Tag: jerry falwell
We’ve Seen This Clinton Conspiracy Movie Before — And It Still Stinks

We’ve Seen This Clinton Conspiracy Movie Before — And It Still Stinks

Back in 2000, I interviewed the late Rev. Jerry Falwell on camera in connection with a documentary film of Joe Conason’s and my book The Hunting of the President. It took place at Liberty University, in Lynchburg, VA. We were surprised he agreed to speak with us, as an entire chapter of the book dealt with The Clinton Chronicles, a bizarre video Falwell promoted on his syndicated TV program The Old Time Gospel Hour.

A near-delusional concatenation of preposterous falsehoods and conspiracy theories, the video presented the then-President (and his wife) as an embezzler, drug smuggler, and serial killer. Supposedly, Bill Clinton routinely had his political rivals murdered, which in a small state like Arkansas, you’d think local reporters might have noticed.

Almost needless to say, the fool thing sold like gangbusters. It was reportedly shown in evangelical churches. As H.L. Mencken used to say, “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.”

Alas, to many voters, the real world give and take of democratic politics isn’t exciting enough. They require End Times melodrama: salvation vs. damnation, good vs. evil. Your candidate’s a savior; his opponent’s satanic.

Anyway, when Falwell brought his road show to Arkansas, the pastor of Little Rock’s largest Baptist church denied him its pulpit. He explained that by promoting a scurrilous video filled with falsehoods about the Clintons and many other Arkansans, the portly televangelist had violated the Ninth Commandment against bearing false witness.

So I asked Falwell, on camera, if the Ninth Commandment was more or less important, theologically speaking, than the Sixth Commandment forbidding adultery. Somewhat to his credit, he acknowledged that they were the same. Falwell added that he’d had no idea how many of the video’s crackpot claims were true, but that the American people deserved to hear them.

 At $40 a pop, including $3 for shipping and handling.

And with that the interview ended. Rev. Falwell suddenly had somewhere else he needed to be.

Ancient history, I know. Pre-Fox News, pre-Breitbart, pre-Internet even. I mean, VHS videotapes. Who even remembers what those were?

 Falwell died in 2007, although his son, Jerry Falwell, Jr., recently awarded an honorary doctorate from Liberty University to that exemplary Christian, President Donald J. Trump.

A controversial Fox News report about the death of a Democratic National Committee employee last summer a story that had fueled a conspiracy theory that rocketed across right-wing media, but reportedly embarrassed some of the networks staffers was retracted by the network Tuesday afternoon. Fox News host Sean Hannity has featured the story heavily and tweeted about it Tuesday afternoon. Newt Gingrich also spoke of the story over the weekend.

But one thing that hasn’t changed over the ensuing decades is the seeming need of a substantial proportion of the American electorate to believe that Democrats named Clinton are satanic killers.

Hence the appearance, after all these years, of yet another make-believe murder tale—this one championed by Fox News, Breitbart, and online conspiracy sites, with a substantial boost from WikiLeaks and Russian state news media.

Oh, and Newt Gingrich. Because it wouldn’t be a serious hoax without Newt. Also because, believe it or not, defending the honor of wrongly accused Kremlin intelligence agencies appears to be the whole point.

The Washington Post’s Dave Weigel documented Newt’s recent appearance on Fox and Friends,  where the former Speaker breathlessly announced that “it wasn’t the Russians” that leaked thousands of embarrassing Democratic National Committee emails to WikiLeaks.

No, it was supposedly a young DNC staffer named Seth Rich, who was shot to death on a Washington street at 4 a.m. in what DC police think was a botched robbery attempt last July.

Russian “fake news” operatives went right to work, charging that “a top American Democratic Party staffer preparing to testify against Hillary Clinton was assassinated this past Sunday during a secret meeting in Washington D.C. he believed he was having with Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents, but who turned out, instead, to be a ‘hit team’—and who, in turn, were captured yesterday after a running gun battle with US federal police forces just blocks from the White House.”

Got that? A team of professional assassins hired by Hillary Clinton got into a firefight with Federal agents, and were taken down just outside the White House. And you never heard about it. Total media blackout.

