IV Contents - Unschooling

Unschooling

We keep trying to explain away American fundamentalism.
That is, those of us not engaged personally or emotionally in
the biggest political and cultural movement of our times —those on
the sidelines of history—keep trying to come up with theories to
discredit the evident allure of this punishing yet oddly comforting
idea of a deity, this strange god. His invisible hand is everywhere, say
His citizen-theologians, caressing and xing every outcome: Little
League games, job searches, test scores, the spread of sexually trans-
mitted diseases, the success or failure of terrorists, victory or defeat
in battle, at the ballot box, i n bed. Those unable to feel His soothing
touch at moments such as these snort at the notion of a God with the
patience or the prurience to monitor every tick and twitch of desire,
a supreme being able to make a lion and a lamb cuddle but unable to
abide two men kissi ng. A divine love that speaks through hurricanes.
Who would worship such a god? His followers, we try to reassure
ourselves, must be dupes, or saps, or fools, thei r faith illiterate, in-
sane, or m isi nformed, their strength eeti ng, hollow, an aberration.
We don’t like to consider the possibility that they are not new-
comers to power but returnees, that the revivals that have been
sweeping the nation with generational regularity since its inception
are not are-ups but the natural temperature uctuations of Ameri-
can empire. We can’t accept the possibility that those we dismiss as
dupes, or saps, or fools —the believers —have been with us from the
very beginning, that their story about what America once was and


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 337
should be seems to some great portion of the population more com-
pelling, more just, and more beautiful than the perfunctory pro-
cesses of secular democracy. Thus we are at a loss to account for this
recurri ng American mood. The classic means of explaining it away—
class envy, sexual anxiety—do not su ce. We cannot, like H. L.
Mencken writing from the Scopes “monkey” trial of 1925, dismiss
the Christian Right as a carnival of backward bu oons resentful of
modernity’s privileges. We cannot, like the Washington Post in 1993,
explain away the movement as “largely poor, uneducated, and easy to
com mand.” We cannot, like the writer Theodor Adorno, a refugee
from Nazi Germany, attribute America’s radical religion—nascent
fascism? —to Freudian yearning for a father gure.
No, God isn’t dead; Freud and Marx are. The old theories have
failed. The new Christ, fty years ago no more than a corollary to
American power, twenty- ve years ago at its vanguard, is now at the
very center. His followers are not anxiously awaiting his return at the
rapture; he’s here right now. They’re not envious of the middle class,
they are the middle class. They’re not looking for a hero to lead
them; they’re building biblical house holds, every man endowed with
“ headship” over his own family. They don’t silence sex; they promise
sac red sex to those who couple properly—orgasms, according to a
bit of fundamentalist folklore passed between young singles, “600
percent” more intense for those who wait than those experienced by
secular lovers.
Intensity! That’s what one nds within the ranks of the Ameri-
can believers. “This thing is real!” declare our nation’s fundamental-
ist pastors. It’s all coming together: the sacred and the profane,
God’s time and straight time, what t heologians and graduates of the
new fundamentalist prep schools might call kairos and chronos, the mys-
tical and the mundane. American fundamentalism—not a political
party, not a denomination, not a uniform ideology but a manifold
movement—is moving in every direction all at once, claiming the
earth for God’s kingdom, “in the world but not of it” and yet just
loving it to death, anyway. It feels fabulous, t his faith, it tingles in all
the right places.


338 | JEFF SHARLET
Those of us who nd ourselves suddenly (or so it seems) at the
dried-out margins keep telling ourselves that this country is still a
democracy, and that democracy still means “moderation,” private
religion and a public square safe for “civil society.” The fundamental-
ist Christ is not, we tell ourselves, the real Christ. He’s an imposter,
a faker, a fraud recently perpetrated on the good-hearted but gullible
American masses by cynical men, manipulators, pro teers, a cabal of
televangelists. Why? Greed. Anger. Fundamentalists are bitter, an
eminent divine of academe opined at a gathering of worthies con-
vened in 2005 by Boston’s PBS a l iate, because they feel neglected
by the Ivies. Perhaps more dialogue between Cambridge and Lynch-
burg, Virginia, home of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, will heal
us all.
Rationalism itself has been colonized by fundamentalism, re-
made in the image of the seductive but strict logic of a pri me mover
that sets things in motion, not just at the beginning but always. The
cause behind every e ect, says fundamentalist science, is God. Even
the inexorable facts of math are subject to his decree, as explained in
homeschooling texts such as Mathematics: Is God Silent? Two plus two
is four because God says so. If he chose, it could just as easily be
v e .
It would be cliché to quote George Orwell here were it not for
the fact that fundamentalist intellectuals do so with even greater fre-
quency than those of the Left. At a ral ly to expose the “myth” of
church/state separation in the spring of 20 06, Orwell was quoted at
me four times, most emphatically by William J. Federer, a compiler
of quotations whose America’s God and Country—a collection of seem-
ingly theocratic bon mots distilled from the founders and other great
men “ for use i n speeches, papers, [and] debates”—has sold half a mil-
lion copies. “ Those who control the past,” Federer quoted Orwell’s
198 4, “control the future.”
Federer, a tall, lean, oaken-voiced man, loved talking about his-
tory as revelation, nodding along gently to his own lectures. He wore
a gray suit, a red tie marred by a stain, and an American ag pin in
his lapel. He looked like a congressman. He’d twice run for former


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 339
House minority leader Dick Gephardt’s St. Louis seat. He lost both
times, but the movement considers him a winner—in 20 00, he
faced Gephardt in the nation’s third most expensive congressional
race, forcing him to spend down his war chest and default on prom-
ises to fellow Democrats, a move that led to Gephardt’s fall.
Federer and I were riding together in a white school bus full of
Christians from around the country to pray at the site on which the
Danbury, Connecticut, First Baptist Church once stood. It was in an
1802 letter to this church that Thomas Je erson coined the phrase
“wall of separation,” three words upon which the battle over whether
the United States is to be a Christian nation turns. Federer, leaning
over the back of his seat as several pastors bent thei r ears toward his
story, wanted me to understand that what Je erson—notorious deist
and author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom —had really
meant to promote was a “one-way wall,” designed to protect the
church from the state, not the other way arou nd. Je erson, Federer
told me, was a believer; l ike all the Founders, he knew that there
could be no government without God. Why hadn’t I been taught
this? Because I was a victim of godless public schools.
“Those who control the present,” Federer continued darkly,
“control the past.” He paused and stared at me to make sure I under-
stood the equation. “Orson Welles wrote that,” he said.
Welles, Orwell, who cares? Federer wasn’t talking tactics or, for
that matter, even history; he was talking revolution, past, present,
and future.


The rst pillar of American fundamentalism is Jesus Christ; the
second is history, and in the fundamentalist m ind the two are con-
verging. Fundamentalism considers itself a faith of basic truths unal-
tered (if not always acknowledged) since their transmission from
heaven, rst through the Bible and second through what they see as
American scripture, divinely inspired, devoutly i ntended: the Decla-
ration of Independence, the Constitution, and the often overlooked
Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which declared “religion” necessary


340 | JEFF SHARLET
to “good government” and thus to be encouraged through schools.
Well into the nineteenth century, most American schoolchildren
learned their ABCs from The New- En gland Primer, which begins with
“In Adam’s Fall, we sinned all” and continues on to “Spiritual Milk
for American Babes, Drawn out of the Breasts of Both Testaments.”
In 1836, McGu ey’s Eclectic Readers began to displace the Primer, selling
some 122 million copies of lessons such as “ The Bible the Best of
Classics” and “Religion the Only Basis of Society” during the follow-
ing century.
It wasn’t until the 1930s, the most irreligious decade in Ameri-
can history, that public education veered away from biblical indoctri-
nation so thoroughly that within a few decades most Americans
wrongly believed that nationalistic manifest destiny—itself thinly
veiled Calvinism—rather than open piety was the American educa-
tional tradition. The fundamentalist movement sees that to reclaim
America for God, it must rst reclaim that tradition, and so it is pro-
ducing a ood of educational texts with which to wash away the
stains of secular history.
Such chronicles are written primarily for the homeschoolers and
the fundamentalist academies that as of this writing together account
for as much as 10 percent or more of the nation’s children, an ex-
panding population that buys a billion dollars’ worth of educational
materials annually. These pupils are known by many within the
movement as “Generation Joshua,” in honor of the biblical hero who
marched seven times around Jericho before slaughtering “every liv-
ing thing in it.” The Home School Legal Defense Association has
lately been attempting to organize Generation Joshua into “GenJ” po-
litical action clubs for teens modeled, claims the association, on a
scheme for Christian governance conceived of by Alexander Hamil-
ton shortly before Aaron Burr shot him dead in a duel. Set up by
congressional district, the clubs study “America’s Godly heritage,”
write letters to the editor, and register older siblings as voters. They
adopt thrilling names such as Joshua’s Arrows of Nashville, Tennes-
see, or Operation Impact of Los Gatos, California, or the GenJ Hot
Rockin’ Awesomes of Purcellville, Virginia.


