It was a scene nearly 40 years in the making. The famous Las Vegas strip. The place that forgives all sins. Donald Trump who used inherited wealth to build a real estate business that included harassing tenants and discriminating against minorities, endorsing for President Mitt Romney, who used his inherited wealth to build a business that tossed thousands of innocent people out of their jobs.
Both are worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
2,000 miles away, a third man, Barack Hussein Obama, who chose Christianity as his religion, used it to guide his career and his personal family values, quotes biblical scripture at the National Prayer Breakfast. “John tells us,” The President says, “that ‘if anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him?’”
And there it is; the great crossroads in American culture. A 30 year pivotal moment in which the candidates being supported by the fervent Christian right, live lives of personal sin and the kind of greed that devours entire segments of our population, while displaying vitriol and anger toward a man who lives his personal life with a powerful devotion to his the family he values above all else.
I really thought this was going to happen, in one form or another much sooner. It’s been building for more than 3 decades…
Let me take you back to the beginning of it all; when Christian leaders decided to abandon the values of standing up for the poor and vulnerable among us and Conservatives abandoned their libertarian values of keeping government out of the private lives of American citizens.
In 1980 Jerry Falwell, creator of the nascent political organization “The Moral Majority” decided the group should endorse Ronald Reagan. Reagan, who rarely practiced his religion, either before or after this marriage with Falwell’s group, knew he was getting a political ally who could attract an enormous number of evangelical, religious Christian voters and, unlike Martin Luther King, Jr. and the religious left, would convince his followers that top down economics, and an immense military machine, somehow fit into the Christian credo.
Besides they were good at sending checks they really couldn’t afford to causes that mirrored their beliefs.
Reagan agreed that speaking Falwell’s language of family values, homophobia, and evangelical Christian dogma would give him an enormous political boost.
They were both considered then and lionized today as people who truly defined morality.
I guess it depends on your definition of moral.
Both Regan and Falwell had histories of fervent objection to the civil rights movement and its goal in the 1960s. Running for Governor of California in 1966, Reagan promised to toss the Fair Housing Act in the dustbin of history. "If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house," said the most revered Republican in modern history, "he has a right to do so."
Falwell was even more blunt. After the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that ended discrimination in schools, Falwell, a fervent segregationist, said this; "If Chief Justice Warren and his associates had known God's word and had desired to do the Lord's will, I am quite confident that the 1954 decision would never have been made. The facilities should be separate. When God has drawn the line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line.”
Moral?
While both Reagan and Falwell wisely cooled off their racist rhetoric as it became politically toxic they clearly came to an agreement that would cement the power of their two institutions. The highly profitable political religious right, and the Movement Conservative ideology that calls for soaking the rich even at the expense of the middle class and the working poor, would abandon their core moral values.
Falwell rejected Jesus’ lifelong commitment to lifting the poor and vulnerable in society and Reagan washed his hands of the libertarian roots of Conservatism.
And in Reagan and Falwell’s America, commitment to Christ equaled a commitment to unhinged and unregulated Capitalism, no matter what trail of destitution was left in its wake.
Falwell fully supported every one of Reagan’s efforts to cut effective anti-poverty programs, raising taxes on middle class Americans, and creating an astonishing 43% increase in spending on building up a powerful, deadly military machine.
Falwell and his followers fully supported Reagan’s economic theology called Supply Side Economics; the theory that slashing taxes on the very rich and deregulating the Financial Services industry and the biggest polluters, would trickle down to the middle class and the poor. And why not? Falwell himself was beginning to reap enormous profits from his leadership of the Moral Majority and Lynchburg’s Thomas Road Baptist Church, now home to a TV empire. Falwell’s wealth grew exponentially, worth hundreds of millions of dollars at the time of his 2007 death.
This of course flies in the face of Jesus’ depiction of wealth as written in the gospels. “I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” In the same conversation Jesus had with a young man he said, "If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.”
In today’s conservative America, if a Democrat made a statement like that he would be condemned to eternal political purgatory and damned as a godless socialist. In fact at a recent Republican debate, when Ron Paul suggested our foreign policy should follow the Golden Rule—Do unto others as you would have them do unto you—he was booed by the crowd of Tea Party conservatives who polls show overwhelmingly consider themselves religious Christians.
The roots of this rejection of Jesus’ statement can be found in Calvinist thinking that transformed the humility and abiding concern for the poor and impoverished into a justification for greed. A 2005 article by Gordon Bigelow in Harper’s Magazine lays it out quite clearly.
