Holy Terror - Alternative Views

Speaker 1: If we could get the 45 million Christians, all of them registered to vote and go out and vote, we could have the equivalent of almost 90 million voters, and we could vote in a slate of morally minded people.

Don Crosby: The problem is when they get so wild-eyed that they want to actually murder people. And kill people. The current religious right has a term— they have their own vocabulary. One of their words is pregatory prayer. Pregatory. It's not in the dictionary, but it's a word. It's a big word. It means, in the religious right term, that when they pray that a person be changed against abortion or whatever, against homosexuals, If that person is not converted, then they have a right, a God-given right, to execute God's judgment upon that person. So, which of course means to kill them.

Speaker 3: They said there was only one solution to these moral problems. America needed to be a nation ruled by Christian principles. The Bible, not the Constitution, was the supreme law of the land.

Speaker 4: I pledge allegiance to the Christian flag. And to the Savior for whose kingdom it stands.

Don Crosby: It began as a— from a high vantage point under a money-making scheme for people sending out direct mail to raise money. They would then pick the high emotional items on which they could raise money. And then in terms of the extreme religious right, They began with the communism aspect, and this raised lots of money, to be against communism. It helped the Reagan administration tremendously. After communism went down, they had to shift to 2 other areas, which were equally profitable.

Speaker 3: Other opinions were not tolerated. Books that they thought undermined America's moral values were burned. Hey, let's make a movement out of it!

Speaker 5: Yeah!

Speaker 3: Don't check any of this stuff!

Speaker 6: We look at the fascinating and alarming ideas and activities of the religious right, right now on Alternative Views. There's a lot to the religious right which is generally not known, because it's covert. What are the real aims and tactics? What are their dangerous covert activities and ideas? We have 3 sources to present to you on this Alternative Views, a documentary produced by the Institute for First Amendment Studies. An interview with a gentleman from the Institute for First Amendment Studies. And we'll also review the book Holy Terror, which gives a lot of information about the religious right.

Skip Porteous: All Christians should be involved in government.

Speaker 5: Christians who previously were very happy to live their private lives and be moral individuals and raise their families and have nothing to do with politics, Christians of this persuasion are finding that they no longer can in conscience live with their private moral life.

Speaker 1: If we could get the 45 million Christians If all of them registered to vote and go out and vote, we could have the equivalent of almost 90 million voters, and we could vote in a slate of morally minded people.

Speaker 4: There's a very good book here which all of you should read if you want to understand what is happening politically in the United States. States and the dangers to our political and social institutions. The authors, Flo Conway and Tim Siegelman, say about holy terror that it speaks reverently of God and country, of traditional values, American morality, and the Judeo-Christian ethic, but It is— has little, if anything, to do with religion as we know it. It has no expression of faith or devotion, no act of patriotism or love for America. Instead, it's the exploitation of religion as the vehicle for a larger social and political movement, a drive for power. Not only at the national level, but in every domain of public concern, in the most intimate areas of our private lives, and in the volatile arena of world affairs. It's this broad program of intimidation, manipulation, and control in the name of religion which we call the holy terror. Of course, these people are talking about the fundamentalists, Right wing in the United States. We're going to look at this phenomenon and see how it's organized, see who the people are involved in it, their tactics for converting people to their point of view, and their drive to gain control of the United States government and what they plan to do after they get control.

Skip Porteous: In 15 years, the religious right has gone from a fringe movement to a respected mainstream political organization that has taken over much of the Republican Party. They're no longer a bunch of loudmouth preachers who shock people with the outrageous statements they make. They've learned the political talk. But underneath this well-oiled machine beats the same extremist heart.

Speaker 8: The question is, what does faith mean in relationship to politics? What are the issues we're concerned about? And then how do we offer our religious sensibilities in a pluralistic political context?

Speaker 4: We have with us Don Crosby. Who's with the Institute for First Amendment Studies. And Don is part of this organization that is studying the religious right and trying to take steps to do something about it. The religious right in the United States, the authors say it's religion run amok. What do they mean by that, you suppose?

Don Crosby: Under the cloak of religion, They seem to find an excuse for political gain and gathering up the religious or possibly pseudo-religious people, take them off on a fling to gain control and convince them that this is all done under God's name.

Speaker 4: That's pretty heavy-duty stuff. If God says it's supposed to be that way, then by gosh, it should be that way.

Don Crosby: It's difficult. We run into First Amendment problems and all sorts of things. The First Amendment doesn't exactly protect black religion, but then on the other hand it does. So where do you draw the line?

Skip Porteous: Yeah.

Speaker 4: What is the religious right? We hear of Pat Robertson. He's very well-known and famous, but there are other people too, and a lot of different organizations that are involved in the religious right. Does your organization track these and see what they're doing?

Don Crosby: Yes, our tracking goes back for some 11, 12 years and tries to follow just what they've been doing, how they've done it, and of course what their plans are.

Speaker 4: Now, what would you— how would you describe the right-wing religious network? Is it a whole bunch of organizations, or is it a small bunch, or is it overt, covert, or just a handful of Of charismatic leaders, or is it widespread in a whole lot of people?

Don Crosby: Well, it seems to be all of those to varying degrees, whatever works they seem to use. It began as a— from a high vantage point under a money-making scheme for people sending out direct mail to raise money. They would then pick the high emotional items on which they could raise money. And then, in terms of the extreme religious right, they began with the communism aspect, and this raised lots of money, to be against communism. It helped the Reagan administration tremendously. After communism went down, they had to shift to 2 other areas, which were equally profitable. But raising money, I believe, was the prime instigator for the formation of the religious right, and this happened through 2 big direct mail houses.

Speaker 4: Is that where Richard Viguerie and Paul Ryrich come in?

Don Crosby: Exactly.

Speaker 4: And there are a whole lot of different organizations and different types of religions and/or religious approaches —to this, from reading Holy Terror. And also, there's a great Covert Action Information Bulletin study from 1987, which is on the religious right, a lot of documentation there. And then, most recently, we have In These Times has an article about the religious right. Right. There are a lot of other articles in the publication, but a very, very good one in there about how they're organizing now. So, with these 3— the book Holy Terror and then these 3 magazines, you can really get a good idea. But they also are interlocked with some very significant business leaders and corporations, like what, Coors is one.

Speaker 8: Yes.

Speaker 4: I guess, what, the Hunt brothers?

Don Crosby: Yes, they seem to be. A lot of their money comes from some of the large liquor interests, strangely enough.

Speaker 4: Oh, isn't that ironic? They're teetotalers, and yet they— I'll be darned. Which of these corporations— what do you mean, like beer or hard liquor?

Don Crosby: Well, the Coors seem to have the—

Speaker 4: Oh, that's right.

Don Crosby: The Coors Foundation, under Adolph Coors, is a great contributor to the religious right. And at all their recent meetings, Coors beer flowed like water at the recent victory campaigns for various candidates.

Speaker 9: This is a mighty army.

Speaker 10: Forward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war. With the cross of Jesus, though we go before, Christ the royal Master takes again the power.

Speaker 8: Amen.

Speaker 3: Religion and politics. For the past 18 years, as a correspondent covering religion in America for a Dutch Christian network, I have reported about the rise of the religious right in the United States. America, from its inception, has vigorously held to a belief in the separation of church and state. But in Holland, where I grew up, Religion and politics were ineluctably entwined. I was born in this village. My father was the minister of this church. He was a man with passionate political beliefs, and he did not hesitate to preach about them from the pulpit. So, the way I saw it, religion would always be about taking a position on the hotly contested issues. And when I first came to America in 1970 as an exchange student, I saw the intimate relationship between church and social justice in the Black Pentecostal church to which my host family belonged. From this pulpit, I heard sermons much like my father's on racial, social and economic justice.

