[Paleopsych] Frank Rich: The God Racket, From DeMille to DeLay

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Arts > Frank Rich: The God Racket, From DeMille to DeLay
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/27/arts/27Rich.html
March 27, 2005

    AS Congress and the president scurried to play God in the lives of
    Terri Schiavo and her family last weekend, ABC kicked off Holy Week
    with its perennial ritual: a rebroadcast of the 1956 Hollywood
    blockbuster, "The Ten Commandments."

    Cecil B. DeMille's epic is known for the parting of its Technicolor
    Red Sea, for the religiosity of its dialogue (Anne Baxter's Nefretiri
    to Charlton Heston's Moses: "You can worship any God you like as long
    as I can worship you.") and for a Golden Calf scene that DeMille
    himself described as "an orgy Sunday-school children can watch." But
    this year the lovable old war horse has a relevance that transcends
    camp. At a time when government, culture, science, medicine and the
    rule of law are all under threat from an emboldened religious minority
    out to remake America according to its dogma, the half-forgotten show
    business history of "The Ten Commandments" provides a telling back
    story.

    As DeMille readied his costly Paramount production for release a
    half-century ago, he seized on an ingenious publicity scheme. In
    partnership with the Fraternal Order of Eagles, a nationwide
    association of civic-minded clubs founded by theater owners, he
    sponsored the construction of several thousand Ten Commandments
    monuments throughout the country to hype his product. The Pharaoh
    himself - that would be Yul Brynner - participated in the gala
    unveiling of the Milwaukee slab. Heston did the same in North Dakota.
    Bizarrely enough, all these years later, it is another of these
    DeMille-inspired granite monuments, on the grounds of the Texas
    Capitol in Austin, that is a focus of the Ten Commandments case that
    the United States Supreme Court heard this month.

    We must wait for the court's ruling on whether the relics of a
    Hollywood relic breach the separation of church and state. Either way,
    it's clear that one principle, so firmly upheld by DeMille, has
    remained inviolate no matter what the courts have to say: American
    moguls, snake-oil salesmen and politicians looking to score riches or
    power will stop at little if they feel it is in their interests to
    exploit God to achieve those ends. While sometimes God racketeers are
    guilty of the relatively minor sin of bad taste - witness the
    crucifixion-nail jewelry licensed by Mel Gibson - sometimes we get the
    demagoguery of Father Coughlin or the big-time cons of Jimmy Swaggart
    and Jim Bakker.

    The religio-hucksterism surrounding the Schiavo case makes DeMille's
    Hollywood crusades look like amateur night. This circus is the latest
    and most egregious in a series of cultural shocks that have followed
    Election Day 2004, when a fateful exit poll question on "moral values"
    ignited a take-no-prisoners political grab by moral zealots. During
    the commercial interruptions on "The Ten Commandments" last weekend,
    viewers could surf over to the cable news networks and find a
    Bible-thumping show as only Washington could conceive it. Congress was
    floating such scenarios as staging a meeting in Ms. Schiavo's hospital
    room or, alternatively, subpoenaing her, her husband and her doctors
    to a hearing in Washington. All in the name of faith.

    Like many Americans, I suspect, I tried to picture how I would have
    reacted if a bunch of smarmy, camera-seeking politicians came anywhere
    near a hospital room where my own relative was hooked up to life
    support. I imagined summoning the Clint Eastwood of "Dirty Harry," not
    "Million Dollar Baby." But before my fantasy could get very far, star
    politicians with the most to gain from playing the God card started
    hatching stunts whose extravagant shamelessness could upstage any
    humble reverie of my own.

    Senator Bill Frist, the Harvard-educated heart surgeon with
    presidential aspirations, announced that watching videos of Ms.
    Schiavo had persuaded him that her doctors in Florida were mistaken
    about her vegetative state - a remarkable diagnosis given that he had
    not only failed to examine the patient ostensibly under his care but
    has no expertise in the medical specialty, neurology, relevant to her
    case. No less audacious was Tom DeLay, last seen on "60 Minutes" a few
    weeks ago deflecting Lesley Stahl's questions about his proximity to
    allegedly criminal fund-raising by saying he would talk only about
    children stranded by the tsunami. Those kids were quickly forgotten as
    he hitched his own political rehabilitation to a brain-damaged
    patient's feeding tube. Adopting a prayerful tone, the former
    exterminator from Sugar Land, Tex., took it upon himself to instruct
    "millions of people praying around the world this Palm Sunday weekend"
    to "not be afraid."

