Goldberg, a secular Jew, provides a hard-nosed look at the agendas and power of ultra-conservative Christian organizations in the United States. Goldberg calls this trend “Christian Nationalism,” after the openly-stated goal of many fundamentalist leaders to “take back America.” From, of course, the gays, the morally decadent (such as distributors of birth control), the Darwin-lovers, and the unpatriotic atheists who believe in separation of church and state.

Goldberg comes on strong and occasionally a bit sarcastic—for example, she bemoans the way Intelligent Design proponents have flaunted academic degrees to present their theories as “something more respectable than creationism in drag”—but her anti-fundamentalist rhetoric may not be overstated at all. Her research exposes the very real underground motives of the religious right, who feel bound by their beliefs to combat a spiritually bankrupt nation. There’s no greater motivation than the conviction that one is following God’s explicit orders.

“Dominion theologians” nationwide take Genesis 1:26-28 (where God tells Adam to assume dominion of the world) as scriptural direction for Christians to assume control by divine right. The Christian duty is to seize it. Evangelists with crazed followings preach that the separation between religion and politics is “what Satan likes most,” and call for a regime that will clean up the “dung-eating dogs” (gays). Jews better repent, too, since the holocaust God planned didn’t seem to get through to them. But more dangerous than these extremists are the everyday right-wingers who are raised to carefully infiltrate government and the Judicial bench for the good of Christ, so that that our nation can be set right … so that we can quit handing out condoms, quit treating gays like they’re equals, quit pretending evolution is more scientific than creationism. Under President Bush’s lead, government grant money by the millions poured into these agendas. The back cover promises a “witty, funny” read, but I couldn’t laugh. Religion-gone-bad is jaw-droppingly frightening, and this is a hard book to put down.

Goldberg calls for action. She explains that “the anxieties that underlay Christian nationalism’s appeal—fears about social breakdown, marital instability, and cultural decline—are real. They should be acknowledged and, whenever possible, addressed. But as long as the movement aims at the destruction of secular society and the political enforcement of its theology, it has to be battled, not comforted and appeased.” ( )

The author spent a great deal of time researching the growing, but secretive, Christian reconstructionist movement that seeks to implement God's Law, as defined in Leviticus, in the United States. A frightening narrative, particulrly when she describes the levels of power to which some of the members of this movement have risen. A must read for anyone who is complacent about the First Amendment and our right to freedom of (and from) religion. ( )

Michelle Goldberg does a good job documenting the major outlines of the Christian Nationalist (Reconstructist/Dominion Theology) movement in late 20th Century USA - our own "Texas Taliban" of fundamentalists. Touches on everything from Rushdoony to the Dover Area School District Intelligent Design case.

She's pretty professionally dispassionate in the face of a scary totalitarian worldview that

a) Is clear in its desire to destroy American pluralism and democracy

b) Doesn't let facts, science or reason get in the way of its ideology - in fact is deliberately anti-intellectual and insular

c) Has a pathological, paranoid persecution complex

d) Is naked in its ravenous desire for political power.

I got the sense that the people Goldberg interviewed would be eager to toss homosexuals and other "adulterers" into concentration camps and worse.

Definitely recommended; one of the first books in what has become a series to touch this subject, such as Kevin Phillips' American Theocracy and Max Blumenthal's Republican Gomorrah. ( )

You may have noticed this is you live in the United States, but what is arguably the most mythomaniac country on Earth has been enduring a seismic shift in the way it understands itself for the last decade or so. One of the great new ideas is that the wall of separation between church and state is just too high. "Kingdom Coming" is a fascinating exploration of the folks who want to lower or eliminate that wall, and how their carefully couched, reasonable words mask some fairly alarming beliefs. ( )

Scary stuff, and almost unbelievable, but it's all documented in black and white. Goldberg does an excellent job showing how this tiny radical minority has already wielded enormous influence in the Republican Party and the Bush administration. It's like a paranoid fascist nation within the nation, impervious to facts and reason. Yikes. Goldberg ends by arguing that there is no compromise or negotiating with these folks. They need to be defeated, plain and simple. Amen to that. ( )

I wasn't aware of the degree of penetration of fundamental Christianity in American politics and society. She shows that what they can't get democratically, they try to get through the back door with relentless political manipulation and lobbying. They're bad news in the same way that Al Qaeda and Zionist settlers are, with their "Koranic / Biblical Mandates", and they're also potentially violent, but not so far along this road as their Muslim and Jewish counterparts.

