Republican Gomorrah Read online

  Fromm’s understanding of the psychological character of authoritarianism was not only penetrating but also prophetic. He described how submission to the authority of a higher power to escape the complexities of personal freedom would lead not to order and harmony but ultimately to destructiveness. Movements that evangelized among the crisis-stricken and desperate, promising redemption through a holy crusade, ultimately assumed the dysfunctional characteristics of their followers. After sowing destruction all around it, Fromm predicted that such a movement would turn on itself. Dramatic self-immolation was the inevitable fate of movements composed of conflicted individuals who sought above all the destruction of their blemished selves.

  “The function of an authoritarian ideology and practice can be compared to the function of neurotic symptoms,” Fromm wrote. “Such symptoms result from unbearable psychological conditions and at the same time offer a solution that makes life possible. Yet they are not a solution that leads to happiness or growth of personality. They leave unchanged the conditions that necessitate the neurotic solution.”

  Fromm’s analysis in Escape from Freedom provides an eerie but prescient description of the authoritarian mindset driving the movement that has substantially taken over the modern Republican Party: the Christian right. Over the last five years, I interviewed hundreds of the Christian right’s leaders and activists, attended dozens of its rallies and conferences, listened to countless hours of its radio programs, and sat in movement-oriented houses of worship where no journalists were permitted. As I explored the contours of the movement, I discovered a culture of personal crisis lurking behind the histrionics and expressions of social resentment. This culture is the mortar that bonds leaders and followers together.

  Inside the movement initiates refer to it cryptically as “The Family,” an exclusive sect. The Christian right as a whole is called “the pro-Family” movement, and movement allies are known as “friends of The Family.” In an actual family, blood ties are required; however, joining the Christian right requires little more than becoming “born-again,” a process of confession, conversion, and submission to a strict father figure.

  The movement’s Jesus is the opposite of the prince of peace. He is a stern, overtly masculine patriarch charging into the fray with his sword raised against secular foes; he is “the head of a dreadful company, mounted on a white horse, with a double-edged sword, his robe dipped in blood,” according to movement propagandist Steve Arterburn. Mark Driscoll, a pastor who operates an alternative Christian rock venue from his church, stirs the souls of twenty-something evangelical males with visions of “Ultimate Fighting Jesus.” This same musclebound god-man starred in Mel Gibson’s blood-drenched The Passion of the Christ, enduring bone-crushing punishment at the hands of Jews and pagans for two hours of unrelieved pornographic masochism.

  A portrait of virility and violence, the movement’s omnipotent macho Jesus represents the mirror inversion of the weak men who necessitated his creation. As Fromm explained, “the lust for power is not rooted in strength but in weakness [italics in original]. It is the expression of the individual self to stand alone and live. It is the desperate attempt to gain secondary strength where genuine strength is lacking.”

  The movement’s macho Jesus provided purpose to Tom DeLay, a dallying, alcoholic Texas legislator transformed through evangelical religion from “Hot Tub Tommy” into a dictatorial House majority leader known as “The Hammer.” Macho Jesus was the god of Ted Haggard, a closet homosexual born-again and charismatic megachurch leader, risen to head of the National Association of Evangelicals, preaching the gospel of spiritual warfare and anti-gay crusades. And he was the god of Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., an eccentric millionaire whose inheritance of massive wealth literally drove him mad, prompting his institutionalization, who found relief as one of the far right’s most reliable financial angels. Macho Jesus even transformed the serial killer Ted Bundy, murderer and rapist of dozens of women, who became a poster child for anti-pornography activists with his nationally televised death row confessional.