Whoever wrote that has seen far too many spy thrillers, where epic car chases and gun battles take place in picturesque parts of major cities all the time. Of course, Jason Bourne rarely sticks around to read the newspapers. But if you’re the kind of person who believes that such things are possible…

Well, you’re either a gullible hayseed who also believes that Hillary Clinton ran a child-molesting ring at a Washington pizza joint while simultaneously conducting a presidential campaign… Or else you’re a Kremlin imagineer whose only knowledge of American life derives from Clint Eastwood movies.

For the record, apart from Seth Rich’s tragic death, there’s zero evidence for a single alleged “fact” supporting this absurd fable. No leaked emails, no pending testimony, no hit team, no nothing. It’s sheer make-believe. The victim’s bereaved parents have repeatedly begged these cruel hoaxers to stop besmirching their son’s memory.

But that’s not how they roll, Fox News apparatchiks.

Editor’s note: Fox News Channel retracted its online version of the Seth Rich fake news story on Tuesday. Fox News host Sean Hannity continued to promote the falsehoods, however.

Christian Fundamentalism Is Weakening Force In Politics

Christian Fundamentalism Is Weakening Force In Politics

In the waning days of March, a scandal has engulfed the Alabama State Capitol as Gov. Robert Bentley fired his top cop, who then turned around and accused the governor of having had an extramarital affair. The controversy engines hit high gear with the release of a salacious audiotape, in which the governor is overheard telling his listener how much he loves her and enjoys touching her breasts.

For all the inevitable handwringing and headlines, though, the accusations of Bentley’s romantic dalliance with a staffer — long-rumored in Alabama political circles and seemingly confirmed when his wife of 50 years filed for divorce in 2015 — are unlikely to damage his political standing. Nothing to see here, folks.

Except this: The disgrace of Bentley — a churchgoing, Bible-thumping moralist — is just one more gaping hole in the mantle of sanctimony that has afforded the Christian right a special place in American politics for the last 40 years. Though you will still occasionally hear rhetoric from the campaign trail that purports to espouse Christian values, fundamentalist Christianity — at least as a potent voting bloc — is pretty much a spent force in GOP politics.

If you have any doubt about that, just survey the current GOP presidential field, which is led by the narcissistic, non-Scriptural, thrice-married hedonist Donald Trump. Ted Cruz bet his presidential run on his bona fides as a true believer in the fundamentalist strain of Christianity, which emphasizes church attendance, public prayer and a narrow-minded moral code (at least for public consumption). But in primary contests so far, Trump has at least held his own with conservative churchgoers.

That’s the only thing about Trump’s baffling rise that prompts me to say a couple of hallelujahs. I don’t mourn the passing of fundamentalist Christianity as a commanding force; its adherents have done little to advance moral or ethical values.

With a precious few exceptions, they don’t promote social justice, or work to eliminate poverty, or campaign for compassion toward the “stranger” — immigrants. Instead, they have tried to impose their mean and rigid religious beliefs on public policy, misinterpreting the U.S. Constitution and misunderstanding the civic underpinnings of a pluralistic democracy.

Their enthusiasm for Trump underscores what has always been true about that group: They have strong nationalist and authoritarian impulses; they’re xenophobes; they’re averse to social change. There is also, among some white fundamentalist Christians, a strong whiff of racism.

It helps to remember the early days of the late Jerry Falwell, who founded the Moral Majority in 1979 and arranged a marriage of convenience with the Republican Party. As pastor of the Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia, he railed against the 1954 Supreme Court decision that desegregated public schools and denounced the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as a “Communist subversive.”

Falwell abandoned that rhetoric after he became a nationally prominent figure, but he didn’t abandon his right-wing views on race. His foray into national politics began when the federal government moved to revoke the tax-exempt status of the white-only private schools — “seg academies” — that sprang up in the wake of public school desegregation. Falwell had started his own seg academy in Virginia.

Given the animating passions of Falwell’s followers, it’s no surprise that so many conservative Christians have made a seamless transition to Trump. They had already shown themselves to be flexible on their principles, so long as their politicians continued to support the policies that were really important to them. Those include contempt for the poor, suspicion of Muslims, and a nationalist rhetoric that insists on dominance on the world stage.

Bentley has hewed closely enough to that line to make it unlikely he’ll pay any price for his alleged affair. (For the record, Bentley has stated, unconvincingly, that he has not had any “physical” relationship with the staffer.)

For example, the governor supported the state’s extremely harsh law aimed at illegal workers, even though it originally included a provision (since struck down by a federal court) making it a crime to “transport” an undocumented immigrant. Some critics pointed out that could punish a good Christian who offers an immigrant a ride to church.