To my mind, a big failure of the book is that it doesn't recognize Liberal extremism and the obvious role that it plays in generating support for the religious right. It seems obvious that gay marriage, gay adoption, the presentation of homosexuality as an alternative lifestyle in schools, or legal action against crucifixes and Christmas trees is going to infuriate the right + that this is exactly the stealth action against the democratic majority that she herself criticizes.

She writes at some length about the parallels with the rise of totalitarian fascism in Weimar Germany without mentioning the relevant fact that fascism drew its support among the uncommited for its opposition to German Communist revolutionary movements (i.e. the government can't stop them but Hitler can). Extreme liberalism is OK for her and she can't seem to see that it's a big part of the problem. ( )

http://ffedor.blogspot.com/2007/08/sad-sheep-scary-shepherds.html ( )

Haven't written a review of this book but I have used and referred to it in an essay I have blogged here on the threats of Utopian visions, and in another critique here of an academic bible scholar (Bauckham) who attacks the Enlightenment.

To date the best book concerning the 'christian right' by the non Christian 'Left'. Miss Goldberg understands them bettter than they understand themselves; and they do not understand themselves at all. She says much in the book which i have heard no where outside of the walls of my classs room. ( )

A birds-eye view of mixing religion and politics in the USA. Makes the point that most of our leaders on the religious right seem to have constant science-fiction movies, religiously based running in their brains. ( )

OK, nothing earth-shattering but a good roundup. ( )

This is scarier than anything that Stephen King has ever written.

We're halfway across the world fighting religious extremism, and here it is, growing in our own backyard.

Bin Laden and Sheikh Omar, look out, there's a new breed of totalitarian faith in town. ( )

A good survey review of Christian Nationalism and its rise to national ascendancy via the Bush Administration, but nothing new for those who have been tracking the media on this issue.

Quotes:

Pg. 14: Reconstructionist theory calls for a stealth strategy to Christianize politics and culture. In a 1981 article from the Journal of Christian Reconstruction, Gary North, one of the movement's key theorists, wrote of the need for activists to penetrate secular institutions to "smooth the transition to Christian political leadership....Christians must begin to organize politically within the present party structure, and they must begin to infiltrate the existing institutional order." The Christian Coalition specialized in this kind of dispersed political warfare. While the Moral Majority had focused on direct mail and large rallies, the Christian Coalition trained activists and candidates on the local level. They ran in school board races and learned how to become Republican delegates. Crucially, Christian Coalition manuals urged candidates to keep their religious agenda quiet until after they were elected. Supporters would learn who the local Christian Coalition candidates were through voter guides distributed at evangelical churches, but the general public was often in the dark. "I want to be invisible," Ralph Reed told the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot in 1991. "I paint my face and travel at night. You don't know it's over until you're in a body bag. You don't know until election night."

Pg. 30: Several times in out history, apparently innocuous references to God have been injected into public life during national crises, only to be used later to legitimate further erosions of church/state separation. “It is not true that the founders designed a Christian commonwealth, which was then eroded by secular humanists and liberals; the reverse is true,” historians Issac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore write in their 1996 book The Godless Constitution. “The framers erected a godless federal constitutional structure, which was then undermined as God entered first the U.S. currency in 1863, then the federal mail service in 1912, and finally the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954.” Advocates of the Christian nation, in turn, often cite these precedents to argue that America has no true legacy of secularism.