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 341
“Who, knowing the facts of our history,” asks the epigraph to
the 200 0 edition of The American Republic for Christian Schools, a ju-
nior high–level textbook, “can doubt that the United States of
America has been a t hought in the mind of God from all eternity?”1
So that I would know the facts, I undertook my own course of home-
schooling: in addition to The American Republic, I read the two-
volu me teac her’s edition of United States History for Christian Schools,
appropriate for eleventh-graders, and the accompanying Economics
for Christian Schools,* and I walked the st reet s of Brooklyn listen-
in g to an eighteen-tape lectu re series on America up to 1865
created for a Christian college by the late Rousas John Rushdoony,
the theologian who helped launch Christian homeschooling and re-
vived the idea of reading American history through a providential
lens.† I was down by the waterfront, pausing to scribble a note on
Alexis de Tocqueville —Rushdoony argues that de Tocquevi lle was
really a fundamentalist Christian disguised as a Frenchman—when
a white and blue police van rolled up behind me and squawked its
siren. There were four o cers inside.
“What are you writing? ” the driver asked. The other three leaned
toward the window.
“Notes,” I said, tapping my headphones.
“Okay. What are you listening to? ”
I said I didn’t think I had to tell him.
“This is a high- security area,” he said. On the other side of a
barbed-wire fence, he said, was a Coast Guard storage facility for
deadly chemicals. “Somebody blow that up and boom, bye-bye
Brooklyn.” Note taking in the vicinity might be a problem. “ So, I
gotta ask again, what are you listening to?”
How to explain—to the cop who had just clued me in on the



*Sample lesson: “Above all, one must never come to see the propagation of the free market as an
end i n itself. The free market merely sets the stage for an un hindered propagation of the gospel of
Jesus Ch rist.”
†F or instance: the “Protestant Wind ” with which, accord ing to an eleventh-grade tex t, God
help ed the British defeat the Spanish Armada so that the New World wou ld not be overly settled
by agents of the Vatican.


342 | JEFF SHARLET
ripest terrorist target in Brooklyn—that I was listening to a Chris-
tian jihadi lecture on how democracy as practiced in America was
de ance of God’s intentions, how God gave to the United States the
“i rresistible blessings” of biblical capital ism unknown to Europe, and
how we have vandalized this with vulgar regulations, how God loves
the righteous who ght in His name?
Like this: “American history.”
Providence would have been a better word. I was “unschooling”
myself, Bill Apelian, the director of Bob Jones University Press, ex-
plained. What seemed to me a self-directed course of study was, in
fact, the replacement of my secular assumptions with a curriculum
guided by God. When BJU Press, one of the biggest fundamentalist
educational publishers, started out thirty years ago, science was its
most popular subject, and it could be summed up in one word: cre-
ated. Now, American history is on the rise. “We call it Heritage Stud-
ies,” Apelian said, and explained its growing centrality: “ History is
God’s working in man.”
My unschooling continued. I read Rushdoony’s most in uential
contemporary, the late Francis Schae er, an American whose Swiss
mountai n retreat, L’Abri (The Shelter), served as a Christian ma-
drassa at which a generation of fundamental ist intellectuals studied a
reenchanted American past, “Christian at least in memory.” And I
read Schae er’s disciples. Tim LaHaye, who besides coauthori ng the
hugely pop u lar Left Behind series of novels has published an equally
fantastical work of history called Mind Siege. ( “The leading authorities
of Secular Humanism may be pictured as a baseball team,” writes
L aHaye, with John Dewey as pitcher, Margaret Sanger in center eld,
Bertrand Russel l at third, and Isaac Asimov at rst). And David Bar-
ton, the president of a history ministry called WallBuilders (as i n, to
keep the heathen out); and Chuck Colson, who searches from the
Greeks to the American founders to fellow Watergate felon G. Gor-
don Liddy for the essence of the Christian worldview, a vision of an
American future so entirely Christ- ltered that beside it theocracy—
the clum sy governance of priestly bureaucrats, disdained by Schaef-
fer and Colson—seems a modest ambition. Theocentric is the preferred


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 343
term, Randall Terry, the Schae er disciple who went on to found
Operation Rescue, one of the galvanizing forces of the anti- abortion
movement, told me. “That means you view the world in His terms.
Theocentrists, we don’t believe man can create law. Man can only
embrace or reject law.” The study of history for fundamentalists is a
pro cess of divining that law, and to that end the theocentric world-
view collapses the past into one great parable—Colson, for i nstance,
studies the Roman Empire for insight into the expansion of
America’s —applicable at all stages of learning.
It is character, in t he nineteenth-century, British Empire sense
of the word, that drives American fundamentalism’s engagement
with t he past. History matters not for its progression of “fact,
fact, fact,” Michael McHugh, one of the pioneers of modern funda-
mentalist education told me, but for “key personalities.” In Francis
Schae er’s telling of U.S. history, for instance, John Witherspoon—
the only pastor to have signed the Declaration of Independence—
looms as large as Thomas Je erson, because it was Witherspoon who
infused the founding with the idea of Lex Rex, “ law is king” (divine law,
that is), derived from the ercest Protestant reformers of the seven-
teenth century, men who considered John Calvin’s Geneva too gentle
for God. In the movement’s history, key men are often those such as
Witherspoon or Schae er himself, intellectuals and activists who
shape ideas. But in the movement’s telling of American history, key
personalities are often soldiers, such as General Douglas MacArthur.
After the war, McHugh explained, MacArthur ruled Japan “accord-
ing to Christian principles” for ve years. “ To what end? ” I asked. Ja-
pan is hardly any more Christian for this divine i ntervention. “The
Japanese people did capture a vision,” McHugh said. Not the whole
Christian deal but one of its essential foundations: “MacArthur set
the stage for free enterprise,” he explained. With Japan com mitted
to capitalism, the United States was free to turn its attention toward
the Soviet Union. The general’s providential anking maneuver, you
might say, helped America win the Cold War.2
But one needn’t be a ag o cer to be used by God. Another
favorite of Christian history is Sergeant Alvin York, a farmer from


344 | JEFF SHARLET
Pall Mall, Tennessee, who in World War I turned his trigger nger
over to God and became perhaps the greatest Christian sniper of the
twentieth century.
“God uses ordinary people,” McHugh explained. Anyone might
be a key personality. The proper study of history includes the student
as a main character, an approach he described as relational, a buzz-
word in contemporary fundamentalism that denotes a sort of pulsing
circuit of energy between, say, pleasant Betty Johnson, your churchy
neighbor, and the awesome realm of supernatural events in which
her real life occurs. There, Jesus is as real to Betty as she is to you,
and so are Sergeant York, General MacArthur, and even George
Washington, who, as “ father of our nation,” is almost a fourth mem-
ber of the Holy Trinity, a mi nd bender made possible through God’s
math.
You may have seen his ghostly form, along with that of Abraham
Lincoln, anking an image of George W. Bush deep in prayer in a
lithograph widely distributed by the Presidential Prayer Team, a ve-
year-old out t that claims to have organized nearly 3 million prayer
warriors on the president’s behalf. The Prayer Team claims to tran-
scend ideology because it will pray for the president whether he or
she is a Republican or a Democrat. That is, it will always pray for
authority. Its reverence built upon American fundamentalism’s imag-
ined history, the Prayer Team has neatly rewritten not only America’s
democratic tradition but also traditional Christianity, replaci ng both
with an amalgamation of elite and populist fundamentalism. The
legacy of Abram Vereide echoes i n the Prayer Team’s belief that the
right relationship of citizen to leader is both spiritual and submissive,
an idea it has dilated from the prayer cells of elites to its 3-million-
strong “small group” approach to authoritarian religion. The populist
twist is the prom ise that the citizen is not the victi m of such dis-
guised politics but, potentially, thei r star. In a similar image pasted
onto ve hundred billboards around the country, an ethereal Wash-
ington kneels in prayer with an anonymous soldier in desert
fatigues—just anot her everyday hero. That could be you, the key
man theory of fundamentalist hi story proposes. It’s like the


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 345
Rapture, when t he saved shall rise together, but it’s happen ing
right now: George Washington and Bet ty Johnson and you, oat-
ing up toward vic tory wit h arms entwined, key personalities in
Christian history.


