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Max Blumenthal
February 26, 2005

Air Jesus

With The Evangelical Air Force

As Christian broadcasting's leading lights gathered at the National Religious Broadcasters' convention in Anaheim, California, only power-mongering and profiteering could keep their contradictions from bubbling to the surface

"How many of you out there think ministering the Word is unpopular?" the Rev. James McDonald asked a rapt crowd of hundreds at the opening ceremony of the National Religious Broadcasters' (NRB - website) convention. A beefy, bald-headed evangelist Air Jesus: With the Evangelical Air Forcewith a folksy style and an uncanny resemblance to Jesse Ventura, McDonald spent his 30 minute sermon harping on a theme that would dominate the convention: Christian persecution.

For five days inside the Anaheim Convention Center, from February 11-16, the NRB's attendees conducted business as if they were huddled in the catacombs of Rome rather than welcomed guests at a self-contained suburban city of paisley-carpeted hotels, all-you-can-eat buffets and climate-controlled conference halls directly across the street from Disneyland. Indeed, when McDonald asked attendees for a show of hands in affirmation of his question, nearly every hand in the room shot up.

It might seem ironic for McDonald to invoke the spectre of persecution at the convention of a group that represents the interests of 1700 broadcasters and which enjoys unfettered access to congressional Republicans and the White House. The NRB's influence was best summarized by its new CEO, Frank Wright, who, in describing a recent lobbying excursion to Capitol Hill, said, "We got into rooms we've never been in before. We got down on the floor of the Senate and prayed over Hillary Clinton's desk." Wright went on to rally support for the NRB's handpicked candidate for FCC commissioner, whom he refused to name, and rail against federal hate crime legislation because, "Calls for tolerance are often a subterfuge when everything will be tolerated except Christian truth."

Given the NRB's political muscle, the persecution mentality that undergirded its convention seemed more like a justification for its members' aggressive profiteering and politicking than a cry for social justice. But at a gathering where women who had had multiple abortions organized to prevent other women from doing the same, where Israeli Jews heaped effusive affection upon evangelicals who cheerfully predicted their doom at the dawn of the apocalypse, and where evangelical leaders who warned of Islam's imperial ambitions hatched plans to "take over cities for Christ," the theme of victimization was only one of many contradictions looming just beneath the surface.

Such contradictions are inherent in the Christian Right, and might have translated into internecine conflict long ago, balkanizing the movement and curtailing its influence, had its leaders not so assiduously cultivated Jesus as a unifying symbol of the their will to power.

As NRB chairman Rev. Glenn Plummer reminded the opening ceremony's audience, "We are joined together because we're exalting one name above all others...That is our calling and that is our job."

Nowhere during the NRB conference were the contradictions more severe -- or better suppressed -- than at the Israeli Tourism Ministry breakfast. Since the Intifada began four years ago, damaging Israel's international prestige and scaring off Jewish tourists, Israel ramped up its campaign for evangelical support by marketing itself as the place "where Jesus walked" and enlisting Christian broadcasters as surrogate propagandists. With the Intifada now at a dead end and Israel expecting upwards of 700,000 Christian tourists this year, tourism officials deployed to the convention exuded a blithe, celebratory mood, feting their Christian guests with abundant helpings of scrambled eggs, creamed spinach and sweet rolls, all courtesy of grateful Israeli taxpayers.

In recent years, one of the most outspoken evangelical supporters of Israel has been popular radio host Janet Parshall. As the breakfast's keynote speaker, she described her decision to tour Israel by recounting a conversation with God.

"God, the Holy Land has terrorists, I said. But, God said, 'Janet, you're from Washington DC,'" Parshall recalled to uproarious laughter. But whom was Parshall's God referring to? To DC's political class? Or to DC's sizable population of young Black males who are so often demonized in the conservative media as a criminal plague? The crowd seemed to know.