Neither Bentley nor his supporters minded a bit.

(Cynthia Tucker won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2007. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.)

Photo: U.S. Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz speaks at a campaign event at Lakeside Plastics in Oshkosh, Wisconsin March 25, 2016. REUTERS/Mark Kauzlarich

Sanders Preaches Message Of Morality And Justice At Liberty University

Sanders Preaches Message Of Morality And Justice At Liberty University

On Monday, Democratic presidential candidate and U.S. senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) sought to make his brand of democratic socialism palatable to an audience of conservative Christians.

In a stirring, eloquent stump speech that touched on religion, health care, education, and income disparity, Sanders connected his progressive agenda to tackle economic inequality with an ethical obligation that had a firmly religious basis. Before an unlikely crowd, in an address that sometimes resembled a lecture, sometimes a sermon, he bridged abstract values of morality and justice with concrete policy proposals. His goal, he said, was to “find common ground.”

The location was an incongruous one for Sanders’ full-throated liberal oratory: Liberty University, the Baptist school founded by Jerry Falwell (Sanders was given a warm introduction by Falwell’s son) — the very same venue where five months previous, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) launched his presidential run on a series of promises to repeal Obamacare, gut Planned Parenthood, and roll back progress on marriage equality. In other words, the antitheses of virtually every one of Sanders’ points.

Sanders made no secret of where he stood on social issues, the items on which he was most likely to diverge from the popular opinion in the room. He affirmed his support for same-sex marriage and a woman’s right to a legal abortion. (Throughout the speech Sanders received scattered applause, punctuated by ardent cheers from small but vocal pockets of the crowd.) But the senator from Vermont then suggested that, among those who hold opposing views, there was a valuable opportunity “to reach out of our zone of comfort,” and to have “civil discourse.”

“It is very easy for those in politics to talk to those who agree with us. I do that every day. It is harder, but not less important, to try to communicate with those who do not agree with us,” Sanders said in his prepared remarks.

He hastened to stake out common ground in the question of how best to lead a “moral life” — an inquiry that he argued was both deeply theological and inescapably political, one that he said both the audience and he could agree was vital. He said he was motivated by a vision of morality shared by all religions, namely, the Golden Rule as articulated in the Book of Matthew: “So in everything, do to others what you would have them to do to you, for this sums up the Law and the prophets,” which he quoted.

“Let me be very frank. I understand that issues such as abortion and gay marriage are very important to you and that we disagree on those issues. I get that. But let me respectfully suggest that there are other issues out there that are of enormous consequence to our country and the world and that maybe, just maybe, we don’t disagree on them. And maybe, just maybe, we can work together in trying to resolve them,” he said.

His speech touched on Americans who became sick and died because of a lack of health insurance, mothers separated from their weeks-old children because they did not have paid leave, rampant youth unemployment and mass incarceration, particularly among people of color. Amid the explosion in wealth for millionaires and billionaires, he said, children still lived in poverty. That all of this could occur in the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, was tantamount to a moral crime, he argued.

“There is no justice when so few have so much,” he said. “In your hearts, you will have to determine the morality of that and the justice of that.”

He asked the crowd to interrogate the meaning of the words “family values,” which are commonly invoked by conservatives in anti-abortion or anti-gay-marriage screeds.

“All of us believe in ‘family values,'” Sanders said. “Is it a family value that the United States is the only major country on Earth that does not provide paid family and medical leave?” He renewed his calls for universal health care, tuition-free education, and paid leave for new parents and sick employees. These issues, he said, were inseparable from the health and well-being of the family — and so necessarily must be considered “family values.”

In a Q&A session moderated by David Nasser, Liberty University’s Senior Vice President of Spiritual Development, Sanders took three pre-screened questions from the student body.

In a response to the first one — on the subject of race — Sanders conceded that while the country had been “created […] on racist principles,” it had made many positive strides, but cautioned the audience that they should be aware “to what degree racism is alive in this country.” He cited the massacre of a Bible study group at a historic African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina, and the too-common occurrence of unarmed men of color being shot by police. He said that institutional racism was a very real scourge and that police officers who committed crimes should be brought to justice, but was careful to note that the vast majority of men and women who serve in law enforcement were honest.

When Nasser posed a question about abortion, he framed it by invoking Sanders’ own stated mission to protect society’s most vulnerable, saying that many conservatives believed unborn children fell within that category. The question got perhaps the loudest applause in the event.