Speaker 10: Yes, he wants us to feed and clothe— feed the hungry and clothe the naked. Nobody wants to talk about it. So if nobody else don't talk about it, the church is obligated.

Speaker 3: In 1976, when I returned to America as a correspondent, the country was caught up in a religious revival. From former Watergate convicts to Black Panther leaders to the president of the United States, Christians were declaring their newfound faith. They were born again. I went to California to cover the I went to California to film a student movement called Campus Crusade and encountered born-again Christians playing basketball for the Lord. When you play your opponents in a game, do you talk with them about your beliefs?

Don Crosby: Well, not during the game. Sometimes before or after the game we have that opportunity, if our schedule permits.

Speaker 11: My attitude for playing is not basically for my own ego or for my own success.

Speaker 4: But it's to represent Jesus Christ while I play.

Speaker 3: Okay.

Speaker 5: Last week we discussed the 3 types of people that the Bible talks about.

Speaker 3: The born-again movement took a fundamentalist view of Christian doctrine, and even though its theology struck me as naive, I certainly didn't doubt the sincerity of their faith.

Don Crosby: What is the one gift that spiritual man has that natural man doesn't have?

Speaker 4: The one key to eternal life.

Speaker 3: Eternal life. Okay, good, Pam. That same year, I made a film about another group of born-again Christians, the Sojourners. Their faith had led them to establish a community in one of Washington's poorest neighborhoods. There they worked for racial and social justice. This was something I was well acquainted with from my own background.

Speaker 10: You are seated at the right hand of the Father. Receive our prayer. For you alone are the Holy One. You alone are the Lord. You are the Lord. You are the Lord.

Speaker 8: In this country, there is a lot of attention given to believing in Jesus. The question is not often asked concretely, what does believing in Jesus mean in our own situation? What does believing in Jesus mean in a country which is Producing the neutron bomb, for example. What does believing in Jesus mean in a country governed by a money system that rewards the rich and punishes the poor? Now, believing in Jesus, I think, has some pretty concrete meaning for all those kinds of questions.

Speaker 3: The Soul Journal magazine was the first to sound the alarm about the religious right. Recently, I went back to talk to Jim Wallace about this. I read in 1976, April 1976, and I have a very beaten-up copy of it that has little scribble Do you remember this? Do you remember this?

Speaker 8: Oh, of course. Yeah. No one, no one, nobody thought that— they thought we were being alarmist. There really wasn't any right-wing religious political thing going on. But we stumbled onto this. Friends called us from around the country and said, something is happening. It's new, it's different, and it was frightening them.

Speaker 4: In the United States, where the religious right is just trying to take over completely and completely fundamentalize, from a religious point of view, our institutions.

Don Crosby: That wouldn't be so much of a problem. The problem is when they get so wild-eyed that they want to actually murder people. And kill people. The current religious right has a term— they have their own vocabulary— one of their words is pregatory prayer. Pregatory. It's not in the dictionary, but it's a word. It's a big word. It means, in the religious right term, that when they pray that a person be changed against abortion or whatever, against homosexuals, If that person is not converted, then they have a right, a God-given right, to execute God's judgment upon that person. So, which of course means to kill them. And this, it's elements like this that make them so dangerous.

Speaker 4: Is this very widespread? Do most, do many of them believe that, that they can have summary executions of the people that they don't like?

Don Crosby: We scratched the surface of the Christian Coalition, and it's not far behind that, you'll get some of the surface leaders and the followers that don't know it. But just a little bit deeper into the religious right, they certainly know it.

Speaker 4: Now, I've seen quotes from some of these people that say when they take power, they're going to Christianize America and they're going to execute all the homosexuals The nonbelievers, the so-called secular humanists, even all the astrologers. They execute them. You know, zap. That's it.

Don Crosby: Well, that'll take care of the population problem caused by their abortion stand.

Speaker 4: Yeah. And that's in addition— that's an interesting thing this Holy Terror talked about, and that they— these people were having trouble raising money for their various concerns many years back. And so they thought, hey, they hit upon this idea of abortion as a moneymaker.

Don Crosby: Oh, definitely.

Speaker 4: Is that the way it happened?

Don Crosby: Mm-hmm. Whatever, against peanut butter, anything, as long as it's a good moneyraiser, because emotionally charged.

Speaker 4: And they really hit on it there, according to this book. And your studies, too, have shown that. Because it's a real emotional issue and they can keep fanning the flames and people will pour money in. It's a good money-raiser, yes. Yeah. They're incredibly manipulative and cynical, aren't they?

Speaker 8: We investigated and we found this was the first organized initiative from the religious right to establish their own political agenda and power.

Speaker 3: We don't see the names of Pat Robertson here yet, and we didn't see the name of Jerry Falwell, and, you know, people who then became known as the faces and the spokespeople of the religious right.

Speaker 8: The names have changed, but the agenda is the same. This effort failed, and in 1980 they reorganized, and then you You saw the involvement of Jerry Falwell, other television personalities.

Speaker 10: The television network presents Jim and Tammy. Jerry Falwell presents.

Speaker 4: The Old-Time Gospel Hour.

Don Crosby: The world outreach partners and friends of the Jimmy Swaggart Ministries invite you now to join us for an unforgettable hour that will prayerfully bless your life.

Speaker 10: And now, here they come, our host and hostess, Jim and Tammy Baker!

Speaker 3: The electronic church had attracted the attention of the media. Even my employers in Holland thought we should cover them. They were fascinated by the hucksterism of the preachers.

Speaker 4: Call now, make your pledge. Pledge that $200.

Don Crosby: You'll also receive an inspiring tape of special worship and praise songs and a daily Bible reading guide. Call now, join The 700 Club.

Speaker 4: This VHS cassette is yours If you, on this final Sunday in September, call that number and join the 15,000 Club.

Speaker 3: But I resisted this assignment. I wrote my producer, condemning the preacher for using the medium is a cheap shot. An electronic pulpit is still just a pulpit. Yet I soon realized that I had missed an important aspect of the electronic church. Later that same year, while covering grassroots religion in a small church in New Hampshire, I met Dr. Bob Billings. Billings was the head of Moral Majority, a political organization founded by televangelist Jerry Falwell.

Bob Billings: We are having Christian people here, but this is not a primary, and it's not primarily— it is not a religious meeting. This is a political-type meeting. What we're trying to do is work through the organization that we think can do the most to turn this nation around, and my kind of people, by the way, and that's the church. Now, if you're talking about endorsing candidates or supporting them, the church may not endorse them and they may not support them, but you may do it as an Yes. And you can very well do what I have done many times, as I did last night. I was on a radio talk show out of Atlanta, only I was in Rochester, New York, and we were on long distance for 2 hours. And they asked me about the presidential candidates, and I said, I cannot tell you who to vote for, but I want you to know I'm going to vote for Ronald Reagan. And so you can get up in the pulpit and say, I can't tell you folks who to vote for, but I know as a pastor I'm going to vote for— and then name whoever it is. And if you are a good leader, your folks will exercise good fellowship if you have good leadership. And they'll probably do the same thing you do.

Speaker 3: I wanted to know more about this man Billings, a fundamentalist who sounded more like a political organizer. I discovered that he was one of 4 men who were the architects of the religious right. All of them were ultraconservative political operatives. One of them was Paul Weyrich. Here at his offices, I filmed his assistant, Connie Marschner. Training small cadres of conservative Christians in the art of influencing government.

Speaker 4: Our Father, who art in heaven, give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.

Speaker 3: And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Doug, Candace— What this footage doesn't What I can show is that several times they made me turn off my camera and leave the room. At the time, I wondered if they were hiding something, if there was indeed some secret plot to take over power in America, as I had read in Jim Wallace's magazine.

