I know that I've already written about Michele Bachmann earlier, but The New Yorker has a must read profile on Bachmann. While the article is entitled "A Leap of Faith" it might just as well be captioned "The Face of Insanity." Conservative pundit David Frum found it impossible to not comment on The New Yorker article in a piece on his blog bearing the title "Inside Bachmann's Brain." Here are some highlights from Frum's piece:
"Here’s a route into her head; remember Bachmann’s statement about the Founders tirelessly working to end slavery? The statement was widely ridiculed as an expression of pure ignorance. Lizza takes the statement instead as a route into Bachmann’s own personal alternative knowledge system:
Bachmann’s comment about slavery was not a gaffe. It is, as she would say, a world view. In “Christianity and the Constitution,” the book she worked on with [John] Eidsmoe, her law school mentor, he argues that John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and John Adams “expressed their abhorrence for the institution” and explains that “many Christians opposed slavery even though they owned slaves.” They didn’t free their slaves, he writes, because of their benevolence. “It might be very difficult for a freed slave to make a living in that economy; under such circumstances setting slaves free was both inhumane and irresponsible.”
You don’t want to invest a lot of time nit-picking the historical inaccuracies here. (For example, John Adams was a Unitarian who rejected the divinity of Christ, Alexander Hamilton avoided church, and while all three genuinely abhorred slavery, only Jay can be said to have worked to end it.) The anecdote is valuable as an illustration of the way in which Bachmann processes information. Lizza found a 2005 interview in which Bachmann was asked about books she liked. She praised two: Ann Coulter’s Treason and Total Truth by Nancy Pearcey. Lizza explains the latter:
[Pearcey] teaches readers how to implement Schaeffer’s idea that a Biblical world view should suffuse every aspect of one’s life. She tells her readers to be extremely cautious with ideas from non-Christians. There may “be occasions when Christians are mistaken on some point while nonbelievers get it right,” she writes in “Total Truth.” “Nevertheless, the overall systems of thought constructed by nonbelievers will be false—for if the system is not built on Biblical truth, then it will be built on some other ultimate principle. Even individual truths will be seen through the distorting lens of a false world view.
As Lizza points out, Bachmann regards even the most mundane political facts through the prism of a worldview that would probably seem extremely strange to most Americans. One of her first great political causes was to attack federal vocational education programs on the grounds that they promoted:
a “new restructuring of American society,” beginning with “workforce boards” that would tell every student the specific career options he or she could pursue, turning children into “human resources for a centrally planned economy.”
This kind of talk would sound paranoid to most of us. It emerges from a religious philosophy that rejects the federal government as an alien instrument of destruction, ripping apart a Christian society. Bachmann’s religiously grounded rejection of the American state finds a hearing with many more conventional conservatives radicalized by today’s hard economic times.
As for The New Yorker article itself, here are some other interesting highlights that underscore the fact that Michele Bachmann is utterly unfit for the presidency - or any other elected office for that matter:
Bachmann belongs to a generation of Christian conservatives whose views have been shaped by institutions, tracts, and leaders not commonly known to secular Americans, or even to most Christians. Her campaign is going to be a conversation about a set of beliefs more extreme than those of any American politician of her stature, including Sarah Palin, to whom she is inevitably compared. Bachmann said in 2004 that being gay is “personal enslavement,” and that, if same-sex marriage were legalized, “little children will be forced to learn that homosexuality is normal and natural and that perhaps they should try it.” Speaking about gay-rights activists, that same year, she said, “It is our children that is the prize for this community.” She believes that evolution is a theory that has “never been proven,” and that intelligent design should be taught in schools.
In the fall of 1975, Bachmann enrolled at Winona State University, a small school in southeastern Minnesota, where she became more devout and tried to lead her dormmates to Christianity. There she met Marcus, whom, she has said, God called her to marry. She had a vision while praying “of me marrying this man in the valley where his parents have a farm in western Wisconsin.” According to Michele, Marcus was simultaneously having a vision about marrying her.
