The Public Eye Magazine, Vol. VIII, Nos. 1 & 2, March/June 1994
The Christian Right has shown impressive resilience and has rebounded dramatically after a series of embarrassing televangelist scandals of the late 1980s, the collapse of Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority, and the failed presidential bid of Pat Robertson. In the 1990s, Christian Right organizing went to the grassroots and exerted wide influence in American politics across the country.
There is no doubt that Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition gets much of the credit for this successful strategic shift to the local level. But another largely overlooked reason for the persistent success of the Christian Right is a theological shift since the 1960s. The catalyst for the shift is Christian Reconstructionism--arguably the driving ideology of the Christian Right in the 1990s.
The significance of the Reconstructionist movement is not its numbers, but the power of its ideas and their surprisingly rapid acceptance. Many on the Christian Right are unaware that they hold Reconstructionist ideas. Because as a theology it is controversial, even among evangelicals, many who are consciously influenced by it avoid the label. This furtiveness is not, however, as significant as the potency of the ideology itself. Generally, Reconstructionism seeks to replace democracy with a theocratic elite that would govern by imposing their interpretation of "Biblical Law." Reconstructionism would eliminate not only democracy but many of its manifestations, such as labor unions, civil rights laws, and public schools. Women would be generally relegated to hearth and home. Insufficiently Christian men would be denied citizenship, perhaps executed. So severe is this theocracy that it would extend capital punishment beyond such crimes as kidnapping, rape, and murder to include, among other things, blasphemy, heresy, adultery, and homosexuality.
Reconstructionism has expanded from the works of a small group of scholars to inform a wide swath of conservative Christian thought and action. While many Reconstructionist political positions are commonly held conservative views, what is significant is that Reconstructionists have created a comprehensive program, with Biblical justifications for far right political policies. Many post-World War II conservative, anticommunist activists were also, if secondarily, conservative Christians. However, the Reconstructionist movement calls on conservatives to be Christians first, and to build a church-based political movement from there.
For much of Reconstructionism's short history it has been an ideology in search of a constituency. But its influence has grown far beyond the founders' expectations. As Reconstructionist author Gary North observes, "We once were shepherds without sheep. No longer."
What is Reconstructionism?
Reconstructionism is a theology that arose out of conservative Presbyterianism (Reformed and Orthodox), which proposes that contemporary application of the laws of Old Testament Israel, or "Biblical Law," is the basis for reconstructing society toward the Kingdom of God on earth.
Reconstructionism argues that the Bible is to be the governing text for all areas of life--such as government, education, law, and the arts, not merely "social" or "moral" issues like pornography, homosexuality, and abortion. Reconstructionists have formulated a "Biblical world view" and "Biblical principles" by which to examine contemporary matters. Reconstructionist theologian David Chilton succinctly describes this view: "The Christian goal for the world is the universal development of Biblical theocratic republics, in which every area of life is redeemed and placed under the Lordship of Jesus Christ and the rule of God's law."
More broadly, Reconstructionists believe that there are three main areas of governance: family government, church government, and civil government. Under God's covenant, the nuclear family is the basic unit. The husband is the head of the family, and wife and children are "in submission" to him. In turn, the husband "submits" to Jesus and to God's laws as detailed in the Old Testament. The church has its own ecclesiastical structure and governance. Civil government exists to implement God's laws. All three institutions are under Biblical Law, the implementation of which is called "theonomy."
The Origin of Reconstructionism
The original and defining text of Reconstructionism is Institutes of Biblical Law, published in 1973 by Rousas John Rushdoony--an 800-page explanation of the Ten Commandments, the Biblical "case law" that derives from them, and their application today. "The only true order," writes Rushdoony, "is founded on Biblical Law.
All law is religious in nature, and every non-Biblical law-order represents an anti-Christian religion." In brief, he continues, "Every law-order is a state of war against the enemies of that order, and all law is a form of warfare."
Gary North, Rushdoony's son-in-law, wrote an appendix to Institutes on the subject of "Christian economics." It is a polemic which serves as a model for the application of "Biblical Principles."
Rushdoony and a younger theologian, Rev. Greg Bahnsen, were both students of Cornelius Van Til, a Princeton University theologian. Although Van Til himself never became a Reconstructionist, Reconstructionists claim him as the father of their movement. According to Gary North, Van Til argued that "There is no philosophical strategy that has ever worked, except this one; to challenge the lost in terms of the revelation of God in His Bible. . .by what standard can man know anything truly? By the Bible, and only by the Bible." This idea that the correct and only way to view reality is through the lens of a Biblical world view is known as presuppositionalism. According to Gary North, Van Til stopped short of proposing what a Biblical society might look like or how to get there. That is where Reconstructionism begins. While Van Til states that man is not autonomous and that all rationality is inseparable from faith in God and the Bible, the Reconstructionists go further and set a course of world conquest or "dominion," claiming a Biblically prophesied "inevitable victory."
Reconstructionists also believe that "the Christians" are the "new chosen people of God," commanded to do what "Adam in Eden and Israel in Canaan failed to do. . .create the society that God requires." Further, Jews, once the "chosen people," failed to live up to God's covenant and therefore are no longer God's chosen. Christians, of the correct sort, now are.
Rushdoony's Institutes of Biblical Law consciously echoes a major work of the Protestant Reformation, John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion. In fact, Reconstructionists see themselves as the theological and political heirs of Calvin. The theocracy Calvin created in Geneva, Switzerland in the 1500s is one of the political models Reconstructionists look to, along with Old Testament Israel and the Calvinist Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Capital Punishment
Epitomizing the Reconstructionist idea of Biblical "warfare" is the centrality of capital punishment under Biblical Law. Doctrinal leaders (notably Rushdoony, North, and Bahnsen) call for the death penalty for a wide range of crimes in addition to such contemporary capital crimes as rape, kidnapping, and murder. Death is also the punishment for apostasy (abandonment of the faith), heresy, blasphemy, witchcraft, astrology, adultery, "sodomy or homosexuality," incest, striking a parent, incorrigible juvenile delinquency, and, in the case of women, "unchastity before marriage."
According to Gary North, women who have abortions should be publicly executed, "along with those who advised them to abort their children." Rushdoony concludes: "God's government prevails, and His alternatives are clear-cut: either men and nations obey His laws, or God invokes the death penalty against them." Reconstructionists insist that "the death penalty is the maximum, not necessarily the mandatory penalty." However, such judgments may depend less on Biblical Principles than on which faction gains power in the theocratic republic. The potential for bloodthirsty episodes on the order of the Salem witchcraft trials or the Spanish Inquisition is inadvertently revealed by Reconstructionist theologian Rev. Ray Sutton, who claims that the Reconstructed Biblical theocracies would be "happy" places, to which people would flock because "capital punishment is one of the best evangelistic tools of a society."
The Biblically approved methods of execution include burning (at the stake for example), stoning, hanging, and "the sword." Gary North, the self-described economist of Reconstructionism, prefers stoning because, among other things, stones are cheap, plentiful, and convenient. Punishments for non-capital crimes generally involve whipping, restitution in the form of indentured servitude, or slavery. Prisons would likely be only temporary holding tanks, prior to imposition of the actual sentence.
People who sympathize with Reconstructionism often flee the label because of the severe and unpopular nature of such views. Even those who feel it appropriate that they would be the governors of God's theocracy often waffle on the particulars, like capital punishment for sinners and nonbelievers. Unflinching advocates, however, insist upon consistency. Rev. Greg Bahnsen, in his book By This Standard, writes: "We. . .endorse the justice of God's penal code, if the Bible is to be the foundation of our Christian political ethic."
Reconstructionism has adopted "covenantalism," the theological doctrine that Biblical "covenants" exist between God and man, God and nations, God and families, and that they make up the binding, incorporating doctrine that makes sense of everything. Specifically, there is a series of covenant "structures" that make up a Biblical blueprint for society's institutions. Reconstructionists believe that God "judges" a whole society according to how it keeps these covenantal laws, and provides signs of that judgment. This belief can be seen, for example, in the claim that AIDS is a "sign of God's judgment."
Reconstructionist Rev. Ray Sutton writes that "there is no such thing as a natural disaster. Nature is not neutral. Nothing takes place in nature by chance. . .Although we may not know the exact sin being judged," Sutton declares, "what occurs results from God."
Christian Historical Revisionism
Part of the Reconstructionist world view is a revisionist view of history called "Christian history," which holds that history is predestined from "creation" until the inevitable arrival of the Kingdom of God. Christian history is written by means of retroactively discerning "God's providence."
Most Reconstructionists, for example, argue that the United States is a "Christian Nation" and that they are the champions and heirs of the "original intentions of the Founding Fathers." This dual justification for their views, one religious, the other somehow constitutional, is the result of a form of historical revisionism that Rushdoony frankly calls "Christian revisionism."
Christian revisionism is important in understanding the Christian Right's approach to politics and public policy. If one's political righteousness and sense of historical continuity are articles of faith, what appear as facts to everyone else fall before the compelling evidence of faith. Whatever does not fit neatly into a "Biblical world view" becomes problematic, perhaps a delusion sent by Satan.
The invocations of the Bible and the Founding Fathers are powerful ingredients for good religious-nationalist demagoguery. However, among the stark flaws of Reconstructionist history is the way Christian revisionism distorts historical fact.
For example, by interpreting the framing of the Constitution as if it were a document inspired by and adhering to a Reconstructionist version of Biblical Christianity, Reconstructionists make a claim that denies the existence of Article VI of the Constitution. Most historians agree that Article VI, which states that public officials shall be "bound by oath or affirmation to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States," was a move toward disestablishment of churches as official power brokers and the establishment of the principles of religious pluralism and separation of church and state.
R. J. Rushdoony, in his influential 1963 book, The Nature of the American System, claims that "The Constitution was designed to perpetuate a Christian order," then asks rhetorically: "Why then is there, in the main, an absence of any reference to Christianity in the Constitution?" He argues that the purpose was to protect religion from the federal government and to preserve "states' rights."
Once again, however, such a view requires ignoring Article VI. Before 1787, most of the colonies and early states had required pledges of allegiance to Christianity and that one be a Christian of the correct sect to hold office. Part of the struggle toward democracy at the time was the disestablishment of the state churches--the power structures of the local colonial theocracies. Thus the "religious test" was a significant philosophical matter. There was little debate over Article VI, which passed unanimously at the Constitutional Convention.
Most of the states soon followed the federal lead in conforming to it. Reconstructionist author Gary DeMar, in his 1993 book America's Christian History: The Untold Story, also trips over Article VI. He quotes from colonial and state constitutions to prove they were "Christian" states. And, of course, they generally were, until the framers of the Constitution set disestablishment irrevocably in motion. Yet DeMar tries to explain this away, claiming that Article VI merely banned "government mandated religious tests"--as if there were any other kind at issue. He later asserts that Article VI was a "mistake" on the part of the framers, implying that they did not intend disestablishment.
By contrast, mainstream historian Garry Wills sees no mistake. In his book Under God: Religion and American Politics, he concludes that the framers stitched together ideas from "constitutional monarchies, ancient republics, and modern leagues. . . .but we [the US] invented nothing, except disestablishment. . . . No other government in the history of the world had launched itself without the help of officially recognized gods and their state connected ministers." Disestablishment was the clear and unambiguous choice of the framers of the Constitution, most of whom were also serious Christians.
