Michelle Goldberg is a native Buffalonian and a graduate of the University at Buffalo. As a writer for UB’s student paper, The Spectrum, she wrote an attention-grabbing article in 1995, when pro-life students erected 4,400 white crosses—with the permission of the UB’s Amherst Campus—to represent the number of abortions claimed to be performed each day in the United States. “This week is anti-choice week at UB,” she wrote in the article, which was also picked up by Artvoice.

Her interest in the anti-abortion movement grew through her experiences doing clinic defense during the infamous Spring of Life protests, which polarized much of Western New York and the nation during the early 1990s.

After finishing a master’s degree in journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, she worked in San Francisco as a freelance journalist, writing a series of articles on the “ex-gay” movement.

Now a senior writer for Salon.com in New York City, Goldberg has traveled extensively, often reporting from the Middle East on topics involving ideology and politics. Goldberg is also adjunct professor at New York University’s Graduate School of Journalism. She has written columns for the San Francisco Bay Guardian and Shift Magazine, and has contributed articles to Rolling Stone, the UK Guardian, Utne Reader and Newsday, among others. Her first book, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, was published just this year by W. W. Norton & Co.

She made time for this interview after a trip to Mississippi, where she was researching an article for Salon.com.

Artvoice: You just got back from Mississippi. What were you working on?

Michelle Goldberg: I was in Mississippi doing a piece about the last abortion clinic in the state. It’s been under siege by protesters all month. It’s going to be in Salon sometime next week.

AV: You’ve said that the first time you came into contact with real religious zealots was back in 1990, during the Spring of Life in Buffalo.

MG: Yes…I was 16 during the Spring of Life, and I went a few times before homeroom to go link arms with people, and keep the clinics open, and at the time I wasn’t necessarily that aware of the broader context. I wasn’t that aware of the movement and the different factions within it, I just thought of the right as being these screaming, frightening people who, well—one of them punched me in the stomach. Remember how they used to charge the lines? And they kept it up after the Spring of Life, so I would go and do clinic defense most weekends until I left town when I was 17.

I think that what struck me about it, besides the size of it, was that you kind of enter this whole other world, where you learn about the Army of God manual, and the fact that it’s an entire subculture in a lot of ways, with its own stories about history, its own version of science…I think I probably had a very crude idea of it at the time that didn’t make much distinction between different parts of the right.

AV: You write in your book that this movement has certainly grown to encompass a lot of other issues.

MG: What’s really interesting, and I don’t get into this in the book that much because I don’t like to write about myself that much, but a lot of the people who got their start there [during Spring of Life] began to show up in a lot of the other issues that I was following for Salon. For instance, the Schenk brothers: Rob Schenk I saw speak at a rally for Roy Moore in Alabama, and now the Ten Commandments is his big issue. And Randall Terry was a big player in the whole Terry Schiavo fiasco.

AV: Because Operation Rescue is now essentially defunct.

MG: Basically, in 1999 the Faith Act, which Clinton signed, kind of decimated a lot of the big, civil disobedience, blockade-type actions because it made a lot of that a federal crime and imposed really stiff penalties. And then the other thing was the backlash against the murders of Barnett Slepian and David Gunn. Those two things really hurt the movement.

At the same time…well, it’s not a coincidence that they reached their most violent point during Clinton, because it was a response, I think, to their frustration and their sense that there were no channels open to them, that mainstream political channels had failed them. And I think you’ll see that historically…movements become really violent when they feel like they’ve gotten really close and then found themselves thwarted. If you look at, even, the Weather Underground, there was this moment when the student movement seemed to have so much power and to be on the cusp of some kind of revolution, but then it became clear that that was illusory. I’ve talked to people—for instance I was talking to a woman from Mississippi who used to do sidewalk protests, and she started doing it in 1988, and she was sure at the time that abortion would be illegal by 1990.

