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The Christian Right and the Rising Power of the Evangelical Political Movement
CHRIS HEDGES: ...Over the last few decades these radical religious broadcasters, who have essentially taken control of the airwaves, have built a parallel information and entertainment service that is piped into tens of millions of American homes as a way of essentially indoctrinating listeners and viewers with this very frightening ideology. I would second most of what your previous guest said, except that I don't believe, and -- I just, you know, for your listeners and viewers, will reiterate that I grew up in the Church. My father was a Presbyterian minister. I have a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School, which is what you get if you are going to be a minister, although I was not ordained. For me, this is not a religious movement. It's a political movement.

If you look at the ideology that pervades this movement, and the term we use for it is dominionism, it comes from Genesis, where the sort of founders of this movement, Rousas Rushdoony and others, talk about how God gave man -- this is a very patriarchal movement -- dominion over the land. And dominionists believe that they have been tasked by God to create the Christian society through violence, I would add. Violence, the aesthetic of violence is a very powerful component within this movement. The ideology, when you parse it down and look what it's made up of, is essentially an ideology of exclusion and of hatred. It is a totalitarian ideology. It is not religious in any way. These people quote, as they did at this convention, selectively and with gross distortions from the Gospels. You cannot read the four Gospels and walk away and tell me that Jesus was not a pacifist. I'm not a pacifist, but Jesus clearly was. They draw from the Book of Revelations the only time in the Bible, and that's a very questionable book, as Biblical scholars have pointed out for centuries, the only time when you can argue that Jesus endorsed violence and the apocalyptic visions of Paul. And they do this to create an avenging Christ.

They have built a vision of America that is radically -- and a vision of this -- and latched onto a religious movement or awakening that is radically different from previous awakenings, and there have been several throughout American history. In all religious revivals, Christian religious revivals in American history, the pull was to get believers to remove themselves from the contaminants of secular society. This one is very, very different. It is about taking control of secular society. And, of course, I think, as you and others have done such a good job of pointing out, they have built this dangerous alliance with the neoconservatives to essentially create across denominational lines. And we saw this at the convention with the, you know, radical Catholics with -- even there were even people from the Salvation Army; they have recently begun reaching out to the Mormons -- a kind of united front. Those doctrinal differences are still there and still stock, but a front to create what they term a “Christian America.”

And this is an America where people like you and me have no place. And you don't have to take my word for it, turn on Christian broadcasting, listen to Christian radio. Listen to what they say about people like us. It's not a matter that we have an opinion they disagree with. It's not a matter of them de-legitimizing us, which they are. It's a matter of them demonizing us, of talking us -- describing us as militant secular humanists, moral relativists, both of which terms I would not use to describe myself, as a kind of counter-militant ideology that is anti-Christian and that essentially propelled by Satan that they must destroy. Listen to their own language. You know, when in “Justice Sunday,” listen -- you know, I urge everyone to go back and look closely at what James Dobson, head of Focus on the Family, said. He talked about Roe v. Wade causing the biggest holocaust in the 20th century. There is a frightening kind of revisionism and a kind of moral equation of a magnitude that, you know, having lived through disintegrating states in Yugoslavia and other places, essentially divides -- destroys the center, divides the American public, and creates a very dangerous and frightening culture war. And that's what these people are about. ...

AMY GOODMAN: You also talk, Chris Hedges, about the presence of the Israeli government, the tourism industry at this major convention of national religious broadcasters. Can you talk about why they were there?

CHRIS HEDGES: Yes. You know, this is an alliance that for those of us who covered Israel and the Middle East is not a new one. But -- and has been built up over the years, in purely economic terms, because of the second Palestinian uprising or Intifada, Israeli tourism, which is a large source, had been a large source of its revenue before this second uprising, has dropped off significantly. And the bulk of the visitors, foreign visitors, that come to Israel are these radical right Christian pilgrims. So there's an economic motive. That's why the Israeli tourism industry had the largest display booth at this convention in Anaheim. They also hosted a breakfast at which the very conservative Jewish social critic, Michael Medved, spoke along with the minister of tourism, along with a series of evangelical leaders.

And, you know, there is a funny kind of element to this alliance, because, of course, radical Christians believe in the Rapture, which by the way does not exist in the Bible. It's a creation. There's nothing about rapture anywhere in the Bible at all. The -- that Christ will return in the Middle East in actually an area around Iraq in the valley of Armageddon, there will be a final battle and believers will be lifted up into heaven and non-believers, which includes in the eyes of this movement, people who are what they call nominal Christians. People who they do not define as Bible-believing Christians, along with, of course, Jews, atheists, people of other faiths, will suffer the torments of hell. This is all chronicled in disgusting detail in the End Time series, these books by LaHaye that have sold 60 million copies. And that's never mentioned, because it's sort of the huge white elephant in the room that everyone tip-toes around. I mean, I think at its core, of course, it's a complete de-legitimization of Judaism itself, and a belief that Jewish believers are, of course, damned, but what has been convenient between these two movements is that it has united Messianic Jews in Israel with Messianic Christians in the United States.

And this Messianic unity believes that they have been ordained through, I think, if you listen to their rhetoric, a high degree of racism to dominate the Middle East and, in particular, Muslims within the Middle East. The kind of language that they use against Muslims and that they used at this convention against Muslims, I don't think could be used against any other racial group in this country. ...

...I think it's very dangerous to demonize the followers of the movement, and we have to realize, and I want to make clear that when I'm speaking about those people, I'm speaking about primarily the leadership. I think also we have to realize that this is a very different type of evangelical movement from the one that I grew up with. These people are not Billy Graham. They are not Luis Palau. Essentially, these kinds of evangelicals, it's not a theology that I embraced, but it is one that I learned to live with, it's about personal salvation. It comes with a political conservatism, but not a political radicalism. Billy Graham did not, you know, spend a lot of time talking about creating the Christian state or even the fires of hell. He talked a lot more about the joys of salvation. These people have been shunted aside. And we saw it, as Pastor Phelps told us, with the destruction of the Southern Baptist Convention.

And there was -- you know, it was not accidental. These people in the early 1980s, late 1970s, people like Pat Robertson and others, met to create a political force, to take over religious institutions. They have now deeply divided the Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church, as well as secular institutions. People would come down for seminars at Regent University and be taught, you know, Robert’s Rules of Orders and told to run for local school boards and, of course, take over the Republican Party, which they did. And they have pushed out conservatives, not only conservative republicans, but people we would call conservative Christians, and created an entirely new and different movement. Many of the followers, and I count -- I come from Maine, and some of my own family can be counted as members, I suppose, of the religious right, are well-meaning, decent, hard-working good people who are responding to the kind of moral rot that we do have within our society. Unfortunately, I think they're being manipulated and used by this leadership. ...