Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (63 page)

American churches have been more risk-prone, preaching practical working values over humanistic doctrines. “American denominations had to compete like business for customers, for support, for income,” noted political sociologist Seymour Lipset. Unlike in other countries, Americans often opt to go to different churches depending on changing personal, social, economic, or political preferences. It’s as acceptable to change churches as to change homes or shopping brands, provided that your choice is also motivated by moral conscience rather than mere personal opportunity and benefit.

Sarah Palin grew up as a member of the Assemblies of God, the largest Christian Pentecostal movement (about 66 million members worldwide). The movement consists of a self-described “cooperative fellowship” of self-propagating, self-supporting, and self-governing churches. All profess faith in the deity of Christ, the original fall and final salvation of man through belief in Christ’s blood sacrifice and his Second Coming, and the evangelical mission to spread this belief in order to save as many other souls as possible. The movement also acknowledges loyalty to the national government, but allows every church and believer to take the stance each feels is most appropriate and to support or not support national wars as conscience dictates.

Although Palin grew up a Pentecostalist, in her adult life she attended a number of different churches. She is now part of the evangelical movement of Christian Charismatics, the fastest-growing religious movement in the world (over 450 million adherents). The Charismatic movement as a whole is more loosely structured and defined than the Pentecostal movement, more “postconfessional” than denominational, and opinioned somewhere between Pentecostals and other Christians (including Catholics) on a wide range of social and political issues. For example, a 2006 survey by the Pew Research Foundation
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found that one-third of U.S. Charismatics (33 percent) agreed that “God fulfills politics and elections,” versus nearly half (46 percent) of Pentecostals and about a quarter (24 percent) of all Christians surveyed who agreed with the idea.

Charismatics tend to be more wary of institutional authority than classic Pentecostalists, more casual in their attire, and more innovative and modern in their forms of outreach. Sports, the media, advertisement, and public education are all useful means for bringing morally lost and scattered souls into the flock. But toward those who consciously
choose
to remain outside and reject salvation, like many secular liberal Democrats, there can be little room for concession or compromise.

Charismatics also tend to believe that religious experience shouldn’t be restricted to church-related activities but ought to morally motivate and infuse as much of a person’s social, economic, and political life as possible, even as Church and State remain separate: in the Pew survey, 71 percent believe that religious groups should express social and political views, and nearly as many (67 percent) believe that religion is more important to them than nationality. When Sarah Palin said that the Iraq war was “a task that is from God,” other religious conservatives may have thought she was wrong, but they honored her sentiment as fundamentally moral.

“Action,” “challenge,” and “change” are watchwords of the Charismatic movement, which encourages people to “leave the comfort zone” to wage “spiritual combat” in any realm of life where the forces of good and evil, God and Satan, may battle. In this sense, the Charismatic movement is arguably both revivalist and “conservative” in the traditional sense of seeking to be consistent with the founding organizational principles and moral ethos of the republic. “Change” is not a politically expedient notion for Charismatics, but a guiding principle of life and renewal.

America’s vigorous religious ethic not only allows novelty and surprise, but encourages them as long as they give profit and competitive advantage to sectarian interests. A Gallup poll in 1973 asked: “Some people are attracted to new things and new ideas, while others are more cautious about things. What’s your own attitude?” Nearly half the Americans (49 percent) said they were attracted to novelty; only 13 percent favored caution. Canadians preferred caution (35 percent) over newness (30 percent). As
New York Times
columnist David Brooks put it, “From voters, the demand is: Surprise Me Most.”
¹⁰
That’s something that makes a Frenchman cringe.

During the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, there was a spate of pundit and academic analysis of religion in America on the heels of Sarah Palin’s nomination for the vice presidency under the banner of the Republican Party. What was remarkable was how well the analysts described the trees but missed the forest. In one article in the leading French newspaper
Le Monde,
titled “Sarah Palin, A Funny Kind of Parishioner”
(Sarah Palin, une drôle de paroisienne)
sociologist Yannick Fer described the Charismatic movement to which Palin belongs insightfully and accurately. But his conclusion, which would make sense if it were about France, was widely off the mark:

The [political] positions inspired by this religious conviction are conservative, to the point of opposing the autonomy of the individual in the quest to impose “the values of the Bible” on all of society; for, it is a matter of “saving” the nation as much as individuals. The Charismatic creed [in America] reaches the point of contradiction: Everyone is free and responsible for their choice, but there is only one path—a fundamental ambiguity that makes for a political object that is poorly defined, unstable, and problematic.
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In fact, the Pew survey found that a majority of U.S. Charismatics believe that the Bible and the right path for doing good and fighting evil in life are open to interpretation, though a majority believes that both abortion and homosexual behavior are never justified.

As we saw in chapter 21, in France, successive French leaders from the French revolution to the present have repeated the mantra that, beyond the individual, “the only community is the nation.” That’s why notions of multiculturalism and religious sectarianism have little place in French political philosophy. Although European Enlightenment values of individual freedom and choice also entered strongly into the American Republic’s political constitution (especially via Thomas Jefferson and friends), the fundamental social constituent of economic and political culture in the United States was neither the individual nor the state, but the sectarian community. The religious community in the United States was a civic as well as moral community, a combination that infused American economic and political culture with particular dynamism.

