With God On Their side: how Christian fundamentalists are controlling the Bush White House--and interfering with Americans' lives.

Journalist Esther Kaplan's book With God On Their Side: George W. Bush and the Christian Right has just been released in paperback with a new forward. The book, first issued in 2004, was widely praised as the best in-depth examination of the Religious Right's current political power.

Kaplan took some time recently to talk with Church & State about the book and some of what she learned while writing it. (With God On Their Side is being offered as a premium this month for Americans United membership renewals. Please see your membership renewal letter for more information.)

Q. What do you believe is the Religious Right's long-term goal for America? What would our society look like under its control?

A. The movement's vision, in the broadest sense, is to bring God's law into civic and political life, that is the Christian right's conservative evangelical version of God's law. While they don't want to completely exclude non-believers and religious minorities from participating in American public life, this is nevertheless a theocratic vision.

In their America, churches, rather than government, will provide social services, and so tax dollars will flow to churches, where believers can preach, proselytize, and practice religious discrimination as they care for the poor. Conservative Christian faith will be considered an important qualification for public office. Policy on everything from media to medicine will be guided by conservative evangelical moralism, not such values as public health or pluralism. They do view America as, at heart, a Christian nation, and see their role as restoring the country to its early Christian roots. This is a misreading of the foundations of American democracy, but a very popular one.

Q. You write about the under-the-radar effect the Religious Right has had on national policy. Can you provide a few specific examples that Americans might not know about?

A. First of all, readers of Church & State are far more aware of these matters than most Americans. That said, one of the most underreported stories is the enormous sums of tax-payer money that President Bush has handed over to highly political Christian right organizations. Pat Robertson's Operation Blessing, even though it's been investigated by the Virginia authorities for misusing funds, won a $1.5-million multi-year grant from Bush's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Samaritan's Purse, run by Franklin Graham, the man who called Islam "a very evil and wicked religion," has received some $10 million to run abstinence-only programs in Africa. The National Right to Life Committee, together with dozens of socalled "crisis pregnancy centers"--storefronts that pose as clinics in order to pressure young pregnant women not to choose abortion--have received a total of at least $6 million in domestic abstinence--only grants. Concerned Women for America got a major grant to combat sex trafficking, even though the group has no background in the field. Frankly, even to call some of these groups "faith-based" is a stretch--Concerned Women for America is a Beltway lobby group, serving a conservative political agenda.

Q. What sort of access do Religious Right leaders like James Dobson and Jerry Falwell have to the Bush White House?

A. Access is an understatement. When Harriet Miers was nominated to the Supreme Court, Karl Rove called James Dobson personally to get his support, and, according to Dobson, handed over contacts from her church in Texas so that Dobson could speak directly with her pastor about her belief system. Rove and his political staff hold weekly conference calls with Christian right leaders, and these leaders also have a weekly strategy session with a group of conservative Republicans in Congress, called the Values Action Team.

People like Dobson and Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, go on and on to their radio listeners about their private audiences in the Oval Office with the president, or being invited to join the president's motorcade as he goes to sign "moral values" legislation into law, such as the Partial Birth Abortion Act. In fact, the White House director of personnel, the gate-keeper for all of those mid-level hires, the people who actually run policy day in and day out, is a former Heritage Foundation fellow and former vice-president of the Family Research Council. Christian right insiders hold key posts throughout the administration.

Q. The case of David Hager is a good example of how advisory committees play a key role in setting national policy. You write about Hager, a Bush appointee to an FDA panel. What are his beliefs and how did he affect medical policy during his time on the panel?

David Hager is a practicing medical doctor, but he's also a member of the Christian Medical and Dental Association, a group you can only join if you sign onto a statement of faith that you hold the Bible to be literally true. This is hard to square with science. He's also the author of several books, including How Jesus Cared for Women, in which he writes glowingly of a woman experiencing vaginal hemorrhaging who chose to ask her pastor to pray for her rather than undergo medical treatment, and Stress and the Woman's Body, in which he prescribes prayer as treatment for everything from menstrual cramps to cancer.

He was one of several religious conservatives whom Bush appointed to the FDA's Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs. Hager and the others voted against over-the-counter access to Plan B, the emergency contraception pill, and were outvoted. But Hager then claimed that he was asked to produce a "minority report" and that God used that information to influence the FDA's final decision. In the end, the FDA commissioner overrode his own scientific staff as well as the advisory committee and blocked the approval of Plan B. His official justification mimics Hager's--that the drug maker hadn't provided evidence on how adolescents might use the pills. The FDA never requires separate data for adolescents, so this is an extremely fishy explanation.

Q. Your chapter entitled "Christian Nation" looks at the impact of the faith-based initiative. How important is the issue of government funding of religious social programs to the Religious Right?

A. When Bush first proposed the idea, some Christian right leaders were skeptical. Pat Robertson, for example, was concerned that some of the money would go to what he called "aberrant" religions. But in practice, almost all of the money sent to religious groups through the Faith-Based and Community Initiative has gone to Christian organizations, so now the Christian right leadership is fully supportive, and most of the major groups have cashed in. Now their top concern is to avoid having any strings attached--they'd like to be able to "witness" to people as they provide services, meaning our taxpayer dollars would directly support Christian proselytizing. And they'd like to receive taxpayer funds and yet make hiring decisions based on faith--refuse to hire Jews, for example, or nonbelievers or gay people. The Salvation Army has already fired 18 employees for refusing to support the organization's conservative Christian doctrines--Jews, Catholics, and mainline Protestants who had jobs funded almost entirely by government grants. And a district court recently decided that these firings were legal. This is a very dangerous path we're on.

