As US fundies target NZ Jim Peron recounts his awakening to the hypocrisy and moral rot at the heart of the US extreme religious right. There is little doubt in my mind that the Religious Right is a pernicious influence in any society. But then I have no doubt that many critics of the Religious Right are woefully uninformed about this movement. Many criticisms I've seen of the RR have been inaccurate. My criticisms are not just based on sharing very different philosophical premises however. I saw these people in operation up front. I've met many of the leaders of this movement and I know it's history. I also know the inherent problems of such 'faith based' politics. My history with them began as a youth who was recruited to attend what was then the largest fundamentalist church in the United States. My recruiter was David, the son of the pastor. At this time the First Baptist Church of Hammond, Indiana was running anywhere between 10,000 and 20,000 attendees per Sunday. A swarm of busses would scour the greater Chicago area bringing in congregants from hours away. They particularly targeted children and youths. Soon I was out with them going from door to door in the housing projects of Chicago finding new 'converts'. A 'convert' was anyone you could persuade to 'accept Jesus as their Saviour'. It was what other fundamentalists called 'easy believe-ism'. There were two things which this church practised to immediately take control of the minds of their congregants. The first was to preach absolute obedience to 'authority'. But this only applied to God's authority and that meant to the pastor who was 'God's man'. The second was to strip converts of contact with the 'world'. This 'separation of believers' was necessary. Everything had to revolve around the church and only the church. Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night were all reserved for church services. Every Saturday you were to go out 'soul winning' seeking new converts. But even this was not enough. Total separation was required. Converts were told to avoid 'Hollywood movies'. Even recreational activities were strictly controlled. Youths were encouraged to go out on Friday nights with the 'youth group' from the church. But all this was not enough to satisfy them. Total control over the minds of the young especially were required. Quickly the church bought an old school and set up its own school covering all grade levels. I was a member of their first graduating class. All my brothers attended as well. But I always had an independent streak and there were things I saw which I did not like. There was an authoritarianism which I did not like. It worried me enough that I did something that was considered unacceptable, though tolerated. While still attending their school I went off on my own and went to another fundamentalist church- one with only a couple of hundred members. Both churches claimed the Bible was the infallible word of God. Of course that didn't stop them from disagreeing with one another as to what was the 'clear' teaching of Scripture. The difference was this second church didn't teach the authoritarianism of their larger cousins. But this came about a year too late in some ways. That first year at the First Baptist Church and the rest of my schooling at their High School had it's impact - all negative. The first thing that I picked up on was that a large percentage of these people, including the pastor, were believers in the 'conspiracy' theory of history. The believed that a dark cabal of evil men, directly under the influence of Satan, were controlling the levers of power. What I learned much later was that a section of the Ku Klux Klan was active in the church. That aspect was pretty much kept quiet, but the Klan did find the congregation fertile recruiting ground. In some ways what I experienced was even worse. In the Sunday School the teacher preached this conspiracy theory. He encouraged his students (his, because only males were allowed to teach boys) to get involved politically through the John Birch Society. Ostensibly the JBS was supposed to be an 'anti-communist' movement. But under the auspices of its leader, Robert Welch, it taught that a secret conspiracy was behind all wars, economic problems, and political disarray in the world. This conspiracy controlled communism. It encompassed the highest echelons of world banking. And it supposedly dated back to 1776 where it was founded on May 1st by one Adam Weishaupt who christened it the Illuminati. Because of the Sunday School teacher I got involved with the local JBS chapter. Some books they encouraged me to read were sensible but others were extremist tracts on the secret conspiracy. I left First Baptist Church because I realised that the leadership was corrupt. I knew David to be a rather unpleasant fellow. I remember one time in gym class going to shower and seeing David standing in the shower room with his friends. For a joke he'd stand behind someone under a shower who was facing away from him. He'd urinate on them and they wouldn't realise it because of the warm running water from the shower. He and his friends found that funny. I also knew that he was quite a hypocrite. While his father claimed that David was 'chaste' and followed church rules about dating I knew he