Bill O’Reilly’s all-American paranoia: What’s really behind his religion-infused doomsaying

SALON

Wednesday, May 20, 2015 05:58 AM EDT

Bill O’Reilly’s all-American paranoia: What’s really behind his religion-infused doomsaying

 

The Fox New host is convinced of this country's imminent moral collapse--but none of his frantic tirades make sense

 

Conor Lynch
 

Topics: Bill O'Reilly, Religion, Christianity, Fox News, Conservatism, News, Politics News

 

 

 

Bill O'Reilly (Credit: Reuters/Brendan Mcdermid)

 

 

Last week, Bill O’Reilly let it all out in one of his most bizarre rants of late, discussing what he sees as the moral decline of America, and the imminent fall of our empire — much like the way of the Romans.

He said:

“Any student of history knows that when a nation turns inward toward the pursuit of individual gratification, the country is in trouble. Rome [is) the best example. The citizens there ultimately rejected sacrificing for their republic…and the empire collapsed.”

O’Reilly is certainly correct about the decline of the American empire — the ship is sinking, but not for the reasons he seems to think. The Fox News host attributes our impending fall to a moral decline, which to him, of course, means the decline of Christian faith. In some fresh new Pew polls, it was revealed that Christian affiliation in America has continued to drop, while the percentage of unaffiliated (including atheism and agnosticism) has gone up a whopping 6.7 percentage points since 2007. Protestant affiliation dropped by 4.8 percentage points, while Catholicism dropped by 3.1 percentage points.

To O’Reilly, this signals a moral decline in America, a harbinger of our ultimate collapse. The reason for such a dire assumption is simple: O’Reilly, and a significant part of the population, believes that atheism, or any kind of doubt, is synonymous with nihilism. This comes from a presumption that religion is the ultimate moral guide, and without it, human beings are morally bankrupt. As one character famously remarked in Dostoyevsky’s novel “The Brothers Karamazov”:

“If God does not exist, everything is permitted.”

Predictably, O’Reilly attributes the rise in disbelief to things like drug abuse, rap music and the liberal media:

“There is no question that people of faith are being marginalized by a secular media and pernicious entertainment. The rap industry for example often glorifies depraved behavior and that sinks into the minds of some young people, the group that is most likely to reject religion. Also many movies and TV shows promote non traditional values.”

This view is hopelessly naive, and once again sprouts from the assumption that atheism and nihilism are synonymous. It is inconceivable to O’Reilly that the rise in non-affiliation is more likely because of education and the rejection of unprovable myths than because of a moral decline. Even William Jennings Bryan, nearly a century ago, understood that education and scientific advancement were causes for rejection of faith, saying of schoolchildren at the famous Scopes Trial: “If they believe (in evolution), they go back to scoff at the religion of their parents.” The more one understands the natural world, the more likely they are to reject the myths of their parents.

What makes O’Reilly’s conjecture truly insulting is his assurance that non-religious people are somehow more likely to be immoral. This shows not just a remarkable measure of O’Reilly hypocrisy — if increasingly dire reports on his personal life are to be believed — but also his ignorance of history. Before the modern era, it was more or less illegal to be an atheist in the Western world; the further we go back, the more violence rises, as documented in Steven Pinker’s “The Better Angels of Our Nature.” Today, violence is the lowest it’s been in documented history, while religious disbelief is presumably at its highest point.
In his book, Pinker describes what he sees as the likeliest causes of this humanitarian revolution:

“The growth of writing and literacy strikes me as the best candidate for an exogenous change that helped set off the Humanitarian Revolution. The pokey little world of village and clan, accessible through the five senses and informed by a single content provider, the church, gave way to a phantasmagoria of people, places, cultures, and ideas.”

The rise in literacy and education, along with the centralized state, have contributed to the most peaceful and moral era in history — not religion. Furthermore, studies have found that non-belief is more common in wealthy industrialized societies and that rates of the most violent crimes tend to be lower in less religious states. Another report shows that just 0.2 percent of America’s prison population is atheist, while more than half are Catholic or Protestant.
What does all this reveal? Not that atheists or Christians or Buddhists are more or less moral; but that human beings exist in a complex moral landscape, shaped by any number of factors; and that the environment one grows up in plays a crucial role in developing this morality. So, Bill O’Reilly’s fear that the drop in Christianity is contributing to a moral crisis, and that this moral crisis in contributing to the imminent collapse of the American empire, is hogwash.

But this doesn’t mean he’s entirely incorrect about that impending collapse.
Indeed, the American empire that was built up during the 20th century does seem to be heading toward a decline; but it is not because of some great moral crisis. In fact, the moral crisis that O’Reilly attributed to the lack of religion is really just a natural result of our economic system. O’Reilly says “pernicious entertainment” is causing this collapse; but in reality, this entertainment is simply the result of the consumer society, which emerged during the latter half of the 20th century, after capitalists and corporations found that all the basic needs and wants of the people had been satisfied. An entire industry of advertising and marketing was born to create new and increasingly specialized (and often pointless) needs. This grew out of the system of capitalism — the very system that O’Reilly loves so dearly.

When O’Reilly praises the capitalism, he is praising the old Protestant ethic that Max Weber wrote about. But that capitalism is gone, and today we live in what naturally forms from that ideal. So, if there is anything that can truly be blamed for the moral ills that O’Reilly is so concerned about, it is our economic system, based on materialism and self-interest. Ironically, this O’Reilly-backed free-market impetus may very well be a major contributor to our fall.

The United States has been importing and consuming more than it has produced and exported for many years now, and this is simply unsustainable. When a country’s citizens  put everything on credit to satisfy their ridiculous consumption, a fall from grace is bound to occur. This happened in the late 2000s, when the housing bubble collapsed, and there is no reason to think it can’t or won’t happen again in the future.