So, Operation Rescue. In 1999 Flip Benham, who’s the head of it now, changed the name because they had so many millions of dollars of fines against them…he somehow thought that he was going to get out of it by giving it a different name. He changed it to Operation Save America, which still exists, and they are kind of ramping up again a little bit, but it’s kind of a pitiful shadow of its former self. But they had a few hundred people in Mississippi when I was just there. And they’ve started to do a couple of things that they haven’t done in a long time. The owner of the clinic in Mississippi is a woman named Susan Hill, and she lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, and they went to her house and started protesting—which nobody has ever done before—and they also went to the house of the doctor who works there, which hasn’t happened to him in about 10 years. So there is a sense that the threat level is ramping up a bit.

I just want to say one more thing about these protests, which is that they had these t-shirts made that said, “Homosexuality is Sin, Islam is a Lie, Abortion is Murder.” And they actually ripped up and burned a [rainbow] flag at a protest that they had, along with the Koran and a copy of Roe v. Wade. So they’ve kind of conflated them all.

AV: Gay marriage is what you call the “mobilizing passion for the religious right,” whereas it seems like abortion was that mobilizing passion before. How has the issue of homosexuality overtaken abortion as the issue of the day?

MG: Although when I was younger I didn’t understand it, I do now understand where opposition to abortion comes from. And you can probably understand too, that if you really believe it is murder, then you have to act in these ways. But it’s really, really difficult to understand how they get so worked up about gay marriage. I think that part of it is just that—and this is what I write in the book—that any populist movement needs an enemy. And, it’s not that I think they’re wholly cynical—I mean some of them are wholly cynical, and there are some people at the top who I think are totally cynical, inasmuch as Karl Rove has manipulated this issue it’s totally cynical—but some of them I think have just created a whole political structure to justify these gut-level hatreds. But it’s so effective, I mean, it’s so remarkable the way this issue has been used to rally people. When you see people on their feet, by the thousands, cheering that they’re going to, you know, save marriage from the threat of the gay agenda.

I call that chapter “The Protocols of the Elders of San Francisco: The Political Uses of Homophobia.” I mean, when they talk about the “homosexual agenda” it doesn’t seem to correspond to the reality of actual gay people any more than anti-Semitic conspiracies were really based on anything that the individual Jews in people’s neighborhoods were doing. So there are these books that talk about how there’s this giant conspiracy to undermine the nation. And all of these different anxieties about America falling apart and decadence and families unraveling—and families are unraveling, I mean, that’s true—and so they’ve just created this conspiratorial explanation for all of these anxieties.

AV: Do you think it is solely a political scapegoat? Maybe the people who are really mobilizing this movement are just taking advantage of others’ lack of sophistication?

MG: The reason I don’t want to talk about lack of sophistication is because it’s a different kind of ignorance, in that it’s not as if they’re not well read or well educated, it’s just that they’re well read and well educated in a completely alternative reality. It’s not that they’re, like, straw-chewing hicks, it’s that they’re embedded in a culture in which homosexuality is curable. And if they didn’t truly believe that homosexuality is curable then you wouldn’t see people going by the thousands into these heartbreaking, residential rehab centers, that are, you know, ripping their souls apart.

AV: You have said that one other reason that brought this issue to the forefront for you was spending time with people involved in what you call the “ex-gay” movement. I used to say, probably incorrectly, “reformed homosexuals,” because a group of them used to meet weekly at this little café that my mom owned in Allentown. There were probably eight to ten of them, men and women, who would take a table, and they left literature behind, which is how I knew what they were involved in. It seemed strange to me, and so sad.

MG: It really is. When I did the series on the ex-gay movement, they were really sweet people and I really, really liked them, and I saw their dilemma. Especially the younger ones. I mean, if you actually believe that you are going to hell, and if you want to be part of the community that you grew up in, then I can understand the beliefs that were motivating them. And it’s really hard to dislodge that stuff because this alternative reality is so complete that it deflects any evidence of homosexuality being something that people are born with. It almost overrides their own experiences. I think that most of the people going through this program do have a sense at some level that they were born gay, but they’ve kind of bought into this ideology that’s it’s more like alcoholism, or something that they can extricate from themselves. There was a part of me that just wanted to kidnap some of these boys and take them to San Francisco where they could have a normal life.