Even Gary North (who holds a Ph.D. in History) sees the connection between Article VI and disestablishment and attacks Rushdoony's version of the "Christian" Constitution. North writes that "In his desire to make the case for Christian America, he [Rushdoony] closed his eyes to the judicial break from Christian America: the ratification of the Constitution." North says Rushdoony "pretends" that Article VI "does not say what it says, and it does not mean what it has always meant: a legal barrier to Christian theocracy," leading "directly to the rise of religious pluralism."
North's views are the exception on the Christian Right. The falsely nostalgic view of a Christian Constitution, somehow subverted by modernism and the Supreme Court, generally holds sway. Christian historical revisionism is the premise of much Christian Right political and historical literature and is being widely taught and accepted in Christian schools and home schools. It informs the political understanding of the broader Christian Right. The popularization of this perspective is a dangerously polarizing factor in contemporary politics.
A Movement of Ideas
As a movement primarily of ideas, Reconstructionism has no single denominational or institutional home. Nor is it totally defined by a single charismatic leader, nor even a single text. Rather, it is defined by a small group of scholars who are identified with Reformed or Orthodox Presbyterianism. The movement networks primarily through magazines, conferences, publishing houses, think tanks, and bookstores. As a matter of strategy, it is a self-consciously decentralized and publicity-shy movement.
Reconstructionist leaders seem to have two consistent characteristics: a background in conservative Presbyterianism, and connections to the John Birch Society (JBS).
In 1973, R. J. Rushdoony compared the structure of the JBS to the "early church." He wrote in Institutes: "The key to the John Birch Society's effectiveness has been a plan of operation which has a strong resemblance to the early church; have meetings, local `lay' leaders, area supervisors or `bishops.'"
The JBS connection does not stop there. Most leading Reconstructionists have either been JBS members or have close ties to the organization. Reconstructionist literature can be found in JBS-affiliated American Opinion bookstores.
Indeed, the conspiracist views of Reconstructionist writers (focusing on the United Nations and the Council on Foreign Relations, among others) are consistent with those of the John Birch Society. A classic statement of the JBS world view, Call It Conspiracy by Larry Abraham, features a prologue and an epilogue by Reconstructionist Gary North. In fact, former JBS chairman Larry McDonald may himself have been a Reconstructionist. Joseph Morecraft has written that "Larry [McDonald] understood that when the authors of the US Constitution spoke of law, they meant the law of God as revealed in the Bible. I have heard him say many times that we must refute humanistic, relativistic law with Biblical Law."
As opposed to JBS beliefs, however, Reconstructionists emphasize the primacy of Christianity over politics. Gary North, for example, insists that it is the institution of the Church itself to which loyalty and energy are owed, before any other arena of life. Christians are called to Christianity first and foremost, and Christianization should extend to all areas of life. This emphasis on Christianity has political implications because, in the 1990s, it is likely that the JBS world view is persuasive to more people when packaged as a Biblical world view.
Frederick Clarkson is an author and lecturer who has written extensively on right-wing religious groups from the Christian Coalition to the Unification Church. He is co-author of Challenging the Christian Right: The Activist's Handbook, (Institute for First Amendment Studies, 1992), and is author of Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Democracy and Theocracy in the United States, (Common Courage Press, 1996). This article originally appeared in the March and June 1994 issues of The Public Eye.
From time to time in this column I print the work of others. This is one of those times. A dear friend of mine from Greenbrae forwarded me the following speech - "Arrogance is the Opposite of Faith" - given by a minister, Dr. Robin Meyers, at an Oklahoma University Peace Rally in November 2004. The message of this speech is powerful and timeless. It deserves to be read, shared and read again. I hope the readers of this column will be as touched and moved by it as I am.
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"As some of you know, I am minister of Mayflower Congregational Church in Oklahoma City, an Open and Affirming, Peace and Justice church in northwest Oklahoma City, and professor of Rhetoric at Oklahoma City University. But you would most likely have encountered me on the pages of the Oklahoma Gazette, where I have been a columnist for six years, and hold the record for the most number of angry letters to the editor.
"Tonight, I join ranks of those who are angry, because I have watched as the faith I love has been taken over by fundamentalists who claim to speak for Jesus, but whose actions are anything but Christian.
"We've heard a lot lately about so-called "moral values" as having swung the election to President Bush. Well, I'm a great believer in moral values, but we need to have a discussion, all over this country, about exactly what constitutes a moral value - I mean what are we talking about? Because we don't get to make them up as we go along, especially not if we are people of faith. We have an inherited tradition of what is right and wrong, and moral is as moral does.
"Let me give you just a few of the reasons why I take issue with those in power who claim moral values are on their side:
1. When you start a war on false pretenses, and then act as if your deceptions are justified because you are doing God's will, and that your critics are either unpatriotic or lacking in faith, there are some of us who have given our lives to teaching and preaching the faith who believe that this is not only not moral, but immoral.
2. When you live in a country that has established international rules for waging a just war, build the United Nations on your own soil to enforce them, and then arrogantly break the very rules you set down for the rest of the world, you are doing something immoral.
3. When you claim that Jesus is the Lord of your life, and yet fail to acknowledge that your policies ignore his essential teaching, or turn them on their head (you know, Sermon on the Mount stuff, like that we must never return violence for violence and that those who live by the sword will die by the sword), you are doing something immoral.
4. When you act as if the lives of Iraqi civilians are not as important as the lives of American soldiers, and refuse to even count them, you are doing something immoral.
5. When you find a way to avoid combat in Vietnam, and then question the patriotism of someone who volunteered to fight, and came home a hero, you are doing something immoral.
6. When you ignore the fundamental teachings of the gospel, which says that the way the strong treat the weak is the ultimate ethical test, by giving tax breaks to the wealthiest among us so the strong will get stronger and the weak will get weaker, you are doing something immoral.
7. When you wink at the torture of prisoners, and deprive so-called "enemy combatants" of the rules of the Geneva Convention, which your own country helped to establish and insists that other countries follow, you are doing something immoral.
8. When you claim that the world can be divided up into the good guys and the evil doers, slice up your own nation into those who are with you, or with the terrorists - and then launch a war which enriches your own friends and seizes control of the oil to which we are addicted, instead of helping us to kick the habit, you are doing something immoral.
9. When you fail to veto a single spending bill, but ask us to pay for a war with no exit strategy and no end in sight, creating an enormous deficit that hangs like a great millstone around the necks of our children, you are doing something immoral.
10. When you cause most of the rest of the world to hate a country that was once the most loved country in the world, and act like it doesn't matter what others think of us, only what God thinks of you, you have done something immoral.
11. When you use hatred of homosexuals as a wedge issue to turn out record numbers of evangelical voters, and use the Constitution as a tool of discrimination, you are doing something immoral.
12. When you favor the death penalty, and yet claim to be a follower of Jesus, who said an eye for an eye was the old way, not the way of the kingdom, you are doing something immoral.
13. When you dismantle countless environmental laws designed to protect the earth which is God's gift to us all, so that the corporations that bought you and paid for your favors will make higher profits while our children breathe dirty air and live in a toxic world, you have done something immoral. The earth belongs to the Lord, not Halliburton.
14. When you claim that our God is bigger than their God, and that our killing is righteous, while theirs is evil, we have begun to resemble the enemy we claim to be fighting, and that is immoral. We have met the enemy, and the enemy is us.
15. When you tell people that you intend to run and govern as a "compassionate conservative," using the word which is the essence of all religious faith-compassion, and then show no compassion for anyone who disagrees with you, and no patience with those who cry to you for help, you are doing something immoral.
16. When you talk about Jesus constantly, who was a healer of the sick, but do nothing to make sure that anyone who is sick can go to see a doctor, even if she doesn't have a penny in her pocket, you are doing something immoral.
17. When you put judges on the bench who are racist, and will set women back a hundred years, and when you surround yourself with preachers who say gays ought to be killed, you are doing something immoral.
"I'm tired of people thinking that because I'm a Christian, I must be a supporter of President Bush, or that because I favor civil rights and gay rights I must not be a person of faith. I'm tired of people saying that I can't support the troops but oppose the war.
I heard that when I was your age - when the Vietnam War was raging. We knew that war was wrong, and you know that this war is wrong - the only question is how many people are going to die before these make-believe Christians are removed from power?
"This country is bankrupt. The war is morally bankrupt. The claim of this administration to be Christian is bankrupt. And the only people who can turn things around are people like you -young people who are just beginning to wake up to what is happening to them. It's your country to take back. It's your faith to take back.
"It's your future to take back.
"Don't be afraid to speak out. Don't back down when your friends begin to tell you that the cause is righteous and that the flag should be wrapped around the cross, while the rest of us keep our mouths shut.
"Real Christians take chances for peace. So do real Jews, and real Muslims, and real Hindus, and real Buddhists - so do all the faith traditions of the world at their heart believe one thing: Life is precious.
"Every human being is precious. Arrogance is the opposite of faith. Greed is the opposite of charity.
"And believing that one has never made a mistake is the mark of a deluded man, not a man of faith.
"And war - war is the greatest failure of the human race - and thus the greatest failure of faith. There's an old rock and roll song, whose lyrics say it all: War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing.
"And what is the dream of the prophets? That we should study war no more, that we should beat our swords into plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks. Who would Jesus bomb, indeed? How many wars does it take to know that too many people have died?
"What if they gave a war and nobody came? Maybe one day we will find out."
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Kyra Gottesman writes a weekly column for the Oroville Mercury-Register
For many fervent Christians, support for Israel has less to do with Ariel Sharon than preparing for Armageddon.
By Michelle Goldberg
May 24, 2002 / From the Senate floor, Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., preached what was essentially a sermon about Israel last December. "The Bible says that Abram [Abraham] removed his tent, and came and dwelt in the plain of Mamre, which is in Hebron, and built there an altar before the Lord," he said. "Hebron is in the West Bank. It is at this place where God appeared to Abram and said, 'I am giving you this land' ... This is not a political battle at all. It is a contest over whether or not the word of God is true."
As Inhofe's speech suggested, for elements of the Christian right, pro-Israel fervor has ascended to the realm of the sacred. Christian leaders Ralph Reed and Gary Bauer both say that their support of Israel -- and Israeli expansionism -- is partly rooted in biblical injunction. Bauer says, "There are a variety of Old Testament scriptures in which God is saying to Abraham that the people of Israel will occupy all the land between the sea and the river," which he says means the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. "There's a belief that this is covenant land," he adds.
Such views have concrete consequences -- as Nicholas Kristof wrote in the New York Times, evangelical internationalism is a "broad new trend that is beginning to reshape American foreign policy." Many Jewish leaders have welcomed evangelical support on Israel. Yet despite feel-good talk of ecumenical alliances, conservative Christians aren't just acting as backup for their Jewish brothers and sisters. They have an agenda of their own. For now, it coincides with mainstream Jewish concerns. It won't always.