The reality is that the American empire will collapse (barring some miraculous act of God responding to the prayers of O’Reilly), and another empire will likely take its place, just as it always has throughout history. It is also possible that there will be no new empire equatable to modern America, and instead regional powers. Regardless, O’Reilly and his followers will blame this fall from superpower status on the decline of faith and moral decay, because they like to think that America is somehow special; that we are God’s chosen ones. But that is childish, and childish fantasies will only accelerate this inevitable decline.

Follow Conor Lynch on Twitter at @dilgentbureauct

The Invention Of Christian America

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ONE NATION, UNDER GOD?

“Christian America” was born. Not in 1776, but in the mid-20th century. Kruse and I talked about how that happened, why it matters, and what it means for the story we tell ourselves about our country. 

 

ONE NATION, UNDER GOD?

The Invention Of Christian America

by Laura Turner

Apr 27 2015, 9:53 PM

They say politics makes strange bedfellows, but if you were to hear that wealthy businesspeople have taken up with conservative Christians, you probably wouldn’t be too surprised — just think of Hobby Lobby. Has it always been thus? Not according to Kevin Kruse, Princeton historian and author of One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America. Per Kruse, the cozy relationship is more recent than many of us might think.

After all, it wasn’t until 1954 — over 175 years after our nation’s founding — that “under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance. Two years later, “In God We Trust” became the official American motto. This move toward national religiosity wasn’t, as some¹ have assumed, borne entirely out of a response to the godless Communists. Kruse’s book argues that the notion of a Christian America — a country not just comprising Christians but fundamentally Christian in its structure, nature, and history — was cobbled together in the 1930s and '40s by a group of businessmen and ministers who needed each other to unite against a common enemy: FDR and the New Deal. 

The Great Depression saw the revival of public interest in the Social Gospel — the idea that Christianity ought to be more concerned with the common good than individual salvation. Businessmen like J. Howard Pew (of Sun Oil) and Harvey Firestone didn’t like the emphasis on what they saw as “collectivism,” so they decided they needed to partner with a group of likeminded individuals who would help them advance their capitalistic agenda. Who to turn to? 

Reverend James Fifield was especially beloved by his flock — First Congregational Church in Los Angeles — and was the free enterprise-loving clergy that Pew, Firestone, and their cohort needed. Through leaning on an organization called Spiritual Mobilization, Fifield and these wealthy corporate leaders helped ministers to see how the domestic support of FDR’s New Deal, which Fifield and others saw as creeping progressivism, was more than just a political nuisance — it was a spiritual threat. Their fear was the emphasis on collectivism, which religious leaders argued diminished the importance of the individual as presented in the gospel of Jesus Christ, which they saw as elevating personal salvation above communal identity.

Thus “Christian America” was born. Not in 1776, but in the mid-20th century. Kruse and I talked about how that happened, why it matters, and what it means for the story we tell ourselves about our country.

One thing I always wonder about is how do you, as an historian, get to a place where you can put a stake in the ground on this issue? What preponderance of evidence do you have to reach before you think, “Okay, I can confidently draw not just a connection but sort of a conclusion?” 

In some ways it’s always a leap of faith. You reach a certain tipping point where you feel that you’ve got several sources all saying the same thing and no one pushing back the other way, you can kind of assume that that’s the case. So I go down into the private letters of the organizations that were pushing this, the private letters of the corporate figures who were funding it, beyond the public statements — if you look behind the scenes, they’re very clear about why they’re doing this.

Are there moments that stand out to you that do this in the book?

Spiritual Mobilization had this radio program, “The Freedom Story.” They started off only talking about Truman, because that’s what [Fifield and Pew] cared about. Soon enough, though, their lawyer says, “You are a public service radio show, and if you weigh too heavily on domestic politics, we’re going to lose that public service designation. So let’s instead talk about the foreign manifestations of communism, and then you can draw some connections to it at home.” Behind the scenes you can see their motive in this; they’re talking about communism abroad in order to attack the creeping socialism at home — to make the New Deal seem like it’s part of this global communist menace.

I read somewhere else about how you didn’t set out to write this book — you set out to write something different about conservative Christianity. What did you find in your research that was big enough to make you change course?

I did a lot of research for what I thought would be my second book, and dove into the papers of Hugo Black at the Library of Congress — he wrote the decision in Engle v. Vitale, which is the school prayer decision of 1962.²  He got at least ten boxes full of angry letters about the decision. What struck me is that in these letters that were written to him, there was a recurring theme: Over and over again, in hundreds if not thousands of these letters, I saw ordinary Americans tell this Supreme Court justice he’d misread the First Amendment, because our national motto is “In God We Trust.” But that had only been made the national motto six years earlier.

Are Christians aware of this history, or is it something new to them? Are we like Anne Hathaway in The Devil Wears Prada when Meryl Streep schools her about the color of her sweater, unaware of the past? 

Christians and everyone, really, even historians, get this wrong. You can look back to plenty of religious invocations the Founders make, but on the issue of whether America is a Christian nation, [the Founders] are very explicit. The Declaration of Independence attributes rights to the Creator, but the Constitution is very clear; there’s no religion other than a date made in the year of our Lord. It keeps religion at arm’s length.

With The Treaty of Tripoli in 1797, you might as well have the Founders of the United States come back and talk to you directly: “The government of the United States is in no sense founded on the Christian religion.” That’s not a statement I think you could make in the '50s or even today, but it was begun by Washington, signed by John Adams — the most religious of the founders — and passed unanimously by a voice vote in the Senate. It was largely uncontroversial at the time. It would not be today. 

If you asked Americans today if we are a Christian nation, they invoke these phrases and this recent history as evidence that yes, we always have been a Christian nation. And that, I think, is a mistake that not just Christians but I think all Americans make.

Have you seen anything good come out of the relationship between corporate America and Christian America? Or has it been all bad?

Ultimately, there have been some positive effects of this language on America. It was not what the corporations intended: Dwight Eisenhower decoupled religious language from Christian libertarianism and it became more inclusive. 

You see this in the civil rights movement. I don’t talk about this in the book, but Martin Luther King, Jr. and others like him are incredibly effective at using this fusion of religion and Americanism and making it clear that segregation can’t fit as part of this. They mobilize this language against segregation.

