers may choosefrom a variety of actual weapons, ranging from a scaled-down version of the blade wielded by William Wallace, ofBraveheart fame (which, at 4114 f e e t l o n g , i s s t i l l a l o t o f

knife for a kid) too 32'12-inch Confederate o f f ic e r ' s s a b e r .It is history at knifepoint—a theology of arms.

Praying for Peace 0 Ron DICthnni/www.TapestryProductionscom E S S A Y 3 7

THE PASTOR WORE WINGTIPS,SYMBOLIZING PRE-1947 AMERICA--

1947 BEING THE YEAR THESUPREME COURT FIRST CODIFIED

THE "WALL OF SEPARATION"

38 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / DECEMBER 2006

considered by the other fundamentalist publish-ers I spoke to as the intellectual vanguard of themovement, Vision Forum is nonetheless just oneof any number of providers for the fundamental-ist lifestyle, and hardly the biggest. But it is clos-er than any other to the ideas of Rousas JohnRushdoony, whose eighteen-tape lecture series Ihad, in fact, ordered from Vision Forum. Rush-doony wrote two books in the early 1960s—TheMessianic Character of American Education andIntellectual Schizophrenia—whiLh hid the rightcornerstone of modem homeschooling. With the

alternative educa-tional universe ofhorneschooling andprivate evangelicalacademies ca methe formalization ofChristianized Amer-ican history, andthus the basis forthe contemporarymovement's broad-est claims: that the

nation was conceived of as Christian, that sepa-ration of church and state is either a "myth" al-together (Christian historian David Barton's po-sition, endorsed by a number of congressmen) ormeant only to prevent a single denominationfrom prevailing, a perspective that fundamen-talists consider a fair compromise with the anx-ieties of unbelievers.

Rushdoony took the vague sentiments of ear-ly twentieth-century fundamentalism and foundsources for them in American history, creating anintellectual foundation for the movement's po-litical ambitions. 3 He derived from the past notjust a quaint hero worship but also a deep knowl-edge of history's losers, forgotten Americans—rai-nor political figures such as John Winthrop andTimothy Dwight and all the soldiers who foughtfirst for God, then country, the rugged men of thepast who carried the theocratic strand throughfrom the beginning. The Christian conservatives

3 Ritshdoony is best known as the founder of ChristianReconstructionism , a politically defunct school of thoughtthat drifted so far to the right that it dropped off the edge ofthe world. Most notably, Rushdoony proposed the deathpenalty for an ever-expanding subset of sinners, starting withgay men and growing to include blasphemers and badlybehaved children. Such sentiments have since made him abogeyman of the left, but also a convenient scapegoat forftindamentalist apologists. Recently, First Things, a jour-nal for academically pedigreed religious conservatives, pub-lished an essay titled "Theocracy! Theocracyl Theocra-cy!" in which journalist Ross Douthat, eyes rolling, dismissesthe fears of the "anti-theocrat" left by propping up Rush-doony as a fringe lunatic, only to knock him down alongwith leftist critiques that focus on his angriest notions. Thatreading of Rushdoony—by liberal critics and conservativeapologists—misses what matters about his revival of prov-idential history.

of his day, Rushdoony believed, had let them-selves be bound by secularism. They railed againstits tyranny, but addressed themselves only to is-sues set aside by secularism as "moral"—the bestminds of a fundamentalist generation burnedthemselves to furious cinders battling nothingmore than naughty movies and heavy petting.Rushdoony did not believe in such skirmishes, Hewanted a war, and he summoned the spirits of his-tory to the struggle at hand.

A strict Calvinist influenced by his upbringingin the Armenian Presbyterian Church, Rush-doony's own mentor had been a Dutch theologiannamed Cornelius Van Tit Van Til borrowed froma turn-of-the-century theologian turned Dutchprime minister named Abraham Kuyper the ideaof "presuppositionalism," which maintains thateverybody approaches the world with set as-sumptions, thus ruling out the possibility of neu-trality and a classically liberal state; and that sinceChristian presuppositions acknowledge them-selves as such (unlike liberalism's, which are de-liberately ahistorical), every aspect of governanceshould be conducted in the light of revealed truths."There is not a square inch in the whole domainof our human experience," declared Kuyper, "overwhich Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does notcry 'Mine!"

