In Pursuit of the Christianists

Thomas Jefferson cut out of textbooks because he created the separation of Church and State. Revisionist historians claiming America was founded as a Christian nation. A President who tells Jacques Chirac that Gog and Magog are loose in the Middle East. Christian fundamentalist politicians telling the Israelis to build settlements in defiance of American official policy so that Jesus will return and the Jews will finally be incinerated. The prayer leader of the GOP saying that "God is the most terrible terrorist of them all". A fundamentalist preacher who urges Flordia to "cure the Gay." School boards who want to ban teaching evolution. A former vice Presidential candidate who refers to herself as Esther. The governor of Arizona who claims that God chose her to run.

Who are all these people? And where have they come from? And how did they get so much influence in the United States?

I don't expect anyone but myself to read the books I list here. I am embarking on the futile pursuit like Ahab after the White Whale of the Christianists.

To fortify myself, first comes Isaac Kramnick & R. Laurence Moore's The Godless Constitution: A Moral Defense of the Secular State (Norton, 2005). Rice University's D. Michael Lindsay interviews hundreds of evangelical business leaders and politicians for Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite (Oxford,2007). Evangelical professor of Church History at Wheaton College, Mark Noll treads thin ice in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Eerdsman,1994). For my stay out in Rev. Hagee's Ohio, I'm taking Sarah Posner's God's Profits: Faith,Fraud and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters, (PoliPoint Press, 2008), which skewers practitioners of the prosperity gospel.

Rev. Ronald J. Sider tries to emulate Mark Noll's effect on evangelical thinking by asking about The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience:Why are Christians Living Just Like The Rest of the World? (Baker, 2005). This slim book critiques the evangelicals lack of Christian behavior and ethos and their remarkable propensity to mirror the very behavior they deplore. The Evangelical community is plagued by spousal abuse, meth addiction, porn use, adultery and out of wed pregnancies but it lectures the rest of us about family values. Not content with stirring things up about behavior, he returns in The Scandal of Evangelical Politics: Why are Christians Missing the Chance to Really Change the World?(Baker, 2008). Here he tries to work through a political ethic for evangelicals that would avoid both the Right and the Left and be more focused on espousing Christian values.

But it's tough when the Air Force Academy is right next door to James Dobson. Fighting the good fight in stopping the abuse by fundamentalists of our armed forces,Michael Weinstein and Davin Seay chronicles the fight of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation against the erosion of church and state within our armed services, especially during the last Administration. He successfully blocked Franklin Graham from being the chairman of the Pentagon's National Prayer Day Task Force. No pinko, Michael Weinstein was legal counsel to the Reagan White House. The book-With God on Our Side: One Man's War Against An Evangelical Coup in America's Military (Thomas Dunne, 2008).

Hopefully, I can penetrate these questions before John Ensign of Family fame is forced to resign from the Senate.