This is such a white movement in so many ways — the connection between large corporations and Christian America. The people in power are white men. So it’s interesting that some of the civil rights movement was influenced by this rhetoric.

This is a story full of unintended consequences and I think that’s one. Without the groundwork of that fusion of piety and patriotism, you wouldn’t have ministers like King at the forefront of the movement with the language of a religiously-infused Americanism. King calls attention to the founding documents and says, all we’re asking you to do is stay true to what you put down on paper.

In my experience, some of contemporary evangelical Christianity is really this sort of nostalgia for the 1950s, when a woman was a woman and a man was a man. That notion runs throughout the book, too, in terms of people looking backwards toward the era of the Founding Fathers. How has nostalgia been deployed as a political and religious tool?

I don’t talk about it in the book, but one of the later “Freedom Stories” on the radio, they would have Thomas Jefferson travel through time to the ‘50s, furious about the idea of a welfare state. He’s livid and wants to go fight people and rouse an army. So there is a constant looking to the Founders to make these arguments, and all sides do that now. 

But your point about the ‘50s is fascinating, because as we look back to the Founders, I think people who do so very selectively pick out what they like about that era. So if you went back and there were traditional gender roles, where the husband works and the wife stays home and takes care of the family — why is that possible? This is an era in which union levels are at an all-time high. This is an era in which the economy is greatly expanded under Eisenhower, the New Deal state, and the top tax bracket is 92-94 percent. There is a lot on the policy side that makes that familial relationship possible that we just don’t think about.

There are obvious downsides to the ‘50s, too — I mean, we talked about segregation, that’s clearly one of them; gender roles, the rights of gays and lesbians. There’s a lot we would not want to go back to. In some ways, we’re all kind of cafeteria in our approach to nostalgia. You pick and choose parts at will, but you can’t have one part without the other.

The Return of Christian Terrorism

Belief

The Return of Christian Terrorism

 

Threats of right-wing violence have doubled in the past year. What is behind the latest upsurge in the movement to create a Christian theocratic state?

 

 

By Mark Jurgensmeyer / Religion Dispatches

 

April 14, 2010

When Scott Roeder, the murderer of Wichita Kansas abortion clinic provider Dr. George Tiller, had his day in court, he spent much of his rambling self-defense quoting the words of another abortion clinic assassin, Reverend Paul Hill. In the 1990s my own research had brought me into conversation with others in the inner circle in which Hill and Roeder were at that time involved. So it was a chilling experience for me to realize that this awful mood of American Christian terrorism—culminating in the catastrophic attack on the Oklahoma City Federal Builiding—has now returned.

Christian terrorism has returned to America with a vengeance. And it is not just Roeder. When members of the Hutaree militia in Michigan and Ohio recently were arrested with plans to kill a random policeman and then plant Improvised Explosive Devices in the area where the funeral would be held to kill hundreds more, this was a terrorist plot of the sort that would impress Shi’ite militia and al Qaeda activists in Iraq. The Southern Poverty Law Center, founded by Morris Dees, which has closely watched the rise of right-wing extremism in this country for many decades, declares that threats and incidents of right-wing violence have risen 200% in this past year—unfortunately coinciding with the tenure of the first African-American president in US history. When Chip Berlet, one of this country’s best monitors of right-wing extremism, warned in a perceptive essay last week on RD that the hostile right-wing political climate in this country has created the groundwork for a demonic new form of violence and terrorism, I fear that he is correct.

Christian Warrior, Sacred Battle

Though these new forms of violence are undoubtedly political and probably racist, they also have a religious dimension. And this brings me back to what I know about Rev. Paul Hill, the assassin who the similarly misguided assassin, Scott Roeder, quoted at length in that Wichita court room last week. In 1994, Hill, a Presbyterian pastor at the extreme fringe of the anti-abortion activist movement, came armed to a clinic in Pensacola, Florida. He aimed at Dr. John Britton, who was entering the clinic along with his bodyguard, James Barrett. The shots killed both men and wounded Barrett’s wife, Joan. Hill immediately put down his weapon and was arrested; presenting an image of someone who knew that he would be arrested, convicted, and executed by the State of Florida for his actions, which he was in 2003. This would make Hill something of a Christian suicide attacker.

What is interesting about Hill and his supporters is not just his political views, but also his religious ones. As I reported in my book, Terror in the Mind of God, and in an essay for RD several months ago, Hill framed his actions as those of a Christian warrior engaged in sacred battle. “My eyes were opened to the enormous impact” such an event would have, he wrote, adding that “the effect would be incalculable.” Hill said that he opened his Bible and found sustenance in Psalms 91: “You will not be afraid of the terror by night, or of the arrow that flies by day.” Hill interpreted this as an affirmation that his act was biblically approved.

One of the supporters that Paul Hill had written these words to was Rev. Michael Bray, a Lutheran pastor in Bowie, Maryland, who had served prison time for his conviction of fire-bombing abortion-related clinics on the Eastern seaboard. Bray published a newsletter and then a Web site for his Christian anti-abortion movement, and published a book theologically justifying violence against abortion service providers, A Time to Kill. He is also alleged to be the author of the Army of God manual that provides details on how to conduct terrorist acts against abortion-related clinics.

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Recently Bray has publicly defended Paul Roeder, the Wichita assassin, saying that he acted with “righteousness and mercy.” Several years earlier, another member of Bray’s network of associates, Rachelle (“Shelly”) Shannon, a housewife from rural Oregon, had also attacked Dr. George Tiller as he drove away from his clinic in Wichita. She was arrested for attempted murder.
When I interviewed Bray on several occasions in the 1990s, he provided a theological defense of this kind of violence from two different Christian perspectives. In the remainder of this essay, I’ll summarize from Terror in the Mind of Godsome of my observations about these theological strands behind their terrorism in the 1990s—and which, amazingly, are surfacing again today.

