Esther Kaplan: On the Trail of the Christian Right
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Esther Kaplan grew up in the only non-Christian family in her hometown of
King's Valley, Oregon. Her childhood was deeply intertwined with those of
Christian fundamentalists she played with and with whom her family socialized,
even as she was often considered an oddity who needed to be converted. Later
in life she was touched personally and then compelled into activity by the
AIDS epidemic, particularly disturbed by the hateful response of some of the
Christian Right who viewed AIDS as a just punishment from God against gays.
It is this intimate familiarity with both the people who make up much of the
base of the rapidly growing Christian Right in this country, as well as with
the human cost and suffering being inflicted by the political operatives leading
this movement, that Esther has approached the subject of the rising role Christian
fundamentalism in this country.
<p id="byline">by Sunsara Taylor</p>
<p id="issueinfo"><cite>Revolutionary Worker #1269</cite>, February 27, 2005,
 posted at rwor.org</p>
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<div class="longintro">
 <p>Esther Kaplan grew up in the only non-Christian family in her hometown of
   King's Valley, Oregon. Her childhood was deeply intertwined with those of
   Christian fundamentalists she played with and with whom her family socialized,
   even as she was often considered an oddity who needed to be converted. Later
   in life she was touched personally and then compelled into activity by the
   AIDS epidemic, particularly disturbed by the hateful response of some of the
   Christian Right who viewed AIDS as a just punishment from God against gays.
   It is this intimate familiarity with both the people who make up much of the
   base of the rapidly growing Christian Right in this country, as well as with
   the human cost and suffering being inflicted by the political operatives leading
   this movement, that Esther has approached the subject of the rising role Christian
   fundamentalism in this country.</p>
 <p>Then, as it became increasingly clear that the Christian Right was playing
   a more open and heightened role in the re-election campaign for George W.
   Bush, Esther turned her life upside down to finish her book <b><cite>With
   God On Their Side: How Christian Fundamentalists Trampled Science, Policy,
   and Democracy in George W. Bush's White House</cite></b> (New York: The New
   Press, 2004)--an extensive and chilling account of how these forces are remaking
   the country.</p>
 <p>After devouring her book and feeling my stomach knotted up for days while
   coming to terms with how far this fascistic Christian fundamentalism has gotten,
   I got the chance to hear Esther speak and then to sit down with her myself.
   What struck me most was her concern for people--both for people who are caught
   up in reactionary belief systems as well as for the many people on the receiving
   end of the hurt and death caused by Bible-based policy. So, on a very cold
   day in Brooklyn, over cups of hot tea, we talked about what is happening to
   our society and the world.</p>
</div>
<p><b> RW:</b> What originally made you decide to do this book?</p>
<p><b> Esther Kaplan:</b> Well, it was really just coming across evidence that
 this was happening, this Christian Right infiltration of the federal government.
 The way it happened to me, though there could have been any number of points
 of entry, was I was working on a piece about what was then the new Presidential
 AIDS Advisory Council.</p>
<p>I don't know if I wrote about this, but when Bush first came into office he
 (or Andrew Card, his chief of staff) said, "We are going to get rid of
 the White House Office on AIDS. We're not going to have an AIDS Council."
 AIDS just wasn't on his agenda. And there was a huge firestorm--front-page coverage
 in the major papers and all this. So they kind of retracted it, and Ari Fleisher
 said Card had made a mistake.</p>
<p>In mid 2002 they finally appointed this council that they promised to appoint.
 So POZ magazine sent me down to cover it, and I went to a couple of the meetings.
 The first one I went to was in June 2002, and I walked into this room--all-day,
 two-day-long meeting. I was the only member of the press there.</p>
<p>There were almost no AIDS advocates there at all except during the small public
 comment period at the end of the second day, and two or three showed up, maybe.
 And the council was just packed with these completely crazy people. You know,
 like evangelical proselytizers, professional virgins. I mean, just all these
 people who knew nothing about AIDS, who were making openly anti-gay remarks.</p>
<p>The people who'd been on the Clinton council were the serious people in the
 AIDS world, like the head of the National Association of People with AIDS, one
 of the top AIDS prevention researchers in the country at University of California,
 San Francisco, which has a prestigious prevention program. I mean, the heavyweights.
 And, I mean, this was just crazy. So, I covered that. I covered some other AIDS-related
 stuff. And I got a bee in my bonnet that this was probably happening throughout
 the administration and also getting basically no press attention. Nobody else
 was watching them.</p>
<p>Since I started working on it.and now, of course, with the election this is
 all sort of out in the open all of a sudden, but bits and pieces started happening.