Pg. 33: But evangelical Christianity certainly seems to help people fit in in Bush’s administration. As David From, Bush’s former speechwriter, wrote in his book The Right Man, the first words he heard in the Bush White House were “Missed you at Bible study.” Frum, who is Jewish, continued a few paragraphs later, “The news that this was a White House where attendance at Bible study was, if not compulsory, not quite uncompulsory, either was disconcerting to a non-Christian like me.”….The very fact that Bush tends to speak in evangelical code, using phrases that initiates recognize as references to biblical verses, is a sign that in his America, religious insiders are privileged.

Pg. 34: It’s not surprising that Stern is alarmed. Reading his forty-five-year-old book The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology, I shivered at its contemporary resonance. “The ideologists of the conservative revolution superimposed a vision of national redemption upon their dissatisfaction with liberal culture and with the loss of authoritative faith,” he wrote in the introduction. “They posed as the true champions of nationalism, and berated the socialists for their internationalism, and the liberals for their pacifism and their indifference to national greatness.” Fascism isn’t imminent in America. But its language and aesthetics are distressingly common among Christian nationalists. History professor Roger Griffin described the “mobilizing vision” of fascist movements as “the national community rising Phoenix-like after a period of encroaching decadence which all but destroyed it”.

Pg. 52-53: In The New York Times Magazine, Matt Bai wrote of Steve Bouchard, ACT’s Ohio director, and his colleague Tom Lindenfeld: “What gnawed at Bouchard was that nowhere we went in Franklin County, a vigorously contested swing county, did we see any hint of a strong Republican presence—no signs, no door-knockers, no Bush supporters handing out leaflets at the polls. This seemed only to increase Lindenfeld’s confidence….For Bouchard, however, the silence was unsettling. How could there be such a thing as a stealth get-out-the-vote drive?” The drive wasn’t happening in stealth. It was happening in churches, especially megachurches, temples of religious nationalism where millions of Americans gather every week for exultant sermons that mingle evangelical Christianity, self-help, and right-wing politics. Bush’s brigades were hidden in plain sight in a parallel culture, an American that’s both mainstream and invisible to many on the coasts, an America that had been set alight by the intolerable threat posed by gay marriage.

Pg. 55: The homosexual agenda canard is to Christian nationalists what the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was to earlier generations of authoritarians. Just as anti-Semites deny the Holocaust, some Christian nationalists argue that stories about the Nazi victimization of gay people are lies devised to further the homosexual agenda and disarm its opposition….Lively and Abrams are not solitary cranks: their contention that gays were perpetrators rather than victims of the Holocaust is common among Christian nationalists. Among those who’ve endorsed The Pink Swastika is Steve Baldwin, executive director of the Council for National Policy, one of the most powerful right-wing groups in America. Lively, the president of the Pro-Family Law Center in Sacramento, California, serves as California state director of Donald Wildmon’s American Family Association and has been a guest on Fox News, James Dobson’s radio show, The 700 Club, and a host of other programs, and his work is referenced in many books on the “homosexual agenda”.

Pg. 58: All over America, megachurches—generally defined as churches with more than two thousand members—are multiplying. There were about 10 such churches in 1970. Today there are upward of 880. Such churches still represent only 1 percent of American congregations, but they’re growing as older churches atrophy. John N. Vaughn, founder of the research and consultancy firm Church Growth Today, has estimated that a new megachurch opens its doors every two days. These churches are usually located on the sprawling edges of cities, in new exurban developments that almost totally lack for public space—squares, parks, promenades, or even, in some places, sidewalks. With their endless procession of warehouselike chain stores and garish profusion of primary-colored logos, the exurbs are the purest of ecosystems for consumer capitalism. Yet the brutal impersonal utilitarianism of the strip mall and office park architecture—its perversely ascetic refusal to make a single concession to aesthetics—recalls the Stalinist monstrosities imposed on Communist countries. The banality is aggressive and disorientating. Driving through many of these places in states from Pennsylvania to Colorado, I’ve experienced more than a few moments of vertiginous panic where I literally could not remember where I was. Because most exurbs are so new, none of the residents grew up in them; everyone is from somewhere else and there are few places for them to meet. In such locales, megachurches fill the spiritual and social void, providing atomized residents instant community.