Put baldly, millions of evangelical Christians see forewarnings of Armageddon in the crisis in the Middle East. Followers of dispensationalism, a major strain within American evangelical Christianity, they believe that the return of Jews to Israel and the restoration of Jewish sovereignty over the Temple Mount is a precondition for the rapture, the apocalypse and the return of Christ.
"I believe that Jesus can only return when all of the Jews have returned to their land," writes Norbert Lieth, author of 18 Christian books, in the dispensationalist magazine "Midnight Call." Television preachers like Jack Van Impe and John Hagee and bestselling Christian writers like Hal Lindsey explain the current struggle over Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank as prophesy made manifest. They see their interpretation of Daniel and the Book of Revelations played out every day on the news.
For them, there can be no negotiation over what they call "Judea and Samaria" despite the fact that many Israelis, and Jews worldwide, hope Israel eventually pulls out of the territories. Randall Price, jet-setting founder of World of the Bible Ministries, says, "In the book of Genesis, there are territorial dimensions for the land that is given to Abraham and his descendents. It's from the river of Egypt to the river of the Euphrates." In his view, Israel's right to that land, which extends into modern-day Iraq, is absolute. As for the Palestinians, Price says, "Ishmael has said that his descendants would live to the East of their brother. There's a much larger geographical territory allotted to them."
The Palestinians, he says, have "no historic claims" to the land they're on now and should move to an Arab country outside Israel's dominion.
Seen in this light, Dick Armey's comments to an incredulous Chris Matthews on MSNBC's "Hardball" a few weeks ago make more sense. "I am not content to give up any part of Israel for that purpose of that Palestinian state," he said. "I happened to believe that the Palestinians should leave." After all, Armey might have added, the Bible says so.
While Armey has made his evangelical Christianity clear, there is no evidence that he believes in dispensationalism. According to his communications director, Armey's Zionist stance stems from solidarity with Israel in the war against terrorism. Similarly, a spokesman for Inhofe insists that dispensationalism "has not really figured into his support for Israel."
Reed and Bauer also distance themselves from dispensationalism. "My support for Israel has little or nothing to do with theology of the end times," says Reed. "Evangelicals have a fairly expansive view of God's sovereignty. I believe that he'll be able to work out Israel's role in the end times without our help."
Bauer concurs, "I've always been uncomfortable trying to discern prophetic literature. Christ himself says no man knows the hour or the day, so in my own faith life I've stuck pretty much to the basics of my belief in Jesus Christ as the son of God and have left it to others to argue out what at times are fairly esoteric differences."
There is no reason to doubt either man's sincerity. At the same time, it is crucial to note that while both minimize the influence of dispensationalism, neither will explicitly disavow it. Meanwhile, at least one Republican leader seems to believe the rapture is imminent -- a plaque in Tom DeLay's office reads, "This could be the day."
That's one reason that Chip Berlet, an analyst with the progressive think tank Political Research Associates, argues, "The current administration in the United States is packed with people who are literal Bible believers and who see in Israel a specific role in the end times." The most visible believers, says Berlet, are Attorney General John Ashcroft, Armey and Delay. "My argument is that you don't have to say, 'I am a dispensationalist' to be a person influenced by these apocalyptic metaphors. The more you're embedded in a Christian fundamentalist culture, the more you're going to be influenced by these ideas even if you claim you aren't."
Gershom Gorenberg, Israeli journalist and author of "The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount," cautions that we need to pay attention to these views. "There's a tendency which is very common among secular-leaning people not to take theology very seriously," he says. Yet evangelical leaders are hardly reticent about the central role that religion plays in everything they do. Gorenberg adds, "When Jerry Falwell says, 'I don't think there's a West Bank, there's Judea and Samaria,' why shouldn't I take seriously that he's deriving that from the bible?" As Gorenberg points out, important elements in Israeli society take these people very seriously indeed. When Binyamin Netanyahu visited Washington during the '90s, he met with Jerry Falwell and other Christian leaders before he met with Bill Clinton. American evangelicals have raised millions to return diaspora Jews to Israel. Fundamentalist groups like the Christian Friends of Israeli Communities fund settler movements, "those pioneers now fulfilling the covenant to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob regarding the restoration of all the land God has allocated to Israel," as one pamphlet said.
Yet despite its international influence, most people on America's godless coasts have never heard of dispensationalism. It's one of those words that reveals the yawning ideological gulf between red states and blue. To secular urbanites, it might seem like just another example of fringe American madness, something akin to UFO cults. But it's thoroughly mainstream -- far more so than agnosticism. Darrell Bock, research professor of New Testament studies at the Dallas Theological Seminary, says that the most prevalent view among evangelicals is an unequivocal support for Israel, and that dispensationalism plays a large role in their conviction. And Gorenberg says, "Dispensationalism is a predominant belief among fundamentalists."
It matters that a lot of evangelicals are dispensationalists because a lot of Americans are evangelicals. According to a Gallup Poll taken in March, "46 percent of Americans describe themselves as 'born-again' or evangelical." In a 1999 Newsweek Poll, 71 percent of evangelicals said they believed that the world would end in a battle at Armageddon (which is itself a corruption of the name of the Israeli town Megiddo) between Jesus and the antichrist.
Of course, not every Christian who believes Jews have a God-given right to Palestinian territory is an end-time fundamentalist. "I'm not going to deny that it's a factor, of course it's a factor, but it's an insignificant factor," says Reed. "I think it shows a misunderstanding of both the complexity and the character of Christian support for Israel and the Jewish people."
As Bauer says, Christian support for Israel can be explained partly by the fact that evangelicals typically take a hard line on foreign policy. "American Christians were generally supportive of a more hawkish view in the cold war. It was seen in moral terms. Reagan would refer to us as a shining city on the hill, and many Christians did see it that way. I think now there is a strong sense among American Christians that there is a clash of civilizations going on, and broadly speaking, Israel and the United States are defending Western civilization."
Israel aside, evangelicals tend to be hostile toward Islam, as demonstrated by Billy Graham's son Franklin's statement that it is "a very evil and wicked religion."
"It's certainly seen as an illegitimate faith," says Bock. "Judaism supplies the roots for Christianity and Jesus was Jewish, so there is a recognition of kinship that doesn't exist with Islam. There is also a history of Islam's violent treatment of Christians and Jews that has accelerated this reaction that you've seen. Certainly something like 9/11 takes it high on the charts -- if that can be done as an act of religious faith, this is not a religion worth respecting." Evangelicals point out the horrors perpetrated by Sudan's Muslim government against the country's Christians -- including the widespread slave trade -- as evidence of the religion's amorality.
Yet if end-times prophesy can't completely account for the Christian right's embrace of Israel, it also can't be disentangled from it. As Gorenberg says, "There's a package deal going on here. The same people who hold this particular Christian theology are also conservatives in other ways. They tend to see the world as divided between good guys and bad guys and they tend to see force as the proper solution." They may speak in geopolitical terms, he says, "but they're influenced by a mythological view of the state of Israel."
Besides, even Republicans of the Christian right who don't believe we're on the cusp of the second coming have to appease the evangelicals in their constituency, and among those evangelicals, dispensationalism is as much a part of the culture as is "Star Wars."
Perhaps the most overwhelming evidence for the prevalence of dispensationalism is the success of the "Left Behind" novels. Co-written by Tim LaHaye, former leader of the Moral Majority, and Jerry B. Jenkins, the books are end-time thrillers that have sold more than 50 million copies. As Brodrick Shepherd, owner of the prophecy clearinghouse Armageddon Books, says, the books "have had a tremendous amount of influence in bringing awareness to the idea of dispensationalism."
There are currently 10 books in the series, which tell the story of those left behind after the rapture to deal with the tribulations. The books begin with a ferocious military assault on Israel. A group of Christians, shamed by the weakness of faith that caused them to miss the rapture, band together to fight the antichrist and, among other things, protect the righteous Jews who urge their brethren to turn to Jesus. Meanwhile, a deluded Jewish Nobel prize-winner colludes with the antichrist, one of whose first acts is to forge a cynical peace with Israel. Another popular dispensationalist novel, Hal Lindsey's 1996 "Blood Moon," features an Israeli prime minister who heroically launches preemptive nuclear strikes against the major cities of the Arab world.
It's not just fiction spreading the word about Israel and the last days. "Jack Van Impe Presents," which bills itself as "a weekly news program which analyzes and evaluates world events in the light of Biblical prophecy," is broadcast in all 50 states and throughout the world. So is a program by Pastor John Hagee, who has written that Jesus will only return after the "most devastating war Israel has ever known." End-times teachings are popular on "The 700 Club" and on many of the 1,300 Christian radio stations that are part of the National Religious Broadcasters association. There are Dispensationalist magazines like Endtimes, Midnight Call and Israel My Glory. According to Shepherd, who is fascinated by end-time prophecy but critical of dispensationalism, "When you walk into a Christian bookstore, everything you find on prophecy is going to be from a dispensationalist viewpoint."
For some Jews, the prevalence of dispensationalists has been a boon both politically and economically. Orthodox Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, author of "Understanding Evangelicals: A Guide for the Jewish Community" and head of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, distributed $14 million last year that he raised almost exclusively from American evangelicals. Most of the money went to resettle diaspora Jews in Israel and to help care for new arrivals. He has an office in Chicago staffed by 50 people, most of them evangelical Christians, and one in Jerusalem staffed by Jews. There are 3,500 churches involved with his organization. Recently, he said, the Israeli prime minister's office asked him to start doing public relations work for Israel in the Christian community worldwide.
"The Jewish community over the years has struggled with the question of whether these people are our greatest friends and allies or our greatest adversaries," he says. "I obviously wouldn't be in this business unless I felt that they were among our greatest friends."
Abraham Foxman, executive director of the Anti-Defamation League, doesn't go that far, but he's also not terribly concerned about the evangelicals' motivation. "Some [evangelicals] are motivated theologically, in that for the Second Coming of the Messiah, one of the prerequisites is for Jews to be safe and secure in the Holy Land," he says. "That's not a reason for us to reject them. I believe that when the Jews are safe and secure in the Holy Land the Messiah will come for the first time. So what?"
After all, as Foxman indicates, Christians certainly aren't the only ones with a messianic view of Israel. While secular or reform Jews -- that is, most Jews -- tend to see the need for a secure Jewish homeland as a political matter and are thus willing to negotiate its borders, Orthodox Jews share the evangelicals' conviction that Israel is covenant land. That's why when it comes to issues like settlements, Rabbi Eckstein says, deeply religious Jews have more in common with Christians than with the Jewish mainstream. Israel, says Eckstein, "is the Holy Land for both the religious Jew and for the evangelical Christian. It is a miracle, the ingathering of the exiles. It is God's redemption."
But the two versions of redemption are starkly different. In the evangelical one, the Middle East is convulsed by unprecedented violence and most Jews die.
The vast majority of Jews desperately want to avoid a full-scale conflagration between Israel and the Arab world. Dispensationalists don't. In the dispensationalist narrative, Christians will be raptured to heaven before all the fighting between Jews and Muslims starts. Everyone left will face mass death and destruction. "Some people see some of the imagery in Revelations being caused by nuclear weapons," says Brodrick. Thus evangelical Christians' support for policies like the permanent takeover the West Bank and Gaza and even, in some cases, the expulsion of Palestinians into Jordan, should be understood in the context of a worldview in which world war is inevitable.
