December 12, 2013
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Most of us are so familiar with the cluster of issues that
compel the religious right—opposition to gay marriage and abortion,
hostility to the separation of church and state, hostility to
modernity—that we don’t often think about the underlying theme holding
these disparate obsessions together. It might even be tempting to
believe there isn’t a unifying theme, except for the fact that
conservatives themselves often allude to it: “civilization collapse.”
Over and over again, right-wingers warn that all the things they hate, from
pro-gay Broadway shows to
immigration to
multiculturalism,
are not just signs of an evolving American society, but portend the
actual end of it. The Roman Empire is often darkly alluded to, and you
get the impression many on the right think Rome burned up and descended
into anarchy and darkness. (
Not quite.)
But really, what all these fantasies of cities burning down and
impending war and destruction are expressing is a belief that the
culture of white conservative Christians is the culture of America. So
it follows that if they aren’t the dominant class in the United States,
then America isn’t, in their opinion, really America anymore.
Once
you key into this, understanding why certain social changes alarm the
religious right becomes simple to see. Hostility to abortion,
contraception and gay rights stems directly from a belief that everyone
should hold their rigid views on gender roles—women are supposed to be
housewives and mothers from a young age and men are supposed to be the
heads of their families. School prayer, creationism and claims of a “war
on Christmas” stem from a belief that government and society at large
should issue constant reminders that their version of Christianity is
the “official” culture and religion of America.
It’s
hard to underestimate how much of a crisis moment the election of Barack
Obama for president was for the religious right because of this. And
his re-election, of course, which showed that his presidency was not a
fluke. Even before Obama was elected, the possibility that a black man
with a “multicultural” background was such a massive confirmation of
their worst fear—that they are not, actually, the dominant class in
America–that the campaign against Obama became overwhelmed completely by
this fear. The media frenzy over the minister in Obama’s church was
about racial anxieties, but it was telling that it was his church that
was the focal point of the attack. The stories were practically
tailor-made to signal to conservative Christians that Obama was not one
of them.
Sarah Palin’s campaign as the running mate to John McCain made right-wing fears even more explicit. On the trail, she
notoriously described
conservative, white, Christian-heavy America with these words: “We
believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to
visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real
America, being here with all of you hard-working very patriotic, um,
very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation.” McCain’s campaign
tried lamely to spin it, but the subtext was text now. The Christian
right believes their culture is the only legitimate American culture,
and the election of Barack Obama was a major threat to it.
Birtherism,
a conspiracy theory movement that posits Obama faked his American
citizenship, is easy enough to understand in this light. It’s an
expression of the belief that Obama cannot be a legitimate president,
because, in white Christian right eyes, they are the only legitimate
Americans. So how can someone who isn’t one of them be president?
That’s
why the election of Obama has triggered an all-out response from the
Christian right. If they seem more enraged and active in recent years,
especially with regards to attacks on abortion rights, it’s because they
really are afraid they’re losing their grip on American culture and are
casting around wildly for a way to regain what they perceive as lost
dominance.
Of course, the belief that they ever were the
dominant group in America was always an illusion. It was an illusion
when Jerry Falwell started the Moral Majority in 1979. The name
obviously indicates a belief that white Christian conservatives are the
“majority,” but even then, it had a protest-too-much feel to it. While
most Americans, then and now, are nominally Christian, most of them do
not belong to one of the fundamentalist groups—including the subset of
Catholics who are in bed, politically, with fundamentalist
Protestants—that make up the religious right. But it was easier for the
Christian right to delude themselves into thinking they spoke for the
nation in an era when white men who identify as Christian were nearly
all the power players in politics and when the percentage of Americans
who identified as non-religious was relatively low.
Nowadays,
nearly one in four Americans
is not even labeled a Christian, and non-religious people are a rapidly
growing minority. More importantly, it’s much harder for members of the
religious right to ignore evidence that they simply aren’t the
representatives of “real” America and that real America is actually
quite a diverse and socially liberal place. Contraception use and
premarital sex are nearly universal, the
pop charts that used to be mostly white and male are sexually and racially diverse,
gay people are rapidly approaching equality, and no matter how hard
they try, most Americans just don’t think there’s anything offensive
about greeting someone with “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry
Christmas." Oh yeah, and we have a black president who doesn’t seem to
be bothered that
his wife used to be his mentor.
If
you ever want an explanation for why some Republicans have grown
downright giddy at the prospect of shutting down the federal government,
this helps explain why. It’s not a coincidence that some of the
biggest Bible-thumpers in Congress
are those who are most supportive of finding some way to shut down the
government. If you believe America isn’t really America unless the
Christian right runs it, it’s not a short leap to look to destroying the
system altogether. “If we can’t have it, no one can,” seems to be the
guiding principle behind the push to shut down the federal government.
They like to frame their claims that America will collapse if they
aren’t in charge as warnings. But really, a better word for what they’re
doing is “threats.”
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