The right rides high - dogmatism and religious fundamentalism in U.S. Republican Party - Cover Story

Progressive, The, Oct, 1994 by Chip Berlet

Such scapegoating has been applied intensively in rural areas, and there are signs of an emerging social movement of "new patriots" who are grafting together the conspiracy theories of the John Birch Society with the ardor and armor of the paramilitary Right.

These Far Right forces are beginning to influence state and local politics in the Pacific Northwest and Rocky Mountain states through amorphous sovereignty campaigns, county autonomy and "posse" movements, and some portions of the antienvironmentalist "wise use" effort. The same regions have seen contests within the Republican Party on the state level between mainstream Republicans and the Religious Right. The political spectrum in some states now ranges from repressive corporate liberalism on the "left" through authoritarian theocracy to nascent fascism.

Spanning the breadth of the antidemocratic Right is the banner of the Culture War. According to current conspiratorial myth, liberal treachery in service of godless secular humanism has been "dumbing down" schoolchildren with the help of the National Education Association to prepare the country for totalitarian rule under a "One World Government" and "New World Order."

The idea of the Culture War was promoted by strategist Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation. In 1987, Weyrich commissioned a study, Cultural Conservatism: Toward a New National Agenda, which argued that cultural issues provided antiliberalism with a more unifying concept than economic conservatism. Cultural Conservatism: Theory and Practice followed in 1991.

Earlier, Weyrich had sponsored the 1982 book The Homosexual Agenda and the 1987 Gays, AIDS, and You, which helped spawn successive and successful waves of homophobia. The Free Congress Foundation, founded and funded with money from the Coors Beer family fortune, is the key strategic think tank backing Robertson's Christian Coalition, which is building a grass-roots movement to wage the Culture War.

For Robertson, the Culture War opposes sinister forces wittingly or unwittingly doing the bidding of Satan. This struggle for the soul of America takes on metaphysical dimensions combining historic elements of the Crusades and the Inquisition. The Christian Coalition could conceivably evolve into a more mainstream conservative political movement, or--especially if the economy deteriorates--it could build a mass base for fascism similar to the clerical fascist movements of mid-century Europe.

John C. Green is a political scientist and director of the Ray C. Bliss Institute at the University of Akron in Ohio. With a small group of colleagues, Green has studied the influence of Christian evangelicals on recent elections, and has found that contrary to popular opinion, the nasty and divisive rhetoric of Pat Buchanan, Pat Robertson, and Marilyn Quayle at the 1992 Republican Convention was not as significant a factor in the defeat of Bush as were unemployment and the general state of the economy. On balance, he believes, the Republicans gained more votes than they lost in 1992 by embracing the Religious Right. "Christian evangelicals played a significant role in mobilizing voters and casting votes for the Bush-Quayle ticket," says Green.