 SIECUS and Advocates for Youth and Planned Parenthood launched a project challenging
 the abstinence-only money, and the Union of Concerned Scientists put out a report
 about the politicization of science. And bits and pieces of the story started
 to be pushed into the news by advocates. But when I first began working on it,
 people were talking about the war on terror, the war in Afghanistan in particular
 and eventually Iraq. <em>Maybe </em>people were talking about the economy. But
 this issue of the infiltration of the hard- right evangelicals was just not,
 almost not, covered at all.</p>
<p><b> RW:</b> In your book you trace through the military to science and policy,
 to the whole arena of research around AIDS and drug addiction and teen pregnancy--you
 walk through all these different realms of society. Could you talk a little
 bit about why you say in the beginning, "Yes, It's a Holy War?"</p>
<p><b> EK:</b> Well, I guess for a few reasons. One is that it is widely and openly
 discussed as a holy war by the Christian Right movement, by key leadership on
 the Christian Right. There's been a horrible demonization of Islam as a religion
 by, again, top leaders: Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Franklin Graham (the rising
 star, Billy Graham's son) and so on. And when Bush has really been pushed to
 distance himself from this holy war idea, from the idea that Islam is "evil,"
 he's declined to do so.</p>
<p>Secondly, people in his own administration are echoing this stuff. I think
 the most atrocious example is Jerry Boykin, who is deputy undersecretary of
 defense--a general who has both a military role and a civilian role in the war
 on terror. He's a counter-insurgency expert and someone you might want to look
 into. He was involved in Central America, Somalia--his track record is a whole
 other thing that needs to be investigated. But he was given a civilian post
 in the Department of Defense. He was specifically charged with hunting down
 what were then the top public enemies in the war on terror--Osama bin Laden
 and Saddam Hussein.</p>
<p>And Boykin, simultaneous to having this job, was going around to evangelical
 churches in the northwest giving these speeches--one of which I saw on tape,
 courtesy of Gary Bauer who was sending it out to all his supporters for free--where
 he actually shows on slides pictures of Kim Jong-il, pictures of the Taliban,
 pictures of Osama bin Laden, and so on. In each case he says, "Is this
 the enemy? Is this the enemy? Is this the enemy? No." And he says the enemy
 is Satan, and that we need to join God's Army to defeat this enemy. So, here's
 the guy who is actually supposed to be capturing Osama bin Laden, but he's saying
 in public that Osama bin Laden isn't the enemy.</p>
<p>Now, there was a huge uproar about this, and again, the Christian Right came
 to this guy's defense. They think he's a national hero. They put tremendous
 pressure on the administration to support him. And the last I checked, there
 was word that he was going to get something incredibly mild, like a letter of
 concern, which is almost the mildest response they can make. But he still hasn't
 gotten that, last time I checked, a couple of weeks ago. So you begin to connect
 the dots and say this is a worldview the administration is either fully supportive
 of, or at least is willing to be tacitly supportive of, in order not to alienate
 their Christian Right base.</p>
<p>But then on the ground, there are other issues that are really concrete, like
 the fact that they've really allowed Christian evangelizers to move in on the
 heels of American troops and used this as an opportunity for targeting Muslims
 for conversion, which is a top priority for most of the evangelical missionary
 outfits. We've seen members of the U.S. military pushing Christianity on their
 own soldiers. In the book I mention a piece that appeared in a Florida newspaper
 that was quickly denied--and no other reporters followed up on it--about a chaplain
 that was actually forcing soldiers to get baptized if they wanted the chance
 to dip in a bath while there was this incredible water shortage among U.S. troops.</p>
<p>I reported that this article had come out, along with the administration's
 denial. But just a few weeks ago I actually met one of the soldiers who had
 come back from Iraq who was on that base with that chaplain and who confirmed
 to me that was what had gone on. So, if it's not a holy war, it sure smells
 a lot like it.</p>
<p><b> RW:</b> There's been a lot of protest against the Iraq war and a lot of
 people feel it is unjust and immoral. So what difference does it make that it's
 being cast in terms of a crusade, or a holy war? What difference does it make
 here, and what difference does it make to the people in the Middle East who
 are actually seeing the face of this on the ground?</p>
<p><b> EK:</b> Well, in the Middle East and in South Asia I think it's been incredibly
 inflammatory that that is how it's been framed. I mean, famously, one of the
 many inflammatory remarks made by Christian Right leaders was when Jerry Falwell
 called Muhammed a "terrorist," and it set off these riots in India
 that left several people dead. Stuff that barely makes it into the American
 media. But these statements by the Christian Right against Islam are huge news
 in the Muslim world. That's dangerous in and of itself.</p>
<p>And, of course, when Bush, again, refuses to criticize and distance himself
 from these remarks it's really seen as something that's reflecting the administration's
 views. Especially when it comes from someone like Franklin Graham, who delivered
 the benediction at Bush's inauguration and is a frequent guest at the White
 House.</p>
<p>On the home front, I imagine you've seen some of the data showing how impervious
 Bush supporters seem to be to the actual facts about Iraq as they began to be
 revealed: no WMD's, no connection to al Qaida, and so on.</p>
<p>I think that's the place that I see the influence of this whole holy war worldview,
 which is that you don't really have to concern yourself with the facts, that
 there's something cosmic going on in which America is identified with God, and
 Iraq, Afghanistan, whoever the latest target is, are identified with Satanic
 forces. And the battle just has to go forward, it's somehow part of God's design.</p>
<p>This is reflected in other parts of U.S. foreign policy, like towards Israel
 and Palestine and elsewhere. I think that's where it gets really dangerous.