One afternoon in 20 05, I found in my mail an unsolicited copy of
the “Vision Forum Family Catalog,” a glossy, handsomely produced,
eighty-eight-page publ ication featuring an array of books, videos, and
toys for “The Biblical Family Now and Forever.” Considered the in-
tellectual vanguard of the homeschooli ng movement by the other
fundamentalist publishers with whom I’d spoken, Vision Forum is
nonetheless just one of any number of providers for the fundamental-
ist lifestyle and hardly the largest. But its catalog is as perfect and
polished a distillation as I’ve found of the romance of American fun-
damentalism, the almost sexual tension of its contradictions: its rev-
erence for both rebellion and authority, democracy and theocracy,
blood and innocence. The edition I received was titled “A Line in the
Sand,” in tribute to the Alamo. There, in 1836, faced with near-certain
annihilation at the hands of the Mexican army, the Anglo rebel Lieu-
tenant Colonel William Barret Travis rallied his doomed men by
drawing said line with his sword and challenging them to cross it. All
who did so, he said, would prove thei r preparedness “to give their
lives in freedom’s cause.”
A boy of about eight enacts the scene on the catalog’s cover. He is
dark-eyed, big-eared, and dimple-chinned, and he’s dressed in an
idyllic costume only a romantic could imagine Colonel Travis wear-
ing so close to his apocalyptic end: a white straw planter’s hat, a
Confederate gray, double- breasted shell jacket, a bow tie of black
ribbon, a red sash, khaki jodhpurs, and shiny black fetish boots,
spread wide. The young rebel seems to have been photoshopped in
front of the Alamo at u nlikely scale: he towers over a dark wooden
door, as big as an eight-year-old boy’s imagination.
Much of the catalog is given over to educational materials for
Christian homeschoolers, but the back of the book is dedicated to


346 | JEFF SHARLET
equipping one’s son with the sort of toys that will allow him to “re-
build a culture of courageous boyhood.” Hats, for instance—leather
Civil War kepis, coonskin caps, and a ninety- ve-dollar li fe- size rep-
lica of a fteenth-century knight’s helmet among them. An
eigh teen- dollar video titled Putting on the Whole Armor of God asks,
“Boys, are you ready for warfare?” Young Christian soldiers may
choose from a variety of actual weapons, ranging from a scaled-down
version of the blade wielded by William Wallace, of Braveheart fame
(which at four and a quarter feet long is still a lot of kni fe for a kid) to
a thirty- two- and- a-half- inch Confederate o cer’s saber. It is history
at knifepoint; a theology of arms.
Not all of the toys are made for literal battle. For thirty dollars
you can buy your boy an “Estwing Professional Rock Hammer,” iden-
tical to those used by creationist paleontologists to prove that dino-
saurs coexisted with Adam and Eve. For thi rty-eight dollars you can
acquire a “stellarscope” that functions as a pocket- sized planetarium
for understanding God’s heavens. I was tempted to buy my nephew
an “Ancient Roman Coin Kit,” which includes “ten genuine ancient
Roman coins with accumulated dirt” and tools and instructions for
cleaning and identifying them. “ They will captivate you,” “Line in
the Sand” promises. “Were they held by a third-century Christian? A
martyr?”
Martyrdom, real and metaphorical, is something of a family con-
cern at Vision Forum. Founder Douglas W. Phillips’s father, How-
ard, is a Harvard graduate, a veteran of the Nixon administration,
and a Jewish convert to evangelicalism, all marks of a ne pedigree
within elite Christian conservative culture. Moreover, Phill ips was
one of the small group that “discovered ” Jerry Falwell, recruiting the
Virginian to lead the Moral Majority in 1979. And yet Phil lips’s com-
mitment to the intellectually dense ideas of Rousas John Rushdoony,
considered too di cult and too extreme by many within the move-
ment, led to internal exile within the populist front of American
fu ndamentalism.
In the past few years, though, Phillips has regained a measure of
his former i n uence. Ideas once considered too heady for a movement


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 347
that de ned itself through televangelists are now taught in elite
colleges and universities such as Patrick Henry, Liberty, and
Regent—institutions funded by the millions those TV preachers
raised from the masses —as well as in the most august of Bible
schools and Christian colleges, Wheaton, Westmont, Moody, and
Biola, invigorated by a new generation of book-hungry homeschool-
ers. The anti-intellectualism that shaped the fundamentalism of the
twentieth century has been replaced by a feverish thirst for intellec-
tual legitimacy—to be achieved, however, not on term s set by secu-
larism but by the Christian Right’s very own eggheads, come in from
the cold.
They’ve brought with them the anxiety of a besieged m inority.
They’ve lent to the angry mob ethos of the Moral Majority—now
defunct, displaced by countless divisions and battalions, a united
front in place of a single army—the cachet of an avant-garde, with all
the attendant wounded pride of a misunderstood genius.
The chief candidate for that label within fundamentalism’s intel-
lectual revival is the late Rushdoony, whose eighteen-tape American
history lectures I had obtained from Vision Forum. Rushdoony is best
known as the founder of Christian Reconstructionism, a politically
defunct but subtly i n uential school of thought that drifted so far to
the right that it dropped o the edge of the world, disavowed as
“scary” even by Jerry Falwell. Most notably, Rushdoony proposed the
death penalty for an ever-expanding subset of sinners, starting with
gay men and growing to include blasphemers and badly behaved chil-
dren. Such sentiments have made him a bogeyman of the Left but
also a convenient scapegoat for fundamentalist apologists. Ralph
Reed, for instance, the former head of the Christian Coalition, made
a great show of attacking the ideas of Reconstructionism as mis-
guided, not to mention bad public relations. More recently, First
Things, a journal for academically pedigreed Christian conservatives,
published an oddly skeptical antimanifesto titled “Theocracy! Theoc-
racy! Theocracy!” in which a young journalist, Ross Douthat, eyes
rolling, dismisses the fears of the “antitheocrat” Left by propping up
Rushdoony as a fringe lunatic only to knock him down along with the


348 | JEFF SHARLET
liberal c ritiques that focus on his angriest notions. (Douthat was evi-
dently unaware of First Things’s lengthy tribute to Rushdoony upon
his death in 2001.) That reading of Rushdoony—by liberal critics and
conservative apologists—misses what matters about his revival of
providential history.3
Rushdoony was a monster, but he wasn’t insane. His most vio-
lent positions were the result of fundamentalism’s requisite literalist
reading of sc ripture, an approach that one senses rather bored him.
A natural ideologue, he seemed drawn most emotionally not to the
strict legal code of Leviticus but to the “strange re” of its tenth
chapter, the blasphemous tribute paid to God by priests lost in the
aesthetics of devotion. Rushdoony would have had them killed for
their presumption, which is exactly what God did. But I imagine
Rushdoony sympathized with thei r misgu ided sentiments. His Re-
constructionist movement fell apart when his son-i n-law, an even
more bloodthirsty theologian named Gary North, split with Rush-
doony over what he saw as his father-in-law’s romantic insistence that
the Constitution was an entirely God-breathed document, perverted
by politicians, no doubt, but purely of heaven at its inception. North,
who may actually be a psychopath—he favors stoning as a method of
execution because it would double as a “community project” —was
right on this one occasion.
Rushdoony was to the study of history what a holy warrior is to
jihad, submitti ng his mind completely to God. He derived from the
past not just a quai nt hero worship but also a deep knowledge of his-
tory’s losers, forgotten Americans—minor pol itical gures l ike John
Witherspoon and major revivalists l ike Charles Grandison Finney and
all the soldiers who fought rst for God, then country, the rugged
men of the past who carried the theocratic strand through from the
beginning. The Christian conservatives of his day, Rushdoony be-
lieved, had let themselves be bound by secularism. They railed agai nst
its tyranny but addressed themselves only to issues set aside by secu-
larism as “moral”; the best minds of a fundamentalist generation
burned themselves to furious cinders battling nothing more than
naughty movies and heavy petting. Rushdoony did not believe in such