AV: So there is a real belief in fire and brimstone, and hell, and the Second Coming?

MG: Oh, absolutely. I think it’s so real, and it’s there all the time. I was talking to a professor recently about Premillenial Dispensationalism, which is that whole belief about the Rapture, and how the Second Coming will be presaged by natural disaster, and global unrest, and then at some point true believers will be raptured up to heaven, and the rest of us will look around and see these piles of clothes where all the Christians were. And then there will be a Third World War, and then Christ will come, and there will be a thousand-year reign of peace on earth under King Jesus.

I’ve talked to Premillenial Dispensationalists who’ve said that growing up, everyone had this formative story about coming home one day, and their parents weren’t home, and they couldn’t find them, and then all of the sudden they were like, oh my God, the Rapture has happened and I’ve been left here all alone.

AV: That was a childhood experience that a lot of people reported?

MG: Yeah, a really common one, so I think that all of these beliefs and fears are pretty deeply felt.

AV: You have written about the Left Behind series, and I think we all can read thrillers and mysteries and not take them literally, realizing they are beach reads or whatever you want to call them. I’m not sure how people who read the Left Behind series are taking them.

MG: I think a lot of people probably understand that they’re fiction, but it’s more that it represents the worldview that they’re embedded in. So, it’s a fictional account but it kind of dramatizes all of these real-world assumptions.

AV: An author can work a lot of little tidbits of information that can masquerade as facts into a work of fiction. If I read a mystery and there is a lot about police procedure, for instance, I might think well, they really do it that way, and so I incorporate some of these things as fact. I’m wondering to what extent the people who are reading the Left Behind series are incorporating some of it as truth.

MG: Yeah, in the same way that maybe the Michael Crichton books worked to reinforce global warming denial, people do take this stuff seriously. Bush had Michael Crichton to the White House to talk about how global warming is a myth!

But the thing about the Left Behind books is that, first of all, [author Tim] LaHaye makes pretty clear that he believes in this scenario. Though the story is fictional in terms of the characters—you know, Rayford Steel and Buck Williams and all these people—they’re embedded within a scenario that…not that it could happen, but this is how, in terms of meta-historical events, this is how it’s going to unfold. There is going to be this Third World War in the Middle East, there is going to be a Rapture, and this is a fantasy about what happens to the people who are left behind. The Left Behind books dramatize all of these different strands of right-wing paranoia, where the Antichrist is the bioengineered son of two gay men, and then he becomes the Secretary General of the United Nations. At one moment in the series one of the heroes makes this valiant attempt to assassinate him, because under this regime he starts trying to confiscate people’s guns, and trying to promote abortion, and declares war on Christianity.

AV: Where does that line blur, between an NRA agenda and Christianity? Obviously there isn’t anything in the Bible about guns.

MG: I’m glad you asked that, because the one thing that I think is important is that when I write about Christian nationalism I’m not writing about Christianity as a faith, I’m not even writing about Evangelical Christianity as a faith. This is a political ideology that combines strains of Birchism—you know, from the John Birch society—and various other right-wing obsessions, with this kind of fundamentalist certainty and apocalyptic anxiety. And it’s all stirred together to create this right-wing political movement.

AV: Would you classify it as hysteria?

MG: I classify it as proto-totalitarian. If you read Hannah Arendt or any of the writers who do these studies of fascism—and I’m not saying that we live in a fascist country by any means, I’ve been to a lot of fascist countries, and as much as I loathe Bush life is a lot worse for a lot of other people. Unless you’re in Guantanamo, we still haven’t seen how bad things could be.

AV: Although the situation at Guantanamo can be seen as a step in that direction.