Speaker 5: Hatfield. Anybody want to approach Hatfield's office?

Speaker 3: There had, in fact, been a pact made A meeting took place between these 4 political pros and television preacher Jerry Falwell. They recruited Falwell to become the public face for a new political organization of fundamentalist Christians. So was born the religious right. Falwell's participation was crucial. His resources and his reach were The electronic church was not the innocent phenomenon I had originally believed. It was playing a pivotal role in the rapid rise of the religious right.

Speaker 10: I don't hear you saying too much about the $5 billion spent on rock and roll, the sadistic, horrifying, hellish, demonic music that's damning and destroying untold Millions of young men and young ladies in this nation. I am sick and tired of some pornographer telling me that I am violating their First Amendment rights because I tell them they cannot print the garbage and the rot and the filth and the swill that's decimating the youth of this nation.

Don Crosby: Some call it free choice. God calls it murder.

Speaker 10: Why don't you write about abortion? I don't see anything that you write about abortion. $500 million was spent last year on the murder of 1.5 million little American babies.

Speaker 3: They said there was only one solution to these moral problems. America needed to be a nation ruled by Christian principles. The Bible, not the Constitution, was the supreme law of the land.

Speaker 10: This nation is a nation under God, of God and by God Almighty. And this is the Constitution of the United States, the holy Don't you commit yourself to some political party or politician. You commit yourself to the principles of God and demand those parties and politicians align themselves with the eternal values in this book, and America will be forever the greatest nation on this earth.

Speaker 4: I pledge allegiance to the Christian flag and to the Savior for whose kingdom it stands. One Savior, crucified, risen, and coming again, with life and liberty for all who believe. They say that the United States— that there's no such thing as separation of church and state, the Constitution was never meant to imply that, and that the Founding Fathers were all good practicing Christians. Is this part of their lies?

Don Crosby: The history of that is not true. I thought we had all been taught just the reverse of that in school and college and graduate school and all, but the 2 paths, Robertson and Buchanan, spew forth ideas very often about the idea that God intended the this government to be completely Christian. Huey Long said it best, I think, at least it's attributed to him. He said that if fascism is ever to come to the United States, it will come on the backs of flag-waving Christians.

Speaker 4: Maybe that's why he was shot. What is so interesting about this is that the The Founding Fathers, most of them were deists. They weren't Christians at all. And a lot of them were Masons. And yet a lot of the religious right just get furious about Freemasons and Freemasonry. And yet it was a lot of these people who were the Founding Fathers. So it's such a curious contradiction there.

Don Crosby: Well, in the 1600s, the United States was quite a religious country. The— in the 1600s, they were escaping religious prosecution, and then at the end of the 1600s, these same people became the prosecutors themselves. So by the 1700s, in 1720, when our Constitution was actually written, the founders of our Constitution were, were non-religious. The Constitution only mentions religion once, and that is simply to say that If you're a politician, then your religion doesn't have anything to do with your election.

Speaker 4: Yeah, there's no religious requirement for holding office.

Don Crosby: Which would be directly against the Christian Coalition's philosophy. You can't have the Constitution as it is and the Religious Coalition in the same country. The religious right leaders claim that the liberals and the communists came forth with the idea that The United States was not a Christian— founded as a Christian country. I hope so. Well, let's— I hope it's not too tedious, but let's look at the history of that for a moment. They did have a large influence on the forming of the United States. Their Christianity was there. Massachusetts became a colony where religious dissenters such as Baptists, Quakers, Catholics, and Jews. And non-congregationalists were taxed and fined and arrested and publicly flogged and banished and even hanged for their religious beliefs. The good side, though, of the early United States, while Massachusetts was a hotbed of religious persecution, Roger Williams and Dr. Clark established Rhode Island as a lively experiment in religious liberty.

Speaker 4: Yeah. Liberal, religious liberalism and pluralism at the time, wasn't it?

Don Crosby: Well, whatever name may work, King Charles II of England granted a colony charter for Rhode Island on the 8th of July, 1663, for religious liberty. The results of this charter were that Rhode Island was a safe haven for all persons of all expressions of religious faith or lack thereof. None were persecuted for his religious beliefs, something unusual for the United States. At the time of the founding of the 13 colonies, though, only 5 to 7% of the population identified themselves with any church.

Speaker 4: Any church at all?

Speaker 5: Wow.

Don Crosby: The radical religious right enjoys telling people that 9 of the original 13 colonies were Christian. Again, there's a big difference between the 1600s and the 1700s in the United States.

Speaker 4: So they were during the 1600s, by force if no other reason, but then by 1700s they weren't.

Don Crosby: It wasn't anti-religious, but it was non-religious when the Constitution was written. As early as 1650, the colonists like Roger Williams President John Clark recognized the value of keeping the church and the state separate.

Speaker 4: Reverend Falwell, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for—

Don Crosby: well, there are no words to describe a welcome such as you've given me here. It's a real pleasure to be with so many who firmly believe that the answers to the world's problems Ronald Reagan became the political messiah of the religious right.

Speaker 3: So what did you suggest to the president?

Speaker 1: I suggested that we take his interpretation of traditional values and require them of all government employees. That would include schoolteachers. Schoolteachers would have to teach the Traditional values that our president talks about and 80% of our American people believe in, that that would be the moral standard for the public schools, for the television networks, and for government employees. Those are all people that are paid one way or another or controlled by the government.

Don Crosby: Jerry Falwell, in his revisionistic view of America's Founding Fathers, declares that our nation was founded under God, By God and for God. But the Constitution does not mention God at all. Article 4th, it states that no religious test shall be made— shall be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States. So here the religious right now is breaking the law, saying that only their people are to be elected. That's the only people they will vote for.

Speaker 4: And even the Declaration of Independence just referred to Creator. It didn't say a thing about the Christian God or any other gods. It just said Creator, which reflected their deist ideas of an unmoved mover, just one God who kind of created everything and weren't able to understand who it was or what it was. But there were— the Indians call it the great mystery, and then once this creation was made, they said, okay, you're on your own, do it. These were the deists. They weren't Christians at all.

Don Crosby: Did you know that Thomas Jefferson wrote his own Bible? He knew Hebrew and Greek and wrote his own Bible?

Speaker 4: No, I did not.

Don Crosby: He did. The Hebrew King? It was an exclusive Bible. It left out all references to the miraculous. It left Jesus Christ in the tomb, and It focused primarily on the ethical teachings of the Old and New Testament and the Sermon on the Mount. That was Jefferson's Bible. He was a once-born man whose genius was to bring the Puritans from the right and the religious dissenters from the left, like Baptists and Quakers, and unite them all into one government. That was his genius.

Speaker 4: And yet he was— he He was just vilified by the Christians when he was running for office against John Adams. And they were saying he was an atheist and he wouldn't discuss his religious preferences and all. And he was saying, hey, church-state separation, you know, religion has nothing to do with this. And because he was at that time a Class B atheist, a deist. Right.

Don Crosby: A lot of examples like this need to be brought up, but one in particular, Jerry Falwell claims that Benjamin Franklin had an impassioned plea before the 1787 Constitutional Convention to disband for a few days and pray, and then come back together and begin each session with prayer. Jerry Falwell says that this happened. Yes. And that as a result of this, we had a complete writing of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It's a beautiful story, but unfortunately it's not consistent with historical facts. The notes of the debate in the Federal Convention of 1787 by James Madison renders this account. Thursday, the 28th of June, 1787, Franklin did make an impassioned plea seeking divine guidance. And then he moved that the prayers employing the assistance of heaven and blessings for which— of our deliberations be held in the assembly before we proceed to business. No mention of Christian, but Madison records Records show that Alexander Hamilton and others opposed this motion, and so a compromise motion was made that the convention request a sermon be preached on July 4th, 1787, and from then on to begin daily meetings with prayer. Some members attempted to postpone this motion silently through adjournment. After several unsuccessful attempts, the adjournment was carried out without any vote on the motion, and the motion was not taken up again on Friday, the 27th of June, the next day, when the convention reconvened. And Franklin then himself noted that with the exception of 3 or 4 others, most of the representatives thought prayers were unnecessary. The convention did not adjourn for 2 days Nor did they use prayers exclusively to open the convention's daily meetings. Likewise, the Bill of Rights was not introduced or ratified until after the states ratified the Constitution.