 And this is an issue in the sciences and other areas, but when you stop caring
 about the facts because you believe in a project for cosmic reasons, then you're
 immune to the kind of democratic give- and-take that really should be shaping
 policy. Whether that happens through street protests, through investigative
 journalism, or whatever, this is how we should be debating our national policy:
 what's really happening, what do we really think about it, and what are we going
 to do about it?</p>
<p>But we have a sector, which is a minority of the country--around 20% of the
 country but 40% of Bush's electorate--who are more or less <em>immune </em>from
 any actual information that surfaces. Now this is a problem because then how
 do we make corrections? How do we move forward? How do we learn from mistakes
 in responses to 9/11 or anything else if a huge chunk of the country and a huger
 chunk of Bush's base is not going to engage?</p>
<p><b> RW </b>: This relates to the last question asked to the panel I saw you
 on recently: "Why do the facts seem to matter so little?" Everybody
 answered it, and a couple of people before you answered it with an important
 part of the answer, pointing out that a lot of people don't get the facts because
 the way the major media works.</p>
<p><b> EK:</b> Absolutely.</p>
<p><b> RW:</b> You agreed with that, but added that there's a whole section of
 people for whom the facts don't matter. I am just curious.in this divide with
 the red states and blue states, I know it is not that simple, but in some of
 these concentrations of blue areas, have you found that people understand what's
 actually happening with this section of people who don't care about the facts?</p>
<p><b> EK:</b> Well, like I said, I think there was a tremendous amount of oblivion
 about it before the election. Which is a bit curious, given that this movement
 has been building for a good 25 years or more, and given the past political
 impact on previous administrations. But nevertheless, I think people maybe thought
 their day had come and gone or something and just had not clued in to the way
 that there is a real powerful synergy between this movement and Bush.</p>
<p>My concern, now that the issue has popped into the public, is that people are
 looking at it in a depoliticized way, which is to say, they are just taking
 on face value that there's this constituency who is deeply concerned about homosexuality
 and abortion and that they're driven by these moral values and so on. Which
 to some extent is true, but I think that it's really important that we as a
 nation wake up to the presence of this constituency and grapple with it, because
 it's a very serious thing to grapple with, that we really understand that these
 folks were <em>organized politically.</em>That they were organized by right-wing
 operatives who really went into these congregations, these organizations, and
 helped consolidate them as a political movement around this list of hot-button
 social issues. If these average community members or churchgoers were asked
 in an open-ended way what they're concerned about in their lives and what are
 their struggles with their kids, their spouses, I'm not sure that they'd be
 listing things like gay marriage, to be honest.</p>
<p>But the scare tactics around it--that this is going to be the fall of civilization
 and so on--they've really been organized around this stuff and including, I
 think, to bring some of the millennialist worldviews more directly into the
 realm of politics.</p>
<p>I mean, it's one thing to have a set of beliefs where you think that you know
 the world story is unfolding according to some divine plan. But to bring that
 into the political realm, that took a lot of organizing over a long period of
 time. And I think it's important for us to see this as a political outcome--that
 people are now viewing something as concrete as a war on Iraq in biblical terms.
 I don't think it had to be that way.</p>
<p><b> RW:</b> One of the things that I found striking in your book is your discussion
 of science and what's being done to science. This is a realm that the majority
 of people in this country aren't on the inside of, and especially the people
 who are suffering the most from the Bush regime are not in the science world.
