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The long march through the institutions
Earlier this week, I published a piece in Salon about the war on Christmas canard that various right-wing demagogues are using to stoke the embers of outrage among their base. (If you want to read it and are not a Salon subscriber, you have to click through an advertisement). Last year, we heard a lot about this from Bill O'Reilly -- there were regular "Christmas Under Siege" segments on The O'Reilly Factor. This year, the spurious campaign to defend Christmas is likely to be a lot bigger, with the Christian right legal outfits Alliance Defense Fund and Liberty Counsel both mobilizing upwards of 700 lawyers each to intervene if anyone interferes with the singing of Christmas hymns in schools or the erection of crèches on government property. The war on Christmas trope is useful in framing an aggressive campaign to get more Christianity into public life into a defensive stance against a malign secular conspiracy to drive religion underground.
One thing I quoted, but didn't have a chance to delve into, is this line from a San Francisco Chronicle story about Liberty Counsel's "Friend or Foe Christmas Campaign:" "The 8,000 members of the Christian Educators Association International will be the campaign's 'eyes and ears' in the nation's public schools. They'll be reporting to 750 Liberty Counsel lawyers who are ready to pounce if, for example, a teacher is muzzled from leading the third-graders in 'Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.'" Apparently, members of the Christian Educators Association International are being instructed to act as informers for a movement that is fundamentally hostile to the very existence of the secular public schools where these people presumably work. And this points to the way that the phenomenon described by Mainstream Baptist and Joan Bokaer -- of the Christian right taking over local Republican party organizations from within -- has now spread far beyond politics, to encompass many different aspects of American life.
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We can see this with the growth of religious right organizations like Pharmacists for Life that, by encouraging and supporting pharmacists who refuse to dispense contraceptives, impose their religious doctrines on the general public. It's also at work with the increasing emphasis on evangelism in the workplace; with the aggressive proselytizing and climate of Christian nationalism at the Air Force Academy; and with the increasingly sectarian character of government-funded social services, courtesy of Bush's faith-based initiative. The woman in the mink coat that Joan wrote about was driven out of her party; now we're seeing people driven out of their jobs.
As I'll be writing in a Salon piece next week, this growing, diffuse campaign to Christianize all kinds of institutions from within is part of what has Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League so alarmed. I'm not sure what the best strategy is to counter it, because the lines separating evangelical self-expression and comradeship, which they have every right to, from improper coercion and subversion, can be difficult to draw. Nor does the establishment clause necessarily protect us in the private sphere. Obviously, in some cases people can make civil rights claims, but what I'm worried about, and not clear on how to respond to, is this attempt to polarize every bit of our public life along religious lines.
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