Pg. 69: Christian nationalism, like most militant ideologies, can exist only in opposition to something. Its sense of righteousness depends on feeling besieged, no matter how much power it amasses. Conservatives control almost the entire federal government, along with an enormous Christian counterculture, but go to any right-wing gathering, and you’ll hear speaker after speaker talk about being under attack, about yearning to “take the country back,” about the necessity of fighting ever harder. Needing to see their foe as equal to their hatred, they exaggerate its strength. So gay people become a threat to the most important thing conservatives have—their families. In standing up to that threat, they see themselves as heroes. Their loathing is transformed into virtue. This is a familiar phenomenon, one Richard Hofstadter described in his seminal 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”: “Since the enemy is though of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated—if not from the world, at least from the theater of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention,” Hofstadter wrote. “Even partial success leaves him with the same sense of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.”

Pg. 72-74:…[T]he language that the right uses to describe its enemies echoes all the tropes of classic anti-Semitism. The day after the 2004 election, the right-wing magazine Human Events posted a pseudosatirical piece on its Web site called “Declaration of Expulsion: A Modest Proposal.” In it, the writer suggested excising several of the blue states from the union….[T]he qualities the Nazis projected onto Jews are now ascribed to liberals and especially to homosexuals. Christian nationalists hate them as weak degenerates even as they fear their secret subversive networks, whose terrifying power is invoked to justify whatever is done in opposition.

Pg. 80: “Totalitarian propaganda can outrageously insult common sense only where common sense has lost its validity.” – Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Pg 84: The Center for Science and Culture also aims, in a far more elliptical way, to put God at the center of civic life. Originally called the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture, CSC speaks in two languages—one for the general public, and one for the faithful. Talking to the latter, it’s been candid about its true, grandiose goal of undermining the secular legacy of the Enlightenment and rebuilding society on religious foundations. As it said in a 1999 fund-raising proposal that was later leaked online, “Discover Institute’s Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies.”

Pg. 87: The authors of “The Wedge Strategy” wrote that the second phase of their program “is to prepare the popular reception of our ideas” by cultivating opinion makers and “our natural constituency, namely, Christians.” Armed with degrees and the credibility they bring, CSC fellows have secured invitations to testify before state boards of education. They’ve published op-eds in mainstream newspapers and are regularly consulted for “balance” in stories about evolution controversies. The reframing of evolution, a theory undisputed among scientific experts, as one side of a public “debate” is an enormous victory for the Christian right. The right has helped create an atmosphere in which our understanding of empirical reality is subject to political pressure, in which the findings of science are trumped by ideology. It has succeeded where leftist postmodernists failed in subverting the authority of the rational….This kind of psychological climate—at once utterly credulous and sullenly cynical—gives totalitarian movements space to grow. As Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism, “Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”

Pg. 102: There’s a tremendous irony in the way conservatives have adopted their position on evolution. After all, the right has been complaining about relativism—the idea that there is no absolute truth—for years. Now challenging the conclusions of science in the name of cultural tolerance, conservatives have created their own version of radical deconstructionism. Aping the French academicians they once excoriated, they’re undermining the very idea of empirical reality, dismissing inconvenient facts as the product of an oppressive ideology.

Pg. 107: In the faith-based regime that’s coming to supplant the New Deal, conversion is a key to recovery. The diversion of billions of taxpayer dollars from secular social service organizations to such sectarian religious outfits has been one of the most underreported stories of the Bush presidency. Bush’s faith-based initiatives have become a spoils system for evangelical ministries, which are now involved in everything from prison programs and job training to teenage pregnancy prevention, supplanting the safety net that was supposed to catch all Americans. As a result of faith-based grants, a growing number of government-funded social service jobs explicitly refuse to hire Jews, gay people, and other undesirables; such discrimination is defended by the administration and its surrogates in the name of religious freedom.

