With God on Their Side: George W. Bush and the Christian Right
The book Amy Goodman hailed as "classic muckraking at its best."
When asked which single issue most affected their vote in the last presidential election, more than one in five Americans said "moral values"�and 78 percent of these voters chose to reelect President Bush. Indeed, Christian fundamentalists made up close to 40 percent of the president's electorate in 2004, and their turnout increased by some four million voters over 2000.
As Esther Kaplan shows in her richly detailed investigation, it's no wonder the Christian right voted for Bush in droves�their loyal support in 2000 produced fantastic results. While organizations that offer abortion counseling and services or help to prevent HIV see their funds cut, church groups receive millions in federal dollars to promote sexual abstinence and marriage (provided, of course, it is heterosexual). Bush has appointed a Christian right dream team to the federal courts, dedicated to tearing down what one such judge calls "the so-called separation of church and state." Religious zeal even shapes Bush's foreign policy, as Christian belief in the end times spurs the administration's support for hard-line policies in Israel.
A prescient study of the Christian right's growing political clout, With God on Their Side is essential reading for anyone concerned about America's direction.
Customer Review: A Great Book--Except For The Subtitle
This is not exactly a non-partisan book. Liberal Democrats will love it and conservative Republicans will be angry. I personally believe that Esther Kaplan has proven her case that the George W Bush administration is fundamentally incompatible with American traditions of democratic government. She is especially good when discussing exactly how a phony religiosity is being used as a cover for an elitist economic agenda and a foreign policy out of touch with the real world.
There are excellent chapters about the Republican romance with pseudo-science, the current administration's inept attempts to deal with the worldwide AIDS crisis, and GOP attempts to mix moralism and public health policy. But the best chapter is the one about stacking the courts. The author argues that an essential part of the Reagan-Bush agenda has been an attempt to remake the courts as a reactionary force for generations to come. And the net result is that average Americans have no legal protections against the corporate world, laws to protect disabled people are invalidated, and even Constitutional rights supposedly in force since the founding of the Nation are compromised.
The subtitle and numerous comments throughout the book assume that the "Christian Right" is somehow connected to the Christian Faith. However I do not believe that it is correct to blame those of us in the Christian Community for the fact that there are unbelievers, total phonies, and outrageous hypocrites within the ranks. The "Pseudo-Religious Right" would be more accurate terminology.
Customer Review: Contains much information crucial for understanding how the Right is hurting America
Let me preface this review by stating my own religious background, so that my comments here can be more accurately understood. I consider myself a devout Christian and an adherent to orthodox Christian beliefs as contained in most Christian creeds. I am not a fundamentalist, however. I was raised Southern Baptist, but no longer consider myself one because of the convention's continuing embrace of nutzoid right wing ideology. The main break for me came when the SBC proclaimed women to be properly subservient to men. Also, I have seen a increasing abandonment of traditional, defining Baptist beliefs such as the priesthood of the believers (THE central Baptist principle) and the separation of Church and State, which was pretty much a Baptist invention in the US. Politically I am of the far left, inspired almost entirely not by any political thinker but by repeated readings of the Sermon on the Mount. I am, of course, hardly the first Christian in history to have been so affected by these words of Christ.
My background therefore colors my reaction to this book. Like Kaplan I have grown increasingly dismayed by the role that right wing religion has come to play in American political life. Like Kaplan I believe that this influence has been uniformly awful. Like Kaplan, I think that everything possible must be undertaken to inform the public at large of the specific ways religious agendas are harming America. I think the book is not quite perfect, but it nonetheless contains a large amount of very useful information of which all voters need to be aware.
Let me point out two things that Kaplan does not raise, but that I believe at the heart of the matters at hand. First, one reason that the Founders wanted a sharp separation between Church and State (and despite the reinvented history of Pat Robertson and the Dominionists, there is absolutely no question of where they stood on the matter) was that they understood that if you introduced religion into politics, it essentially took on a party flavor. And the fortunes of specific parties waxed and waned. Madison understood this better than anyone. If you tie religion to specific political beliefs and stances, if the general public turns against those beliefs and stances, it turns against religion as well. We see this happening right now with my old Southern Baptist Convention, with poll numbers increasingly showing a broad negative perception of Southern Baptists because of their involvement in politics. I think these numbers are going to increase and I believe that the stagnant membership in the SBC churches will begin to decline. All of this could have been predicted twenty-five years ago when the denomination shifted sharply to the right.
The second thing that I want to point out that Kaplan neglects is a fact that a disturbingly small number seem to be aware of: most Christians in the United States do not support the far right. Most Christians are either moderates or liberals. Roman Catholics, for instance, tend to be anti-abortion and sympathetic to many so-called pro-family measures (though there is great diversity in the American Catholic church, since the vast majority of Catholics believe in birth control, despite the teachings of Rome, and many support a woman's right to choose whether to have an abortion as well), but on most other issues the Church is either moderate or left leaning. And while contemporary Protestantism is dominated in the public eye by Southern Baptists and the Pentecostal denominations, the large number of protestant denominations that are much further to the left are ignored. Even many Baptists, such as American Baptists and Swedish Baptists, are much further to the right than the SBC.
