It seemed like an auspicious debut: The new magazine Hi was just off the presses and it generated heavy buzz. It was glossy. It was young. It was fresh and hip and just a little bit sexy. The multimillion-dollar launch across 14 countries got headlines worldwide. And for the U.S. State Department that seemed to be good news, because Hi is a government publication issued to win hearts and minds in the Arab and Muslim world.
While produced by a private company, Hi is just one part of a U.S. campaign to convince citizens of Arab and Muslim countries to look a little more favorably on the United States. Critics have called it “soft-sell propaganda”; press reports from the Middle East have suggested that much of the young-adult target audience finds it laughable. All of which suggests that it will have little impact in offsetting long-held negative attitudes toward the United States — suspicions worsened almost universally by the ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In “Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush’s War in Iraq,” co-authors Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber explain why efforts like Hi have almost inevitably failed. “The United States lost the propaganda war a long time ago,” Rampton told Salon, citing the wisdom of an Arab-American news executive. “They could have the prophet Mohammed doing their public relations, and it wouldn’t help.”
That hasn’t stopped the Bush administration from trying. Last Thursday, the White House announced its plan to launch a round-the-clock television station, a competitor to the al-Jazeera network — albeit with a slightly different perspective. Congress has approved $32 million to fund the project, with another $30 million to follow soon.
But to Stauber and Rampton, projects like Hi and the new TV station prove only that the Bush administration understands neither the Middle East nor the art of communication. Aided by Roger Ailes’ flag-waving “news” crew at the Fox network and the timidity of the mainstream press, the propaganda campaign at home has been relatively effective, they say. But though Bush doesn’t seem to realize it, the Middle East isn’t Texas. Across the Middle East and throughout the Muslim world, people loathe America for its Israel policy and for its decades of manipulation and arrogance. No glossy magazine or advertising campaign is going to change that. What might work, Stauber and Rampton say, is having a real dialogue with the Middle East — not just talking, but listening, too.
“Weapons of Mass Deception” is a readable, witty, fact-filled catalog of the U.S. government’s attempts to counter the tide of anti-U.S. sentiment that the Bush administration abruptly discovered in the Muslim world after Sept. 11, 2001. It starts with the story of Charlotte Beers, former chairwoman and CEO of two of the world’s top ad agencies, J. Walter Thompson and Ogilvy & Mather. She was hired after 9/11, as Colin Powell explained, “to change from just selling the U.S. … to really branding foreign policy.”
Efforts like these eventually cost $1 billion a year. Where did the money go?
A $5 million failed “Shared Values” advertising campaign was a typical Beers project. The TV commercial showed average Muslim Americans going about their daily lives, enjoying the lack of religious and racial discrimination in the U.S. Meant to be broadcast in Islamic countries, the “Shared Values” ad prominently featured a woman running in shorts. Deemed offensive to Muslims, the ad was not permitted to be broadcast on many important television stations in Egypt and other largely Islamic countries.
Another Beers’ idea was Radio Sawa, a station playing music by corn-fed American superstars. Radio Sawa broadcasts plenty of pop, but also features hourly news with a distinctly pro-America perspective. Rampton and Stauber admit that Radio Sawa has had a certain level of popularity — but they say that most of its audience simply tunes out the talking.
Early this year, polls by the Pew Research Center indicated that the United States’ public image had plummeted around the globe, including in the Arab countries targeted by Beers and her “public diplomacy” crew. When Egyptians were asked in the poll if they had a “favorable” view of the United States, only 6 percent said yes.
With her campaign subject to critical harpooning, Beers resigned in March of this year, citing “health reasons.” Much of the media was surprisingly explicit in calling her State Department work a failure.
Much of the research for “Weapons of Mass Deception” came from their Web site, PR Watch, and their “Disinfopedia,” an “encyclopedia of propaganda” about “public relations firms, think tanks, industry-funded organizations and industry-friendly experts.” Previous joint projects by the former investigative journalists include the books “Trust Us, We’re Experts: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles With Your Future” and “Toxic Sludge Is Good for You: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry.”
Rampton and Stauber spoke with Salon by phone from Madison, Wis. They explained why American pop radio isn’t going to prevent future al-Qaida attacks, how the Pentagon may be falling for its own propaganda, and why Bush turned the “war on terror” into the war in Iraq.
What’s the difference between government-sponsored P.R. and propaganda?
Sheldon Rampton: From the very outset, public relations was steeped in propaganda, but the term “public relations” sounds less offensive to most ears, so it’s the term they prefer. Public relations is constantly looking for new euphemisms for itself, because every term they use for it eventually becomes synonymous with manipulation or deception in the public’s eyes.
So they come up with other terms, like “community relations” or “reputation management” or “perception management.”
What does a “perception manager” — or, more specifically, Charlotte Beers — do?
Rampton:They spend their days planning propaganda. [laughs] The job of someone who’s doing “public diplomacy” is to try to come up with ways of influencing the opinions of people outside of the United States to view the U.S. and its policies in a more favorable light. That description of their task is not terribly different from the way most scholars would define propaganda.
In the book, you describe the P.R. efforts of Charlotte Beers in Arab and Muslim countries. Can you describe her tenure in the State Department a bit here?
Rampton: Charlotte Beers’ task was not to promote the war in Iraq or the war in Afghanistan. Her specific task was to create a more favorable impression of the United States overseas, especially in Arab and Muslim countries.
Charlotte Beers’ work was a good example of the limits of propaganda as a form of communication. It’s one of the myths about propaganda that it’s some all-powerful force that can hypnotize people into accepting things that they wouldn’t otherwise believe.
Propaganda is sometimes successful at deceiving people, but oftentimes it’s much less successful at influencing its target population than it is at helping the propaganda team deceive themselves. I think Charlotte Beers’ campaign is an example of that.
Every quantitative indicator that anyone has shows that her campaign, rather than helping, probably contributed to the decline of public opinion regarding the United States. Several of her campaigns became objects of ridicule.
The approach of her campaign — that you can “brand” America — is something that’s bound to attract resentment. It contains a number of undemocratic assumptions about how communication should happen.
“Branding America”? What does “branding” mean, in regards to a country?
Rampton: Charlotte Beers was an expert in “brand management.” Branding, in general, is the idea of getting people to associate emotional values with the product or idea you’re trying to sell.
This is what advertisers are always saying in one form or another. “Sell the sizzle, not the steak.” They try to get you to buy an automobile, not because it is a form of transportation, but because it makes you feel powerful. Or it makes you feel sexy. They try to sell things on the basis of these emotional reactions that they’re trying to get you to develop.
That manipulation is tremendously successful in a lot of cases, right?
Rampton: It is successful in advertising. But the problem Charlotte Beers was facing when she did her campaign was that she was trying to communicate to an audience that was much more hostile and likely to view with suspicion everything she was trying to communicate.
In the book, we quote Osama Siblani, publisher of the Arab American News. His point is that the United States has been doing propaganda in Arab and Muslim countries for a long time, the people there are used to it, and the skepticism they feel is from decades of history. The way he put it is that the United States lost the propaganda war a long time ago. They could have the prophet Mohammed doing their public relations, and it wouldn’t help.
John Stauber: Also, there’s essentially two types of propaganda: advertising and public relations. The difference is that advertising is usually perceptible and in your face. If you spend enough money on it and it’s clever enough and you utilize effects and thrills, you might be able to sell a product.
Advertising can work well for branding because it’s so pervasive. But it’s not subtle. I think the idea that an advertising approach — and Charlotte Beers was a product of Madison Avenue — to “brand” America and change the minds of Muslims about American policies was absolutely the wrong way to go.
There’s this split in the propaganda industry and between the advertising and the P.R. people. The split came about because of the idea that the best approach to manipulating public opinion in Muslim countries was to turn to advertising.