Q. In researching the book, you traveled around the country and examined some "faith-based" programs in action. What kind of things did you see?

A. One thing that's true is these are very committed people. The trouble is that many of them are receiving federal public health or social service grants when their ultimate goal is to save souls for the afterlife, not improve people's lives in the here and now.

I visited one Christian drug treatment center in Louisiana, for example, which has received high praise from George W. Bush, where the intake director told me he'd be unwilling to refer people to a secular program, even if that was their preference. How would a Christian, Bible-based recovery program work for a secular person, a Muslim or a Jew? It probably wouldn't, but this man's true goal was to bring people to Christ. This dynamic is especially worrisome when it comes to faith-based AIDS and abstinence-only grants, many of which have gone to conservative evangelical organizations. One woman who ran a program in Tennessee told me fairly directly that the goal of the abstinence-only message was to teach young people right from wrong--teach them a religious moral code, in effect--regardless of the outcome. If you teach abstinence, and only abstinence, and refuse to discuss condoms or birth control with sexually active teens, they may get pregnant or get a sexually transmitted disease, but at least they'll realize they were on the wrong path. This is the thinking. Morality is the measure, not public health outcomes. Of course this morality-first approach becomes quite dangerous when you apply it to HIV prevention in sub-Saharan Africa, where HIV rates can be as high as one in four in some localities, and the cost will be measured in human lives. And yet the current administration is doing this right now, to the tune of $1 billion.

Q. What shocked you most as you were researching the book?

A. I suppose it was the breadth and depth of the Christian right's influence. The attention to detail. On the one hand, the president signing executive orders to create the faith-based initiative, signing a bill to ban so-called "partial birth abortion," appointing ultraconservative judges to the federal courts, flying in on Air Force One from his vacation in Crawford to sign a bill intervening in the end-of-life choices of Terri Schiavo--the public dimension. On the other, the constant tinkering behind the scenes to advance the pro-life or the "family values" agenda outside of the public eye. Changing the mandate of an obscure advisory group set up to oversee guidelines for human research so that it's also charged with protecting embryos. Inking a back room deal to swap an acre of national park land for five acres of private land to preserve a giant cross erected in the Mojave Desert in violation of church-state separation. Overruling Park Service personnel to assure that a creationist book is sold at the Grand Canyon, asserting that the canyon was created by the biblical flood that launched Noah's ark. Making the murder of a pregnant woman a two-victim crime, just to prepare the legal ground for arguments that embryos have independent civil rights in the eyes of the law. And the impressive level of strategic coordination, between White House operatives and Christian right leaders, which has made all of this possible.

Q. You examine the role of the federal judiciary in your chapter "Stacking the Courts." Religious Right groups frequently bash the federal courts while at the same time salivating at the prospect of taking them over. With the Alito nomination poised to change the balance on the Supreme Court, do you believe Religious Right leaders have the opportunity to consolidate control over our legal system?

A. In short, yes, they do. The right's strategy for stacking the courts with conservatives was launched during the Reagan administration in the wake of decisions such as Roe v. Wade, and has been pursued by both George Bushes since. Conservative nominees from these three presidencies are now balanced on the federal courts only by the moderate-to-liberal nominees of Bill Clinton, which they outnumber by almost two to one. On the Supreme Court, the combination of Scalia, Thomas, Roberts and Alito has the potential to be a right-wing juggernaut, which could swing the door open to a thoroughgoing infiltration of Christianity into government, from school prayer to taxpayer-funded conversion efforts, and turn the clock back on women's rights, gay rights and civil rights. We will likely face a situation where the federal courts will simply cease to be a force in the expansion--or even protection--of our democratic rights.

Q. The new Afterward to the paperback version of your book discusses the 2004 elections and the rise of the so-called "values voters." Do values voters exist, or are they a media myth?

A. It's a real phenomenon, and it's a crucial part of why we're currently facing one-party rule in Washington. If we look at detailed studies of who voted why in 2004, we see that people who were most motivated by foreign policy issues, such as the war, were sharply divided between Bush and Kerry. But those who put social issues (not economic ones) first went strongly for Bush. In Ohio, one of the most respected analysts of evangelical voting patterns, John Green of the University of Akron, found that the Christian right's mobilization around the anti-gay marriage ballot initiative in Ohio single-handedly produced an extra 50,000 to 100,000 Bush votes--and this where the margin of victory was at most around 118,000. It is only people who put economic concerns first, such as union families, where we see the "values" issues losing their relevance, but as critics such as Tom Frank has pointed out, the Democrats have done little in the way of putting forward a strong, populist economic agenda to counter the increasing pull of issues such as marriage and abortion that the Christian right has used to such spectacular effect.

Q. What can ordinary Americans do to turn the tide?

A. Certainly we all have to educate ourselves, and organizations such as Americans United, Political Research Associates and People For the American Way who are doing research and producing vital publications deserve our support. The Christian right grassroots is much more effective at supporting its own institutions and publications than progressives are, and that's a lesson we can learn from them.

We also need to relinquish the idea that the Christian right is just a religious movement, deserving of tolerance, and acknowledge that it is a political movement bent on rewriting American government. And when any movement's agenda stands opposed to civil rights, women's rights, equality, pluralism and public health, that movement deserves to be opposed. Issue by issue, whether it's efforts to reduce women's control over their reproductive lives, or limit the full participation of gay men and lesbians in society or use federal dollars to pay for Christian proselytizing, we need to make our voices heard. Right now, the Christian right has claimed ownership over the question of moral values in this country, and the rest of us need to take that space back.