Speaker 4: So that's Madison himself talking. Madison, of course, is one of the central Founding Fathers, and he was there at the time. Now, Falwell wasn't there, I assume.

Don Crosby: The radical religious right claims that the formers of the Constitution were deeply religious people, with 52 of the 55 alleged to have been orthodox evangelical Christians.

Speaker 4: Oh my God.

Don Crosby: But listen to the following account from Clinton Royster, the historian of the 1787 Constitutional Convention. He says that, speaking of the Christians there, the gathering at Philadelphia was largely made up of men In whom the old fires were under control or even flickered out. Most were nominal members of one of the traditional churches in their part of the country, and most were men who could take their religion or they could leave it alone. But no one would dare proclaim that his opinions had the support of the God of Abraham and Paul. The Convention of 1787 was non-religious. Accordingly, The document produced was a rationalistic document that did not mention God. Now, Luther Martin, on the other hand, at that time brought up a motion to show preference to those who were Christians.

Speaker 4: He was a member of the convention?

Don Crosby: Uh-huh, uh-huh. And the 1787 convention rejected his views and presented the Constitution to the 13 colonies as a nonreligious document. So the idea was brought up and voted on. Let's take the letter to the Danbury Baptist Association that's been quoted so often by the Supreme Court.

Speaker 4: Now, when was this? Danbury—

Don Crosby: This was immediately after the Bill of Rights was written.

Speaker 4: Oh, okay.

Don Crosby: And the people were trying to interpret it as As to what it meant and so forth in the First Amendment. Thomas Jefferson did write this explanation of the First Amendment to the Dansbury Baptist Convention. The radical religious right claims that this is just an offhand note being written hastily so that they could gain some political momentum. However, looking at the facts of the matter, the time is 1802, Jefferson's President of the United States, he's under fire from conservative religious leaders for his strong views on religious liberty, so he seeks the advice of his attorney, whose name is Levi Lincoln.

Speaker 8: Mm-hmm.

Don Crosby: His attorney and he compose these comments and present them to the Danbury Baptists, which states in part: That the act— and then he quotes the law— make no law representing establishment of religion or prohibiting the free use thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state, unquote.

Speaker 4: That was many, many years before the Supreme Court made a definitive statement on this in 1946, or was it '48? I forget.

Don Crosby: But they, but they used the Danbury Statement as part of their evidence.

Speaker 3: Those who thought differently were branded the enemy.

Speaker 9: Well, where does the deception of the New Age movement and Eastern religions lead? There's no greater example than a country where there are 350 million people in grinding poverty. That nation? India.

Speaker 4: A nation fallen prey to New Age mysticism, Hinduism, occultic practices, idol worship— these practices are woven into the fabric of one of the oldest and most populous nations on Earth, India. For the past 20 years, America has imported and mainstreamed these same beliefs and practices. What has been the cost for this kind of idolatry?

Don Crosby: Is India's grinding poverty the result of the worship of false gods?

Speaker 4: Are poverty, disease, and desperate squalor the price that India has paid? And could America be next?

Speaker 3: Other opinions were not tolerated. Books that they thought undermined America's moral values were burned.

Speaker 10: Hey, let's make a movement out of this!

Speaker 9: Take the pencil, it's a burn!

Speaker 10: No one should have any of this stuff!

Don Crosby: They declare that since the 1962 and '63 Supreme Court decisions prohibiting state-mandated prayer and Bible reading, the public school performance has declined and social ills have increased. The idea being that the first event caused the second. If one is going to say that, you could just as easily say that 8 years earlier the phrase under God was added to the Pledge of Allegiance. And therefore, this is what caused the decline in values of the United States.

Speaker 3: And in name of Christian righteousness, they supported apartheid in South Africa and the Contras in Central America.

Speaker 9: This is one of the most moving experiences in my life to be here today. Esto ha sido una de las experiencias más conmovidas en mi vida. To see your faith, para ver su fe, your desire for. El deseo que tienen para la libertad, su coraje y su disciplina. Queremos ayudar a las víctimas del comunismo.

Don Crosby: Russia, nation in conflict, God's instrument to fulfill end-time prophecy.

Speaker 3: In the mid-1980s, they were vehemently opposed to a nuclear freeze. I didn't get it. How could Christians take this position? Why were they so enthralled by the image of war? I decided to examine what seemed to be at the center of their beliefs. The vision of the end time, the Apocalypse.

Speaker 4: The eternal plan of Almighty God.

Don Crosby: Russia, World War III and Armageddon.

Speaker 10: The description here is of a time in which the nation of Israel has been regathered. That's now. And there is an involvement with Sidon and Tyre.

Don Crosby: That's going on in Lebanon right now.

Speaker 10: And these events, according to the prophet Joel, are to lead on up to the Battle of Armageddon.

Speaker 3: That summer, while thousands of Christians marched for disarmament, end-time preachers like Hilton Sutton talked with great ease about nuclear weapons. It was all part of the inevitability of their scenario for the end time.

Speaker 4: The day is going to come Uh, in which, uh, the Soviets will attempt an invasion of the State of Israel. Many of us within our theological field refer to it as World War III. It will only last a day, just a 24-hour period. It's described for us very vividly in Ezekiel chapters 38 and 39. Uh, it comes at the very onset of that 7-year period That we refer to as the tribulation, the apocalyptic era.

Speaker 3: Do you think that nuclear weapons will be involved in the destruction of Russia?

Speaker 4: It is nuclear. It has to be nuclear weapons. The planet Earth is dying. The disease is set.

Speaker 3: These scenes from an evangelical movie about the end times spell out what happens next. 7 horrible years of oppression follow. In Western Europe, the Antichrist rises to total power. Fortunately, true Christians do not suffer through the years of tribulation. They are taken from Earth to heaven in the rapture.

Skip Porteous: And a shocked world will discover suddenly that what the Bible said was true, that he will come as a thief in the night.

Speaker 3: The tribulation culminates in a cataclysmic battle, which takes place in Armageddon.

Speaker 6: Together into a place called, in the Hebrew tongue, Armageddon.

Speaker 4: Armageddon.

Speaker 3: But Christ returns to Earth with his saints and triumphs over all. Professor Robert Jewett saw in this scenario the rationale for the hardline political stance of the religious right.

Speaker 6: What's characteristic about this new apocalypticism is that it is connected up with a view of history and of theology Which, which says that the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount and the ethic of equal justice is for the millennium. It's for the future. What we must do now, according to this theology, is be firm in the faith and, in effect, hate the enemy and be prepared to destroy the enemy. There's a very great unwillingness to compromise.

Speaker 10: We are moving into a major conflict Amen! There is a conflict in the United States of spiritual warfare as great as any that has ever occurred in the history of the church. Believe me, the early church fought no spiritual battles any greater than the one that began on January 1st of this year and will intensify over the next weeks and months, up until Election Day in November.

Speaker 3: If this was the very last day of my life, I would not cry, 'cause I've been waiting for it. What seemed like a terrifying scenario to me is a happy message for the fundamentalists. They won't have to suffer. Christ evacuates them. Too bad for people like me, who are left behind. That summer, I met Skip Porteous. He had been a minister of this fundamentalist church, but he had left it after a crisis of faith. Alarmed by the political activities of his former fundamentalist friends, he decided to expose the agenda of the religious right.