“These [evangelicals] were middle-class reformers who wanted to reshape Protestant doctrine. For them it was unthinkable that capitalism led to class conflict, for that would mean that God had created a world at war with itself. The evangelicals believed in a providential God, one who built a logical and orderly universe, and they saw the new industrial economy as a fulfillment of God's plan. The free market, they believed, was a perfectly designed instrument to reward good Christian behavior and to punish and humiliate the unrepentant.”
In other words, if you are poor or struggling then you must have done something to deserve it.
As Falwell grew more and more wealthy, working class Americans were headed in the opposite direction. From putting the hammer down on unions, to raising middle class taxes multiple times, to nearly defunding successful anti-poverty programs like Aid to Families and Dependent Children, Reagan began what has become a 30 year process of inflating the wealth of the top 5% while the middle class and poor lose ground; creating in 2009 the greatest gap between the top 5% and the rest of the country since the Great Depression. According to the new Christian Conservative dogma, that meant 95% of all Americans must have been doing something to deserve their loss of wealth and economic security.
During the Clinton years Falwell and his followers, which now included powerful radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh, vigorously opposed abortion reduction programs that were rooted in ending poverty and teaching prevention. Abortion rates and unwanted pregnancy rates declined significantly after Clinton promoted prevention, education and an economy that benefitted both the middle class and the impoverished.
George W. Bush, the converted evangelical Christian, abandoned those policies while promoting more deregulation and more tax cuts for the rich. In 2009, as poverty increased, both abortion and unwanted pregnancies began to increase after a long steady decline.
Using hatred and bigotry toward gays and lesbians and shouting ‘family values’ at the top of their lungs, this combination of Conservative economic greed and Religious dogma created the most powerful political force in American history. This allowed Conservative politicians to put forward economic policies that decimated the middle class, while the middle class continued time and time again to vote for the people who were laying waste to the foundations of our economy. It was no surprise then that Bush became a favorite of the evangelical right. His 2004 campaign included an enormous effort to make gays and lesbians second class citizens across the country. This further entrenched evangelicals to his side and brought out more than 4 million voters who wanted to cement ant-gay marriage laws in 18 states.
Bush of course called himself pro-life and based it on his religious beliefs. Yet he had no problem lying lied to the nation to get us into a war in which hundreds of thousands of God’s children were slaughtered while companies like Halliburton profited immensely.
And so the former Libertarian Conservative movement, in cahoots with the formerly compassionate Christian movement, became purveyors of greed, bigotry and anger. Writer and actor John Fugelsang put it best recently when he said, "Only in America can you be Pro-Death Penalty, Pro-War, Pro-Unmanned Drone Bombs, Pro-Nuclear Weapons, Pro-Guns, Pro-Torture, Pro-Land Mines, and STILL call yourself 'Pro-Life'."
As our nation’s economy tilted toward a second Great Depression the American people elected a man named Barack Hussein Obama. This mixed race man with the middle name of a Muslim dictator was an easy target for people who were frightened of Islamic terrorism and not too many years removed from the days of Falwell’s beloved segregation. Vicious lies about Obama permeated the churches and religious based elements of American society; many of whom have been led to believe Obama was a closet Muslim who sympathized with terrorists and in fact, wasn’t even an American.
Proof had no chance against the power of faith.
In 2010 one in five Americans believed Obama was a Muslim. Even those powerful religious leaders, the second generation of Falwell’s movement, when confronted with undeniable facts, still found a way to tie President Obama to a religion they considered evil. Franklin Graham, son of the evangelical icon Billy Graham, said this about Obama, "I think the president's problem is that he was born a Muslim, his father was a Muslim. The seed of Islam is passed through the father like the seed of Judaism is passed through the mother. He was born a Muslim; his father gave him an Islamic name."
And so we end up back in Vegas. Mitt Romney, the man who promised even bigger and more permanent tax cuts for millionaires like himself, while calling for the decimation of Medicare and tax increases on Americans earning $50,000 a year or less, will once again get the support of the religious right, albeit reluctantly because he’s Mormon. Not as bad as the man with the Muslim seed I suppose.
And Barack Obama, a true Christian, a man who lives Christian values in his family and in his policies, will be rejected by the religious right. They will recoil at his calls for asking those same millionaires to pay their fair share to support education, increased jobs for working class Americans and programs that take care of our elderly population, like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
And unlike the commercial, what happens in Vegas will not stay there. Romney and Trump and the rest of the crowd that sees economic greed as part of their religious dogma, will continue to tell the American people that Barack Obama is not one of us, that he just doesn’t understand the values of Christ or America.
©Eric Allan Futterman/EAF Custom Communication
Eric, this is really well done. Solidly written with quite accurate insights. Excellent piece.
ReplyDelete