Jordan had been hard at work on a political strategy for Palin. As an accidental president, she needed to acquire two things: a public persona and a political message. For the former, Jordan adopted one of the oldest archetypes in politics, the “common man.” Palin’s “thing” would be to be absolutely ordinary. It was one of several roles she had auditioned during the campaign, and Jordan correctly judged that it was her best performance. It was a risky choice, though, and a clean break from the traditional wisdom that Americans want their president to be “presidential.” As for the political message, it also was risky, as it required the leader of the federal government to condemn as “socialistic” virtually every federal government program or action other than defense. She would seek systematically to starve the federal government she led by zero tolerance for either increased taxes or increased deficits. These twin strategies suited her perfectly. She could speak freely, and her errors, ignorance, strident anti-intellectualism, and naiveté would simply reinforce her “common man” image. And she needed to master only a single idea and a single policy, and repeat it in answer to every question.
When the outlines of the Jordan plan were leaked, David Brooks, a thoughtful conservative commentator, wrote, “If all government action is automatically dismissed as quasi-socialist, then there is no need to think. A pall of dogmatism will settle over the right.”
“Exactly” is what Jordan must have thought upon reading those words. And of course Brooks was prescient.
The financial crisis inherited from the Bush administration was in full swing, and although the bank bailouts that commenced under Bush were allowed to stand, the administration did not extend any further support to the financial sector, allowed Chrysler and General Motors to go bankrupt, and specifically promised to veto any spending that appeared to be in the nature of a fiscal stimulus. The economic decline that year was precipitous. Unemployment rose to 15 percent, home foreclosures reached unprecedented levels, and middle-class savings and pensions were decimated by a stock market that languished at Dow 5000. The national mood turned ugly.
But Jordan had a plan, and like any good political plan, its first step was to “shore up the base.” And so, in June 2009, the nation suddenly became completely distracted from its economic woes. During the first week of that month, Rupert Murdoch, Ralph Reed, and Steve Jordan announced the merger of the Faith & Freedom Coalition with Fox News to form Fox Faith & Freedom News. This was truly something new, with a major network abandoning all pretense of journalistic neutrality (the “fair and balanced” slogan was dropped) and becoming part of a national political movement. The mainstream media, professional journalists, and academics were all aghast, but public reaction was muted. Democrats in Congress called for an investigation, but this was quashed by the majority. The Federal Communications Commission, whose budget authority had been held up by a small group of extreme conservatives in the House, did nothing. Some liberals even saw this as a positive development, arguing that Fox would be finally exposed as an entity whose raison d’être was to act as agent provocateur for the far right. They were wrong. And no one at the time, not even Sanjay, appreciated the true enormity of what had just happened.
Although the Fox/FFC merger was highly visible, few focused on the parallel—and almost invisible to non-evangelicals—world of Christian broadcasting. At the time when Palin became an accidental president, all six national Christian television networks, and virtually all the two thousand Christian radio stations, had come under the control of the dominionist branch of conservative Christianity. The aspiring theocrats had thus already completely highjacked the Christian mass media, controlled the most-watched mainstream network, and had just merged it with the principal political action group working toward the creation of a Christian Nation. It was a good start for Jordan.
Only one week later, the majority leader of the Senate, the Speaker of the House, and the vice president joined the president in hosting a meeting in the Rose Garden attended by four hundred “religious leaders of all denominations,” according to the White House. Sanjay’s Theocracy Watch revealed that the group actually consisted exclusively of evangelicals other than two conservative Catholics, one representative of Jews for Jesus, and an imam who advocated the deportation of all American Muslims to an Islamic country of their choice, provided it was governed by strict Islamic law. Surrounded by the most committed fundamentalists in the nation, the president laid out her legislative program.