Skip Porteous: I really used to believe in the end times. I think that's one reason I had such fervor in my preaching, because I thought we were living in the last days and people either had to shape up or ship out. It was, I mean, it was a pretty serious thing that out of all of human history that this was it, this was the end, and it was all going to be over pretty soon. I certainly understand the religious right better than any layperson and probably as much as any preacher in America. I mean, I know the mindset. I know the way they think. I know the agenda. I know the whole thing. I was part of it, you know. So I thought it was laughable at first that these people thought they could take over the country for the Lord. And then they really started doing some things. For instance, in 1984, they showed up at the Republican convention in Dallas and were really trying to take over the Republican Party. And so at that point, my wife and I really got concerned. We thought we'd do something about it, and we started writing a newsletter called The Freedom Rider to warn people about the agenda of the religious right and to defend the separation between church and state.

Speaker 3: By the end of 1984, end-time theology had even penetrated the White House.

Speaker 4: What do they actually believe in, then, the radical right here and the religious right in the United States?

Don Crosby: They believe whatever they're told to believe by the televangelists and the people behind the direct— heavy direct mail campaigns.

Speaker 4: Do the fundamentalists in the United States want to establish the Bible as law?

Don Crosby: Oh, yes. That's what they say, yes.

Speaker 4: There are other things, I guess, too. They want to change education, too, don't they?

Don Crosby: Mm-hmm. Heavy on education. And I expect that's why they want to get rid of the individual parenting for orphans and establish orphanages, so they could gather these people under one fundamentalist type of orphanage and snap their minds there so they will go out and become proper Christian Coalition followers.

Speaker 4: The book The Holy Terror says that with their Propaganda and all, he said there's no exchange of ideas. It's just pure propaganda. And it's the first total propaganda in U.S. history, and it's masquerading as religion. This is the first complete package of propaganda that's ever been foisted on the American people. So it is— it is— It is scary, and the people are susceptible to it. That's what amazes me. Are they able to get in for— get people hooked who are already religious but not fundamentalists, and then they can make inroads into their already credulous outlook, because they do have some religious beliefs, and so they steer them in their direction? Yes.

Don Crosby: Theoretically, they can do it with anyone. No, they really have to take over the church and get the minister to do this. They're being very well trained by the Christian Coalition. We have recordings of the people doing this, on how to take over a church, how to get the minister kicked out, put a new minister in. So to answer your question, no, I don't think that they can do it with anybody.

Speaker 11: I see.

Don Crosby: The normal church is susceptible to it until the Christian Coalition comes in and replaces the minister with one of theirs.

Speaker 4: Let's go at a higher level than just the church level, and that is, we were talking a little bit about Reagan a while ago. Reagan opened the door, and Pat Robertson even said that he was talking with God, and God told him to support Reagan and not to Of course, he later ran his own campaign, but nonetheless, that came right down that he was supposed to support Reagan. But Reagan did bring in a whole lot of people from the religious right, including his secretary of defense, a lot of high officeholders and appointees, and Len Nossiger, the press secretary, was a fundamentalist evangelical. And he was a Republican. Original press secretary for Reagan, actually coordinated a lot of his activities with the religious right. And there were a lot of organizations which were set up to bring the religious right together with people from the military-industrial complex. Some of the highest military officials were under this particular control. This mindset, which was scary as hell. People who are apocalyptic in outlook, a lot of them would say back then in the Reagan years, hey, World War III is all right because it's going to bring Jesus back.

Don Crosby: The eschatology of those people is not scriptural at all.

Speaker 4: And then they got involved in a lot of activity in support of some of the most horrible repressive regimes in the world, like in Central America, in Guatemala, where one of their own, General Ríos Montt, who was a member of one of the fundamentalist churches in California, he took over as head of Guatemala, and they had just slaughtered the indigenous population by the thousands and thousands. And there are some of the reports in the COVID Action Information Bulletin that some of these right-wing religious people were actually helping in these campaigns of slaughter and also participating in torture. And what they were saying was, no, we're not killing real ordinary people, we're killing communists. And we're killing Indians because Indians are possessed by the devil. And so, once you depersonalize a person, you can kill them without any— or torture them without any feeling yourself.

Don Crosby: Like the Islamics kill Christians in Egypt right now.

Speaker 4: Yeah. It is really, really scary.

Speaker 13: These same people, in their meetings, are advocating the overthrow of our government. Actually, the assassination of the president of the United States.

Don Crosby: The snapping occurs to weaken an individual's thinking and total emotional controls down to the point where he is suggestible. And then, after the person has snapped, he is then amiable to almost any suggestion. of the, of the religious right with some reinforcement to keep them snapped, to keep their mind broken from, from straight thinking. And then once they are, are snapped, they, they can be told almost anything, even black is white, and, and they can be made to believe it.

Skip Porteous: When we saw the religious right using the stealth tactics, we knew that we had to come up with a way to uncover their candidates. So we began what we call our Religious Right National Data Bank and started gathering the names of people who attend Christian Right conferences and go for training. So when they show up at some state far away from here as a school board candidate, we can check our computer and find out, yes, they were trained by the Christian Coalition for political activism.

Don Crosby: The militias that are in 8 states for sure that we know about Very strongly connected to the Christian Coalition. The, the intertwinement of names there between the militias of these states and the Christian Coalition is just 100%.

Speaker 6: Part 2 of our exposé on the religious right in America, right now on Alternative Views. This is the concluding part of our 2-part series showing the various nefarious activities of the religious right. In the United States. We will continue with our 3 sources, which we presented last time on Alternative Views: the documentary Onward Christian Soldiers, produced by the Institute for First Amendment Studies. We also have a member of that organization with whom we'll talk. That's Don Crosby, who has a lot of insight into the COVID activities And we'll review sections of the book Holy Terror: The Fundamentalists' War on America's Freedoms.

Speaker 3: And Pat Robertson, the television preacher who had quietly built an enormous broadcasting empire, decided to try for the presidency himself.

Speaker 9: Government does not give us our rights and our liberties. God gives it to us. And government didn't give it to us, and government shouldn't try to take it away from us.

Speaker 3: I covered Pat Robertson's campaign. It soon became clear that he didn't have the popular support to win. The religious right was also showing up in local politics. The same year, I filmed in a rural town in Pennsylvania. 2 members of this fundamentalist church had been elected to the 3-person county board of supervisors. Their attempt to translate their beliefs into public policy caused an uproar in the Well, I think there's a lot of paranoia maybe in the community.

Don Crosby: I think there's a general sentiment among some of the citizenry that you might say the religious right is trying to exert some influence on the part of the government in this area.

Speaker 4: Here is Pat Robertson. It was released in 1985. It talks about Potter County, God's country. It says, for the past 5 years, Christians have held 2 elected positions on the 3-member county commission. Well, now, 2 out of 3 are Christian. And the third one, what is— what is he supposed to be? I mean, why is he not a Christian, too? You know, it names Tom Bowman. Max Siollun and Susan Kieffauver as the 2 Christians. Well, where is the other one? Is not Christian? Well, no, but he's not a Pat Robertson person, you see.

Speaker 5: I work at the Community Resource Center as the administrator of all the county social service programs. When I took the job in the county here, the 2 commissioners, the elected officials, were saved, and they began to witness to me. I was drawn to the vision for what God was doing in this area. And as they began to describe what my part in that might be, I was drawn more and more to the word of God and what was going on here. There is no family planning clinic in Potter County now because of the Christian views of the elected officials in the county.

Speaker 4: They're being run over by right-wing steamrollers. What techniques do they use to, first of all, for individuals to go out and proselytize?