Rushdoony saw in the theologian's Europeanproject of health care and schools and even amarket conformed to biblical law a foreshadow-ing of the "city upon a hill" prophesied for Amer-ica by John Winthrop in 1630. He thought mostmodern Americans would see this as well, ifonly they understood that Scripture was the sourceof the nation's idealism and that capitalism, ratherthan Kuyper's socialism, was the means of at-taining the mythical city. He spoke of his fondnessfor John F. Kennedy's rhetoric, for instance, inwhich he heard echoes of America as a "redeemernation," invoking Christian nationalism as a high-minded justification for the Cold War. "God'swork must truly be our own," declared Kennedy,and Rushdoony must have smiled sadly, "They'velost the theology," Rushdoony would lecture ten

years after Kennedy's death, "butthey haven't lost the faith."

Wen Federer and I reached the over-

grown foundation stones of Danbury Baptist,which sit on a grassy hill sprinkled with paleviolets, we gathered in a circle with a crowdof pastors and activists from around the coun-try. The event's organizer was Dave Dauben-mire, head of a fundamentalist "history" min-istry called Minutemen United and a formerhigh school football coach from Ohio who'ddone battle with the ACLU over his insis-tence on praying with his players. Still a re-gional outfit, the Minutemen had managed to

wrangle some respectable B-list activists.4 Inattendance were the Reverend Rob Schenck,a Jewish convert to evangelicalism who runsa Capitol Hil l ministry for politicians calledFaith and Action, and the Reverend FlipBenham, head of Operation Save America,also known as Operation Rescue. He was theman who baptized Norma McCorvey—JaneRoe—into fundamentalism. For the rally,he'd worn vintage white-and-brown wingtips,symbols o f his commitment to pre-1947America-1947 being the year when theSupreme Court first codified Jefferson's "wallof separation," in a case involving govern-ment funds for parochial schools.

Providential historians are divided on the ques-tion of whether it was this decision, Everson v.Board of Education, or FDR's socialistic New Dealthat led God to remove His protection from thenation. Operation Save America's number two,Pastor Rusty Thomas of Waco, Texas, favors theless controversial New Deal school of thought.God, Rusty told me, "always gave us a left hookof judgment, then He gave us a right cross of re-vival." But when the left hook of the Great De-pression came, goes the economic theory of fun-damentalism, Americans turned to governmentas their savior instead of God. "So we got an-other left hook." Kennedy's assassination, he ex-plained. Then another left hook: Vietnam. Stillwe didn't learn. So God kept throwing punches,said Rusty: crack, AIDS, global warming, Sep-tember 11, 2,500 flag-draped coffins shipped homefrom Iraq and more on the way.

Rusty began the day's preaching, pacing backand forth between Danbury Baptist's foundationstones. He looked like an exclamation point—tiny feet in thin-soled black leather shoes, al-most dwarfish legs, and a powerful torso barelycontained by a jacket of double-breasted grayhoundstooth. But he had one of the most nu-anced preaching voices I've ever heard, a softrasp that seemed to come straight from a brokenheart. "We are here to start a gentle revolution,"he whispered. "To reclaim the godly heritage." Hesounded sad, for his sin and mine—we were allguilty of turning our backs on the lessons of his-tory. But then he growled up to a full fury thatmade even the flaxen-haired pastor besideme literally blink before leaning forward intoRusty's thunder.

"'And when you go to war in your land"—Rusty recited from the Book of Numbers--"andmake no mistake about it, we are in a war—"

4 Minutemen United should not be confused with the,anti-immigrant Minutemen militias. Coach Dave's outfitis every bit as militaristic in its rhetoric—one Minutemenproject is called "Polished Sha f t "-bu t i t i s e d u c a t i o n a l i n

its operations, offering, for instance, instruction inAmerica's "godly heritage" for schoolteachers.

"Amen!" hollered Reverend Flip."And when you go to war in your land,"

continued Rusty, "against an adversary who op-presses you"—and here he interrupted himself."How many besides me are vexed by what is hap-pening in the United States of America today?"

The crowd, shedding jackets and coats be-neath a wan but warm spring sun, murmuredamens.

