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Michelle Goldberg, a senior political reporter for Salon.com, has been covering the intersection of politics and ideology for years. Before the 2004 election, and during the ensuing months when many Americans were trying to understand how an administration marked by cronyism, disregard for the national budget, and poorly disguised self-interest had been reinstated, Goldberg traveled through the heartland of a country in the grips of a fevered religious radicalism: the America of our time. From the classroom to the mega-church to the federal court, she saw how the growing influence of dominionism-the doctrine that Christians have the right to rule nonbelievers-is threatening the foundations of democracy.In Kingdom Coming, Goldberg demonstrates how an increasingly bellicose fundamentalism is gaining traction throughout our national life, taking us on a tour of the parallel right-wing evangelical culture that is buoyed by Republican political patronage. Deep within the red zones of a divided America, we meet military retirees pledging to seize the nation in Christ's name, perfidious congressmen courting the confidence of neo-confederates and proponents of theocracy, and leaders of federally funded programs offering Jesus as the solution to the country's social problems.With her trenchant interviews and the telling testimonies of the people behind this movement, Goldberg gains access into the hearts and minds of citizens who are striving to remake the secular Republic bequeathed by our founders into a Christian nation run according to their interpretation of scripture. In her examination of the ever-widening divide between believers and nonbelievers, Goldberg illustrates the subversive effect of this conservative stranglehold nationwide. In an age when faith rather than reason is heralded and the values of the Enlightenment are threatened by a mystical nationalism claiming divine sanction, Kingdom Coming brings us face to face with the irrational forces that are remaking much of America.… (more)
User reviews
She's pretty professionally dispassionate in the face of a scary totalitarian worldview that
a) Is clear in its desire to destroy American pluralism and democracy
b) Doesn't let facts, science or reason get in the way of its ideology - in fact is deliberately anti-intellectual and insular
c) Has a pathological, paranoid persecution complex
d) Is naked in its ravenous desire for political power.
I got the sense that the people Goldberg interviewed would be eager to toss homosexuals and other "adulterers" into concentration camps and worse.
Definitely recommended; one of the first books in what has become a series to touch this subject, such as Kevin Phillips' American Theocracy and Max Blumenthal's Republican Gomorrah.
Goldberg comes on strong and occasionally a bit sarcastic—for example, she bemoans the way Intelligent Design proponents have flaunted academic degrees to present their theories as “something more respectable than creationism in drag”—but her anti-fundamentalist rhetoric may not be overstated at all. Her research exposes the very real underground motives of the religious right, who feel bound by their beliefs to combat a spiritually bankrupt nation. There’s no greater motivation than the conviction that one is following God’s explicit orders.
“Dominion theologians” nationwide take Genesis 1:26-28 (where God tells Adam to assume dominion of the world) as scriptural direction for Christians to assume control by divine right. The Christian duty is to seize it. Evangelists with crazed followings preach that the separation between religion and politics is “what Satan likes most,” and call for a regime that will clean up the “dung-eating dogs” (gays). Jews better repent, too, since the holocaust God planned didn’t seem to get through to them. But more dangerous than these extremists are the everyday right-wingers who are raised to carefully infiltrate government and the Judicial bench for the good of Christ, so that that our nation can be set right … so that we can quit handing out condoms, quit treating gays like they’re equals, quit pretending evolution is more scientific than creationism. Under President Bush’s lead, government grant money by the millions poured into these agendas. The back cover promises a “witty, funny” read, but I couldn’t laugh. Religion-gone-bad is jaw-droppingly frightening, and this is a hard book to put down.
Goldberg calls for action. She explains that “the anxieties that underlay Christian nationalism’s appeal—fears about social breakdown, marital instability, and cultural decline—are real. They should be acknowledged and, whenever possible, addressed. But as long as the movement aims at the destruction of secular society and the political enforcement of its theology, it has to be battled, not comforted and appeased.”
We're halfway across the world fighting religious extremism, and here it is, growing in our own backyard.
Bin Laden and Sheikh Omar, look out, there's a new breed of totalitarian faith in town.
She shows that what they can't get democratically, they try to get through the back door with relentless political manipulation and lobbying.
They're bad news in the same way that Al Qaeda and
To my mind, a big failure of the book is that it doesn't recognize Liberal extremism and the obvious role that it plays in generating support for the religious right. It seems obvious that gay marriage, gay adoption, the presentation of homosexuality as an alternative lifestyle in schools, or legal action against crucifixes and Christmas trees is going to infuriate the right + that this is exactly the stealth action against the democratic majority that she herself criticizes.
She writes at some length about the parallels with the rise of totalitarian fascism in Weimar Germany without mentioning the relevant fact that fascism drew its support among the uncommited for its opposition to German Communist revolutionary movements (i.e. the government can't stop them but Hitler can). Extreme liberalism is OK for her and she can't seem to see that it's a big part of the problem.