Don Crosby: They will try to get into the churches first. This is where their most lucrative members are, lucrative number of members. And they will get the minister to establish a table out front for political action in the foyer of his church, so that as people As people go by, they can pick up their now time-honored literature as to what the good candidates are that are pro-Christian right, anti-abortion, anti-homosexual, and such. And then they— if a minister disagrees, it's unbelievable. They have ways to establish an underground movement within that church. And Through the local gossipers of the church, I presume, to oust that minister and put one in that will allow the Christian Coalition material to be distributed there, and they can talk up the religious extreme-right candidates. You pick a time when there's a low vote turnout, and you get all the churchy people to vote according to this little card that they carried with them to the voters' booth. vote this way. And this, plus the ordinary Republicans that think that they should have less government— less government is better government— that, plus the less government people, plus the people that just arbitrarily vote anything because they forgot their glasses— will carry an election, presuming that it's only 5%, like it is in other countries, that are the radical religious Right? That seems to be enough to take over the Congress and Senate. Now, the Christian Coalition claims as high as 30% believe in their cause. So what shall we say, somewhere between 5 and 30?

Speaker 4: They call their approach stealth politics, that they do it covertly. But they also have the overtness of it as well, as we saw during the election, but a A lot of this is lying low and working within their own organizations and getting out the church vote and keeping a low profile. Did you see much of this during this last election?

Don Crosby: Yes, they're told to be very secretive about it and to try not to use their own church words in public and just They'll get in any way they can to— and say whatever is necessary to get elected, and they will have the automatic vote of the Christian coalition.

Skip Porteous: When Pat Robertson ran for president, many evangelical Christians got involved in politics for the first time. They had something to hope for. They got excited about this. But unfortunately for Robertson, the fall of the TV evangelists like Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart brought Robertson down with them, because people I have sinned against you, my Lord.

Speaker 3: Swaggart publicly confessed his sexual indiscretions.

Don Crosby: And I would ask that your precious blood would wash and cleanse every stain. Until it is in the seas of God's forgetfulness, never to be remembered against me.

Speaker 3: The rise of the religious right seemed to have come to an abrupt end. One nation under God. Yet I found it hard to believe that the religious right would disappear into the woodwork. For years, I'd watched them create a thriving Christian culture isolated from secular America. In 1982, I had filmed one of the many new fundamentalist schools. I'd become fascinated with this totally separate culture. It was easy to get my name on every religious right mailing list. The fundraising letters came weekly. I was urged to write letters to senators and congressmen. There were magazines to subscribe to, products to buy. I could walk with the Lord, lose weight with the Lord, and shop in Christian stores. The Christian market had become a $3 billion business.

Speaker 11: Over here, we have Petra, their new album called No Doubt. They are probably the most popular Christian rock band. You know, just by looking at that album, you wouldn't necessarily know that it's a Christian album.

Speaker 3: This will make and drive any parent crazy.

Speaker 11: Don't tell me any mother-in-law jokes. Esther and I have something in common.

Speaker 3: Oh, Ruth.

Speaker 1: Right.

Speaker 11: All right.

Speaker 3: All right. Bingo.

Speaker 11: This is probably one of our most popular ones. It says, Jesus, have you considered the Lord lately? It's a takeoff on the Ford, have you considered a Ford lately? So it's kind of catchy.

Don Crosby: Right.

Speaker 3: I wonder how the Ford Motor Company felt about it.

Don Crosby: I don't think they did.

Speaker 11: I don't think they really mind it too much, but it's neat because it's a neat way of sharing off your faith, and people come up to you and say, hmm, that's interesting, tell me more. So it's a nonthreatening way of telling people about Christ, and they dress up as a Christian soldier.

Speaker 3: We need to find a kid to try this out on.

Speaker 11: Here we go. The sword of the spirit.

Speaker 3: Spirit of the word.

Speaker 11: The shield of faith.

Speaker 3: The shield of faith. So you hold it probably like this, right?

Speaker 4: Mm-hmm.

Speaker 3: I proposed to my producer to make a film about this alternative culture, but he insisted that the religious right was dead.

Speaker 4: It's not Muhammad bless America, it's God bless America.

Speaker 3: Yet I know it wasn't. It was on this culture of white Protestant America that Pat Robertson built the new religious right. The mailing list of 2 million names that he had amassed during his failed presidential bid became the basis for his Christian Coalition, the most successful Christian right organization yet.

Speaker 5: My home.

Speaker 14: For too long, we, although our theology should tell us otherwise, we have been looking for a. Mm-hmm. We have been hoping that if we could just elect the Gipper, or if we could just elect Pat Robertson, or maybe if we could just elect Bill Bennett, that we'd be able to turn the country around. And we really believed, as we began this in 1989, and we still believe today, that the Lord is going to honor our work if we will do what the Israelites did when they moved into their Promised Land. And that is, they occupied it one tract of land at a time.

Skip Porteous: After Pat Robertson's failed campaign, the religious right had to come up with a new tactic for winning in politics. So Ralph Reed, the executive director of the Christian Coalition, started something we call stealth tactics, which would hide the true agenda of the religious right. They now focused on local politics, grassroots Republican local precincts, where they could take over the Republican Party, from county chapters, school boards, water control boards, hospital boards, the low— lower-level politics. Then eventually they could work their way up.

Speaker 3: This 1990 video, which the Christian Coalition made for its members, spells out a strategy. The Christian Coalition has since taken this tape out of circulation.

Speaker 9: The mission of the Christian Coalition is simple: to mobilize Christians one precinct at a time, one community at a time, one state at a time, until once again we are the head and not the tail, and at the top rather than the bottom of our There are so many organizations involved in the religious right.

Speaker 4: Can we just tick off a few names and you can tell us about them? There's the Council for National Policy, the CNP, which the— in these Times articles said is the kind of COVID extra-covert organization from which Which orders flow to all the rest of the religious right. Have you read much about that?

Don Crosby: Just what you say, yes.

Speaker 4: Yeah. Then there's the NCPAC, the National Conservative Political Action Committee, and I guess that's the— what is that, the main PAC that distributes funds?

Don Crosby: Yes. Under the umbrella of the Christian coalition. Now, if these people gain any spotlight, they quick-change the name of that group, as some of the good televangelists or the political leaders when they came out too strong on a religious issue and the churches helped, and the churches then were liable to lose their tax-free advantage because they were delving into politics.

Speaker 11: Right.

Don Crosby: Which via tax law they shouldn't.

Speaker 4: Yeah, there was, I think, one called the Freedom Council, which was started by Pat Robertson back in 1981, but they ran afoul of the IRS, and so they supposedly shut down in '86. But I'm sure there's another organization that's taking this money.

Don Crosby: Yes, the habit of the Christian Coalition is just to change the name if there are problems involved.

Speaker 4: There are other things like the Religious Roundtable and Coalition for Religious Religious Freedom. Are you familiar with those?

Don Crosby: These are common names, yes.

Speaker 4: And they're kind of umbrella groups, I guess, but there are a lot of these things. But then there are some interesting ones. One is a shepherding kind of general overall category which considers itself the activist vanguard. If you run into these people, they require full complete submission to their pastors for Authoritarian, organized in cells, and sometimes it's covert, generally covert. Have you run across these people, the shepherding? What are they like?

Don Crosby: Yes. A lot of it goes back to the sects and the cults of the '60s and '70s, where so many of people's children were taken away and snapped, their minds were snapped and brainwashed. And the parents tried to even hire somebody to snap them back again to reality.

Speaker 4: Is that the deprogramming that they talk about?

Don Crosby: Yes, and the cult sued the parents, and the cult usually won under the strong armor of the First Amendment.