Advertising is blatant manipulation. If there were ads on our TV trying to convince us that Osama bin Laden’s ideology and religion were really wonderful, it would be just as ridiculous as these ads Charlotte Beers was trying to run in Muslim countries.
If there were a P.R. plan that didn’t insult the intelligence of the audience and that was more nuanced, could it change public opinion of the U.S. in Arab and Muslim countries?
Stauber: Overall, the idea that people who are deeply wounded and offended by their personal perception of U.S. policy and the role of it in their lives — the idea that those people can be completely turned around with pop music, advertising and third-party experts … just shows the hubris of the U.S. governmental approach to public opinion outside the United States.
Rampton: If they had had more dialogue, instead of one-way attempts at communication, then they’d have had more success. But even there, the main thing that undermines the propaganda campaign has been the Bush administration’s push to war.
John and I wrote — in our first book together, titled “Toxic Sludge Is Good for You” — a passage about a P.R. campaign to sell people on the idea that “good” sludge is a good fertilizer. Part of that campaign involved trying to persuade people to live next door to places where “good” sludge was being used as fertilizer, like on the farm next to them.
They tried to persuade them that it was harmless to their health … and that it didn’t even smell bad. [laughs] We got a letter from a woman who said: “They tell us there’s no danger, but they also tell us there’s no smell. And every day when I walk outside my door I can smell this stuff, so how am I supposed to believe it when they say there’s no danger, when they won’t even admit there’s a smell?”
The evidence of people’s experience is a powerful thing in itself. And the experience of people in Muslim and Arab countries is as powerful a factor — probably more powerful a factor — in shaping their opinion of the United States than anything we can say by way of propaganda.
Why weren’t people in the Arab world pleased with the United States for the removal of Saddam Hussein from Iraq?
Rampton: As long as there’s a contradiction between our stated goals for the region, which is that we support democracy and good things for the people in the region, and our actions, which consist of allying ourselves with repressive regimes so we can get their oil, public opinion is always going to be in a downward spiral.
Stauber: With Saddam Hussein, for decades the United States essentially looked the other way. People who lived in the Middle East, people who have suffered under Saddam Hussein, understood very well that as long as he was serving the interests of the U.S., he was our friend and ally. His great crime in the eyes of the Bush administration wasn’t gassing his own people, it was appropriating oil that belonged to the ruling family of Kuwait.
There’s a deep and understandable cynicism, and it’s not just a feeling that, ‘Hey, we’re Arabs, we’re Muslims, we don’t get any respect from the United States.’ It’s a long, sordid history of U.S. support for horribly repressive regimes. Saddam Hussein was a wonderful ally to the U.S., until he misunderstood how far he could go.
So it isn’t possible for the U.S. to strike a balance in regard to hot-button issues? On one side, for example, you’d have the support the U.S. gave to Muslims in Kosovo, and on the other, the situation in Palestine and the U.S. backing of Israel?
Stauber: I don’t think any of us really think that way. Just look at the U.S. response to France over this whole affair. I don’t see people boycotting Canadian maple syrup. But the Canadians very loudly kept out of this war and were proud not to support the U.S. in it. But France — there’s something about France! [laughs]
There’s this emotional, anti-France attitude in the U.S. that really was set off by France’s stand on this whole situation. Rational analysis may be a factor, but it’s based on a gut feeling about how we’re treated.
Rampton: There’s definitely an emotional component, but also, there’s a feeling in Arab nations and Muslim nations that the United States is supporting autocratic regimes ranging from Saudi Arabia to Morocco and giving nothing but lip service to democracy. And of course, then there’s huge resentment over Israel. And I think even if we do the right thing in a few places like Bosnia, it’s not going to outweigh the resentment they feel about the rest of things.
If you want to move the dial of public opinion away from that resentment, it’s only through a policy that’s consistently true to the principles that we say we stand for: democracy and respect for human rights. And that has not, thus far, been the policy of our government.
What do you say to other Americans who hate the idea that the United States is hated in some parts of the world? Isn’t it rational to want the U.S. to engage in some P.R. to help remedy that hatred, even if it is a shallow approach, since there is anti-American propaganda flowing the other way?
Rampton: There are two things happening right now, and one is the result of the U.S. policy that John and I have been focusing on. The other thing is the fact that for a variety of reasons, the United States has become the world’s sole standing superpower.
If you ever played the game of Risk you know that sooner or later one person would become more powerful than everyone else, and that every other player would start to worry about that one who was the most powerful on the board. And it didn’t have to do with whether we liked them or not. It had to do with the fact that the most powerful one on the board was the one we were most afraid of.
That’s part of the dilemma for the United States. We have become a superpower that at least imagines itself being capable of dominating the rest of the world without listening.
Yes, we definitely need a strategy for communicating with the rest of the world that changes the way they think about us. But a big part of that communication strategy has to involve changing the way we think about the rest of the world, and demonstrating our willingness to hear what they have to say and give them our attention.
One of the things that I found very striking after Sept. 11 was that this mood began to emerge in the United States that you could not say anything critical about U.S. foreign policy. You couldn’t try to list the reasons why this hatred exists toward the United States, without someone immediately piping up to say, “We’re so traumatized right now, it’s very insensitive of you even to bring that up. We can’t even discuss that now because the pain is just too intense.”
Stauber: Right, and there was even a phrase, “You’re blaming America,” “You’re saying we deserved it.” If you began a rational discussion about why it is that people in other countries might have a hatred for America — not a hatred to the point of flying jets into skyscrapers, but just a hatred — you couldn’t even discuss it. If you began to explore that, there’s right-wing counterattacks, and you’re just part of the “blame America” crowd.
Rampton: There are powerful taboos in place against listening to the reasons why people feel hostile toward the United States or discussing them in public. Until that happens [the taboos are removed], I don’t think we’ll be successful in changing anyone’s mind abroad about us.
You see some of the roots of this coming from the advertising-based P.R.? That the U.S. communicates only through one-direction blasts of information, and not through a conversation?
Rampton: Right. Propaganda is the attempt to influence the thinking of a target population regardless of whether what you’re saying is true or in their interests.
The message of the propaganda may be true or in their interest. For example, a very crude form of war propaganda is dropping leaflets to tell the enemy they’ll be killed unless they surrender. That may be true. It may be in their interest to surrender.
But from the point of view of the person dropping the leaflets of propaganda, you don’t care whether it’s true — you just want them to surrender. And often, propaganda, because of its nature, ends up producing messages that are not true and are not in the interest of that audience. That approach to communication is, in my opinion, fundamentally at odds with the very definition and concept of communication that is at the heart of democratic theories of how communication should take place.
In the democratic model of communication, every party is equal. You don’t have a privileged communicator whose job is to indoctrinate a passive audience. Everyone gets to speak, and everyone’s point of view has some validity. In the propaganda approach, the point of view of the people you’re trying to indoctrinate is mostly an obstacle to overcome.
Why do you think, given the failure of U.S. propaganda abroad, that the Bush administration has been so successful selling the war in Iraq to Americans?
Stauber: These major deceptions, the propaganda campaign that was waged in the United States that succeeded in confusing and misleading and fooling the American people, convinced the majority of Americans that indeed attacking Iraq was somehow a proper response to the terror attacks of 9/11. That Saddam Hussein was somehow in cahoots with al-Qaida in some way. That Iraqis were involved in the attacks on 9/11. That as Condoleezza Rice and other members of the State Department put it, “The next 9/11 might be a mushroom cloud over America” if we don’t do something about Saddam Hussein.
The question we asked at the end of the book is this: Was this the wrong war in the wrong place fought with the wrong weapons in the wrong time? Is this actually going to turn out to be something that will increase the terror threat against the United States?
And so far, it’s looking bad and getting worse.
One of the ironies here is that a critical reader, a critical thinker, someone who really wants to see what’s going on here — reading mainstream sources like the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Guardian, and listening to the BBC — could come to the same conclusions that we did. But that’s not where most Americans get their news. Most Americans get their news from television, which is probably the worst single source for providing factual information and analysis.