Theological Illogic

The more traditional Christian justification that Bray used for his violence was just-war theory. He was fond of quoting two of my own heroes, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Reinhold Niebuhr, in what I regard as perverse ways. Bray thought that their justification of military action against the Nazis (and an attempted assassination plot on Hitler’s life Bonhoeffer was involved in) was an appropriate parallel to his terrorism against the US government’s sanctioning of legal abortions. It seemed highly unlikely to me that Bray’s positions would have been accepted by these or any other theologian within mainstream Protestant thought. Bonhoeffer and Niebuhr, like most modern theologians, supported the principle of the separation of church and state, and were wary of what Niebuhr called “moralism”—the intrusion of religious or other ideological values into the political calculations of statecraft. Moreover, Bray did not rely on mainstream theologians for his most earnest theological justification.

The more significant Christian position that Bray and Hill advanced is related to the End-Time theology of the Rapture as thought to be envisaged by the New Testament book of Revelation. These are ideas related, in turn, to Dominion Theology, the position that Christianity must reassert the dominion of God over all things, including secular politics and society. This point of view, articulated by such right-wing Protestant spokespersons as Rev. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, have been part of the ideology of the Christian Right since at least the 1980s and 1990s.

At its hardest edge, the movement requires the creation of a kind of Christian politics to set the stage for America’s acceptance of the second coming of Christ. In this context, it is significant today that in some parts of the United States, over one-third of the opponents of the policies of President Barack Obama believe he is the Antichrist as characterized in the End-Times Rapture scenario.

The Christian anti-abortion movement is permeated with ideas from Dominion Theology. Randall Terry (founder of the militant anti-abortion organization Operation Rescue and a writer for the Dominion magazine Crosswinds) signed the magazine’s “Manifesto for the Christian Church,” which asserted that America should “function as a Christian nation.” The Manifesto said that America should therefore oppose “social moral evils” of secular society such as “abortion on demand, fornication, homosexuality, sexual entertainment, state usurpation of parental rights and God-given liberties, statist-collectivist theft from citizens through devaluation of their money and redistribution of their wealth, and evolutionism taught as a monopoly viewpoint in the public schools.”
At the extreme right wing of Dominion Theology is a relatively obscure theological movement that Mike Bray found particularly appealing: Reconstruction Theology, whose exponents long to create a Christian theocratic state. Bray had studied their writings extensively and possessed a shelf of books written by Reconstruction authors. The convicted anti-abortion killer Paul Hill cited Reconstruction theologians in his own writings and once studied with a founder of the movement, Greg Bahnsen, at Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson, Mississippi.

Leaders of the Reconstruction movement trace their ideas, which they sometimes called “theonomy,” to Cornelius Van Til, a twentieth-century Presbyterian professor of theology at Princeton Seminary who took seriously the sixteenth-century ideas of the Reformation theologian John Calvin regarding the necessity for presupposing the authority of God in all worldly matters. Followers of Van Til (including his former students Bahnsen and Rousas John Rushdoony, and Rushdoony’s son-in-law, Gary North) adopted this “presuppositionalism” as a doctrine, with all its implications for the role of religion in political life.

Recapturing Institutions for Jesus

Reconstruction writers regard the history of Protestant politics since the early years of the Reformation as having taken a bad turn, and they are especially unhappy with the Enlightenment formulation of church-state separation. They feel it necessary to “reconstruct” Christian society by turning to the Bible as the basis for a nation’s law and social order. To propagate these views, the Reconstructionists established the Institute for Christian Economics in Tyler, Texas, and the Chalcedon Foundation in Vallecito, California. They have published a journal and a steady stream of books and booklets on the theological justification for interjecting Christian ideas into economic, legal, and political life.

According to the most prolific Reconstruction writer, Gary North, it is “the moral obligation of Christians to recapture every institution for Jesus Christ." He feels this to be especially so in the United States, where secular law as construed by the Supreme Court and defended by liberal politicians is moving in what Rushdoony and others regard as a decidedly un-Christian direction; particularly in matters regarding abortion and homosexuality. What the Reconstructionists ultimately want, however, is more than the rejection of secularism. Like other theologians who utilize the biblical concept of “dominion,” they reason that Christians, as the new chosen people of God, are destined to dominate the world.
The Reconstructionists possess a “postmillennial” view of history. That is, they believe that Christ will return to earth only after the thousand years of religious rule that characterizes the Christian idea of the millennium, and therefore Christians have an obligation to provide the political and social conditions that will make Christ’s return possible. “Premillennialists,” on the other hand, hold the view that the thousand years of Christendom will come only after Christ returns, an event that will occur in a cataclysmic moment of world history. Therefore they tend to be much less active politically.

Rev. Paul Hill, Rev. Michael Bray, and other Reconstructionists—along with Dominion theologians such as the American politician and television host Pat Robertson and many other right-wing Christian activists today—are postmillenialists. Hence they believe that a Christian kingdom must be established on Earth before Christ’s return. They take  seriously the idea of a Christian society and a form of religious politics that will make biblical code the law of the United States.
These activists are quite serious about bringing Christian politics into power. Bray said that it is possible, under the right conditions, for a Christian revolution to sweep across the United States and bring in its wake Constitutional changes that would allow for biblical law to be the basis of social legislation. Failing that, Bray envisaged a new federalism that would allow individual states to experiment with religious politics on their own. When I asked Bray what state might be ready for such an experiment, he hesitated and then suggested Louisiana and Mississippi, or, he added, “maybe one of the Dakotas.”

Not all Reconstruction thinkers have endorsed the  use of violence, especially the kind that Bray and Hill have justified. As Reconstruction author Gary North admitted, “there is a division in the theonomic camp” over violence, especially with regard to anti-abortion activities. Some months before Paul Hill killed Dr. Britton and his escort, Hill (apparently hoping for Gary North’s approval in advance) sent a letter to North along with a draft of an essay he had written justifying the possibility of such killings in part on theonomic grounds. North ultimately responded, but only after the murders had been committed.

