Page 2 of 2 US exceptionalism meets Team Jesus Interview by Tom Engelhardt
JC:Yes, what happened there was striking. Take just
this example: a couple of years ago, Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ
rendered in profoundly fundamentalist ways, most terribly, the death of Jesus
as caused by "the Jews", not the Romans. In that movie, [Pontius] Pilate is a
good guy, the Jewish high priest the villain. Gibson justified this by saying
it was how the Gospels tell the story, which is literally true. A
fundamentalist reading of the Gospel story ignores what we know from history
and from scientific inquiry and analysis of the Gospels. It wasn't "the Jews"
who murdered Jesus, it was the Romans, pure and simple. There were complicated
reasons why the Gospels were
written that way, but a fundamentalist reading of those texts is dangerous.
Gibson demonized the Jews, while celebrating grotesque violence as a mode of
salvation, as willed by God.
And then that film was featured at the United States Air Force Academy.
Its commanders made it clear that every one of the cadets, over 4,000 of them,
was supposed to see that movie. Repeatedly over a week, every time cadets went
into H H Arnold Mess Hall, they found fliers on their dinner plates announcing
that this movie was being shown. I saw posters that said: "See The Passion of
the Christ" and "This is an official Air Force Academy event, do not
remove this poster."
As a result of that film, there was an outbreak of pressure, practically
coercion, by born-again evangelical Christians aimed at non-Christian cadets
and, in a special way, at Jews. This went on for months, and when the whistle
was blown by a Jewish cadet and his father, the air force denied it, tried to
cover it up. Yale University sent a team from the Yale Divinity School to
investigate. They issued a devastating report. The commander at the academy was
finally removed; the air force was forced to acknowledge that there was a
problem.
In fact, the academy had allowed itself to become a proselytizing outpost for
evangelical Christian mega-churches in the Colorado Springs area. Chief among
them were Ted Haggard's and James Dobson's, both men then in the inner circle
of the Bush White House, involved in the sort of faith-based initiatives that
marked the Bush administration.
In the Pentagon today, there is active proselytizing by Christian groups that
is allowed by the chain of command. When your superior expects you to show up
at his prayer breakfast, you may not feel free to say no. It's not at all clear
what will happen to your career. He writes your efficiency report. And the next
thing you know, you have, in the culture of the Pentagon, more and more active
religious outreach.
Imagine, then, a military motivated by an explicit Christian, missionizing
impulse at the worst possible moment in our history, because we're confronting
an enemy - and yes, we do have an enemy: fringe, fascist, nihilist extremists
coming out of the Islamic world - who define the conflict entirely in religious
terms. They too want to see this as a new "crusade". That's the language that
Osama bin Laden uses. For the United States of America at this moment to allow
its military to begin to wear the badges of a religious movement is a disaster!
TE: What does this point to, when it comes to the future?
JC: Well, the best thing that's happened, when it comes to all of
this, has been the near-complete political and moral collapse of the Bush
administration, but that doesn't mean this movement is going away. Bush was a
sponsor of it. But look how it took off! Bush sponsored it, to take another
example, in the Justice Department under attorney general [Alberto] Gonzales -
all those born-again Christian lawyers coming from fundamentalist Christian law
schools that have no history of excellence.
We must be aware that there's something much deeper than the Bush
administration and a particular wing of the Republican Party at work here,
however. This isn't just Karl Rove, though he was ingenious at exploiting it.
Let's go back to what kind of a nation the United States is. Here is something
I read recently: though we are officially a secular people, there are more
self-identified Christians in this country than self-identified Jews in Israel
in percentage terms. We commonly think of Israel as a Jewish state. Something
like 75% of Israelis would identify themselves as Jewish. Eighty percent of
Americans identify themselves as Christian! And we're not a Christian nation?
We have to be wary of our Christian roots and of the city-on-a-hill impulse
that still lives just an inch below the surface.
Our war against the Soviet Union was a religious war. [Secretary of state] John
Foster Dulles [under president Dwight Eisenhower] was practically explicit
about this in his speeches, which were like sermons. Not just "communism", but
"atheistic communism". Dwight D Eisenhower was baptized while he was president
- part of a Cold War feeling that we were involved in a Christian defense of
the nation against an atheistic enemy.