Sanders responded by pointing to the many instances in budget appropriations when Republicans had stripped funding from education and social programs — implicitly demanding that conservatives extend their moral crusade to protect unborn children to include born ones as well.

Finally, Nasser offered a prayer expressing both gratitude for Sanders’ visit and a desire for the senator to know that “he has made friends today.”

File photo: yashmori via Flickr

Book Review: ‘One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America’

Book Review: ‘One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America’

Just as Mad Men began wrapping up its final season, and Walmart and NASCAR confronted the governors of two red states over anti-gay “religious freedom” bills, I settled in to read Kevin Kruse’s new history, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America. As one might guess from the subtitle, Kruse argues that the current state of religion’s entanglement in our politics is not the product of piety, but of corporate lobbying, religious pitchmen, and Hollywood stagecraft. We may be living in a moment in which corporate titans fear the impact of anti-gay discrimination on their bottom lines, but the Christian libertarianism Kruse depicts is still alive and well. Witness, for example, Hobby Lobby.

Kruse, a historian at Princeton, traces the rise of Christian nationalism to opposition to New Deal policies — not, as many conventional histories of the movement have pegged it, to abortion, feminism, secularism, or even communism. As I happen to agree with this interpretation, I cracked the binding enthusiastically, and wasn’t disappointed. In these pages, I found a new, meticulous, and vital historical account that should be read by anyone who still scratches their head over whether the Tea Party is a religious movement, or wonders how the idealized conception of America as a “Christian nation” was constructed.

As Kruse chronicles, religious leaders didn’t act alone in orchestrating a decidedly religious opposition to modern welfare state reforms, or in designing American civic religion. Rather, it was a Chamber of Commerce president who called for an antidote to the “virus of collectivism” in a “revival of American patriotism and religious faith.” It was the advertising powerhouse J. Walter Thompson that came up with the “Seven Steps to a Successful Local Religion in Public Life Program.” The same Ad Council officials who came up with a 1955 campaign, “Religion In American Life,” a year later supported Dwight Eisenhower’s presidential campaign with a billboard, “Faith in God and country. That’s Eisenhower! How about you?” Not incidentally, Kruse notes in one of countless fascinating details, J. Walter Thompson at one time employed the future Richard Nixon chief of staff H.R. Haldeman, who went on to be a central figure not only in the Watergate cover-up, but in orchestrating Nixon’s efforts to “romance” religious leaders.

There are four key players in Kruse’s narrative: James Fifield, a California pastor whose role in shaping Christianity’s role in modern politics has been for too long underappreciated; Abraham Vereide, the anti-union crusader who developed the prayer breakfasts and elite cells of politicians and power brokers documented in Jeff Sharlet’s 2008 book, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power; Billy Graham, the only one of the three who became and remains a household name; and Dwight Eisenhower who, in Kruse’s telling, presided over an “incredible transformation” in how Americans understood the role of religion (read: Christianity) in public and political life.

For close observers of the 20th-century rise of Christian civil religion as well as the religious right and the Tea Party, Kruse’s treatment of Fifield will be the most delicious and eye-opening part of the book. Historian Kim Phillips-Fein chronicled Fifield’s role in shaping laissez-faire economic policy in her 2010 Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal, a crucial contribution to understanding the backlash against a social safety net that endures, for example, in the Republican Party’s unrelenting hostility to Obamacare. Kruse’s deep dive into Fifield’s organizing methods, though, brings to life this “apostle to millionaires” and his role in a corporate-Christian alliance to portray the New Deal as both un-American and un-Christian — that is, if Jesus’ gospel were one of rugged individualism.

Before Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, there was Fifield’s Spiritual Mobilization, a campaign to upend the Social Gospel, used by liberals, including FDR, to bolster support for Progressive Era reforms and the New Deal. Fifield’s “important innovation,” Kruse writes, “was his insistence that Christianity and capitalism were political soulmates, first and foremost.” For Fifield, the “state cast a long and ominous shadow,” shaping his theologically-based antagonism to government interventions to support the poor and middle class. In a 1938 pamphlet sent to 70,000 pastors, Fifield wrote, “If, with Jesus, we believe in the sacredness of individual personalities, then our leadership responsibility is very plain.”

