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AS A THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD, I WATCHED William F. Buckley’s Firing Line with my dad, attended Teen Age Republican summer camp, and during the 1968 Nebraska primary campaign, at the behest of a Nixon campaign advance man in Omaha, furtively ripped down Rockefeller and Reagan signs. Three years later I was a McGovern campaign volunteer, but I still watched and admired Buckley on PBS. Today I disagree about political issues with friends and relatives to my right, but we agree on the contours of reality. I never really loathed any president (until now), and over the years I voted for a few Republicans for state and local office.
People on the left are by no means all scrupulously reasonable—many give themselves over to the dubious and untrue. But the politics of Fantasyland are highly asymmetrical. That is, starting in the 1990s, America’s unhinged right became much larger and more influential than its unhinged left. Moreover, it now has unprecedented power—as of 2016, effective control over much of the U.S. government.
Why did the grown-ups and designated drivers on the left manage to remain more or less in charge of their followers, while the reality-based right lost control to its fantasy-prone true believers?
One reason, I believe, is religion. The GOP is now quite explicitly Christian, the first time the United States has had such a major party. It is the American coalition of white Christians, papering over doctrinal and class differences—and now led, weirdly, by one of the least religious presidents in modern times. If more and more of a political party’s members hold more and more extravagantly supernatural beliefs, doesn’t it make sense that the party will be more and more open to make-believe in its politics and policy? The Southern Baptist minister and professor Roger Olson bemoans the fundamentalist takeover of evangelicalism. “An analogy,” he wrote recently, “is what has happened to the Republican Party,” where moderates were marginalized. But that isn’t just an analogousdynamic: the transformations of Christianity and of the political right happened simultaneously and amplified each other.
I doubt the GOP elite deliberately engineered the synergies between the economic and religious sides of their contemporary coalition. But there it is nonetheless. As the incomes of middle- and working-class people flatlined, Republicans pooh-poohed rising economic inequality and insecurity; economic insecurity does correlate with greater religiosity; and for white Americans, greater religiosity does correlate with voting Republican. For Republican politicians and their rich-getting-richer donors, that’s a virtuous circle, not a vicious one.
Another main way fantasists took over the GOP is with the flowering of conspiracism I described in the preceding two chapters. After 9/11, more Democrats than Republicans believed that the Bush administration allowed or arranged the attacks. Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, seen by twenty million Americans in theaters, nudged many liberals toward belief in an untrue conspiracy, but the mainstream left didn’t push that fantasy. America simply has many more fervid conspiracists on the right, as research about belief in particular conspiracies confirms again and again.
Richard Hofstadter argued in the 1960s and many others have since that the right is inherently more fertile ground for such paranoia. Maybe. In any case, only the American right has had a large and organized faction based on paranoid conspiracism for the last six decades. As the pioneer vehicle, the John Birch Society zoomed along and then sputtered out, but its fantastical paradigm and belligerent temperament has endured and reproduced in other forms and under other brand names. When Barry Goldwater was the right-wing Republican presidential nominee in 1964, he had to play down any streaks of Bircher madness, but in his 1979 memoir With No Apologies, he felt free to rave on about the globalist conspiracy’s “pursuit of a New World Order” and impending “period of slavery,” the Council on Foreign Relations’ secret agenda for “one-world rule,” and the Trilateral Commission’s plan for “seizing control of the political government of the United States.” The right had three generations to steep in this. Its exciting taboo vapors wafted more and more into the main chambers of conservatism, becoming familiar, seeming less outlandish. Do you believe that “a secretive power elite with a globalist agenda is conspiring to eventually rule the world through an authoritarian world government”? Yes, say 34 percent of the people who voted Republican in 2012.*1
Look at today’s John Birch website: its concerns and spin are unremarkably Republican—abolish the Fed, pull out of the UN, kill Common Core, give moral support to the latest martyred right-wing lawbreaker who can’t abide some government program or rule. Woodrow Wilson was in office when the Birch Society’s founder came of age, and he demonized Wilson ever after—“more than any other one man [he] started this nation on its present road to totalitarianism.” Which seemed quaint—until recently, when right-wingers like Glenn Beck revived that odd obsession with a president from a century ago.