North regretted that he was too late to deter Hill from his “terrible direction” and chastised Hill in an open letter, published as a booklet, denouncing Hill’s views as “vigilante theology.” According to North, biblical law provides exceptions to the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” (Ex 20:13), but in terms similar to just-war doctrine: when one is authorized to do so by “a covenantal agent” in wartime, to defend one’s household, to execute a convicted criminal, to avenge the death of one’s kin, to save an entire nation, or to stop moral transgressors from bringing bloodguilt on an entire community.

Hill, joined by Bray, responded to North’s letter. They argued that many of those conditions applied to the abortion situation in the United States. Writing from his prison cell in Starke, Florida, Paul Hill said that the biblical commandment against murder also “requires using the means necessary to defend against murder—including lethal force.” He went on to say that he regarded “the cutting edge of Satan’s current attack” to be “the abortionist’s knife,” and therefore his actions had ultimate theological significance.

Bray, in his book, A Time to Kill, spoke to North’s concern about the authorization of violence by a legitimate authority or “a covenental agent,” as North put it. Bray raised the possibility of a “righteous rebellion.” Just as liberation theologians justify the use of unauthorized force for the sake of their vision of a moral order, Bray saw the legitimacy of using violence not only to resist what he regarded as murder—abortion—but also to help bring about the Christian political order envisioned by the radical dominion theology thinkers. In Bray’s mind, a little violence was a small price to pay for the possibility of fulfilling God’s law and establishing His kingdom on earth.

For most of the rest of us, even a little violence is a price too high to pay for these fantastic visions of Christian politics and for America’s recent return to Christian terrorism.

Mark Juergensmeyer is Professor of Sociology and Director of Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the winner of the Grawemeyer Award for his book Terror in the Mind of God (UC Press). He is the editor of Global Religions: An Introduction and is also the author of The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State and Gandhi's Way: A Handbook of Conflict Resolution, both from UC Press.

Right-Wing Lies & Status Updates

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Right-Wing Lies & Status Updates

Jon Stafford  FollowRSS

Daily Kos member

Fri Aug 12, 2011 at 07:20 AM PDT

Right-Wing Lies & Status Updates

by Jon StaffordFollow

Cross-posted on FireDogLake:

The following has been circulating around Facebook as a status update for the past few days:

Salary of US President.........................$400,000
Salary of retired US Presidents .............$180,000 FOR LIFE
Salary of House/Senate ......................$174,00​0 FOR LIFE
Salary of Speaker of the House ............$223,500 FOR LIFE
Salary of Majority/Minority Leaders ...... $193,400 FOR LIFE
Average Salary of Soldier DEPLOYED IN AFGHANISTAN $38,000
I think we found where the cuts should be made! If you agree...REPOST.....keep it going......

Those right-wing trolls sure are industrious little buggers, aren't they?  But, like most of their tropes, this one is full of lies, exaggerations, and red herrings.

First of all, it's just factually incorrect.  The only "salary" on that list paid FOR LIFE is that of retired US presidents.  Members of Congress do not get paid a salary once they leave office.  They do get a pension, based on how many years they have served, but like most pensions it is less than they made in office.  Sometimes a lot less, if they weren't there very long.

But the whole thing is ridiculous.  The idea that cutting these salaries would have any appreciable affect on the nation's finances is, not to put too fine a point on it, stupid. Even if you cut all of them in half, you'd save, what, about $50 million? Sounds like a lot, right? And it is a lot, at least to most people.  (It sure is to me!)  But in the context of the federal government it is miniscule -- 0.002% of the budget for fiscal year 2012. Try trimming 0.002% off your household budget and see how far it gets you.

You can't compare the salaries of people at the highest echelons of government, in the mightiest nation on Earth (at least for now), with what the average attendee at a Tea Party rally makes.  Well, unless the Koch brothers happen to show up. The fact is that these are highly educated, highly accomplished people with an earning potential far beyond what they make as elected officials. They certainly wouldn't be cashiers at Wal-Mart. $400K might be a lot to most people (again, it sure is to me), but compared to what the CEO of even a middling sized corporation makes it's a pittance. There are lots of things wrong with our system, not least of which the influence of private money on public policy.  Not to mention the revolving door of former elected officials making millions working for lobbying firms. But no one gets rich from their government salary. Most people take a pay cut when they go into public life. If the people posting these status updates think it's so great, they are free to run for office themselves.

Finally, there is the comparison with the sainted American Soldier. Unpopular truth: Not all soldiers are heroes. In fact, most of them are not. Which is not to say they are not good people.  But they are folks doing a job. That the job they do happens to involve the risk of getting killed is unfortunate, but that fact was not hidden from them when they signed up. I'm not saying it's not an incredibly tough job, because it is. I wouldn't want to do it. But that's why I don't. And that's the point. We don't have a draft any more. Maybe we should, but we don't. Every single soldier in the military is there because they CHOSE to be there.

Which leads to another unpopular truth: A disturbingly large number of soldiers deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan would not be there if they were qualified to do anything else. Yes, there are some who signed up to serve their country, and that's laudable. But a huge number of them just needed a job and had no other options. And that sucks. In fact it's a huge problem with our society. But it doesn't automatically make those soldiers any more noble or heroic. I don't want to see anyone die. I don't want to see any more mothers lose their children, or children lose their parents. In fact I think we should stop throwing our soldiers' lives away and bring them home from Iraq and Afghanistan. But do they get paid too little? I don't know about that. Frankly, $38K for a 22-year-old kid with a high school education and a rifle sounds a little high to me. If we truly valued these young people's lives we would put the systems in place to provide them the opportunity to build better lives, and not just treat them as cannon fodder.

These kind of "chain posts" feed into two troubling trends in American society today, both favorite themes of the Tea Party:  The idea that public employees should not be paid at a competitive rate, and the deification of the American soldier.  Scapegoating and idol worship never solved anything.

Originally posted to Jon Stafford on Fri Aug 12, 2011 at 07:20 AM PDT.