So you also hold TV news responsible, in some way, for the propaganda that surrounded this war?
Stauber: After 9/11, we saw how the Fox network exploited the terror attacks, wrapped itself in the flag and began beating this drumbeat for war. They exploited the fears that people felt and created what an executive from another network called “the Fox effect.”
First of all, the war could have never taken place if the media had done its job of questioning the administration rather than becoming an echo chamber and propaganda arm.
But the very specific story is how Fox used this jingoistic, hyperpatriotic, rah-rah, let’s-go-to-war coverage to gain a massive market share. Fox actually became the No. 1 source for most people in the United States to get their information about the war.
The reason we subtitled the book “The Uses of Propaganda in Bush’s War in Iraq” is because it wasn’t just the administration or the right-wing think tanks, it was also opportunists and networks like Fox who exploited 9/11 and launched their own propaganda campaign for their own purpose. The U.S. would go to war because Rupert Murdoch, who owns Fox, is of that ideological persuasion and thought it would be a good idea. And to gain market share. It’s really frightening to see how in the 21st century, there’s a huge economic benefit for a TV network for exploiting the fears of a nation to promote war.
Rampton: And the United States is not the only place that this has happened. In the last half of the book we talk about the comparison between the way the war was covered in the United States vs. in other parts of the world.
Just as there is the “Fox effect” in the Western world, there’s an opposite sort of thing going on in Arab and Muslim countries. The way they compete for market share is by getting to see who can present the most outrage and direct that outrage toward the United States. The ironic thing is that if you watch Arab television, and you can actually get some of it on the Web now, it looks a lot like Fox news! [laughs]
So is the fact that the Bush administration successfully “launched” the war in Iraq proof of how powerful propaganda is inside the U.S., if not in the rest of the world?
Rampton: People on all sides of the political spectrum — left, right and center — ascribe enormous power to the media. And it does have a lot of power to influence the way people think. Brian Eno reviewed our book in England. In his review, he commented that the most important thing the media does is not that it tells us what to think, but it tells us what to think about.
For the last year, we’ve all been thinking and talking about Iraq. We weren’t all thinking and talking about Iraq before the Bush administration put it on our agenda. Up until September of last year, the first year after Sept. 11, Iraq was a very minor part of the discussion about the war on terror until the Bush administration put it there.
But what that tells you about the limitations of propaganda is that as powerful as it can be at telling us what’s on the agenda, people still exercise quite a bit of independence in their own opinions.
I think the fact that our book is bouncing around as much as it is by word of mouth reflects that there is a substantial body of opinion in the United States that was never swayed by all the red, white and blue propaganda that we write about.
This article originally appeared on
AlterNet.
Why would any organization or social change movement want to ally itself with a community that’s energetic, excited about activism, highly motivated, increasingly visible, good at fundraising, good at getting into the news, increasingly populated by young people, and with a proven track record of mobilizing online in massive numbers on a moment’s notice?
If you need to ask that — maybe you shouldn’t be in political activism.
And if you don’t need to ask that — if reading that paragraph is making you clutch your chest and drool like a baby — maybe you should be paying attention to the atheist movement.
The so-called “new atheist” movement is definitely not so new. Atheists have been around for decades, and they’ve been organizing for decades. But something new, something big, has been happening in atheism in the last few years — atheism has become much more visible, more vocal, more activist, better organized, and more readily mobilized — especially online, but increasingly in the flesh as well. The recent Reason Rally in Washington, DC brought an estimated 20,000 attendees to the National Mall on March 24 — and that was in the rain. Twenty thousand atheists trucked in from around the country, indeed from around the world, and stood in the rain, all day: to mingle, network, listen to speakers and musicians and comedians, check out organizations, schmooze, celebrate, and show the world the face of happy, diverse, energetic, organized atheism.
Atheists are becoming a force to be reckoned with. Atheists are gaining clout. Atheists are becoming a powerful ally when we’re inspired to take action — and a powerful opponent when we get treated like dirt.
Case Study Number One, “Powerful Ally” Division: The million dollars currently being raised — and the goodness knows how many people being mobilized — for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s “Light the Night Walks,” by the non-theistic Foundation Beyond Beliefand the Todd Stiefel family.
The Stiefel Family and the Foundation Beyond Belief have wanted to make a large atheist contribution to the fight against cancer for some time. Like many people, Todd Stiefel has had many people in his life afflicted with cancer. His family has the resources to make a large financial donation to the fight against it. And as the largest non-theistic charitable organization in the world, the Foundation Beyond Belief was the perfect organization to channel and structure the Stiefel family’s matching offer — and to round up supporters for it.
But it was distressingly difficult to give this money away. If this whole “atheists donating pots of money to the fight against cancer” story seems familiar… you may be remembering theAmerican Cancer Society controversy, in which the ACS initially accepted a $250,000 matching offer from the Stiefel family and the Foundation Beyond Belief to participate as a national team in the ACS’s Relay for Life — and then, suddenly and mysteriously, turned it down. (And were then deluged with angry protests — and withdrawals of donations — when the story hit the Internet. More on that in a tic.)
That isn’t happening this time around. The Stiefel family and the Foundation Beyond Belief have found an organization that’s more than happy to partner with them in the fight against cancer. When Stiefel reached out to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, they cheerfully accepted his offer — a half million dollars in matching funds, as a “Special Friend” team partner in the LL&S’s “Light the Night” Walks, with the goal of uniting the freethought movement around the world to raise a million dollars for the fight against cancer. Andrea Greif, Director of Public Relations for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, says, “LLS is appreciative that Foundation Beyond Belief has set such a generous goal to help us beat blood cancer and we look forward to having their teams join LLS’s Light the Night Walk.” And Stiefel describes the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society as “enthusiastic at the prospect of working with us.” He went on to say, “We LOVE working with the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. They have been very kind, supportive and helpful. They have made it very clear that cancer doesn’t discriminate and neither do they. LLS just wants to put the mission of fighting cancer first.”
This could easily have been a controversial effort. For one thing, the Honored Hero for the FBB in this year’s Light the Night Walk is the recently deceased Christopher Hitchens — a hero to many in the atheist movement, but a very controversial figure to many outside of it (and indeed, even to many atheists). But Hitchens’ status as the FBB’s Honored Hero is apparently not an issue. The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society is accepting FBB’s partnership and generosity with open arms. And these efforts have been extremely effective. As of this writing, the Foundation Beyond Belief has already hit 50 LLS local teams — halfway to the 100 team minimum goal. (By the way: If you were ticked off about the American Cancer Society thing, and you want to translate that anger into action? Participating in the FBB’s Light the Night Walks in your area — or starting an FBB LTN team in your area– would be a great way to do that.)
And this isn’t an isolated incident. In recent months, the atheist community has proven to be extraordinarily good at raising money, visibility, and support for people and causes that capture their imagination. And they have exceptional skills when it comes to fundraising and hell-raising on the Internet.
When high school atheist Jessica Ahlquist was being harassed, bullied and threatened by her schoolmates and community for asking her public school to enforce the state/church separation laws and take down a prayer banner from the school auditorium, the atheist community rose to her aid, with an outpouring of love, admiration, and emotional support… and a college fund totaling over $62,000. When high school atheist Damon Fowler was being harassed, bullied, and threatened by his schoolmates and community for standing up against prayer at his public high school graduation — and was kicked out of his home by his parents — the atheist community rose to his aid, with an outpouring of sympathy and support… and a college fund totaling over $31,000. When Camp Quest, the summer camp for children of non-theist families, was engaged in a major fundraising drive last year, several atheist bloggers (conflict of interest alert — including me) teamed up in a fundraising contest involving a series of grandiose and increasingly ridiculous dares and forfeits, ultimately raising $30,074.80 for the cause.
