Republican Gomorrah Read online

  “It is time for America to embrace the words of Senator Joseph Lieberman,” Hagee rumbled, “and consider a military preemptive strike against Iran to prevent a nuclear Holocaust in Israel!” The crowd leapt to its feet and roared.

  When I interviewed summit attendees about their theological views, I was unable to find a single person among them who did not lust for a blitzkrieg of biblical proportions. “I’m looking forward to Armageddon and to the cleansing of the Earth!” exclaimed John G. Rogers, a pastor from California. William Baker, another Californian, told me he was “absolutely” elated about the prospect of “a battle between the Christians and the anti-Christians.” “I got a bag packed,” a man named Walter Farnham revealed to me. “And when we disappear, you better start to worry. Because if you haven’t seen the ‘Left Behind’ series, it’s scary.” Two kindly older women standing beside Farnham nodded approvingly at the mention of Left Behind.

  Written by the Reverend Tim LaHaye, a founder of the Council for National Policy, the Left Behind series is the Christian right’s most effective recruitment vehicle. Larded from cover to cover with coded anti-Semitic conspiracies about “international bankers” plotting with UN chief Nicholai Carpathia (the evil characters in Left Behind all have ethnic names), who represents the anti-Christ, Left Behind is replete with descriptions of pornographic violence against unbelievers, whose “bodies burst open from head to toe at every word that proceeded out of the mouth of the Lord.”

  According to evangelical pollster George Barna, Left Behind “represents one of the most widely experienced religious teaching or evangelistic tools among adults who are not born-again Christians.” LaHaye’s impact on millions of lives cannot be attributed to his storytelling prowess—his prose is painfully turgid—but rather his ability to mesmerize—or terrorize—unbelievers with the prospect of a gruesome death and eternal anguish in the flames of Hell. By literally scaring the devil out of unbelievers, LaHaye and his acolytes have plumbed the country’s most panic-prone elements within the ranks of the Christian right and thus have expanded their movement in a startlingly rapid fashion.

  Cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Denial of Death offers one explanation for the popular appeal of Hagee and LaHaye’s apocalypticism. Published in 1970 and heavily influenced by the work of Erich Fromm, whom Becker credited with offering “the authentic line of cumulative critical thought on the human condition,” Denial is premised on Becker’s theory that the fear of death is the greatest source of human anxiety. To transcend the terror of mortality, people may seek to follow great leaders or dissolve themselves into causes greater than themselves, especially those that literally promise the heavens. As Becker wrote, “The more you fear death and the emptier you are, the more you people your world with omnipotent father-figures, extra-magical helpers.” When fearful converts become convinced that outside forces threaten their new cultural sanctuary or its leader, they react with belligerent rage. This symbiosis of submissive and aggressive behavior, first identified by Fromm as the “sadomasochistic trend,” is the hallmark of certain right-wing cults.

  In 1989, fifteen years after Becker died, a group of psychologists set out to prove his hypothesis. Psychologists Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski assembled twenty-two municipal court judges from Tucson and divided them into two groups, one of which was required to answer a questionnaire about how its members thought their deaths would occur. Then both groups were asked to set bail for a prostitute who was considered a flight risk. The judges who had been reminded of their impending death set bail at an average of $455, whereas those in the control group set bail at around $80. The greater the fear of death, the more draconian and fearful was the response.

  During the next decade, Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszcynski conducted similar experiments to consolidate their findings. In one test, students from a Christian college were asked to evaluate two essays, one by a Jew and the other by a Christian. Those who performed mortality exercises graded the Jewish author’s work far more negatively than the control group did. Subjects asked to offer their opinion on an essay that criticized the United States demonstrated the same effect: those who had the word death flashed before their eyes judged the essay more harshly than those who did not.

  In the months leading up to the 2004 elections, the psychologists tested the appeal of George W. Bush, showing a group of Rutgers University students an editorial hailing Bush’s handling of the so-called war on terror. Rutgers students do not exactly represent Bush’s core constituency, but those of them who were subjected to mortality reminders responded favorably to the editorial. Meanwhile, those in the control group reacted negatively, as they would have been expected to.