Eckstein recalls an ad for a prophesy book in Charisma magazine that said the post-rapture tribulations would "make the Holocaust seem like a party." Though he believes most evangelicals are more "humble and responsible" than that author, he says, "There are those who are so definitive and absolute about the future, and their theology does entail the destruction of millions of Jews in the battle of Armageddon. I believe it says in the Book of Revelations that the blood will be so high that it will reach the bridle of a horse."
Dispensationalist Christians believe that this is all in the service of establishing the reign of Christ on earth. Yet while they chase this fantasy, they're content to put real lives -- Jewish lives -- on the line. "It doesn't make me feel any better when they tell me to keep the whole West Bank when I don't think that's for the benefit of Israel politically," says Gorenberg. "When somebody's hope for where Israeli policy will lead is Armageddon, clearly they're going to be judging things differently."
For now, as Jews and evangelicals work together, those differences might not matter. Yet as American government support of the mujahedin shows, realpolitik partnerships against metaphysical evil can turn rancid. When people believe their politics are endorsed by God, today's ally can be tomorrow's Satan.
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About the writer Michelle Goldberg is a staff writer for Salon based in New York.
The Pill: The birth-control method that, beginning in the 1960's, changed the cultural landscape. Tom Schierlitz
The Abortion Pill: Mifepristone, left, is taken at a clinic; misoprostol is taken 24 to 48 hours later at home. Tom Schierlitz
Diaphragm: Even this method could be under attack from advocates of abstinence-only birth control. Tom Schierlitz
By RUSSELL SHORTO Published: May 7, 2006
The English writer Daniel Defoe is best remembered today for creating the ultimate escapist fantasy, "Robinson Crusoe," but in 1727 he sent the British public into a scandalous fit with the publication of a nonfiction work called "Conjugal Lewdness: or, Matrimonial Whoredom." After apparently being asked to tone down the title for a subsequent edition, Defoe came up with a new one — "A Treatise Concerning the Use and Abuse of the Marriage Bed" — that only put a finer point on things. The book wasn't a tease, however. It was a moralizing lecture. After the wanton years that followed the restoration of the monarchy, a time when both theaters and brothels multiplied, social conservatism rooted itself in the English bosom. Self-appointed Christian morality police roamed the land, bent on restricting not only homosexuality and prostitution but also what went on between husbands and wives.
It was this latter subject that Defoe chose to address. The sex act and sexual desire should not be separated from reproduction, he and others warned, else "a man may, in effect, make a whore of his own wife." To highlight one type of then-current wickedness, Defoe gives a scene in which a young woman who is about to marry asks a friend for some "recipes." "Why, you little Devil, you would not take Physick to kill the child?" the friend asks as she catches her drift. "No," the young woman answers, "but there may be Things to prevent Conception; an't there?" The friend is scandalized and argues that the two amount to the same thing, but the bride to be dismisses her: "I cannot understand your Niceties; I would not be with Child, that's all; there's no harm in that, I hope." One prime objective of England's Christian warriors in the 1720's was to stamp out what Defoe called "the diabolical practice of attempting to prevent childbearing by physical preparations."
The wheels of history have a tendency to roll back over the same ground. For the past 33 years — since, as they see it, the wanton era of the 1960's culminated in the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 — American social conservatives have been on an unyielding campaign against abortion. But recently, as the conservative tide has continued to swell, this campaign has taken on a broader scope. Its true beginning point may not be Roe but Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 case that had the effect of legalizing contraception. "We see a direct connection between the practice of contraception and the practice of abortion," says Judie Brown, president of the American Life League, an organization that has battled abortion for 27 years but that, like others, now has a larger mission. "The mind-set that invites a couple to use contraception is an antichild mind-set," she told me. "So when a baby is conceived accidentally, the couple already have this negative attitude toward the child. Therefore seeking an abortion is a natural outcome. We oppose all forms of contraception."
The American Life League is a lay Catholic organization, and for years — especially since Pope Paul VI's "Humanae Vitae" encyclical of 1968 forbade "any action which either before, at the moment of or after sexual intercourse, is specifically intended to prevent procreation" — being anti-contraception was largely a Catholic thing. Protestants and other non-Catholics tended to look on curiously as they took part in the general societywide acceptance of various forms of birth control. But no longer. Organizations like the Christian Medical and Dental Associations, which inject a mixture of religion and medicine into the social sphere, operate from a broadly Christian perspective that includes opposition to some forms of birth control. Edward R. Martin Jr., a lawyer for the public-interest law firm Americans United for Life, whose work includes seeking to restrict abortion at the state level and representing pharmacists who have refused to prescribe emergency contraception, told me: "We see contraception and abortion as part of a mind-set that's worrisome in terms of respecting life. If you're trying to build a culture of life, then you have to start from the very beginning of life, from conception, and you have to include how we think and act with regard to sexuality and contraception." Dr. Joseph B. Stanford, who was appointed by President Bush in 2002 to the F.D.A.'s Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee despite (or perhaps because of) his opposition to contraception, sounded not a little like Daniel Defoe in a 1999 essay he wrote: "Sexual union in marriage ought to be a complete giving of each spouse to the other, and when fertility (or potential fertility) is deliberately excluded from that giving I am convinced that something valuable is lost. A husband will sometimes begin to see his wife as an object of sexual pleasure who should always be available for gratification."
As with other efforts — against gay marriage, stem cell research, cloning, assisted suicide — the anti-birth-control campaign isn't centralized; it seems rather to be part of the evolution of the conservative movement. The subject is talked about in evangelical churches and is on the agenda at the major Bible-based conservative organizations like Focus on the Family and the Christian Coalition. It also has its point people in Congress — including Representative Roscoe Bartlett of Maryland, Representative Chris Smith of New Jersey, Representative Joe Pitts and Representative Melissa Hart of Pennsylvania and Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma — all Republicans who have led opposition to various forms of contraception.
R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, is considered one of the leading intellectual figures of evangelical Christianity in the U.S. In a December 2005 column in The Christian Post titled "Can Christians Use Birth Control?" he wrote: "The effective separation of sex from procreation may be one of the most important defining marks of our age — and one of the most ominous. This awareness is spreading among American evangelicals, and it threatens to set loose a firestorm.. . .A growing number of evangelicals are rethinking the issue of birth control — and facing the hard questions posed by reproductive technologies."
It is difficult to state precisely when this rethinking began, but George W. Bush's victory in 2000, which was aided mightily by social conservatives, came around the same time that the abortion pill and the emergency contraception pill reached the market, and that convergence of events might be seen as the beginning of a new chapter in the culture war. State legislatures are debating dozens of bills surrounding emergency contraception, or the "morning-after pill": whether pharmacists have the right to refuse to fill orders; whether it should be made available over the counter; whether Catholic hospitals may decline to provide it to rape victims. To the dismay of many public-health officials, and following the will of conservative Christian organizations, the Bush administration has steadily moved the federal family-planning program in the direction of an abstinence-only-until-marriage program. Some conservative groups and some Republicans in Congress have waged a campaign against condoms in recent years, claiming they are less effective than popularly believed in preventing pregnancy and protecting against sexually transmitted diseases. Important international health experts say the Bush administration has used the government's program for AIDS relief to transmit its abstinence message overseas, de-emphasizing condoms and jeopardizing the health of large numbers of people, especially in Africa. A regulatory challenge has been filed with the F.D.A., and a push by some Republicans in Congress is under way to suspend the sale of the abortion pill (also known by the brand names RU-486 or Mifeprex) on the grounds that it is unsafe. The lead counsel in this challenge, however, admits the underlying motivation is opposition to abortion. Meanwhile, the abortion pill and the emergency contraception pill — because of their ease of use, the mechanisms by which they work and the fact that they are taken after sex — have blurred the line between contraception and abortion and have added a new wrinkle to the traditional anti-abortion movement.
Many Christians who are active in the evolving anti-birth-control arena state frankly that what links their efforts is a religious commitment to altering the moral landscape of the country. In particular, and not to put too fine a point on it, they want to change the way Americans have sex. Dr. Stanford, the F.D.A. adviser on reproductive-health drugs, proclaimed himself "fully committed to promoting an understanding of human sexuality and procreation radically at odds with the prevailing views and practices of our contemporary culture." Focus on the Family posts a kind of contraceptive warning label on its Web site: "Modern contraceptive inventions have given many an exaggerated sense of safety and prompted more people than ever before to move sexual expression outside the marriage boundary." Contraception, by this logic, encourages sexual promiscuity, sexual deviance (like homosexuality) and a preoccupation with sex that is unhealthful even within marriage.
It may be news to many people that contraception as a matter of right and public health is no longer a given, but politicians and those in the public health profession know it well. "The linking of abortion and contraception is indicative of a larger agenda, which is putting sex back into the box, as something that happens only within marriage," says William Smith, vice president for public policy for the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States. Siecus has been around since 1964, and as a group that supports abortion rights, it is natural enemies with many organizations on the right, but its mission has changed in recent years, from doing things like promoting condoms as a way to combat AIDS to, now, fighting to maintain the very idea of birth control as a social good. "Whether it's emergency contraception, sex education or abortion, anything that might be seen as facilitating sex outside a marital context is what they'd like to see obliterated," Smith says.
Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine, an abortion rights Republican who has sponsored legislation that would require insurance companies to cover contraception, has seen a major change. "Two decades or more ago, I don't think there was much of a divide on contraception and family planning," she says. "It was one area both sides could agree on as a way to reduce unwanted pregnancies. Now it becomes embroiled in philosophical disputes."
The Guttmacher Institute, which like Siecus has been an advocate for birth control and sex education for decades, has also felt the shift. "Ten years ago the fight was all about abortion," says Cynthia Dailard, a senior public-policy associate at Guttmacher. "Increasingly, they have moved to attack and denigrate contraception. For those of us who work in the public health field, and respect longstanding public health principles — that condoms reduce S.T.D.'s, that contraception is the most effective way to help people avoid unintended pregnancy — it's extremely disheartening to think we may be set back decades."
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It was a Friday afternoon at the end of August last year, with most of official Washington on vacation, when a press conference was called at F.D.A. headquarters in Rockville, Md. The occasion was a major drug announcement, but no one from the agency's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research was in the room to hear Commissioner Lester M. Crawford declare that "the agency is unable at this time to reach a decision on the approvability of the application." It was for Plan B.
Plan B, the brand name for the most common form of emergency contraception, has been on the market since 1999 (another form, Preven, came on the market in 1998). The pill, which contains concentrated amounts of progestin, a hormone found in ordinary birth control pills, can prevent a pregnancy most effectively if taken within 72 hours of having sex. (The abortion pill, by contrast, can be taken up to 49 days after the beginning of the last menstrual period and causes the chemical abortion of a fetus.) Plan B's manufacturer applied in April 2003 for permission to sell Plan B over the counter. Reproductive and women's health professionals expected clear sailing for the drug (morning-after contraception has been available in some European countries for more than 20 years). Experts overwhelmingly considered it safe: in December 2003 the F.D.A.'s own joint advisory panel voted 28-0 that it was "safe for use in the nonprescription setting" and then voted 23 to 4 in favor of granting Plan B over-the-counter status.