Atheists aren’t just raising money for their own, either. On Kiva — the microlending organization working to alleviate poverty and empower people in need around the world — theAtheists, Agnostics, Skeptics, Freethinkers, Secular Humanists and Non-Religious team is the #1 all-time leader in amount of money loaned… not just among religious affiliation teams, but among all the teams on Kiva. The Reddit atheist community raised over $200,000 for Doctors Without Borders last November, in a fundraising drive that came close to crashing Reddit with the traffic. The Foundation Beyond Belief has been supporting charitable and human rights projects for over two years — well before the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society project began — and to date has raised over a quarter of a million dollars to support human rights, the environment, education, child welfare, anti-poverty efforts, public health, and more.
And the power of atheist organizing extends beyond simple fundraising. To give just two recent examples: When preacher Sean Harris was caught on tape exhorting parents to beat their gay kids, the local atheist communities in the area immediately began sounding the alarm — and rounded up activists to protest at the church the following Sunday. According to Priscilla Parker, President of Military Atheists & Secular Humanists, 27 of the Sean Harris protestors last Sunday were from secular/atheist groups. That may not sound like much — but when you realize that there were a total of about 70 protestors at the event, the atheist presence suddenly looks a lot more significant. (Especially for an event in a highly religious, largely conservative town — and especially for an event that was organized on extremely short notice.) And when American Airlines was planning to air an anti-vaccination ad on their planes’ video systems and in their in-flight magazines, the atheist and skeptical communities dove into action: publicizing the Change.org petition against the Australian Vaccination Network’s ad, and slamming the decision all around the Internet. The story went viral, in large part because of the Internet power of atheists and skeptics — and the joint effort between heathens and other activists ultimately pressured the airline into rejecting the ad.
When a cause catches their hearts, the atheist community can be a powerful ally.
And when a cause catches their hearts in a different way, they can be a powerful opponent.
The American Cancer Society snafu is probably the most obvious example of this. When the ACS turned down the Foundation Beyond Belief’s offer to participate as a national team in the Relay for Life, they apparently didn’t expect much pushback. But when the story broke, it went viral — and made misery for the ACS. For weeks, the ACS was deluged with emails, letters, phone calls, and posts to their Facebook wall. For weeks, their Facebook wall was taken up almost entirely with angry posts about the story. Importantly, while the chief instigators of the rage-fest were atheists, they were quickly followed by a crowd of religious believers, who were just as outraged at the anti-atheist bigotry — and at the rejection of perfectly good money — as the heathens. And very importantly, a flood of people halted their donations to the ACS… including many people who had been regular donators for years.
But there are plenty of other examples as well. The abovementioned American Airlines anti-vaccination ad. The abovementioned Sean Harris protest. The sublimely ridiculousGelatogate, in which a local gelato merchant in Springfield, Missouri posted a sign in his store window reading, “Skepticon [a skeptical/ atheist conference] is NOT Welcomed To My Christian Business”… and then got a faceful of Internet fury when a photo of the sign was Facebooked, Tweeted, G-plussed, texted, blogged, emailed, and generally spread through the atheosphere like wildfire… and then backpedaled as fast as it is possible for a human being to backpedal. Like many social change movements, organizing atheists is like herding cats, and it’s not easy to predict which issues will catch their imaginations — but when it happens, the combination of passionate motivation and Internet savvy turns them into a powerhouse.
And very importantly, the atheist movement is increasingly becoming a youth movement. The Secular Student Alliance – an umbrella organization of non-theistic college and high school groups around the United States and the world — is growing at an astonishing rate. In 2009, they had 143 affiliates: in 2012, they had 351. Impressively, their high school rates are climbing at an even faster clip. In 2010, the organization had only four high school affiliates: this year, that number has climbed to 37. And as anyone knows who understands politics getting young people inspired and on board is enormously important for the long-term future of any social change movement. What’s more, many of these student groups are active in service projects and social change activism outside of atheism… and are eager to partner with other groups to get the job done. If you’re in any doubt about the power of atheism to help move political mountains, now and in the coming years — pay attention to those SSA affiliate numbers. And pay attention to how they keep growing… and growing… and growing.
So what’s the take-home message?
Atheists are your friend. Or they can be. And they can be a very powerful friend indeed.
Progressive and social-change organizers and organizations are having a hard time seeing the atheist movement as… well, as anything, really. Except maybe as a pain in the neck. Many progressives are undoubtedly aware of the existence of atheists: the atheist community’s efforts at visibility have been paying off, and atheism is being discussed in progressive circles as widely as it is everywhere else. But somehow, while the existence of atheists has become undeniable, the existence of atheism as a social change movement is still largely being ignored. To give just one example: In over 100 panels, training sessions, and other presentations at the upcoming 2012 Netroots Nation conference for online progressive activists, not one is about atheists or atheism. (Conflict of interest alert: I was one of the proposed panelists on a proposed atheism panel for Netroots Nation 2012.)
It’s hard to tell what this is about. Do social change organizations see atheists as toxic — too controversial, too likely to draw negative attention, more trouble than we’re worth? Or are these organizations simply unaware that atheists have formed into a serious social change movement — and are growing this movement at a rapid pace?
If it’s the former… then shame on you. In the early days of the LGBT movement, queers were far more controversial than they are now, and associating with queers was considered by many to be toxic. It was still the right thing to do. (Not to mention the smart thing to do.)
If it’s the latter… then sit up. Pay attention. Atheists are here. In just a few short years, the movement has gone from zero to sixty, in both visibility and mobilization. And the atheist movement is largely comprised of people who are passionate, compassionate, courageous, Internet savvy, skilled at seeing through bullshit, willing to defy the status quo, excited about activism… and dedicated to changing the world. After all, as far as they’re concerned, it’s the only world they’ve got.
You want these people on your side.
This article originally appeared on
AlterNet.
Progressives often marvel at how focused, coordinated and aggressive our conservative opposition is. They seem to fall into lockstep and march, building large organizations and executing complex strategies with an astonishing rate of success. We may be smarter, better educated and more reality-based — but they seem to have a cohesion and a discipline that eludes us. What’s going on here?
There are a lot of answers to that question. But I’d suggest that some intriguing answers might come from a close study of conservative religious paradigms, which play an essential role in giving conservatives a unique kind of emotional and social durability.
Conservative faiths — particularly evangelical Protestantism, but orthodox Catholicism and Judaism also include similar teachings – inculcate a worldview that equips people with extra tools to work with in face of large-scale change. The same qualities that lead non-believers to deride faith as a crutch also give believers very real psychological support in turbulent times — the kind of sure footing that makes organizing for political and social change easier, more effective, and more gratifying for those who are operating off this sturdy base.
What follows are just a few examples of advantages followers of conservative religions may enjoy when facing transformative change. I offer them not as an argument for belief — that’s not an option for many of us, and not even most religious liberals would agree with the theology at work in these systems — but rather in the hope that if we study these advantages closely, we might find authentic ways to cultivate similar strengths that are firmly rooted in our own worldview. There are lessons to be learned here.
Knowing you are on the side of right
The soul-deep certainty that God is on your side, and that you are fighting on the side of Eternal Truth, may be the biggest political and cultural confidence-builder there is. Conservatives know, beyond the shadow of doubt, that they are on the side of the angels, and this profound sense of spiritual assurance reduces hesitation, spurs action, and increases their willingness to take big risks for the sake of the ultimate victory they know in their bones is coming. They shake off defeat more easily, too, because they know it’s only a temporary setback on their way to that promised victory. After all, the Bible asks: if God is for us, who can be against us?
Progressives operate from a far more open-ended place. We’re suspicious of that kind of deep spiritual certainty, because we know how often it’s led people and nations into moral catastrophe. Instead, we prefer to operate out of our heads. We’re always questioning, taking in new data, re-analyzing, and re-deciding what we’ve already decided, triangulating and re-triangulating against our own moral lines. In our minds, the final outcome is never preordained; and what’s “right” is an ever-shifting target that we constantly need reorient ourselves toward. Chris Mooney documented these tendencies in his recent book, “The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science — And Reality.” He notes that this hyperflexibility can make it devilishly hard for liberals to settle on a plan of action — let alone actually act effectively together with confidence when the time comes.