MG: Well, yeah, I think that we’re taking steps in that direction, and I’ve written about this elsewhere, that we don’t really have a language to talk about the kind of intermediate stages when democracy starts to decline but we’re still quite a ways from full-blown authoritarianism. And because we don’t have that language it’s very difficult to talk about without sounding hysterical.

AV: But you do that very successfully, I think, in your book, in that you’re not alarmist but you do convey the sense that you are alarmed. And you try to address that issue of that interim without suggesting that authoritarianism is a given.

MG: It’s a movement that has more power than I think we should be comfortable with but it is by no means an unstoppable juggernaut. They’re quite far from achieving all their goals but they’ve achieved more of them than I’m comfortable with.

You asked if it was a hysteria, and if you look at all of the studies—or not all of them but all of the ones I’ve read—of the way these movements work, one of the most salient things about them is that they create their own reality. Hannah Arendt writes about this, that there’s this kind of contempt for fact and a belief that truth belongs to whoever has the power to impose it.

AV: There are arguments to be made for that, no?

MG: There’s a post-modern argument, but I would say that the post-modernists treat that as a critique. [Laughs.]

AV: And post-modernism is intellectual, whereas here we’re talking about fundamentalism, which is not. I remember hearing a commentary on the debate about creationism, about how scientists are sometimes dumbfounded in the face of creationist arguments, so that they can’t really formulate a dialogue.

MG: I’ve done a couple right-wing talk shows since the book came out, and it’s so difficult. I’ll tell you about this one conversation I had, this radio host said to me—he was making an argument for a young earth, that the earth is less that 6,000 years old—“Have you heard that they found some T-Rex bones up in Alaska last year?” And I thought, well, no, I haven’t, but okay, go on. He said, “Well, they found in those bones soft tissue. So can you explain to me why, if the world is older than 6,000 years, why that tissue hadn’t fossilized?” And all I could say was something like “I’m sure that a scientist could explain that,” but I was just kind of taken off-guard by this whole line of apologetics that I’ve since heard elsewhere but I just hadn’t been introduced to.

Scientists, in general, become scientists—instead of politicians, or writers or whatever—because they like to deal in hard facts instead of rhetoric and persuasion. So I understand why scientists might not want to debate these issues, because it does legitimize them by suggesting that there are grounds for debate. It’s very, very impenetrable because there’s this whole other reality. [Creationists will] start citing all of these creation scientists, and according to “professor so-and-so,” because there are these universities that have graduate schools in creationist astrophysics and creationist biology.

AV: Are these programs relatively new?

MG: It’s more that it’s been getting much more sophisticated. The creationists kind of withdrew after the Scopes trial and created their own subculture and didn’t engage with the mainstream that much. I don’t even remember when the Institute for Creation Studies was founded, but I think it was in the ’70s, and so it’s really been building and going really public since the ’70s. Creationism goes back, but the whole young earth movement? I mean, William Jennings Bryant never argued that the earth is only 6,000 years old. That’s a relatively new tactic, it’s something that you see since the ’70s.

There have been creation museums for a while, but they’re usually pretty pitiful, and really pokey, and really sad-looking. Now, and opening next year, there’s going to be this sophisticated, state-of-the-art creationist museum near Cincinatti, with a planetarium and dioramas, and it’s all going to look very much like a normal science museum. So it’s just the level of slickness and professionalism.

AV: So it’s being marketed—sold, really—in a professional manner?

MG: Yeah, absolutely it’s being marketed, and it’s not just creationism that’s being marketed. Christian nationalism as a whole has adopted all of the techniques of mainstream popular culture, so you have these megachurches where the services look like rock concerts, and you have these incredibly slick Christian rock and Christian hip-hop acts performing, and the Christian analogs to everything that you have in mainstream culture look incredibly sophisticated.

It’s all this strange copy of everything in the mainstream world, just slightly altered, or ideologically altered.

AV: Christian rock is a great example because it has appropriated a medium that was always progressive and about free expression and made it palatable for Christian fundamentalists.