"Your soul is vexed," Rusty moaned. Then hecrietl out: "We are under oppression!"• "AMEN!" responded the crowd, rising up to

match Rusty's increased volume. The bill of griev-ances was hard: "Are we not in mourning?" Rustyasked, repeating the question and drawing it outas the women among us closed their eyes andsaid, plain and simple, Yes. "Are we not inmournnnning?" he moaned. "As terrorism strikesus from without, corruptions from within?" Yes,said the women, the men seemingly shamedinto silence. "How many know we're losing ourchildren?" Yes. "Our marriages are failing!" YES.

Pastor Rusty, in fact, was a ,s i n g l e f a t h e r— o f

ten, the youngest of whom is named Torah. Liz,his wife of twenty years, died last year from lym-phoma, on the verge of what seemed like re-covery. Reverend Flip had chronicled online herlong fight, a roller coaster of remission and re-lapse, so that the family's prayer partners—ac-tivists and Christian radio listeners across thecountry—could help fight for her survival."Goodnight for now, sweet sister," Flip wrotewhen they failed. "We'll see you in the morning."

"There's going to have to be a great funda-mental shift," Rusty preached near the end ofhis sermon. Not just in society but among the be-lievers. There is a "mothering" church, he said,and a "fatherhood" church, separate but equalaspects of God. The mother church nurtures andholds a child when he's done wrong; the fatherchurch is the church of discipline. The motherchurch feeds the poor, comforts the dying, at-tempting to remind nations of righteous behav-ior. But to Rusty the lesson of American history—the lesson of Valley Forge and Shiloh; Khe Sanhand Baghdad; Dallas, 1963; Roe v. Wade, 1973;Manhattan, 2001—is clear: this nation is too far

gone to be redeemed by mercy alone.It is the father church's time.

he father church, to Rusty, was the Old

Testament church, and he had begun the day'srally with a command from the Hebrew Bible."Then shall you sound an alarm with a trum-pet that you may be remembered before theLord your God," he had recited, "'and youSHOUT"—he replaced the future tense of thebiblical "shall" with his own present-tense bel-low—" to be saved from your enemy!" He hadturned to the man standing behind him, a wiry,

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goateed musician in a brown bomber jacket."So brother," Rusty had called, his voice nowjoyful, "let it rip, potato chip!" At which theslender man had blown his horn.

The day's appointed born-again Ba' al Tokea,the "Master of the Blast," was named Lane Med-calf, and his instrument was a three-foot-longspiral hewn from the head of ram: a shofar, aJewish trumpet, generally reserved—since thedestruction of the Temple 1,936 years ago—forRosh Hashanah and Yom Kipptir. But onceupon a time its blast signaled Joshua's assault onJericho, the first battle for the Promised Land,

Medcalf had borrowed his shofar from his boss'swife, also a Christian. Medcalf was an artificial-flavor compounder, less than a chemist but morethan a factory worker. He had been saved since hewas a teenager, but lately he had become engrossedin Jewish history. Fifty-three, he was slender andsleight in the shoulders, cautious but earnest abouthis words. "The shofar was for warfare," he ex-plained. "It's still a weapon of warfare, but forfighting demonic influence." Medcales shofar blaststhat day, for instance, were intended to slay the in-visible demons that had once surrounded SupremeCourt Justice Hugo Black, author of the Everson v,Board of Education decision, in 1947.

"Hugo got a little skewed," he told me.Black himself had not been evil, Medcalf ex-plained, just overwhelmed by Satan, whowhispered in his ear, "I was told" here Med-calf's voice dropped a note—"that he was aformer Ku Klux Klan member." (This is true.He was also a Protestant, and his decision wasin keeping with that period's fundamentalistanimus toward Catholic schools.) Medcalf hadalso been told, he continued, that in the mid-1950s there had been another Supreme Courtdecision, he couldn't remember the name, thatforced children to go to school where theydidn't want to go. This also is technicallytrue—Medcalf may have been referring toBrown v. Board of Education, the 1954 decisionthat overturned official school segregation,leading to busing and the formation of private,all-white evangelical academies,

It was Brown, along with two decisions inthe early 1960s striking down school prayer,that led to fundamentalism's embrace of histo-ry as a redeeming creed. Catholics already hada system for educating their children religious-ly. Fundamentalists began to build one, andthe bricks of its construction were the proof-texts of an alternate Christian nation: a letterby John Jay, the first chief justice of theSupreme Court, on the biblical justificationsfor America's wars; President James Garfield'sGilded Age pleas for more pious men in highoffice; even, eventually, the speeches of Mar-tin Luther King Jr., claimed now from

megachurch pulpits across the country as amartyr of fundamentalism.