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 349
skirm ishes. He wanted a war, and he summoned the spirits of history
to the struggle at hand.
Two central Rushdoony ideas, disassociated from his name, have
since been assimilated into the mainstream of Christian conservative
thinking. One is Christian education: homeschooling and private
Protestant academies, both of which he was among the rst to advo-
cate during the early 1960s. Among the chief champions of that edu-
cational movement today are John W. Whitehead, a constitutional
lawyer who counts Rushdoony as one of his greatest in uences, and the
founders of two fundamentalist colleges, Patrick Henry and New St.
Andrews, explicitly dedicated to training culture warriors according
to the tenets of Rushdoony’s other major contribution to postwar
fundamentalism: the revival of the American providential history
that had been rusting since the ni neteenth century, when no less a
hero of the secular past than Daniel Webster declared history “a
study of secondary causes that God uses and perm its in order to ful-
ll his inscrutable decree.” Duri ng the intervening years, el ite funda-
mentalists studied at elite universities (Rushdoony attended Berkeley),
and the rest of the faithful went to public schools and perhaps a Bible
college. Elites learned secular history; the rest rarely learned much
history at all, a state of a airs that kept the movement divided. It was
Rushdoony’s disdain for all things secular that cleared the course for
the convergence in the last few decades of the two streams of funda-
mentalist culture, united across classes behind a vision of a “God-
led” society.
A strict Calvinist in uenced by his upbringing in the Armenian
Presbyterian Church, Rushdoony found his way to the
turn-of-the-century Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper and his idea
of presuppositionalism, which maintains that (a) everybody approaches
the world with assumptions, thus ruling out the possibility of neu-
trality and a classically liberal state; and (b) that since Christian pre-
suppositions acknowledge themselves as such (unlike liberalism’s,
which are deliberately ahistorical), every aspect of governance should
be conducted in the light of its revealed truths. “ There is not a square
inch in the whole domain of our human experience,” declared Kuyper,


350 | JEFF SHARLET
“over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry
‘Mine!’ ” 4
And yet Kuyper’s Christ—more the product of nineteenth-
century imperialism than of scripture—is, in a sense, an afterthought
to Kuyper’s rst assertion, which anticipated postmodernism and its
distrust of modernity’s claim that we can know “facts” absent the
interference of values. Kuyper turned i nstead to divine love as the
foundation of what Rushdoony—and now the majority of the Chris-
tian conservative intellectuals—called a biblical worldview, a re ne-
ment of theology into pol itical ideology.
Kuyper was both a democrat and a theologian who as Dutch
prime m inister tried to conform all aspects of his country to his vi-
sion of God. For much of the twentieth century, he was remembered
fondly only by progressive Social Gospel Christians, who saw in his
Europe an project of state health care and free education and even a
market conformed to biblical law, to the detriment of raw capital-
ism, a foreshadowing of the “city upon a hill” prophesied for America
by John Winthrop in 1630.5
Rushdoony agreed, and he thought most Americans would as
well, once they understood that scripture was the source of the na-
tion’s idealism. He spoke often of his fondness for John F. Kennedy’s
rhetoric, for instance, in which he heard echoes of America as a re-
deemer nation. “God’s work must be our own,” declared Kennedy,
and Rushdoony smiled sadly. “They’ve lost the theology,” Rushdoony
would lecture ten years after Kennedy’s death, “but they haven’t lost
the faith.”
Restoring the former was a matter not of grace but of education.
New generations would have to be raised up who understood the
ancestry of language such as Kennedy’s, who would seek to ful ll the
vision not through social programs—unlike Kuyper, Rushdoony
scorned governmental attempts to ameliorate su ering that he took
to be God’s “ inscrutable decree” —but through the intellectual as
well as spiritual embrace of true religion. Telling kids to stay clear of
bad in uences would not do the job. Bible camps and radio preachers
and all the various campus crusades and college clubs for the mildest


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 351
of young people—no redeemers, they—had failed. Rushdoony de-
cided to start from the beginni ng, to claim the future by reclaiming
the past.


Amid a pantheon now celebrated by fundamentalist historians, the
most surprising hero is Stonewall Jackson of the Confederacy, per-
haps the most brilliant general i n American history and certainly the
most pious. United States History for Christian Schools devotes more
space to Jackson, “Soldier of the Cross,” and the revivals he led
among his troops in the midst of the Civil War, than to either Robert
E. Lee or U. S. Grant; Practical Homeschooling magazine o ers in-
structions for making Stonewall costumes out of gray sweatsuits
with which to celebrate his birthday, declared a homeschooling “ fun
day.” Fundamentalists even celebrate him as an early civil rights vi-
sionary, dedicated to teaching slaves to read so that they could learn
their Bible lessons. For fundamentalist admirers, that is enough, as
evidenced by the 2006 publication of Stonewall Jackson: The Black Man’s
Friend, by Richard G. Williams, a regular contributor to the conser-
vative Washington Times.
Jackson’s popularity with fundamentalists represents the triumph
of the Christian history Rushdoony dreamed of when he discovered,
during the early 1960s, a forgotten volume titled The Life and Cam-
paigns of Lieutenant General Thomas J. Stonewall Jackson. Its author, Rob-
ert Lewis Dabney, had served under Jackson, but more important he
was a Calvinist theologian who believed deeply in a God who worked
through chosen individuals, and he wrote the general’s li fe in biblical
terms. To Rushdoony, the story transcended its Confederate origins,
and he helped make it a founding text of the nascent homeschooling
movement. It’s not the Confederacy fundamentalists love but mar-
tyrdom. Jackson fought rst for God and only second for Virginia,
and, as every fundamentalist fan knows, no Yankee bullet could
touch him. He was shot accidentally by his own men and nonetheless
died happy on a Sunday, content that he had arrived at God’s chosen
hour.


352 | JEFF SHARLET
Born in the mountains of what later became West Virginia, Jack-
son was orphaned by the time he was seven. His stepfather shipped
the boy o to one uncle who beat him and then another who gambled
and counterfeited and drank but also let him read. Against all expec-
tations and two years later than most, he became a cadet at West
Point. He began at the bottom of his class.6
Four years later, he had climbed close to the top, and without the
help of charisma. His frame and his face had broadened, but his eyes,
pale irises of corn ower ringed in dead-of-night blue, seemed dis-
tant. His nose was long, wavering, and it ended in what looked like a
permanent drip. His bright red l ips curled inward, as if hiding. Even
as an army o cer, he felt so out of place in “society” that he was
deathly afraid of public speaking. Absent enemy re, he did not know
how to take a stand. Before the war he watched John Brown hang
with his own eyes and marveled at the strength of the man’s Chris-
tian conviction and wondered, perhaps, what he would have done
had it been his neck in the noose. And yet when his own time to ght
came, he proved just as ferociously devoted to his cause. In All Things
for the Good: The Steadfast Fidelity of Stonewall Jackson, the fundamental-
ist historian J. Steven Wilkins opens a chapter on Jackson’s belief in
the “ black ag” of no quarter for the enemy with a quotation of
Jackson’s view of mercy toward Union soldiers: “Shoot them al l, I do
not wish them to be brave.”
Earlier, in the Mexican War, Lieutenant Jackson de ed an order
to retreat, fought the Mexican cavalry alone with one artillery piece,
and won. General Win eld Scott, commander of t he U.S. forces,
commended him for “t he way [he] slaughtered those poor Mexi-
cans.” Many of the poor Mexic ans slaughtered by Jackson were
civilians. His small victory helped clear the way for t he American
advance, and Jackson was ordered to turn his guns on Mexico City
residents attempting to ee the oncomi ng U.S. Army. He did so
without hesitation—mowing them down even as they sought to
surrender.
What are we to make of this murder? Fundamentalists see in that
willingness to kill innocents con rmation of Romans 13:1. This