The hope many people had for the drug was tied to an ugly number: 21. That is the number of abortions in the U.S. per year per 1,000 women of reproductive age, which puts the country at or near the top among developed nations. Put another way, according to a study released this past week by the Guttmacher Institute, there are 6.4 million pregnancies a year in the U.S., 3.1 million of which are unintended and 1.3 million of which end in abortion. In the seven years since the last such study, the overall unintended-pregnancy rate has remained unchanged; for women below the poverty level it increased 29 percent. If women had quick, easy access to a backup contraceptive, the thinking of Plan B proponents went, those rates — and thus the abortion rate — would drop. "I saw it as a win-win situation, something that everyone on both sides of the abortion issue could support," says Dr. Susan F. Wood, who was at the time director of the Office of Women's Health at the F.D.A. "I still don't get what happened."
One thing that happened, which Dr. Wood and many others may have failed to notice, was the change in conservative circles on the subject of contraception. At a White House press briefing in May of last year, three months before the F.D.A.'s nonruling on Plan B, Press Secretary Scott McClellan was asked four times by a WorldNetDaily correspondent, Les Kinsolving, if the president supported contraception. "I think the president's views are very clear when it comes to building a culture of life," McClellan replied. Kinsolving said, "If they were clear, I wouldn't have asked." McClellan replied: "And if you want to ask those questions, that's fine. I'm just not going to dignify them with a response." This exchange caught the attention of bloggers and others. In July, a group of Democrats in Congress, led by Representative Carolyn Maloney of New York, sent the first of four letters to the president asking outright: "Mr. President, do you support the right to use contraception?" According to Representative Maloney's office, the White House has still not responded.
For those who were listening, that silence may have given an indication of what had been going on inside the F.D.A. After the agency's advisory committees voted in favor of over-the-counter status for Plan B at the end of 2003, and after it was further approved at every level of the agency's professional staff, standard procedure would have been for the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research arm of the F.D.A. to approve the application. But one member of the F.D.A.'s Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee had reservations: Dr. W. David Hager, a Christian conservative whom President Bush appointed to lead the panel in 2002. (After an outcry from women's groups, who were upset at Dr. Hager's writing that he used Jesus as a model for how he treated women in his gynecology practice, he was shifted from chairman of the panel to ordinary member.) Dr. Hager said he feared that if Plan B were freely available, it would increase sexual promiscuity among teenagers. F.D.A. staff members presented research showing that these fears were ungrounded: large-scale studies showed no increase in sexual activity when Plan B was available to them, and both the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Society for Adolescent Medicine endorsed the switch to over-the-counter status. Others argued that the concern was outside the agency's purview: that the F.D.A.'s mandate was specifically limited to safety and did not extend to matters like whether a product might lead to people having more sex. Meanwhile a government report later found that Dr. Janet Woodcock, deputy commissioner for operations at the F.D.A., had also expressed a fear that making the drug available over the counter could lead to "extreme promiscuous behaviors such as the medication taking on an 'urban legend' status that would lead adolescents to form sex-based cults centered around the use of Plan B." In May 2004, the F.D.A. rejected the finding of its scientific committees and denied the application, citing some of the reasons that Dr. Hager had expressed.
The drug's manufacturer reapplied two months later, this time for permission to sell it over the counter to women ages 16 and up, seemingly dealing with the issue of youth. Then, last August, Crawford made his announcement that the F.D.A. would delay its decision, a delay that could be indefinite. The announcement made headlines across the country. Dr. Wood, the F.D.A.'s women's health official, resigned in protest. Democrats in Congress asked for an investigation into what they felt was politics — the anti-birth-control agenda of the politically powerful Christian right — trumping science. The Government Accountability Office conducted a study of the events and issued a report last November concluding that the decision to reject the findings of the scientific advisory panel "was not typical of the other 67 prescription-to-O.T.C. switch decisions made from 1994 to 2004." Currently, Senators Hillary Clinton and Patty Murray are holding up the nomination of Andrew von Eschenbach as F.D.A. commissioner until the F.D.A. issues a verdict on the drug.
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The saga of emergency contraception and the F.D.A. is developing into one of the iconic clashes of the Bush era: a story of the entanglement of politics, science and religious beliefs. At the heart of it is the question of whether emergency contraception is or could be a form of abortion. "The science is very clear that this does not cause an abortion," William Smith of Siecus told me. The same clarity exists on the other side. One of the "common and intended modes of action" of emergency contraception, according to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, "is to prevent the development of the embryo, resulting in his or her death." Dr. Gene Rudd, an obstetrician-gynecologist who is associate executive director of the Christian Medical and Dental Associations, advises his group's member physicians that "those who consider life to begin at fertilization recognize the pills' mechanisms as abortifacient," or inducing an abortion.
The issue is partly — but only partly — one of definition. According to the makers of the emergency contraception pill, it has three possible means of functioning. Most commonly, it stops ovulation — the release of an egg —or prevents sperm from fertilizing an egg. In some cases, however, depending on where a woman is in her cycle, it may stop an already fertilized egg from attaching to the uterine wall. In such a situation, for those who believe that life — and thus also pregnancy — begins at the moment of fertilization, it would indeed function as an abortifacient. According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, however, pregnancy begins not at fertilization but at implantation. The medical thinking behind this definition has to do with the fact that implantation is the moment when a woman's body begins to nurture the fertilized egg. The roughly one-half of all fertilized eggs that never attach to a uterine wall are thus not generally considered to be tiny humans — ensouled beings — that died but rather fertilized eggs that did not turn into pregnancies. Federal regulations enacted during the Bush administration agree with this, stating, "Pregnancy encompasses the period of time from implantation until delivery."
People are, of course, perfectly within their rights to believe that pregnancy begins when sperm meets egg. And it is reasonable for groups like the Christian Medical and Dental Associations, Focus on the Family and the American Life League to want to alert their members that something billed as contraception might actually have a function that runs counter to their beliefs. But there are two twists. One is that emergency contraception may not actually work as an abortifacient. "There is no direct evidence that it blocks implantation," Dr. Wood says. "We can't tell for sure because very little research has been done on direct implantation of human eggs. You run into moral problems doing research on a woman's body and a human embryo. And since half of all fertilized eggs do not implant anyway, it would be difficult to know if this was the mechanism responsible." Still, if it's even possible for emergency contraception to stop implantation, then it's right for Dr. Rudd of the C.M.D.A. to advise his group's member physicians, "Regardless of what an assembly of experts define, or fail to define, as the beginning of pregnancy, if a patient retains the moral conviction that life begins at fertilization, she must be made aware of information relevant to that conviction."
But the other twist is that emergency contraception apparently works in a manner similar to that of the ordinary birth control pill. That is to say, the pill, which contains the hormone progestin, also has three possible means of operation: by stopping ovulation, preventing fertilization or impeding implantation. If emergency contraception is a potential abortifacient, then the same would seem to be true for the pill, which tens of millions of women have taken over the past several decades. Dr. Rudd disputed this. "The scientific evidence is that emergency contraception is more likely to have a post-fertility effect than the routine birth control," he told me. But Dr. James Trussell, director of the Office of Population Research at Princeton University and one of the world's leading experts on contraception, said: "That is completely wrong. The evidence is about the same for all hormonal methods of contraception. We can't rule out a post-fertility effect for Plan B, and the same is true for the birth control pill."
What's more, Dr. Trussell added: "There is evidence that there is a contraceptive effect of breast feeding after fertilization. While a woman is breast feeding, the first ovulation is characterized by a short luteal phase, or second half of the cycle. It's thought that because of that, implantation does not occur." In other words, if the emergency contraception pill causes abortions by blocking implantation, then by the same definition breast feeding may as well. Besides that, the intrauterine device, or IUD, can alter the lining of the uterus and, in theory, prevent implantation.
Ron Stephens is both a pharmacist and a Republican state legislator in Illinois, one of the states that are currently battlegrounds between pharmacists who claim the right to refuse to fill prescriptions for emergency contraceptives and women's and civil rights groups that argue that pharmacists must fill all prescriptions presented to them. Stephens not only supports the pharmacists' right of refusal but he also refuses to fill prescriptions for emergency contraception himself. He does, however, fill prescriptions for the birth control pill. When I asked him recently to explain his thinking on the two drugs, he said: "It's the difference between stopping a pregnancy from happening and ending a pregnancy. My understanding of the science is that the morning-after pill can end a pregnancy, whereas birth control pills will make a woman's body believe she is already pregnant so that the egg will not be fertilized." And what if studies show that, in fact, both drugs can prevent implantation? "Everyone has their natural prejudice," Stephens replied. "I'm going to understand it my way, and the issue is that you should not be forced to do something you believe is immoral."
If the pill and the IUD may prevent implantation, and if implantation is where anti-abortion groups draw the line, why haven't such groups railed against them for decades? Some have, but they got no traction. What happened, over the past 40 years, is that contraception became an accepted fact of life, and those who were opposed to it found themselves residing on the outer fringe.
In the current, evolving movement against contraception, therefore, some groups soft-pedal their position. "Concerned Women for America does not take a position regarding birth control," Wendy Wright, president of that influential, 500,000-member, biblically-based organization, told me. She went on to say, however, that C.W.A. does "educate regarding how certain birth control methods operate." Specifically, the group offers a brochure titled "High-Tech Birth Control: Health Care or Health Risk?" to those who call seeking guidance. Most methods of birth control can pose health risks. A 2005 World Health Organization study, for instance, found a connection between some forms of the pill and cancer. But the C.W.A. brochure goes well beyond this. Its section on emergency contraception advises that "its main function is to abort a living human embryo." One function of the birth control pill, it states, is to induce "a chemical abortion." The section on the IUD indicates none of its practical benefits (its 99 percent effectiveness in preventing pregnancy, its reversibility) and consists mostly of a litany of health complications, many of which health experts refute.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 98 percent of all women who have ever had intercourse have used at least one contraceptive method. Worldwide, about 76 million women currently use the birth control pill. It would be suicide for an organization that hopes to influence public policy to assert outright opposition to contraception. Instead, attacks are mostly around the periphery of the issue: on the health aspects of various forms of contraception, on the mechanism by which they work, on the efficacy of certain methods.
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Why is this happening? What's the nature of the opposition to something that has become so basic a part of modern life?
One starting point is the Catholic Church, and especially Pope John Paul II, whose personal and philosophical magnetism revitalized Catholics around the world, especially the young. A series of reflections the pope gave between 1979 and 1984 on the "theology of the body" — his vision of the integrated physical, mental and spiritual human — has become a whole method of study within the church.
The pope was a trained philosopher, and the actual text of his addresses on the topic can be dense: "Masculinity and femininity — namely, sex — is the original sign of a creative donation and an awareness on the part of man, male-female, of a gift lived in an original way." But his words have been unpacked and pored over by theologians and students, and they have shaped a new approach to sex that is, in many ways, old. Kimberly Zenarolla, for one, is applying the theology of the body to the American political sphere. She is the director of strategic development for the National Pro-Life Action Center, a two-year-old organization with 10,000 members that lobbies on abortion, euthanasia, stem cell research and contraception. She's also a single 34-year-old who lives in Washington with, as she put it, "a group of young professionals who are living the countercultural message of chastity to its fullest expression."