Pg. 110: Most politically aware people have heard George Bush’s phrase “compassionate conservatism,” but few realize what it really means. During the 2000 presidential campaign, the media largely interpreted it as either a code for moderation or an empty catchphrase akin to Push pere’s vision of a “kinder, gentler” America. This suited Republicans fine, since it allowed them to communicate on two levels, with a vague anodyne message for most Americans, and a much more precise, coded one for the evangelical right. The latter could recognize compassionate conservatism as a specific doctrine rooted in right-wing Christianity. Compassionate Conservatism is the title of another of [Marvin] Olasky’s books. George W. Bush wrote its introduction, calling Olasky “compassionate conservatism’s leading thinker.” Olasky stood beside Bush during one of the first policy speeches of his 2000 presidential campaign, when Bush laid out his plan to shift $8 billion in federal funds to faith-based agencies. Olasky’s work thus serves as a valuable guide to the kind of society that Bush and his Christian nationalist backers are striving to create. His vision is a deeply radical one, heavily influenced by Christian Reconstructionism. He yearns for the days before the New Deal, when sinners could be denied aid until they repented. “An emphasis on freedom also should include a willingness to step away for a time and let those who have dug their own hole ‘suffer the consequences of their misconduct,’” Olasky wrote in the The Tragedy of American Compassion. “The early Calvinists knew that time spent in the pit could be what was needed to save a life from permanent debauch (and a soul from hell).”

Pg. 115-116: One of the first things Bush did when he became president was to create a White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. He went on to set up similar offices in major government departments…Some of the staff at these offices were recruited from the cadres of the Christian right….Christian nationalists in the administration have the opportunity to channel grants to their friends in the movement. (One way of doing this is by packing the panels that review grant applications with movement supporters.) Indeed, much of the faith-based funding is structured to help build the movement. Because many small churches and grassroots ministries don’t know how to write grant proposals or work with the government the Bush administration has established the Compassion Capital Fund. Large, experienced organizations like Pat Robertson’s Operation Blessing get Compassion Capital grants to teach smaller organizations how to apply for funds themselves. Compassion Capital recipients also distribute a percentage of their federal money to small sub-grantees. Thus Robertson’s organization gets to hand out taxpayer dollars to faith-based programs of its choosing, enlarging its network and political clout in the progress.

Pg. 120-121: While a fraction of the billions of dollars the government has doled out has gone to the Unification Church as well as to a small handful of Jewish and Muslim groups, the overwhelming majority of the funding is being pumped into churches and Christian ministries. Exact percentages are nearly impossible to come by, because the faith-based initiative is structured in a way that makes it incredibly difficult to track where all the funds are going….Amazingly, the administration seems to have no central tally of how much federal money is going to religious groups, or what’s being done with it. “They want to do everything they can to avoid particular, number-crunching evaluation,” Billy Terry, a consultant who has sat on several of the federal panels that review faith-based grant applicants, told me. “They couldn’t evaluate what they’ve done if they wanted to. There’s no data. There’s no structure.”

Pg. 123: Vouchers are key to the right-wing plan for sectarian social services. Legally, programs funded with vouchers allow for much more evangelizing than other kinds of government grants, because it’s the individual addict, not the government, who’s choosing where the money goes. (The same principle applies to school vouches, which is one reason they’re so crucial to the Christian right’s program). In Compassionate Conservatism, Olasky cites Carl Esbeck, a prominent Christian nationalist lawyer who would later become head of the faith-based initiatives office in the Department of Justice, arguing that vouchers free users from the restraints of the First Amendment.

Pg. 126: In the Bush Administration, though, there’s an astonishing indifference to measuring the results of faith-based programs, despite the billions being spent on them. As Amy Sullivan wrote in the Washington Monthly, “Unfortunately, in the midst of all of the instructions included in the various executive orders, it turns out that the Bush administration forgot to require evaluation of organizations that receive government grants. …The accountability president has chosen not to direct any money toward figuring out whether faith-based approaches really work.”