First, she announced, a joint resolution of Congress would declare America to be “a Christian Nation, which devoutly recognizes the authority and law of Jesus Christ.” As a resolution, it was non-binding and would have no legal effect and thus was not subject to review by the Supreme Court. This was, the president argued, little different from the addition of God to the currency in 1863 and to postage stamps in 1912, or from the amendment in the 1950s of the Pledge of Allegiance to include the words “under God.” Declaring the United States to be a Christian Nation was, she said, a simple and uncontroversial statement of fact and perfectly consistent with these many prior affirmations of the role of God in our national life. America was conceived as a Christian Nation by the founders and remained overwhelmingly Christian. She hit the majoritarian theme relentlessly, reminding the members of Congress who were present that in a recent poll 57 percent of Americans surveyed agreed with the statement, “Members of Congress and other political leaders are ignoring our religious heritage.” “No more,” she said, to the tumultuous applause of the assembled preachers.
The president did go off message with a reporter the next day when she attempted an extemporaneous explanation that America was “ya know, kind of like Israel, a Jewish state, but also of course with the right of people at home to also practice those minority religions too.” When asked whether this meant that people could practice “those minority religions” in public as well as “at home,” she declined to answer. When reminded that the “God” in the pledge and on the currency was the God of Abraham, common to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, she professed doubt that this was indeed so, and—showing some confusion over Trinitarian theology—stated that “it was always understood, in an American context, that God meant Jesus, you know, and also his Father too, of course, together.” When later asked why—if this was a Christian Nation—there was no mention of God or Christianity in the Constitution, she looked surprised and started to answer “That can’t be …” before she was interrupted by Vice President Brownback, who explained that mentioning the fact in the Constitution would have been superfluous. “Christ in the eighteenth century,” he said, “was like the air and water. He was everywhere, part of the accepted background of life. You wouldn’t send an e-mail to your folks from a vacation and think to mention that there was air to breath, would you? No. Just read the words of the founders. America was a religious project from the moment the first Pilgrim set foot on Plymouth Rock. And when the Founding Fathers, our Christian godfearing founding fathers, got together in Philadelphia and, with the assistance of God, gave us our divinely inspired Constitution, they gave us a Christian Nation. They knew it, and the people knew it. No reason to say it.”
Brownback’s comments were lauded by David Barton on Fox Faith & Freedom News, or F3, as it was already starting to be called. Barton was the wildly popular evangelical pseudo-historian, whose life’s work was to recast American history to support the core proposition that America’s origins were as a Christian Nation. That day was the first time I heard him speak. He explained to Glenn Beck and the country his version of American history:
“The old world was irredeemably corrupt, so God conceived of a completely new nation, a ‘Shining City on a Hill,’ to be born on the blank slate of the New World, in which Christianity could flourish and establish dominion over civic and political life. This is what the Pilgrims and other early settlers came to do, and it is what they did do. As you know, Glenn, the Massachusetts Bay Colony was for all intents and purposes a theocracy. Then we won the Revolution—a bunch of ragtag farmers against the greatest army and navy in the world. You think that would have been possible without God’s intervention? Then the Lord, through our godly Christian Founding Fathers, gave us our Constitution—a template for creating a nation like none other on the earth before or since. How else do you think this small country rose up and overtook so rapidly the nations of the Old World? The great religious revivals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were manifestations of Godly religion deepening its hold on American life. But in the twentieth century, Glenn, God’s people in America began to lose their way.”
Sanjay turned the channel. An historian from Princeton was speaking on CNN: “Even in Salem, Massachusetts,
in 1683
, 83 percent of taxpayers stated that they had no religious allegiance. There is not a single mention of God in the US Constitution. Although theocrats and religious dissidents of all types constituted many of the earliest settlers of the New World, the political project that climaxed with the birth of America was first and foremost a project of the enlightenment, where freedom
from
state religion—the source of so much turmoil and tragedy in European history—was among the core objectives.”
The second announcement made by President Palin in the Rose Garden that day was that Congress would again take up the Houses of Worship Free Speech Restoration Act, which in 2002 had been only thirty-one votes short of passage by the House and was reintroduced in 2003 and 2005. The act would allow, on “free speech” grounds, tax-exempt churches to endorse candidates for public office and otherwise engage in political activity without imperiling their tax exemption.
