more about Republican Gomorrah

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Here's an excerpt of an excerpt from Max Blumenthal's book Republican Gomorrah:

Inside the movement initiates refer to it cryptically as “The Family,” an exclusive sect. The Christian right as a whole is called “the pro-Family” movement, and movement allies are known as “friends of The Family.” In an actual family, blood ties are required; however, joining the Christian right requires little more than becoming “born again,” a process of confession, conversion, and submission to a strict father figure.

 I hate to disagree with Mr Blumenthal, when he's reporter and I'm just a blogger, but when I hear James Dobson et al talk about "the family," as in "Focus On The Family," I still hear "nuclear family" as in "Ozzie and Harriet" not the very scary political group documented in Jeff Sharlet's book The Family. 

This equivocation is really disturbing, in the same way Sharlet's misuse of the term "fundamentalism" is disturbing: there are good reasons to be aware of the existence of The Family and good reasons to be concerned about Dobson's political machinations, and good reasons to be concerned about Christian Dominionism, but it's sloppy at best to mistake one group for another.

I'm doubly disturbed about Sharlet; it's as if he doesn't understand that Christian Fundamentalism is a well-defined social movement with a well-defined history, and it is by definition separatist and therefore not involved in American secular politics. When Jerry Falwell founded Moral Majority, for example, he left Fundamentalism as a social and religious movement.

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Max Blumenthal: Republican Gomorrah (part three): terrible times in the last days

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Last night I wrapped up the second half of Max Blumenthal's book Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party.

This was fairly unpleasant reading: Blumenthal talked about the personal lives of various Christian leaders and their children, various Republican men and their sexual behavior, including various illegal activities, the question of whether a man who has sex with other men is a homosexual, etc. Then he devotes an entire section of the book to the significance of Sarah Palin.

This is pretty sordid stuff; I got really tired after a while of Blumenthal's descriptions of pornography, sex acts, etc. I suppose I should have expected this, however, from a book with the word "Gomorrah" in it.

I also got tired of Blumenthal's rhetorical flourishes; he often characterizes a person or organization organization in a way that isn't accurate and typically involves a value judgment or a particular interpretation of history (was Francis Schaeffer really the godfather of Dominonism? Is Youth With A Mission a Dominionist group? etc.) and footnote factual claims on each side of the flourish without doing anything to suggest why his characterization is accurate.

I finally decided that Blumenthal is just a muckraker, and I shouldn't expect anything more from this book. It's not a good book, Blumenthal doesn't apparently understand what he's seeing, he apparently doesn't understand that when James Dobson talks about "The Family" he's talking about an idealized nuclear family and not the group that sponsors the National Prayer Breakfast (or just doesn't care), he evidently thinks abortion and pornography are morally neutral or even beneficial, etc. etc.

All that being said, I wish I could find a version of this book that had been fact-checked a bit more carefully, and was written for a centrist rather than a left-leaning audience: he covers a lot of political ground, mentions, contextualizes, and connects a lot of names, and at least mentions every high-profile scandal in the Christian Right (and many in the Republican Party) for the last twenty years. He at least name-checks a lot of the things about the current state of the Christian Right that really bother me, including

• The connections between Sarah Palin and Third Wave Pentecostalism
• Anything and everything having to do with the Council for National Policy
• Purity balls (do these things really exist?)
• The continuing unacknowledged influence of Rousas John Rushdoony
• The various sexual scandals and the way Christian Right leaders respond to them
• The fact that the "movement" has more to do with making Christians into Republicans (and not, say, the other way around)

Unfortunately Blumental makes a mess of this book; I almost wonder if it was intended to inoculate people on the Christian Right against criticism, rather than it's apparent intent to diagnose a real problem on the right.

Blumenthal's basic premise, that the Republican Party is popular with the Christian Right (or perhaps the other way around) because the Christian Right alternately tells fear stories and offers the prospect of a "magic daddy" who can keep everyone safe at the cost of their freedom. This is unfortunately something Blumenthal assumes rather than proves, and it colors his analysis to its detriment. He doesn't compare it to any other fear and magic stories popular in political circles (collective action, labor unions, the New Deal, the Great Society, the free market, etc.) and as I've noted earlier he always seem to be reaching for connections that don't quite make sense.
 

I'm glad to have this book behind me; I'll probably take a break from religion and politics for a little while before wading back into my history of Fundamentalist Christianity/history of the Religious Right reading list again.

Max Blumenthal: Republican Gomorrah (part two)

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I'm fifteen chapters into Max Blumenthal's book Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party and I'm still waiting for the book to gel. Apart from the fact that Blumenthal is a reporter who has dealt with some of the principal players in the book, the fact that he clearly doesn't like Republicans, or Christian political activists, there's not much I can get my hands on.

