From Deer Hunting with Jesus (Joe Bageant, 2007) pp162-8
Brother Mike has been preacher, youth pastor, bus outreach manager, and general all-round wrangler for God at this church since 1974. That was the year Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, Nixon resigned, and Brother Mike was born-again in Christ. For thirty of the thirty-one years sing then, he and his wife June lived in a church-supplied mobile home on the church property. Only in 2006, with retirement staring them in the face, did they move into a middle-class ranch house of their own, again with help from the church.
My brother’s church is what is known as an independent Baptist church. It is independent enough of your world and mine that he says things like, “I helped cast out a demon the other day, Joey. I wish you could have been there.” Independent fundamentalist churches are theologically woolly places whose belief systems can accommodate just about any interpretation of the Good Book that a “Preacher Bob” or a “Pastor Donnie” can come up with. Members of the clergy arise from within the church ranks and are usually poorly educated, though, like most Americans, they do not see themselves that way. Lack of a broad higher education is a hallmark of fundamentalist ministers and goes completely unremarked by their congregations, in whose eyes a two-year technical school or community college, and especially a seminary of their own, is on par with nearly any of the vile secular universities. In fact, the “Bible colleges” are better because they don’t teach philosophy, science, the arts, or literature in any form a secular person would recognize.
This rejection of “fancy learnin’” has been a feature of American fundamentalism since the backwoods-stump church days, and it continues to provide the nation with charismatic literalists whose analytical abilities are minimal. If you combine that with more than thirty years of Christian school growth (rooted in the antidesegregation movement), more than 2 million fundamentalist Christian school students nationally, and millions more fundamentalist kids in the public school system, you can begin to understand why so many states find themselves revamping their educational systems so that the teachings of Darwin can be replaced by the fables of Adam and Eve and we can all be reassured that David slew Goliath despite the complete lack of evidence that either existed.
The members of Shenandoah Bible Baptist are ultraright politically, though they don’t think so. They consider themselves “mainstream,” and if numbers tell the story, they have a better claim to that label than the liberals whom they outnumber.
Being very certain that God exists is a mainstream characteristic. Seventy-six percent of Protestants, 64 percent of Catholics, and one-third of Jews are “absolutely certain,” according to Harris polls. The members of Shenandoah Bible are also in the mainstream when it comes to their level of education. They are among the three-quarters of Americans who seem satisfied just to finish high school or who think that a year or so of any sort of training after high school is enough. (Liberals can be grateful they are not all registered voters. As it stands, Christian fundamentalists make up 25 percent of those entitled to vote, according to the Pew Research Center, and 20 million of America’s 50 million fundamentalists voted in the last two elections.)
Pollsters agree that church attendance is among the best indicators of whether a voter is liberal or conservative. Sixty-two percent of working-class Americans attend church, and 89 percent of all Americans take their faith seriously enough to make it to church several times a year. Thirty-six percent of them attend Church at least twice a month.
Gallup surveys show that one-quarter to one-third of the U.S. population identifies itself as “born-again” evangelicals, a large umbrella that includes liberal born-agains such as Jimmy Carter and even a few Christian Greens. There is more diversity among fundamentalists than is generally understood by the secular public. But taken as a whole, fundamentalists have three things in common: They are whiter than Aunt Nelly’s napkin, and, for the most part, they are working class and have only high school educations.
Yet some evangelicals stand apart from the mainstream in one important way: They would scrap the Constitution and institute “Biblical Law,” the rules of the Old Testament, and they take the long view toward the establishment of a theocratic state. Others believe we are rapidly entering the End Times and the fulfillment of the darkest biblical prophecies. Like many of their Scots-Irish ancestors, they see a theocracy of one sort or another as a necessary part of the End Times, and, though few publicly say so, some are not averse to a nuclear war in the Middle East, ideally with the help of Israel.
As Brother Mike puts it, “Israel is the key to everything. When the state of Israel was founded, the End Times were set in motion.” To wit, the Messiah can return to earth only after an apocalypse in Israel called Armageddon, which a minority of influential fundamentalists are promoting with all their power so that The End can take place. The first requirement was establishment of the state of Israel. Done. The next is Israel’s occupation of the Middle East as a return of its “Biblical lands.” Which means more wars. Radical Christian conservatives believe that peace cannot ever lead to Christ’s return, and indeed impedes the thousand-year Reign of Christ, and that anyone promoting peace is a tool of Satan. Fundamentalists support any and all wars Middle Eastern, and many consider the deaths of their own children as a kind of holy martyrdom. “He (or she) died protecting this country’s Christian values.” You hear it over and over from the most radical parents of those killed. The parade of deaths, however, has shaken at least a few loose from the militaristic Christian fold.
