Tea Party Movement Returns Christian Right to Its Racist Past
By Michelle Goldberg, The American Prospect
Posted on October 2, 2009, Printed on October 2, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/142988/
Now that popular conservatism has given itself over so avidly to
racial resentment, it's curious to remember how hard the right once
tried to scrub itself of the lingering taint of prejudice. Indeed, for
a decade and a half the Christian right -- until recently the most
powerful and visible grassroots conservative movement -- struggled
mightily to escape its own bigoted history. In his 1996 book Active
Faith, Ralph Reed acknowledged that Christian conservatives had been
on the wrong side of the civil rights movement. "The white evangelical
church carries a shameful legacy of racism and the historical baggage
of indifference to the most central struggle for social justice in
this century, a legacy that is only now being wiped clean by the
sanctifying work of repentance and racial reconciliation," wrote Reed.
"Racial reconciliation" became a kind of buzz phrase. The idea
animated Promise Keepers meetings. "Racism is an insidious monster,"
Bill McCartney, the group's founder, said at a 39,000-man Atlanta
rally. "You can't say you love God and not love your brother." The
Traditional Values Coalition distributed a video called "Gay Rights,
Special Rights" to black churches; it criticized the gay rights
movement for co-opting the noble legacy of the civil rights struggle.
Throughout the Bush years, homophobia and professions of anti-racism
were twinned in a weird way, as if the latter proved that the right
wasn't simply still skulking around history's dark side. At a deeply
surreal 2006 event at the Greater Exodus Baptist Church, an African
American church in downtown Philadelphia, leaders of the religious
right invoked Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks on behalf of gay
marriage bans and Bush's judicial nominees. At the end of the evening,
several dozen clergymen, black and white, joined hands in prayer at
the front of the room. "Black Americans, white Americans," said a
beaming Tony Perkins, leader of the Family Research Council.
"Christians, standing together." The whole premise of compassionate
conservatism -- which shoveled taxpayer money towards
administration-friendly churches like Greater Exodus Baptist -- was
that the right cared as deeply as the left about issues like inner
city poverty.
What a difference an election makes. Even if you believed that
compassionate conservatism was always a bit of a con, it's amazing to
see how quickly it has vanished, and how fast an older style of
reaction, one more explicitly rooted in racial grievance, has
reasserted itself.
Today's grassroots right is by all appearances as socially
conservative as ever, but its tone and its rhetoric are profoundly
different than they were even a year ago. For the last 15 years, the
right-wing populism has been substantially electrified by sexual
anxiety. Now it's charged with racial anxiety. By all accounts, there
were more confederate flags than crosses at last weekend's anti-Obama
rally in Washington, DC. Glenn Beck has become a far more influential
figure on the right than, say, James Dobson, and he's much more
interested in race than in sexual deviancy. For the first time in at
least a decade, middle class whites have been galvanized by the fear
that their taxes are benefiting lazy, shiftless others. The messianic,
imperialistic, hubristic side of the right has gone into retreat, and
a cramped, mean and paranoid style has come to the fore.
To some extent, a newfound suspicion of government was probably
inevitable as soon as Democrats took power. At the same time, with the
implosion of the Christian right's leadership and the last year's
cornucopia of GOP sex scandals, the party needed to take a break from
incessant moralizing, and required a new ideology to take the place of
family values cant. The belief system analysts sometimes call
"producerism" served nicely. Producerism sees society as divided
between productive workers -- laborers, small businessmen and the like
-- and the parasites who live off them. Those parasites exist at both
the top and the bottom of the social hierarchy -- they are both
financiers and welfare bums -- and their larceny is enabled by the
government they control.
Producerism has often been a trope of right-wing movements, especially
during times of economic distress, when many people sense they're
getting screwed. Its racist (and often anti-Semitic) potential is
obvious, so it gels well with the climate of Dixiecrat racial angst
occasioned by the election of our first black president. The result is
the return of the repressed.
It's not, after all, as if the Christian right was something
completely removed from the old racist right -- rather, as Reed
acknowledged all those years ago, they were initially deeply
intertwined. The Columbia historian Randall Balmer has shown that
Christian conservatives were not, contrary to their own mythology,
initially mobilized by their outrage at Roe vs. Wade. Rather, what
spurred them into action was the IRS's attempt to revoke the
tax-exempt status of whites only Christian schools, schools that had
been created specifically to evade desegregation.
The Christian right was always rooted in an older style of reactionary
politics. Before he became a political organizer himself, Falwell --
who ran one of those Christian segregation academies -- attacked
Martin Luther King Jr. for his political activism. ("Preachers are not
called to be politicians, but to be soul winners," he said.) Before
Tony Perkins was basking in homophobic interracial amity, he paid Ku
Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke $82,500 for his mailing list. In
2004, David Barton, then the vice president of the Texas GOP, spoke at
an event featuring white preachers and ministry workers dropping to
their knees before their black brethren to plead for forgiveness.
Thirteen years earlier, Barton had twice been a featured speaker at
meetings of the Christian Identity movement, which preaches that
blacks are sub-human "mud people." One could go on and on.
As racism grew politically unacceptable, the Christian right was able
to channel resentment over the decline of white male privilege into a
Kulterkampf directed at more acceptable enemies, like gays and
lesbians. The movement borrowed heavily from Catholic theology and
convinced itself that it was in a righteous struggle against a culture
of death, not a culture of diversity. Now the mask is off. One wonders
if fifteen years from now, they'll bother apologizing all over again.
Michelle Goldberg is a senior correspondent at The American Prospect.
She is also the author of Kingdom Coming and The Means of
Reproduction.
© 2009 The American Prospect All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/142988/
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