Parshall was preceded by Michael Medved, a former left-wing Jewish radical who gained prominence as a convert to conservatism. He began his speech by reminding the crowd why he was one of the Christian Right's favorite House Hebrews: "A more Christian America is good for the Jews because a more Christian America is good for America." The audience clapped politely, but did not truly warm up to Medved until his first salvo against other Jews. "When you see Jews who are part of the attack on Christmas," Medved said, "you know they have rejected their own faith." The crowd erupted in spontaneous applause.

Perhaps the most startling moment of the morning was an appearance by popular Christian Zionist author, Kay Arthur of Precepts Ministries. "I love America," Arthur said, her voice quivering with emotion. "But if it came to a choice between Israel and America, I would stand with Israel." While the crowd applauded tepidly, I looked around and saw more than a few faces cringing with embarrassment. Arthur went on to read excerpts from the Book of Revelations, painting a surreal image of Jesus seated in a throne floating above Jerusalem, rapturing all the world's true believers up to Heaven. She left the fate of unreconstructed Jews to the imagination.

When Arthur finished, Israel's soft-spoken tourism minister, Avraham Hirschsohn, approached the podium to declare somewhat unctuously, "You stood with us for the last four years when nobody else would. Thank you."

The following day, I paid a visit to the Israeli Tourism Ministry's booth in the convention's cavernous exposition hall. There I met a tall, svelte blonde named Marina, who lived on a cooperative mango farm near the Sea of Gallilee. I asked her if she agreed with the political views of the NRB conventioneers.

"No, no, and no," she stated firmly.

Then what was she doing there?

"I walked around here earlier today looking at everything," Marina said, "and I wondered to myself, 'What am I doing here?'" Her eyes welled up with tears. "I mean, come on, these people are anti-Semitic." Though I didn't see any overt anti-semitism in evidence at the conference, evangelical leaders like Pat Robertson and Don Wildmon of the American Family Association (website) have long histories of anti-semitic statements.

Just then a small, aging man ambled towards us and identified himself as Itzhak, the founder of Kibbutz Ginosar (website), also located on the Gallilee. "But these people supported us for four years," he reminded Marina in a scolding tone, referring to conservative evangelicals. I asked him if he agreed with their politics.

Itzhak paused, staring at the ground for a moment, then asked me, "Did you see the bus?"

I replied that I had not.

"The Americans brought that bus," he said. His voice dripped with disdain.

I followed Itzhak's directions to the back of the convention hall and there it was: Bus #19, a Jerusalem city bus attacked by a Palestinian suicide bomber in January 2004. A scorched, hollow hulk of twisted steel beams, the bus was hoisted up on a display platform like a concept car at some macabre auto convention. A giant piece of posterboard leaning against the platform featured headshots of hundreds of Israeli suicide bombing casualties. Beside was a banner that read, "Terror Cannot Be Tolerated." (So must tolerance be terrorized?)

Bus #19 is owned by a Christian Zionist group called "The Jerusalem Connection" (website), which, according to its president, retired US Brigadier General James Hutchens, "looks at the conflict in Israel within a biblical context." The bus had toured the world, from The Hague, where it served as a prop for protesters against the World Court's condemnation of the Israeli separation wall, to the US for various evangelical "Remember Israel" rallies. At each stop, it was being offered up by The Jerusalem Connection like a moonbounce for a kid's birthday party.

At a table near the bus, a Jerusalem Connection employee was handing out pamphlets titled, "Bring Bus #19 To Your Community!" One reason the pamphlet offered for sponsoring it: "For Christians, you will increase in stature, appreciation and acceptance by Jews."

Rev. Plummer was holding court with some friends beside the bus, just where he promised to be during his fiery speech a day prior at the Israeli Tourism Ministry breakfast. A slight, mustachioed Black man, Plummer is a leading light in the GOP's push for a greater share of the Black vote. And though he took his token potshots at Black liberals at the breakfast, asserting that Blacks "have more allegiance to a party than to the God that made us," his most vitriolic statements were directed against Islam.

"I come from Detroit, where the biggest mosque in America is," Plummer said:

"It didn't take 9/11 to show me there is a battle for the souls of men...When Islam comes into a place, their intention is to take over everything. The businesses, the neighborhoods, everything."