“How can we say we are free,” asked the president, “if our religious leaders and religious people are not allowed to exercise their most fundamental political liberty, the right of free speech and engagement in the political process?”
And third in the trinity was the Academic Freedom Bill of Rights, a surprising choice that was based on legislation proposed by Florida Republicans in 2005. The bill gave students standing to sue their universities if they believed they were subjected to “liberal bias.”
“It’s only fair,” said Palin, “that students paying for an education get a real education, with all of history, and all points of view, and not simply political indoctrination. It’s a matter of freedom, academic freedom. Let the courts decide; I think we can trust our courts—especially our state courts, which are close to the people—to distinguish liberal bias from real academic freedom.” Or as Fox Faith & Freedom News put it rather more candidly, the act was necessary to “fight leftist totalitarianism by dictator professors.”
With deft handling by Speaker Boehner and Majority Leader McConnell, the Joint Resolution and both pieces of legislation passed one week later with only a single amendment, which added to the Joint Resolution a reference to the constitutional protection of freedom of religion. This allowed moderate Republicans and Democrats to put the best possible face on it, emphasizing that as a joint resolution it meant nothing legally and that by insisting on an express acknowledgment of freedom of religion, they had specifically rebutted any implication that the status of the country as a Christian Nation in any way derogated from the rights of other religions.
The next morning Sanjay called me at work and asked if I had access to a television and insisted that I tune in immediately to see what was happening. In a reaction unanticipated by both right and left, small groups started to gather throughout the country in shopping malls, mega-church parking lots, and the occasional town square and celebrate their new Christian Nation by burning books.
“Isn’t it joyous?” one typical pastor was quoted as saying. “All that filth, all that pornography, so-called gay literature, abortion manuals, irreligious filth forced on our children, evolution nonsense, so-called science, the Koran—all the work of the devil and all purified in God’s great light and heat. I knew this day would come,” he said, breaking down in tears, “but I just wasn’t sure I would live to see the day. And now, by the grace of Jesus, my nation, my America, has been redeemed. Praise God. Praise God.”
The bonfires were ringed with families and typically included hundreds of children. A festival atmosphere prevailed. New families arrived with lawn chairs and coolers of beer. But for the fuel source and the absence of cheerleaders, the scenes could have been college pre-game bonfires.
Soon the media, including Fox Faith & Freedom News, had switched to nonstop coverage of the phenomenon. Book burnings continued in all fifty states, with over two thousand specific locations indicated by little flames on the CNN national map. In Colorado Springs, the crowd in the parking lot of the New Life Church was estimated at twelve thousand. SUVs drove up and off-loaded new piles of books to keep the fires going. Reporters asked irreverently whether the celebrants had been stockpiling gay pornography in their houses and, if not, where they had gotten the books. The answers were evasive, although it soon became clear that teenagers were checking books out of public libraries to provide fuel for the bonfires, after which almost all public libraries closed by midday and locked their doors. It also became clear that, having little use for books of any sort, families were just emptying out the dusty bookcases at home, where the volumes, many inherited from their parents, hadn’t left the shelves for years. Reporters spotted Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, 1950s encyclopedias, American Heritage
dictionaries, lots of Danielle Steel and Harry Potter books, and many other works that hardly seemed to fit the stated criteria for destruction (although, when asked, a number of pastors explained that the Harry Potter series, which promoted the false religion of witchcraft, had to go).
I remember being startled by a CNN interview that morning with a woman from the National Institute for Literacy. When asked to offer her explanation for the orgy of hostility toward the written word, she said, “I’m not sure that it’s really hostility; more like indifference probably. After all, one survey showed that one-third of high school graduates in America, after they leave high school, never read another book for the rest of their lives. And do you know what the percentage was for college graduates? Forty-two percent. That’s right, 42 percent of American adults who have had the benefit of tertiary education will never read another book after graduation. Putting aside what that says about the quality of college education, I think part of this is that for many American households, books are simply an anachronism.”