  The movement’s most powerful leader embodied the most severe qualities of his followers’ god. James Dobson is a quintessential strict father whose influence has been compared by journalistic observers to that of a cult leader. Unlike most of his peers, Dobson had no theological credentials or religious training. He was a child psychologist who burst onto the scene with a best-selling book that urged beating children into submission in order to restore the respect for God and government that America’s youth had lost during the 1960s. Dobson leveraged his fame and wealth to build a kingdom of crisis that counseled the trauma-wracked Middle American masses with Christian-oriented solutions to their personal problems. Then he marshaled them into apocalyptic morality crusades against abortion and homosexuality. When his Christian army reached critical mass, Dobson set them against the Republican establishment, flexing his grassroots muscle to destroy the ambitions of moderates such as Bob Dole and Colin Powell, and propelling movement figures such as DeLay and George W. Bush into ascendancy.

  As Dobson consolidated his status as Republican kingmaker, the destructive tendencies of his closest allies began exploding, plunging the party into Gomorrah-like revelations of bizarre sex scandals and criminality. Ranging from DeLay’s misadventures with the felonious super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff and Christian right operative Ralph Reed to Haggard’s gay tryst with a male escort to Senator Larry Craig’s bathroom stall come-on to an undercover cop, the scandals never ceased to surprise people who had once envisioned the Grand Old Party as a bastion of “family values.” Piled atop the Republicans’ disastrously handled occupation of Iraq and response to Hurricane Katrina, these sordid scandals ended the twelve-year experiment with Republican rule of the Congress in 2006.

  In the chaotic 2008 Republican presidential primary, the Republican base split its vote between Mitt Romney, the economic conservative, and Mike Huckabee, the social conservative, creating space for John McCain, distrusted by all factions, to emerge. McCain wished to have as his running mate an independent-minded politician who could garner votes outside the Republicans’ increasingly narrow sphere of influence. His intention was to name Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, who had been the Democratic candidate for vice president in 2000. But the movement rejected his appeal to pragmatism, threatened a full-scale revolt, and demanded to vet his running mate as a condition for support. From the Last Frontier of Alaska, a self-proclaimed “hardcore pro-lifer” and “prayer warrior,” Governor Sarah Palin, was summoned to deliver to McCain the political elements he had once labeled “agents of intolerance.”

  Through Palin, archetype of the right-wing woman, the movement’s influence over the party reached its zenith. As a direct result, however, the party sank to its nadir, suffering crushing defeats in the presidential and congressional races. Palin’s candidacy mobilized the Christian right elements that McCain alienated, but she repelled independents and moderate Republicans in droves, winnowing away the party’s constituency in every region of the country except the Deep South. Palin fatally tarnished McCain’s image while laying the groundwork for her potential resurrection—and that of the movement—in the presidential contest of 2012.

  The Christian right reached the mountaintop with the presidency of George W. Bush, shrouding science and reason in the shadow of the cross and the flag. But even at the height of Bush’s glory, in his 2004 campaign, a few isolated moderate Republicans warned that the Republican Party was in danger of collapse. Of course their jeremiads were ignored. That year, Christie Todd Whitman published a book titled It’s My Party Too, decrying the takeover by what she called the “social fundamentalists.” A member of a distinguished and wealthy eastern Republican family, with deep ties to the party, she had been governor of New Jersey and head of the Environmental Protection Agency under Bush, only to quit when fundamentalist ideologues substituted right-wing doctrine for science in its studies. After the 2008 Republican debacle, Whitman pointed out that
even though McCain was not considered a champion of the religious right, his percentage of so-called “values voters” increased by 3 percent over Bush’s in 2004. McCain, the last Republican moderate on the national stage, had lost among “moderate voters” by 21 points to Obama.

  As soon as Obama took office, the movement camped in the wilderness prepared to take political advantage of the worst economic troubles since the Great Depression by injecting a renewed sense of anti-government resentment. As most people agonized and even panicked over the sudden economic collapse, the Christian right’s peddlers of crisis lifted their hands to the heavens. They had a whole new world of trauma to exploit, more desperate and embittered followers to manipulate, and maybe—just maybe—another chance at power.