Also: because we’re not buttressed by the reassuring conviction that the CEO of the Universe has our backs, we feel more acutely alone in the battle, and often doubt that our ultimate victory is anything but assured. Because of this, it’s much easier for us to feel overwhelmed, discouraged and burned out. When religious conservatives feel this way, they can resort to sanctuaries of prayer, fellowship and reconnection with their sense of larger purpose. Most secular progressives don’t have any kind of built-in weekly restoration-and-regeneration process — and the lack of safe healing space does take its toll.
I’d gently suggest that there are authentically progressive, non-theistic ways of tapping into that deep spiritual conviction, raising our own sense of trust in the righteousness of our vision, and finding regular sources of sanctuary and restoration. And that it would be good for us to start exploring ways to do this.
We might, for example, make telling pieces of our own glorious history a regular feature of all of our gatherings. We could make a bigger ritual out of invoking the achievements of our progressive forebears, the noble example of the lives they lived, and the ways in which they altered the course of American history. These stories ground us in our own progressive identity, forge us into a community, reaffirm our shared vision, and rouse our courage. We are capable of everything Mother Jones and Martin Luther King Jr. were. Our enemies are no more dangerous or implacable now than the segregationists, the robber barons, the slaveowners, or the royalists were back then. We don’t know for sure if God is for us or against us, but we do know, with certainty, that “the moral arc of the universe is long, and it bends toward justice.” And we are the ones in our generation who have been entrusted with the sacred task of bending it a little further. History, at least, is on our side.
Being accountable to God, and nobody else
Which brings us to another, closely related item: Religious conservatives are highly motivated by the sense that, today and every day until the end of time, they’re ultimately accountable to God for how things on earth turn out. The fear of failing the test before St. Peter — and again on Judgment Day — gives their temporal efforts a sense of urgency and commitment to the cause that we progressives sometimes have a very hard time mustering.
At the same time — perhaps paradoxically — believing that the only consequence that matters will be deferred until after death makes it easier to let go of the day-to-day ebb and flow of one’s fortunes here on earth. Conservative Christians believe that they are in this world, but not of it; and therefore, it’s a sin to worry too much about what goes on here. And they certainly don’t care much about what people outside their own tribe think about them. (Inside the tribe, they care very much.) God’s judgment is the only one that matters in the end; here on earth, persecution is just the clearest possible sign that you’re doing the right thing. This ability to disengage can be a profound source of peace and courage.
Progressives, on the other hand, worry a lot about this world. We have to: we believe that we are directly accountable to history and our grandkids for what happens on our watch. There is no mercy, no grace, no forgiveness or born-again do-overs if we screw it up. And that, frankly, makes us a little tense. We think we should control everything, and take it out on each other when we can’t. They know they can’t, and let God handle the rest. And that ability to let go of what they can’t control very often makes them easier to be around, and far less likely to take out their frustrations on each other.
Recognizing your special destiny in the eternal human story
All three major monotheisms have a linear view of human history as an ever-progressing struggle between the forces of Good and Evil. This narrative gives every succeeding generation an ever-more-important role on the front lines of the Ultimate Cosmic Battle (the final scene of which is always viewed as possibly happening Any Day Now).
Seeing your personal struggles as part of an eternal battle between Good and Evil locates you in time, and gives an epic quality to your very existence. No matter how ordinary your existence is, the notion that God Has A Plan For Your Life — and every life — lends a vivid sense that your everyday actions have tremendous potential to affect the ultimate fate of humanity. How you manage your family and raise your kids matters. How you allocate your resources, devote your talents, and spend your time matters. What your church congregation does matters. The entire world is fraught with meaning, because your existence is exquisitely precious in the sight of God. You matter.
Again, this sense of being a chosen warrior in a heroic and eternal struggle is a tremendous psychological confidence-booster. It encourages people to dream big — and to take concrete steps toward fulfilling those dreams. It justifies all kinds of risks. It stirs feelings of deep love and respect toward one’s fellow warriors, which in turn creates strong movement cohesion. It gives people a vast mental space in which to regain their perspective following setbacks.
And perhaps most importantly: it confers the long view required for high-quality foresight, and the ability and inspiration to make bold plans that span decades and even generations. If your sense of time takes in all of history, from the Creation to the Apocalypse, then it doesn’t really matter whether or not you’ll live to see the changes you’re working for. The battle is forever; your job is to fight it as well as you can while you can, while also raising the next generation to take over for you when their time comes. And the most important work isn’t about getting big wins today; rather, it’s the work that builds enduring institutions that will enforce the conservative worldview long after your generation is gone.
Progressives need to bear in mind that we have a long history, too. We are today’s heirs to the Enlightenment, the latest in a series of generations that have been upholding America’s founding values and worldview since before the nation began. The progressive argument for justice and freedom is a conversation that will not end in our lifetimes. We don’t have to win all the battles, but we were born to this fight, and must also write our own chapter in its history before handing it over to the next generation.
And, most importantly: we need to cultivate that same long foresight that leads conservatives to protect their existing institutions like they were prized forts on a battlefield (which they are), and seed new ones constantly to expand their capacity to dominate the future. Our progressive legacy includes the vast array of public and private amenities — universities, parks, transit systems, social organizations, hospitals, libraries, public programs, on and on — that were created by our forebears for the same purpose, and continue to add to the dignity, opportunity and enlightenment of every American. Protecting this inheritance is the first duty of every progressive. Expanding it to serve future generations is the way we pay the gift forward.
I once was lost, but now am found
Another huge strength of the conservative side is the Christian redemption narrative. We make fun of the way the right-wing’s fallen angels do penance and are accepted readily (often far too readily, in our view) back into respectability. Make the obligatory confession, do your ablutions, and you’re back in good graces in time for Sunday dinner. And the rest of the movement will have your back the whole way. They may hate the sin, but they do walk their talk when it comes to continuing to love the sinner.
Our way of handling disgrace is demonstrably much more damaging, both to our own fallen angels and to the movement as a whole. If someone on our side is tarred — even if we all know the smear is completely unjust and undeserved — we will not defend the accused. Instead, we’ll close ranks and jettison them before anybody else has a chance to. And over and over, we lose incredibly valuable and talented people this way — people we’ve invested a lot of capital in raising up to leadership, and whose future contributions to the movement are forever lost to us when this happens.
As long as we’re so willing to off our own disgraced members, the right wing will always have an edge on us. They can take shots at our leaders and organizations (ACORN? Van Jones? Anthony Weiner?), and consistently score fatal hits, because we will reliably join them in putting their targets out of our misery. But because they have a theology that enjoins them to protect and forgive their own, they get to redeem their own disgraced people (David Vitter? Newt Gingrich?), and keep their talent in circulation. On their side, these hits are seldom fatal. They don’t lose their stars very often.
We could do with our own universally accepted rituals of repentance and redemption — a known, established path that lets our good people make their amends and put their mistakes behind them, and enables us to acknowledge both flaws and growth in each other with grace and mercy. If someone has done their penance, there will be room again for them in our circle. And our refusal to turn on each other will also do wonders for our overall level of community trust.
A mistake should not be the end of the world — or even people’s otherwise brilliant careers. And it won’t be if we find our way back to a belief in the power of redemption.
Coming together for love and community, not just work
Religion is a potent social technology — and its greatest strength is not about theology, but rather in its ability to knit people together in tight, close communities of trust, commitment, care and meaning. And regular observance of shared rituals is central to this power. Religious conservatives attend services at least once a week (in some churches, they go twice) to affirm their commitment to their shared values, celebrate and mourn the passages of life, and connect with each other not as workers and warriors, but as human beings.