    The president was not about to be outpreached by these saps. The same
    Mr. Bush who couldn't be bothered to interrupt his vacation during the
    darkening summer of 2001, not even when he received a briefing titled
    "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.," flew from his Crawford ranch
    to Washington to sign Congress's Schiavo bill into law. The bill could
    have been flown to him in Texas, but his ceremonial arrival and
    departure by helicopter on the White House lawn allowed him to
    showboat as if he had just landed on the deck of an aircraft carrier.
    Within hours he turned Ms. Schiavo into a slick applause line at a
    Social Security rally. "It is wise to always err on the side of life,"
    he said, wisdom that apparently had not occurred to him in 1999, when
    he mocked the failed pleas for clemency of Karla Faye Tucker, the
    born-again Texas death-row inmate, in a magazine interview with Tucker
    Carlson.

    These theatrics were foretold. Culture is often a more reliable
    prophecy than religion of where the country is going, and our culture
    has been screaming its theocratic inclinations for months now. The
    anti-indecency campaign, already a roaring success, has just yielded a
    new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Kevin J.
    Martin, who had been endorsed by the Parents Television Council and
    other avatars of the religious right. The push for the sanctity of
    marriage (or all marriages except Terri and Michael Schiavo's) has led
    to the banishment of lesbian moms on public television. The
    Armageddon-fueled worldview of the "Left Behind" books extends its
    spell by the day, soon to surface in a new NBC prime-time mini-series,
    "Revelations," being sold with the slogan "The End is Near."

    All this is happening while polls consistently show that at most a
    fifth of the country subscribes to the religious views of those in the
    Republican base whom even George Will, speaking last Sunday on ABC's
    "This Week," acknowledged may be considered "extremists." In that
    famous Election Day exit poll, "moral values" voters amounted to only
    22 percent. Similarly, an ABC News survey last weekend found that only
    27 percent of Americans thought it was "appropriate" for Congress to
    "get involved" in the Schiavo case and only 16 percent said it would
    want to be kept alive in her condition. But a majority of American
    colonists didn't believe in witches during the Salem trials either -
    any more than the Taliban reflected the views of a majority of
    Afghans. At a certain point - and we seem to be at that point - fear
    takes over, allowing a mob to bully the majority over the short term.
    (Of course, if you believe the end is near, there is no long term.)

    That bullying, stoked by politicians in power, has become omnipresent,
    leading television stations to practice self-censorship and high
    school teachers to avoid mentioning "the E word," evolution, in their
    classrooms, lest they arouse fundamentalist rancor. The president is
    on record as saying that the jury is still out on evolution, so
    perhaps it's no surprise that The Los Angeles Times has uncovered a
    three-year-old "religious rights" unit in the Justice Department that
    investigated a biology professor at Texas Tech because he refused to
    write letters of recommendation for students who do not accept
    evolution as "the central, unifying principle of biology." Cornelia
    Dean of The New York Times [1]broke the story last weekend that some
    Imax theaters, even those in science centers, are now refusing to show
    documentaries like "Galápagos" or "Volcanoes of the Deep Sea" because
    their references to Darwin and the Big Bang theory might antagonize
    some audiences. Soon such films will disappear along with biology
    textbooks that don't give equal time to creationism.

    James Cameron, producer of "Volcanoes" (and, more famously, the
    director of "Titanic"), called this development "obviously symptomatic
    of our shift away from empiricism in science to faith-based science."
    Faith-based science has in turn begat faith-based medicine that
    impedes stem-cell research, not to mention faith-based abstinence-only
    health policy that impedes the prevention of unwanted pregnancies and
    diseases like AIDS.

    Faith-based news is not far behind. Ashley Smith, the 26-year-old
    woman who was held hostage by Brian Nichols, the accused Atlanta
    courthouse killer, has been canonized by virtually every American news
    organization as God's messenger because she inspired Mr. Nichols to
    surrender by talking about her faith and reading him a chapter from
    Rick Warren's best seller, "The Purpose-Driven Life." But if she's
    speaking for God, what does that make Dennis Rader, the church council
    president arrested in Wichita's B.T.K. serial killer case? Was God
    instructing Terry Ratzmann, the devoted member of the Living Church of
    God who this month murdered his pastor, an elderly man, two teenagers
    and two others before killing himself at a weekly church service in
    Wisconsin? The religious elements of these stories, including the role
    played by the end-of-times fatalism of Mr. Ratzmann's church, are left
    largely unexamined by the same news outlets that serve up Ashley
    Smith's tale as an inspirational parable for profit.

    Next to what's happening now, official displays of DeMille's old Ten
    Commandments monuments seem an innocuous encroachment of religion into
    public life. It is a full-scale jihad that our government signed onto
    last weekend, and what's most scary about it is how little was heard
    from the political opposition. The Harvard Law School constitutional
    scholar Laurence Tribe pointed out this week that even Joe McCarthy
    did not go so far as this Congress and president did in conspiring to
    "try to undo the processes of a state court." But faced with
    McCarthyism in God's name, most Democratic leaders went into hiding
    and stayed silent. Prayers are no more likely to revive their spines
    than poor Terri Schiavo's brain.