 And yet, there is a whole chill being put through the National Institutes of
 Health and the Center for Disease Control. I found it very harrowing, this stuff
 about people having to censor their grant proposals and not being able to put
 certain things in writing, and this McCarthy era in this whole world of science.</p>
<p><b> EK:</b> What you're talking about is a lot of the researchers I talked
 with--particularly in the areas of HIV and gay sexuality, family planning, drug
 addiction and so on--feeling like they had to censor the titles of their grants
 and censor their email communications with the Federal Finance Agency.</p>
<p>One thing I will say is--a lot of it is self-censorship. Self-censorship in
 response to huge and very intimidating actions by the U.S. Congress and the
 federal government that have sent a very strong message that "if you are
 dealing with these hot-button issues you'd better look out because we're going
 after your funding." This is in the form of amendments proposed on the
 floor of Congress, threatening phone calls made by NIH.</p>
<p>But nevertheless, the way most researchers have responded is to be very careful
 about trying to protect their research, protect their programs--which is a completely
 reasonable and in many ways admirable response because they are working on issues
 about saving lives. How do you do HIV prevention among high-risk populations
 of gay men where infections are now on the rise--this is a life-and-death issue.</p>
<p>But on the other hand, I really do hope, in the months and years to come, that
 we see more researchers speak out and really begin to protest this publicly
 and not just suffer silently and individually. That they begin to mount a collective
 response.</p>
<p>But yeah, there's a tremendous amount of censorship going on and intimidation
 leading to self-censorship. In terms of overt censorship, there's data just
 being pulled off government websites if it offends the moral sensibilities or
 political proclivities of the Christian Right.</p>
<p>One classic example is there was data posted on the National Cancer Institute
 website showing that there's no connection between having an abortion and risk
 for cancer, which is a scare-tactic that anti-abortion activists have been using
 for years. You know, "If you have an abortion, you're going to get breast
 cancer." They hated that this debunking information was up on the government
 website, and it was pulled down. The National Cancer Institute convened some
 bogus conference to re-review the data, even though there'd been no significant
 data on this front since the original analysis was put up there. And a year
 and a half later they finally reiterated the earlier statement. But in the meantime,
 two different states passed statutes mandating that women seeking abortions
 be told that they'll be at risk for breast cancer. So we have this strange situation
 where completely false scientific conclusions are now mandated into state laws
 and so on, and this has been aided and abetted by what's going on in the Bush
 administration.</p>
<p><b> RW:</b> At one point you say in your book, basically, if progressive people
 don't recognize how much these little scientific rulings have to do with impacting
 people's lives, the anti-abortion movement certainly understands that acutely,
 and this is sort of what you are describing. Maybe you could talk about the
 connection between some of the science censorship and what the impact is on
 people. How does this influence policy and filter down to the ground?</p>
<p><b> EK:</b> Yeah, I think two of the issues that have the most sweeping impact
 are the promotion of abstinence-only education at home and abroad, and the various
 efforts to de-fund international family planning groups. Both the Mexico City
 Policy, which has been called the "global gag rule," and subsequently
 a lot of other efforts to de-fund United Nations Population Fund, and then a
 number of other individual family planning groups.</p>
<p>If you look at what's happened with that internationally, there's a couple
 of really disturbing things. One, in places like Romania that have really depended
 on abortion for family planning, a lot of what the family planning clinics do
 there is when a woman comes in for an abortion they try to counsel her about
 engaging in other family planning methods, whether it's birth control pills
 or barrier devices or whatever, so that they don't have to depend on abortion
 for family planning. And the only way that they can engage in that conversation,
 which can have the net effect of actually reducing abortions in those countries,
 is to talk about abortions and to offer abortions.</p>
<p>So in a place like Romania, in the early analysis, it actually seems to be
 causing abortions to rise there. Or it's poised to do so, because all the organizations
 that offer abortions have to lose all their support from the United States for
 family planning methods, so they no longer have the support to supply family
 planning methods. And the other ones that have to completely stop offering abortions,
 they aren't reaching those women. So that's absurd.</p>
<p>Even more concerning is all the organizations and family planning clinics that
 have begun to offer integrated HIV prevention and HIV testing and HIV care.