Also republished by Daily Kos Classics.

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Republicans are not conservative: They are Radical Fundamentalists

Daily Kos

News, Community, Action

Mon Feb 27, 2012 at 05:59 AM PST

Republicans are not conservative: They are Radical Fundamentalists

by stonedoubt

I am tired of letting Republicans and Tea Party supporters co-opt the term "conservative". Republicans are not conservatives... they are radical fundamentalists and we should be referring to them as such.
From the Dictionary: conservative

con·serv·a·tive [kuhn-sur-vuh-tiv]
1. disposed to preserve existing conditions, institutions, etc., or to restore traditional ones, and to limit change.
2. cautiously moderate or purposefully low: a conservative estimate.
3. traditional in style or manner; avoiding novelty or showiness: conservative suit.
4. ( often initial capital letter ) of or pertaining to the Conservative party.
5. ( initial capital letter ) of, pertaining to, or characteristic of Conservative Jews or Conservative Judaism.

By their own definition... they are fundamentalists.
From Conservapedia

A conservative is someone who adheres to principles of personal responsibility, moral values, and limited government, agreeing with George Washington's Farewell Address that "religion and morality are indispensable supports" to political prosperity.

From the Dictionary: fundamentalism

1: often capitalized : a movement in 20th century Protestantism emphasizing the literally interpreted Bible as fundamental to Christian life and teaching b : the beliefs of this movement c : adherence to such beliefs

2: a movement or attitude stressing strict and literal adherence to a set of basic principles

From the Dictionary: radical

d: advocating extreme measures to retain or restore a political state of affairs

The current platform of the Republican Party and the prescribed changes presented by the Tea Party cannot be construed as conservative... it is purely radical fundamentalism. 

 

Can we please stop calling them conservatives and start referring to them by their proper label?

UPDATE: I want to make it clear that I am not generalizing individuals who call themselves Republican. I am framing the Republican Party... which continues a platform of radical fundamentalism. The Republican mainstream ideology is radical fundamentalism, currently. It is not just the leadership. Pretty much every issue poll and candidacy poll in recent memory paints a picture of majority support for radical fundamentalism within the party.

I realize that you can't put everyone in that box... Andrew Sullivan and David Frum are a couple of "conservative" pundits that come to mind that I wouldn't necessarily paint as radical fundamentalists. I am sure that there are many people who call themselves Republican that share their moderate views about conservatism in general.

Originally posted to stonedoubt on Mon Feb 27, 2012 at 05:59 AM PST.

Also republished by Daily Kos Classics.

Tea Party’s absurd advantage: Why America’s budget talk is so messed up

SALON

FRIDAY, MAR 20, 2015 02:28 PM EDT

Tea Party’s absurd advantage: Why America’s budget talk is so messed up

Paul Ryan & co. repeatedly unveil plans from the far right fringe -- and get taken seriously each time. Here's why

HEATHER DIGBY PARTON

TOPICS: GOP, REPUBLICANS, BUDGET, POVERTY, PAUL RYAN, TEA PARTY, PAUL KRUGMAN, MEDIA CRITICISM, NEW YORK TIMES, THE RIGHT, LIBERAL, CONSERVATIVE, HILLARY CLINTON, POLITICS NEWS

Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Paul Ryan (Credit: Reuters/Yuri Gripas/AP/J. Scott Applewhite)

It must be springtime since all of the Village is once again excitedly poring over the Republican budget plan. As usual they are searching for reasons to praise its responsible agenda of slashing benefits for poor , old and sick people in order that we all be forced to “take our medicine” and recognize that “we are all going to have to sacrifice.”  (Of course the millionaire celebrities who are saying won’t feel any pain, but you can be sure they have your best interests at heart.)

In years past, the star of the show was Very Serious Person, Paul Ryan, the Republican budget savant who everyone agreed was so spectacularly serious that even though his budget numbers never added up, he was still worthy of deep respect and rapt attention just because he was so darned … serious. This piece by William Saletan from 2012 perfectly illustrates the phenomenon:

Ryan is a real fiscal conservative. He isn’t just another Tea-Party ideologue spouting dogma about less government and the magic of free enterprise. He has actually crunched the numbers and laid out long-term budget proposals.

Paul Krugman was appropriately gobsmacked:

Look, Ryan hasn’t “crunched the numbers”; he has just scribbled some stuff down, without checking at all to see if it makes sense. He asserts that he can cut taxes without net loss of revenue by closing unspecified loopholes; he asserts that he can cut discretionary spending to levels not seen since Calvin Coolidge, without saying how; he asserts that he can convert Medicare to a voucher system, with much lower spending than now projected, without even a hint of how this is supposed to work. This is just a fantasy, not a serious policy proposal. So why does Saletan believe otherwise? Has he crunched the numbers himself? Of course not. What he’s doing – and what the whole Beltway media crowd has done – is to slot Ryan into a role someone is supposed to be playing in their political play, that of the thoughtful, serious conservative wonk. In reality, Ryan is nothing like that; he’s a hard-core conservative, with a voting record as far right as Michelle Bachman’s, who has shown no competence at all on the numbers thing.

What Ryan is good at is exploiting the willful gullibility of the Beltway media, using a soft-focus style to play into their desire to have a conservative wonk they can say nice things about. And apparently the trick still works.

Indeed it did. But it turns out that it wasn’t only particular to the Very Serious Ryan, with whom they did have a Very Serious love affair. For years, no matter how tragically misguided the proposed tax cuts for the rich and benefits cuts for the poor and whatever hare-brained “reforms” he pretended to propose the commentariat acted as if the yearly Republican budget had been delivered directly from Mt Sinai. This year proves that they will greet every braindead, extremist GOP budget with similar excitement regardless of Ryan’s involvement.  The 2015 Budget Committee proposal under the new chairman Tom Price, for instance, has garnered tremendous coverage even as it’s acknowledged by everyone that it has as much chance of passing as a ban on flying American flags at political events.