Huddling up for Team Jesus TE: And, of course, he titled his memoir Crusade in Europe.
JC: Christian points of reference came very easily in those
years, but what has made the Bush era especially dangerous is that a political
party has explicitly, overtly embraced a religious movement for the political
power it generates. Fundamentalists have their rights, their place, in America,
but there's no place for a political movement that aims to take control of the
levers of state power in the name of religion. That's a violation of the "wall
of separation". You can't have military commanders giving orders down the chain
of command that have religious content to them. You can't, on the eve of
battle, require your soldiers to gather in a huddle the way a coach might, and
say the Lord's Prayer.
TE: And yet it's happening ...
JC: It's happening all the time! At the Air Force Academy, "Team
Jesus" was one of the nicknames for the football team and one of the most
vociferous evangelical Christian proselytizers was the football coach. Look at
it from his point of view. What happens when he can get his huddle together and
they're all saying the Lord's Prayer? A chief military virtue is "unit
cohesion". It can be created in any number of ways, but one shortcut is if you
can get everybody into a kind of Pentecostal religious fervor. If you can get
your young men and women feeling the presence of the Lord, they're going to
fight better, possibly more selflessly. That's what's in it for the military.
Let's think cynically. There may be some military commanders who don't give
much of a damn about God, but who see what God can do for fighting spirit. It
works.
Let's all gather around the Humvee before we head into this village. Let us
pray. You can bet that's going on in Iraq right now. Here's the question: What
happens to the kid who doesn't want to get around that Humvee or, more to the
point, to the Muslim bystanders who see American soldiers invoking God on their
way into battle?
TE: Or when you loose well-armed, even nuclear-armed people eager
to purify the world ...
JC: If I have a point to make, it's this: the religious tradition
of Christian fundamentalism is one thing; the tradition of American
exceptionalism another. They both have their roots in the same experience. They
were separated. Under George Bush they've been brought together.
TE: When it comes to the Bush administration, complete collapse
or not, we know that this man, without the possibility of changing his mind,
and his vice president, without the possibility of changing his mind, with
whomever they can still control in their own government and military, are there
until January 2009. What does it mean to have people in a fundamentalist
mindset, but thoroughly embattled and on the downward slide? I wouldn't like to
write off the next year and a half. It's a potential nightmare.
JC: It could indeed be. But this issue involves more than the
temperament of George Bush. It involves the structure of the fundamentalist
mind. One pillar is bipolarity - the understanding of reality as divided
between good and evil; you're on the side of good and they're on the side of
evil. However, they can begin by being Osama bin Laden's band, which then
becomes the Taliban, which becomes Afghanistan, which becomes all the Muslims
who ever talked about the Great Satan, which becomes Iraq, and now maybe Iran,
and even critics in the US. "They", "they", "they". We see that progression in
Bush.
A second pillar is an absolute allergy to doubt. The fundamentalist mindset
doesn't survive once you admit doubt or self-criticism. When asked for an
example of a mistake he had made, Bush surprised people two years ago by
claiming he couldn't think of one. The tragedy of Bush is, if you ask that
question of him today, I'm sure he would answer the same way.
A world religiously aflame
Let's just step back a minute, though. How different are the Democratic
presidential candidates really? What I hear from them, too, is a world divided
between the good and the bad. I also hear - this is the meaning of the new
rhetoric about the failure of Iraq being the failure of Iraqis - that we
Americans are not to criticize what we've done in any basic way. "I wouldn't
renounce my vote." "The president lied to me, that's why I voted the way I
did." No capacity for self-criticism, for doubt.
You know, the genius of the American system - why the constitution is worth
defending - is that our constitution comes from Roger Williams, not John
Winthrop and John Cotton. It assumes a world not divided between good and evil,
but one where everybody participates in the whole mess.
What are checks and balances? The constitution's authors understood that even
people motivated by good intentions are going to screw up. So everybody, every
institution, needs to be checked. This system assumes not bipolarity but
unipolarity, in the sense that we're all capable of mistakes, that we all have
to be constantly criticized. The constitution is an ingenious structure for
living in the real world.
