Before and after the 2004 presidential election, Salon senior writer Michelle Goldberg traveled the United States to research Christian nationalism, which seeks to transform the country into a Christain nation. The result is the book Kingdom Coming ( W.W. Norton & Company, 2006), which describes the “parallel reality”inhabited by the fevered supporters of this goal. She was interviewed for Free Inquiry by managing editor Andrea Szalanski.—EDS.
Free Inquiry: You had early exposure to political action based on religious ideology when you joined clinic defenders during Operation Rescue’s visit to Buffalo in 1992. Was that your first cause for alarm? What views did you take from those first encounters?
Michelle Goldberg: I used to do clinic defense outside the clinic run by Barnett Slepian [murdered in 1998]. What I observed was not a cause for alarm in terms of having a kind of broader picture of what was happening in American society--I was a teenager. But it was my first encounter with the violence of the movement and also the underground, cell-like nature of it. It was the first time I ever learned about, say, the Army of God manual, an anti-abortion terrorist manual. It was certainly the first time that anybody had ever punched me. I was punched in the stomach during one of these rallies, and in certain ways I have to say it sort of gave me a misleading picture of what this movement is, because the movement as a whole is not violent.
Later on, after I finished graduate school at Berkeley, I did a series about the ex-gay movement, and that was my introduction into the broader movement. I felt great sympathy for the people who were seeking out this movement. They felt like they had no other way of rejoining their families and their communities, and they were afraid they were going to be condemned to hell. And here was this group, holding out the promise of being “normal” and backed by pseudoscientific literature.
I think this medical “authenticity” is part of why this movement has become so powerful. There were scholarly looking journals and seemingly legitimate professional organizations that have been erected just to counteract so-called mainstream science. That was the first time that I had a glimpse at the depth of the parallel reality that this movement has created.
FI: Your research on the Christian Right and firsthand reports of meetings where you observed or met some of the leaders as well as followers are impressive. You seem to have had a lot of personal contact. What was that like for you, as a journalist and a secularist?How did people react to you personally? In revealing your point of view, did you open or change any minds?
Goldberg: It wasn’t that difficult in terms of getting access. I would usually just show up. I would go to a church for a few days or go to a rally or a conference and try to buttonhole people afterwards. I don’t think some people particularly wanted to talk to me, but they didn’t want to be rude if I traveled all the way from New York.
I found often that, even if people initially weren’t that eager to talk to me, they became pretty forthcoming once we started speaking. In part, that was because they were talking about their real beliefs--they espouse them and proselytize for them and are totally convinced of their legitimacy, so it’s not the kind of thing that they want to keep under wraps.
It was mostly the scope of the movement that constantly amazed and sometimes overwhelmed me. At the beginning of the book, I write about being at a home-schooling conference in Colorado in a six-thousand-square-foot s building. It was bigger than most public libraries and filled with just mountains and mountains of media, all of it weaving together a tapestry of fabrications.
FI: When you would talk to people, in revealing your point of view when you were identifying yourself, do you think you opened or changed any minds?
Goldberg: I don’t think I changed any minds. I might have made a few people see that secularists also have families, that they also have morals, that we’re not the demonic caricatures that sometimes their leadership would present us as. It was often very hard to argue with them, because we had so little common factual ground, so little agreement about the most basic principles. I remember having an argument with a preacher at one of the Dover, Pennsylvania, school-board meetings, the town where they had the Intelligent Design controversy. He kept citing books and studies by various people connected with the ID movement, and none of it had any validity for me. He would talk about something put out for the Institute for Creation Research, and I would talk about things put out by sources that ranged from National Geographic to Richard Dawkins to any kind of mainstream science organization. He was convinced that all those organizations had been so compromised by secularism that there was almost a conspiracy to hide the truth of God’s design in the world.
FI: You met a lot of people--did you see a real division between the leaders and the followers of the movement? Did your preconceptions change?
Goldberg: I think it’s natural that I would have viewed the leaders as being more frightening and devious just because they have more power. That doesn’t mean I necessarily think that were just cynically manipulating these people--I think that there are plenty of true believers also among the leadership. The one place where I would say my mind did not necessarily change but maybe awoken was regarding the depth of the anxiety in this country that this movement is speaking to and that other movements aren’t, including the Left. When people talk about marriage being under attack, they aren’t just referring to gays seeking legal unions--the idea that marriage and family life is quite unstable is very true, especially in the most conservative states where divorce rates tend to be highest. The idea that our culture is kind of decadent, vulgar, and corrupt--I certainly see some of that. I look at something like the video game Grand Theft Auto, and I groan as well. As I researched the book, I started to recognize the need for security and the longing for wholesomeness that people have and that liberals could speak to. There’s a criticism of capitalism that liberals maybe could speak to but have failed to do so.
FI: You’ve mentioned that some measures of immorality, like the divorce rate, are higher in the conservative states. Did you get any sense of why that is so?
