Republican Gomorrah Read online

  “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute,” Kennedy declared, “where no Catholic prelate would tell the president, should he be Catholic, how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference; and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.”

  On December 4, 2007, Romney took the rostrum at the George H. W. Bush Library, in College Station, Texas, outside Houston, where JFK delivered his famous speech. Romney opened with a predictable and requisite pledge: “If I am fortunate to become your president, I will serve no one religion, no one group, no one cause, and no one interest.” Minutes later, he contradicted his earnest vow to defy religious interest groups. “In recent years,” he proclaimed, “the notion of the separation of church and state has been taken by some well beyond its original meaning. They seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God. Religion is seen as merely a private affair with no place in public life. It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America—the religion of secularism. They are wrong.”

  Romney’s strident attack on separation of church and state was a tacit rebuke of Kennedy, not to mention Thomas Jefferson, and it affirmed the Christian right’s control over the Republican Party. Romney went on to mock Europeans “too ‘enlightened’ to venture inside [their churches] and kneel in prayer;” then he invoked “violent Jihad” as atheism’s “other extreme.” Finally, he declared, “Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom.” The line so excited Rush Limbaugh that during his broadcast the following day he falsely attributed it to Founding Father John Adams. But Romney’s speech hardly galvanized the party grassroots, especially in Iowa, where Huckabee had already attained the status of a saint.

  Huckabee’s appeal among the Republican base stemmed from more subtle factors than his positions on social issues. Unlike Romney and the rest of his adversaries, Huckabee demonstrated an intimate understanding of the complexities of the Christian right. Most important, he recognized how the movement’s underlying culture of personal crisis animated its politics of resentment. His familiarity with this critical nuance was apparent when he spoke before an assemblage of Iowa’s most politically active clergy members, the Pastors and Pews conference, in July 2007. Huckabee’s speech was a remarkably coherent disquisition on the nexus between private trauma and political conservatism. Echoing his friend Dobson, he insisted that man is too inherently corrupt to stand against the putrid headwinds of modern culture alone and that he must therefore submit to strict Dominionist guidelines:

  If you want to make the hair on the back of my neck stand up, just tell me that my experience as a pastor lets you know that I don’t have a clue about human life and the struggle of it. . . . Name me any profession in this country, on this planet where people touch more the lives of every social pathology today. . . .

  To that wife who’s trying to use makeup not to enhance her beauty but to hide the scars and the bruises from the abuse of some alcoholic husband who beats the daylights out of her every time he gets drunk—I’ve talked to her. From the person who’s struggling with who he or she may be in the context of a relationship that believes that he’s in love with a person of the same gender—I’ve talked to him. Name any problem, any social pathology, name any issue that’s confronting, and I’ll tell you who’s dealing with them. It’s the pastors of America who see the tears pouring out day after day after day . . . who understand life at a level very few people see because these are the men and women who have front row seats to the real struggles of life. . . .

  Chuck Colson said it beautifully, he said, “The problem in today’s world of this conflict of faith and secularism is that humanists don’t understand humanity, but a lot of Christians don’t understand Christianity. In part because we don’t understand that the nature of man. . . . The nature of man is not that he’s basically good; the nature of man is that he’s basically selfish. We have a sin nature, not a God nature. We have a God who made us, but we come into this world broken. We come into this world with a self-centeredness that only grace can fix. And if we fail to understand that, then we will believe as those who are the secularists do, that man’s problems are essentially either economic or educational.

  Huckabee drew an especially sharp contrast with the signature stump speech of the man who preceded him as Arkansas governor and who was still the standard bearer of the Democratic Party by the time Huckabee entered Iowa: Bill Clinton. Clinton’s own campaign for the presidency began in Iowa amid a harsh economic recession. He reassured anxious blue-collar voters there, and later from his Oval Office desk, with a memorable phrase: “I feel your pain.” In his Pastors and Pews speech, Huckabee placed the pain of average Americans at the center of his concerns, but he referred to a strikingly different kind of pain than Clinton did.

