Rainbow Pie (Joe Bageant) pp122-6
Sixty-nine per cent of Americans told Zogby International’s pollsters in 2006 they believed that if darwinism was to be taught in schools, ‘the evidence against darwinism’ and ‘intelligent design’ and creationism should be taught alongside it. This is what happens when the industrial state’s fanatical belief in science comes up against the religious institutions’ flaying of the people’s minds with superstitious fear of an unseen, omnipotent, and unquestionable, wrathful God. No one should suffer those two forces in tension within the one mind and soul. In her later years, my mother once said of her religious upbringing, ‘How any kid is supposed to grow up knowing anything as an adult, without ever being allowed to ask a question, is entirely beyond me.’ Outwardly, the Pentecostal fanatics of her childhood failed to convert her in any significant way. But, inwardly, they would later affect my family deeply through the viral transmission of terrifying Old Testament fundamentalism to an already-religious family.
Harsh Christian fundamentalism has been part of the American fabric since it arrived with the Scots-Irish, German, and English religious reformers of the 18th century – though few could have predicted, or even imagined, that it would eventually take on the political potency we see today. The rise of Billy Graham and Oral Roberts during the 1950s and 1960s on television was an indicator of its growing mass appeal, a national acknowledgement of a widespread following that had always been there, just not so public, The media evolution and political consequences of fundamentalism now comfort millions of Americans, and scare the crap out of millions more.
Christian fundamentalism is still morphing, shape-shifting to suit new political agendas, as it has done since the ‘evangelical movement’ of the 1960s and 1970s, under which umbrella the Jimmy Swaggarts, Pat Robertsons, James Hagees, and subsequent power-drunk charlatans slipped into the nation’s religious mainstream. Religion is, among other things, an industry in the United States. Every church, no matter what type, wants to grow – just like any other business does. The church business is built upon the faithfulness of America’s under-educated and neglected whites, who trust their preachers more than they do their politicians. The preachers, at least, lie to them face-to-face, eyeball-to-eyeball, from the pulpit. In a sense, they trust ‘the devil they know’, and overlook the many sexual and financial scandals of their fundamentalist Christian leadership. At the very least, their preachers are mouthing the word of God, which is right there for all to see in the Bible.
For some reason, hopeful American progressives at this writing seem to believe that the thin majority of educated Democrats now in Congress, led by the clearly educated and articulate Obama, can somehow affect the hearts and minds of tens of millions who honestly believe that one of Noah’s chores was feeding the dinosaurs on the ark. But the ignorance and superstition of American fundamentalism goes back a long way, and is rooted in the lack of real education in heartland America. As long as we purposefully refuse to fully educate the hardest-working class of Americans, or allow any development of their intellectual and philosophical vistas, simple-minded fundamentalism will be back on our nation’s political front porch, and scaring the rest of the world. Especially those godless, unarmed Europeans with their free socialist healthcare and their liberal educations.
Regardless of its negative intellectual and political impact – and you sure gotta describe wiping its arse on the US Constitution at every opportunity as ‘negative’ – fundamenta1ism has also done cultural and social good for the white American underclass. The hardening of Protestant fundamentalism is in part an attempt by ordinary working-class people to replace the sense of community life that was lost in the second half of the 20th century. It established new human networks not unlike those of the early-settler communities, with household-centred values and the communal spirit of yeoman goodwill. A good, old-fashioned American-style church supper or children’s event touches my heart like nothing else; I would gladly attend more of them, were it not for the abysmally ignorant conversation that accompanies them. And I blame that on our system, which purposefully and consistently rejected universal and free higher education, leaving the bulk of the citizenry in frustrated ignorance and incomprehension, clay to be kneaded into outrage by political potters.
But underneath fundamentalist Christian outrage, and despite its misdirection by demagogues, one can find their adherents in common cause with progressives: there is much the same disgust with the cheapening and trivialisation of society. For example, both sides abhor the debased sexuality of advertising and entertainment; the destruction of familial intimacy; monetary greed; infantile materialism; the fraudulence of American politics; and – particularly among working-class heartlanders – the media mockery of America’s traditional, rural-based values. Even fundamentalism’s obsession with ‘the end times’ can be seen as a variation on the ecological movement’s eco-apocalypse being delivered by global warming. Biblical apocalypse or planetary ecocide: either way, we’re talking about the end of the World, with one camp assembled under the tent of technology and ‘rational science’ (unable to grasp that technology is by no means neutral in destroying the natural world), and the other in the shadow of the cross waiting for the Last Days.
There are also a growing number of in-betweeners, most notably the Christian Greens. American political strategists don’t know what to make of them yet, but both camps want them inside their tent. The Christian Green fundamentalists in my home state grew out of the anti— mountaintop-removal movement in Appalachian coal country, aligning themselves with eco-movement politics in the spirit of earth stewardship.
Although they get a small splash of media coverage, mostly due to their political novelty, they are getting nowhere in this age of increasing coal-energy dependency. ‘Mr Peabody’s coal train’ still hauls away my native mountains to fuel the national power grid, to run electric toothbrushes for those without enough stamina to move a one-ounce object up and down, and to run all those ‘non- polluting’ electric lawn mowers to smelt metal, make plastics, and provide electricity to recharge the batteries of ‘green’ hybrid cars, which, for all intents and purposes, run on coal. When it comes to American self-delusion and denial, the difference is mostly a matter of type.
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