In theory, Plummer wasn't opposed to having religious extremists subvert a greater society. His critique of Islam, couched in the language of spiritual warfare, was only meant to cast it as Christianity's most dangerous competitor. The Christian Right's dominionist intentions, a theme of the convention, were particularly in evidence at a seminar called, "Taking Over Cities For Christ: The Thousand Day Plan."

The seminar was led by Raul Justiniano, the Bolivian president of the Confederation of Ibero-American Communicators (COICOM), NRB's Latin American counterpart. Like a counter-revolutionary version of Che Guevara, the goateed Justiniano laid out his three-year plan to "invade" Latin American cities one by one by establishing cells in local churches and spreading outwards to "take possession of all parts of the city."

In the past decade, Justiniano has plastered Latin American cities with apparently non-religious billboard advertisements soliciting people to evangelization centers, saturated local media with Christian-themed commercials and films, and hosted stadium-sized revivals across the sub-continent. All in all, he claims to have won millions of souls through 61 "invasions" in six countries.

"Christian media is the air force and the church gives us people on the ground to mobilize our troops," Justiniano explained. "People will take notice and those are your targets. Everyone will be networked in eventually."

Like Justiniano, Olivia Gans was fluent in the language of cultural counter-revolution. A chipper, middle-aged woman leaning against an orthopedic cane, Gans manned the booth of America's oldest and largest anti-abortion group, the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC - website). While the much of the Christian Right's leadership uncompromisingly demands a reversal of Roe v. Wade, NRLC has quietly shifted its focus from overturning Roe to what Gans calls, "changing the culture."

As she told me, "You can't just change the laws on abortion all of the sudden and expect everybody to just go along with it. So many people who have grown Truck with signs outside the convention center up since the Roe decision have been acculturated in a time where anything goes. But with the young people, what we're seeing is a real generational shift."

Gans cited a bill just introduced in congress by Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KA), the Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act, as a manifestation of NRLC's incremental strategy. Though the bill is only a modest step against abortion rights, requiring federally funded abortion doctors to offer women anesthetics for their fetus after informing them that abortion will cause it pain, it is a priority for social conservatives in the 109th congress. "This bill might not stop abortion, but it will serve as a platform for changing the conversation," Gans said. "And it will keep the movement's momentum going."

Before I moved on, Gans felt compelled to describe her entree into the anti-abortion activism to me. She had had an abortion two decades ago and became so possessed with guilt, she said, that she founded the "American Victims of Abortion" (website), a group comprised of "people intimately touched by abortion" which is now a subsidiary of NRLC.

In contrast to the NRLC, another anti-abortion group across the hall, "Operation Outcry" (website) was pursuing a totalistic strategy. Standing behind Outcry's booth, a toothy blonde named Luana Stoltenberg told me, "We think it's time to put a stop to the violence and we think this country's ready."

According to Stoltenberg, Outcry activists are engaged in a 40-day fast outside the Capitol building, where they stand each day with the word "Life" taped over their mouths. And Outcry's legal arm, the Texas-based Justice Foundation, is representing the former "Jane Roe," Norma McCorvey, in asking the Supreme Court to reverse the decision that bears her name. It is a long-shot case, she admits, but another way to "keep the discussion on the table." (On February 23, 2005, the Supreme Court ruled that it would not hear McCorvey's case to reopen Roe v. Wade.)

Though Stoltenberg and Gans differed slightly on strategy, their roots in anti-abortion activism were identical. "I know the devastation of abortion first-hand," Stoltenberg said plaintively. "I had three abortions. They left me infertile and now I have to live with the fact that the only children I'll ever have were killed."

Perhaps the most influential figure appearing at the NRB conference was Focus on the Family (website) founder James Dobson, a moral mongering child psychologist who transformed a family help line broadcast on over 3000 radio stations into a political army with local chapters in 36 states.

On Friday evening a crowd of a few dozen fawning followers and activists gathered to meet Dobson and his 20-something son, Ryan, in a stuffy conference room decked out like a VFW hall, replete with red, white and blue ribbons and furnished with ping-pong tables and a hot dog stand. The only thing that kept me from believing I had walked through a time warp to the 1950s was an announcement by a guy in a striped referee jersey that Dobson and son would give iPods to the two contestants deemed suitable to face them in ping-pong.