Medcalf was part of the generation for whomKing was a hero rather than a villain. When hewas a kid, his older brother joined a Christianyouth band, and when he played his guitar kidsprayed out loud, free-form, with their hands in theair and their whole bodies swaying, while girlsflocked to him. "I had never seen Christianitylike that before," Medcalf remembered. He want-ed to join the band. He teamed keyboards and thedrums. "Suddenly, I could understand the Bible,The Holy Spirit got up on me. Manr

When he was fifteen, he accepted Jesus.When he was Sixteen the girl he was in lovewith accepted his invitation to a Bible studymeeting, and later he married her. "Church"was no longer a place you went to; it was anexperience you consumed, and you wanted asmuch as you could get. You wore your jeansto worship and grew your hair long. Youcalled yourself a Jesus Freak and you calledJesus a revolutionary. You listened to groupslike The Way and Love Song and the AllSaved Freak Band, and you read rags likeRight On! and The Fish and The HollywoodFree Paper. "1T r u c k i n' f o r J e su s ," M ed ca l f re-

membered. "Solid stuff, man."Medcalf suddenly looked sad. He blinked, as

if holding back tears. What had gone wrong?"We sold ourselves," he said, his voice nearly

a whisper. He meant it literally: albums andT-shirts, "bumper stickers." Commercialism killedChristian rock and roll. "We lost our teeth." In1973, the Supreme Court handed down Roe v.Wade. "It happened on our watch, man," Med-calf said. The Jesus Freaks had failed, They hadlived for today and forgotten tomorrow, and thenit had slipped away from them.

To get it back, Medcalf said, the movementmust go backward. Not to the 1960s but to "be-fore." It needs a foundation, he explained, eter-nal truths. These were to be found in twoplaceK the Bible and the Constitution.

While we were talking, Reverend Flip had be-gun to preach. He told the crowd about a recentvictory he'd scored in North Carolina, where he'dled 700 prayer warriors to a school-board meetingto protest the formation of a Gay-Straight Al-liance club in a local high school. "The preach-ers preached, the singers sang, the prayers prayed,and the theology of the church became biographyin the streets!" Flip said. The school board shutdown the club. Flip said this was what Jesus want-ed. He even did an impression: "Cry to me," hesaid in his best bass God voice; "the prayers of therighteous will be answered."

Medcalf smiled and applauded gently. He toldme how his prayers had changed when he start-ed studying history and blowing the shofar. "I

was praying for God to restore America back toits roots one day when I had what I guess youwould call a supernatural experience. The HolySpirit caused me to weep and cry, enabling me tohave a broken heart. 'Please come back,' I prayed.It was just so intense." It worked: "Things havestarted changing." He said the appointments ofSamuel Alito and John Roberts to the SupremeCourt were probably the result of God's inter-vention. They may be the men God was waitingfor, the right tools for the job of restoration. Theymay be under an anointing.

This is the secret of Christian history. I tdoesn't require great men—Medcalf consideredBush's 2000 election an "answer to prayer," buthe was under no delusions about the president'snatural abilities—only willing men, ready to beanointed. Bush was one; Medealf was another.Medealf submitted to Bush's authority accordingto Romans 13:1, a key verse of American fun-damentalism—"the powers that be are ordainedof God"—but both submitted equally to God'sguiding hand. To Medcalf this results in a democ-racy more radical than any dreamed of in the1960s. In the flow of secular time, Medcalf is anebbish from Connecticut, mixing beakers fullof artificial flavors. But in Christian time, he is aherald, blowing his shofar back to 1947, calling

the key men of our Christian nation'shistory to battle.

In the pantheon of fundamentalist history, the

man revered above a ll others is GeneralStonewall Jackson of the Confederacy, perhapsthe most brilliant military commander in Amer-ican history and certainly the most pious. Unit-ed States History for Christian Schools devotesmore space to Jackson, "Soldier of the Cross,"and the revivals he led among his troops in themidst of the Civil War, than to either Robert E.Lee or Ulysses S. Grant; Practical Homeschoolingmagazine offers instructions fo r makingStonewall costumes out of gray sweatsuits withwhich one can celebrate his birthday, a home-schooling "fun day." The Vision Forum cata-logue offers for men a military biography and forthe ladies a collection of Jackson's letters to hiswife; both books extol his strategic and roman-tic achievements as corollaries to his unparal-leled love Of God.