Wilson pushed the League of Nations, the failed forerunner of the United Nations—and the UN, according to the far right in the 1950s and the mainstream right since the 1990s, is a headquarters of the globalist tyranny. In fact, of course, the UN has been a flawed but occasionally indispensable apparatus, and the right-wing vision of its villainous master plan for world domination is mad. The Republican Party’s platform started depicting the UN as a bogeyman in 1996; the 2004 platform demanded that “American troops must never serve under United Nations command,” but that document still had lots of references to the UN’s utility and importance—the last one that did. (The 2016 GOP platform calls for a constitutional amendment to protect homeschooling “from interference by states, the federal government, or…the United Nations.”)
This is not just symbolic wankery. It has had effects in the real world. Take Agenda 21, for instance. In 1992 the UN held an Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro to start getting everyone on the same page concerning the environment and the new notion of sustainable development, especially concerning CO2 emissions. It adopted a voluntary blueprint called Agenda 21. And then nobody outside the environmental do-good sector paid attention. From 1994 to 2006, there was exactly one reference to Agenda 21 in The New York Times.
But then the far right discovered it—exposed it!—and refashioned Agenda 21 as a secret key to the globalist conspiracy. (Conspiracists love learning the names of little-known government programs, especially if they contain numbers—the air force’s Area 51, CIA’s Operation 40, Special Ops’ U.S. war games in 2015 called Jade 15—then repeating them until they become, dum-dum-dum, shorthand for shadowy evil.) By 2012, American right-wingers knew to be scared, very scared, of this vague, twenty-year-old international environmental plan. Agenda 21 and sustainable development, they say, were just totalitarianism and Communism by a different name. When the Obama administration created the White House Rural Council to promote economic development in places like Appalachia, a Fox News anchor warned that it was “eerily similar to a U.N. plan called Agenda 21, where a centralized planning agency would be responsible for oversight into all areas of our lives. A one-world order.” When Newt Gingrich was the front-runner for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination and mentioned it during a debate, applause prevented him from finishing the thought. At that moment, Beck had just published his dystopian novel Agenda 21, and on his TV program one of the main Agenda 21 hysterics provided a perfect glimpse into the conspiracist mind: “You’re not going to find anything that isn’t Agenda 21 these days….People recognize many, many things that are wrong but they don’t realize that they’re all connected.”
By then, conservative activists all over the country were using Agenda 21 as the scary catchphrase to defeat ordinary county and city land-use plans, carbon-emission information programs, plans for high-speed trains, traffic decongestion, bike lanes, and home energy meters. The Republican National Committee called it a “comprehensive plan of…global political control” including “socialist/communist redistribution of wealth.” The last two GOP platforms have had anti–Agenda 21 planks, and a dozen state legislatures passed resolutions decrying it.
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IN THE LATE 1960s and early ’70s, the fantasy far left shot its wad and didn’t leave many active cells. At the same time, the reality-based left more or less won: the retreat from Vietnam, the passage of civil rights and environmental protection laws, increasing legal and cultural equality for women, legalized abortion. Two leaders of the right, Milton Friedman and Richard Nixon, famously said at the time, “We are all Keynesians now”—meaning that, yes, the government does need to use taxes and spending to manage the economy.
But then the right wanted its turn to win: it more or less accepted racial and gender legal equality and learned to live with social welfare and regulation and bigger government, but it insisted on slowing it all down. The political center moved right—but in the 1970s and ’80s not yet unreasonably. Most of America decided that we were all free marketeers now, that business was not necessarily bad, and that government couldn’t solve all problems. It still seemed like the normal cyclical seesawing of American politics. In the 1990s the right also achieved two of its wildest existential dreams: the Soviet Union and international Communism collapsed, and as crime declined by half, law-and-order was restored.