The current section of the book (chapters 7-15) deal mostly with the impact James Dobson had on national politics during the Clinton and Bush years, with sections devoted to various supporting actors, most of them unsavory characters, including:

• Newt Gingrich
• Dick Armey
• Tom DeLay
• Ralph Reed
• Jack Abramoff
• Ted Bundy
• David Berkowitz

I haven't paid much attention to Dobson, and I had no idea he had been part of the media circus surrounding serial killers Bundy and Berkowitz; I was aware that Dobson has made some peculiar calls when choosing candidates to support and candidates to spurn, and that he's not always consistent in the choices he makes.Like Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell, etc. before him, Dobson has at times seemed at best naive in his dealings with politicians.

Unfortunately, Blumenthal doesn't really delve into the question that interests me, which is why Dobson believes what he believes and/or apparently makes snap judgments regarding who to support and who to spurn. Instead he wastes pages trying and failing to connect pieces that just don't quite fit together: he tries to suggest that because Dobson associate John Tanner defended Ted Bundy and prosecuted Aileen Wuornos that someone (Dobson? Tanner? The Christian Right?) hates women; he tries and fails to connect Dobson with Jack Abramoff just because they both had political and financial dealings with Ralph Reed.

Blumenthal is right about several things: the Terry Schaivo episode was at best a misguided disaster; Newt Gingrich's rehabilitation is probably a sick joke; the Christian Right's civil rights record is middling to poor. Unfortunately he handles these stories so poorly, so pointillistically, that no real theme ever really emerges. Unless maybe that point is "James Dobson is a bad person," or some such. His recurring references to Erich Fromm's 1941 book Escape from Freedom offer this book its only real theme, but his reading of Fromm is shallow and the Fromm references don't gel either: the things he says about people trading freedom for certainty are not new and not peculiar to the Christian Right; they're a problem on the other side of the aisle as well, and the fact that Blumental ignores this more basic question undermines his application of Fromm.

I didn't know anything about Blumenthal before opening this book, and it wasn't until I reached the point where he mentions having been somewhere on assignment for The Huffington Post that I realized where he's coming from. And I guess that's disappointing: I get the feeling that when Blumenthal makes poor distinctions he's doing it on purpose: instead of looking for a solvable problem he's looking to smear various Christian leaders and make their involvement in the political process suspect, suggesting that because they believe what they believe they shouldn't be involved in opinion-making. This strikes me as an oddly partisan viewpoint, and ultimately unhelpful.
 

Max Blumenthal: Republican Gomorrah (part one): march against Bablyon

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Max Blumenthal's 2009 book Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party is another one of those "who are these people?" books that attempts to explain who's who and what's what in the Christian Right. It appears to have been written for a TIME Magazine-reading audience, possibly with connections inside the Beltway, since it starts with selections from the TIME list of the 25 most influential Evangelicals and peppers the summary with political reference points: the John Birch Society, the Communist Party, the ACLU, etc.


So far I've just gotten through Part One, for which Blumenthal chooses as an epigram Jeremiah 50:21-22 (march and destroy, etc.). I still have no idea where Blumenthal is going: in the introduction he suggests that he will be explaining the relationship between the Christian Right and the misbehavior of Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay, Larry Craig, etc. and its commitment to authoritarian government, but by the end of Part One he's just given biographical information on a handful of politically influential Christians:

• Rousas John Rushdoony
• Francis Schaeffer
• Howard and Roberta Green Ahmanson
• Marvin Olasky
• James Dobson
• Chuck Colson
  

And when he makes the turn into Part Two he's still talking about Dobson, connecting Dobson's advocacy of corporal punishment (spanking, plus some sort of trapezius nerve pinch) with his political action against pornography.

I hesitate to say that this is a bad book; Blumenthal is telling a particular story to a particular audience, and it's probably unreasonable to expect him to get details right when he's talking about things that are peripheral to his story or that his audience already believes or doesn't care about: he frames generally accepted terms he doesn't like in scare quotes: e.g. "pro-life," misapplies terms (the Presbyterian Church in America is not ultraconservative; they're a conservative branch of a mainline denomination), gets basic facts wrong (John Wesley wasn't a Calvinist), and tends to quote single sources as authoritative without adequate justification.

I suspect it's fair to say that Blumenthal isn't interested in putting the Christian Right in whatever form into historical perspective; he's looking to sell books to people who already fear and hate the Christian Right. And that's a double shame: first because the rise of the Christian Right is poorly understood by people who disagree with them, and second because Blumenthal's sloppiness and high rhetorical tone doesn't help anyone's understanding.

There are multiple perspectives on the Christian Right as a religious and political movement, and most of the things written about it look at it from one and only one of these perspectives:

• A grass-roots political movement
• The continuation of some interrupted political story
• A foreign imposition of an antidemocratic authoritarian political system
• A deviant but uniquely American religious phenomenon
• A story of blind faith and political naivete becoming politically savvy
• A conspiracy of a cabal of shady characters 

Blumenthal seems to be taking the third perspective, putting him in the same category with John Dean and Joe Conason, writing Beltway books for a Beltway audience concerned with Beltway values.

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