  After studying Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszcynski’s experiments, journalist John Judis of The New Republic concluded that the surprising breadth of Republican success during the Bush era could be attributed to a single tactic: mortality reminders. “Mortality reminders not only enhanced the appeal of Bush’s political style,” Judis wrote, “but also deepened and broadened the appeal of the conservative social positions that Republicans had been running on.”

  Most candidates in the 2008 GOP primary loaded their rhetorical arsenals with mortality reminders. Rudy Giuliani’s entire campaign was based on reminding Americans of 9/11; Fred Thompson, the conservative senator from Tennessee and erstwhile Law and Order star, followed Rudy’s lead. “Twelve million illegal immigrants later,” he warned an audience in California, “we are now living in a nation that is beset by people who are suicidal maniacs and want to kill countless innocent men, women and children around the world.” Mike Huckabee also linked immigration to terrorism, commenting darkly the day after Pakistani presidential candidate Benazir Bhutto’s assassination by radical Islamic terrorists, “It’s interesting that there were more Pakistanis who illegally crossed the border than of any other nationality except for those immediately south of our border.” (His claim was immediately contradicted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials).

  Not to be outdone, Mitt Romney rattled an audience with the horrifying prospect of al-Qaida, China, and Iran teaming up to indoctrinate their offspring—a rhetorical stretch that sounded like a script proposal for Red Dawn II. “It’s because of America’s strength that we don’t speak German and that our children don’t speak Russian. And it’s because of America’s strength that our grandchildren won’t have to speak Arabic or Farsi or Chinese,” he said to raucous applause from the 2007 Conservative Political Action Conference. Colorado Representative Tom Tancredo hammered the death theme the hardest. A fanatical nativist rejected for service in Vietnam on the basis of his claim of “depression and severe anxiety,” Tancredo rarely missed an opportunity to detail the invading scourge’s murderous capacity. Illegal immigrants are “coming here to kill you and kill me and our families,” he told a crowd in Illinois.

  John McCain seemed uncomfortable with morbid histrionics. His campaign revolved instead around three themes: his experience, his maverick image, and his honor. Although these themes appealed to many outside the Christian right’s sphere of influence, McCain won the nomination only because Romney and Huckabee split the GOP’s right-wing base. McCain was convinced he could win over independent voters in the general election—independents had propelled him to victory time and again in states such as New Hampshire—but he needed to expand his appeal to the right to consolidate his weak support within the Republican Party. That meant not only highlighting his conservative record on social issues (to the extent that he had one) but also dialing his tone up to a more hysterical pitch. But because McCain was too dour to pantomime demagogy in a convincing manner—the mannequin-like Romney flopped in his own attempts—he settled on outsourcing his charisma to a most fanatical movement surrogate: Pastor Hagee.

  CHAPTER 23

  THE HATE BOAT

  Hagee was a friend of Huckabee, having paid the ex-governor several thousand dollars to give two
sermons at his church in December, after his campaign had collapsed but not officially ended. But Hagee’s ambitions overwhelmed his sense of loyalty; he wanted access to the Oval Office, something Huckabee could not deliver. On the evening of February 26, 2008, Hagee called Huckabee, who was prepping for his upcoming appearance on Saturday Night Live. Huckabee was stunned by his pal’s revelation that he would back McCain. “Have you prayed about this?” Huckabee asked his old friend. “Is this what the Lord wants you to do?” Hagee ducked the question.

  The following morning, McCain staged a press conference in San Antonio to accept Hagee’s endorsement. After McCain and Hagee exchanged a series of canned complements, a reporter asked McCain whether he was aware of Hagee’s conspiratorial End Times prophecies. McCain brushed the question off with boilerplate. “All I can tell you,” he said, “is that I’m very proud to have Pastor Hagee’s support. He has support and respect from throughout the nation and I continue to appreciate his advocacy for freedom and independence for the state of Israel.” Hagee took the microphone, looked the reporter straight in the eye, and declared with all the certitude of a confidence man on the witness stand, “Our support for Israel has nothing to do with an End Times prophetic scenario.”

