Consolidating the culture of fear?

Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism Michelle Goldberg (W. W. Norton, 2006, 224pp) 0393060942, $23.95

MICHELLE GOLDBERG IS very, very worried, and she wants you to be worried too. Goldberg, a senior writer at Salon, is convinced that her "secular urban values," along with American democracy itself, are being threatened by a "totalitarian political ideology" she calls "Christian nationalism."

According to Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, the "religious right" has morphed into a growing movement of bigoted theocrats who seek "dominion" over the United States of America. This movement plans to use its control of a major political party, its influence in all three branches of government and its dissemination of a "monumental library of lies" to transform the United States into a place where a narrow band of right-wing zealots would institute a sectarian totalitarianism, while all other Americans--whether Christian, Jew, Muslim or secular--would learn, in the very best-case scenario, to "know their place."

Kingdom Coming is not a subtle book. It is passionately argued and, no sense denying it, deeply frightening. The important question facing its readers, however, is whether the book is accurate. Is totalitarianism really a present danger in the United States? Is it really true that religious pluralism and political liberty are, at this very moment, hanging in an uncertain balance for the millions and millions of Americans who do not home school their children? Who do not think evolution is a satanic plot? Who do not think abstinence is the best answer to teenage pregnancy? Who do not think gay unions pose the deepest threat to the threadbare institution of American marriage?

I have now read the book twice, and I have to admit that I am still not sure. I still can't decide whether Goldberg is an indispensable Paul Revere riding through the complacent precincts of secular America, calling for us to wake up and bar the door, or a battered scout who went out to survey the potential battlefield and mistook a small band of poorly armed guerillas for a mighty army.

In Goldberg's favor, it is bracing to read her lucid account of how "Christian restorationists" tie opposition to evolution and global warming together as part of a much broader effort to discredit science itself. It is not just Charles Darwin or Al Gore these people object to. According to Goldberg's convincing analysis, there is now a well-funded and well-organized political movement in the United States dedicated to denying the legitimacy of any account of natural phenomena that does not rely directly on religious revelation as its only foundation. Equally convincing is her discussion of the dishonesty of the "abstinence industry" as it partakes in public discussions of the efficacy of condoms or the causes of teenage pregnancy, all the while pushing in less public ways its real agenda, which is the demonization of any sexual expression not focused on childbearing. These discussions of science and of sex support Goldberg's argument that Christian-nationalists operate mostly outside of the glare of the national media. While her fellow "secular urbanites" are sleeping soundly on the two coasts, the middle of the nation is being taken over by local cells whose intention is to "restore" America to a "Christian" status that the people of Manhattan and Berkeley never thought existed in the first place.

But does the evidence call for anything more than a cautious watchfulness? Abortion, after all, is still legal in the United States, despite 18 years of presidential devotion to its criminalization. President Bush, of all people, supports "civil unions" for gay and lesbian couples. The Christian Coalition is in shambles; Ralph Reed can't get himself elected lieutenant governor of Georgia. The Kansas electorate has voted the creationists off the state school board, and Of Pandas and People has been taken out of the classrooms of Dover, Pa. Judge Roy Moore and his Ten Commandments colossus have been removed from the Alabama courthouse. Rick Santorum may be tossed out of the U.S. Senate. John McCain visited Liberty University--then ran straight to The Daily Show so that Jon Stewart could ridicule Jerry Falwell in McCain's smiling presence. Desperate Housewives wins rating wars in states both blue and red. Internet porn continues to explode, as do divorce rates in states where gay marriage has been safely averted--and on and on and on.

I WOULD HATE TO CONSTRUCT A straw man out of Goldberg's book, and thereby repeat the very sin of oversimplification that I am implying she may have committed. She herself advises her fellow secularists not to get "hysterical." But taken as a whole, her book unmistakably places liberal trends in the background in an effort to paint a picture of a country perched, if not on the precipice of theocracy, then at least on a direct path toward it.

I agree with Goldberg on one very important point: Secularists and liberals should not be "complacent" in the face of a political movement that denigrates science, demonizes homosexuality, funnels public funds to sectarian purpose and has a remarkably narrow understanding of dearly held principles like liberty, tolerance and pluralism. I will go even farther and thank Goldberg for doing something I have not done and have no intention of doing. She has visited her enemy's camp, and, most important of all, she has listened to them as they talk to each other and reported to us what they actually say, mean and intend. That is a substantial public service in its own right and reason enough to recommend the book enthusiastically.

I am not as concerned as Goldberg is, nor even as concerned as she would like me to be. Even so, I am going to keep my copy of Kingdom Coming close at hand. I think it would be a good idea if I read it again fairly soon, maybe just after the next elections. That would help me to discern whether my hopeful trust in American democracy has passed over into complacency or naive blindness.

I could be wrong, after all. Goldberg could be right that "something dark is loose" in American religion and American politics. Maybe the theocratic totalitarians are closer to the gate than I think they are. Don't be satisfied with my ambivalence. Read the book yourself. Decide for yourself whether Michelle Goldberg is right to be so very, very worried.

TIMOTHY A. BYRNES is a professor of political science at Colgate University. His most recent book (edited with Peter J. Katzenstein) is Religion in an Expanding Europe.