Zenarolla told me she converted to Catholicism two years ago: "I tell people I became Catholic because of the church's teaching on contraception. We are opposed to sex before marriage and contraception within marriage. We believe that the sexual act is meant to be a complete giving of self. Of course its purpose is procreation, but the church also affirms the unitive aspect: it brings a couple together. By using contraception, they are not allowing the fullness of their expression of love. To frustrate the procreative potential ends up harming the relationship."
The Catholic Church sanctions "natural family planning," otherwise known as the rhythm method, but it holds that artificial means of contraception lead people to see the body as an instrument, reducing human dignity and making them slaves to their desires. As Pope Benedict XVI wrote when he was Cardinal Ratzinger, "Contraception and abortion both have their roots in [a] depersonalized and utilitarian view of sexuality and procreation — which in turn is based on a truncated notion of man and his freedom." American Catholics have overwhelmingly disagreed: a Harris Poll in 2005, for instance, found that 90 percent of Catholics (as compared with 93 percent of all Americans) support the use of contraception. (On April 23, a Vatican spokesman indicated that Pope Benedict XVI would soon issue a new document on condoms, which some people have speculated could for the first time give the church's blessing to the use of condoms to prevent the spread of disease, but not intentionally as a form of contraception. This may seem a fine distinction, but Vatican watchers say that the church could adopt it as a lesser-of-two-evils principle.)
Further, the church holds that contraception and in vitro fertilization are two sides of the same coin: both are attempts to manipulate sexuality to serve the selfish demands of the individual. "I can sympathize with a couple who can't conceive and desperately want a child," Zenarolla says. "But if you examine in vitro fertilization, you begin to see what an objectification of the body it is. Today there are 400,000 leftover frozen embryos. That clump of cells is a human being, with its own DNA. Whenever we take it out of the safe harbor of its mother's womb, it opens up life to manipulation and control: 'I want a boy with blue eyes and no diseases."' The objectification of the human, she says, then transfers to the child. "It leads to eugenics," Zenarolla told me, "to wanting to get rid of people who have defects. It's part of the devaluation of human beings."
From this perspective — essentially that of the strict Catholic — this is the dark future toward which secular society is heading. Bishop John W. Yanta of the Diocese of Amarillo, Tex., who oversees an organization founded last year to train priests in the "Gospel of Life," has called contraception "intrinsically evil" and "a big part of the culture of death."
Some Protestants have come to a similar view recently. Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, explains the evolution of modern evangelical thought on contraception this way: "When the pill came out, evangelicals were very much a part of mainstream American culture, and like others they saw technology as a gift. There was a vaccine to fight polio. The pill was seen in the same light. I think evangelicals thought, Catholics can't use it, but we can: aren't we lucky?"
But then, from this perspective, the pill began to do terrible damage. "I cannot imagine any development in human history, after the Fall, that has had a greater impact on human beings than the pill," Mohler continued. "It became almost an assured form of contraception, something humans had never encountered before in history. Prior to it, every time a couple had sex, there was a good chance of pregnancy. Once that is removed, the entire horizon of the sexual act changes. I think there could be no question that the pill gave incredible license to everything from adultery and affairs to premarital sex and within marriage to a separation of the sex act and procreation."
That may be a distinctly minority position, but some who work in the public health field acknowledge that the social conservatives have a point. "I think the left missed something in the last couple of decades," says Sarah Brown, president of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, which positions itself as a moderate voice in the heated world of reproductive politics. "With the advent of oral contraception, I think there was this great sense that we had a solution to the problem of unintended pregnancy. But that is a medical model. I think the thing that was missed was that sex and pregnancy and relationships aren't just a health issue. They are really about family and gender and religion and values. And what the right did was move in and say we're not just talking about body parts."
Mohler says the awareness of the damage being caused by what he and others call "the contraceptive mentality" is felt most acutely today by younger evangelicals: "I detect a huge shift. Students on our campus are intensely concerned. Not a week goes by that I do not get contacted by pastors about the issue. There are active debates going on. It's one of the things that may serve to divide evangelicalism."
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Eventually, all roads lead to abortion. Once, the definition of abortion was simple — a surgical procedure to extract a fetus — and with the advent of technology that allowed imaging of the fetus within the womb, abortion opponents found they had a powerful tool; photographs of "preborn babies" with human features were common in anti-abortion campaigns. Building on this, and mindful of the difficulty of overturning Roe, they developed an incremental strategy for containing abortion, which has been very effective. Last year, 52 state laws were passed restricting abortion. Currently, more than 100 new state measures are being considered that would limit the procedure, either by making it more difficult to obtain an abortion or by compelling women to reconsider. Nationally, a bill called the Fetal Pain Awareness Act, sponsored by Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas, would require a woman seeking an abortion to be told that, as of 20 weeks, a fetus can feel pain, and that she be offered the option of providing it with painkillers. It has not gotten through Congress, and the science of the "pain age" is hotly disputed, but four states have adopted similar legislation. The Unborn Victims of Violence Act, which President Bush signed in 2004, makes a violent attack on a pregnant woman two crimes: one on the woman and one on her unborn child. It was denounced by abortion rights groups as a step toward granting full legal status to a fetus.
This slow, steady campaign has made an impact on the country at large: polls show that while most people still support Roe, they have deep misgivings about abortion and tend to support restrictions on it, like parental consent and late-term (or partial-birth) bans. One threat to this strategy, according to some on the right, is South Dakota's passage of an abortion ban, which is meant as a direct challenge to Roe.
But the new abortion and contraceptive drugs have changed the dynamic as well. Because the abortion pill operates before a fetus has developed babylike features, it "takes away some ammunition" from the anti-abortion advocates, says Cynthia Dailard of the Guttmacher Institute. Imaging technology helped anti-abortion forces to personify the fetus, and recent tactics that abortion foes have pursued tend to be focused on an older fetus. Such is the case with the Partial Birth Abortion law, which President Bush signed in 2003. It was subsequently declared unconstitutional, but the Supreme Court will take it up again later this year. The new drugs, however, threaten to undercut such efforts. The battle line, in other words, is shifting backward, from viability to implantation. The abortion pill, which has been on the market since 2000, is under attack, with a group of Republicans in Congress calling for its suspension, in the wake of the deaths of five women who took it.
Democrats, meanwhile, have had their difficulty with the abortion issue, and their new hopes are pinned to a strategy that focuses on contraception as a way to reduce unintended pregnancy. Last month, Senators Harry Reid and Hillary Clinton — an anti-abortion Democrat and an abortion rights Democrat — introduced legislation that would require insurance companies to cover contraceptives. In part, the idea is to force Republicans to support contraception or be branded as reactionaries. The conservative counter was that giving even more government backing to emergency contraception and other escape hatches from unwanted pregnancy will lead to a new wave of sexual promiscuity. An editorial in the conservative magazine Human Events characterized the effect of such legislation as "enabling more low-income women to have consequence-free sex."
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Some not-very-attentive college kids spending spring break in Fort Lauderdale got a shock when they wandered into a tent on the beach last March. The sign welcoming passers-by actually said, "Girls Gone Mild." Inside they found a few dozen young people drinking bottled water, some wearing T-shirts that said, "Pet Your Dog, Not Your Date," others perusing a chart about S.T.D.'s.
If there is a place where anti-birth-control conservatives speak their subtext regarding sex, it is in the abstinence movement, where the message is "just don't do it." Federal support for abstinence education in schools — which teaches kids the benefits of saving their virginity until marriage — began in 1981, but the program muddled along for years and was tangled for a time in a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union that charged that it was explicitly Christian in context. Under President Bush, spending increased significantly: the 2007 budget calls for $204 million to support abstinence programs (up from $80 million in 2001).
Leslee Unruh, a 51-year-old former motivational speaker who says that her life was transformed in 1984 by the psychological devastation wrought by having an abortion, is the doyenne of the abstinence movement. She has dedicated herself to fostering in teenagers a holistic approach to relationships. Like many in the abstinence movement, Unruh says she believes that society is unhealthily focused on sex and that dwelling on contraception makes it worse. "I see the problem as a lack of teaching about relationships: how to bond with the person you're going to have a relationship with, so that it's something that's good for you," she says. "We teach kids it doesn't have to be physical."
In addition to providing an information center for the abstinence industry that has blossomed in recent years, she takes her message directly to kids. Besides "Girls Gone Mild," she sponsors "Purity Balls," which fathers attend with their teenage daughters. "We think the relationship between fathers and their daughters is the key," she told me. At the purity ball, a father gives a "purity ring" to his daughter — a symbol of the promise she makes to maintain her virginity for her future husband. Then, during her marriage ceremony, the daughter gives the ring to her new husband. Abstinence Clearinghouse's Web site advertises the purity ball as an event "which celebrates your 'little girl' and her gift of sexual purity."
The intellectual force behind the abstinence-education movement is Robert Rector, senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation. Rector wrote some of the federal legislation mandating abstinence education, and he worked on a number of studies that purport to demonstrate its effectiveness. One component of abstinence education is the "virginity pledge," and Rector is an author of one study that concluded that teenagers who take virginity pledges "have substantially improved life outcomes," and another that showed that "sexually active teenagers are more likely to be depressed and to attempt suicide."
The idea of promoting abstinence over comprehensive sex education (which includes information on various forms of contraception and how to use them) gets to the core of the expanded conservative approach to birth control issues. It really is all about sex. "There are two philosophies of sexuality," Rector told me. "One regards it as primarily physical and all about physical pleasure. Therefore, the idea is to have lots of physical pleasure without acquiring disease or getting pregnant. The other is primarily moral and psychological in nature, and stresses that this is the part of sex that's rewarding and important."
Rector says that abstinence programs can't properly be combined with other elements in a comprehensive sex education program because the message is lost when a teacher says: "One option you might want to consider is abstaining. Now let's talk about diaphragms."
Abstinence education, meanwhile, gets withering criticism from the other side. "There is still not a single, sound peer-reviewed study that shows abstinence programs work," says William Smith of Siecus. Peter Bearman, director of the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy at Columbia University, who has analyzed virginity pledge programs including Rector's, says: "The money being poured into these programs is out of control. And the thing is this is not about public health. It's a moral revolution. The goal is not stopping unwanted pregnancy but stopping sexual expression."
A December 2004 report on federally financed abstinence-only programs conducted by the office of Representative Henry Waxman, Democrat of California, charged that the major programs presented misleading information about health (one curriculum quoted in the report stated that "condoms fail to prevent H.I.V. approximately 31 percent of the time"), state beliefs as facts (the report cited a curriculum that refers to a 43-day-old fetus as a "thinking person") and give outmoded stereotypes of the sexes.
All parents struggle with how to shield their children from the excesses of popular culture, and not surprisingly, surveys show that most want teenagers to delay first intercourse. But by wide margins they also say kids should be taught about contraceptives. A poll released in 2004 by National Public Radio, the Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government found, for example, that 95 percent of parents think that schools should encourage teenagers to wait until they are older to have sex, and also that 94 percent think that kids should learn about birth control in school.