was having sex with numerous girls. I later learned that this continued even after he married and he was exposed for having numerous affairs with women in his church. His wife, who was also in my class, left him because of it. He married a woman and together they advertised in 'swingers' publications. She had a checkered past and was rumoured to be involved with porn. He's still preaching however. What I later learned, to my complete shock, was that the police suspected them both in the 'death' of the woman's first child. Police were quite convinced that they killed the child but said they couldn't prove it. Later on a second child was also 'accidentally killed'. Supposedly the child was in the back seat of their car and the door somehow swung open as they were pulling out of the driveway. The child allegedly then fell out and rolled under the car and was killed. Meanwhile inside the church itself there were various rumours. It later turned out that the Pastor of the church had his own private harem. His wife, a lovely woman, was forced to face the fact that he had a mistress who also acted as his secretary and would sit next to him on the platform of the church every Sunday. The secretary's husband eventually divorced her and wrote an expose of how his marriage was destroyed by the affair between the Pastor (God's man) and his wife. It seemed that David was only carrying on family tradition. I worked evenings at a local health club at the registration desk. Late at night various church leaders used the venue to meet their mistresses. Each would check in separately and then find a private place where they could be together. By now the politics of the church had taken root already. I was now a member of the JBS and attended their youth camp in the summer. Various Birch Society authors would come to the camp and teach their conspiracy gospel. I well remember that another participant was the son of a a leading advocate of the 'creationist' theory who ran the crusade against evolution. And since I was a student at the Baptist High School I was getting all this conspiracy theory history reinforced by teachers as well. I was encouraged to write essays on the 'conspiracy' for classes and did so. Between the JBS and the conspiracy advocates at the school I was persuaded that this view of the world must be true. And I read vociferously the tracts that were being published by various groups. I soon had a large library of such literature (which since then was sold off to a University research library). Many of the teachers and most the JBS members were also involved in what was called the American Party. This political party was the extremist rump of an extremist movement. It was originally founded by George Wallace, the racist governor from Alabama who ran for president in 1968 garnering around 14% of the vote. What was left of the party after Wallace's unsuccessful run was the American Party. It was then being lead by Tom Anderson a council member of the John Birch Society. To say the least it was a collection of extremists and the uninformed. You'd find Klan members by the gaggle along with fundamentalists of all stripes. In my few years there I met most of them. What I discovered was that the conspiracy theorists were an odd lot in that they each had different conspiracies. There were some who only thought of communism as a conspiracy. But most had the idea of a grander, larger, more ancient conspiracy. But who ran it? Well the answer depended on who was being asked the question. For some it was the USA's Council on Foreign Relations, for others it was International Bankers. Some included the Freemasons or the Jews or the Bilderbergers. And some wove them all together into one grand plot with each arm being controlled by the secret - well secret to everyone but the theorists themselves - Illuminati. Racism was endemic in the movement. How they saw Jews varied. Many thought Jews were God's chosen people and therefore victims of the conspiracy. But others said the Jews had rejected Christ and were now in league with Satan and, as such, were the leaders of the conspiracy against God and country. The more of this I saw the more concerned I became. One Sunday I was taken to a 'Christian Identity' church that met in an old store front. There fundamentalist Christianity was combined with anti-Jewish rhetoric. But it was justified by Scripture, or so it appeared. But the worst was when some Birchers and Christians invited me to a meeting in private home. There in a large garage some 100 people met. A man marched in to preach to us. He was in what appeared to be a knock-off copy of a Nazi uniform. He preached a message of hate for a full hour. The one image I'll never forget was when he told the assembly, to their cheers and applause, how that when Christian Americans took over the country again the 'kikes and niggers' would be rounded up. He told how they'd be taken one by one and thrown into those large tree chipping machines. ******************** The image horrified me. And it woke me up to what I had been suckered into. After this sermon the head Nazi singled me out and wanted to know what I thought. I was afraid to answer. I couldn't applaud what he said. Its viciousness and extremism was just too much for me to tolerate or to ignore. Yet