Speaker 4: Well, also under Reagan, and with the approval of Ed Meese, a lot of right-wing religious people were put on the bench as judges all around the country too. So they're gonna— the religious people are gonna— the religious right's gonna get a good hearing from a lot of these people.

Don Crosby: Yes, yesterday there was an article on television indicating the person going to— a couple going to have an abortion and a policeman stopping them for speeding and finding out what their purpose was, and the police then took the couple to a church for religious counseling for several hours, and then the people went ahead and had the abortion anyway.

Speaker 15: The first is a grassroots strategy. We're going to have the nation divided up into 7 7-state regions, and in each of those regions we're going to have a full-time, paid, trained, professional regional director. They will be responsible for mobilizing people at the grassroots. Second aspect of the grassroots strategy is one that I've already touched on, and that's the leadership schools. We're going to put literally millions of dollars into the field to teach people. And then finally, and really most importantly, it's a strategy of prayer. You know, as good as it sounds, if it's our plan and not God's plan, it's not going to work. And you've got to always, as David saw it when he went into battle against the Philistines, you've all got to always get down on your face before God and say, Lord, do you want me to go up into battle or not?

Skip Porteous: Since 1989, the religious right has helped elect over 12,000 conservative Christians to school boards across America. They're affecting about 2,500 school boards right now. This shows how effective this grassroots politics has been.

Speaker 15: And I believe that if we carry this fivefold strategy out with diligence, And with effectiveness, I think that we will be the most powerful political force in the nation by the end of this decade.

Skip Porteous: Good morning, Institute for First Amendment Studies. Yes, Doug Weed. Who's calling, please? Oh, the newspaper in Phoenix. Yeah, I think we have some information on Doug Weed. When we saw the religious right using the stealth tactics, we We knew that we had to come up with a way to uncover their candidates. So we began what we call a Religious Right National Data Bank and started gathering the names of people who attend Christian right conferences and go for training. So when they show up at some state far away from here as a school board candidate, we can check a computer and find out, yes, they were trained by the Christian Coalition for Political Activism. Another way we gather The way we get information is through volunteer public-spirited citizens who infiltrate radical religious right groups and then report back to us with the information that they gather.

Speaker 3: Skip Porteous's undercover agent insisted that I conceal his identity.

Speaker 13: I have attended the Christian Coalition training schools in which you are instructed in so many things that would be contrary to what the teachings of Christ would have been. Number 1, how to assess your opponent and what services to get to dig up as much dirt on that individual as you can dig up.

Speaker 4: How do they get people hooked into this religious experience, this fundamental religious experience?

Don Crosby: They're excellent salesmen. They are thoroughly brainwashed as to what they want to say and well led by some just ingenious leaders. Madison Avenue could never have done better.

Speaker 4: But how do they approach and get somebody actually hooked in this business called snapping, which I've heard about?

Don Crosby: The snapping occurs to weaken an individual's thinking and and total emotional controls down to the point where he is suggestible. And then after the person has snapped, he is then amiable to almost any suggestion of the religious right with some reinforcement to keep them snapped, to keep their mind broken from straight thinking. And then once they are snapped, they can be told Almost anything, even black is white, and they can be made to believe it. And so on that level, they simply tell the person what to do. They can tell them to go proselyte and give them certain things to reel off as they go to visit people. Ring on your door— ring your doorbell and say this and this and this and this. They're brilliant leaders behind it.

Speaker 4: Now, they They talk about complete submission to the Bible or to God or to their own leaders. How are they able— are they able to maintain this? How are they able to keep people from exercising their own individuality or own way of thinking? Is it complete brainwashing, like we were taught back in the '50s during the Korean War and all that?

Skip Porteous: Yes.

Don Crosby: Yes, it's close. The reinforcement comes with a constant guilt complex and a fear that's instilled in those that have been snapped. This reinforces the snapping process until they're unable to think straight for themselves. Their thinking goes in a short loop, and it always comes back to, oh, you're not saved if you haven't done this. You're not saved if you don't do this. And if you don't believe that the liberals should be overthrown, then you're not saved.

Speaker 4: And if you have any doubts, then it's your own fault. You're not either studying the Bible enough or you're not submitting to the will of Jesus or God.

Don Crosby: It's a very short loop of thinking, yes, very short.

Speaker 4: Now, this— getting back to the snapping itself, how does the process work? Say some Kids are met on the street by some of these right-wing religious nuts, and they— what is the approach? They try to get them to go to church, or just talk to them and steer the conversation to religion, or how does it work?

Don Crosby: Yes, no, we have something you can't live without, and they bring them into the group, and then through various means they can be snapped Until their thinking is not straight anymore.

Speaker 4: What actually is snapping? Is that just a point that occurs in this indoctrination where the person's will is just snapped or gone or cut and they give it over?

Don Crosby: Exactly. It takes a few minutes of explanation.

Speaker 4: OK.

Don Crosby: If I could snap your mind, if If I could deprive you of food and sleep for a while and constantly repeat certain themes to you that are not rational to you at this moment, and then at a certain time you begin to believe them, and I could lead you around by the nose the rest of your life if I continually reinforce this snapping situation.

Speaker 6: Yes.

Don Crosby: And put it upon— this began, as far as we can tell, in human history about 1,600 years ago—

Speaker 8: Hmm.

Don Crosby: —by a tribe in Australia called the Ananda tribe, A-N-A-D-A tribe. They would take the young boys at the age of puberty and bring them into an isolated area, into a little hut. And they would semi-starve them, keep them in constant fear of something, with noises or whatever they happened to be— snakes or whatever they happened to be afraid of. And they had what they called a bullroper, something they could swing over their head, which makes a horrible noise.

Bob Billings: Ow.

Don Crosby: They would bring that out to these young puberty-aged boys and just keep them frightened. They keep them awake at night and deprive them of sleep. And then after weeks of this, their elders, the people whom these boys respected, would converge upon these poor boys, and the elders would have masks on and frighten them. And at that point, the boys always would snap. If they didn't, they would do it again until they did snap. And snapping of the mind It's just like entering another dimension, almost, in your personality. You're in a drastically reduced state of mind. You're only allowed to adhere to strict laws of the tribe. You live the rest of your life then in this This dream state that you've been thrown into. You have no feelings of pain. Flies can walk across the eyeballs of these young boys and they won't feel it. And they can stand on one foot all day long, some surprising elements of strength and surprising endurance. Now, this snap Snapping is also possible by other means in a normal human being. You can do it with guilt anxiety. If a person is emotionally stressed to begin with, he's more liable for snapping than otherwise.

Speaker 4: That's why university students perhaps are really available and easy targets, because of their immaturity and because of the anxiety.

Don Crosby: A lot of them have snapped and go into cults and so forth, and even to the extreme of joining the suicide cults.

Speaker 4: Suicide cults? What do you mean, like Jonestown?

Don Crosby: Yes, Jonestown. There was one in the newspaper yesterday where the French police have arrested, I think, 43 people trying to start a Jonestown-like movement. to find the heart of this suicide cult. 48 people have died so far in France as a result of that, and it's an ongoing investigation in France at the moment. Switzerland had a similar incident about a month ago, and then, as you mentioned, Jonestown and such.

Speaker 4: Boy, that is— that's so sick.

Don Crosby: But that's part of snapping, to convince the people they should commit suicide. In the name of their God.

Speaker 4: Well, they always say, you know, they're looking forward to death so they can go see Jesus, and they say, you know, why wait?

Don Crosby: That's unfortunately true.

Speaker 4: Well, tell us some more about snapping then.

Don Crosby: In this world, most snapping occurs in this society by guilt, anxiety, and ego. Ego destruction, a sensory deprivation, peer pressure. You can do it with repetitive chants or songs by repeating it week after week or maybe even year after year. You can get a group into a frenzy like at a rock concert and create a snapping. Sometimes it only lasts for a day or so, but it's snapping. I'm sorry, I didn't hear you.