[I]n January, 1977. Later that year, they experienced a second life-altering event: they watched a series of films by the evangelist and theologian Francis Schaeffer called “How Should We Then Live?” . . . . In the films, Schaeffer—who has a white goatee and is dressed in a shearling coat and mountain climber’s knickers—condemns the influence of the Italian Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Darwin, secular humanism, and postmodernism. He repeatedly reminds viewers of the “inerrancy” of the Bible and the necessity of a Biblical world view.
Francis Schaeffer instructed his followers and students at L’Abri that the Bible was not just a book but “the total truth.” He was a major contributor to the school of thought now known as Dominionism, . . . . Sara Diamond, who has written several books about evangelical movements in America, has succinctly defined the philosophy that resulted from Schaeffer’s interpretation: “Christians, and Christians alone, are Biblically mandated to occupy all secular institutions until Christ returns.”
Bachmann enrolled at the new O. W. Coburn School of Law, at Oral Roberts University, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. . . . . Among the professors were Herbert W. Titus, a Vice-Presidential candidate of the far-right U.S. Taxpayers Party (now called the Constitution Party), and John Whitehead, who started the Rutherford Institute, a conservative legal-advocacy group. The law review published essays by Schaeffer and Rousas John Rushdoony, a prominent Dominionist who has called for a pure Christian theocracy in which Old Testament law—execution for adulterers and homosexuals, for example—would be instituted. In a 1982 essay in the law review, Rushdoony condemned the secularization of public schools and declared, “With the coming collapse of humanistic statism, the Christian must prepare to take over, he must prepare for victory.”
At Oral Roberts, Bachmann worked for a professor named John Eidsmoe . . . . . Bachmann worked as Eidsmoe’s research assistant on his book “Christianity and the Constitution,” published in 1987. . . . . Eidsmoe has stirred controversy. In 2005, he spoke at the national convention of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a defiantly pro-white, and anti-black, organization. (Eidsmoe says that he deeply despises racism, but that he will speak “to anyone.”) In Alabama last year, he addressed an event commemorating Secession Day and told an interviewer that it was the state’s “constitutional right to secede,” and that “Jefferson Davis and John C. Calhoun understood the Constitution better than did Abraham Lincoln and Daniel Webster.” Bachmann has not, however, distanced herself, and she has long described her work for Eidsmoe as an important part of her résumé.
Around this time [the late 1990's], Bachmann became interested in the writings of David A. Noebel, the founder and director of Summit Ministries, an educational organization founded to reverse the harmful effects of what it calls “our current post-Christian culture.” He was a longtime John Birch Society member, whose pamphlets include “The Homosexual Revolution: End Time Abomination,” and “Communism, Hypnotism, and the Beatles,” in which Noebel argued that the band was being used by Communists to infiltrate the minds of young Americans. Bachmann once gave a speech touting her relationship with Noebel’s organization. “I went on to serve on the board of directors with Summit Ministries,” she said, adding that Summit’s message is “wonderful and worthwhile.”
While looking over Bachmann’s State Senate campaign Web site, I stumbled upon a list of book recommendations. The third book on the list, which appeared just before the Declaration of Independence and George Washington’s Farewell Address, is a 1997 biography of Robert E. Lee by J. Steven Wilkins.
Wilkins is the leading proponent of the theory that the South was an orthodox Christian nation unjustly attacked by the godless North. This revisionist take on the Civil War, known as the “theological war” thesis, had little resonance outside a small group of Southern historians until the mid-twentieth century, when Rushdoony and others began to popularize it in evangelical circles. In the book, Wilkins condemns “the radical abolitionists of New England” and writes that “most southerners strove to treat their slaves with respect and provide them with a sufficiency of goods for a comfortable, though—by modern standards—spare existence.”
There's much more in The New Yorker article. All of it paints one overall picture: Michele Bachmann is religious extremist nutcase who has disconcerting ties to racists as well as Christian Dominionist. Anyone who cares about the separation of church and state and equality for all races ought to be terrified that someone as extreme - and in my view mentally deranged - as Bachmann is in the top of the polls in Iowa at the moment.
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