Still, none of this changes the importance of Kaplan's book. In a series of chapters she shows specifically how the religious right has penetrated American government and begun to dictate policy in increasingly disturbing ways. Several chapters of her book cover aspects of the relation of the religious right to the Bush administration and the Republican Party of which most people are already aware. In other words, that those on the religious right overwhelmingly support the GOP and provide them with funding. What most Americans are unaware of is the incredibly harmful influence that the religious right has had on public policy.
The damage that religious right beliefs have been doing comes in several key areas. For instance, the fear of Darwinian science has led to an assertion of non-scientific creationist ideas in weird and unexpected places. In our National Parks, for instance, books reflecting the almost universally and globally held scientific consensus have been replaced by equally universally and globally disdained books reflecting a creationist understanding of geology. In other words, books reflecting our foremost experts on geology have been replaced by writings by ideologues.
Understandings of the ultimate course of world history have led to an uncritical support for Israel and an utter disregard for the Palestinians. Granted, the Bush administration is hardly the first to take this position, but even in the Reagan administration there was unqualified criticism of Israel for the expansion of the settlements. Under Bush and his similarly minded religious right cohorts, we have seen the most hands-off approach towards Israel since the nation was created in 1948. What is truly scary is that the religious right in truth has no genuine concern for Israel or the Jews. Their only concern, as seen in the violently anti-Semitic LEFT BEHIND series (I say this because there as in much religious right ideology Jews are not taken as they are and wish to be, but for the role that the right presumes they are destined to play, i.e. mainly as cannon fodder in a series of unspeakably violent tragedies) is in making conditions right for Armageddon and a massive military conflict. There is absolutely no question that a dramatic escalation of military activities in Israel and Palestine would be greeted with great joy in the Religious Right, while an effective two-state solution guaranteeing the Palestinians a nation and recognition of their rights would be cause for consternation and regret. As Kaplan rightly points out, are these the kinds of people we want in charge of our foreign policy?
Beliefs in sexual morality have caused almost unprecedented problems in public policy. World bodies dealing with AIDS have become increasingly frustrated with the US in attempts to deal with AIDS (a frustration that has increased since the publication of Kaplan's book). While most organizations want to deal with the issue taking a multi-tiered approach, including condoms, the US representatives, a disturbing number of them without backgrounds in public health but instead chosen for their religious positions, insist on emphasizing abstinence above all others. Increasingly the US has come to be perceived as on the margins of this and other world health issues. If the US didn't have large amounts of cash and political clout, we would be completely ignored by the international community. We are largely irrelevant in terms of the ideas that we have to offer.
Abstinence has also inflicted damage on domestic policy. Increasingly sex education in the US has come to reflect only the beliefs of the religious right ideologues. Although it is too early to say for sure, but it appears that abstinence only education is considerably less effective in preventing pregnancy rates. In fact, pregnancy rates have gone up slightly among teens even while sexual activity has gone down.
These are only a few of the areas that Kaplan covers in her book. She writes extensively about how right wing religious ideology has harmed AIDS research, almost all public health research, environmental research and policy, and a host of other areas.
I do want to point out what I think is the book's most serious shortcoming: a minimal discussion of the Dominionist movement. There is a brief mention of this, but the small but very influential group of people who intentionally stay beneath the radar but who have as their agenda the recreation of America as a Christian Nation exert a huge amount of influence on the religious right. Even most on the Right are unaware of their true beliefs. The Dominionists bring forward only their least objectionable beliefs, such as the anti-historical claim that the US was created as a Christian nation and that we should be once again. But they keep many of their beliefs out of the public eye, such as the belief of the most ardent Dominionists that no women should be allowed to work and should stay home and be caretakers (though given the fact that there are more women than men in the population, I am not sure how that works out). Or their internal debates as to whether homosexuals should be stoned to death or burned, i.e., the most ardent Dominionists don't disagree over whether they should die, but only on the Biblically agreed method of execution. Luckily, other books similar to Kaplan's, such as Kevin Phillips AMERICAN THEOCRACY and Michele Goldberg's KINGDOM COMING address dominionism as great length. It is her failure to take up this incredibly important topic that keeps me from giving it five stars.
All of this leads to the question: what next? Books like this are a crucial first step. People like Sara Diamond and Frederick Clarkson have been warning us about the dangers of the far religious right for years. With polling showing that even most Republicans feel that the Religious Right has too much influence in American life, it is looking like the mood in the country is shifting against the religious ideologues. On a policy level, the success of the Religious Right has depended entirely on the general ignorance of the public. Not many Americans would support "abstinence only" as the primary approach to dealing with AIDS in Africa. Or refusing to fund any AIDS studies because it might be of benefit to gays (most Americans are opposed to Gay marriage, but support Civil unions and every other fundamental right available to US citizens). Information is the key. Books like Kaplan's, and those mentioned above by Phillips and Goldberg, or more specialized books such as Stephanie Hendricks's DIVINE DESTRUCTION: DOMINION THEOLOGY AND AMERICAN ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY are helping.
My recommendation for those coming to learn about these issues for the first time to read this and one other book. Kaplan is great in talking about the specific influences that the religious right is having on public polity. But she is somewhat weak on the ideology under girding the religious right. Michele Goldberg's KINGDOM COMING: THE RISE OF CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM is basically an updating of the work by Sara Diamond and Frederick Clarkson in the 1990s. Together, these two books can help expose the pernicious influence that the religious right has had on contemporary American politics. My hope is that gradually my fellow Christians will come to their senses and start moving back to a Biblically instead of politically mandated understanding of the role of Christians in society.
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