  While another financial crisis loomed on the horizon, Huckabee dismissed economic tinkering as a remedy to the country’s hardships. According to Huckabee’s pessimistic vision, which was actually a projection of his experiences in evangelical culture, ordinary Americans are totally and naturally depraved. Scholarships and economic aid would do nothing to divert them from their slouch toward Gomorrah. The pain brought on by Americans’ “social pathology” could be cured only through “grace,” or submission to an omnipotent Jesus. And only Huckabee, with his background as a crude psychologist anointed by God, could lead the serried masses into the Kingdom. His campaign was for a magic helper, not a president.

  Huckabee continued his speech by reminding pastors that the next generation was seething with sin. “We’ve gone from Leave It to Beaver to Beavis and Butthead, . . . ” he said. “From a time when teachers carried paddles and ruled the halls to now, where kids carry guns and the teachers are afraid.” The only way to heal the nation’s pain, Huckabee proclaimed, was to mete it out to the young rebellious ones. Again, he channeled Dobson. “Yes, I do believe that the old-fashioned ways of discipline are good ones,” he remarked with a wry smile. “I was the recipient of quite a few. I tell people, ‘My father was the most patriotic man I think I knew. Utter patriotism. He laid on the stripes; I saw stars.’ True American patriotism!” For the first time, Huckabee’s enraptured audience burst into spontaneous applause.

  Huckabee’s smiling appeals to cultural resentment and anger electrified the Republican base. Soon after his Pastors and Pews address, an ad hoc network of locally influential pastors, many of whom already communicated with one another through Family Research Council President Tony Perkins’s weekly conference calls, joined to form the grassroots arm of his campaign. By November 2007, Huckabee was polling even with Romney in Iowa and showed strength across the Bible Belt. Just as his surge in the polls began, Huckabee addressed the student body of the late Reverend Falwell’s Liberty University. There, he assured his star-struck audience that his sudden rise was evidence of a holy anointing. “There’s only one explanation for [my surge] and it’s not a human one,” Huckabee insisted, inspiring thunderous applause from the overflow crowd. “It’s the same power that helped a little boy with two fish and five loaves feed a crowd of five thousand people.”

  Huckabee made this remarkable statement in response to a question from a student, not a reporter. Political reporters with access to the candidate shied away from asking him pointed questions about his theological beliefs, focusing instead on what New York Times political correspondent Adam Nagourney called his “easy-going, self-effacing, jaunty style.” Times liberal commentator Frank Rich likened Huckabee to Democratic presidential frontrunner Barack Obama, writing, “both men aspire . . . to avoid the hyper-partisanship of the Clinton-Bush era.” With its emotional yearning for postpartisan heroes, the national press corps gave Huckabee all the cover he needed. He would thus remain the “affable,” bass-playing Republican counterp
art to Obama, not the sectarian ideologue he truly was.

  On January 3, 2008, Huckabee scored a stunning upset in Iowa, defeating Romney by eight points. His victory decided the course of the Republican primary. Now, Romney’s only hope of salvaging his campaign was to win New Hampshire. But McCain was set to capitalize on substantial residual support from his successful 2000 primary campaign in the Granite State. As Republican voters looked forward to the general election, they were increasingly inclined to vote tactically. With his decades of experience with foreign policy (an Achilles heel for the domestic-minded governors Huckabee and Romney), compelling personal history, and maverick image, McCain seemed strongest in a hypothetical match-up against either Hillary Clinton or Obama.

  McCain defeated Romney handily in New Hampshire, then swept into an insurmountable position on Super Tuesday. Huckabee won Alabama, West Virginia, Georgia, Tennessee, and Arkansas on Super Tuesday, all heavily evangelical states (they also are among the nation’s leaders in divorce and teen pregnancy rates). But with his campaign funds nearly expended and McCain just inches from securing the nomination, Huckabee could claim only moral victory. His campaign suddenly morphed into a massive publicity stunt made up of paid speeches before Christian-right outfits and talk show appearances full of folksy humor and hearty guffaws.