Ironically, it was a French nobleman who first noted this novel historical condition. Alexis de Tocqueville stressed in
Democracy in America,
his masterful analysis of the young republic, written in 1835, that religious conservatism in America does
not
mean sacrifice of individual interest for group interest, or subservience of the individual to the State or any other ruling collectivity. Rather, religion mitigates the selfishness of unbridled individualism and “private animosities,” while shoring up free institutions that engage “aspiring hopes” as against “general despotism [that] gives rise to indifference.”

It must be acknowledged that equality, which brings great benefits to the world, nevertheless … tends to isolate them from each other, to concentrate every man’s attention on himself; and it lays open the soul to an inordinate love of material gratification…. Religious nations are thus naturally strong on the very point on which democratic nations are weak, which shows of what importance it is for men to preserve their religion as their conditions become more equal…. Thus it is, that, by respecting all democratic tendencies not absolutely contrary to herself, and by making use of several of them for her own purposes, Religion sustains a successful struggle of that spirit of individual independence which is her most dangerous opponent…. As soon as several of the inhabitants of the United States have taken up an opinion or feeling which they wish to promote, they look out for mutual assistance; and as soon as they have found out each other they combine. From that moment they are not longer isolated men, but a power seen from afar, whose actions serve as an example, and whose language is listened to.
¹²

When Sarah Palin invoked God to help Alaska get a natural-gas pipeline, she was doing exactly what de Tocqueville described: rallying people to come together to promote a project:

I think God’s will has to be done in unifying people and companies in getting that gas line built, so pray for that. But I can do my job there in developing our natural resources and doing things like getting the roads paved and making sure our troopers have their cop cars and their uniforms and their guns, and making sure our public schools are funded, but really all of that stuff doesn’t do any good if the people of Alaska’s heart isn’t right with God. And that is going to be your job, as I am going to be doing my job, let’s strike this deal, your job is going to be going out there, reaching the people, herding people, throughout Alaska, and we can work together to make sure God’s will is done here.
¹³

One key to previous Democratic success in the presidency has been to inspire people to greater sacrifice and cooperative effort through belief in a providential mission. President John Kennedy, in his inaugural address, asked citizens to renew their faith and effort on behalf of the country by renewing faith in their God-given destiny. Through such cooperative spirit, the impossible could become possible, whether getting to the moon, defeating communism, or even wiping out poverty:

The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe—the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God…. With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own.

De Tocqueville surmised, correctly it seems, that religion in America would give its democracy greater vigor, endurance, cooperative power, and competitive force than any strictly authoritarian regime or unbridled democracy.

In 1852, communism’s cofounder Friedrich Engels wrote to Karl Marx that California’s sudden rise as a social and economic force “out of nothing” was “not provided for in the
[Communist] Manifesto.
… We shall have to allow for this.” He puzzled over the apparent exception of “Yankee blood” to the universal rule of “historical determinism.” During a brief visit to North America in 1888, Engels observed that, unlike the case in Canada or Europe, “Here one sees how necessary the feverish spirit of the Americans is for the rapid development of a new country.”
¹⁴
(But Marx, though he claimed that Communist theory was exclusively grounded in the history of human practice, actually professed an idealistic faith common to German and French Romantics, to wit: “It may work in practice, but if it doesn’t work in theory, ignore it.”)
¹⁵

The great German political economist Max Weber attributed this “feverish spirit” to American capitalism’s peculiar “Protestant ethic.” An anecdote of his illustrates the religious sentiment that seemed to pervade American business life, which depended on personal trust and long-term credit relations. In 1904, on a long railroad journey through what was then U.S. Indian territory, Weber sat next to a traveling salesman of “undertaker’s hardware” (iron letters for tombstones) and casually mentioned the strong church-mindedness of Americans. The salesman responded, “Sir, for my part everybody may believe or not believe as he pleases; but if I saw a farmer or a businessman not belonging to any church at all, I wouldn’t trust him with fifty cents. Why pay me, if he doesn’t believe in anything?”
¹⁶
Americans have traditionally tended to build economies on credit and trust in the future and others, rather than with cash and legal contracts. (But Americans, at least policy makers and negotiators, also tend to treat members of other cultures, such as political rival Russia
¹⁷
or economic rival Japan,
¹⁸
with greater distrust and self-serving bias—“our side is inherently fairer than yours”—than some other cultures treat one another.)

RELIGIOUS ORIGINS OF CIVIL RIGHTS

The role of religion in America, as in world history generally, has always been both reactionary and progressive. Benjamin Franklin believed religion could be harnessed to fight tyranny. But then he also believed that Negroes and Indians and Germans and all other “swarthy” peoples who were not of English complexion should be excluded from what a like-minded John Adams would call America’s “Commonwealth of Christian Virtue.”

It was not Enlightenment views of humanity that drove the abolitionist movement in America in the first half of the nineteenth century, observes Columbia University historian Simon Schama,
¹⁹
or the civil rights movement in the second half of the twentieth. It was a religious reckoning against “the national sin,” pulsating from the pulpit in thunderous throbs and answered by congregations in rapturous song, sway, and action. Not that Enlightenment views couldn’t be used to advance these causes: treating people as chattel clearly violates the basic human right of the Enlightenment to sovereignty over one’s own person. Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams invoked this type of argument on occasion to limited effect. But it was the pious and passionate devotion and willingness to die of those like the black slave rebel Nat Turner and the white insurrectionist John Brown, whom France’s Victor Hugo compared to Spartacus
²⁰
and others saw as “the father of American terrorism,”
²¹
that stirred people to fight until change.