End Times theology, or premillennialism (a once obscure doctrine conceived by John Nelson Darby of the Plymouth Brethren in 1827), has many variants. All of them boil down to the idea that history is scripted by God and will soon come to an apocalyptic conclusion according to his plan. Your only hope is to accept Jesus as your personal Savior. Then, if you happen to be a member of the Rapturist cult of End Times believers, God will “rapture you up” just as he launches seven years of horror and death upon the earth. An Antichrist will arise, and worldwide war will be the norm. Billions will die. Fundamentalist Christians look around at AIDS, warfare across the globe, crime, the rise of narco-states, and ecological collapse, and they see confirmation of God’s plan. Rev. Rich Lang of Trinity United Methodist Church in Seattle says, “This theology of despair is very seductive and it is shaping the spirituality of millions of Christians today.”
Hard-core End Times fundamentalists apply their interpretation of the Bible to all things in life, including modern world politics, with predictably strange conclusions:
¢ The United Nations is a tool of the Antichrist. America alone must spread the gospel around the world.
¢ There is no need to worry about the environment because we are not going to need this earth much longer.
° Israel is to be defended at all costs and even encouraged to expand, because the Bible declares that Israel must rule all the land from the Nile to the Euphrates in order for End Times prophecy to be fulfilled.
° God will provide a Christian leader to shepherd the American flock as they become his chosen people to extend the gospel worldwide and rid the earth of evil.
Meanwhile, there is the work of “reconstructing” our country and achieving “dominion” over it, as required by certain core End Times theologies. “Reconstructionist” plans are as hard and unforgiving as a gravestone. Capital punishment, central to the Reconstructionist ideal, is prescribed for a wide range of crimes, including abandonment of the faith, blasphemy, heresy, witchcraft, astrology, adultery, sodomy, homosexuality, striking a parent, and “unchastity before marriage” (by women only). Biblically correct methods of execution include stoning, the sword, hanging, and burning. Stoning is preferred, according to Gary North, self-styled Reconstructionist economist, because stones are plentiful and cheap. Biblical law would also eliminate labor unions, civil rights laws, and public schools. The late Reconstruction theologian David Chilton declared, “The Christian goal for the world is the universal development of Biblical theocratic republics.”
Incidentally, the Republic of Jesus as described by some End Times cults would be not only a legal hell but an ecological one as well. Pure Rapturist doctrine (all types of Rapturists argue over whose doctrine is purest) calls for scrapping environmental protection of all kinds, because there will be no need for this planet once the Rapture occurs.
You may not have heard of Reconstructionists such as R. J. Rushdoony or David Chilton or Gary North. But individually and together they have influenced more contemporary American minds than Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal, and Howard Zinn combined. Christian Reconstructionism and Dominionism are by no means the dominant strains of fundamentalism these days, nor have they ever been. But since the 1970s, through hundreds of books and college classes, the doctrine of Reconstructionism has come to permeate not only the religious right but mainstream churches as well, through demonstrative Charismatic movements such as Pentecostalism, which focuses on healing, prophecy, and gifts such as the ability to “speak in tongues.” Pentecostals lined up behind Christian media mogul Pat Robertson in the 1970s and 1980s, making him rich and powerful. In return, he gave them the power and confidence to launch emotionally and politically charged movements such as the effort to overturn Roe v. Wade (thereby elevating the humble zygote into previously unimaginable news value).
This push toward a theocracy and the infiltration of main stream Protestantism by religious extremists was one of the biggest underreported political stories of the second half of the twentieth century. Religious reporters all but ran from it, partly because they must please all the churches they cover. But many of them didn’t even see it happening. Yet thousands of mainstream Methodist, Presbyterian, and other Protestant churches were pushed inexorably rightward, often without even realizing it. Clearly the Methodist church down the street from my house does not understand what it has become. Other mainstream churches with more progressive leadership flinched and bowed to the radicals at every turn. They had to if they wanted to retain or gain members swept up in the evangelical movement. So what if the most fervent of these people declared that lesbianism was rampant in the nation’s middle school restrooms and vowed to reconstruct America to fit Leviticus?
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