Those rituals are social superglue. They build trust that extends outward into everything else these communities do. They inspire and engage people’s hearts, minds, bodies, and spirits, offer incredible healing and solace when things go wrong, and provide a ready-made outlet for celebration and re-commitment to doing even more when things go right.
The rituals that make community are simple, powerful, essentially human, and independent of any theology. Sitting down together to share a good meal. (In my long experience, there’s far more likely to be large quantities of good food at a conservative gathering than a progressive one. Eating together is vastly big mojo, and we often shortchange this.) Raising voices together in song, poetry, or a shared creed. Being present with each other to mark the passages of life — birth, marriage, parenthood, retirement, and loss. Gatherings that are about joy, play, sensual pleasure, and relaxation. Other gatherings that give us safe places to struggle among trusted friends with the things that are hardest and darkest within ourselves.
Secular progressives might even consider keeping a Sabbath. How much more effective would we be if we set aside a day of personal downtime every week? Shut off the phone, turn off the computer, and re-focus on life’s deep essentials:, home, self, health, family, community, and our own sanity. It might be a day to make a real meal, have friends over, create something beautiful, linger in a hot bath with a book, take a long bike ride, watch old movies, or make a picnic with your kids. You don’t have to be a person of faith to appreciate and savor the gift of simply being human. And such days are a potent reminder of why we’re doing this work in the first place, and what this life is for.
Conservatives may think and believe differently than we do. But their sheer political durability is due to some specific strengths in their communities and characters — strengths that aren’t out of reach for us, even if we arrive at them by different routes. We may not believe in God; but we have every bit as deep a need to believe in our cause, our future, our prospects, ourselves, and each other. And anything we can do to deepen our confidence in those things makes our movement more effective going forward.
If history is told by the winners, then Joel Osteen — the relentlessly upbeat spiritual caretaker of the national attitude — is history’s designated chaplain. In a marathon Sunday faith rally in the heart of the nation’s capital, Osteen, who presides over America’s largest megachurch congregation, the nondenominational Lakewood Church in Houston, exhorted the tens of thousands of believers amassed in Nationals Stadium to “live in victory,” to seize their “destiny moments,” and to fulfill God’s plan for their personal, financial and emotional success.
The Washington rally — billed as “America’s Night of Hope” — had gone a bit afoul of its own victory plan, however. It had originally been scheduled the night before, but as a persistent afternoon drizzle gave way to some spirited cloudbursts, the event’s organizers rescheduled it for the following afternoon. As I approached the centerfield box office outside Nationals Park on Saturday, the marquee overhead bore what had to be the glummest rainout announcement of the young 2012 baseball season: “Night of Hope postponed until 4 p.m. Sunday.” And since the Osteen message involves a lot of merchandising, the imposing tables hawking T-shirts and other commemorative swag seemed suddenly off-kilter. One prominent Night of Hope T-shirt was emblazoned with the inspirational divine message “I can do all things” — all things, that is, but summon the faithful to stand out in the rain.
But the Osteens were not about to let the intervention of the elements become any sort of setback. As the megachurch pastor — turned out in a blue suit and a beatific grin, looking for all the world like a fitter Tim Allen, fresh out of rehab — took his spot at the second-base perimeter of the infield, before the bank of TV cameras set up on the pitchers mound, he called out, “Isn’t it great to be here? It’s another great day the Lord has made!” He paused to note that, yes, “we had some rain last night,” but that the event’s reshuffled schedule could well mean that some people who couldn’t have made the evening version of the prayer gathering might well have turned up serendipitously today. In any event, Osteen declared his certitude that “God put the right people here right now.”
That confident assertion of — and indeed, identification with — the divine will is one of the calling cards of the Osteen faith. Amid all the spirited self-affirmations and folksy homilies that stud an Osteen sermon, it’s easy to miss the oddly deterministic invocations of divine prerogative summoned up by the preacher, who belongs to the “Word Faith” tradition of Pentecostal belief. Osteen’s serene depictions of God’s eternally uptending designs for the fates of individual believers are a sort of inverted Calvinism. Where the Puritan forebears of today’s Protestant scene beheld a terrible, impersonal Creator whose rigid system of eternal reward and punishment dispatched many an infant and solemn believer to the pit of damnation, Osteen’s God is an intensely personal presence, guiding believers out of pitfalls into inevitable glory and joy — not so much a raging Patriarch as a genial cruise director. “God’s dream for our own life is so much bigger than our own,” went one frequent refrain at the D.C. rally. “Let’s not put any limits on God.” Osteen characterized the Deity as a “running-over” and “abundant” God. “Have you ever been to a fast-food restaurant, and they ask you if you want to supersize this? Well, God is a supersizing God,” who is determined, Osteen assured the crowd, to “supersize your joy.”
It stands to reason, in this arrangement of cosmic fate, that the stubborn human weakness for anxious introspection and downbeat self-doubt is something of an affront to the author of being. “When you are criticizing yourself,” Osteen announced, “you are criticizing God’s creation. The next time you think something negative, turn that around, and say, ‘I am God’s masterpiece.’”
The talismanic faith in positive utterance is another key article of belief in the Word Faith tradition. Some Word Faith devotees are devout believers in faith-healing, and one of the key episodes Osteen cites in his own account of his faith journey is the miraculous recovery of his mother from an apparently terminal case of liver cancer in 1981. Faced with the prospect of losing his mother, the young Osteen — then a communications student at Oral Roberts University with no ministerial ambitions — turned to prayer, saying to God, as he now recounts, “I know you can do what doctors can’t do, what medical science can’t do.” Sure enough, Osteen’s mother, Dodie, went on to be cancer-free, and took to the podium on Sunday after her son’s testimonial. She reprised the story of how she fought off the specter of death by seeking out the “most healing” passages of scripture, which she assembled into a digest she still consults regularly: “Like American Express, I don’t leave home without it,” she said. Then she issued a disclaimer for her listeners contending with severe illness: “I don’t advise you not to seek treatment — get treatment any way you can.” Such cautions sounded a bit rushed and legalistic next to her own account of her recovery: When she and her preacher-husband both sensed the end was near, she recalled, “We lay on our faces … He said, ‘I need you, the church needs you, the children need you … And now, almost 31 years later, I won the battle and so will you!” God, after all, “delights in answering the prayers of his children,” and “loves everybody the same, but he can do for you what he did for me.”
The Word Faith image of the wonder-working, healing God is discomfiting to ponder, and not just because he might tempt desperately sick believers to go rogue beyond the dictates of medical science. The constant recitation of God’s transcendent goodness and the deference paid to his ironclad ability to lift believers magically out of suffering and woe both subtly downgrade the divine presence into a glorified lifestyle concierge. This God has no real way of accounting for the age-old paradoxes of theology, such as the tolerance of personal and historic evil, or the deeper ironies and unintended consequences of the believing life. Even less does the Osteen family’s success gospel encompass a sustained social ethic — even though the D.C. event featured an appeal on behalf of the World Vision ministries to adopt a needy child in the developing world. The believer’s chief task is to ratify the preexisting divine script of success in his or her individual life — and then to bear testimony to that joyous transformation in a community of like-minded success believers.