Pg. 128: There is one ill that faith-based programs are proven to ameliorate—unemployment among Christian evangelicals. The Christianization of the safety net has created a kind of affirmative action for the born again. That’s because the Bush administration decreed faith-based groups exempt from a 1965 executive order that bars religious discrimination in federally funded hiring. As a result, Jews, Hindus, Muslims, gay people, secularists, and others can’t compete for a growing number of social service jobs.

Pg. 135-136: At Reclaiming America for Christ, [Pam] Stenzel told her audience about a conversation she’d had with a skeptical businessman on an airplane. The man had asked about abstinence education’s success rate—a question she regarded as risible. “What he’s asking,” she said, “is does it work. You know what? Doesn’t matter.” “People of God, “she cried, “can I beg you, to commit yourself to the truth, not what works! To truth! I don’t care if it works, because at the end of the day I’m not answering to you, I’m answering to God!”

Pg. 150-151: [David] Hager, who is close to James Dobson, comes from the Christian nationalist counterintelligentsia that works to give the movement’s theories a gloss of scientific legitimacy. He’s a member of the advisory board of the Medical Institute for Sexual Health, the Austin-based think tank that is to sex education what the Discovery Institute is to the teaching of evolution. Founded in 1992 by Joe McIlhaney, an evangelical gynecologist close to George W. Bush, the medical institute translates the Christian worldview of sex into scientific language, publishing professional-seeming reports designed to discredit mainstream scientific findings about condom effectiveness and to promote abstinence education….These days, the Medical Institute for Sexual Health gets much more respect from the government. Thanks to Bush, it received at least $1.5 million in federal contracts related to abstinence education and STD research. Bush put McIlhaney on the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS and on the advisory committee to the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Pg. 153: The Bush administration’s elevation of the Medical Institute for Social Health into a new scientific establishment has echoes in Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism. She wrote of how totalitarian movements created “paraprofessional” associations of teachers, doctors, lawyers, and the like, which mimicked ordinary professional groups in order to erode their legitimacy and eventually replace them. As she noted, “None of these institutions had more professional value than the imitation of the army represented by the stormtroopers, but together they created a perfect world of appearances in which every reality in the nontotalitarian world was slavishly duplicated in the form of humbug. The technique of duplication, certainly useless for the direct overthrow of government, proved extremely fruitful in the work of undermining actively existing institutions and in the “decomposition of the status quo,” which totalitarian organizations invariably prefer to an open show of force. If it is the task of movements to “bore their way like polyps into all positions of power,” then they must be ready for any specific social and political position.”

Pg. 160: The next day, on a panel called “Remedies to Judicial Tyranny,” constitutional lawyer Edwin Vieira discussed Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion in Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down that state’s antisodomy law. Vieira accused Kennedy of relying on “Marxist, Leninist, Satanic principles drawn from foreign law” in his jurisprudence. What to do about Communist judges in thrall to the devil? Vieira said, “Here again I draw on the wisdom of Stalin. We’re talking about the greatest political figure of the twentieth century…He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him whenever he ran into difficulty. ‘No man, no problem.’” The audience laughed, and Vieira repeated, “’No man, no problem’ This is not a structural problem we have. This is a problem of personnel.” The full Stalin quote is this: “Death solves all problems: no man, no problem.”

Pg. 167: For [Howard] Phillips, the fight over judges is ultimately a fight over the right to impose biblical law. As he said in a 2003 speech given at a rally for Roy Moore, “The overarching question we face today is: ‘Whois America’s sovereign?” and ‘What is his law?’…The holy Bible makes clear that Jesus Christ is our sovereign. He is king of kings, lord of lords, the ruler of all nations. America’s founding fathers understood and acted on this Biblical truth. …Clearly, if the words of the framers are honored, Congress has no authority to restrict the establishment of Biblical religion in the State of Alabama—neither has any federal judge such authority.”