 AIDS is still very stigmatized in the developing world and in Sub- Saharan Africa
 where the epidemic is at its most intense. You just can't have a free-standing
 HIV clinic and expect people to walk in and get tested and get services. They
 are not going to do it.</p>
<p>So family planning clinics had really become the place, in many cases, where
 that would happen. So right at a time when Bush is launching his global AIDS
 initiative and we are supposedly scaling up our response to AIDS worldwide,
 all the clinics that are best positioned to respond to the AIDS crisis and offer
 counseling, testing, care, etc., are cut off of all their grants from the United
 States, the biggest family care funder in the world.</p>
<p>Many of them had to close down or lay off staff. They became these crippled
 organizations if they survive at all. And even though technically the AIDS-related
 grants that the U.S. is giving out right now don't have to comply with the global
 gag rule, for people I've spoken with, family planning providers on the ground,
 they know full well the stigma created by the gag rule is going to make it almost
 impossible for them to get an AIDS grant. Even though technically they can,
 it's just not going to happen. So it's just an enormous lost opportunity, and
 it will absolutely be counted in lost lives.</p>
<p>I think in terms of the abstinence-only, which is based on completely bogus
 science and bogus assumptions, the limited data we have so far shows that people
 who are taught abstinence-only--and in the U.S. system that means no mention
 of birth control or condoms, except to describe their failure rates--is that
 it actually puts young people at greater risk for sexually transmitted diseases
 and for pregnancy.</p>
<p>They may delay having sex the first time for a few months, or maybe as many
 as eight months. But once they do have sex, they're just so unprepared. They
 don't get screened for STDs. They don't use condoms. They're really just putting
 themselves at risk. And it's way too early to have any data about what's happening
 in this country with STD rates among youth and pregnancy rates as a result of
 the abstinence-only, but it's frightening to consider what that impact might
 be.</p>
<p>And the fact that that's now being exported to Africa is really criminal. I
 mean, when you're working in a country where there is like a 25% infection rate,
 and you're going provide them abstinence-only education that disparages the
 efficacy of condoms--that's really criminal.</p>
<p><b> RW:</b> You document how the whole faith-based initiative is taking money
 out of a lot of the secular social services and putting the money into these
 Christian programs. Some of them are just shocking to me, including the stuff
 that you are talking about where you can't even mention condoms. But they make
 it almost sound nice-- "We're gonna stop discriminating against the religious
 services that want to do good things for Americans and the poor and all this."</p>
<p><b> EK:</b> Very beautiful. Well okay, a few things are happening.</p>
<p>One is that groups that define themselves as faith-based are being privileged
 over secular social service providers who, in many cases, may have a lot more
 experience to go on. A group called OMB Watch, a government watchdog group,
 reported that there was a veterans group that had been funded consistently in
 the past, but then once this faith-based initiative started, they were turned
 down for funding for their veterans' program. They then re-defined themselves
 as a faith-based group and got funding the next year.</p>
<p>The patterns of who among the religious groups are getting funding also indicates
 discrimination. As of this summer, and there may be some new grants I haven't
 seen yet, not a single faith grant that went out of the initiative to a faith-based
 group went to any religion except for Christian groups.</p>
<p>When I spoke to the director of the program about this, I said I am not seeing
 Muslim charities or Jewish charities, or any charities that aren't Christian,
 why is that? He gave me what I thought was a very disrespectful remark about
 minority religions, which was, "Well, Jews and Muslims only want to serve
 their own kind, so they aren't really interested in getting this money."
