C STREET: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy

[polichick]

For anyone who loves a good HORROR story, I recommend Jeff Sharlet's new book, C STREET: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy.

In this book, Sharlet (contributing editor for Harper's Magazine and Rolling Stone, and author of THE FAMILY) shows how, over several decades, Congressional members of C Street's Family and their missionaries across the globe have influenced American foreign policy and domestic policy alike; how the military has been infiltrated with fundie crusaders, including a general at the U.S. Air Force Academy who directed his 104 subordinates to read and live by Rick Warren's book, THE PURPOSE-DRIVEN LIFE and a Lt. Col who penned a book titled, UNDER ORDERS: A SPIRITUAL HANDBOOK FOR MILITARY PERSONNEL (the first seemingly approved by the new Democratic president in his elevation of Warren at the inaguration and the second actually recommended by General David Petraeus); and how the movement includes the infiltration of secular institutions as well as military, since things like secular education are anathema to the idea of the leadership of a chosen few and a government by God.

Sharlet shows how this movement/infilatration grew duing the Vietnam and Reagan years, and how much of a crusade it has become for believers. The C-Street Family has established 'cells' in over 70 countries and few U.S. policians dare to miss the National Prayer Breakfast, the only public event sponsored by The Family.

Excerpt:


"The names don't really matter. The fundamentalist threat to American democracy isn't a person, a politician whose defeat would put the matter to rest once and for all. It's an idea. In its most modest shape it's the question posed by a future air force officer: 'Who are we to question why God builds up nations?' - imperial narcissism so blind that the questioner believes his fatalistic acceptance of his own power is a form of humility. In its bluntest expression it's the 'government by God' preached at C Street. In its most awful, it is the 'God-led politics' of Uganda, the nightmare scenario of fundamentalism in power.

<snip>

"The threat isn't theocracy, an idea nearly every fundamentalist denounces as the province of mullahs and the Middle Ages, but the conflation of democracy with authoritarianism. Not the jackbooted kind or even the iron fist within the velvet glove, but rather the 'Father knows best' variety, trickle-down paternalism, the authority of the Father-God descending down upon us through his chosen, our servant leaders, men and even the occasional women who are to society as fundamentalists believe fathers should be to their families, both loving and stern.

"If 'trickle-down,' in the context of paternalism, evokes the wrong kind of flow, consider the old bit of Reaganspeak a clue to the repurposing of language that is the real art of fundamentalism: democracy redefined as rule by a class of the anointed; religion reduced to the (mistaken) beliefs of other people; law a euphemism for scripture, and scripture itself not just malleable but liquid, easily poured into any vessel, a Sanford or a Palin, a Thune or a Pickering - fuel for the long march toward freedom, which is just another word for no questions asked. 'Starve doubts, feed freedom,' as Abram Vereide* put it shortly before he died."

*Abram Vereide founded The Family in the 1930s.

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/C-Street/Jeff-Sharlet/e/9780316091077


My question is: How do we extricate democracy from this complex web of government/military/religious perversion?

[hootinholler]

1. By exposing it. n/t

[polichick]

2. You're right - thankfully, Rachel has been having Jeff Sharlet...

...on her show quite a bit.