  Republican Gomorrah is an intimate portrayal of a political, social, and religious movement defined by an “escape from freedom.” As Erich Fromm explained, those who join the ranks of an authoritarian cause to resolve inner turmoil and self-doubt are always its most fervent, rigidly ideological, and loyal members. They are often its most politically influential members as well. President Eisenhower described the “mental stress and burden” that animates such movements. His admonition to beware the danger posed to democracy by those who seek “freedom from the necessity of informing themselves and making up their own minds concerning these tremendous complex and difficult questions” should be as memorable in history as his caution about the “military-industrial complex” in his farewell address.

  The characters I have profiled may not represent a majority in terms of sheer numbers, but through their combined power, they reflect the dominant character of the movement—and, by extension, of the Republican Party they have subsumed. That party has ignored Eisenhower’s warning and realized his darkest fears.

  Brooklyn, New York

  January 2009

  PART ONE

  “Yes, march against Babylon, the land of rebels, a land that I will judge! Pursue, kill, and completely destroy them, as I have commanded you,” says the Lord. “Let the battle cry be heard in the land, a shout of great destruction.”

  JEREMIAH 50:21-22

  CHAPTER 1

  GOD’S GOVERNMENT

  In April 1915, the snow had just begun to melt from the peaks of Mount Ararat and run into the villages nestled in its valleys. In the shadow of the mountain lay the idyllic town of Van, which the Rushdoony clan had called home for nearly 2,000 years. That spring brought catastrophe for the Rushdoonys. The Ottoman army laid siege to their town, hoping to quash the only fortress of resistance against its military crusade to eradicate the Armenian race. When the Ottoman cannons opened fire, Y. K. Rushdoony and his wife fled for the hills, embarking on a harrowing horseback trek westward through Europe, a voyage across the Atlantic, and a trip from one end of the American continent to the other, finally to begin a new life in California.

  In 1916, the year of their arrival in the United States, Y. K.’s wife gave birth to their second son, Rousas John “R. J.” Rushdoony. (R. J.’s older brother had been one of the 1.5 million who perished in the Armenian genocide.) As a descendant of a line of aristocratic priests reaching back to the year 315, and as a son of survivors of a recent genocide, the young Rushdoony was raised on tales of the slaughter that uprooted his family’s ancient Christian heritage. He studied divinity, enrolling at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California, and plunged headfirst into the works of conservative theological authorities such as John Calvin, Abraham Kuyper, and Cornelius Van Til, which appealed to him as a way to revive the ruptured religious traditions of his aristocratic ancestors. Upon graduation, Rushdoony entered the clergy as a minister in the ultraconservative Orthodox Presbyterian Church and immediately began mapping out a system to restore purity and order to the fallen world that surrounded him. His inspiration was the alternative Christian legal system that evolved in the shadow of the Roman Empire, a system that the Romans often turned to and the only legal system that survived the collapse of the empire. Rushdoony invoked the apostle Paul’s defiance of civil court authority. “Don’t go to the civil courts,” Rushdoony said. “They’re ungodly. Create your own courts.”

  Rushdoony’s radical worldview intensified when the Red Scare swept across America in the 1950s. During the peak of anti-Communist Senator Joseph McCarthy’s show trials, Rushdoony befriended a retired candy manufacturer named Robert Welch, who shared his visceral hatred of political subversives. Welch had leveraged his fortune into creating in 1958 a right-wing fringe group, the John Birch Society, and had gained notoriety by red-baiting prominent public figures such as President Truman, President Eisenhower, and Allen Dulles, director of the CIA—all covert Soviet agents in his mind. His hysteria reached a crescendo with his explanation of a “Master Conspiracy,” a scenario in which the Rothschilds and the Council on Foreign Relations secretly controlled the Soviet Union and the Communist movement and, by extension, the United States. By 1961, the John Birch Society had more than 100,000 tightly organized and highly motivated members and had taken over sections of the Republican Party in California, Texas, and Arizona. After the 1964 presidential campaign in which the right seized control of the party through the candidacy of Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, who lost in a landslide, the Society became a divisive issue among conservatives. William F. Buckley Jr., the influential editor of the National Review, who had been close to the Society, denounced it as an impediment to the legitimacy of the conservative movement. But while Buckley’s harsh attack isolated the Society as extremist, Rushdoony’s admiration only grew.