  Hagee, in fact, had uttered this disclaimer word for word in a press conference during Christians United for Israel’s 2007 Summit. In response, I read to him a passage from his best-selling polemic Jerusalem Countdown (the book’s cover depicts an atomic mushroom cloud), in which he described anti-Semitism as a divinely ordained phenomenon: “It was the disobedience and rebellion of the Jews, God’s chosen people, to their covenantal responsibility to serve only the one true God, Jehovah, that gave rise to the opposition and persecution that they experienced beginning in Canaan and continuing to this very day.” Then I asked Hagee to explain his support for Israel in the context of that passage. Moments after my question, which Hagee curtly dismissed, the preacher’s wife ordered a team of off-duty police officers to remove me from the premises.

  Liberal bloggers seized on the Hagee endorsement moments after it was announced, unearthing his vast catalog of conspiratorial prophesies. Hagee’s proclamation that the Vatican was the “Great Whore” of Babylon—a belief shared by most Christian Zionists—gained immediate media traction, mainly because Bill Donohue of the Catholic League denounced it. But Donohue, a strident right-wing apologist for the so-called “Nazi Pope,” Pius XII, and assailant of “secular Jews” in Hollywood “who hate Christianity,” accepted an apology from Hagee soon after. Like an angel in the whirlwind of the liberal media, McCain stood by Hagee’s side, earning effusive praise from Christian-right activists for his loyalty. Perhaps he was not the crypto-liberal traitor they had taken him for.

  But when the now notorious footage of Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s “greatest hits” emerged in March, first on ABC News and then on a feedback loop on Fox News, liberal bloggers resuscitated with renewed passion their campaign to spotlight McCain’s own “problem pastor.” The bloggers had railed against Hagee with negligible effect, but now, an exceptionally avid researcher of the Christian right named Bruce Wilson provided the weapon they needed.

  In a short YouTube video, Wilson reproduced audio of Hagee’s declaration in 2006 that Adolf Hitler was used by God to force the Jews to Israel. “Hitler was a hunter,” Hagee preached. “That will be offensive to some people. Well, dear heart, be offended: I didn’t write it. Jeremiah wrote it. It was the truth and it is the truth. How did it happen? Because God allowed it to happen. Why did it happen? Because God said, ‘My top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel.’”

  When Wilson’s video exploded online, it generated tens of thousands of hits. McCain, for his part, was shocked by Hagee’s animadversions. On May 23, with the New York Times poised to report on Wilson’s research, McCain cut the preacher loose, calling his remarks about Hitler “crazy and unacceptable” and adding, “I would reject the endorsement of the expression of those kind of views.” A frustrated McCain aide excused the campaign’s ruinous dance with Hagee as the result of “poor vetting,” but it had only taken bloggers a few keystrokes to vet the notorious preacher. Was the McCain campaign truly this incompetent? Or was it naïve about the Christian-right leaders it was courting?

  Curiously, even after McCain’s embarrassing renunciation of Hagee, his best friend in the Senate and top campaign surrogate, independent Senator Joseph Lieberman, kept a keynote address at Hagee’s 2008 Summit on his schedule. Lieberman, an Orthodox Jew, forged ties to the Christian right during a fruitless music censorship campaign in the 1990s and then insinuated himself into neoconservative circles after most congressional Democrats turned against the war in Iraq. He combined these two elements through his alliance with Hagee, who upheld the Christian right’s draconian positions on social issues and the neoconservatives’ connection to the Israeli right.

  During the dinner banquet at Hagee’s Summit in 2007, Lieberman had lauded the pastor in Hebrew, as an “Ish Elochim, a man of God. And I have something else,” Lieberman added. “Like Moses, he’s become the leader of a mighty multitude. Even greater than the multitude that Moses led from Egypt to the Promised Land.”

