Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party
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Last annotated on March 5, 2013
A phalanx of young men in red baseball caps and polo shirts ran up and down the aisles of St. Paul, Minnesota’s Excel Center pumping their fists and chantingRead more at location 46
“It is ‘The True Believer,’ by Eric Hoffer; you might find it of interest. In it, he points out that dictatorial systems make one contribution to their people which leads them to tend to support such systems—freedom from the necessity of informing themselves and making up their own minds concerning these tremendous complex and difficult questions.”Read more at location 130
Hoffer’s experiences at this historical fulcrum provided the basis for his seminal work The True Believer, published in 1951. “A rising mass movement attracts and holds a following not by its doctrine and promises,” he wrote, “but by the refuge it offers from the anxieties, barrenness and meaninglessness of an individual existence.” The true believer was at his core an ineffectual man with no capacity for self-fulfillment. Only the drama provided by a mass movement gave him purpose. “Faith in a holy cause,” Hoffer wrote, “is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves.”Read more at location 145
Hoffer’s analysis of the political fanatic earned him national cult status, gaining the approval not only of Eisenhower but also of serious intellectuals such as the British philosopher Bertrand Russell. Hoffer’s analysis, however, was limited for the same reason it resonated so widely. By positioning himself as a non-ideological voice of the American everyman, the ultimate individual standing alone against a rising tide of extremism, Hoffer conflated the underlying motives of all mass movements together. According to Hoffer, fascists, Communists, black nationalists, fanatical “Mohammadens,” and Southern racists equally shared an extreme sensibility, and therefore he insisted, “All mass movements are interchangeable.” But were they really?Read more at location 149
In 1941, Fromm published Escape from Freedom, a book illuminating the danger of rising authoritarian movements with penetrating psychoanalytical insight.Read more at location 163
“there is no greater mistake and no graver danger than not to see that in our own society we are faced with the same phenomenon that is fertile soil for the rise of Fascism anywhere: the insignificance and powerlessness of the individual.” Those who could not endure the vertiginous new social, political, and personal freedoms of the modern age, those who craved “security and a feeling of belonging and of being rooted somewhere” might be susceptible to the siren song of fascism. For the fascist, the struggle for a utopian future was more than politics and even war—it was an effort to attain salvation through self-medication. When radical extremists sought to cleanse society of sin and evil, what they really desired was the cleansing of their souls.Read more at location 166
He described how submission to the authority of a higher power to escape the complexities of personal freedom would lead not to order and harmony but ultimately to destructiveness. Movements that evangelized among the crisis-stricken and desperate, promising redemption through a holy crusade, ultimately assumed the dysfunctional characteristics of their followers. After sowing destruction all around it, Fromm predicted that such a movement would turn on itself. Dramatic self-immolation was the inevitable fate of movements composed of conflicted individuals who sought above all the destruction of their blemished selves. “The function of an authoritarian ideology and practice can be compared to the function of neurotic symptoms,” Fromm wrote. “Such symptoms result from unbearable psychological conditions and at the same time offer a solution that makes life possible. Yet they are not a solution that leads to happiness or growth of personality. They leave unchanged the conditions that necessitate the neurotic solution.”Read more at location 172
Fromm’s analysis in Escape from Freedom provides an eerie but prescient description of the authoritarian mindset driving the movement that has substantially taken over the modern Republican Party: the Christian right. Over the last five years, I interviewed hundreds of the Christian right’s leaders and activists, attended dozens of its rallies and conferences, listened to countless hours of its radio programs, and sat in movement-oriented houses of worship where no journalists were permitted. As I explored the contours of the movement, I discovered a culture of personal crisis lurking behind the histrionics and expressions of social resentment. This culture is the mortar that bonds leaders and followers together.Read more at location 180
Inside the movement initiates refer to it cryptically as “The Family,” an exclusive sect. The Christian right as a whole is called “the pro-Family” movement, and movement allies are known as “friends of The Family.” In an actual family, blood ties are required; however, joining the Christian right requires little more than becoming “born-again,” a process of confession, conversion, and submission to a strict father figure.Read more at location 186