 Which, you know, one could turn around and say that about the evangelicals.</p>
<p>And then, the last important pattern is that a lot of the money is going to
 overtly political Christian Right programs.</p>
<p>Some of this is abstinence money, some of this is faith-based money, but a
 lot of it is going to these things called crisis pregnancy centers, which you
 probably know about. Storefronts that try to present themselves as clinics,
 but they're really little kind of propaganda outfits to get young women to not
 have abortions and often they use scare tactics like the "threat of breast
 cancer" and showing bloody pictures of fetuses and so on. Many of them
 have been sued, actually for falsely presenting themselves as clinics when they
 have no medical personnel on staff. Anyway, they are getting a huge proportion,
 millions of the abstinence-only funding.</p>
<p>Major players on the Christian Right, like Franklin Graham's group Samaritan's
 Purse, just got a huge multimillion-dollar grant to do abstinence-only education
 in Africa through the Presidential Emergency AIDS Initiative. Pat Robertson's
 group, Operation Blessing, got approved for $1.5 million. Chuck Colson's Prison
 Fellowship Ministries got a $2 million grant to do job training for ex-offenders.</p>
<p>So some of the really big players, the politically connected players on the
 Christian Right, are just raking it in. They're increasing their staff. It's
 really an injection of taxpayer money right into these Christian Right groups
 to help them hire staff and do what they do, which is not really service provisions
 so much as ideological work.</p>
<p><b> RW:</b> You talk in your book about a "broadcast" and a "narrowcast"
 that Bush uses when he speaks that plays on the fact that there are different
 audiences that listen with different ears. What do the Christian fundamentalist
 base of George Bush hear that many of us don't when he speaks--the "narrowcast"
 in terms of "End Times" discussion of Palestine and international
 policy, morality based on a literal interpretation of the Bible, etc?</p>
<p><b> EK:</b> Well, you have to be careful not to extrapolate too much from your
 own anecdotal encounters and so on, so part of what I also depend on is some
 fairly deepened opinion research that has been done at places like Beliefnet
 and the Pew Center on Religion in Public Life and some of these places that
 have really been following these belief systems for a while now.</p>
<p>I think that the core--if you look at the evangelical organizations, whether
 it be Association of Religious Broadcasters or the Southern Baptist Seminary,
 these organizations that have a "statement of belief" that they ask
 people to subscribe to in order to be a member--the common denominator is personal
 acceptance of Jesus Christ as your savior, belief in the literal truth of the
 Bible and a few other obscure, doctrinal things about Jesus' resurrection. And
 a commitment to be sort of "guided in life by one's walk with Jesus, walk
 with God."</p>
<p>So I think that a lot of the details about your exact stand on gay marriage,
 your exact interpretation of the End Times and so on.there's certainly a lot
 of doctrinal debate about interpretations of the End Times, and I think on some
 of the other newer issues, there's still kind of shaking out what exactly the
 consensus is. And I think there's probably some movement there.</p>
<p>But in terms of what are they seeing in George Bush that they really respond
 to? I think, number one, it's really that he's so open and explicit about his
 religious faith. They really like that he talks about it publicly. That he talks
 about it to other heads of state, which has been seen internationally as quite
 a scandal. I mean the fact that he seems to have spent time praying and studying
 the Bible with Tony Blair is a scandal in the UK.</p>
<p>You know, we just kind of accept that about him, I guess. But they love that
 he talks about his experience of being born again, that in the presidential
 debate of 2000 he talked about Jesus as his favorite philosopher. All that stuff
 is, number one, what they really respond to in him.</p>
<p>The second is a sense that more or less he's lined up with their positions
 on this moral values agenda. You know, they had some doubts at times and they've
 really pushed him. They were extremely frustrated that he took so long to throw
 his weight behind the idea of a federal constitutional amendment banning gay
 marriage. He spent a lot of months trying to do other things--dumping marriage
 promotion money into the welfare program and doing all this other stuff-- to
 avoid taking that position. But he finally kind of got his back against the
 wall.</p>
<p>So sometimes, they have their doubts. But when push comes to shove, he's going
 to sign any anti-abortion bill that comes across his desk, and he's going to
 support the strategies to block gay marriage. He's going to support religious,
 well I should say Christian, approaches to everything from pregnancy prevention,
 STD prevention, drug treatment. He's going to say that he thinks the Christian
 solution is the best.</p>
<p>I think that on that level they just fundamentally feel that they have an ally,
 even though they may feel that he needs a little pushing here or there.</p>
<p>And they've developed a belief that has been encouraged by Bush administration
 officials and certainly by their own leadership within the Chritian Right movement,
 that there was divine intervention in Bush being president. They weren't even
 sure, many of them--people like James Dobson who's head of Focus on the Family,
 one of the most powerful Christian Right groups, he didn't support Bush in 2000.
 He didn't think Bush was sufficiently pro-life. He wasn't enthusiastic about
 him. But once 9/11 happened, there was this thing that happened on the Christian
 Right where they looked back at the fact that Bush became president without
 winning the popular vote, that this huge crisis emerged coming out of that "evil"
 religion, Islam, and they developed this idea that God had put Bush in the presidency.
 That we Americans weren't aware how much we were going to need Bush's leadership,
 but<em> God knew. </em>And even though we didn't vote for him and put him in
 there, God knew and he put him in to lead for "such a time as this,"
 as General Jerry Boykin likes to say, quoting the Bible.</p>
<p>So, when Bush weaves into his speeches--particularly post-9/11 around the War
 on Terror or whether it's around combating AIDS, or whatever the issue is--when
 he weaves in these biblical references and these moral references, it really
 feeds that idea that in some sense God is working through Bush. Bush is happy
 to be in the hands of God. He's happy to be doing God's work. So supporting
 God, standing with God, walking with Jesus, you know, all these things that
 are so central to them, and supporting Bush are really all tied up together.