Fundamentalists even celebrate the Confed-erate hero as an early civil rights visionary, ded-icated to teaching slaves to read so that theycould learn their Bible lessons. For fundamentalistadmirers, that is enough; this fall saw the publi-cation of Stonewall Jackson: The Black Man'sFriend, by Richard 0, Williams, a regular con-tributor to the conservative Washington Times.Jackson fought not to defend slavery, argues an-other biographer, but for religious freedom; he be-

lieved the North had usurped the moral juris-diction of God. "The North seemed to be striv-ing to alter basic American structures," writesJames I. Robertson Jr. "Such activity flew in theface of God's preordained notion of what Amer-ica should be."

Jackson's popularity with fundamentalists rep-resents the triumph of the Christian history thatRousas John Rushdoony dreamed of when he dis-covered, during the early 1960s, the forgotten'wocks of the theologian Robert Lewis Dabney,including Life andCampaigns of Lieut. -Gen. Thomas I , Jack-son (Stonewall Jack-son) Dabney hadserved under Jack-son, but, more im-portant, he was atheologian in thetradition o f JohnCalvin—that is, hebelieved deeply in aGod who worked through chosen individuals—and he wrote the general's life in biblical terms.Rushcloony imagined the story as transcending itsConfederate origins, and so helped make ita founding text of the nascent homeschool-ing movement,5 In 2003, Vision Forum sponsored a nationalessay contest and awarded first prize to a pretty,freckle-faced young woman named AmandaFreeborn for her essay, "How Stonewall Jack-son Demonstrated a Biblical Vision of Man-hood." "There is a name," writes Freeborn,

that casts upon the screen of our imaginations theimage of the personification of godly manhood.That name is Stonewall Jackson.... His life was atestimony to the world of what God can dothrough a man consecrated to his purposes.

Freeborn goes on to admire Jackson's rever-ence for authority and his commitment toprayer—in battle, wrote a fighting pastor whoknew him, Jackson would give up the reins ofhis horse "to lift up his hands towards heaven."And she admires his Job-like acceptance of suf-fering—in civilian life he was shy, inept, and sophysically fragile that he spent much his timeinvestigating ascetic diets and taking the watersat miracle spas around the country. With his

IN THE PANTHEON OFFUNDAMENTALIST HISTORY, THE

MAN REVERED ABOVE ALL OTHERS

IS GENERAL STONEWALL J ACKSONOF THE CONFEDERACY

5 Although Rushcloony was a bigot and a partisan of theSouth, his commitment to states' rights was riot racial butreligious: he recognized that the Constitution fully sepa-rates church and state only at the federal level. Thus aChristian nation could be built state legislature by statelegislature, an approach that has since become the mainstrategy of Christian conservative organizations, whichreplicate themselves state by state to do battle with better-known but more cumbersome liberal organizations.

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wife, Anna, he loved to dance secret polkas whenno one else was watching, but he felt so out ofplace in "society" that he was deathly afraid ofpublic speaking. Absent enemy fire, he did notknow how to take a stand. He watched JohnBrown hang with his own eyes and marveled atthe strength of the man's Christian conviction.And yet when his own time to fight came, heproved just as devoted. "Draw the sword," he toldhis students at the Virginia Military Institute,"and throw away the scabbard." In All Things forGood: The Steadfast Fidelity of Stonewall Jackson,fundamentalist historian J. Steven Wilkins opensa chapter on Jackson's belief in the "black flag"of no quarter for the enemy with a quotation:"Shoot them all, I do not wish them to be brave."The only path to peace, he believed, was total war.

"Today," writes Freeborn,

Mr. Jackson's life stands as a witness to a new gen-eration of what God can and desires to do in eachof His children. Let us rise up and follow the shin-ing example of this stem soldier, loving husband, de-voted church officer, and Christ-like man.

Civil War buffs study his military maneuversand wonder whether, had he not been mistakenfor a Yankee and shot by his own men in 1863,he might have outflanked the Union Army andfought the North to a standstill. But Freebornchooses as case study not a Civil War battle buthis first victory as a lowly lieutenant out of WestPoint. Sent to the Mexican War, he defied an or-der to retreat, fought the Mexican cavalry alonewith one artillery piece, won, and was promoted,later commended by General Winfield Scott,commander of the U.S. forces, for "the way inwhich [he] slaughtered those poor Mexicans."