It’s a curiously childlike vision of faith — a point driven home in a homily offered up by Joel’s wife, Victoria, who serves as a kind of co-pastor of the separate domestic sphere at the couple’s revival meetings. When she finds herself assailed by cares, anxieties and negative thoughts, Victoria reported, “I visualize a bouquet of helium balloons in my hands, and I literally hold those balloons out and release them to the heavens … And as I release those balloons to Him, I say, ‘I may not have the power to change my circumstances, but God has that power to change our circumstances.’” In a later homily on the properties of unconditional love and forgiveness, Victoria delivered an extended gloss on what was apparently one of the few remotely traumatic moments in her suburban Texas upbringing — a time when, as a freshly licensed driver, she had taken out her dad’s car and negligently instructed a friend to roll down a passenger-side window that was malfunctioning, thereby breaking it once and for all. When she finally summoned the nerve to fess up to her dad, she found him to be disappointed but gloriously forgiving; he “didn’t judge my future from that one mistake” — and neither will the indulgent dad of the Osteen heavens. “You may not have been shown unconditional love in your life,” Victoria announced, “but God loves you unconditionally.” The problem, of course, is that even those of us who did survive unhappy childhoods are no longer 16 — and as a result, we need a God who can meet the challenges of the new responsibilities we’ve taken on as we’ve matured, not a figure of undifferentiated sentiment, handing our forgiveness and love like lottery tickets.
The other childlike quality of the Lakewood account of divine grace has to do with the past — which, together with negative thinking, represents the closest thing to evil in the Osteen’s scheme of salvation. The past is bad because it mires believers in remembered hurts and slights, and thereby obstructs God’s grander design for their lives. “When we hold on to the past, when we don’t go to God, that just puts more baggage in our suitcases,” Victoria exhorted, in a not-altogether-wieldy metaphor.
This spiritual hostility to the past was an all too frequent refrain in the event’s musical selections — a monotonous offering of anthemic, bombastic Christian rock, all composed without the benefit of a single minor chord or any discernible melody. “I’m moving forward,” went the lyrics to one of these intra-sermon studies in Journey-esque hymnody. “I’m not going back / I’m moving ahead / I’m here to declare to you that the past is over.” An American idol contestant named Danny Gokey also offered testimony about how the Osteens had helped him conquer his depression in the wake of the untimely passing of his wife. Gokey then performed a Christian rock number of his own, “My Best Days Are Ahead of Me,” which seemed to make short work of his once-debilitating grief: “I don’t get lost in the past or get stuck in some sad memories,” he sang, rather creepily; the song’s bridge announced that “Age isn’t nothing but a number,” and then resolved on a Successories-style upgrade of a well-known Army recruiting slogan: “If I keep getting better / I can be anything I want to be.”
There’s a term from the psychiatric clinics that neatly captures the outlook of someone possessed of grandiose fantasies about the imperial reach of the self, and a principled refusal to acknowledge anything poised to diminish such fantasies — such as the passage of time. That term is “narcissistic personality disorder,” and it does nothing to detract from the positive features of the Osteen gospel — the injunctions to persevere in the face of adversity, or the appeals for donations to World Vision — to note that this is a system of faith tailor-made to sustain narcissistic delusion. To grasp the overweening self-absorption of the Osteen faith, one need look no further than the frequent recourse Osteen makes to his own success story in sealing the case for God’s providential plan for the believer’s own life. Now, unlike other well-known evangelists, Osteen can’t lay much claim to a hardscrabble Horatio Alger-style life story. His 1920s forebear in Pentecostal media preaching, Aimee Semple McPherson, was a single-mother missionary before coming into fame and fortune as an evangelical celebrity in the Radio Age; Billy Graham was the son of a poor North Carolina dairy farmer. Osteen, by contrast, was a second-generation evangelical leader, who’d been working as a TV producer for his father John Osteen’s growing ministry before he succeeded to the elder Osteen’s pulpit after his father’s death. His personal biography tracks closer to fellow Pentecostal TV preacher Pat Robertson’s background: Robertson was the son of a U.S. senator before finding his own adult spiritual calling.
Nonetheless, Osteen repeatedly cites his own success presiding over the spiritual flock he inherited as the prime exhibit of God’s ready transposition of divine grace into worldly success. When he first acceded to the pulpit, he recalled from his riser above second base, he felt no special aptitude for ministering; he’d heard that Lakewood church leaders were raising doubts about his vocation, and the church needed to move into a bigger, upgraded new facility. “At one point,” Osteen preached, “it seemed like everything was coming against me. The enemy was fighting me not from where I was coming, but from where I was going … He didn’t want Lakewood to be in the Compaq Center” — the former home arena for the Houston Rockets, and now home to the Lakewood congregation of nearly 50,000 souls. The Compaq Center deal is a frequent touchstone in Osteen’s faith reminiscence; it occupies a good stretch of his blockbuster best-selling self-improvement tract, “Become a Better You,” which also finds evidence of divine favor in a home-flipping deal Joel and Victoria struck at the height of the housing bubble, as well as in such mundane votes of divine confidence as setting the pastor up with a premium parking space. Indeed, the steady parade of testimonials from the wider Osteen clan on the Night of Hope risers bespeaks a family-wide penchant for casting one’s commonplace personal biography as a sort of infomercial version of the Christian faith. (In addition to mother Dodie and wife Victoria, Osteen’s brother Paul, who runs a medical charity in Africa, took to the stage Sunday to relate a more responsible story of healing, in which due medical diligence properly preceded the broader appeal to faith; Joel’s two children, Alexandra and Jonathan, are respectively a vocalist and guitarist in the ministry’s Christian rock ensemble.)
Now, it may very well be that in a certain kind of conviction of grace, believers feel themselves suffused with the divine presence, and find their most quotidian activities reflect celestial favor; the 14th-century Saint Julian of Norwich recorded a vision in which she beheld the entirety of creation in an object no larger than a hazelnut, cupped in her hand. Perhaps, in this view of things, a converted sports arena or excellent parking spot is no great stretch when it comes to testifying on behalf of a God for whom all things are possible.
Still, the claustral feel of Osteen’s success gospel paradoxically works exactly the same effect that he warns believers to resist: It imposes limits on God, by largely confining his workings to the dominant American culture of success. If the Osteen-coached believer does not reap abundant and large reward in career, family life or creative pursuits, they are not necessarily going to curse their God, as Job’s comforters had counseled him to do amid his notorious personal setbacks. But neither are they going to make the key connections that earlier Protestant divines have preached, going back to Jonathan Edwards and John Calvin: that the divinity does not, in fact, have your own personal happiness occupying pride of place on his exhaustive to-do list. The universe is ultimately about a larger set of concerns, and faith concerns a much vaster striving toward justice than believers are wont to see in their personal affairs, their social conquests or their annual paychecks. This is why Edwards, for all of his better-known hell-and-brimstone sermons, urged onto believers a stoic “consent to being in general” — not a plan for individual life advancement.
This disjuncture between Protestantism’s more humbling counsel and the feel-good Word Faith gospel became most painfully evident during one of Osteen’s closing perorations. In chilling detail, he recounted the story of a young Tutsi Christian woman who’d hid out in the bathroom of her church pastor’s office at the height of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. The machete-wielding Hutu killers who pursued her returned to the pastor’s office every day for 91 days, usually calling out for her by name. At one point, Osteen said, a Hutu militia man was poised to turn the knob on the door to the tiny bathroom where the woman was quartered alongside six other Tutsi believers — but at the last moment, he became distracted and walked away. Finally, when the genocide had been contained, the woman was free, and has been traveling with ministers ever since to testify to the amazing story of her survival. “Nearly 1 million Rwandans were killed in this genocide,” Osteen said as he wound up to the story’s larger moral. “It was very sad.”
Well, no. The Rwandan genocide was something far more than sad — it was a colossal failure of moral and political agency, going back to the German and Belgian colonial partition of the country that set up artificial power conflicts between the nation’s two main tribes. This horror also most certainly came about thanks to the wretched failures of the Clinton administration and other Western powers to arrest a well-documented string of massacres, even as senior U.N. officials such as Lt. Gen Romeo Dallaire, the leader of the agency’s Rwandan peacekeeping mission, implored them to.
For Osteen, of course, the story of this woman’s survival was a divine miracle. But if this one survivor was enjoying the loving favor of an omnipotent God, what are we to conclude that this same God thought of the more than 800,000 Rwandans murdered in the genocide? Was their faith wanting? Was God planning unparalleled new successes and joys for their surviving family members? Are these the people Osteen has in mind when he exhorts his listeners not to be victims, but victors?
