Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

It was an ordinary spring school board meeting in the small bedroom community of Dover, Pennsylvania. The high school needed new biology textbooks, and the science department had recommended Kenneth Miller and Joseph Levine's widely used Biology. But Bill Buckingham, a new board member who'd recently become chair of the curriculum committee, had an objection. Biology, he said, was "laced with Darwinism." He wanted a textbook that balanced theories of evolution with Christian creationism, and he was willing to turn to his town into a cultural battlefield to get it.

"This country wasn't founded on Muslim beliefs or evolution," said Buckingham, a stocky, gray-haired man who wears a red, white and blue crucifix pin on his lapel. "This country was founded on Christianity and our students should be taught as such."

...as Christian nationalists assert their right to rule, a deep anxiety stalks the country's more cosmopolitan corners. There are intimations of religious authoritarianism, but because they are only intimations, they're hard to discuss without sounding shrill and hyperbolic.

A few days before Bush's second inauguration, The New York Times carried a story headlined "Warning from a Student of Democracy's Collapse" about Fritz Stern, a refugee from Nazi Germany, professor emeritus at Columbia, and scholar of fascism. It quoted a speech he had given in Germany that drew parallels between Nazism and the American religious right. "Some people recognized the moral perils of mixing religion and politics," he was quoted as saying of prewar Germany, "but many more were seduced by it. It was the pseudo-religious transfiguration of politics that largely ensured [Hitler's] success, notably in Protestant areas."

It's not surprising that Stern is alarmed. Reading his forty five year old book, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology, I shivered at its contemporary resonance. "The ideologists of the conservative revolution superimposed a vision of national redemption upon their dissatisfaction with liberal culture and with the loss of authoritarian faith," he wrote in the introduction. "They posed at the true champions of nationalism, and berated the socialists for their internationalism,and the liberals for their pacifism and their indifference to national greatness."

Fascism isn't imminent in America. But its language and aesthetics are distressingly common among Christian nationalists. History professor Roger Griffin described the "mobilizing vision" of fascist movements as "the national community rising Phoenix-like after a period of encroaching decadence which all but destroyed it (his italics). The Ten Commandments has become a potent symbol of this dreamed-for resurrection on the American right."

Speaking to outsiders, most Christian nationalists say they're simply responding to anti-Christian persecution. They say that secularism is itself a religion,on unfairly imposed on them. They say they're the victims in the culture wars. But Christian nationalist ideologues don't want equality, they want dominance. In his book The Changing of the Guard: Biblical Principles for Political Action, George Grant, former executive director of D.James Kennedy's Coral Ridge Ministries, wrote: Christians have an obligation, a mandate, a commission, a holy responsibility to reclaim the land for Jesus Christ--to have dominion in civil structures, just as in every other aspect of life and godliness."

....David Barton, a frequent guest on Kennedy's radio show has done more to popularize Christian nationalist history than anyone else. Barton's work is cited constantly by conservative leaders and rank-and-file Republicans alike to "prove" that separation of church and state is a myth. In February 2006, Time magazine cited him as one of the country's twenty-five most important evangelicals. .... His books and videos argue that separation of church and state is a myth fostered by God-hating secularists, that most of the founding fathers shared the beliefs of today's religious right, and that they intended Christianity to be central to American government.

Right now, it's hard to find so much as a Web site offering advice to those facing Christian nationalist challenges to their schools. The lack of an infrastructure for fighting local political contests is partly the result of liberals' reliance on the courts to protect minority rights.... It's unfair to condemn anyone for seeking redress from the Supreme Court---African Americans, gay people, and others are entirely justified in not wanting to put their civil rights up for popular vote. But whether or not relying on the courts was wise, is no longer possible. The bench is filling up with judges who are fundamentally hostile to many rights liberals treasure--from the right to private consensual sex to the right to a public education from of religious indoctrination. This is a tremendous loss, but progressives can make a virtue of necessity by refocusing on local politics.

It was through local politics, finally, that intelligent design was defeated in Dover. On November 8, 2005 -- after arguments in the lawsuit had concluded but before the judge had issued his ruling---Dover voters narrowly ousted all of the eight school board members who were up for reelection and replaced them with a proevolution slate.