But also starting in the 1990s, the farthest-right half of our right half, roughly a quarter of Americans, couldn’t and wouldn’t adjust their beliefs to comport with their side’s victories and the dramatically new and improved realities. They’d made a god out of Reagan, but they ignored or didn’t register that he was practical and reasonable, that he didn’t completely buy his own antigovernment bullshit. After Reagan, his hopped-up true-believer faction began insisting on total victory. In a democracy, total victory by any faction is a fantasy, of course.
Pat Buchanan had been a senior official in three straight GOP administrations, making a career of bumptious nationalism and anti-Communism. As a teenager in the 1950s, his hero had been Joe McCarthy. The Soviet empire ended just as he began his first campaign for the GOP presidential nomination in 1992, so he simply substituted New World Order and Davos for Communism and Moscow in his talking points. He’d also praised his primary campaign opponent David Duke, the former KKK Imperial Wizard, for not being “intimidated into shucking off winning social issues” such as “discrimination against white folks.” Buchanan won 23 percent of the national GOP primary vote against the incumbent Republican president, and in his campaign during the next cycle carried four states. Buchanan, running against a Bush in an effort to run against a Clinton, was a smarter, more sincere and ideologically coherent Trump twenty years ahead of his time.
Another way the GOP got loopy is by overdoing libertarianism. I have some libertarian tendencies, but at full-strength purity it’s an ideology most boys grow out of. On the American right since the 1980s, however, they did not. Libertarianism used to have a robust left wing as well. Both disliked government. Both were driven by a fantastically nostalgic conviction that a country of three hundred million people at the turn of the twenty-first century could and should revert to something like its nineteenth-century self. Both had a familiar American magical-thinking fetish for gold—to return to gold as the foundation of U.S. currency because, they think, only gold is real.
However, as the post-Reagan Republican mother ship maintained extreme and accelerating antigovernment fervor—acquiring escape velocity during the 2000s, leaving Earth orbit in the 2010s—libertarianism became a right-wing movement. (Also helpful was the fact that extreme economic libertarians included extremely rich people like the Koch brothers who could finance its spread.) Most Republicans are very selective, cherry-picking libertarians: let business do whatever it wants, but don’t spoil poor people with government handouts; let individuals have gun arsenals but not abortions or recreational drugs or marriage with whomever they wish; and don’t mention Ayn Rand’s atheism.
It’s a political movement whose most widely read and influential texts are fiction. “I grew up reading Ayn Rand,” Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has said, “and it taught me quite a bit about who I am and what my value systems are, and what my beliefs are.” It was those fictions that allowed him and other higher-IQ Americans to see contemporary America as a dystopia in which selfishness is righteous and they are the last heroes. “I think a lot of people,” Ryan said in 2009, “would observe that we are right now living in an Ayn Rand novel.” I assume he meant Atlas Shrugged, a novel that Trump’s secretary of state (the former CEO of ExxonMobil) has said is his favorite book. It’s the story of a heroic cabal of men’s men industrialists who cause the socialistic U.S. government to collapse so they can take over, start again, and make everything right.
For a while, realist Republican leaders effectively encouraged and exploited the predispositions of their fantastical partisans. That was the stone-cold cynicism of Karl Rove, like the Wizard of Oz’s evil twin coming out from behind the curtain for a candid chat just before he won a second term for George Bush, explaining that the “judicious study of discernible reality” had been rendered obsolete. They were rational people who understood that a large fraction of Americans don’t bother with rationality when they vote, that many voters resent the judicious study of discernible reality. Keeping those people angry and scared won them elections.