The Bush administration's point man on abstinence — Jeffrey Trimbath, the director of Abstinence Education in the Family and Youth Services Bureau of the Department of Health and Human Services — declined through a spokesman to speak with me and referred me instead to Rector. Rector sought to refute the Waxman report, saying that some of what was cited as flawed information in curricula did not come from abstinence curricula at all, but from other sources. The first major evaluation of abstinence education — a Congressionally-authorized study being conducted by Mathematica Policy Research — is due to be completed later this year.
Abstinence has also become a primary element of Pepfar, President Bush's overseas AIDS relief program — with, some experts say, disastrous results. The Government Accountability Office released a study in April that found that in many countries administrators were forced to cut funds intended to fight mother-to-child H.I.V. infection in order to finance abstinence programs. Stephen Lewis, the United Nations special envoy for H.I.V./AIDS in Africa, who had previously charged that the Bush program put "significant numbers" of people in Africa at risk, told me: "I feel vindicated by the G.A.O. study. I think it raises legitimate questions about the disproportionate attention given to abstinence as opposed to condoms. At this moment, even the Catholic Church is reconsidering condoms." On April 7, the State Department issued its own response to the G.A.O. study, in which it claimed that as a result of approaches like the Bush administration's "ABC policy" — promoting "abstinence" and "being faithful," then "condoms" — H.I.V. transmission has fallen in Uganda, Zimbabwe and Kenya and "male faithfulness" has increased.
On the domestic front, the rise in abstinence education has been paralleled by a tendency on the part of some conservatives to denigrate condoms. Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who is also an obstetrician, has led a campaign to force condom makers to indicate on their labels that they may not prevent certain S.T.D.'s, specifically the human papillomavirus. In 2001, when he was in the House of Representatives, he issued a press release entitled "Condoms Do Not Prevent Most S.T.D.'s." Sex educators say this is a twisting of data to suit an ideologically driven anti-sex agenda. "An N.I.H. panel said condoms are impermeable to even the smallest S.T.D. viruses," Cynthia Dailard of Guttmacher says.
Senator Coburn told me that he's not anti-birth-control: "I'm not a no-condom person. I prescribe tons of birth control products. But that's only one-half of the issue. The other half is preventing S.T.D.'s." This is not the message of the federal abstinence initiative, however. The emphasis there is squarely on promoting a moral framework that puts sexuality in a particular place. As the 2007 federal guidelines for program financing state, "It is required that the abstinence education curriculum teaches that a mutually faithful monogamous relationship in the context of marriage is the expected standard of human sexual activity."
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Social conservatives in the U.S. seem to be moving in the opposite direction from much of the rest of the world. At least 12 countries have liberalized abortion laws in recent years. Emergency contraception is currently available without a prescription in more than 40 countries. In much of Western Europe, abortion and contraception are available and fully covered by insurance.
The dark side of this, according to some commentators, is the declining birth rate in Europe. It takes an average of 2.1 children per woman to keep a population constant. Italy and Spain are tied for the lowest fertility rate in Western Europe, at 1.28. Even Ireland, the country with the highest birth rate, at 1.86, is suffering a population drain. (The U.S. rate is 2.09.) From 1994 to 2004, the average age at which European women became mothers rose by about 16 months, to 28.2. This, according to social conservatives, is the black hole into which the contraceptive mentality is drawn. As the Canadian priest Raymond J. de Souza wrote in National Review in 2004, "If children are a sign of hope in the future, Europe — and to a lesser extent Canada, Australia and the United States — is losing its will to live."
This would seem to be a bind, because the benefits of family planning are profound: couples can organize their lives, financially and otherwise, when they are able to choose when to have children and how many to have. And, around the world, countries in which abortion is legal and contraception is widely available tend to rank among the lowest in rate of abortion, while those that outlaw abortion — notably in Central and South America and Africa — have rates that are among the highest. According to Stanley K. Henshaw of the Guttmacher Institute, recent drops in abortion rates in Eastern Europe are due to improved access to contraceptives. The U.S. falls somewhere in the middle in rate of abortion: at 21 per 1,000 women of reproductive age, it is roughly on par with Nigeria (25), much better than Peru (56) but far worse than the Netherlands (9).
The Netherlands, where the teen pregnancy rate also ranks among the lowest in the world, has long been of interest to sex educators in the U.S. for the frankness of its approach. The national sex education course, called Long Live Love, begins at age 13. One of its hallmarks has been dubbed "Double Dutch" — encouraging the use of both condoms and birth control pills. "It's proven successful," says Margo Mulder of STI AIDS Netherlands, the Dutch health education center. "It shows that when you discuss contraception and protection with students, they actually are careful. And I know that some people in the U.S. say that when you promote contraception, you're also promoting sex, but we've found that when you educate people, they don't have sex earlier. They think about it. So you're not promoting sex, you're helping them to be rational about doing it."
The problem with this, as far as American social conservatives are concerned, is that it treats symptoms rather than what they see as the underlying disease: an outlook that is focused on the individual at the expense of family and society. Their ultimate goal is not a number — the percentage of abortions or unintended pregnancies — but an ideal, a way for people to think and behave. As Mohler says of the Dutch approach in particular: "The idea is to completely sever the sex act from reproduction, and then train teens to do it. It treats sex as a morally meaningless act. I find it profoundly anti-humanistic."
While Americans as a whole don't hold such a dark view of comprehensive sex education, many do feel there's something wrong with a strictly clinical approach. This ambivalence, according to Sarah Brown of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, gets to the root of the problem and may explain the numbers. "One of the things I'm most often asked is why the abortion and unintended pregnancy rates are so much lower in Europe," she says. "People talk about the easy access to contraception there, but I think it's really a matter of the underlying social norms. In Europe, these things are in the open, and the only issue is to be careful. Here in the U.S., people are still arguing about whether it's O.K. to have sex."
Russell Shorto, a contributing writer, has written for the magazine about the anti-gay-marriage movement and religion in the workplace.
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Religion and Politics in Australia* Sunday 27 March 2005
The growing influence of conservative religion on Australian politics.
Terry Lane: Now there was an interesting moment, you might recall, in the Federal election campaign last year, when the Prime Minister launched Mr Don Randall’s campaign for the Perth seat of Canning. The launch was being held, probably significantly, in the Christian Life Centre, and Mr Randall welcomed the Prime Minister as, as he said, ‘a Christian leader’, and said that Mr Latham, on the other hand, ‘as an atheist, or agnostic, or whatever he calls himself these days’, would be less welcome in this particular venue. Mr Howard responded by saying that ‘although I come from a Christian tradition myself, I respect fully the secular nature of our society’. Now on the face of it, it looks like a mild rebuke for the enthusiastically Christian Mr Randall. But Marion Maddox reckons that there is more to this exchange than meets the ear. Dr Marion Maddox teaches at Victoria University in Wellington, in New Zealand, and she went there from positions in Adelaide, where she specialised in the subject of religion and politics. Marion Maddox has written a book called ‘God Under Howard: The rise of the religious right in Australian politics’, and when I spoke to her from Wellington, I asked her what it is that she thinks was going on in Mr Howard’s rejoinder to Mr Randall.
Marion Maddox: Well if it had been just that one incident, then we probably would be able to say nothing very much was going on, and as you put it, it was a rebuke. But what was kind of striking about it in the context of the election campaign was that it was at a time when particularly the conservative side of politics seemed to be getting religion in a big way, and going to some efforts to kind of play up its religious side. You know we had in the months leading up to the election campaign, Peter Costello’s famous appearance at Hillsong church; we had the increasing emphasis on family values that seemed to mean somehow a particular religiously-endorsed kind of family; we had the debates about the transfer of federal funding to mainly independent, low-fee Christian schools, most of which are identified with a particularly conservative kind of Christianity. So there was a lot of kind of religious talk going on around that time, and that’s why I think an incident like that Canning campaign launch, we’ve got to kind of look at it and see whether there might be a bit more to it. And what it immediately kind of strikingly reminds me of, is a pattern of conversation that American religious right leaders are very good at, and that they actually talk about as a strategy. You know, this is how you do it. So it’s not like we’re kind of making up the idea that there’s a strategy; at least in America, people who excel at political rhetoric know and say that they’re doing a strategy, which is where you kind of cultivate somebody more conservative than yourself, or encourage them to put a more conservative or more extreme sounding view than you’re prepared to articulate yourself. But then you distance yourself from it, and say, ‘Oh well, I wouldn’t want to go as far as that’. And the effect of it is that you manage to convey two messages at once. So people who want to, hear that the Prime Minister, in the Canning example - if we read it in the context of that well-known American strategy - people who want to hear that the Prime Minister is a good Christian, God-fearing man, can take the message from what Don Randall said, but other people who might be in a secular society such as Australia made uneasy by that kind of association, can say, ‘Oh well no, Howard immediately distanced himself and said “No, I respect the secular nature of Australia”.’ But meanwhile, the people at whom you might say that the religious message is being targeted, they can discount that and say, ‘Oh well, of course he would have to say that wouldn’t he, because of all those left-leaning, liberal trendy elites who force him into it’. So it’s sort of a way of saying two things at once to different audiences, without hopefully scaring off either of them.
Terry Lane: But if Mr Randall’s comment came as unexpected, that is the criticism of Mr Latham for being ‘an atheist or agnostic or whatever he calls himself these days’, you’d have to say either Mr Howard has the rhetoric well-rehearsed and ready to deliver on demand, or he’s very quick-thinking and cunning.
Marion Maddox: Oh, well, I mean we’ve got plenty of examples subsequently of him doing a similar kind of thing within his own conversation. I’m thinking there of something that happened after my book came out, so I don’t talk about it in the book, but in his valedictory speech to parliament on the 9th December, 2004 - you know they make those valedictory speeches, they say ‘I wish all the Comcar drivers a Happy Christmas, and thank you to all the Parliament House catering staff’, and all that kind of thing, and they wish each other a Happy Christmas and a good break. And in amongst his remarks to that effect, John Howard said, ‘And it’s very important that we remember that Christmas is not just any celebration, but it commemorates the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, the most significant person in human history’, he said. So people that come from another religious tradition might think that that’s quite a strong statement. And then he went on, and he said, ‘I think I try myself to live up to Christian principles and I think that it’s very important for people who do embrace that religious tradition, to say so. We don’t wear it as much on our sleeves as perhaps people in other countries do, but nevertheless our society is based on Judaeo-Christian values.’ So he went on at quite some length about identifying himself with Christianity, and Christianity with the basis of Australian society. But at the same time, tossing in plenty of references: ‘I respect the secular nature of our society’, just like what he said in the Randall exchange. And I think there have been plenty of examples recently, particularly on the conservative side of politics, this kind of talking up the Christian content of ideas like values and tradition and so on, while at the same time being careful not to be too explicit in ways that might put off the secular significant majority of the Australian population.
Terry Lane: The critical question Marion is, do you think that he believes it, or is he cynically playing to a particular bloc?