The movement’s Jesus is the opposite of the prince of peace. He is a stern, overtly masculine patriarch charging into the fray with his sword raised against secular foes; he is “the head of a dreadful company, mounted on a white horse, with a double-edged sword, his robe dipped in blood,” according to movement propagandist Steve Arterburn. Mark Driscoll, a pastor who operates an alternative Christian rock venue from his church, stirs the souls of twenty-something evangelical males with visions of “Ultimate Fighting Jesus.” This same musclebound god-man starred in Mel Gibson’s blood-drenched The Passion of the Christ, enduring bone-crushing punishment at the hands of Jews and pagans for two hours of unrelieved pornographic masochism.Read more at location 189
A portrait of virility and violence, the movement’s omnipotent macho Jesus represents the mirror inversion of the weak men who necessitated his creation. As Fromm explained, “the lust for power is not rooted in strength but in weakness [italics in original]. It is the expression of the individual self to stand alone and live. It is the desperate attempt to gain secondary strength where genuine strength is lacking.”Read more at location 195
The movement’s macho Jesus provided purpose to Tom DeLay, a dallying, alcoholic Texas legislator transformed through evangelical religion from “Hot Tub Tommy” into a dictatorial House majority leader known as “The Hammer.” Macho Jesus was the god of Ted Haggard, a closet homosexual born-again and charismatic megachurch leader, risen to head of the National Association of Evangelicals, preaching the gospel of spiritual warfare and anti-gay crusades. And he was the god of Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., an eccentric millionaire whose inheritance of massive wealth literally drove him mad, prompting his institutionalization, who found relief as one of the far right’s most reliable financial angels. Macho Jesus even transformed the serial killer Ted Bundy, murderer and rapist of dozens of women, who became a poster child for anti-pornography activists with his nationally televised death row confessional.Read more at location 198
The movement’s most powerful leader embodied the most severe qualities of his followers’ god. James Dobson is a quintessential strict father whose influence has been compared by journalistic observers to that of a cult leader. Unlike most of his peers, Dobson had no theological credentials or religious training. He was a child psychologist who burst onto the scene with a best-selling book that urged beating children into submission in order to restore the respect for God and government that America’s youth had lost during the 1960s. Dobson leveraged his fame and wealth to build a kingdom of crisis that counseled the trauma-wracked Middle American masses with Christian-oriented solutions to their personal problems. Then he marshaled them into apocalyptic morality crusades against abortion and homosexuality. When his Christian army reached critical mass, Dobson set them against the Republican establishment, flexing his grassroots muscle to destroy the ambitions of moderates such as Bob Dole and Colin Powell, and propelling movement figures such as DeLay and George W. Bush into ascendancy.Read more at location 205
As Dobson consolidated his status as Republican kingmaker, the destructive tendencies of his closest allies began exploding, plunging the party into Gomorrah-like revelations of bizarre sex scandals and criminality. Ranging from DeLay’s misadventures with the felonious super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff and Christian right operative Ralph Reed to Haggard’s gay tryst with a male escort to Senator Larry Craig’s bathroom stall come-on to an undercover cop, the scandals never ceased to surprise people who had once envisioned the Grand Old Party as a bastion of “family values.” Piled atop the Republicans’ disastrously handled occupation of Iraq and response to Hurricane Katrina, these sordid scandals ended the twelve-year experiment with Republican rule of the Congress in 2006.Read more at location 213
Through Palin, archetype of the right-wing woman, the movement’s influence over the party reached its zenith.Read more at location 225
she repelled independents and moderate Republicans in droves, winnowing away the party’s constituency in every region of the country except the Deep South.Read more at location 227
The Christian right reached the mountaintop with the presidency of George W. Bush, shrouding science and reason in the shadow of the cross and the flag.Read more at location 230
As soon as Obama took office, the movement camped in the wilderness prepared to take political advantage of the worst economic troubles since the Great Depression by injecting a renewed sense of anti-government resentment.Read more at location 238
“Yes, march against Babylon, the land of rebels, a land that I will judge! Pursue, kill, and completely destroy them, as I have commanded you,” says the Lord. “Let the battle cry be heard in the land, a shout of great destruction.” JEREMIAH 50:21-22Read more at location 252
He urged evangelicals to cast off their insular perspective and begin a process of taking dominion over the land as the Bible commanded them to do. His work dovetailed with the emerging conservative counterculture.Read more at location 295