  Unlike McCain’s, the pious Lieberman’s embrace of Hagee seemed genuine. He was very probably the reason why McCain had courted the pastor in the first place. When I first reported Lieberman’s scheduled Christians United for Israel speech in June 2008, an appearance that even newspapers in the senator’s home state of Connecticut had overlooked, a storm of controversy erupted. In its wake, a liberal pro-Israel advocacy group called J Street sponsored a poll revealing that only 37 percent of Jews approved of Lieberman’s leadership and that a piddling 7 percent approved of Hagee.

  Days later, I released more footage on the Huffington Post, compiled by Bruce Wilson, this time featuring Hagee identifying the antiChrist as gay, with “fierce features,” and “partially Jewish, as was Adolf Hitler.” But even this failed to shake Lieberman’s faith. On July 23, he struck a defiant tone in his speech before the gathering of Christians United, likening Hagee once again to the most revered Jewish prophet. “Dear friends,” Lieberman said, “I can only imagine what the bloggers of today would have had to say about Moses and Miriam.”

  The neoconservatives orbiting Lieberman’s office had long sought an alliance with the Christian right. As far back as July 1984, Irving Kristol, neoconservative godfather, urged that American Jews, “enmeshed in the liberal time warp,” ally with Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority. Kristol’s apologia was inspired by the anti-Semitic ravings of a preacher named Bailey Smith. “I don’t know why God chose the Jew,” Smith had said. “They have such funny noses.” When Jewish groups pounced on Smith’s remarks and on those of Jerry Falwell, who told his followers that Jews “can make more money accidentally than you can on purpose,” Kristol rushed to the preachers’ defense.

  “Why should Jews care about the theology of a fundamentalist preacher when they do not for a moment believe that he speaks with any authority on the question of God’s attentiveness to human prayer?” Kristol wrote. “And what do such theological abstractions matter as against the mundane fact that this same preacher is vigorously pro-Israel?”

  In a 2003 essay for his son William’s magazine the Weekly Standard, Kristol added a new wrinkle to his apologia, claiming that the alliance was formed organically in response to American culture “sinking to new levels of vulgarity.” Neoconservatives and the religious right, Kristol wrote, “are united on issues concerning the quality of education, the relations of church and state, the regulation of pornography, and the like, all of which they regard as proper candidates for the government’s attention. And since the Republican Party now has a substantial base among the religious, this gives neocons a certain influence and even power.”

  Neoconservative William Bennett, the Reagan administration’s secretary of education and former Bush I drug czar, was a key neocon liaison to the religi
ous right, having led high-profile battles against rap music lyrics, illicit drug use, and gay rights. (William Kristol also served as his chief of staff in the Department of Education.) In his moralistic polemic The Book of Virtues, Bennett presented self-control as a panacea for societal problems. “We should know that too much of anything, even a good thing, may prove to be our undoing,” he wrote. “[We] need . . . to set definite boundaries on our appetites.”

  But Bennett had an almost unquenchable appetite of his own, and it wasn’t just for catered soufflés on the Washington dinner circuit. Bennett was a “preferred customer” at over a dozen casinos between Atlantic City and Las Vegas. By the time reporters Josh Green and Jonathan Alter revealed his high-stakes hustling in the Washington Monthly in 2003, he had gambled away $8 million.

  While Bennett faded from the scene momentarily after his gambling addiction came to light, the pantheon of the neoconservative clique fixated on realizing their geopolitical goals in the Middle East, an agenda that dovetailed with the Likud Party, which a few of them had advised. In his original 1984 manifesto for a neoconservative- Christian-right alliance, Irving Kristol insisted that it was essential in order to defend Israel. Under George W. Bush, the neocons cultivated support from the droves of evangelicals who viewed the so-called war on terror as a spiritual war between good and evil. So far as the neocons were concerned, Hagee’s occasional anti-Semitic eruptions were inconsequential if the primary target of his vitriol remained the Muslim evildoers surrounding Israel.