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 353
snippet of Paul ’s best-known epistle is a key verse for the Christian
Right: “ For there is no power but of God; the powers that be are or-
dained of God.” Obeying one’s superiors, according to this logic, is
an act of devotion to the God above them.
But wait. Fundamentalists also praise the heroism that resulted
from Jackson’s de ance of orders to retreat, his rout of the Mexican
cavalry so miraculous —it’s said that a cannonball bounced between
his legs as he stood fast—that it seems to fundamentalist biographers
proof that he was anointed by God. Is this hypocrisy on the part of
his fans? Not exactly.
Key men always obey orders, but they follow the command of
the highest authority. Jackson’s amazing victory is taken as evidence
that God was with him—that God overrode the orders of his earthly
com manders. The civilians dead as a result of Jackson’s subsequent
obedience to those same earthly commanders are also signs of God’s
guiding hand. The providential God sees everything; that such a
tragedy was allowed to occur must therefore be evidence of a greater
plan. One of fundamental ist history’s favorite proofs comes not from
scripture itself but from Ben Franklin’s paraphrase at the Constitu-
tional Convention: “ If a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without
His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his aid? ”
Put in political terms, the contradictory legend of Stonewall
Jackson—rebellion and reverence, rage and order—results in the
synthesis of self-destructive patriotism embraced by contemporary
fundamentalism. A striking example is a short video on faith and
diplomacy made in the aftermath of September 11, 20 01, by Chris-
tian Embassy, a behind-the-scenes ministry for government and
military elites created in 1974 as a sister ministry to the Family,
ers, Bill Bright of
with which it coordinates its e orts.7 Its found
Campus Crusade and Congressman John Conlan, considered them-
selves America’s saviors. For Bright, the threat was always commu-
nism, but for Conlan, it was a Jewish congressional opponent who,
lacking “a clear testimony for Jesus Christ,” would not be able to
ful ll his responsibilities.8
And yet, Christian Embassy’s self-promotional video almost seems


354 | JEFF SHARLET
to endorse deliberate negligence of duty. Dan Cooper, then an under-
secretary of defense, grins for the camera as he announces that his
evangelizing activities are “more important than doing the job.” Major
General Jack Catton, testifying in uniform at the Pentagon—an appar-
ent violation of military regulations intended to keep the armed forces
neutral on religious questions—says he sees his position as an adviser
to the Joint Chiefs of Sta as a “wonderful opportunity” to evangelize
men and women setting defense policy. “My rst priority is my faith,”
he tells them; God before country. “I think it’s a huge impact,” he says.
“You have many men and women who are seeking God’s counsel and
wisdom as they advise the chairman [of the Joint Chiefs] and the secre-
tary of defense.” Christian Embassy also sends congressional delega-
tions to Africa and Eastern Europe. “We were congressmen goin’ over
there to represent the Lord,” says Representative John Carter of Texas.
“We are here to tell you about Jesus . . . and that’s it.”
The Embassy encourages its prayer-cell members in the State
Department to do the same; their rst priority is not to explain U.S.
positions but to send the diplomats home “with a personal relation-
ship with the King of Kings, Jesus Christ.” 9 Brigadier General Bob
Caslen, promoted since the making of the video to com mandant of
West Point, puts it in sensual terms: “We are the aroma of Jesus.”
There’s a joyous disregard for democracy in t hese senti ments, its
demands and its compromises, that in its darkest manifestat ion
becomes the overlooked piety at the heart of the old logic of Viet-
nam, lately applied to Iraq: in order to save the village, we must
destroy it.10
But that story is older than Vietnam. Here’s the village life, mod-
est and hard but sustai ned by tender mercies, that Jackson wanted to
save: Between the Mexican War and the Civil War, he moved to tiny
Lexington, Virginia, to become a teacher. He married a minister’s
daughter, gardened, took long strolls, meditated often on peaceful
portions of scripture. The bloody hero of the Mexican War disap-
peared, replaced by a shy, painfully polite man, obsessed with “tak-
ing the waters” for his frail constitution. When the minister’s
daughter died bearing their stillborn child, he married again, his “be-


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 355
loved esposa,” Anna Jackson, who, after his death, revealed that
whenever they were alone together the publicly awkward, nervous
man would grab her, kiss her, and twirl her round. They danced se-
cret polkas. He taught Sunday school.
This is the myth of the quiet man, a noble soul of no outward
distinction. “When it came to learning,” writes the Christian biogra-
pher J. Steven Wilkins, assessing his hero’s visible assets in All Things
for the Good, “everything was a challenge.” Wilki ns continues: “ He did
not have striking characteristics . . . He was gangly, uncoordinated,
and spoke in a high-pitched voice . . . He did not have a great per-
sonality.” Slow, homely, and squeaky; also, peculiar in his posture—he
sat ramrod straight, he said, because he was afraid of squishi ng his
organs—and known by what friends he had for smiling lamely when
he guessed that someone was saying something funny. Then came the
war.
Jackson didn’t want it. Didn’t want slavery (but accepted it as
ordained of God and kept ve slaves), didn’t want secession (but ac-
cepted it as the will of Virgi nia, “to which [his] sword belongs” ),
didn’t want anything but quiet i n which to consider his diet (a source
of deep fascination and increasing asceticism as the war grew closer)
and Scripture (he wished he’d been called by God to the ministry).
Instead, he was cal led to kill ing. “Draw the sword,” he told his stu-
dents, “and throw away the scabbard.”
Anxious about praying aloud in front of others, i n battle, Jackson
would abandon the reins of his horse to lift up his hands toward
heaven. In camp he led revivals and stumbled about as if bl ind, his
eyes shut as he talked to God. Under re he shouted his prayers, im-
ploring God not for mercy but for the blood of his enemies. “He lives
by the New Testament and ghts by the Old,” wrote a contemporary,
a standard to which the movement now aspires. “He had none of the
things held to be essential for leadership,” writes biographer Wil ki ns.
“All he had was a sincere fear of God.”
This, too, is the American myth of the quiet man, transformed
by crisis into a hero. This is the model for spiritual warfare American
fundamentalism wants to implement in every house hold, each fam ily


356 | JEFF SHARLET
and every livi ng room Bible study group discovering within itself
unexpected reserves of leadership and, as need arises, ferocity. Jack-
son’s troops thought he was l iterally invulnerable. His presence
among his men inspired them to fearlessness in battle. And yet Jack-
son was killed in 1863 by his own men, who mistook his return from
an unannounced scouting sortie as a Union charge. This, too, is an
old story: felled within the walls. Our heroes are too great to be
killed by the enemy; only our own weaknesses can undo us. South-
ern dreamers say the Confederacy would have won, abolished slavery
peacefully, and established a true Christian nation had Jackson, “the
greatest Christian general in the history of this nation,” lived to con-
tinue out anking the Union army.
Of course, we would have won in Vietnam, too, if only we hadn’t
tied our own hands, and we’d win in Iraq, if only Democrats would
stop whining. Most of all, we—the believers—could nally build
that city upon a hill God prom ised the as-yet- unformed nation nearly
four centuries ago, if only we could submit to God. Jackson, note his
Christian biographers, saw this problem even before the war. “We
call ourselves a Christian people,” Jackson once wrote, but what he
considered the “extreme” doctrine of separation prevented the United
States from ful lling its destiny.
Look at his wisdom! say his Christian biographers. “A gift from
God,” he would have demurred. Oh, the humility of this fallen hero,
cries American fundamentalism, always deep in conversation with its
mythic past, the model for a new struggle.