MG: More than that, they are increasingly packaging Christianity itself as rebellion against the tyranny of church-state separation, against the tyranny of a secular culture. All the language of this movement is very insurgent and kind of revolutionary. It’s not like Footloose anymore, where you have the killjoy preacher and the wild kids. Now it’s the kids rebelling against secularism. When I was in Mississippi interviewing people who had slept in front of the courthouse when they were trying to cart away the Ten Commandments monument, I was talking to this folk singer who saw himself as a part of a kind of civil rights movement, and the secular state as this horrible Goliath.

AV: It could be said that you went “undercover” while writing this book, though that isn’t quite true because you were always honest, when asked, about the fact that you are a journalist, and that you’re not a Christian. How often did that come up?

MG: What I would usually do was just go and hang out for a while. I’m a fairly nondescript person, and in a lot of cases I felt like—especially in places where women aren’t taken seriously—people probably didn’t even notice me. So sometimes I would just hang out and blend in. I would just approach people with my tape recorder and say, “I’m here writing a book about the culture wars,” and a lot of times people would just start talking and it wouldn’t even go any further than that in terms of “Who are you?” or “What’s your agenda?” But often the question would come up, “Are you a Christian?” and I would say, “No, I’m a Jew.”

AV: Did you ever feel like that put you in a compromised position?

MG: Only once. You know what I was talking about before—Premillenial Dispensationalism? In which Jews are kind of the key to the Second Coming of Christ because of this scenario where the Jews have to return to the biblical state of Israel to kick off the whole Second Coming? So the Jews are kind of fetishized by a lot of people in this movement. I had someone in Louisiana say something like “Oh, it’s such an honor to meet you, you’re one of God’s chosen people.” And I said, “Haven’t you ever met a Jew before?” And she said, “Well, not who just came out and admitted it.”

Only once did I meet someone who was really hostile. It was the founder of the group American Veterans in Domestic Defense, and he took the [Ten Commandments] monument on tour all over the country. He was talking about how the Jews control everything and are trying to destroy Christianity in our country. He was talking to me for a while before he asked me what my name was, and when I told him he was like “So, do your people ever talk about this stuff?” And I said, “Do my people ever talk about their plans to destroy Christianity?” I feel like this is a stupid joke now because I’ve repeated it so many times, but I just said, “I didn’t get the memo.”

AV: Have you felt a backlash since the book’s publication? I didn’t find a whole lot of criticism of you or your book online. I know Janice Crouse, from Concerned Women for America, was pretty upset with you.

MG: Oh, you found that? Well, if you want to read another negative piece, Ross Douthat, who is this hotshot young conservative writer, wrote a piece, and I was actually pretty flattered by it because it attacks me along with Kevin Phillips, Randall Balmer, Jeff Charlot, and a couple of other people who I respect and admire.

AV: Have you heard from any of the people that you interviewed for the book?

MG: No, I haven’t. I mean, I’ve gotten some angry e-mails but not nearly as many as I was expecting. And I have been invited to be on several right-wing talk shows. I did one right-wing talk show, called Worldviews with Warren Smith—and Warren Smith is a guy who is friends with most of the people I talk about in my book, he is very much a part of this movement—and he actually didn’t really quite disagree with that much of it. He was more like, “Yes, these are the leaders [of this movement], and this is what we believe, and what’s wrong with that?”

I will be debating Phil Burris, who founded Citizens for Community Values in Cincinatti, at the end of August. He was a driving force behind trying to strip gay people of their rights in Ohio.

AV: I was looking into megachurches, to see how many there are in Western New York—and there are quite a few—but Ohio has a huge number of them.

MG: Yeah, what’s happened in Ohio is pretty fascinating, because you don’t really think of Ohio as being the heart of religious fundamentalism.

AV: But it is a Midwestern state that’s very near New York and the Northeast, which is seen as a hotbed of liberalism.