Pg. 176-177: Using language that could have been lifted from a John Birch Society tract, Michael Schwartz, chief of staff to Oklahoma senator Tom Coburn, went further, attacking the principle of judicial review itself. “The Supreme Court is inherently an anti-majoritarian institution,” Schwartz said. “As long as it purports to grade the papers of Congress, it is contrary to the very basis of this republic, which is not sovereignty of judges, but sovereignty of the people. And until we can restore sovereignty of the people, it is a sick and sad joke to claim that we have a constitution.” Like many Christian nationalists, Schwartz would be happy to see the solid institutions of American government smashed….The journalist Max Blumenthal attended the conference dressed like a young conservative in slacks and a blazer. When he approached Schwartz outside the Marriott, Schwartz thought he was a sympathizer. Before Blumenthal said anything, Schwartz smiled at him and said, “I’m a radical! I’m a real extremist. I don’t want to impeach judges. I want to impale them!”

Pg. 179: “Knowing what we do about the fascist cycle, we can find more ominous warning signals in situations of political deadlock in the face of crisis, threatened conservatives looking for tough allies, ready to give up due process and the rule of law, seeking mass support by nationalist and racialist demagoguery,�� wrote [Robert O.] Paxton. “Fascists are close to power when conservatives begin to borrow their techniques, appeal to their ‘mobilizing passions’ and try to co-opt the fascist following.”

Pg. 180: “History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes. – Thomas Jefferson”

Pg. 191: Similarly, while I support liberal struggles for economic justices…I don’t think economic populism will do much to neutralize the religious right. Cultural interests are real interests, and many drives are stronger than material ones. As Arendt pointed out, totalitarian movements have always confounded observers who try to analyze them in terms of class. (Arendt wrote, “Since virtually all of European history through many centuries had taught people to judge each political action by its cui bono and all political events by their particular underlying interests, they were suddenly confronted with an element of unprecedented unpredictability. Because of its demagogic qualities, totalitarian propaganda, which long before the seizure of power clearly indicated how little the masses were driven by the famous instinct of self-preservation, was not taken seriously.”)

Pg. 196-197: Such a movement will come into being only when enough people in the blue states stop internalizing right-wing jeers about how out of touch they are with “real Americans” and start getting angry at being rules by reactionaries who are out of touch with them. After all the heartland has no claim to moral authority. The states whose voters are most obsessed with “moral values” have the highest divorce and teen pregnancy rates. The country’s highest murder rates are in the South and the lowest are in New England. The five states with the best-ranked public schools in the country-Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, New Jersey, and Wisconsin—are all progressive redoubts. The five states with the worst—New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, Mississippi, and Louisiana—all went for Bush. Despite the evidence, our culture clings to the volkisch myth of Middle American wholesomeness. Liberals have been so intimidated by charges of elitism that they rarely speak up for their own values. How else to explain how little discussion there is in our politics of the feudal backwardness and moral dissipation that results whenever Christian nationalists have the chance to put their policies into practice?

Pg. 207: At a time when religious extremism seems everywhere ascendant, I see a different struggle, one between modernity, humanism, reason, and progress on one hand, and fundamentalism, tribalism, Puritanism, and obscurantism on the other…In the summer of 2005 I interviewed Marjane Satrapi, an Iranian graphic novelist whose books, Persepolis and Persepolis, chronicle her childhood during the revolution that instituted religious rule. Part of a cosmopolitan, politically engaged family, Satrapi captures their terrified disbelief as theocrats obsessed with sex and death took over Iran. I thought secularists in America might be feeling some faint shadow of that same horror, but I was reluctant to make comparisons between Iran’s despotic mullahs and our Christian nationalists, because I didn’t want to trivialize her country’s exponentially greater suffering. Satrapi had no such qualms. “They are the same!” she said over the phone…before spontaneously launching into a plea for solidarity among all enemies of fundamentalism. “The secular people, we have no country. We the people—all the secular people who are looking for freedom—we have to keep together. We are international, as they” –the zealots of all religions—“are international.” ( )

I've just started reading the book. So far I do know this: she's [Michelle Goldberg] absolutely gorgeous. She looks a little bit like Karen O. from the band Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs. Check out their CD's.