The Reverend Billy Graham had railed against sinful behavior as he barnstormed across the country in his well-attended crusades during the 1950s and 1960s. He routinely urged his audiences to “create a culture with Christ at its center,” but his message was consistent with the evangelical tradition of effecting change through personal persuasion, not political imposition.Read more at location 297
In 1973, Rushdoony published his magnum opus, The Institutes of Biblical Law, an eight-hundred-page book deliberately invoking Calvin’s Institutes of Christian Religion to suggest his traditionalism.Read more at location 304
“Reconstructionism seeks to replace democracy with a theocratic elite that would govern by imposing their interpretation of ‘Biblical Law.’ Reconstructionism would eliminate not only democracy but many of its manifestations, such as labor unions, civil rights laws, and public schools. Women would be generally relegated to hearth and home. Insufficiently Christian men would be denied citizenship, perhaps executed.”Read more at location 308
When the Supreme Court handed down its Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, Falwell inveighed against the court from the pulpit. Like Rushdoony, Falwell posited segregation as a biblical mandate. “The facilities should be separate,” the basso profondo preacher boomed from above his congregation during a 1958 sermon. “When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line. The true Negro does not want integration.”Read more at location 324
But when the Supreme Court legalized abortion with its 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling, Schaeffer snapped. He transformed suddenly into a fiery herald of doom unrecognizable in the all-embracing counselor of L’Abri’s halcyon days. Schaeffer now cast the counterculture as a cancerous side effect of modernism, and the modern age as a giant sickness that imperiled the survival of civilization. In 1976, he published a best-selling polemic that inspired the Christian right’s advance guard, How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Civilization and Culture. The book concluded by proclaiming legalized abortion—“infanticide,” Schaeffer called it—the final leg in Western civilization’s death march. To preserve Judeo-Christian society, Schaeffer implored evangelicals to organize a crusade to stop abortion by any means.Read more at location 370
“What changed their mind was Jimmy Carter’s intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation.”Read more at location 386
Schaeffer became an evangelist in the truest sense of the word. He insinuated himself into Republican Washington and befriended then representative Jack Kemp,Read more at location 388
As Schaeffer’s crusade gradually expanded beyond his influence, he grew disenchanted with his retrograde Southern Baptist allies. He privately called Falwell a charlatan and mocked his followers as “the low IQs.” Schaeffer was particularly disgusted by the homophobic passions of Falwell and his allies. Abortion was the issue that made Schaeffer’s blood boil, not the presenßce of gays at the head of public school classrooms and Boy Scout troops. “My dad would have identified with the left if they had picked up on the issue of abortion,” Frank Schaeffer told me.Read more at location 399
“There does come a time when force, even physical force, is appropriate,” Schaeffer wrote in his 1981 book A Christian Manifesto. “When all avenues of flight and protest have closed,Read more at location 405
In Manifesto, Schaeffer described Christians as victims of persecution at the hands of a tyrannical secular elite not unlike the Romans who dragged Christians before teams of lions two thousand years before. So long as the “establishment elite” held sway, Schaeffer argued, Bible-believing Christians were powerless to stop the mass slaughter of innocent fetuses. To defend their supposedly threatened rights, Schaeffer suggested that Christians at least consider righteous violence as a last recourse.Read more at location 407
“What’s amazing about Christian Manifesto,” Frank Schaeffer remarked to me, “was that my father was practically calling for the overthrow of the United States government.Read more at location 416
As he lay dying at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, Schaeffer agonized about the rise of the Christian right. He was convinced that he had created a monster. When former orange juice industry poster child and outspoken homophobe Anita BryantRead more at location 420
appeared to beseech Schaeffer for his deathbed blessing for her anti-gay crusade, Schaeffer angrily rebuked her. “My dad simply told Anita off and told her he would have no part of what she was doing under any circumstances,” Frank Schaeffer recalled. “He said if she had any concern for the well-being of homosexuals this was a hell of a way to demonstrate it.”Read more at location 421
When Schaeffer finally succumbed to cancer in 1984, his acolytes had assumed key positions within the Republican Party. The Republican National Convention plank that year not only reiterated the party’s call for a constitutional amendment asserting legal rights for fetuses, it insisted for the first time that the Fourteenth Amendment’s legal protections apply to them as well and called for the appointment of more anti-abortion judges. Four years later, the party plank invoked the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome” to demand that Roe v. Wade be overturned. With Schaeffer’s inspiration, the movement that once mounted massive resistance against civil rights had regenerated itself by co-optingRead more at location 424