 Because Bush is sort of an agent of God.</p>
<p>When I was at a Christian Coalition event in late September, in the lead-up
 to the election, and Jerry Falwell spoke at it, he was saying things along these
 lines about how Bush won in 2000 and then he said something like, "And
 this time around we want him to win the popular vote so decisively so that we'll
 know and the Republican Party will know that Jesus did it." And I'm sure
 that's how they feel now--that, again, somehow God is working through the electorate,
 working through the American people to have a godly leader like George Bush.</p>
<p><b> RW:</b> I feel like some of the people, like Viguerie and Dobson, actually
 have their own double-speak where they are telling their constituency one thing
 and meanwhile in the New York Times the day after the election they're saying:
 now we're calling for our revolution. And they are making these very calculating
 demands on the other hand, and you have Viguerie saying openly that abortion
 is the door we'll get people in through and from there we take on secularism
 and from there.he ends up with people backing an aggressive international posture
 against the rest of the world. But a lot of the people who are buying this don't
 really understand where it leads and what it is all serving.</p>
<p><b> EK:</b> Right. But with that ideology of the active hand of God in the
 world, which is different than just a general faith in God which most Americans
 have, but the evangelical idea of the active hand of God expressing agency in
 the world, I don't know that they feel like they have to understand where it
 exactly is all going. They kind of have to have faith that it is going in the
 right direction. There's a lot of forgiveness there--whether it's deaths of
 American soldiers in Iraq, or the economy being in trouble or whatever--there's
 a lot of forgiveness because there is some sense that there is a divine presence
 somewhere.</p>
<p><b> RW: </b>There's a big irony that struck me even more powerfully as I was
 reading where the Christian Right always postures like they're under attack.
 And meanwhile, actually ever since Constantine, Christianity has justified the
 Crusades, the Holocaust, the African slave trade, the genocide of the Native
 Americans.all the way down, you have all this history, and today they are highly
 positioned all throughout government, military and finance. Yet they still are
 portraying themselves like they are the victims. And this frames the national
 dialogue too. It really has made a lot of progressive people hesitate to challenge
 something that is very dangerous because they actually believe that on our side
 we should be tolerant because on their side they are very intolerant and that's
 what we don't like. So we have this very ironic, and dangerous, situation.</p>
<p><b> EK:</b> Well, in Europe, where secularism is so much more prominent despite
 the fact that many of those countries have official state religions, ironically
 it's easier for them to challenge this sort of thing from a secular viewpoint.</p>
<p>No matter how one views what happened in France, for example, around their
 decision to not allow Muslim students to wear the headscarves in class (which
 could easily be read as an attack on minorities), to the extent that it was
 talked about in religious terms, it was really openly like, our schools are
 secular and you can't have religious displays there.</p>
<p>That kind of thing is much harder to pull off in this country because this
 country is so overwhelmingly religious. I think it hovers around 10%, the number
 of people in this country who call themselves secular or atheist or agnostic
 or something like that. And maybe there's another 10% or so that is religious
 minorities. But then there's the 80% of the country that's Christian believers.</p>
<p>So, strategically, what are the implications of that for countering the Christian
 Right? It's complicated. Certainly what I've been encouraging people to do who
 are concerned is to first of all be really unafraid to articulate their values
 as values, whether those are secular values or religious values.</p>
<p>Something like the debate over abstinence-only, the typical way it's framed
 right now is on the one hand there's the "morality-driven people"
 who support abstinence and then there's science-oriented people who support
 comprehensive sexuality education, including information about condoms and so
 on. But that's suppressing the fact that there is a value behind comprehensive
 sexual education as well. That value is saving lives. That is a value.</p>
<p>And the people who I speak to who are working to combat abstinence-only and
 are working to get decent HIV prevention information out there are deeply moral-values-driven
 people. They are deeply concerned about saving lives in Africa, about saving
 young people in this country from HIV infection.</p>
<p>And so I think that--this doesn't go to your question about tolerance, but
 I do feel, because we believe in science, we tend to allow our side to be seen
 as the scientific secular side versus the values side. As opposed to saying:
 You have a value, which is to lay down these moral lines in the sand and just
 dare anyone to cross them or pay the consequences if they do. We have a value,
 which is to save lives. At any cost. Damn the ideology. You know, we're gonna
 do what it takes to save lives.</p>
<p>And you can apply that to questions of whether the war on Iraq is just or unjust
 and to a whole huge realm of policies where I think there is a lot of room for
 critics of the Christian Right values agenda to critique it not only based on
 bogus science and based on religious fantasies of End Times and all that, but
 also to say, well,<em> we have a different value system </em>. This is what
 our value system is. I think there is a way to articulate values that aren't
 exclusive in the way that the evangelical Christian Right does.</p>
<p>I went to an event the other night at Riverside Church, which was an interfaith
 dialogue in response to the elections. Very strong Christian religious voices
 there, talking about the dangers of the link that's been made between Christianity
 and empire and really trying to return Christianity to something that is primarily
 about protecting the poor and the disenfranchised. Very strong Jewish statements.