But over the last generation, a lot of the rabble they roused came to believe all the untruths. “The problem is that Republicans have purposefully torn down the validating institutions,” says the political journalist Josh Barro, a Republican until 2016. “They have convinced voters that the media cannot be trusted; they have gotten them used to ignoring inconvenient facts about policy; and they have abolished standards of discourse.” The right’s ideological center of gravity careened way to the right of Rove and all Bushes, finally knocking them and their ilk aside. What had been its fantastical fringe became the GOP center. In retrospect, the sudden change in the gun lobby in the late 1970s, from more or less flexible to absolutely hysterical, was a harbinger of the transformation of the entire right a generation later. Reasonable Republicanism was replaced by absolutism: nonew taxes, virtually no regulation, abolish the EPA and the IRS and the Federal Reserve.
As I’ve said, there are left-wing believers in nonexistent conspiracies and other fantasies, but they’re not nearly as numerous or influential. During the 2016 Democratic primaries, after Bernie Sanders did better in some election-day exit polls than he did in the voting, some of his supporters were convinced a conspiracy had falsified the results. (In fact, exit polls always tend to oversample younger voters.) And while you might have considered Sanders’s leftism unrealistic or its campaign rhetoric hyperbolic (“the business model of Wall Street is fraud”), the campaign wasn’t based on outright fantasies. You may not want democratic socialism, but Denmark is a real country.
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SO WHILE POLITICIANS of all stripes propagate politically useful make-believe, Republicans let this habit get the best of them in several consequential areas. Environmental science had the bad luck to recognize and start to publicize global warming in the early 2000s, just as full Fantasyland dawned. At first, Republicans were officially reasonable on the subject. As recently as 2008, their party platform mentioned “climate change” thirteen times, stipulating it was caused by “human economic activity,” and they committed themselves to “decreasing the long term demand for oil” in order “to address the challenge.” Four years later they had switched to denialism, the next platform mentioning “climate change” once, in scare quotes, only to disparage concern about it. The 2012 platform considered the UN’s twenty-year-old global warming mission statement Agenda 21 a more dire problem than global warming.
The Republican position is now to oppose even studying climate change as well as any and all proposals to reduce carbon emissions. Rational people may disagree about how governments might minimize or prepare for the effects of global warming. You are entitled to your own opinion. But refusing to accept its reality is a new and unacceptable posture. You are not entitled to your own facts.
On this subject, some Republicans are Cynics, some are Believers, and many combine bits of both. The pure Cynics are doing the bidding of the fossil fuel industry, which has cynically and successfully raised doubts about the clear scientific consensus on the cause of global warming. In this, they repeated what the tobacco industry had pioneered starting in the 1960s, as soon as medical science established that smoking causes cancer. At the Brown & Williamson cigarette company in 1969, an internal memo was explicit. “Doubt is our product,” it declared, “the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.”
Senate Environment Committee chair James Inhofe is from Oklahoma, a big oil state, so he has rational political reasons to belittle climate change. But he also argues, in his book on the subject, The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future, that it’s just God turning up Earth’s thermostat a little, and he condemns “the arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate,” which “is to me outrageous.” Searching the records of the 278 Republicans serving in the Senate and House in 2014, the news organization PolitiFact found only eight who publicly acknowledged that global warming is real and caused by humans. We can’t know, of course, how many of the others are Believers and how many are Cynics. The good news is that only 17 percent of Americans who don’t call themselves Republican believe global warming is a myth.*2
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IN ADDITION TO having become a distinctly Christian party, the GOP is more than ever America’s self-consciously white party. The nationalization of its Southern Strategy from the 1960s worked partly because it rode demographic change. In 1960, 90 percent of Americans were white and non-Hispanic. Only a few states had white populations of less than 70 percent—specifically Mississippi, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Alabama. Today the white majority in the whole country is down nearly to 60 percent; in other words, America’s racial makeup is now more “Southern” than the Deep South’s was in the 1960s.