When William Federer and I reached the overgrown fou ndation
stones of Danbury Baptist, which sit on a grassy hill sprinkled with
pale violets, we gathered i n a circle with an invitation-only crowd
of pastors and activists from around the country. The event’s orga-
niz er was Dave Daubenmi re, a former high school football coach
from Ohio who’d done battle with the ACLU over his insistence on
praying with his players. Since then he’d launched a fundamentalist
mi nistry called Minutemen United, with which he was climbing


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 357
the ladder of the activist hierarchy.* Still a minor league out t, the
Minutemen had managed to wrangle some respectable B-li st activ-
ists. Besides Federer, there was the Reverend Rob Schenck. Schenck
brought greetings from t he Library of Congress’s c hief of manu-
scripts, who, he said, had used “FBI classi ed technology” to dis-
cover previously unknown margin notes in Je erson’s 1802 letter
proving his Christian intentions. There was the Patriot Pastor, a
giant man from New Hampshire who travels the country i n a tri-
corne hat, black vest, frilly shirt, and leggings, lect uring on the
“Black Regi ment,” t he ghting pastors of the Revolutionary War.
“This is the manifest destiny of my life,” he told me. There was the
Reverend Fl ip Benham, head of Operation Save America, also
known as Operation Resc ue. He was the man who baptized Norma
McCorvey—Jane Roe of Roe v. Wade—into fu ndamentalism. For
the rally, he was wearing vintage white- and-brown wi ngtips, sym-
bols of his commitment to pre-1947 America—1947 being the year
when the Supreme Court ru led according to Je erson’s “wall of
separation” for the rst ti me, in a case concerni ng government
funds for parochial schools.
Providential historians are divided on the question of whether it
was this decision, Everson v. Board of Education, or FDR’s socialistic
New Deal that led God to withdraw his protection from the nation.
Operation Save America’s number two, Pastor Rusty Thomas of
Waco, Texas, favors the less controversial New Deal school of
thought. God, Rusty told me, “always gave us a left hook of judg-
ment, then he gave us a right cross of revival.” But when the left
hook of the Great Depression came, goes the economic theory of
fundamentalism, Americans turned to government as their savior
instead of God. “So we got another left hook.” Kennedy’s assassina-
tion, he explained. Then another left hook: Vietnam. Still we didn’t
learn. So God kept throwing punches, said Rusty: crack, AIDS,


*The Minutemen United should not be confused with the anti- i mmigrant Minutemen militias.
Coach Dave’s out t is ever y bit as militari stic in its rhetoric—one related min istr y is called Pol-
ished Shaft—but educational i n its operations, o ering, for in stance, instruction i n Amer ica’s
“god ly heritage” for schoolteacher s.


358 | JEFF SHARLET
global warming, September 11, thousands of ag-draped co ns
shipped home from Iraq and more on the way.
Rusty began the day’s preaching, pacing back and forth between
Danbury Baptist’s foundation stones. He looked like an exclamation
point—ti ny feet in thin-soled black leather shoes, almost dwar sh
legs, and a powerful torso barely contained by a jacket of double-
breasted gray houndstooth. But he had one of the most nuanced
preaching voices I’ve ever heard, a soft rasp that seemed to come
straight from a broken heart. “We are here to start a gentle revolu-
tion,” he whispered, “to reclaim the godly heritage.” He sounded sad,
for his sin and mine. We were all guilty of turning our backs on the
lessons of history. But then he growled up to a volume that made
even the axen-haired pastor beside me literally blin k before leaning
forward into Rusty’s thunder.
“And when you go to war in your land,” Rusty recited from the
Book of Numbers, “—and make no m istake about it, we are in a
war—”
Amen! hollered Reverend Fl ip.
“And when you go to war in your land,” continued Rusty, “agai nst
an adversary who oppresses you” —and here he interrupte d himself:
“How many besides me are vexed by what is happening in the United
States of America today?”
The crowd, shedding jackets and coats beneath a wan but warm
spring sun, murmured amen.
“Your soul is vexed,” Rusty moaned. Then he cried out, “We are
under oppression!”
“AMEN!” responded the crowd, amping up to match Rusty’s in-
creased volume. The bill of grievances was hard: “Are we not in
mourning? ” Rusty asked, repeating the question and drawing it out
as the women among us closed their eyes and said, plain and simple,
yes. “Are we not in mournnnning?” he moaned. “As terrorism strikes
us from without, corruptions from within?” Yes, said the women, the
men seemingly shamed into silence. “How many know we’re losing
our children?” Yes. “Our marriages are failing!” YES.
Pastor Rusty, in fact, was a single father of ten, the youngest of


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 359
whom is named Torah. Liz, his wife of twenty years, had died a year
past from lymphoma, on the verge of what seemed like recovery.
Reverend Flip had chronicled online her long ght, a roller coaster of
remission and relapse, so that the family’s prayer partners—activists
and Christian radio listeners across the country—could help ght for
her survival. “Good night for now, sweet sister,” Flip wrote when
they failed. “We’ll see you in the morning.”
Grief, not arrogance, translates the promise of salvation—“whoso-
ever shall lose his life for my sake shall nd it” —into a battle cry. For
believers forti ed by the providential past, all of history’s lessons
curdle into the tragedy of one’s own awful losses, and the anguish
that emerges is not singular but like that of a vast choir, a Christian
nation punished for sin and yet promised ultimate victory. Later that
afternoon, on the Danbury village green, Rusty would grip my arm
and pul l me close, tears streaming from jay-blue eyes as he confessed
that he had betrayed God. He had neglected the twin si ns fundamen-
talists believe to be the collective responsibility of the entire society
in which they occur. “Child sacri ce”—by which he meant
abortion—“and homosexual sodomy. Any nation that condoned
those behaviors? That did not challenge them, that did not prevent
them from happening? It will be reduced to rubble.”
He shook his head, eyes squeezed shut. The church had allowed
women to murder their children and men through sodomy to damn
themselves and all their brothers. It was his fault more than theirs
because he knew the “ blueprint of God’s Word.” He had pored over
the Bible and the Constitution and the May ower Compact, had
memorized choice words from John Adams and John Witherspoon
and Patrick Henry, Jeremiah and Nehem iah and John the Revelator.
Scripture and American history are in agreement, he had fou nd: be-
neath God, fami ly, and church is the state, with only one simple re-
sponsibility: “The symbol of the state is a sword. Not a spoon, feeding
the poor, not a teaching instrument to educate our young.” Rusty
stepped back, sts clenching. “And the sword is an instrument of
death!” he yelled. He twitched his Italian loafers in a preacher two-
step. He shook out his neck like a boxer. Then sorrow slumped his


360 | JEFF SHARLET
shoulders. He had failed to wield the sword. He had failed the wid-
ows and orphans. He had failed his brothers lost to sodomy. “There’s
nobody clean in this,” he whispered.
There is a mother church, Rusty preaches, and a father church, sepa-
rate but equal aspects of God. The mother church nurtures and holds
a child when he’s done wrong; the father church is the church of dis-
cipli ne. The mother church feeds the poor, comforts the dying, at-
tempting to remind nations of righteous behavior. But to Rusty the
lesson of American history, the lesson of Valley Forge and Shiloh,
Khe Sanh and Baghdad, Dallas 1963, Roe v. Wade 1973, Manhattan
2001, is clear: this nation is too far gone to be redeemed by mercy
alone. It is the father church’s turn.
“Then shall you sound an alarm with a trumpet that you may be
remembered before the Lord your God,” he preached on the hill at
Danbury, again quoting from the Book of Numbers, “and you
SHOUT”—he replaced the future tense of the biblical sha ll with his
own present-tense bellow—“to be saved from your enemy!” He
turned to the man standing behind him, a wiry, goateed musician in
a brown bomber jacket. “So, brother,” Rusty called, his voice now
joyful, “ let it rip, potato chip!” At which the slender man blew his
horn.