 Manning Marable was also on the program, and he's, as far as I know, a secular
 socialist in his leanings. There was an imam there. And there was really a sense
 that there could be some joint moral values that were articulated from an interfaith
 place and also from a religious-secular place, that there are some shared values
 that do drive people.</p>
<p>I think that, at least provisionally, one of the solutions at this moment is
 to really be saying, we're opposing your policies from a values perspective
 also. We value human life and human dignity and so on.</p>
<p><b> RW: </b>I think that is really important. I think it is true.we are concerned
 with the facts, we are concerned with a lot of the different issues, and people
 go and think about them and spend a lot of time researching them and organizing
 around them and this sort of thing. But somehow, I think there is something
 about people, if you look at human societies, people need to understand the
 world and they need to have meaning in the world, they need to understand what
 it means to be human in whatever environment and social setting they are in.
 And if we don't speak to that from whatever perspective--on a progressive or
 a radical or revolutionary perspective, secular or religious--then we cede all
 that ground. And there's a lot of turmoil in people's lives these days, especially.
 And we're either speaking to it or we're giving all that ground to these people
 who will be very happy to offer very absolute views on that. So I guess I am
 mostly agreeing, not really asking something here.</p>
<p>But just to round things out, and also out of curiosity before closing, you
 knew that there was a problem that you were going to go investigate. But what
 was the most surprising, or the thing that you keep thinking about them afterwards,
 that stood out?</p>
<p><b> EK:</b> Well, there were a couple things, experiences I had, that really
 affected my thinking. One, which I do recount in the book, which was very striking
 to me, was an encounter I had with one of the abstinence educators in Tennessee
 who confessed to me at one point that several of her friends who'd been teaching
 their children abstinence for their whole growing up now had pregnant teenage
 daughters. You know, I really thought she was confessing to me that there were
 some faults in the abstinence approach when she told me this. But then she said
 that they really didn't regret it at all. That they felt actually very good
 that they'd given a clear moral message throughout, even though they hadn't
 been effective with their own daughters.</p>
<p>I just turned that over and over in my mind, for weeks afterwards. That's when
 it really hit me that their approach to all these public health issues, whether
 drug addiction, HIV infection, teen pregnancy, is not actually about results.
 That's not what they're actually trying to do. That's what public health people
 are trying to achieve, but that's not what they are trying to achieve.</p>
<p>What they're really trying to achieve is setting a clear moral standard, and
 they really care that it is clear and strong and that it is clearly communicated.
 And that people hear that and if they cross the line they will pay the consequences,
 but at least they really know what that standard is.</p>
<p>I see that reflected in the evangelical Christian perspective, which is that
 it really doesn't matter how much you've sinned-- you know, the amount of generosity
 they feel towards George Bush who spent decades being just a complete drunk
 and probably drug addict and womanizer--but as long as you get to that point
 where you embrace what is correct, you embrace Jesus, you embrace their moral
 code, then all is forgiven. So it's okay if someone gets pregnant as a teenager,
 as long as they get to that point where they acknowledge they were wrong or
 they sinned or made a mistake and correct their way and embrace Jesus and they'll
 have a beautiful afterlife.</p>
<p>I think that's a really important thing to keep in mind in a lot of these public
 health debates in particular. No matter what kind of smokescreens they put up,
 they are not really interested in results. And if you try to interpret it that
 way, you kind of get confused about what they're really saying.</p>
<p>The other thing that was pretty surprising to me, I guess, because I think
 of the administration as so much more savvy than this, is that they really had
 only given the faith-based grants to Christian groups. You'd think they would
 be smart enough to have given out some of the grants to Muslim or Jewish charities
 or something to cover their tail. But to me, that was really revealing of just
 how bald their approach to all of this is.</p>
<p></p>
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