The insanity of the Republican Party and its willingness to do violence against constitutional rights of citizens in order to prostitute itself to Christofascists seems to know few limits. Increasingly, even seemingly educated Republicans - NOTE: education does not guarantee sanity - are running Hell bent to buy into the "Christian nation" myth manufactured by the far right. A case in point? Ben Sasse,
winner of last week’s Republican Senate primary in Nebraska, who ten years ago wrote a dissertation entitled “The Anti-Madalyn Majority: Secular Left, Religious Right, and the Rise of Reagan's America,” that parrots the talking points on history revisionists like the discredited David Barton. What is frightening is that Sasse is likely to be elected to the U. S. Senate come November. Religion Dispatches looks at Sasse's disturbing views. Here are excerpts:
Ben Sasse,
winner of last week’s Republican Senate primary in Nebraska and likely the next senator from that state, is a Tea Party hero with an unusual credential: a PhD in history from Yale.
Sasse—a proud anti-choice activist, homeschooler, and opponent of Obamacare and its “entire failed worldview”—bills himself as an outsider to politics . . . . Glenn Beck told the candidate, “I can hear the Constitution running through your veins.”
If the Constitution could actually flow through the human circulatory system, there’s one part I might imagine Sasse omitting:
the Establishment Clause, or at least the Establishment Clause as
interpreted by the Warren Court, whose church-state decisions of the
early 1960s form the lynchpin of Sasse’s 2004 doctoral dissertation. . . . . he argues, not unpersuasively, that the roots of the modern religious right lie in the 1962 and 1963 Supreme Court decisions striking down mandatory public school prayer and Bible reading. Those decisions, Sasse maintains, touched a nerve among what he calls the “masses,” by which he means Americans
horrified by rapid cultural changes, a reaction that “elites” dismissed
as the backwater views of an unrepresentative, anti-modernist minority.
By failing to recognize what Sasse
characterizes as a spontaneous, grassroots reaction to “judicial
tyranny” (yes, Sasse documents the use of that term in the Cold War era),
intellectual and journalistic elites, along with the entire Democratic
Party, failed to grasp the true motivation of religious conservatives,
or the political turns they would force the country to take.
[E]ven though the historical record
is rife with demagogues who stirred up anti-communist (and then,
anti-secularist) passions, in his thesis Sasse claims instead that this
grassroots reaction was sua sponte.
Only later in the dissertation—after documenting, in fascinating detail, Congressional hearings on a proposed constitutional amendment to permit school prayer—does Sasse concede that reporters “did uncover some other unseemly conservative allies, such as the John Birch Society, Billy Hargis, and Gerald L.K. Smith,” founder of the anti-Semitic Christian Nationalist Crusade.
Sasse argues that a conservative push for the entanglement of religion and politics prevailed. “Americans did not want a privatization of faith,” he maintains, adding,
Democrats faced a major obstacle in
equaling the fervor of the Republicans in the prayer crusade because of
the visibility of the alliance between the Democratic Party and the
liberal Jewish groups so closely identified with the legal
secularization movement.
Other historians, notably Randall Balmer, have
documented conservative backlash to school desegregation and the 1976
revocation of Bob Jones University’s tax-exempt status for its
interracial dating ban as motivating forces for the religious right.
Sasse conceded “nativist passions and racist status anxiety surely comprise part of the story, but not the whole of it.”
Instead, he argues, the
religious right “is better understood first as a consequence of fears
about top-down communism—and about the evaporation of a religious
understanding of the nation—than as simply a product of resistance to
the sexual revolution or desegregation.”
The GOP didn’t win over working class white voters by opposing civil rights and abortion, according to Sasse, but by highlighting a clash between religion and secularism. It wasn’t Reagan who turned the tide of white evangelicals to the Republican Party, but Nixon. Evangelicals didn’t become more prominent in the public square because of Reagan’s presidency, and their storied role in his election, but in the rise of “entrepreneurial” evangelicalism and the explosion of para-church structures, which “remade the experience of lived religion for countless lay Protestants.”
Sasse’s dissertation was written during the presidency of George W. Bush (in whose administration Sasse later served). As a candidate ten years later, Sasse has reprised themes about elites (the Obama administration) imposing something terrible (the contraception coverage benefit) on religious objectors.
[S]hould the [U.S. Supreme] Court’s “activist judges” rule in the Obama
administration’s favor [on contraception coverage], you can count on conservative leaders stoking
the fears of Ben Sasse’s religious “grassroots.”