The day’s appointed born- again ba’al tokea, the “master of the blast,”
was named Lane Medcalf, and his instrument was a shofar, a Jewish
trumpet, a three-foot-long spiral horn hewn from the head of a ram,
boiled clean of cartilage, polished to a high gleam. Generally reserved
for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, once upon a time its blast sig-
naled Joshua’s assault on Jericho, the rst battle for the Promised
Land.
Medcalf had borrowed his shofar from his boss’s wife, also a
Christian. He was an arti cial avor compounder, less than a chem-
ist but more than a factory worker. He had been saved since he was a
teenager, but lately he had become engrossed in Jewish history. He
was slender and slight in t he shoulders, cautious but earnest about


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 361
his words. Except for his pale blue eyes, he could have passed for a
rabbinical student on the lam from his studies, despite the fact that he
was fty-three. If he’d grown up in Brooklyn instead of Minnesota,
he might have been called a lu ftmensch, Yiddish for a sweet soul who
seems a little lost.
But Medcalf wasn’t interested in Yiddish; he wanted to know
Hebrew. And he wasn’t contemplating conversion; he was simply go-
ing deeper into the past, i n search of a truer Christianity, a faith
more raw. “We’ve lost our Judeo side,” he told me later. By this, he
meant ghting spirit. “The shofar was for warfare,” he explained.
“You know, alarm, in a battle situation. It’s still a weapon of warfare,
but for ghting demonic in uence.” Medcalf ’s shofar blasts that day,
for instance, were intended to travel through time and slay the invis-
ible demons that had once surrounded Supreme Court justice Hugo
Black, the author of the Everson v. Board of Education decision, in
1947.
“Hugo got a little skewed,” he told me. Black himself had not
been evil, Medcalf explained, just overwhelmed by Satan, who whis-
pered in his ear. “I was told”—here Medcalf ’s voice dropped a
note—“that he was a former Ku Klux Klan member.” (This is true.
He was also a Protestant, and his decision was in keeping with that
period’s fundamental ist animus toward Catholic schools.) Medcal f
had also been told, he conti nued, that in the mid-1950s there had
been another Supreme Court decision, he couldn’t remember the
name, that forced children to go to school where they didn’t want to
go. This also is technically true. Medcalf may have been referring to
Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 decision that overturned o cial
school segregation, leading to busing and the formation of private,
all- white evangelical academies.
It was Brown, along with two decisions in the early 1960s striking
down school prayer, that led to fundamentalism’s embrace of history
as a redeem ing creed. They had a right to educate their children reli-
giously. Catholics already had a system for doing so. Fundamentalists
began to build one, and the bricks of its construction were the proof-
texts of an alternate Christian nation: the letters of John Jay, the rst


362 | JEFF SHARLET
chief justice of the Supreme Court, on the biblical justi cations for
America’s wars; President James Gar eld’s Gilded Age plea for more
Christians in high o ces; even, eventually, the speeches of Martin
Luther King Jr., claimed now from megachurch pulpits across the
country as a martyr of fundamentalism. “All it takes is a God-
intoxicated people,” they quote King, inaccurately and i ndi erent to
context, “one generation, to alter the course of history from
then on.”11
Medcalf was part of the generation for whom Ki ng was a hero
rather than a villain. When he was a kid, his older brother joined a
Christian rock band, and when he played his guitar kids prayed out
loud, free form, with their hands in the air and their whole bodies
swaying, and girls ocked to hi m. “I had never seen Christianity l ike
that before,” Medcal f remembered. He wanted to join the band. He
learned keyboards and the drums. “ Suddenly, I could understand the
Bible. The Holy Spirit got up on me. Man!” “Church” was no longer
a place you went to; it was an experience you consumed, and you
wanted as much as you could get. You wore your jeans to worship
and grew your hair long. You called yourself a Jesus freak and you
called Jesus a revolutionary. You listened to groups like The Way and
Love Song and the All Saved Freak Band, and you read rags like Right
On! and The Fish and Hollywood Free Paper. “ ‘Truckin’ for Jesus,’ ”
Medcalf remembered. “Solid stu , man.”
In 1972, he went to Dallas, for Campus Crusade’s “Explo” —
“Godstock” for the Jesus People.12 Eighty- ve thousand Jesus freaks
packed the Cotton Bowl for a week straight of Christian rock and
preaching. When Billy Graham took the stage, all he could do was
smile with a hand outstretched in salute as the crowd screamed their
love for ten minutes solid. “ It was awesome,” Medcalf said. “We
knew what he had done for us. He gave us the pure gospel.”
Medcalf suddenly looked sad. He blinked, as if holding back
tears. What had gone wrong?
“We sold ourselves,” he said, his voice nearly a whisper. He meant
it literally: albums and t-shirts, “ bumper stickers.” Commercialism
killed Christian rock n’ roll. “We lost our teeth.” One year after


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 363
Explo, the Supreme Court handed down Roe v. Wade. “It happened on
our watch, man,” Medcalf said. The Jesus freaks had failed. They had
lived for today and forgotten tomorrow, and then it had slipped away
from them. To get it back, Medcalf said, the movement must go
backward. Not to the 1960s but to “ before.” It needs a foundation, he
explained, eternal truths. These were to be found in two places: the
Bible and the Constitution.
While we were talking, Reverend Flip had begun to preach. He told
the crowd about a recent victory he’d scored near Charlotte, North
Caroli na, where he’d led seven hundred prayer warriors to a school
board meeting to protest the formation of a Gay-Straight Alliance
club in a local high school. “The preachers preached, the singers
sang, the pray-ers prayed, and the theology of the church became
biography i n the streets!” Flip said. The school board shut down the
club—a deliberate bid, it had declared, to bring the issue before
the courts and get gay-straight clubs outlawed everywhere. Flip said
this was what Jesus wanted. He even did an impression: “Cry to me,”
he said in his best bass God voice; the prayers of the righteous will be
answered.
Medcalf smiled and applauded gently. He told me how his prayers
had changed when he started studying history and blowing the sho-
far. “ I was praying for God to restore America back to its roots one
day when I had what I guess you would call a supernatural experi-
ence. The Holy Spirit caused me to weep and cry, enabling me to
have a broken heart. ‘Please come back,’ I prayed. It was just so in-
tense.” It worked: “Thi ngs have started changing.” He said the ap-
pointments of Samuel Alito and John Roberts to the Supreme Court
were probably the result of God’s intervention. They may be the men
God was waiting for, the right tools for the job of restoration. They
may be under an anoi nting.
That’s the secret of Christian history. It doesn’t require great
men—Medcalf considered Bush’s 2000 election an “answer to prayer,”
but he was under no illusions about the president’s natural abilities—only
wil ling men, ready to be anointed. Bush was one; Medcalf was an-
other. Medcalf submitted to Bush’s authority according to


364 | JEFF SHARLET
Romans 13—“the powers that be are ordained of God”—but both
submitted equally to God’s guiding hand. To Medcalf this resulted in a
democracy more radical than any dreamed of in the 1960s. In the ow
of secular time, Medcalf was a nebbish from Connecticut, mixing
beakers full of arti cial avors. But in Christian time, he was a herald,
blowing his shofar back to 1947, calling the key men of our Christian
nation’s history to battle.


After the rally in Danbury, I joined a group of about twenty pas-
tors, activists, and a few wives for a victory dinner. It really had felt
victorious; Pastor Rusty had worked the crowd i nto a high fever of
hallelujahs, and then all the pastors had joined hands in a circle at the
center for round robin prayer. The Reverend Jim Lilly, a white
hip-hop Assemblies of God preacher from a nearby town, led the
way, his neck heavy with cruciform bl ing and bobbing up and down
to the beat of his own exhortations, his smooth tenor gone gravelly:
“YES, LORD! PULL IT DOWN, LORD! PULL DOWN THAT
LIE!” He meant history as told absent the anointing of God. “KING
OF GLORY! COME IN! KING OF GLORY! MIGHTY IN BAT-
TLE! MANIFEST YOURSELF ON THIS LAND!” A pastor from a
Latino fundamentalist church in the Midwest grabbed the reins:
“Lord God, we pray for the restoration of the land!” Reverend Lilly
was overtaken by a t of what’s called holy laughter, a gift of the spirit
that’s like speaking in tongues. Medcalf got busy on his shofar, and
the whole crowd decided to march seven times around the founda-
tion, just like Jericho, singing in unison an old gospel hymn, “Power in
the Blood,” There is pow’r, pow’r, wonder-workin’ pow’r, in—the—prec—
ious—blood —of —the—lamb!
Everyone was feel ing pretty high at the di nner later that eve ning.
They dragged four long tables into a giant square on the second oor
of the restaurant, an Italian joint that doubled as the kind of comedy
club that brings in sidekicks from Howard Stern’s radio show. I sat
between the Patriot Pastor, still in costume, and Bill Federer, an ac-
cidental place of honor that seemed to make some of the event’s local