It’s something of an obscenity even to frame such questions. Yet they are the inevitable outcome of a theology-free success gospel, pitched exclusively to tales of individual triumph. Osteen’s sermons all begin with a self-empowering chant from believers. “This is my Bible,” it goes in part; “I am what it says I am. I have what it says I have.” But there are legions of dead — now confined by definition, it’s true, in the hated past — who come bearing the testimony that the Bible is not actually about you.
When North Carolina voters head to the polls on May 8, they will be asked to decide on a constitutional amendment – known as “Amendment One” – that prohibits marriages between same-sex couples. Same-sex marriage is already illegal by statute, but N.C. is the only state left in the Southeast without a constitutional ban.
So this is quite a showdown. There’s much talk of liberty, lifestyle and family — and a whole lot of talk about God. As opponents and supporters target churches all the way from Appalachia to the Outer Banks, religious leaders are flooding the airwaves to share their views on a hot button issue that throws core values into stark relief.
Growing up, I attended a church in Raleigh that is deeply involved in the current debate. And I can tell you that the fault lines are deep – and often surprising – to folks in other parts of the country.
A Tale of Two Churches
The Upper Room Church of God in Christ, located in south Raleigh, is presided over by the Rev. Patrick Wooden, who describes homosexuality a “deathstyle” and presents himself as a zealous defender of traditional marriage. Rev. Wooden, an African American, launched his ministry career with a tent revival in a small rural town. Bringing a message infused with miracles and warnings of the devil’s influence, the pastor came to Raleigh to lead the Upper Room in 1987, where his congregation, by the reckoning of the church website, today numbers 3,000. Proudly describing himself as a businessman and his church as one of the largest employers of blacks in Raleigh, Rev. Wooden’s teachings carry a whiff of prosperity gospel that appeals to those striving for economic salvation as well as spiritual. And he champions social views that have made him a rising right-wing media star, complete with spots on “The O’Reilly Factor.”
A passage in Genesis forms the basis for Rev. Wooden’s view that God’s definition of marriage is strictly a male-and-female union. He rattled it off in a recent TV appearance: “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.”
Rev. Wooden is particularly incensed with those who equate the battle for gay rights with the struggle for civil rights. His comments on homosexuality, sometimes graphic, push the notion that gays are aberrant both culturally and physically. Who, he demands, could support a practice that forces men “to wear a diaper or a butt plug just to be able to contain their bowels?” For him, comparing gays to blacks is denigrating.
Just a few miles away from Rev. Wooden’s church, just at the edge of the North Carolina State University, stands Pullen Memorial Baptist Church, where a different strain of righteousness prevails. The church is led by Rev. Jack McKinney and co-pastor Rev. Nancy Petty, a lesbian who has made history as the first openly gay minister to lead a Baptist church in the South. Pullen, with roots in the late 19th century, evolved a brand of progressive Christianity under the leadership of poet and scholar E. McNeill Poteat, Jr., whose preaching emphasized an inclusive spirit uncommon in Baptist churches. In 1956, the liberal firebrand W.W. Finlator was called to Pullen, and under his guidance, the church opened its doors to worshippers of all races in 1958. In the late 60s, it was this focus on inclusiveness and social justice that attracted my father and mother (an Episcopalian and a Methodist respectively) who both taught at local colleges.
Finlator’s legacy of tolerance continued after his retirement in 1982, when the issue of gay rights began to emerge on the national scene. In 1992 the Southern Baptist Convention cast Pullen out for blessing a same-sex union. Today the church serves as the headquarters for the North Carolina Religious Coalition for Marriage Equality, an interfaith same-sex marriage advocacy group composed of state religious leaders. Last year, Rev. Petty declared that until gay unions are legislatively permitted, she would no longer sign marriage licenses, stating her view that “every time I sign a marriage license for a heterosexual couple and act as an agent of the state, I am reminded of those couples who I marry that are denied the basic human right to legally marry the person of their choice.”
Squaring off against the Rev. Wooden in a recent forum on the same-sex marriage amendment, Rev. Petty expressed her view that the Bible doesn’t prescribe a single form of marriage. She has condemned Amendment One as “anti-family” and calls upon North Carolinians to stand together to “protect all people’s rights.”
Varieties of Religious Experience
That two churches of such dramatically divergent views could occupy a 10-mile radius underscores the complexity of religion in North Carolina, where clashes in the public square date all the way back to the 17th century, when Quakers and Anglicans struggled for control of the colony’s political leadership.
Allegiances break down along racial and class lines in ways that have long confounded and intrigued social scientists, who offer a variety of theories on why you’d have a predominately black church’s leader defending traditional marriage against gays while the head of a nearby, mostly white church frames the issue as an urgent question of civil rights.
Over the last century, the tradition of southern progressive Christianity, with its intellectual strain, was deeply entwined with the national political battle to secure support for Roosevelt’s New Deal. Aligned with northeastern churches like New York’s Riverside Church (built in 1930 with Rockefeller money as a cathedral to progressive Protestantism), congregations like Raleigh’s Pullen Memorial and Chapel Hill’s Binkley Baptist Church, along with divinity programs at institutions of learning like UNC, Chapel Hill, tended to foster openness to others’ beliefs, a tradition of combining faith and reason, and an emphasis on questioning dogma and viewing the Bible in historical context.
Meanwhile, the rise of fundamentalism and the so-called “newer sect” faiths like the Pentecostals tended to attract more rural, working-class Christians. Historian Ken Fones-Wolf of the University of West Virginia has pointed out that hard times of the Depression tended to reinforce rural-born Southerners’ strong beliefs in the importance of God’s grace, salvation through faith, the necessity of bearing witness, and the Bible as the sole religious authority. Ministers at these pulpits, along with those of most of the fast-rising Baptists, were suspicious of outsiders and reminded their flocks to be wary of associating with those – like labor unions, for example – who did not share their faith.
Which Side Are You On?
The primary election takes place Tuesday, May 8, but early voting is already underway. In addition to voting up or down on the gay marriage amendment, N.C. voters will make political party selections in a crowded race for governor. The hot button gay marriage issue appears to be driving people to the polls early.
The timing of the vote is thought by many to boost the chance of passage because of the Republican presidential primary — though Romney’s annointment may throw off that calculation. Over the past decade, the Democratic-controlled legislature successfully successfully blocked efforts by social conservatives to alter the Constitution to ban same-sex marriage. But now, Republicans control both houses, and last September they found enough support to put the question to voters.
Polls and denominational stances reveal demographic trends that resist easy categories. In January, the Raleigh-based Public Policy Polling found that 56 percent of respondents to a poll favored the amendment, while 36 percent would vote against it. Ten percent were undecided. The most prominent Catholic leaders in the state, Bishops Peter Jugis of Charlotte and Michael Burbidge of Raleigh, support the amendment. On the other hand, the state’s Episcopal Diocese opposes it. Black Christians, among the most opposed to homosexuality, make up 13 percent of the state population (nearly twice as high as the national average). Yet the North Carolina NAACP, which includes thousands of African-American pastors across the state, is against the amendment.
When my dad was a kid in the small town of Winton, N.C., his Episcopalian family frowned on the idea of his bringing home a Presbyterian. The notion that the state’s churches are now divided on the issue of whether partners of the same sex can marry attests to an astonishing transformation in just one generation. The values voters express on May 8 will say a lot about the direction of southern Christianity. In a state where religion plays a central role, questions about inclusiveness, tradition and openness to change will send a powerful signal throughout the nation. There is an awful lot at stake — maybe even the soul of the South.
A billboard erected by atheists in Oklahoma City. (Credit: AP/Sue Ogrocki) 
(Credit: Antonov Roman via Shutterstock) 
(Credit: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque) 
Joel Osteen 
(Credit: mehmet alci via Shutterstock) 