Many of the poor Mexicans Jackson slaugh-tered were civilians. After his small victory hadhelped clear the way for the American advance,Jackson received orders to turn his guns on Mex-ico City residents attempting to flee the oncom-ing U.S. army. He did so without hesitationmowing them down as they sought to surrender.

What are we to make of this murder? Secularhistorians attribute this atrocity to Jackson's mil-itary discipline—he simply obeyed orders. Butfundamentalists see in that discipline, that will-ingness to kill innocents, confirmation of Ro-mans 13:1: "For there is no power but of God: thepowers that be are ordained of God.". O b e y i n gone's superiors, according to this logic, is an actof devotion to the God above them.

But wait—fundamentalists also praise theheroism that resulted from his defiance of or-ders to retreat, his rout of the Mexican cavalryso miraculous—it's said that a cannonballbounced between his legs as he stood fast—that it seems to fundamentalist biographersproof that he was anointed by God. Is this

hypocrisy on the part of his fans? Not exactly.Key men always obey orders, but they follow

the command of the highest authority. Jackson'samazing victory is taken as evidence that God waswith him—that God overrode the orders of hisearthly commanders. And yet the civilian deadthat resulted from Jackson's subsequent obedi-ence of those very same earthly commanders arealso signs of God's guiding hand. The providen-tial God sees everything; that such a tragedy wasallowed to occur must be evidence of a greaterplan. One of fundamentalist history's favoriteproofs comes not from Scripture itself but fromBen F r a n k l i n ' s/p a r a p h r a s e a t t h e C o n s t it u t i o na l

Convention: "And if a sparroW cannot fall to theground without His notice, is it probable that anempire can rise without His aid?"

To put it in political terms, the contradictorylegend of Stonewall Jackson rebellion and rev-erence, rage and order—results in the synthesis ofself-destructive patriotism embraced by contem-porary /f u n da m en t a l is m . The most s tr ik ing exam-

ple is a short video on faith and diplomacy madein the aftermath of September 11, 2001, by Chris-tian Embassy, a behind-the-scenes ministry forgovernment and military elites. It almost seems toendorse deliberate negligence of duty. Dan Coop-er, an undersecretary of veterans' affairs, announcesthat his weekly prayer sessions are "more impor-tant than doing the job." Major General JackCatton says that he sees his position as an advis-er to the Joint Chiefs of Staff as a "wonderful op-portunity" to evangelize men and women settingdefense policy. "My first priority is my faith," hesays. "I think it's a huge impact... . You have manymen and women who are seeking God's counseland wisdom as they advise the Chairman [of theJoint Chiefs] and the Secretary of Defense."Brigadier General Bob Caslen puts it in sensualterms: "We're the aroma of Jesus Christ." There'sa joyous disregard for democracy in these senti-ments, for its demands and its compromises, thatin its darkest manifestation becomes the over-looked piety at the heart of the old logic of Viet-

nam, lately applied to Iraq: In order to

0 ‘ save the village, we must destroy it.n the Danbury village green Pastor Rustygripped my arm and pulled me close, tearsstreaming from hazel eyes as he confessed thathe had betrayed God. The rally had migratedfrom the hilltop to the town's center, an historicpatch of grass next to a redbrick parking garage.A stage had been erected, and on it a series ofpreachers sermonized about God and Americanhistory for a small crowd of parents and childrensitting on blankets and in lawn chairs. Rustyand I talked back by the literature tables. He hadsomething he wanted to explain. He had ne-glected the twin sins, he said, the two wicked

acts that fundamentalists believe to be the col-lective responsibility of the entire society inwhich they occur. "Child sacrifice"—by whichhe meant abortion—"and sodomy. Any nationthat condoned those behaviors? That did notchallenge them, that did not prevent them fromhappening? It will be reduced to rubble."