I was afraid to tell him what I really thought. I had visions of being bundled into the back of a car and never being seen again. I smiled and told him that I felt like the man who just saw his mother-in-law drive off a cliff in his car. I had mixed emotions. That satisfied him. I started thinking about all that I had seen and tried to understand it. I started to reconsider all the positions I had accepted blindly because I felt these were God's people. I had been active in the American Party attending it's conventions around the US. I also heard the stories about the hypocritical conduct of the various leaders. I traveled to Salt Lake City to attend a Party convention with an older man who was a friend and a girl my age. She attended a fundamentalist university run by Billy James Hargis. I already knew that Hargis frequently slept with his students - male and female. On that trip she told me about a married couple at the school who, on their wedding night, confessed their infidelity to one another. Both had been sexual partners of Hargis. I was in West Virginia during the last days of the textbook protests lead by Alice Moore and Rev. Ezra Graley. I worked for a few weeks for Graley and stayed in his home. I listened to him admit that some of the fundamentalist ministers who lead the anti-textbook campaign had probably been involved in the many violent incidents. Schools were bombed, so were school buses. People were shot at and on one occasion an attempt was made to set off a bomb during a school board meeting. Each step of extremism seemed the logical extension of the previous step. And each seemed consistent with the assertion that we were God's people doing his Divine will. But I was seeing the flaws. First I realised that their conspiracy books were not making sense. I'd read each one. I'd even read the foot notes and from there I'd go and read the sources quoted. I noticed a pattern where quotes were taken out of context to fit the theory of the author. I couldn't explain how one set of books would add the Roman Catholic Church to the conspiracy while another set would claim the Protestantism was part of the conspiracy against the true Roman church. The contradictions and inconsistencies were glaring. But then so too was the faith itself on which this was built. I attended a small Assembly of God Church which said they put the exact teachings of the Bible into practice. Yet they differed substantially with the beliefs I was taught at the Baptist high school. My best friend attended a Calvinist fundamentalist church and they too had the exact teachings of the faith. Yet all three were different. How could there be three versions of the one true faith? How could the Bible be 'clear' in it's teachings if so many fundamentalists couldn't agree with each other? It wasn't making sense to me. And the moral hypocrisy was more than I could accept. When I spent a summer off from school working for the American Party I was asked to work for an Indianapolis Senate candidate's campaign in Indianapolis. He brought in another worker, also male, from the racist Youth Action group out of Washington, DC. I found it a bit surprising that the two of them shared a bed every night. My high school principal was Robert Billings, Jr., who was the man who got Jerry Falwell to found the Moral Majority. Billings taught us racist theories in class but when questioned by the media pretended otherwise. One of my teachers went on to run a church in Minnesota and he organised the repeal of the gay rights law in Minnesota. I met them all: Jerry Falwell, Phyllis Schlafly, Pat Robertson, Ezra Graley, Tom Anderson, Meldrim Thompson, Alan Stang and more. I knew what they'd say in private and then watch them deny it in public. I remember a rally in Indianapolis where Falwell was the key speaker to promote a law to make it a felony to be a homosexual. Two weeks later he was interviewed on television in Chicago and claimed that he was against 'special rights' for gays but didn't want to strip them of any rights. But then one fundamentalist, Greg Bahnsen, said he didn't want to strip homosexuals completely of rights either. He said they had the right to a fast and fair trial with a quick execution if found guilty. This is a relatively short recounting of what I saw and what I experienced. I was able to think myself out that movement. I fell for much of what they promoted but it was not permanent nor was it fatal. The contradictions and absurdities were too obvious for me to ignore. But I also know that many of my fellow fundamentalists were not too bright. And I've little doubt that they still believe much of what they were told. They still believe in their conspiracies. They might call it the Illuminati or communism or humanism. But they still are a danger. The fundamentalist mindset combined with the authoritarian tenor of their faith can all too easily lead people into the most extreme of positions. And while there are many such individuals who don't adopt such extremism the tendency is one that the Religious Right encourages and promotes. Jim Peron now lives with his male partner in Auckland where he runs a small bookshop and is involved in promoting Liberal political causes, especially through www.liberalvalues.org.nz. Jim Peron - 2nd August 2004