Schaeffer had influenced not only Jack Kemp and Jerry Falwell. He had also had a lasting impact on Tim LaHaye, a Christian right leader he considered a huckstering extremist. After visiting Schaeffer at L’Abri, LaHaye went on to coauthor the best-selling apocalyptic pulp fiction Left Behind series. The Reverend Pat Robertson, whom Schaeffer believed to be pathologically insane, and who once boasted to Schaeffer of burning a Modigliani painting in his fireplace, praised his books. Late in Schaeffer’s life, a popular child psychologist named James Dobson became a fixture at his lectures. Schaeffer resented Dobson’s machinations, privately deriding him as a disingenuous power-monger concerned with politics above all else. But with Schaeffer dead, Dobson cast himself as torchbearer of his legacy. “Thank God for Francis Schaeffer,” Dobson declared in a 2002 speech. “He saw everything that we’re going through today . . . He said that there was a connection between abortion and infanticide and euthanasia.”Read more at location 430
Born-again Watergate felon Chuck Colson assumed a similar posture, styling himself as Schaeffer’s intellectual heir. Colson marketed his 1999 polemic How Should We Now Live? as a twenty-first-century remix of Schaeffer’s seminal tome How Should We Then Live? But the admiration was not mutual. “Dad absolutely couldn’t stand Colson,” Frank Schaeffer said.Read more at location 437
Other less prominent but significant activists felt Schaeffer’s impact. Two young Pentecostals, Randall Terry and Rob Schenck, studied Schaeffer at the Elim Bible Academy in upstate New York during the early 1980s. Upon their graduation, the two founded Operation Rescue, a militant anti-abortion group that organized blockades of Planned Parenthood clinics and spawned closely affiliated offshoots that engaged in acts of domestic terror and the assassination of abortion doctors. Terry, a self-described Christian Reconstructionist, credited Schaeffer as his inspiration: “You have to read Schaeffer’s Christian Manifesto if you want to understandRead more at location 440
Dobson hosted Frank Schaeffer on his radio show in 1985 and then excitedly printed 150,000 copies of Schaeffer’s book A Time for Anger: The Myth of Neutrality, a strident attack on cultural liberalism.Read more at location 460
Reflecting on the movement he left, Schaeffer saw its greatest danger in the tendency of its leaders to celebrate cultural decline. “We thrived on bad news, we thanked God that education was falling apart and teen pregnancy was going up,” he recalled. “We couldn’t peddle solutions unless there was a crisis. We were in business the same way an oncologist was—if there was no cancer he’d be out of business. Quite simply, we were trying to manufacture crisis.”Read more at location 467
Having watched the movement take his father’s post-Roe polemics to their logical conclusion—domestic terrorism—Frank Schaeffer believes his father would recant them if he had lived long enough. “My dad had become someone who unleashed something where people were being killed,”Read more at location 471
Rushdoony was still very much alive, operating out of Chalcedon, a Reconstructionist foundation in northern California that Newsweek dubbed “the think-tank of the Christian right.” The radical cleric reaped the fruits of his budding friendship with Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., a reclusive trust fund baby who had spent the late 1960s in a mental institution and emerged as a devoted follower of Reconstructionism.Read more at location 477
In 1992, Howard F. Ahmanson Jr. initiated a string of stealth political successes, banding together with four right-wing businessmen to back the campaigns of anti-gay, anti-abortion, pro-big-business candidates for the California Assembly. Two years later, the cabal of secret funders scored a major victory, propelling the Republican Party’s takeover of the California Assembly. With $3 million funneled through seven right-wing political action fronts, Ahmanson and his cohorts captured a startling twenty-five of the GOP’s thirty-nine legislative seats for their candidates.Read more at location 579
Ahmanson was studying for a master’s degree in linguistics.) Olasky’s first book, Turning Point: A Christian Worldview Declaration,Read more at location 613
Even though theological scholars and reviewers generally ignored the book, it helped promote Olasky within Washington’s conservative circles, and in 1989 he was offered a well-paying Bradley Foundation stipend as a resident scholar at the Heritage Foundation.Read more at location 615
In 1992, Olasky wrote The Tragedy of American Compassion, an argument for transferring government social welfare programs to the church, which he claimed was the traditional and most effective approach until the New Deal—the very policy Rushdoony and his acolytes had long advocated.Read more at location 617
In 1993, The Tragedy of American Compassion earned Olasky an invitation from Republican strategist Karl Rove to meet with an evangelical Christian running for governor of Texas—George W. Bush. The following year, after the Republicans gained control of the Congress, the new speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, gave every Republican member a copy of Olasky’s book. The political thinker whom the Los Angeles Times dubbed an “unlikely guru” became a key advisor to Governor Bush, packaging for him the politics of “compassionate conservatism.”Read more at location 622