MG: There’s an article in the New Yorker this week about this trio—Rod Parsley, Ken Blackwell and Russell Johnson. The three of them have been doing such intense organizing [in Ohio]. Ken Blackwell is the Republican nominee for governor, and that in itself is remarkable, that he got the nomination, because the whole Republican establishment favored his opponent. He was able to win the primary just with the support of the religious right. If he becomes governor—and he’s behind—but if he becomes governor he will be the most Christian Nationalist governor that we’ve ever had. That definitely shows the extent to which this movement has captured the Republican Party. It is the Republican Party in much of the country.

AV: Is there more power in the grassroots movement than there is with, say, the television evangelists like Falwell?

MG: I think it’s both. [The movement] used to be pretty centralized and it’s been slowly getting more and more diffuse. You can trace it from Jerry Falwell, who was recruited by these right-wing operatives to start this organization that could pull blue-collar Democrats away from the party, but it was with mailings and national rallies and things like that. And then you had the Christian Coalition, which was born out of the ashes of Pat Robertson’s presidential campaign…the Christian Coalition built this whole grassroots network. They held trainings to teach people how to run for school board, or how to run for city council, or how to become a precinct captain.

Then, when the Christian Coalition fell apart, power passed both to national organizations like James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, but also to a bunch of interlocking regional organizations. Focus on the Family is a national organization but it has regional affiliates, and they usually have different names. They’re not called Focus on the Family, but they are all connected to that organization. And they all do stuff at the state level. A lot of these most important battles—especially about abortion, gay rights, church-state separation and the teaching of science—all of this stuff is now happening at the state level but with outside national support.

AV: About the separation of church and state, is the argument basically that the Founding Fathers took it for granted that the US would be a Christian nation?

MG: That’s right. I was having an argument with one right-wing radio host, and I said to him, “Do you think it was just an accident that the founders don’t mention God or Jesus anywhere in the Constitution?” And he said, “So are you saying that the Constitution makes no reference to God?” And all of the sudden knew what he was going to say, because I had heard this argument before. He said, “How is the Constitution signed? It’s signed, ‘In the Year of Our Lord, 1787.’” I thought, well, yes, you know, they are referencing Jesus Christ, but that’s just how they talked about time. And he said, “So you will admit that the Constitution says that Jesus Christ is Lord. Is the Constitution unconstitutional?”

And again, this is a really hard thing to argue because it is, in certain ways, so preposterous. It assumes that the founders embedded all these hidden meanings.

AV: Or that they didn’t need to say it…

MG: Because it was taken for granted, right. Here are a couple of arguments that they make. They’ll make the argument that the First Amendment is only intended to mean that the federal government cannot favor one Christian denomination over another. They’ll say that the First Amendment: a) doesn’t apply to the states; and b) is only intended to mean that no one can say America is a Presbyterian nation, or a Baptist nation.

And the First Amendment actually didn’t apply to the states until the 14th Amendment and the Incorporation Doctrine…the way the court has interpreted the 14th Amendment to hold that the Bill of Rights applies to the states, so that it would be a violation of due process for the states to establish a religion or to prohibit free speech.

This movement objects to that reading of the 14th Amendment. Which is so radical, if you think about how that would change society, if the states weren’t bound by the Bill of Rights. And they do believe, actually, that the states should be free to establish whatever religion they want. I mean, some people believe that and some people don’t, but it’s a view that sounds so out there but yet it’s also one that’s been espoused by [US Supreme Court Justice] Clarence Thomas.

AV: Explain the difference, if there is one, between Christian nationalism and theocracy.

MG: Well, theocracy is not specific to any religion. And I also think that though there are theocratic Christian Nationalists, not all Christian Nationalists dream of a theocracy. The mainstream of the movement [do not] want to create a Christian version of Iran, or the Taliban era in Afghanistan.

AV: What about the term “Christian Taliban”?

