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With The Evangelical Air Force
As Christian broadcasting's leading lights gathered at the National Religious Broadcasters' convention in Anaheim, California, only power-mongering and profiteering could keep their contradictions from bubbling to the surface

...It might seem ironic for McDonald to invoke the spectre of persecution at the convention of a group that represents the interests of 1700 broadcasters and which enjoys unfettered access to congressional Republicans and the White House. The NRB's influence was best summarized by its new CEO, Frank Wright, who, in describing a recent lobbying excursion to Capitol Hill, said, "We got into rooms we've never been in before. We got down on the floor of the Senate and prayed over Hillary Clinton's desk." Wright went on to rally support for the NRB's handpicked candidate for FCC commissioner, whom he refused to name, and rail against federal hate crime legislation because, "Calls for tolerance are often a subterfuge when everything will be tolerated except Christian truth."

Given the NRB's political muscle, the persecution mentality that undergirded its convention seemed more like a justification for its members' aggressive profiteering and politicking than a cry for social justice. But at a gathering where women who had had multiple abortions organized to prevent other women from doing the same, where Israeli Jews heaped effusive affection upon evangelicals who cheerfully predicted their doom at the dawn of the apocalypse, and where evangelical leaders who warned of Islam's imperial ambitions hatched plans to "take over cities for Christ," the theme of victimization was only one of many contradictions looming just beneath the surface.

Such contradictions are inherent in the Christian Right, and might have translated into internecine conflict long ago, balkanizing the movement and curtailing its influence, had its leaders not so assiduously cultivated Jesus as a unifying symbol of the their will to power....

...Perhaps the most startling moment of the morning was an appearance by popular Christian Zionist author, Kay Arthur of Precepts Ministries. "I love America," Arthur said, her voice quivering with emotion. "But if it came to a choice between Israel and America, I would stand with Israel." While the crowd applauded tepidly, I looked around and saw more than a few faces cringing with embarrassment. Arthur went on to read excerpts from the Book of Revelations, painting a surreal image of Jesus seated in a throne floating above Jerusalem, rapturing all the world's true believers up to Heaven. She left the fate of unreconstructed Jews to the imagination....

...Like everything else about Dobson, his passive attitude was calculated. The evening was to belong to Ryan, who dominated the discussion with long, blustery yarns about everything from his passion for skateboarding to his views on abortion. With close-cropped hair, gauge earrings and a handlebar mustache reminiscent of the biker from the Village People, Ryan had studiously cast himself as a rebel for Christ. But behind his bad-boy veneer, he is being groomed as the heir to his dad's political empire. Adopted by his parents when he was six months old, Ryan interned for a year at Washington's premier right-wing Christian think tank, the Family Research Council (website), which his father founded, and today is dispatched across the country for speaking engagements before evangelical youth groups, which his father promotes.

While at the NRB, Ryan explained the logic behind his latest book, 2Die4, a sequel to his other ghostwritten masterpiece, Be Intolerant: Because Some Things Are Just Stupid. "Kids today are looking for something to die for, they're looking for a cause," Ryan said. "If you give them something to die for, they'll go to the edge of the earth for you. Kids like that give me hope for revolution in America."

During a brief Q&A session, I asked Ryan if he thought there were any specific causes kids should die for. I wanted to know if he sought to literally usher children toward martyrdom like some Hamas lieutenant or was just using jarring rhetoric to spur apathetic teens to activism....

...In James Dobson's War on America, a 1998 tell-all book by Dobson's former radio co-host, Gil Alexander Moegerle recounts a conversation he had with the late Stan Mooneyham, former president of the evangelical relief group World Vision. "Dobson believes he has no dark side," Mooneyham told Moegerle. "He doesn't accept his shadow, which only means he has pushed it into the cellar and locked the door. But it will someday roar out and do him in." I wondered if his son might become that shadow.

Of course, Dobson is unlikely to abdicate his position at the helm of the Christian Right any time soon. He still serves as the moral beacon for a movement that enjoys unprecedented influence in Washington and is resurgent throughout the world. It remains to be seen if the stark, inherent contractions of his movement will slow its swelling ranks or impede its increasingly ambitious agenda.