Zeus.” When the newly inaugurated President Bush signed an executive order to create a White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in January 2001, Olasky was standing by his side, beaming with pride as the new president turned his brainchild into government policy.Read more at location 627
“It is ironic that several of these individuals,” Judge Jones stated, “who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the I.D. [intelligent design] policy.” Yet if Jones had known the origins of intelligent design, he might not have seemed so shocked by the schemes of its proponents. Under Reconstructionist rules of engagement, lying,Read more at location 649
deception, and stealth are considered legitimate tactics and are even encouraged. There is no requirement for Christians to be truthful “in acts of war,” Rushdoony wrote. “Spying is legitimate, as are deceptive tactics.”Read more at location 652
Indeed, deception has proved essential to the success of the Ahmansons’ campaign to undermine mainline churches. The National Council of Churches—the governing body of the mainline Episcopal, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches—is one of America’s most effective progressive institutions. During the past fifty years, the NCC has advanced civil rights, environmentalism, and peace movements. The NCC’s symbolism as a liberal bulwark made it a natural target. Progressive Methodist minister Andrew Weaver explained three years before his death in 2008, “NCC church members’ influence is disproportionate to their numbers, and [they] include remarkably high numbers of leaders in politics, business, and culture. . . . A hostile takeover of these churches would represent a massive shift in American culture, power andRead more at location 654
In the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, the IRD changed tactics, replacing Communism with homosexuality as its wedge issue.Read more at location 668
With this tactic, at an expense of $1.5 million, the Christian right raised Islamophobia as its new wedge for the post-9/11, post-Bush era.Read more at location 687
“Due to my association with Rushdoony, reporters have often assumed that I agree with him in all applications of the penalties of the Old Testament Law, particularly the stoning of homosexuals,” Ahmanson wrote. “My vision for homosexuals isRead more at location 703
life, not death, not death by stoning or any other form of execution, not a long, lingering, painful death from AIDS, not a violent death by assault, and not a tragic death by suicide. My understanding of Christianity is that we are all broken, in need of healing and restoration. So far as I can tell, the only hope for our healing is through faith in Jesus Christ and the power of his resurrection from the dead.” For crisis-wracked individuals such as Ahmanson, radical Christian conservatism is more than politics and more than a style. As Ahmanson readily admits, it makes possible his psychological survival in the whirlwind of an increasingly chaotic society. “We are all broken,” as he told me.Read more at location 704
Although Dobson speaks of a return to traditional values, he is a new type of figure. His background as a trained child psychologist, rather than as a theologian or preacher, reflects the dominant character of the Christian right, and his rise reveals the little-understood transformation of the movement.Read more at location 716
According to Dobson’s one-time co-host and former senior vice president of Focus on the Family, Gil Alexander-Moegerle, Dobson was repelled by Pomona’s flourishing racial diversity. “His complaint was that nonwhites brought with them cultural ideas and religious ideas foreign to the traditional American view of life which Jim [Dobson] defined as Western and Christian,” Alexander-Moegerle wrote in his searing tell-all memoir, James Dobson’s War on America. “He clearly wished for an America that was just like him.”Read more at location 733
To those not initiated into the special language of the group, references to “The Family” might seem as anodyne as the root beer floats served in the mock-1950s malt shop in the basement of Focus on the Family’s “Welcome Center.” To Dobson’s flock, however, the phrase is clearly understood as a reference to the mass movement of right-wing evangelicals that excludes from its ranks all homosexuals, members of minority religions, and liberal and moderate Christians.Read more at location 759
The Princes’ son Erik, who served as an intern at Dobson’s organization, is founder and CEO of the controversial international mercenary firm Blackwater, described by journalist Jeremy Scahill as “a politically connected private army that has become the Bush administration’s Praetorian Guard.” Taking a cue from Blackwater, Dobson has implemented a vast security apparatus that monitors every move of Focus visitors.Read more at location 781
According to a job application obtained by reporter Cara DeGette in 2006, Focus security guards have collected an arsenal of 2,000 weapons and take target practice at the nearby Air Force Academy.Read more at location 786