After much hemming and hawing and jockeying between the defense hawks and the fiscal hawks with the Tea Party vultures pacing around with a ravenous look in their eyes, the House GOP budget committee finally managed to pass a document. Passing the budget in the full House and then coming together with the Senate in reconciliation is a long shot to say the least, despite the fact that they are promising to lard the reconciliation process with as many offensive proposals as they can muster. It would be entertaining if it weren’t such a stale and boring story line by now. But the beltway wags can’t stop themselves from writing breathless story after breathless story even as they acknowledge that the budget features draconian cuts to necessary services,  has little chance of passage and no chance of being signed by the president. The fact that the numbers never add up is barely mentioned.

Meanwhile, every year the House Progressive Caucus releases what they entitle The People’s Budget, with numbers that add up, sensible deficit reduction along with protection for the most vulnerable paid for by higher taxes on the wealthiest among us. Katrina vanden Heuval described it this way in the Washington Post:

On the investment side, the CPC expands investments in areas vital to our future. It would rebuild America, modernizing our outmoded infrastructure. It would invest to lead the green industrial revolution that is already forging markets and creating jobs across the globe.

The CPC understands that we must do the basics in education. It would provide pre-K for every child, the most important single reform we can make in education. It calls for increasing investment in our public schools, helping to mitigate the destructive inequality between rich districts and poor. It would provide students with four years of debt-free college education, and pay for renegotiating existing student loans, relieving the burden now crushing an entire generation.

The CPC recognizes that more seniors are facing a retirement crisis. On budget, it would adopt an inflation measure for Social Security that reflects the rising costs seniors face in areas like health care. Off budget, the CPC calls for expanded Social Security benefits, paid for by lifting the income cap on Social Security payroll contributions. No longer would Donald Trump pay a lower rate in Social Security taxes than the police who guard his palaces.

The CPC would also expand the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit, giving a break to low-wage workers and to parents struggling with the costs of childcare. And needless to say, the CPC would defend Medicare and Medicaid, not privatize it, and strengthen health-care reform, not eliminate it.

But with the exception of a few scattered liberal writers, that proposal might as well have been released underwater for all the attention it gets. If it is mentioned by the mainstream cognoscenti it’s usually accompanied by eye-rolling and barely suppressed giggles as if this proposal was found on the back cover of Angela Davis’s copy of Das Kapital. Meanwhile, the dead on arrival GOP slash and burn budget is discussed endlessly on every cable network.

And it’s not just the People’s Budget that gets short shrift. Paul Waldman wrote a post at the Plumline on Thursday in which he pointed out that there’s yet another liberal economic plan in the mix:

Today, the Economic Policy Institute — a liberal think tank that gets support from labor unions — released an 11-point “Agenda to Raise America’s Pay,” and it’s worth paying attention to because something like it will probably become Hillary Clinton’s economic plan. Conservatives would probably look at it and say this is the same old thing: Increase the minimum wage, lower barriers to collective bargaining, invest in infrastructure, reform immigration, raise taxes on the wealthy and so on. (You can see a similar set of recommendations in this report from the Center for American Progress.) But the fact that many of these ideas are familiar doesn’t diminish the degree to which they’re both popular and aimed directly at income inequality. And some of the proposals, such as increasing the availability of overtime pay and sick leave, or encouraging the Fed to prioritize lowering unemployment over protecting against future inflation, haven’t been as commonly discussed among regular people sitting around kitchen tables.

It’s doubtful that most Americans have discussed more than a few high profile proposals like the minimum wage at the dinner table. Why would they? The media never mentions them. Now, if Clinton wins the nomination and does adopt this agenda as her own, they will certainly get more play. But it starts at a disadvantage compared to the GOP budget plans because people have heard all these conservative proposals again and again being discussed respectfully in the media while the liberal agenda sounds like something jarring and odd.

The People’s Budget and the Agenda to Raise America’s Pay are mainstream programs that would be eminently achievable if the Republicans and the moneyed elites would allow taxes on the people who are reaping all the benefits in this economy to be raised to a level that makes sense. They do not need all the money, they really don’t. If they are taxed at the rates people of vast wealth have historically been taxed they will still have vast wealth. But this is considered crazy talk in the political world. The GOP’s insistence that 5+5=12, on the other hand, is not only perfectly respectable it is Very, Very Serious.

Heather Digby Parton, also known as "Digby," is a contributing writer to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism.

Why conservatives refuse to believe Obama is Christian

SALON

Tuesday, Mar 3, 2015 04:30 AM EST

Why conservatives refuse to believe Obama is Christian

Scott Walker is the latest Republican to question the president's faith, and he's not just speaking to the fringe

Sarah Posner, Religion Dispatches

Topics: Religion Dispatches, Scott Walker, Republicans, GOP, Barack Obama, Christian Fundamentalism, Politics News

Scott Walker (Credit: AP/Andy Manis)

This article originally appeared on Religion Dispatches. 

 

Alex Theodoridis, a political scientist at the University of California, Merced, conducted a survey last fall of Americans’ understanding of President Obama’s religious beliefs. Remarkably, he found that in response to the question, “Which of these do you think most likely describes what Obama believes deep down? Muslim, Christian, atheist, spiritual, or I don’t know,” 54 percent of Republicans said Obama is Muslim. Only nine percent said he is Christian.

Writing at the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog, Theodoridis elaborated:

The percentage selecting “Muslim” is notably higher than in other polls conducted on this topic. This difference likely depends on how the question is phrased.

Previous survey questions about Obama’s religion tend to sound like a pop quiz — such as “do you happen to know the religious faith of Barack Obama?” But by asking “what Obama believes deep down?” I was intentionally granting respondents license to stray from the pesident’s self-reported Christian faith. This reveals a prevalent willingness to distrust this pesident or categorize him as “the other” in terms of religion.

Of course, respondents could also be “cheerleading” — using a survey question to express their general dislike of Obama rather than a genuine view about his religious faith.