Notably, Fifield was not from a conservative denomination, but a Congregationalist whom Kruse describes as theologically liberal but politically conservative. (I suppose “liberal” is accurate should one read his interpretation of Jesus as a libertarian dogmatist as taking liberties with the text.) At the height of his career, Fifield pastored the 4,000-member First Congregational Church in Los Angeles, which counted among its members and supporters the director Cecil B. DeMille and the actor Charlton Heston. Emblematic of Kruse’s lively, detailed reporting on Fifield is an anecdote about Heston reciting lines from his role as Moses in DeMille’s Ten Commandments to worshippers at First Congregational, and his recounting of DeMille’s own theo-cultural cri de coeur in the film’s trailer: “we are still fighting the same battle that Moses fought.” (If you’ve ever heard a contemporary Tea Party activist rail against the “slavery” or “tyranny” of “big government,” you’ll realize the “battle” to which DeMille alluded.)

Throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, Fifield, often with DeMille’s help, staged events like “Independence Sunday,” during which thousands of pastors sermonized on the theme “Freedom Under God.” His Committee to Proclaim Liberty enlisted the aid of Hollywood allies, including Walt Disney and Ronald Reagan, as well as corporate leaders including J. Howard Pew, Conrad Hilton, and executives from Chrysler, Kraft Foods, Marshall Field, Eastern Airlines, General Motors, the United States Chamber of Commerce, and the National Association of Manufacturers. Fifield’s tools for recruiting pastors included distributing free copies of Friedrich Hayek’s libertarian classic, The Road to Serfdom. A 1952 issue of Fifield’s Faith and Freedom magazine denounced the social safety net as “tyrannical” and compared the Social Gospel to socialism, a theology that leads to “socialized covetousness, stealing, and the bearing of false witness.”

Kruse argues convincingly that Fifield’s organizing, and in particular his opposition to the New Deal, helped lay the groundwork for a convergence that came to define religion’s entanglement in national political life in the latter half of the 20th century. First, Billy Graham popularized many of Fifield’s ideas to a mass audience, through his popular crusades and revivals. Second, Vereide’s prayer breakfasts for business elites around the country became “an important political rite of passage” that Vereide, who shared Fifield’s anti-New Deal views, sought to replicate “in every conceivable corner of the federal government,” eventually culminating in the annual National Prayer Breakfast. (Conrad Hilton, Kruse tells us, designed a portrait of a piously kneeling Uncle Sam for the first National Prayer Breakfast, and Graham declared the breakfast “could well be a turning point in the history of Western Civilization.”) And finally, Eisenhower’s campaign and presidency—with Graham’s close orchestration and advice—created the contemporary fusion of religion and politics that still pervades today.

By the height of the Cold War, then, “working lock-step to advance Christian libertarianism, these three movements effectively harnessed Cold War anxieties for an already established campaign against the New Deal,” Kruse writes. Eisenhower, though, eventually soured on the stridency of some of his most libertarian supporters, calling them “stupid” and a “splinter group.” He opted instead for a less combative theme of “Government under God,” and with his support, “One Nation Under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance” and “In God We Trust” to currency in 1954, a process Kruse recounts in detail.

Both Graham and Nixon, who served as vice president under Eisenhower, had “front-row seats” for the religion-and-politics revolution over which Eisenhower presided. Disappointed by the failure to harness that religious energy for his 1960 campaign, Nixon, with Graham’s close counsel, revitalized it in 1968. In the charged climate not only of the Vietnam War and the sexual revolution, but of widespread conservative anger over the 1962 and 1963 Supreme Court decisions striking down mandatory school prayer and Bible reading in public schools, Nixon’s first inaugural involved, Kruse writes, “an unprecedented display of public prayer and formal worship.” This religiosity persisted through his presidency, after he instituted worship services in the White House’s East Room. Nixon’s special counsel Charles Colson (who, after his own post-Watergate conversion, went on to found Prison Fellowship) was instructed to carry out the “president’s request that you develop a list of rich people with strong religious interest to be invited to the White House church services.”

If I have a quibble with One Nation, I would have liked to see Kruse explore how, even though rejected by Eisenhower, the strident Christian libertarians (the forerunners, I would argue, of the Tea Party) never went away, instead creating an ongoing tension between Eisenhower’s uber-civil civic religion and the clamorous anti-New Deal, anti-communist hard right. Still, it’s essential reading for anyone who wants to understand that uniquely American alliance between God and mammon.