Several people have already demolished some of the more ridiculous claims made so far in this discussion.
Let me address the more absurd claims about the Talbot article.
Not once did Talbot claim she was looking at the entire evangelical Christian experience. She said was exploring a paticular subculture that is growing within certain evangelical circles: separatism. Here is what she said:
"There are about 20 million evangelical Christians in the U.S. today; together with fundamentalists, who tend to be more withdrawn from public life and more theologically conservative, they make up about 25 percent of the American population. Many of them lead lives that are far less sequestered and culturally abstemious than the Scheibners'."
"I had become interested in the idea of a Christian counterculture, and I wanted to write about a family who seemed to be living it out. I wasn't looking for people involved in a violent or illegal confrontation with the government -- militia types, say -- nor for people who belonged to a tradition with a long history of separateness, like the Amish. What I was looking for were people who were, as Steve Scheibner later described his family, ''selective separatists'': people who voted and paid taxes, worked in the mainstream world and even did community service, but who quite deliberately chose, as Megan put it, 'not to participate in those parts of the culture that do not bring glory to God.' "
Talbot correctly cites the movement as having two key texts, an influential letter by Paul Weyrich and a book by Cal Thomas and Ed Dobson. I was an adivisor to the PBS series With God On Our Side, and we ended the series with a scene with Ed Dobson making the argument for a return to a form of separatism.
For Christian Right strategist Paul Weyrich, the failure of the impeachment drive prompted an exasperated admission of defeat in the electoral arena. In late 1997 Weyrich had been squeezed out of the NET television network he had founded, apparently for his divisive behavior in attacking GOP pragmatists. Weyrich, dubbed by the New Republic the "Robespierre of the Right," was known for his doctrinaire views. In a widely-circulated and debated letter, Weyrich promoted a separatist post-impeachment strategy:
"I believe that we probably have lost the culture war. That doesn't mean the war is not going to continue, and that it isn't going to be fought on other fronts. But in terms of society in general, we have lost. This is why, even when we win in politics, our victories fail to translate into the kind of policies we believe are important."
"Therefore, what seems to me a legitimate strategy for us to follow is to look at ways to separate ourselves from the institutions that have been captured by the ideology of Political Correctness, or by other enemies of our traditional culture."
"What I mean by separation is, for example, what the homeschoolers have done. Faced with public school systems that no longer educate but instead "condition" students with the attitudes demanded by Political Correctness, they have seceded. They have separated themselves from public schools and have created new institutions, new schools, in their homes."
"I think that we have to look at a whole series of possibilities for bypassing the institutions that are controlled by the enemy. If we expend our energies on fighting on the "turf" they already control, we will probably not accomplish what we hope, and we may spend ourselves to the point of exhaustion."
See full text at: http://www.conservativenews.org/InDepth/archive/199902/IND19990218c.html .
This view is not, in fact, new. In 1996 militant Protestants and Catholics unhappy with the pragmatism of the Christian Coalition began to question the legitimacy of electoral politics, the judiciary, and the government itself. These groups began to push openly theocratic arguments. A predominantly Catholic movement emerged from this sector to suggest civil disobedience against abortion is mandated by the primacy of natural law over the constitutional separation of powers which allowed the judiciary to protect abortion rights. An example of this theocratic movement is the newspaper Culture Wars with its motto: "No social progress outside the moral order."
Christian Right ideologues such as James Dobson, and Carmen Pate, president of Concerned Woman for America, rejected Weyrich's call. A debate quickly emerged among Christian Right leaders with comments and roundtable essays appearing in the evangelical media. Weyrich clarified his meaning in several printed responses where he said he never meant to suggest giving up. In the influential evangelical magazine World he wrote:
".when critics say in supposed response to me that 'before striking our colors in the culture wars, Christians should at least put up a fight,' I am puzzled. Of course they should. That is exactly what I am urging them to do. The question is not whether we should fight, but how."
".in essence, I said that we need to change our strategy. Instead of relying on politics to retake the culturally and morally decadent institutions of contemporary America, I said that we should separate from those institutions and build our own."