  During this period, a substantial segment of the opinion-making elite resolved to wish away the culture wars. The Christian right of old was dead, they declared, and a new generation of shiny, happy evangelicals had risen from its ashes, ready to scrap their parents’ gay-bashing and abortion clinic blockades in favor of feel-good environmental and anti-poverty crusades. Amy Sullivan, a writer for Time and self-proclaimed “leading expert on religion and the Democratic Party,” first tested this narrative in a lengthy April 2006 profile of Christian-right direct-mail maven Randy Brinson. Over the course of several thousand words, Sullivan detailed Brinson’s supposed progressive awakening, concluding he was “proof that some evangelicals are willing to take their chances and cross over to see what Democrats have to offer.” By the time the 2008 Republican primary began, however, Brinson had forked over his company’s mailing list to Huckabee and cast his lot with the Republican dark horse.

  Still, Sullivan would not back down. With the 2008 presidential campaign in full swing, she reiterated her fanciful theory. “Dobson and his colleagues have also been stymied by a new generation of Evangelical leaders who stubbornly refuse to join the political fray,” she claimed. “. . . the old lions of the Christian right are suddenly sputtering.”

  To bolster her point, Sullivan pointed to Rick Warren, author of the best-selling The Purpose Driven Life and a California megachurch leader identified by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof as “an evangelical liberals can love.” Warren’s press puffers invariably omitted his well-documented history of backing anti-gay crusades (as Sullivan did) and would be caught off guard when he threw his considerable weight behind Proposition 8, a draconian ballot measure designed to nullify already-certified same-sex marriages and civil unions in his home state. In the media-manufactured age of postpartisanship, gays turned out to be collateral damage.

  Other like-minded liberal pundits identified Giuliani’s presidential campaign as a signal of the Christian right’s supposedly imminent destruction. “Merely entertaining Giuliani as a candidate demonstrates that, for many conservatives, political power counts more than Christian values. The religious right is dead,” declared columnist Bill Press. Echoing Press, the Times’s Rich claimed that Giuliani’s early popularity in the GOP primary revealed how “the political clout ritualistically ascribed to Perkins, James Dobson of Focus on the Family, Gary Bauer of American Values and their ilk is a sham. . . . They don’t speak for the Republican Party.”

  But then the Republican Party spoke. Giuliani’s campaign strategy, tacitly acknowledging the Christian right’s dominance by avoiding any state where the movement held influence, ended where it began, in Florida. Upon his humiliating third-place finish in the Sunshine State, Giuliani flew to the Ronald Reagan Library in Simi Valley to publicly endorse the party’s new nominee, McCain. Back in Washington, Tony Perkins danced on Giuliani’s political grave. “Giuliani, with his, you know, Big Apple values—abortion rights, gay rights—turned voters sour to him,” Perkins said during an appearance on CNN. “That’s why he avoided the early states, because conservatives just were, you know, very aggressive in their opposition to him.” The GOP may have paraded as the party of Reagan during its national conventions, but the party’s grassroots were firmly in the grip of Dobson and his minions.

  John McCain loathed the Christian right more than he disliked any Democrat. Ralph Reed and his local allies had sabotaged McCain’s campaign in South Carolina in 2000, spreading rumors that he had fathered a black child out of wedlock, when in fact he had adopted a Bangladeshi child whose parents had been killed by land mines. Having surveyed the wreckage of Giuliani’s campaign, McCain reluctantly groped for a strategy to energize the elements that once lusted for his destruction.

  Dobson, for his part, had endorsed Huckabee just days before he dropped out but refused to campaign for him. He and his allies watched and waited now, scrutinizing McCain’s every move. Dobson signaled that if McCain were to select the right vice president, he might reverse his earlier vow to oppose him.

  CHAPTER 22

  THE PARTY OF DEATH

  John McCain’s campaign for the White House depended in large part on a parallel campaign he waged for the heart of the Christian right. McCain knew this would be an uphill battle. During the 2000 Republican primary campaign, he damned Christian right leaders as “agents of intolerance,” adding, “They are corrupting influences on religion and politics and those who practice them in the name of religion or in the name of the Republican Party or in the name of America shame our faith, our party and our country.” So he started early making amends and finding allies, flying off to San Antonio, Texas, in February 2007 to dine with a popular Pentecostal pastor named John Hagee. Hagee was unknown to the national political press corps—and to most Americans, for that matter—but within the Christian right, especially in Pentecostal circles, he was an increasingly influential figure. McCain had been apprised of Hagee’s influence, but to his own extreme detriment, never inquired into the source of it.

