The war against pluralism.

THE YEAR WAS 1972. The young woman seated across from me in my study was the first "Jesus freak" I'd ever met. She was in her early twenties, bright-eyed and assertive, dressed in the thrift-shop motley that was the hippie fashion of the 1960s. She had asked to interview me for a new Berkeley-based magazine called Right On, but she came as much to talk as to listen. She wanted to tell me about the Christian commune that she had helped organize. Though I heard her out politely, it was with a kind of smug dismissiveness. That was, after all, the period when people with any taste for religion were inclined to journey east--towards Zen or Hinduism or Sufism--rather than back to the old rugged cross.

I soon discovered that she had come with a purpose in mind. Would I be willing to let her quote me to the effect that she and her barefoot apostles were the true counterculture of the day? I had recently coined the term to suggest that youthful protest had to do with issues that went beyond standard politics. I had to admit that the Christian populism she was advocating--"Give all you have to the poor and follow me"--was decidedly "counter" with respect to mainstream American materialism. But there was a vexing theme that kept popping up in our conversation. "One"--that word echoed through all she said. That was the emblematic Jesus-freak gesture: a single finger pointing skyward. One finger up, meaning one way, one truth, one road to salvation. Such exclusivity was exactly the opposite of what I found most attractive in the youthful dissent of the time: its spirit of openness and adventure, its willingness to sample and experiment, its fascination with the exotic and forbidden. In contrast, my interviewer's Judeo-Christian religiosity smacked of a crying need for strict orthodoxy. And of that I had had enough in my own pre-Vatican-II Catholic school days. At St. Veronicas in Polish Chicago where I grew up, religion meant the Baltimore catechism learned by rote under threat of a sound knuckle-rapping. What chance was there that something as retrogressive as my visitor's old-time religion would be around long enough to merit comment?

How wrong can one be? Some two months after my interview appeared in Right On, Time magazine ran a cover story on "the Jesus people" as the biggest new thing happening on campuses around the country. We were in the early dawn of a potent political development in the United States: the rise of evangelical power.

Fast-forward another decade or so, and the religious movement called the Moral Majority would play a major role in putting Ronald Reagan in the White House. Skip forward another twenty years to the opening of the twenty-first century, and we have George W. Bush, the most overtly religious president in American history, a born-again Texan who opens cabinet meetings with a prayer, holds the record for his frequency in using the word "evil" at press conferences, and who never finishes a speech without asking God to bless America. We can not only credit Bush with giving his conservative political base everything they have long wanted by way of domestic policy (faith-based social programs, curtailing abortion rights, defending prayers and the teaching of creationism in the schools) but also with imbuing our foreign affairs with a providential sense of national destiny.

But, we might ask, does not freedom of religion apply to the president's evangelical Christianity as much as to any other citizen's religious beliefs? Of course it does. But we can still have reservations about the repercussions of so much high-level bibliolatry. I'm haunted by the argument that right wingers once raised about communism during the McCarthy years. Communists, they contended, use civil liberties in order to overturn them once they take power-if they ever do. I wonder how long religious freedom would last if militant fundamentalists took over our government. These are people who speak of having "a biblical duty" (the words of Randall Terry, leader of the anti-abortion movement Operation Rescue) "to conquer this nation."

But there is something that I find even more unsettling about the growing influence of the religious right over American political life. It goes back to that encounter with my Jesus-freak student in 1972. Pleasant and courteous as she was, when it came to hearing divergent ideas, she was bulletproof. Why? Because as a Humanist and liberal I qualified in her eyes as a damned soul. While we talked she kept her guard up, lest my secularism contaminate her.

Was I annoyed? Not really. I recognized what she was doing. In my Catholic boyhood I related to people in exactly that way. From the vantage point of my sinless purity, most of the people I met were surely damned. I remember weeping into my pillow at night, fearing that my parents were going to hell for missing Mass or eating meat on Friday. Being among God's chosen gave me a certain smug comfort in dealing with anybody I disliked or disagreed with. After all, I was a member of the most exclusive club in the universe--the club of the elect.

Nothing distorts our relations with others more than the conviction that I am bound for glory and you are condemned to eternal perdition. And the more literal the belief, the greater the distortion. Those who harbor that belief may find ways of being tactful, but believing that the difference between you and me is all the difference between heaven and hell fixes the greatest possible gulf between us. At the extreme--and bear in mind that we are talking about an increasingly popular form of religious extremism--worshipping the One Great God easily carries over into an all-out war on pluralism. That is what worries me most--not only from a civil libertarian perspective but with respect to the quality of our cultural life.

By "pluralism," I do not mean an abstract legal principle. I mean that spontaneous joy we take in the human variety, the delightful surprise we experience when we meet someone who has taken another road in life, perhaps a road we will want to follow. Exuberant variety is what Walt Whitman had in mind when he defined democracy as singing the song of ourselves. He saw America as a massive jazz improvisation on a million themes that we inherit from the past. "I hear America singing," he wrote, "the varied carols I hear." The San Francisco poet Robert Duncan expressed Whitman's democratic ideal nicely when he said that we are living in a Symposium of the Whole, a time when "all the old, excluded orders must be included, the female, the proletariat, the foreign, the animal and vegetable, the unconscious and the unknown, the criminal and failure--all that has been outcast and vagabond."

A true Whitmanesque democracy does not simply grant us the right to sing our own song; it encourages us to do so. True democracy longs for diversity, originality, experimentation. In that sense, democracy is a means, not an end. It is the theme that all of us vary and pass along, like a good jazz combo playing its music. Can jazz and Jesus go together? That is something for individual Christians to decide. Every religion is what its believers make of it. But I do know that those who regard pluralism as the work of the devil undermine democracy and impoverish our culture. That is the greatest price we are paying for the political success of a growingly religious right wing in America. We are losing touch with the existential roots of democracy. And yet there are millions of my fellow citizens who are praising God to see that happen.

The result is not simply a blight upon our own culture. The war against pluralism carries over into foreign affairs. Bad enough for the United States to embark on an imperial course of policy; but much worse if that empire should fall under the control of bigots and Bible thumpers who see the rest of the human race as a collection of damned souls.

Theodore Roszak is professor emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay, and an internationally renowned social critic. His influential book The Making of a Counter Culture, helped define the youthful rebellion of the sixties. This piece is an excerpt from his new book, World, Beware! American Triumphalism in an Age of Terror.