But, if these results were largely driven by anti-Obama cheerleading, we should expect more respondents, especially Republicans, to choose the very unpopular category of “atheist.” Relatively few do so.

Previous ruminations on the Obama-is-a-secret-Muslim theme have suggested various sources for it: ignorance, Fox News, racism, too much World Net Daily in your diet.

Theodoridis’ post was inspired by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s remarks that he didn’t know whether Obama is a Christian. But do other elected Republicans suggest that Obama is not only not a Christian, but a Muslim? I ran a search in the Congressional Record for recent floor speeches in which the word Islam or Islamic and the President appear. This is snapshot, of course, and the number of constituents who actually listen to these speeches is infinitesimal. But if elected Republicans aren’t afraid to question Obama’s religious commitments for the permanent record, think of what they might say to constituents in smaller settings, or the well that they are drawing from when they make remarks in Congressional sessions for which they receive no pushback, and in fact receive encouragement.

Republicans drew from recent conservative complaints that Obama refuses to say that Islamic State and other terrorist groups are “Islamic,” that he doesn’t take the threat of terrorism seriously, and he is insufficiently protective of American exceptionalism.

On February 24, 2015, Rep. Mark Walker (R-NC) said on the House floor that his constituents “shared with me their frustration at the ambiguous language from this administration in describing the evils of radical Islamist terrorism,” and that he himself has “grown weary at the timidity” of Obama, who “continues to be defensive, at best.” He went on:

At first glance, the silence appears to be passive or poor leadership. But I am inclined to believe that the President’s posture is not one of weakness but, rather, an intentional directive in both rhetoric and action. It appears that his promise to take our country in a fundamentally new direction is being played out in realtime. Instead of defending our liberty and our way of life, which is the most charitable in the world, our President seems to scoff at the belief that our country has been uniquely blessed by God.

I would be remiss today if I did not pause and remember our Egyptian Christian brothers in the recent barbaric attacks in Libya. ISIS murdered innocent husbands and fathers who clearly died for their faith and their beliefs.

Just this morning, we hear further reports out of Syria that Islamic State militants have abducted dozens of Christians, including women and children. Weeks prior, the President chastised the Christian community for getting on their judgmental high horses. Yet, in describing our martyred brothers from Egypt, the President refused to even utter the word, “Christian.”

The undermining of our beliefs has become an issue with this President.

Contrary to Walker’s statement, which echoes a claim circulating in conservative circles that Obama did not identify the Coptic victims of the Islamic State massacre as Christians, at last week’s summit on countering religious extremism, Obama noted that that Islamic State’s “slaughter of EgyptianChristians in Libya has shocked the world.” Notice, in Walker’s speech, the juxtaposition of the statement that Obama “seems to scoff at the belief that our country has been uniquely blessed by God” (i.e., he’s not a Christian) with his own remembrance of the murdered Egyptian Christians “who clearly died for their faith and their beliefs.”

Some of the floor statements come from ardent Christian supporters of Israel, who contrast Obama negatively with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

In a February 5, 2015 floor speech, Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) called Netanyahu “one of the most prescient voices that we have in the entire world to address some of the subjects and some of the dangers that face the United States of America.” In contrast, Franks claimed, Obama “chooses to listen to these mysterious voices of those who did not vote in our Nation’s election,” yet “has sought to go after and silence” Netanyahu. (He did not specify whose “mysterious voices” were whispering in Obama’s ear.) Franks questioned whether Obama is “so naive or, worse, so arrogant as to believe that we can have any type of credible, diplomatic agreement” with Iran.

Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX), in February 2, 2015 floor remarks, asked, “this administration also refuses to say that we are at war with radical Islam. There is so much sensitivity in the White House over its statements that one is puzzled to wonder: Why are they sensitive about calling terrorists ‘terrorists?’”
Hmm. Gotta wonder, right?

The next day in a floor speech, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), after describing atrocities committed by terrorists, added, “I guess if you are part of this administration, you shouldn’t consider that to be all that radical because this administration, under their watch, with Commander in Chief Barack Obama, had orders given to remove crosses from the chapels on our military installations.” (Gohmert repeats this claim, despite it having been debunked in 2013; the military, according to FactCheck.org, “has a longstanding policy against permanent religious symbols being attached to military chapels.”) In the speech, two days before the National Prayer Breakfast, Gohmert noted Obama’s upcoming appearance, adding, “I am greatly appreciative of the President’s espoused faith.” (emphasis mine).

In a January 14, 2015 stemwinder, after laying out a litany of Obama’s alleged sins in failing to recognizing “that radical Islam is a threat to our very existence and way of life,” Gohmert delivered a brief lecture on how Christians are supposed to act (and govern):

I have Christian friends that say: Yes, but as Christians, we are supposed to turn the other cheek. That is as individuals. Individual Christians should live out the beatitudes as Christ gave them. But the government has a different role. If you do evil, you should be afraid because the government, within the bounds of Christianity–Romans 13:4–is supposed to punish the evil, eliminate the evils, and protect your people. I don’t try to convert anybody using my position in government, but for those who misunderstand Christian teaching, you need to read Romans 13.

Romans 13 is about submission to governmental authority, and the particular verse Gohmert cited reads: “For the one in authority is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. They are God’s servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer.” In other words, Obama isn’t punishing (purportedly Islamic) wrongdoers; he therefore doesn’t understand what Gohmert believes to be biblical imperatives for governing. Draw your own conclusions.

Of course Poe, Franks, and Gohmert represent the far right flank of their party, but their fellow Republicans don’t dispute them. As Theodoridis theorizes, Scott Walker is a “moderate” on the spectrum of misrepresenting Obama’s religion because he merely said he didn’t know whether Obama is a Christian. But you could argue that Poe, Franks, and Gohmert never explicitly said Obama is a Muslim. Yet according to Theodoridis’ research, a majority of Republicans think he is.

Sarah Posner is the senior editor of Religion Dispatches, where she writes about politics. She is also the author of God's Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters" (PoliPoint Press, 2008).