MG: I actually think it’s misleading, and I think it’s a little bit harmful…Again, there are many, many intermediate stages of losing your freedom before you get to full-on theocracy, or full-on totalitarianism, so I think that when you start talking about theocracy—and I understand why people do it—it allows people to say, “Oh, that’s not really a possibility, that’s so far off, that’s not a thing we have to worry about.” And I would say that’s true. You don’t really have to worry about a full-on theocracy. What you do have to worry about are these very subtle changes that add up to something quite profound. To things that used to be impossible in America becoming possible. Things like the religious discrimination in hiring that has to do with the faith-based initiatives, or the undermining of reality and the Enlightenment as the basis for our politics.

Christian Nationalists, some of them would create a theocracy but most of them just envision a country in which Christianity is dominant and understood to be somewhat authoritative. Other people can continue practicing their religion, but they would have to know their place. That’s pretty far from what I see as the best ideals of America, but it is also something that is quite a ways away from a hard theocracy.

AV: How about the term “Christian Zionism”?

MG: Remember before when I talked about Premillenial Dispensationalism? This belief that the Jews need to return to Biblical Israel, and that this will kick off the events that will bring about the Second Coming? Christian Zionism is essentially the underlying theology for the Left Behind novels. And this is where it gets confusing, because most American Jews are somewhat Zionist, but the difference is that most American Jews support Israel, but most American Jews also support a two-state solution. And they tend to be quite liberal, and so they don’t as a rule support the settlements in the West Bank, and previously in Gaza, whereas the Christian Zionists, because they believe that the Jews need to retake all of biblical Israel, they support the most expansionist Israeli policies. They donate huge amounts of money to settlements and support the most hard-line elements in the Israeli government.

AV: Do you think the mainstream media is taking any of these ideas seriously? Do you see it spilling over into the mainstream?

MG:There have been all of these segments recently on CNN that have been like, “Is this the apocalypse?” And they’ve had all of these apocalyptic authors like John Hagee, who is one of the biggest Christian Zionist preachers. As if this were a rational subject. The stories haven’t been like, “Oh, wow, there’s this interesting group of people who believe that this is the apocalypse,” they’re more like “Hmm…could this be happening? Is this the end of the world?”

It’s just bizarre that the mainstream media would report on that. And again, it’s this undermining of rationalism. It’s totally legitimate to report on the fact that millions and millions of Americans believe this, but it’s totally bizarre, and signals that rationality is losing its hold, when it’s like, “I don’t know, let’s see what the Book of Revelations has to say.”

I think that you see these debates in Congress, too. You have senators talking about what is God’s will and what is God’s law. It’s a change in our language, in our political culture, in the way reality is understood. And, of course, it’s a change in policy. I try not to be too abstract in the book, but also to show that even though we are far from a theocracy, that real people’s lives are actually being affected.

AV: You mentioned the faith-based initiatives. What do you think a Democratic administration would do with those?

MG: I don’t really have a problem with religious groups getting social service funding. And they have been getting it for a long time. And if people want to bring churches to do more work in their communities, I don’t think there’s anything to object to. Hopefully what a Democratic administration should object to is, first of all, the fact that you can get [federal] money and then discriminate on the basis of religion when you’re hiring. You can run a fully federally funded or fully state-funded job that says, “No Jews or homosexuals.” That’s a big change in the way America works. And that is happening.

Another problem is that there’s no oversight. It’s really been used as a kind of patronage program for the religious right. I write in my book about these “capacity grants” that are intended to build up small churches that don’t have the infrastructure yet to be doing any kind of social services work. If they don’t have that infrastructure, why are they getting that government money? It’s because the Republicans and this movement believe that they should have that capacity, and that government should actually be building up their capacity. So these capacity-building grants go to bigger religious groups that can then go out and distribute sub-grants. Pat Robertson got a grant for $1.5 million, which is not a lot of money to him, and then he gets to go out and distribute that money in chunks to smaller religious organizations. What the hell is going on when we’re giving Pat Robertson money that he can then go hand out like the Pied Piper?

The faith-based initiative has been more about building up the religious right than it has been about helping the poor. I think it’s likely that a Democratic administration will want to channel money to churches that are doing good work. I think that they will be much more sensitive to civil rights concerns and won’t be giving people money to proselytize on the public dime, or to discriminate on the public dime. My sense is that under a Democratic administration Pat Robertson is not going to be getting big chunks of government money. And the pro-life movement isn’t going to be getting millions and millions of dollars to do their so-called “abstinence education.”