For a while, the party’s leaders were careful to clear their deck of explicit racism. It was reasonable, wasn’t it, to be concerned about violent crime spiraling upward from the 1960s through the ’80s? We don’t want social welfare programs to encourage cultures of poverty and dependency, do we? Although the dog-whistled resentment of new policies disfavoring or seeming to disfavor white people became more audible, Republican leaders publicly stuck to not-entirely-unreasonable arguments: affirmative action is an imperfect solution; too much multiculturalism might Balkanize America; we shouldn’t let immigrants pour into the U.S. helter-skelter. But in this century, more Republican leaders started cozying up to the ugliest fantasists, unapologetic racists. When Congressman Ron Paul ran for the 2008 GOP nomination, he appeared repeatedly with the neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, who was just coining the term “alt-right” for his movement. Senator Rand Paul employed as an aide and wrote a book with a former leader of the League of the South, an organization devoted to a twenty-first-century do-over of Confederate secession.
After we elected a black president, more regular whistles joined the kind only dogs can hear. Even thoughtful Ross Douthat, one of the Times’s conservative columnists, admitted to a weakness for the Old South fantasy. During the debate about governments displaying Confederate symbols after nine black people were shot dead by a white supremacist in Charleston, he discussed “the temptation…to regard the Confederate States of America as the political and historical champion of all…attractive Southern distinctives….Even a secession-hating Yankee like myself has felt, at certain moments the pull of that idea, the lure of that fantasy.”
Meanwhile the party Establishment was convincing majorities of Republicans of an entirely fraudulent fantasy it knew to be a lie—that rampant voter fraud required new ID laws to prevent (black and brown and young) people from casting ballots illegally. Moreover in all sorts of ways, the GOP, more than any other U.S. institution, helped convince white people of an extraordinary falsehood underlying the others. For almost a generation now, according to a new study by professors at the Harvard Business School and Tufts, the average white American has subscribed to the fantasy that antiwhite bias is a more serious problem in the United States than antiblack bias.
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AND THEN THERE was a new set of nonwhite people to fear. On September 20, 2001, President Bush made a point of saying that our enemy “is not our many Muslim friends…[or] our many Arab friends.” But after that, many Republicans began explicitly encouraging and exaggerating fears of Muslims, especially after the election of a nonwhite president with the middle name Hussein. Why did half of Republicans—and two-thirds of Trump’s primary voters—remain convinced that Obama is a Muslim?*3 Because GOP elected officials and other conservative leaders encouraged them for more than a decade. The hysterical fear of Muslims combines several familiar, long-standing American strains of fantasy-driven abomination: of secret conspirators in high places, of nonwhite people by white people, of non-Protestants by Protestants, of non-Christians by Christians, and of scary foreigners by everyone.
Sharia law uses the sacred texts of Islam as the basis for moral behavior, the way Jews are supposed to use the Talmud and Christians the Bible—and, in Muslim countries, it uses the Quran explicitly as the basis for legal codes. Just before we elected our forty-fourth non-Muslim president in a row, people on the right began fantasizing that American Muslims were scheming to supplant U.S. jurisprudence with Islamic jurisprudence. The definitive text is a 2010 book called Shariah: The Threat to America. Its nineteen authors included respectable hard-right conservatives and national security wonks. We’re “infiltrated and deeply influenced,” the book says, “by an enemy within that is openly determined to replace the U.S. Constitution with shariah.” The movement took off, and in short order the specter of sharia became a right-wing catchphrase encompassing suspicion of almost any Islamic involvement in the U.S. civic sphere. The word gave Islamophobia a patina of legitimacy. It was a specific fantasy—not I hate Muslims or I hate Arabsbut rather I don’t want to live under Taliban law, and therefore it could pass as not racist but anti-tyranny. It was also a shiny new exotic term, a word nobody in America but a few intellectuals knew.