  From the pulpit of his 18,000-member Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Hagee delivers weekly sermons beamed out over the hundreds of stations owned by evangelical mega-network Salem Communications. His preaching style is hardly different from that of many other Pentecostal televangelists. Hagee routinely assures members of his flock that their terminal diseases, credit card debts, and interpersonal troubles will all be wiped away if only they lavish generous cash donations upon him, donations that he calls “love gifts.” By exploiting the desperate and gullible, Hagee and other practitioners of the prosperity gospel, one of the most popular trends in modern Pentecostalism, have raked in more than $1 million a year, making him one of the world’s wealthiest preachers.

  If this were the extent of Hagee’s activities, it would be remarkable enough. But there is more to Hagee than hucksterism. Hagee is a Christian Zionist who preaches that the prophecies of the Book of Revelations will unfold as soon as the Jewish diaspora resettles in “Biblical Israel,” meaning all of Israel and the West Bank. A natural ally of Israel’s rightist Likud Party and the messianic Jewish settlers colonizing the West Bank, Hagee leveraged his millions to unite dozens of conservative mega-church congregations and some of the Christian right’s most prominent figures—including the Reverend Jerry Falwell, Gary Bauer, and Rod Parsley, a Pentecostal preacher with considerable sway in his home state of Ohio—under the banner of Christians United for Israel (CUFI), the largest nationwide evangelical political organization dedicated to supporting Israel, or at least its most right-wing elements. Hagee said he would like to see CUFI become “the Christian version of AIPAC,” referring to the vaunted pro-Israel group rated second
only to the National Rifle Association as the most effective lobby in Washington. The preacher tapped Republican Senator Arlen Specter’s former chief of staff, David Brog, as his Capitol Hill lobbyist and then proceeded to make inroads in influence.

  Despite his pretensions to philosemitism, Hagee’s interest in Israel was motivated exclusively by his belief in End Times theology, a doctrine that celebrates natural disaster, war, and global pandemics as harbingers of Christ’s imminent return. According to Hagee’s reading of the Book of Revelations, the lodestar of End Times theology, when Jesus returns to Jerusalem, the Jews must convert to evangelical Christianity or suffer eternal torment in “an everlasting lake of fire.” And liberals had better seek cover as well. “As soon as Jesus sits on his throne he’s gonna rule the world with a rod of iron,” the portly Hagee boomed in a December 2007 jeremiad. “That means he’s gonna make the ACLU do what he wants them to. That means you’re not gonna have to ask if you can pray in public school. We will live by the law of God and no other law.”

  Hagee’s apocalyptics engulfed more than the ACLU. His vision of the Rapture extended to a Holy War between Israel and its Muslim neighbors. “The coming nuclear showdown with Iran is a certainty,” Hagee wrote in 2006 in the Pentecostal magazine Charisma. “Israel and America must confront Iran’s nuclear ability and willingness to destroy Israel with nuclear weapons. For Israel to wait is to risk committing national suicide.” Only through this catastrophic scenario could Hagee’s prophecies be realized.

  In July 2007, I covered Christians United for Israel’s “Washington-Israel” Summit. Staged inside the cavernous halls of Washington, DC’s Convention Center, the event was more than a political rally—it was a gigantic vaudeville of doom, despair, and destruction. Speakers from Newt Gingrich to former Israeli Ambassador Dore Gold stoked the anxieties of the nearly three thousand attendees with graphic descriptions of Iran’s fearsome Shihab missile, warning that it could strike as far as Israel, into the heart of Europe, and beyond. After the Cornerstone Church chorus belted out a saccharine rendition of the Zionist folk anthem “Jerusalem, City of Gold,” and evangelical crowd members, many clad in kippas and tallis, blew supersized shofars and danced in the aisles, Hagee waddled to the rostrum.