AV: To what extent is this movement now like a runaway train?

MG: Really the current infrastructure was created during the Clinton administration, because Ralph Reed focused so intently at the local level, and that local infrastructure isn’t going to be washed away in 2006 or 2008. There can be setbacks, and [the movement] can be marginalized, but it’s not going anywhere. As Ohio and some other states show, the movement controls the Republican party. That doesn’t mean that all Republicans are Christian Nationalists, they’re not—but Christian Nationalists have systematically come to dominate the Republican party at the grassroots level, and they’re the most coherent and cohesive block of voters.

Then you have all these systemic advantages that Republicans have at the national level. Because of a combination of redistricting and apportionment—the way Senate seats are handed out, the way Congressional seats are districted—you have this massive, built-in Republican advantage. Part of it is the small state advantage—that Wyoming has the same number of senators as New York and California—and part of it is the redistricting. For example, I was just reading in the New Yorker that in Ohio, where the vote is pretty evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, Republicans still have a lock on 12 out of 18 Congressional seats. So it’s not necessarily that the movement is anywhere close to a majority in the country. It’s not even the majority of evangelicals.

AV: It’s the power that this minority holds?

MG: Yeah, and I think that though a lot of their goals would undermine parts of American democracy, the way that they’ve gone about things, in many cases, has not been an illegitimate power grab. Most of what they’ve done is just out-organize other people.

AV: CBS News has said the fundamentalist evangelicals make up the largest single religious grouping in the United States, and you say in your book that it is the “largest, most powerful mass movement in the nation.” Can you back up those claims?

MG: It’s not like anybody asks in a poll, “Are you a Christian Nationalist?” That’s a term that I use to describe this political ideology. In trying to figure out how many people are Christian Nationalists or how big the movement is, I kind of extrapolated from a few different polls. Polls that ask, “Do you believe that Christianity should be made the official religion of the United States?” Or “Do you believe that homosexuals should have the same rights as other Americans?”

There are so many different sub-groups. When you’re talking about right-wing Protestants, for example, you’re talking about Baptists, Assemblies of God, Pentacostals, Church of Christ, you’re talking about all of these different denominations, as well as non-denominational evangelicals. There are evangelical Methodists. If you look at these religious identification surveys you have to know which groups to add up. But 40 percent of Americans are born-again Christians. Surveys show between 30 and 40 percent.

AV: You said that you don’t like to write about yourself, but can you talk about your own ideas about faith?

MG: I’d say I’m an agnostic in that I believe that none of us have any idea. When I was younger I was probably a little bit stupidly, militantly atheistic. I’ve since seen some of the ways in which faith can make people better instead of worse. If you look at someone like Bill Moyers, I think it’s pretty clear that this Baptist tradition has shaped his thought and shaped his morality. Or look at the Catholic Worker movement. I did a story not long ago about the Christian Peacemakers in Iraq. Religion moves some people to do profoundly good things. So I’m not quite with Sam Harris, who wrote The End of Faith, who is wholly contemptuous. And I also see how some people really need it. To me the problem is not faith, it’s fundamentalism, and certainty, and this arrogance that you have some kind of hotline to the divine.

AV: Do you have another book in the works?

MG: I’m right now just in the very early stages of researching a book about the global war over reproductive rights. I’m hoping that it will come out in 2008. I’m going to Ethiopia next month to do some research for it.

AV: You’ve been getting some media attention since this book has been published. How is it feeling?

MG: Well, it’s interesting that you say that because I don’t feel like it has gotten that much attention. It doesn’t feel like that much has really changed, in my life, in my career, in my bank account… (laughs). Everybody tells you that publishing a book is a profoundly anti-climactic experience.

It is thrilling for a couple weeks, but it really doesn’t change your life that much.