Before the games began, the referee sat on a stool next to Dobson and son for an informal discussion of some of their favorite topics: family, culture, and the homosexual agenda. Dobson was uncharacteristically reticent during the event, seated in a hunched posture and speaking only when spoken to.

He did not seem anything like the kingmaker who answered a post-election thank you call from the White House by demanding that Bush get "more aggressive" or "pay a price in four years." Nor did he seem like the draconian uber-dad who, in his best-selling parenting handbook, "Dare to Discipline," advised parents to spank their children with "sufficient magnitude to cause the child to cry genuinely."

One of few times Dobson spoke out of turn was to make a clarification he had apparently wanted to issue for some time. "I did not say SpongeBob was gay," Dobson told the crowd, responding to media ridicule of his attack on the popular cartoon character:

"All I said was he was part of a video produced by a group with strong linkages to the homosexual community that's teaching things like tolerance and diversity. And you can see where they're going with that. They're teaching kids to think different about homosexuality."

Like everything else about Dobson, his passive attitude was calculated. The evening was to belong to Ryan, who dominated the discussion with long, blustery yarns about everything from his passion for skateboarding to his views on abortion. With close-cropped hair, gauge earrings and a handlebar mustache reminiscent of the biker from the Village People, Ryan had studiously cast himself as a rebel for Christ. But behind his bad-boy veneer, he is being groomed as the heir to his dad's political empire. Adopted by his parents when he was six months old, Ryan interned for a year at Washington's premier right-wing Christian think tank, the Family Research Council (website), which his father founded, and today is dispatched across the country for speaking engagements before evangelical youth groups, which his father promotes.

While at the NRB, Ryan explained the logic behind his latest book, 2Die4, a sequel to his other ghostwritten masterpiece, Be Intolerant: Because Some Things Are Just Stupid. "Kids today are looking for something to die for, they're looking for a cause," Ryan said. "If you give them something to die for, they'll go to the edge of the earth for you. Kids like that give me hope for revolution in America."

During a brief Q&A session, I asked Ryan if he thought there were any specific causes kids should die for. I wanted to know if he sought to literally usher children toward martyrdom like some Hamas lieutenant or was just using jarring rhetoric to spur apathetic teens to activism.

Without hesitation Ryan responded, "People keep saying we need to change the discussion on abortion before we can ban it. We don't need to change the discussion. Like 80 percent of the country is against abortion," he stated, citing some highly dubious polling data. "What kind of country fines people $25,000 for killing a bald eagle but doesn't do anything when unborn babies get thrown in the trash?" But before he could complete his apparent endorsement of a violent struggle to stop abortion, Ryan trailed off on a platitude about keeping himself "pure" for his fiancee.

Once the talk ended, two nebishy, balding men stepped up to a ping-pong table in the center of the room to challenge the Dobsons. The dynamic father and son team spanked them with sufficient magnitude, playing like they had practiced for weeks before the match. At one point Ryan slammed the ball so hard across the table it ricocheted into an unsuspecting woman's face. While the startled woman tried to collect herself, Ryan pumped his fist in celebration.

In James Dobson's War on America, a 1998 tell-all book by Dobson's former radio co-host, Gil Alexander Moegerle recounts a conversation he had with the late Stan Mooneyham, former president of the evangelical relief group World Vision. "Dobson believes he has no dark side," Mooneyham told Moegerle. "He doesn't accept his shadow, which only means he has pushed it into the cellar and locked the door. But it will someday roar out and do him in." I wondered if his son might become that shadow.

Of course, Dobson is unlikely to abdicate his position at the helm of the Christian Right any time soon. He still serves as the moral beacon for a movement that enjoys unprecedented influence in Washington and is resurgent throughout the world. It remains to be seen if the stark, inherent contractions of his movement will slow its swelling ranks or impede its increasingly ambitious agenda.