TE: And yet, in recent years, the presidency and the Pentagon, in
particular, as you've written in your history of the Pentagon, House of War,
have seemingly grown beyond institutional checks and balances.
JC: The question today is whether the constitution continues to
exist as anything beyond a kind of totem, a vestige. Recent history certainly
suggests that the Pentagon is now "unchecked". And if we can end our present
war by blaming the Iraqis, then the Pentagon will be immune from criticism and
prepared for the next foray of American power. That's why we must challenge
this laying the blame on the Iraqi people, as if their "sectarianism" weighs
more than our hubris. As of now, I fear, we'll be getting out of this war with
what brought us into it intact.
TE: People sometimes ask me about Iraq: "Well, what would you
do?" It's a question that drives me crazy. I always think: Well, why didn't you
ask me back when it mattered? Why didn't you ask me when I could have said,
"Don't go in"? So I'm hesitant to ask you, but if you had the power to begin to
organize people in some fashion, what first steps would you take to mend this
world?
JC: Let me just say that we've been talking only America here, in
part because I think people are attuned to the threat from what's called
"Islamic fundamentalism". My own conviction is that a crucial 21st-century
problem is going to be Christian fundamentalism. Its global growth is an
unnoticed story in the United States. Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia
are now absolutely on fire with zealous belief in the saving power of Jesus, in
the most intolerant of ways. A religious ideology that affirms the salvific
power of violence is taking hold. It denigrates people who are not part of the
saved community, permitting discrimination, and ultimately violence. Hundreds
of millions of people are embracing this kind of Christianity.
So what am I doing? I'm a Christian. I'm raising this alarm from within the
community. That's why I believe, as a Roman Catholic, that my own tradition
must be rescued from its current temptation to fundamentalism. There are a
billion Catholics in the world. For all its problems, Roman Catholicism has
reckoned with the Enlightenment, has accepted the scientific world view, has no
argument with evolution, has learned to read the Bible in metaphoric ways, as
opposed to literal ones. Today we have a fundamentalist pope, but he rules from
the margin. It's hugely important that the Catholic tradition not go
fundamentalist.
You ask me what I would do. I think, for one thing, that believing people,
whether Jews, Muslims or Christians, need to affirm the importance of
pluralism, respect for the other, and modesty about religious claims. I could
be a Jew sitting in Jerusalem and offer exactly the same argument about the
Jewish zealots making claims on land in the name of God. So Jewish zealotry,
Muslim zealotry, Christian zealotry, all three empowered lately, all three
armed to the teeth. That's what's really terrifying - and, in the world of
weapons of mass destruction, it's not that hard to get armed to the teeth.
So here's a message addressed to the participants in the Tomdispatch community
who may have a religious interest: embrace it. Fight for it. Fight for a
post-Enlightenment, post-modern, intelligent approach to religion. Don't
surrender religion to the wackos.
If the wackos take over religion, they're going to take over state power, and
the world won't survive the 21st century. And the United States of America has
been at the center of this. When George W Bush launched his war in the name of
God ... even more, when this nation took the September 11 assaults as a
religious war, Muslims attacking us good, virtuous - we didn't call ourselves
Christians, but we were an inch away from it - that's when we began to make our
part of this mistake.
TE: And we should have taken it as ...?
JC: A savage crime. Think of al-Qaeda as the Mafia. When the
Mafia blows up a distillery and kills 18 people in the neighborhood as part of
a turf war, or goes after a hardware dealer who doesn't pay protection money
and paralyzes the neighborhood with fear, or when the Mafia takes over a whole
region of a nation, as it did in Italy for most of the 20th century, fight
back; but fight back against the criminal network with a massive act of law
enforcement the way the Italian government did.
It took the Italian government 50 years to break the Mafia's hold over Sicily,
and they still have to keep fighting. But they never declared war on Sicily.
They never went in and bombed Sicily. They gave their judges and police
inspectors and detectives body armor and they went after the Mafia hitmen with
highly armed SWAT [special weapons and tactics] teams. I'm not talking about
pacifism here. But keep religious ideology out of this. And keep the language
of war out, too.