He shook his head, eyes squeezed shut. Thechurch had allowed women to murder their chil-dren and men through sodomy to damn them-selves and all their brothers. It was his fault morethan theirs because he knew the "blueprint ofGod's Word." He had pored over the Bible andthe Constitution and the Mayflower Compact,had memorized choice words from John Adamsand John Witherspoon and Patrick Henry, Jere-miah and Nehemiah and John the Revelator.Scripture and American history are in agree-ment, he had found: beneath God, family, andchurch is the state, with only one simple re-sponsibility: "The symbol of the state is a sword.Not a spoon, feeding the poor, not a teachinginstrument to educate our young." Rusty steppedback, fists clenched. "And the sword is an in-strument of death!" he yelled. He twitched hisItalian loafers in a preacher two-step. He shookout his neck like a boxer. Then sorrow slumpedhis shoulders. He had failed to wield the sword.He had failed the widows and orphans. He hadfailed his brothers lost to sodomy. "There's nobodyclean in this," he whispered. •

Grief, not arrogance, translates the promise ofsalvation—"whosoever shall lose his life for mysake shall find it"—into a battle cry. Guilt, notpride, builds the most zealous discipline. "Obe-dience is my greatest weapon," the rally's orga-nizer, Coach Dave, told me at the end of theday. He took off his Minutemen United baseballcap, navy blue with a red cross, and ran his handthrough his gray hair. In obedience, he said, hefound strength. I imagined him lecturing his for-mer football team. Obedience, he continued, wasa gift from God; but you needed the Holy Spiritto open it. "The Holy Spirit of God is like the soft-ware," he said.

He tried to explain. "We may need another9/11," he declared slowly, a teacher reciting alesson, "to bring about a full spiritual revival."He must have seen my surprise. "Now, youdon't get that, do you?" I admitted that I didnot. Well, he continued, history's horrors arejust like God spanking a child. "That's a per-fect example of where you need the software tounderstand .what I just said, or else you'regonna say, 'Coach, you mean He spanks us bykilling people?' You need the software. What'sthe software? Well, it's history. You gotta un-derstand what history is. It's collective. Areyou getting the software? Collective. History."

I got it. Fundamentalism embraces its mythic

past; our more comfortable, liberal histories declaretheir own myths simply a matter of record. Theimagination with which we, the levelheaded mass-es, view the demigod Founders and the Civil War,the "Good Fight" against Hitler and the Ameri-can tragedy of Vietnam (the tragedy is alwaysours alone), is almost as deeply mystical as that offundamentalism's, thickened by destiny, blind toall that does not square with the story we tell our-selves about who we are as a nation. There are oc-casional attempts at recovering these near-invis-ible pieces, "people's history" and nationalapologies and HBO specials about embatrassingmissteps in the march of progress, usually relatedto race and inevitably restored to forwaid motionby the courage of some key man of liberalism:Jackie Robinson at first base, 1947; Rosa Parkson the bus, 1955; Muhammad Ah refusing to fightin Vietnam. But such interventions are not muchdifferent than fundamentalism's addition of Mar-tin Luther King to its pantheon; they are attemptsto persuade ourselves that the big "We" of na-tionalism was better than the little people of his-tory actually were.

The actual past no more serves the imaginationof secularism than that of fundamentalism. Lib-erals like to point out that many of the Founderswere not, in fact, Christian but rather deists ordownright unbelievers. Fundamentalists respondby trotting out the Founders' most pious words,of which there are many (Franklin proposingprayer at the Constitutional Convention; Wash-ington thanking God for His direct hand in rev-olutionary victories; etc., etc.). Liberals shootback with the Founders' Enlightenment writings,and note their dependence on John Locke; fun-damentalists respond that Locke helped the Car-olinas write a theocentric constitution. But fun-damentalist historians can also point, accurately,to the subsequent instances of overlooked religiousinfluence in American history—not just SergeantYork's Christian trigger finger and StonewallJackson's tragic example but also the religiousroots of abolitionism, the divine justification usedto convert or kill Native Americans, the violentpiety of presidents—not just Bush and Reagan butalso Lincoln and McKinley and Wilson and evensweet Jimmy Carter, the first born-again president,led by God and Zbigniew Brzezinski to funnelanti-Communist dollars to the bloodthirsty Sal-vadoran regime.

The dupes, the saps, and the fools—the be-lievers—prefer their re-enchanted past, alive tothe dark magic with which all histories are con-structed. For them America's past merely chartsGod's love, its meanings revealed to His keymen, presidents and generals, preachers and agoy with a shofar. The rest of us are simply notpart of the dream Fundamentalism is writing usOut of history.

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