Weyrich was proposing a separatist strategy as a way to build enclaves with parallel institutions such as "schools, media, entertainment, universities" from which to continue the culture wars-essentially "creating a new society within the ruins of the old." This strategy also surfaced at the 1998 Christian Coalition "Road to Victory" conference. The workshop on education included two panelists Marty Angell and Marshall Fritz who argued in favor of expanding separate, parallel Christian school systems. Fritz blasted the idea of state-funded public schools.
Moving in a slightly different direction, conservative evangelicals Cal Thomas and Ed Dobson wrote a book, Blinded by Might: Can the Religious Right Save America? suggesting that evangelicals had compromised their piety by pushing too far into electoral politics. Instead of separatism, however, they suggested returning to the basic evangelical idea of saving souls. See http://www.zondervan.com/blindedbymight/index.htm .
The Free Congress Foundation has held a conference on the subject:
"On June 18 and 19, 1999, the Free Congress Foundation hosted a roundtable gathering on the subject of cultural separation -- or, as the roundtable came to call it, cultural Independence. About 40 people attended, most self-selected: they were people who had read Paul Weyrich's February letter, agreed with it, and told the Foundation they would like to be involved in moving the concept of cultural Independence forward." see http://www.freecongress.org/centers/conservativism/independentforum.htm .
----- Original Message ----- From: Eric Beck <rayrena at accesshub.net> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Saturday, July 08, 2000 2:52 PM Subject: journalistic crackpots in public life (was: religious crackpotsin public life)
> Yoshie quoted:
>
> >Margaret Talbot, "A Mighty Fortress," New York Times Sunday Magazine
> >27 February 2000 (p. 40):
> >
> >***** The re-emergence of a Christian right in the mid-80's took no
> >one by greater surprise than the liberal academics and journalists
> >who were frequently called upon to account for itS.As a result, much
> >of the commentary on conservative Christians has tended to portray
> >themS"as a group somehow left behind by the modern world -
> >economically, culturally, psychologicallyS.
> >
> >The trouble with this theory of "status discontent" - of conservative
> >Christians as downwardly mobile rubes - was that most of them were
> >neitherS.Of all these groups [evangelicals, liberal Protestants,
> >Catholics, and nonreligious] evangelicals are the least likely to
> >have had only a high school education or less. They are more likely
> >than liberals or the nonreligious to belong to $50,000-and-above
> >income bracket. And they are no more likely to live in rural areas
> >than anyone else; the new centers of conservative Christianity, it
> >turns out, are the prosperous suburbs in Midwestern states like
> >Kansas and Oklahoma. *****
>
> I remember this awful article. It purported that Christians were
> increasingly and drastically isolating themselves from the larger culture.
> Unfortunately, the writer stated only one (rather vague and unsourced)
> demographic stat in support of this "trend," and her interview sample was
1
> family (the mother of which she met in a chatroom--how's that for
> detachment from contemp culture!). She also didn't bother to define
> "evangelical" or where she got the numbers for her nifty little divisions
> (evangelical, liberal Protestants, Catholics, nonreligious). And those are
> just her objective sins: The tone of the piece was that of the enlightened
> liberal who's shocked at the withdrawal--imagine, kids that don't know
what
> a Pokemon is!--and a little afraid that her way of life is being invaded
by
> the home-schooling heathens. Though she tried to show some empathy with
the
> family, it was a purely pro forma attempt.
>
> I know what you are trying to do here, Yoshie: show that it's not the
> heroic poor and working class but the benighted middle and upper-middle
> classes who are entranced by religion. Which is fine, of course--if it's
> true. And it might be, but I wouldn't go around quoting hack reporters and
> phoned-in articles in support of your belief.
>
> I also know that, as you might put it, LBO-talkers wouldn't know what to
do
> if religion wasn't around; Othering Christians allows them to show their
> enlightenment and provides an omnipresent boogeyman for what's wrong with
> this, er, God-forsaken society. Undifferentiating attacks on religion are
> also an assault on people like Ken, Kelley, me, etc., who are trying to
> understand belief and religion. [rest of performance deleted]
>
> Eric
>
>