those who control the present control the past
Harpers has posted Through a Glass, Darkly: How the Christian right is reimagining U.S. history:
If the term “fundamentalism” endures, the classic means of explaining it away—class envy, sexual anxiety—do not. We cannot, like H. L. Mencken, writing from the Scopes “monkey” trial of 1925, dismiss the Christian right as a carnival of backward buffoons jealous of modernity’s privileges. We cannot, like the Washington Post, in 1993, explain away the movement as “largely poor, uneducated and easy to command.” We cannot, like the writer Theodor Adorno, a refugee from Nazi Germany who sat squinting in the white light of L.A., unhappily scribbling notes about angry radio preachers, attribute radical religion—nascent fascism?—to Freudian yearning for a father figure.
The old theories have failed. The new Christ, fifty years ago no more than a corollary to American power, twenty-five years ago at its vanguard, is now at the very center. His followers are not anxiously awaiting his return at the Rapture; he’s here right now. They’re not envious of the middle class; they are the middle class. They’re not looking for a hero to lead them; they’re building biblical households, every man endowed with “headship” over his own family. They don’t silence sex; they promise sacred sex to those who couple properly—orgasms more intense for young Christians who wait than those experienced by secular lovers.
Intensity! That’s what one finds within the ranks of the American believers. “This thing is real!” declare our nation’s pastors. It’s all coming together: the sacred and the profane, God’s time and straight time, what theologians and graduates of the new fundamentalist prep schools might call “kairos” and “chronos,” the mystical and the mundane. American fundamentalism—not a political party, not a denomination, not a uniform ideology, but a manifold movement—is moving in every direction all at once, claiming the earth for God’s kingdom, “in the world but not of it” and yet just loving it to death anyway.