You know, only in going to war do humans feel the need to appeal to God.
There's no "God with us" on the belt buckles of cops. God gets invoked in war,
because it's a much more extreme state of the human condition. War always
brings you very quickly to the point of "us or them".
When somebody comes at you with a savage act of violence, go back at them with
your best, most heavily armed cops. Don't go to war against them. It's a very
basic idea. It can't be emphasized enough. We're going to have another
terrorist attack in this country. It's crucially important that, however
horrendous, it be treated as a crime - not an act of war.
Unbuilding the Pentagon TE: You've written a whole book recently about the Pentagon. In
this period, it has grown fantastically. We've even ended up with two
Pentagons, the second being the Department of Homeland Security. Now, we have a
North American Command, Northcom, for the first time ...
JC: ... And there's another deeply troubling phenomenon, these
so-called "contractors" outside the purview of the Pentagon, of the US
government, people paid to serve, who are not sworn officers of the government
...
TE: And isn't the all-volunteer army itself becoming a
part-mercenary army, because they're having to pay and pay and pay to lure in
reluctant recruits? My question is: Do you see a way to begin to unbuild the
Pentagon? Are we stuck with the Department of Homeland Security forever?
JC: If any nation was ever stuck with an all-powerful,
untouchable military establishment, it was the Soviet Union. By 1987, 1988, the
only institution in Soviet society that was working, the only one that was
funded, was the military; and it was the most reactionary wing of society.
If the Russians could get out from under that, there's no reason in the world
why we can't get out from under our version of the same. But it takes a
Gorbachev. Who knows when such a figure will come here?
Two things happened that enabled [general secretary of the Communist Party
Mikhail] Gorbachev to defeat his own military and dismantle the Soviet system.
One was the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant, a massive, horrendous
public mistake - and the mistake wasn't just the nuclear meltdown, but the way
in which the militarized establishment dealt with it. They sent hundreds of
people in to shut down a poisoned reactor, saying there was no threat to their
health. They were mostly poisoned. Dead very quickly. And then the militarized
establishment told the people of Ukraine and the eastern Soviet territories
that there was no radioactive threat to them, and hundreds of people later came
down with serious illnesses and cancers. That happened in 1986, within months
of Gorbachev's coming to power. It prepared the people for a different kind of
power.
And then there was that second, wonderful incident, forgotten today. An
absolute fluke, pure serendipity. These things happen in life. A young German
kid named Mathias Rust flew a Piper Cub plane from Germany to Moscow and landed
in Red Square, untouched. He had demonstrated in the most graphic way possible
that the best-funded, most vaunted system in the Soviet Empire, the
anti-aircraft defense system, a supposedly unbreachable set of defenses, could
be totally fooled by a prankster. It was madness.
Anybody else would have executed that kid! But Gorbachev had him sent right
home to Germany. Then he fired his entire military establishment - army and air
ministers, a hundred generals - his reactionary nemesis. Rust's flight was such
an embarrassment that he could do it.
I'm saying: don't ever claim the system is unreformable. [US president Bill]
Clinton had a golden opportunity after the Soviet Union disappeared in 1991-92.
Les Aspin, a dove, an expert at arms reduction and arms control, was put in as
secretary of defense. And you remember who Clinton's national security adviser
was? Anthony Lake, who had resigned in an act of conscience against the
invasion of Cambodia. Clinton's motive upon coming to office was to disempower
the Pentagon. I'm certain of it. He failed. Aspin was destroyed by the
president's failure to support him. The gays-in-the-military episode was part
of the story. The real "don't ask/don't tell" story of that moment, though, was
the Pentagon's: don't ask us about our nuclear weapons and we won't tell you
what we're doing to maintain them.
Could we get out of this trap? Yes, but Democrats would have to be far more
direct in challenging the assumptions and structures of the American military
ethos.
TE: Last words?
JC [pauses]: Well, the last word in this conversation is:
religion and politics, religion and military power, are a deadly mix in an age
of weapons of mass destruction; and, if the United States of America gets this
wrong, there's no reason to think anybody else is going to get it right.
Casting an eye across the century to come, this is the issue.
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