Breathless letters are fired off each month to the homes of crisis-wracked Focus members, warning them of the latest threat to the movement, from “the homosexual agenda” to the Christian right’s latest hobgoblin, “radical Islam.” Members are urged to contribute to Focus on the Family Action (Dobson’s political lobbying arm), to vote for anti-gay ballot measures and conservative candidates, and to flood Capitol Hill with calls whenever a piece of “anti-family” legislation hits the floor.Read more at location 810
Instead, he exploits the culture of personal crisis that has united his constituents into “The Family.” He is their strict father, the one who helped them repair their marriage after an adulterous affair, treat their child’s bedwetting problem, or “cure” their homosexual tendencies. On election day, Dobson’s flock repays him with political fealty.Read more at location 826
Dobson flatly rejected the notion that the residual ravages of Jim Crow, the ever-escalating violence of the Vietnam War, or the resentful style of President Richard Nixon had provoked any of these problems. Instead, he homed in on a scapegoat: Dr. Benjamin Spock, a pediatrician whose perennially best-selling book Baby and Child Care advised parents to treat their children respectfully as individuals. ToRead more at location 863
Dobson envisioned himself as Spock’s foil. He pecked away at his typewriter, hoping to produce the definitive child-rearing manual for conservative Americans revolted by the “permissive” passion play of the 1960s.Read more at location 880
Dobson’s manual, Dare to Discipline, read like a manifesto for domestic violence when it finally appeared in 1970.Read more at location 885
When Dobson updated his child-rearing advice in his 1992 manual The Strong-Willed Child, he extended his advocacy of corporal punishment to unruly household pets.Read more at location 903
Colson read R. J. Rushdoony with avid interest upon his release from prison, and he was among the first evangelical leaders to latch on to Schaeffer’s anti-abortion crusade. His 1995 science fiction novel Gideon’s Torch revealed his radical passions. The book follows a heroic band of Christian guerrillas who must stop the National Institutes of Health from harvesting brain tissue from aborted fetuses to cure AIDS, a plan funded by Hollywood liberals. To do so, they launch a righteous killing spree of abortion doctors, eventually firebombing the National Institutes of Health. Not surprisingly, Gideon’s Torch became a recruiting tool for those wishing to realize its fictional narrative. It has been excerpted at length on the website of the Army of God, a radical anti-abortion group responsible for the killing and bombing of abortion providers.Read more at location 953
Philip Greven, a professor of history at Rutgers University and a leading expert on Protestant religious thought, is one of the few researchers of American conservatism who has recognized the impact of corporal punishment on the sensibility of movement members. In his incisive book Spare the Child: The Religious Roots of Punishment and the Psychological Impact of Physical Abuse, Greven analyzed Dare to Discipline in detail, concluding that Dobson’s violent child-rearing methods served an underlying purpose, producing droves of activists embarked on an authoritarian mission.Read more at location 969
“The persistent ‘conservatism’ of American politics and society is rooted in large part in the physical violence done to children,” Greven wrote. “The roots of this persistent tilt towards hierarchy,Read more at location 974
enforced order, and absolute authority—so evident in Germany earlier in this century and in the radical right in America today—are always traceable to aggression against children’s wills and bodies, to the pain and the suffering they experience long before they, as adults, confront the complex issues of the polity, the society, and the world.”Read more at location 975
Every sinner who submits must be convinced that, as Dobson has insisted, “Pain is a marvelous purifier.” Dobson’s emphasis on pain, simultaneously inflicted on weaker beings and the self, reflects the sadomasochism at the core of his philosophy.Read more at location 983
Erich Fromm, in his book Escape from Freedom, insisted that sadomasochism was more than a sexual kink. It was, he claimed, a defining characteristic of the authoritarian personality, finding its most dangerous expression in the political sphere. “The essence of the authoritarian character,” Fromm wrote, “has been described as the simultaneous presence of sadistic and masochistic drives. Sadism was understood as aiming at unrestricted power over another person more or less mixed with destructiveness; masochism as aiming at dissolving oneself in an overwhelmingly strong power and participating in its strength and glory.”Read more at location 992
Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall. PROVERBS 16:18Read more at location 1010
The 1980s brought new opportunities—and new dragons to slay—for James Dobson. With the Reagan administration, Dobson was able to establish a foothold in Washington. His closest White House ally was Gary Bauer, the elfin undersecretary of education who used his post to limit funding for public schools, which he blamed for eroding the country’s moral character.Read more at location 1013
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