The holy blitz rolls on

But don't you feel like the tipping point is still quite a way off? Speaking personally, when I've read about totalitarian movements, I've always imagined that I'd know enough to pack up and go. That would seem to be a very premature thing to do here.

Well, most people didn't pack up and go. The people who packed up and left were the exception, and most people thought they were crazy. My friends in Pristina had no idea what was going on in Kosovo until they were literally herded down to the train station and pushed into boxcars and shipped like cattle to Macedonia. And that's not because they weren't intelligent or perceptive. It was because, like all of us, they couldn't comprehend how fragile the world was around them, and how radically and quickly it could change. I think that's a human phenomenon.

Hitler was in power in 1933, but it took him until the late '30s to begin to consolidate his program. He never spoke about the Jews because he realized that raw anti-Semitism didn't play out with the German public. All he did was talk about family values and restoring the moral core of Germany. The Russian revolution took a decade to consolidate. It takes time to acculturate a society to a radical agenda, but that acculturation has clearly begun here, and I don't see people standing up and trying to stop them. The Democratic policy of trying to reach out to a movement that attacks whole segments of the society as worthy only of conversion or eradication is frightening.

Doesn't it make sense for the Democrats to reach out to the huge number of evangelicals who aren't necessarily part of the religious right, but who may be sympathetic to some of its rhetoric? Couldn't those people be up for grabs?

I don't think they are up for grabs because they have been ushered into a non-reality-based belief system. This isn't a matter of, "This is one viewpoint, here's another." This is a world of magic and signs and miracles and wonders, and [on the other side] is the world you hate, the liberal society that has shunted you aside and thrust you into despair. The rage that is directed at those who go after the movement is the rage of those who fear deeply being pushed back into this despair, from which many of the people I interviewed feel they barely escaped. A lot of people talked about suicide attempts or thoughts of suicide -- these people really reached horrific levels of desperation. And now they believe that Jesus has a plan for them and intervenes in their life every day to protect them, and they can't give that up.

So in a way, the movement really has helped them.

Well, in same way unemployed workers in Weimar Germany were helped by becoming brownshirts, yes. It gave them a sense of purpose. Look, you could always tell in a refugee camp in Gaza when one of these kids joined Hamas, because suddenly they were clean, their djelleba was white, they walked with a sense of purpose. It was a very similar kind of conversion experience. If you go back and read [Arthur] Koestler and other writers on the Communist Party, you find the same thing.

This is a question that I get all the time, and you've probably heard it too: Do you think Bush is a believer, or do you think he and his administration are just cynically manipulating their foot soldiers?

I think he's a believer, to the extent that this belief system empowers his own arrogant sense of privilege and intellectual shallowness. When you know right and wrong, when you've been mandated by God to lead, you don't have to ask hard questions, you don't have to listen to anyone else. I think that plays into the Bush character pretty well.

I think there are probably other aspects or tenets of this belief system that he finds distasteful and doesn't like. But in a real sense he fits the profile: a washout, not a very good family life -- apparently his mother was a horror show -- a drunk, a drug addict, coasted because of his daddy, reaches middle age, hasn't done anything with his life, finds Jesus. That fits a lot of people in the movement.

What do you think of the argument, exemplified by David Kuo's book, "Tempting Faith," that this administration has duped the Christian right and hasn't really given them much in exchange for their support?

It's given them a lot of money. It's given them a few hundred million dollars. I wouldn't call that nothing.

Kuo's argument is that Bush promised $8 billion for the faith-based initiative but that there was actually very little new funding. What's missing in what he says, I think, is that while there was little new money, there was a massive effort to shift money that was already appropriated from secular social services to evangelical groups. But if you believe, as Kuo apparently did, that compassionate conservatism really meant helping the poor, then Bush hasn't really done anything to further it.

Well, [Bush] never wanted to help the poor. That was just to sell us on a program -- he didn't have any intention of helping the poor.

Did you start out to research this book with the intellectual framework that comes from Hannah Arendt and Karl Popper in mind?

Yes. I studied a lot of Christian ethics, a lot of Reinhold Niebuhr, Karl Barth, that's how I was formed, so when I covered conflicts as a foreign correspondent, the peculiarity of my education made me look at those conflicts a little differently. I was always very wary of utopian movements because I had it pounded into me that utopianism is a dangerous phenomenon, of the left or the right. I was very critical of liberation theology because it essentially endorsed violence to create a Christian society. The way that I articulated that was really through writers like Popper and Arendt. I needed Karl Popper and Hannah Arendt to get a lot of the despotic movements that I was covering, to give myself a vocabulary by which to explain these movements to myself. Even when I teach journalism classes I tend to make them read "The Origins of Totalitarianism" because I think it's such an important book. I've read the book seven or eight times.

When did you see its relevance to the Christian right?

Because of my close coverage, or close connection with movements like Hamas or Milosevic, or even some of the despotic movements in Latin America like Eframn Rmos Montt in Guatemala, I'd already been conditioned to smell these people out. And then of course coming out the church and coming out of seminary, the combination was such that as soon as I came back from overseas, I had a sense of who these people were. There was a strange kind of confluence from my experience as a reporter and my academic background that came together and gave me a kind of sensitivity to the Christian right that maybe other people didn't have immediately. I don't know how much it's apparent, but it's an angry book.

That's very apparent.

Good. My father remains the most important influence on my life, and he was a Presbyterian minister, a devout Christian. I quote H. Richard Niebuhr saying, "Religion is a good thing for good people and a bad thing for bad people." I wouldn't describe myself as particularly pious but I certainly would describe myself as religious. And when I see how these people are manipulating the Christian religion for personal empowerment and wealth and for the destruction of the very values that I think are embodied in the teachings of Jesus Christ, I'm angry.

Story finder (3 ways to search Salon)

Search terms:

Salon the Web

Salon Directory (browse by topic)