Marion Maddox: Well, who can see into the soul of the Prime Minister, or into anybody’s soul for that matter? But we can look at what he’s told us himself over the years about his religious position. He was interviewed, as all the leaders of parties were, by Geraldine Doogue on Compass, both for the last election and back in 1998, but John Howard was the only person who was still a leader, who had been leader in 1998, so he’s the only one who we got to hear the religious views of twice. And in both of those interviews, he described himself as not too passionately committed I suppose. In the 2004 interview he told Geraldine Doogue, ‘I go to church a bit more often than Christmas and Easter, but not every Sunday’. In the 1998 interview, he said that he respected people who identified with the emotional evangelical aspects of Christianity, the traditions that make a lot out of talking about your own salvation narrative, when you were saved, that kind of thing. He said he respected those, but that was not his inclination. So you get from what he said about his own religious practice over the years, you get the feeling that perhaps like many Australians, he has a sort of - well, I don’t want to put words into somebody’s mouth about their faith - but perhaps a fairly general or amorphous kind of religious commitment that expresses itself in occasional religious practice, ‘going to church a bit more often than Christmas and Easter’ but not necessarily in a very regular way. But the fact that it’s become so much more politically prominent over the last few years, I think that does reflect a changed perception about the political role of faith. I just can’t imagine in previous Christmases that either John Howard or any other leader really, would have made statements as strong as those that he made in last year’s valedictory speeches. I think it has to be indicative that in the lead-up to the last election, a new item popped up on the Prime Minister’s biography on his web page, you know on the web pages they have, career highlights and things, and John Howard’s biography just before the last election sprouted a new entry which was that he’d been a Sunday School teacher. I’m sure when I printed off the biography previously, that hadn’t been there. Why did the Australian public suddenly need to know that some time in the dim, distant past the Prime Minister had been a Sunday School teacher? I just think there was a sort of not necessarily a shift in the faith of individuals, but a shift in the way that it was presented to the public.
Can I give you another example? The Women’s Weekly ran that interview with leaders’ wives, and both Mrs Howard and Mrs Anderson made a lot about their religious faith. Now I certainly wouldn’t want for a minute to say that that was in any way insincere, but I just think that it’s something that … we’ve had very religiously sincere leaders and their families in the past, but that hasn’t been something that people have chosen to play up in their political persona, or in interviews with a media outlet. So I just think all those things kind of build up a picture that the individual little instances don’t necessarily demonstrate on their own.
Terry Lane: I’m talking to Dr Marion Maddox about her book, ‘God Under Howard: the rise of the religious right in Australian politics’. And talking about the Prime Minister’s religious past, you say that he didn’t learn his Christianity from John Wesley (because after all there are frequent references to his Methodist upbringing) so much as from The Saturday Evening Post. And you got that from his brother.
Marion Maddox: I did, yes.
Terry Lane: So it must be authentic.
Marion Maddox: Well, anyone who’s got a family I’m sure knows that people have different memories of the same events. And unfortunately John Howard himself declined to be interviewed, so I was left relying on the views of those who were ready to be interviewed. But yes, the picture that I got was, as you say, we hear quite a bit about the Howard family’s Methodist background, and they were regulars at the church, which across the road from their house in Earlwood, but the Methodist church of that era, in the 1950s, didn’t reflect very much of the political tenor, we might say, of the grown-up John Howard’s positions. For example, the Methodist church in the 1950s, when I went back through its newspapers and talked to people who’d been involved at the time and so on, it actively campaigned for an open door to refugees, it campaigned for recognising Aboriginal peoples as the original owners of Australia, which I thought, ‘Oh my goodness, I wonder why then if John Howard is so influenced by Methodism, why did he absolutely refuse all attempts to have the word ‘owners’ put into the preamble to the Constitution that he proposed?’ It advocated no-fault divorce in contradiction to the positions of many in the coalition parties who’ve argued that we should to back to making divorce harder. The Methodist church in the 1950s was arguing for no-fault divorce. So on many fronts, social and economic, the Methodist church in the 1950s was far from being a source for the politics of the grown-up John Howard, seemed to stand diametrically opposite to the positions that are now often attributed to it retrospectively. So I thought, ‘Well, this is a bit funny’. And then when I was talking to Bob Howard, John Howard’s brother, he said ‘Well yes, we went to church, but we didn’t engage with the political kind of themes that were coming through in the Methodist church at the time’. In fact the parents, in his memory, were quite critical of people like Alan Walker and other leading figures of Methodist social justice campaigns, you might say. And what the family read was not the Methodist church newspaper, but The Saturday Evening Post. So the kind of defining literature was all those log-cabin-to-the-White-House kind of stories that The Saturday Evening Post specialised in, a smorgasbord of American consumerism, you might say, being delivered to the family mailbox every fortnight. And they waited eagerly for the next instalment, and that was the more influential kind of world view in the family.
Terry Lane: This is one of the striking differences between the relationship between Bush and his electorate and Howard and his electorate. Bush can proceed on the assumption that, what is it now, something like 40% of Americans call themselves born-again Bible-believing Christians. So it’s a huge voting bloc that the Republican Party has been able to command in presidential elections, and that’s pretty simple and straightforward. But in Australia, there are two more or less equally balanced churches. There is what we might call the mainstream or the old churches, and the new churches that are preaching the prosperity gospel - If God loves you, you’ll be rich - The Hillsong Message. But the old churches are a real problem, it seems to me, for anybody who wants to make a cynical appeal to religion in Australia, because as you say, the research shows that while regular churchgoers might vote conservative, their views are not conservative; they have quite sort of softly radical views on issues like welfare, Aboriginal welfare, reconciliation, land rights, treatment of refugees, attitudes to war, so that you could imagine that there are a lot of people in the churches in Australia who vote for Howard, but feel uncomfortable about what he does.
Marion Maddox: Yes, and one of the themes that I pick up in the book is that over the terms of Howard government, Howard and his senior ministers have gone to a lot of effort on the one hand, to do this kind of religious allusion in their conversation that picks up conservative Christian themes, but on the other hand, to devote just as much energy telling the mainline churches, the older denominations, to shut up and keep out of politics and stop meddling in what doesn’t concern them; stick to spiritual matters. We’re never quite told what those are, but apparently something that’s not political.
Terry Lane: Not just ‘not understand’ them, but particularly in the rhetoric of Mr Downer, there are constant references to the ignorance of church leaders: ‘You are ignorant, you don’t understand, you don’t know what’s going on, you don’t know the facts’, as though somehow they are - what might we say - disenfranchised because they don’t know enough. I mean that’s a funny approach to democracy itself.
Marion Maddox: It is a curious approach, isn’t it. Actually I once put that view to Harry Herbert, a prominent social justice spokesperson in the Uniting church, and he said, ‘Well, come off it, politicians aren’t always on top of – they might be on top of their specific portfolio area, but they have to cover so many areas that they can’t know all the detail of every policy that they propose either.’ Both church leaders and political leaders rely on advice, they rely on information from a range of sources, and if we’re going to start telling people that they can’t be involved in public debate because they’re not specialists on every single topic that comes up, then as you say, the consequences for democracy might be a bit constraining.
Terry Lane: We’re going to run out of time soon, and we have to get on to what is really the sinister theme in your book, one part of which is the role played by right-wing think-tanks in Australia to try to purge the mainstream churches of their sentimental radicalism, and the other is the intrusion of the American evangelicals into the Australian political scene by a program of recruiting influential people. Now tell us about The Family and what it does.
Marion Maddox: The Family is one of the names of an organisation that has existed since the 1930s, but it has had various different titles. One is The Family, one is The Fellowship, one is International Christian Leadership, one is the International Council for Christian Leadership, and right at the beginning when it was just American, it was called the National Council for Christian Leadership. And I just for convenience went with The Family as the most recent name that it goes by. It was founded in the 1930s by a Norwegian actually, immigrant to America called Abraham Vereide, and he started it because he was worried that Seattle, where he lived at the time, was at risk of Communist takeover, and the solution was prayer groups meeting with the most powerful men, it was in those days, to hold up the nation in prayer, and so he started what became the Prayer Breakfast Movement in America, meetings of politicians, business leaders, industrialists, meeting outside of a church context to pray together, read the Bible, and discuss their lives in the context of what they’ve read. I’ve just been reading Abraham Vereide’s biography and it’s full of testimonies about the effectiveness of this, like the time when a labour union leader came to one of the breakfasts and immediately was moved to confess to all the industrialists present how much he’d been a thorn in their side, and that he was going to go away and not disrupt production any more. So Abraham Vereide, although he talked about it in politically neutral terms, plainly saw his movement as having a political goal.
Terry Lane: And an international political goal, a global political goal.
Marion Maddox: Definitely. In fact, reading his biography, it’s a diary of his travels. He spends apparently most of his life trotting the world to spread the message of National Prayer Breakfasts, and it became a part of the American political calendar in 1953, when Eisenhower sort of gave presidential endorsement to what is still an annual Presidential, as it’s called, Prayer Breakfast in America, but it’s financed significantly and organised by The Family, as their archives and tax records show. And it has been copied in many countries, including Australia, which has a National Prayer Breakfast each October or November, and in a number of African countries and New Zealand has the Wellington Prayer Breakfast also in October. So it’s been very successful in having an international spread, and it seems to be regularly associated with these groups of powerful people who meet at other times through the year for prayer and discussion. And we might all say ‘Well, what a very admirable thing, and why should anybody worry about that?’ But the worrying aspect of it, as a number of American journalists who’ve investigated The Family have demonstrated, is that The Family itself as an organisation, has aspirations which are quite undemocratic. So Geoffrey Charlotte, an American journalist who lived in a house run by The Family, a training house, for some time, he quoted leaders of the organisation saying things like, ‘Everything you need to know about leadership you can see in the cross: it’s vertical, not horizontal. We elect our leaders but Jesus elects his, and what it means to be a leader elected by Jesus is that you can do anything you like and nobody can judge you, because you’ve got divine endorsement’. So in other words, the sorts of checks and balances on leaders that we normally assume to be an essential part of the democratic process, The Family sees as an obstacle to divine rule, and if the law comes from God, rather than from humans, then why wouldn’t you want to just impose it in quite a direct way. And The Family, in its discussions of its own goals does have quite a specific commitment to putting what it regards as Christian values, which of course are not what many Christians would regard as Christian values, into place through the law, regardless really of whether it’s endorsed by the majority of the people.
Terry Lane: Christian values, including stoning to death blasphemers, adulterers and homosexuals. And unruly children.
Marion Maddox: And rape victims who’ve been raped in the city. If you didn’t cry out, never mind if you had a sock in your mouth, you deserve what you had coming to you. That’s the views of Christian Reconstructionism, which is a kind of extreme Christian sect, most Christians would say, but that has been disproportionately influential in relation to its size in spreading the idea that perhaps not the extreme penalties that you’ve just cited, but perhaps a milder form of Dominionism, as it’s often called - Christians, taking dominion over this world - is the way to hasten Jesus’ return. Jesus won’t come back until Christians have taken over and made the world ready by imposing so-called Christian laws.
Terry Lane: Yes, it’s both funny and scary. Marion, thank you very much for your time. I’ve been talking to Dr Marion Maddox about her book, ‘God Under Howard: The rise of the religious right in Australian politics’, and it’s published by Allen & Unwin.
net.au/rn/talks/natint/stories/s1331259.htm .. shit! sorry, closed it without checking and trying to find it, again ..
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