The coinventor of the fantasy and the ringleader and front man of Shariah: The Threat to America was Frank Gaffney, who’d been a Pentagon official in the 1980s. After 9/11, he claimed that Saddam Hussein’s regime was behind those attacks—and that it had recruited Timothy McVeigh to bomb the Oklahoma City federal building. Gaffney became obsessed with his fantasy that the conservative antitax lobbyist Grover Norquist is a covert agent of the Muslim Brotherhood. As soon as Obama got elected, naturally, Gaffney was referring to the “mounting evidence that the president not only identifies with Muslims, but actually may still be one himself.” None of this got Gaffney excommunicated from the right.
The antisharia movement lobbied states to pass statutes and constitutional amendments banning the use of sharia in their courts and legal systems, a fantasy solution to an imaginary problem, almost like a government plan to prevent a zombie apocalypse. Starting in 2010, nine states passed such measures. And when candidate Trump first announced his proposed ban on Muslim immigrants—because sharia “authorizes such atrocities as murder…beheadings”—his backup data consisted entirely of bogus polling by Frank Gaffney.
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WHEN I WAS growing up, my Republican parents loathed all Kennedys, distrusted unions, and complained about “confiscatory” federal income tax rates of 91 percent. But conservatism to them also meant conserving the natural environment and allowing people to make their own choices, including about abortion. They were emphatically reasonable, disinclined to believe in secret Communist/Washington/elite plots to destroy America, rolling their eyes and shaking their heads about far-right acquaintances—such as our neighbors who opposed the fluoridation of Omaha’s drinking water and considered Richard Nixon suspiciously leftish.*4 My folks never belonged to a church. Godless midwestern Republicans, born and raised—which was not so odd forty years ago. Until around 1980, “the Christian right” was not a phrase in American politics. In 2000 my widowed seventy-eight-year-old mom, having voted for fourteen Republican presidential nominees in a row, decisively quit a party that had become too religious for her.
The Christian takeover happened gradually, but then quickly in the end, like a phase change from liquid to gas. In 2008 three-quarters of the GOP presidential primary candidates said they believed in evolution, but in 2012 it was down to a third, and then in 2016 only one did. That one, Jeb Bush, was careful to say evolutionary biology was only his truth, that “it does not need to be in the curriculum” of public schools, and if it is, ought to be accompanied by creationist teaching.
Most people aligned with the white pan-Christian party today don’t have a strong secular vision of America. A two-to-one majority of Republicans say they “support establishing Christianity as the national religion.” (And a large majority of all Americans believe that the “Constitution establishes [the United States as] a Christian nation” already.)*5 I’m pretty sure we’re never going to become a Christian version of Saudi Arabia or Iran, but are we not already close to something like Turkey, officially secular but with a distinctly religious party in charge? When Megyn Kelly asked the GOP candidates during a 2015 primary debate if “any of them have received a word from God on what they should do and take care of first,” it was strange, but she was just acknowledging the new Republican normal.
In fact, there are millions of American Christians trying to realize their fantasy of a fully theocratic nation. Their movement is called the Third Wave or dominionism, a term coined by Peter Wagner, the godfather of “spiritual warfare,” who believes the satanic sun goddess has sex with the Japanese emperor (see Chapter 31). The movement is a loose confederation of churches, mostly charismatic and Pentecostal but some merely fundamentalist. They are endeavoring to acquire political and cultural power in order to battle and defeat demons and put fundamentalist Christians in charge.
They are, in other words, like the Muslim Brotherhood as the right-wingers imagine it, seeking to be long-run agents of influence in America. After the movement made news because of its links to national Republicans during the 2012 election cycle, Wagner wrote an essay in Charisma Newsabout the criticism that his group has an “excessive fixation on Satan and demonic spirits. This is purely a judgment call, and it may only mean that we cast out more demons than they do. So what?” As for a theocracy, Wagner says, “There’s nobody that I know—there may be some fringe people—who would even advocate a theocracy.” Fringe people—as opposed to one member of Wagner’s own Council of Prophetic Elders who, according to Charisma, “received word that a witch had applied for a job as chaplain of [Alaska’s] prison system. ‘As we continued to pray against the spirit of witchcraft, her incense altar caught on fire, her car engine blew up, she went blind in her left eye, and she was diagnosed with cancer.’ ” Hallelujah. In fact, a former Republican governor of Alaska, officially Pentecostal until she ran for statewide office, was a member of the prayer group led by her regional Wagnerian commandant and witch-buster—and Sarah Palin is now, of course, a prominent member of the GOP faction that runs the country.