  Rushdoony marveled at the Leninist organizational model the John Birch Society had adopted from the Communist Party. Welch had divided Birch members into small cell groups (when a chapter grew larger than two dozen, it was split in half) with four-letter code names. Secrecy was of the essence; Welch believed that operating in the light of day might alert Communist secret agents to Bircher activities. Cells were deployed for acts of harassment and disruption that included sending to members of Congress postcards detailing a supposed Communist plot to erect a “Negro Soviet Republic” in the South, infiltrating ACLU meetings to shout down perceived Communist sympathizers (the ACLU, in fact, was hostile to Communism), and ensuring that local newsstands were stocked with copies of the right-wing weekly Human Events. On the fateful day that President John F. Kennedy visited Dallas, November 22, 1963, Birchers welcomed him by mounting posters around the city showing the president’s head at the center of rifle crosshairs. Rushdoony was mightily impressed by the Society’s actions. “The key to the John Birch Society’s effectiveness has been a plan of operation which has a strong resemblance to the early church,” he wrote.

  Rushdoony, however, never became a card-carrying Bircher. “Welch always saw things in terms of conspiracy,” he mused, “and I always see things in terms of sin.” For Rushdoony, defeating the Red Menace was a noble cause, but an effort that would remove only one of the many malignant elements that lurked within what he called the “humanistic spectrum.” He became actively involved in issues concerning home schooling and Christian schools. He took part in seminars on creationism at “evangelical convocations.” He urged evangelicals to cast off their insular perspective and begin a process of taking dominion over the land as the Bible commanded them to do. His work dovetailed with the emerging conservative counterculture.

  The Reverend Billy Graham had railed against sinful behavior as he barnstormed across the country in his well-attended crusades during the 1950s and 1960s. He routinely urged his audiences to “create a culture with Christ at its center,” but his message was consistent with the evangelical tradition of effecting change through personal persuasion, not political imposition. Graham delighted in rubbing shoulders with presidents and counseling them, but he offered no suggestions for altering the Constitution. By contrast, Rushdoony’s concept of cleansing the land of sin by seizing the reins of government was genuinely revolutionary. In a political climate rife with Cold War hyster
ia, turmoil over the role of women, protest against the Vietnam War, campus unrest, countercultural contempt for established authority, and racial agitation, a growing number of evangelicals were receptive to hearing a new doctrine for the times from a new prophet.

  In 1973, Rushdoony published his magnum opus, The Institutes of Biblical Law, an eight-hundred-page book deliberately invoking Calvin’s Institutes of Christian Religion to suggest his traditionalism. Instead of appealing to a mass audience, the pedantic Rushdoony sought to influence an elite cadre in the expectation that they would distill his message for the grassroots. He labeled his philosophy “Christian Reconstructionism” and painstakingly outlined plans for the church to take over the federal government and “reconstruct” it along biblical lines. According to Frederick Clarkson, a pioneering researcher of the Christian right, “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.”

  Calling for the literal application of all 613 laws described in the Book of Leviticus, Rushdoony paid special attention to punishments. Instead of serving prison sentences, criminals would be sentenced to indentured servitude, whipped, sold into slavery, or executed. “God’s government prevails,” Rushdoony wrote, “and His alternatives are clear-cut: either men and nations obey His laws, or God invokes the death penalty against them.” Those eligible on Rushdoony’s long list for execution included disobedient children, unchaste women, apostates, blasphemers, practitioners of witchcraft, astrologers, adulterers, and, of course, anyone who engaged in “sodomy or homosexuality.”