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 365
eld organizers a little jealous. Across the table sat Pastor Rusty and
Reverend Flip. Flip threw his tie over his shoulder and leaned back in
his chair. The waitress, a handsome middle- aged woman named
Anna, looked crushed when she learned that the whole group, out of
respect for the nondrinkers among them, would be sticking to iced
tea. Several of the men asked her where her accent was from. She
said she was Polish- Rus sian, but when she came around to Flip, he
said, “Hola, Señorita,” and asked her where she was from. Anna
rolled her eyes. We ordered, most of us the bu et. Anna came back
to re ll our iced tea. She tried to tally the orders, which the pastors
kept changing. “You ordered the bu et? ” she asked Flip.
Flip took a toothpick from his mouth, xed her with a stare. He
owned the room. “I think I already had a bu et,” he said, pronounc-
ing the word as Bu y. “Now I’d like to try an Anna.”
Nobody missed a beat. The party went on.
I thought, Here’s where it would be easiest to unravel the whole
tapestry of fundamentalism. To dismiss it as rank hypocrisy, a bunch
of bullies cloaking their lusts, for sex or money or power, in piety.
But to do so would be to ignore the anointing. Flip doesn’t command
whatever small following he has in the movement because he’s a good
man but because he’s God’s chosen man. “God uses who he chooses,”
a North Carolina preacher once told me, the essence of John Calvin’s
dense theology of election boiled down to an advertising slogan. Flip
obeyed orders, and that made him a key man.
“Obedience is my greatest weapon,” Coach Dave told me after
dinner. He took o the ball cap he’d had made, blue black with a red
cross, and ran his hand through his white hair. In obedience, he said,
he found strength. Coach Dave was built like an old can of beans,
squat and solid with muscle except for a bulge in the middle. I imag-
ined him lecturing his former football team. Obedience, he contin-
ued, was a gift from God; but you needed the Holy Spirit to open it.
“The Holy Spirit is like the software,” he said.
He tried to explain. “We may need another 9/11,” he declared
slowly, a teacher reciting a lesson, “to bring about a full spiritual re-
vival.” He must have seen my surprise. “Now, you don’t get that, do


366 | JEFF SHARLET
you? ” I admitted that I did not. Well, he continued, history’s horrors
are just like God spanking a child. “ That’s a perfect example of where
you need the software to understand what I just said, or else you’re
gonna say, ‘Coach, you mean he spanks us by killing people?’ You
need the software. What’s the software? Well, it’s history. You gotta
understand what history is. It’s collective. Are you getting the soft-
ware? Collective. History.”
Now I got it. Fundamentalism blends the concept of a God in-
volved in our daily a airs with the Enlightenment’s rationalization of
that deity as a broader, more vague “common good.” The fundamen-
talist God is rst and foremost all-powerful, his divinity de ned by
his authority; the “common good” is all-inclusive, its legitimacy es-
tablished by democracy. Fundamentalism, as a theology, as a “world-
view,” wants both: the power and the legitimacy, divine will and
democracy, one and the same. As theology, such confusion may be
resolved with resort to miracles, but as politics, it is broken logic, a
story that defeats itself. Why, then, does it prosper?
Secularists like to point out that many of the Founders were not,
in fact, Christian but rather Deists or downright unbelievers. Funda-
mentalists respond by trotting out the Founders’ most pious words,
of which there are many (Franklin proposi ng prayer at the Constitu-
tional Convention; Washington thanki ng God for His direct hand in
revolutionary victories; etc., etc.). Secularists shoot back with the
founders’ Enlightenment writings and note their dependence on John
Locke; fundamentalists respond that Locke helped South Caroli na
write a baldly theocratic constitution. Round and round it goes, a
lucrative subgenre of popular history, “founder porn,” that results in
spasms of righteous ecstasy—secular as well as fundamentalist—
over the mystical authority of origins.
But fundamentalist historians can also point, accurately, to the
subsequent instances of overlooked religious in uence in American
history: not just Sergeant York’s Christian trigger nger and Stone-
wall Jackson’s tragic example, but also the religious roots of aboli-
tionism, the divine justi cation used to convert or kill Native
Americans, the violent pietism of presidents: not just Bush and


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 367
Reagan, but also Lincoln and McKinley and Wilson and even sweet
Jimmy Carter, the rst born- agai n president, led by God and Zbig-
niew Brzezinski to funnel anticommunist dollars to El Salvador, the
most murderous regime in the hemi sphere. Historians enmeshed in
the assumptions of Enlightenment rationalism naturally seek rational
explanations for events, and in so doing tend to deemphasize the
religious beliefs of historical actors. Fundamentalist historians go
straight to those beliefs; as a result, they really do see a history
missed by most secular observers.
Fundamentalism embraces its mythic past; secular liberalism de-
clares its own myth simply a matter of record. Liberalism proposes
in place of nationalist epic a “demysti ed ” state based on reason. And
yet the imagination with which we, the levelheaded masses, view the
“demigod” Founders and the Civil War, the Good Fight agai nst Hit-
ler, and the American tragedy of Vietnam (the tragedy is always ours
alone) is almost as deeply mystical as that of fundamentalism’s, thick-
ened by “destiny,” blind to all that which does not square with the
story we tell ourselves about who we are as a nation. There are oc-
casional attempts at recovering these near-invisible pieces, “people’s
history” and national apologies and HBO specials about embarrassing
missteps in the march of progress, usually related to race and inevita-
bly restored to forward motion by the courage of some “key man” of
liberalism, Jackie Robinson at rst base, 1947, Rosa Parks on the
bus, 1955, Muhammad Ali refusing to ght in Vietnam, 1966. But
such interventions are not so di erent from fundamentalism’s addi-
tion of Martin Luther King to its pantheon; they are attempts to
convince ourselves that the big We of nationalism was better than the
little people of history actually were.
Likewise our attempts to shunt fundamentalists into the outer
circle of kooks and haters and losers and left- behinds, undemocratic
dimwits who do not understand the story the rest of us have agreed
to live by. Our refusal to recognize the theocratic strand running
throughout American history is as self-deceivi ng as fundamentalism’s
insistence that the United States was created a Christian nation.
The actual past no more serves the secular imagination than that


368 | JEFF SHARLET
of fundamental ism. While fundamental ism projects providence onto
the past, secularism seeks to account for history with tools of ratio-
nalism. But history can not be demysti ed; it is dependent as much on
mystery—that which we recognize we cannot know about the
past—as on the rationally understood. If we believe the aphorisms of
literature—“The past isn’t dead, it’s not even past,” and “The past is
a foreign country” —then we believe in mystic history. We are not so
secular after all. Fundamentalism knows this, and that is why, for
now at least, those we’ve m isunderstood as the dupes, the saps, and
the fools—the believers —prefer its reenchanted past, alive to the
dark magic with which all histories are constructed, to the demysti-
ed state’s blind certainty that it is history’s victor.
Most of us outside the in uence of fundamentalism ask, when
confronted with its burgeoning power, “What do these people want?
What are they going to do? ” But the more relevant question is, “What
have they already done? ” Consider the accomplishments of the move-
ment, its populist and its elite branches combined: foreign policy on
a near-constant footing of Manichean urgency for the last hundred
years; “free markets” imprinted on the American mind as some sort
of natural law; a manic-depressive sexuality that puzzles both prudes
and liberti nes throughout the rest of the world; and a schizophrenic
sense of democracy as founded on individual rights and yet indebted
to a higher authority that trumps personal liberties.
Run that through Coach’s software; look through a glass darkly.
This, then, is what American fundamentalism understands democ-
racy to mean, this is what it understands as “ freedom of religion”: the
freedom to conform, to submit, to become one with the “ biblical
worldview,” the “theocentric” parable, the story that swallows all
others like a black hole. Within it time loops around, past becomes
present, and the future is nothing but a matter of return. Not to the
Garden but to the May ower, the Constitution, or Stonewall Jackson’s
last battle, moments of American purity, glimpses of the Camelot
that haunts every nationalist imagination, fundamentalist or secular.
History is God’s love, its meanings revealed to his key men, presi-
dents and generals, preachers and a schlemiel with a shofar. As for


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 369
the rest of us, we are simply not part of the dream. Fundamentalism
is writi ng us out of history.
“What is to be done?” the unbelievers ask. Oh, it’s si mple: think
up a better story, a c reation myth that is as rich as American funda-
mentalism’s. We cannot just counter fundamentalism’s key men
with our own; nor can we simply switch out the celebratory model
of history for an entirely grim chronicle of horrors. Rather, we must
continue to revisit the history of American fundamentalism—which
is to say, we must reconsider the story we speak of when we say
“A mer ica.”