Fantasyland is the result of one part of our national character overtaking the other part, and the new religiosity of Republican politics is a good example—there in the bloodstream forever but under control. Although constitutionally the United States can have no state religion, faith has always bordered on being mandatory. “Unbelievers are to be met with in America,” Tocqueville wrote forty-two years after the Constitution came into force, “but, to say the truth, there is no public organ of infidelity.” Only four presidents have lacked a Christian denominational affiliation, the most recent one in the 1880s. Two-thirds of Republicans today admit they’d be less likely to vote for a presidential candidate who disbelieves in God.*6
As a matter of fact, the Constitution’s key clause—“no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust”—is kind of a theoretical freedom. Not only have we never had an openly unbelieving president, of the 535 members of the last Congress, exactly one listed her religion as “none.” Among all 7,383 state legislators, there is apparently only one atheist.*7 Eight of the fifty state constitutions officially prohibit atheists from holding public office; of those, Pennsylvania and Tennessee specifically require officeholders to believe in Heaven and Hell; and in Arkansas, atheists are technically ineligible to have any state job or to testify in court.
The presence of so many Christian true believers holding office or otherwise wielding power has consequences in the real world, even leaving aside abortion laws. In Washington, D.C., they use their understandings of the Bible as guides to national security policy. Seven out of ten evangelical and fundamentalist Christians believe “the modern nation of Israel was formed as a result of biblical prophecy” and that “events in Israel are part of the prophecies in the Book of Revelation.”*8 In other words, before the end-time battles can happen, as many Jews as possible need to be near Armageddon. The eleven-year-old Christians United for Israel, with 3 million members, is a primary vehicle of the American Christian Zionist movement. Its Pentecostal minister founder has preached that God sent Hitler to Earth as “a hunter” to exterminate Jews in order to herd and corral the survivors in Palestine—“to get them to come back to the land.” The Christian Zionists’ entire political focus is on lobbying for U.S. support of the hardest possible Israeli hard line—in order to be in sync, as they see it, with the Bible’s apocalyptic prophecies.
These beliefs are an important source of the Republicans’ policy toward Israel, and thus of America’s, which is disturbing to me. Is that unfair? In a New York Times column opposing the nuclear deal with Iran, the right-leaning David Brooks argued that the United States should mistrust the Iranian regime specifically because of its religious beliefs about the end-time—because undoubtedly “Iranian leaders are as apocalyptically motivated…as their pronouncements suggest they are.”
I’m reminded of one of Mencken’s dispatches from the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925. “Civilized” Tennesseans, he wrote, “had known for years what was going on in the hills. They knew what the country preachers were preaching—what degraded nonsense was being rammed and hammered into yokel skulls. But they were afraid to go out against the imposture while it was in the making.” In fact, what the contemporary Republican Party has done is worse, because it was deliberate and national and has more profound consequences.
*1 2013 Public Policy Polling survey.
*2 2008–15 biannual surveys by the Project on Climate Change Communication; 2013 Public Policy Polling survey.
*3 2015 and 2016 Public Policy Polling and CNN/Opinion Research Corporation surveys.
*4 The neighbors were the Lamps, whose youngest daughter Ginni graduated from my all-white public high school right after I did, then married a very conservative lawyer named Clarence Thomas.
*5 1997–2007 First Amendment Center surveys; 2013 Public Policy Polling survey.
*6 2015 Pew survey.
*7 Senator Ernie Chambers of Nebraska has actually said the Bible consists of “fairy tales.”
*8 2015 Southern Baptists’ LifeWay Christian Resources survey.