Goldberg: I can’t venture a single reason. I do know that divorce rates are closely correlated with education and that progressive states tend to spend a lot more on public education. They have more college graduates, who have lower divorce rates than noncollege graduates. There’s a complete disinvestment in social services in conservative states that is correlated with all kinds of social dysfunction.
FI: Iin your book, you discuss some of the damage done to individuals as a result of Christian Right programs such as the Faith-Based Initiative—for example, the staff members of the Salvation Army in New York who were terminated as the organization moved toward building a staff committed to Christianity. Are there many such victims?
Goldberg: That’s a really difficult thing to quantify. It’s also hard to say how many people have not gotten jobs because of being of the wrong religion. One of the things that I find so remarkable and that has gotten so little attention, is the aspect of President George W. Bush’s Faith-Based Initiative that exempts these religious groups from abiding by the 1956 Civil Rights Law. It’s so Orwellian, the way they call it religious freedom in hiring. There was a job training program for people in Pennsylvania who were released from prison. The help-wanted ad, for a position that was financed entirely with government money, said “must be a Christian and a believer in Christian life today.” This is something that the Justice Department insists is now permissible.
FI: What can we expect as we approach the next presidential election?
Goldberg: The federal marriage amendment is dead, but there’s going to be a lot of state marriage amendments, which were really really effective in whipping up the power base in 2004. The other thing that I think is important about the state marriage amendments is the way that they allow the churches to get involved, because churches are allowed to campaign for ostensibly nonpartisan issues. That works to the Republicans’ benefit. There are going to be abortion bans, if not on the ballot, then on the agenda.
FI: Do you see any particular state taking the role Ohio pplayed in the last election?
Goldberg: I think it’ll be Ohio again, actually, because the Republican candidate for governor is Ken Blackwell, who is as close to this movement as probably any politician in the country. He’s very, very close to Rod Parsley, the pastor of World Harvest Church, who has been organizing so-called Patriot Pastor’s Networks to politicize as many of the churches in Ohio as he can. Ken Blackwell is a member of the anti-gay Arlington Group--he’s not just somebody affiliated with the movement, he’s part of it.
FI: Our magazine is housed at the Center for Inquiry, which has branches all over the world working to promote a rational, scientific worldview. You quote from a leader in the movement that the object of dominionism is “world conquest.” Did you get a feel for what their plans are outside the United States?
Goldberg: Yes, absolutely. There are a couple of different strands to it. There’s a lot of Christian Right influence in the Middle East, and end-times theology has led to a kind of very aggressive Christian Zionism and fervent support for the most irridentist of Israeli settlers. You’re also seeing a lot of Evangelical influence in global family planning issues. For instance, in PEPSAR (the President’s Emergency Plan on Aids Relief), two-thirds of the prevention money has to go to abstinence-only programs. The abstinence-only groups are run by either American religious groups or local fundamentalists. In the process of carrying out these programs, the networks of local fundamentalist groups are strengthened. There’s also been an attempt to create an international Religious Right, the World Congress of Families, which is a group that brings together fundamentalists of different religions to form a common front against secularism and liberalism.
We’re seeing a powerful right-wing Catholic movement in Poland and South America and evangelical movements in Africa that have been very very disruptive in terms of not just denouncing condoms but spreading misinformation about condoms. I’ll give you a quick example. I was at a United Nations conference on AIDS last spring, and there was a woman from Uganda, where this anti-condom movement is very, very active. One of the recipients of Bush’s PEPSAR grants had held a rally at a university in the capital in which they asked people to bring all the condoms they could find. Then they burned them, while saying prayers. Uganda has been one of the miracles of AIDS prevention in Africa. It has been remarkable in cutting the infection rate. But that is now starting to inch back up.
FI: You write that secularists are like lobsters in the pot—they don’t realize the danger because the water heats up so slowly. What can they do to counteract these actions and protect democracy and pluralism?
Goldberg: First of all, they need to be involved in local politics the way the Religious Right is. The Southern Baptist Conference last spring passed a resolution telling its members to get more involved in their local school boards, to promote that they call “kingdom education.” Besides Intelligent Design, there is also now all over the country something called the National Council and Bible Cirriculum in Public Schools. Its board includes the leading lights of the Christian Nationalist movement, and besides creationism it teaches the revisionist history of America. People need to be involved and vigilant on the local level and understand the code words. One of the things that struck me in writing about Dover was that at first people didn’t know what the ID proponents on the school board were talking about. It took people a long time to realize that the Pandas and People book was a kind of Trojan horse, creationism in drag. There’s no reason they should have known that. There’s a need for organizations that will intervene and help people when they’re being challenged by these takeovers in their local community.
Finally, although I think it’s such a daunting and overwhelming task, ultimately, the only way to counteract this movement is through electoral reform. Part of the problem is that the influence of the places where this movement is strongest is vastly disproportionate in our government.
FI:What's the one question regarding this issue to which you would like an answer?
Goldberg: Is George W. Bush a true believer? Does he truly believe, for example, that the world is hurtling towards Armageddon in the Middle East and that this presages the Second Coming? It's very difficult to gauge the balance of fanaticism and cynicism in his character.
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