Speaker 4: Even though it's not a religious thing, like it was—

Don Crosby: That's right. You can do it with easy answers and instant cure promises. And snapping can occur, but it just happens that the religious people utilize it most.

Speaker 4: Now, I noticed in this book, Holy Terror, when they would talk about different people and their experiences, that they would That the person who was being cultivated or proselytized, if they expressed any doubt, well, they would be told to read John 3:16 or whatever it was over and over and over, or some other sections of the Bible over and over and over, and to contemplate on this all day long.

Speaker 5: Mm-hmm.

Speaker 4: There's no ego left. Everything has been completely submitted, not only the mind, but the emotions, to this fundamentalist Christianity.

Don Crosby: Well, the fundamentalists have taken the word ego as part of their vocabulary now, meaning it's of the devil, contrary to the meaning that the psychologists use. So here again we have a vocabulary problem between the fundies than the rest of the world.

Speaker 10: Hmm.

Don Crosby: But on the subject of snapping, through forcing a person into some of these various things, the promise of instant cures or easy solutions, you can get their mind to snap, and this is what happens. After a person has snapped, It's impossible for that one to integrate his thoughts. He has a new image of himself, and he seems to be floating in space in kind of an accelerated, excited state. He's unable to focus. He's unable to think for himself, and he's unable to question the things that are, that are pointed out to him. He's under a state of illusion, detachment, withdrawal. His voice changes, and the pitch usually rises in a snapped person. Talks in a higher pitch all the time.

Skip Porteous: Hmm.

Don Crosby: We find that there's a lot of eccentricity in the furthered state. Women stop menstruating, men lose their hair, They lose their secondary sex characteristics. There's reduced activity of the central nervous system.

Speaker 4: They become kind of like robots then, automata?

Don Crosby: Yes, it's sort of a trance-like state. They will— they'll feel, but they won't feel with all their feelings. They laugh, but not with all their laughter; love, but not with all their heart. It's a reduced state of mind. They cry, but not with all their tears. And they seem to be doing this all the time with sort of a silly grin on their face.

Speaker 4: Yeah, I've seen some of these really weird-looking religious nuts that will— they have this wild-eyed, strange Strange look on their face, you know, it's like you might see at an insane asylum or something like that. It's really spooky. And so these are people that— and they maintain this state. They go up and down in their mental and emotional state, or is it pretty much straight and steady from there?

Don Crosby: Well, they need to stay with their new peer group to maintain the state, with their church group or whatever it is, the serious brainwashing is easy from that point on. There's very little additional reinforcement that's necessary. And it's not hard then to control the rest of a person's life in that state. He's amiable to suggestion.

Skip Porteous: He can be made to believe anything, no matter how illogical it This map shows the Christian Coalition and the Republican Party. The black states indicate the states that the Christian Coalition is dominant in. It means that it really controls the Republican Party in those states. There are 18 of them. And then the red states, there are 13 of those states, indicate where the Christian Coalition has significant power within the Republican Party.

Speaker 3: So what does this mean?

Skip Porteous: Well, this means that the Christian Coalition actually controls the Republican Party. They decide what Republican candidates will be elected and what the Republican platform will be.

Speaker 4: And then there's Jesse Helms. In The Holy Terror, they talk about how Jesse Helms, he looks kind of spooky and weird and not very dangerous, but he has his own network where he ran kind of a He was a member of the Reign of Terror himself in the Reagan administration, putting his people in power in various places and various offices, raising a lot of money. So there are various centers of activity that the religious right and people in the religious right can use, and their organizations that can honeycomb all throughout the government.

Skip Porteous: Can a presidential candidate I think at this point it would be impossible for a Republican nominee to win anything within the party without the support of the Christian Coalition.

Speaker 10: We love you, Hillary!

Speaker 9: We are going to see in 1994 something that I didn't think we could see until 1996. We're going to see an ideological shift in the Congress of the United States.

Speaker 4: I think that's a very important point.

Speaker 14: Let's remember that what we've got to do in the next 55 days is to focus on these elections that are happening right now. We want to see voter registration drives in every one of your churches. Our objective is to get out between 30 and 35 million voter guides on the Sunday before the November 8th election. I'm a Democrat. By the time it's all over, 1 out of every 3 voters will have had a personal contact from the Christian Coalition. And I believe, as I said earlier today, on November 8th, there's going to be a big cheer that's going to be resounding across this country. So thank you very much.

Speaker 3: For the first time in 40 years, the Republican Party became the majority party in Congress. 60% of the candidates who received a perfect approval rating by the Christian Coalition won. With the Republicans in control of Congress, the powerful Christian right became front-page news. The Christian Coalition threw its weight behind a Republican contract with America, not only for ideological reasons, but also out of political expediency. This broadcast was meant for coalition members only. I was able to intercept it via satellite dish.

Speaker 15: If we will push the contract through, it will give us momentum and it will give us political capital going into the school prayer debates, the abortion debates, and the religious liberty debates that await.

Speaker 3: At a news conference in Washington, the Christian Coalition unveiled its own agenda. They called it the Contract with the American Family.

Speaker 15: It is not a theological statement.

Speaker 14: We make no threats. Today we issue no ultimatums, and we make no demands of either party.

Speaker 3: No threats, no ultimatums. But Republicans were put on notice. The Christian Coalition would not support a Republican presidential candidate was pro-choice. Republican candidates heeded the warning. They moved even further to the right. Whenever it had a chance, the religious right pushed its family values agenda, even if it meant cutting services for the poor.

Speaker 4: Well, it's like so many other good programs Quote, it sounded like a good idea at the time, to set up a government agency to provide legal help for the poor. But the Legal Services Corporation suffers from a reputation as a haven for radical lawyers promoting their agenda at taxpayer expense.

Speaker 9: This thing has been a nightmare. And you see 250-some thousand divorce cases, and that's year after year after year. We don't need a divorce bar funded by our money.

Speaker 3: Christian Coalition members insist that they are not extremists.

Speaker 4: This is not a group of radicals.

Speaker 9: We're not extremists at all.

Speaker 3: We're really the But Porteous, secret agent, heard otherwise in closed meetings of the coalition.

Speaker 13: When I got into the Christian coalition groups, the right-wing Christians, I found a lot different people than you might hear them telling the public that they represent. They are trying to say to the public that they are there to protect family values. To have a country of righteousness, where everybody lives morally, if I may use that quote. But on the other side of the coin, these same people, in their meetings, are advocating the overthrow of our government, actually the assassination of the president of the United States. I had a conversation at another meeting With one man who spoke, and he was saying that the president should be shot. The man that made this statement also is a trainer of militia.

Don Crosby: Last week we found the militias that are in 8 states for sure that we know about very strongly connected to the Christian Coalition. The intertwinement of names there between the The militias of these states and the Christian Coalition is just 100%.

Speaker 4: Now, these individual militias, or are they officially started state militias?

Don Crosby: Oh, no, individual militias. They try to pattern themselves after the Swiss militia that, of course, has private armies. But the intelligence of the Swiss is far from The intelligence of the Christian Coalition. They— each member of the militia in the United States has an envelope, and he keeps this for 1 month, and upon orders from the head people, if there's an emergency, he opens the envelope. Otherwise, it goes unopened until the next month when he receives another envelope. And, of course, the danger of this is the—

Speaker 4: These are orders of what to do if they—

Don Crosby: What to do in an emergency, yes. The danger of this is that there'll be a synthetic emergency that will trigger something and cause all kinds of problems. But the more immediate problem, though, is, as we mentioned, that the prayer group in Washington will set up their purgatory prayer situation and ask you to be converted, for instance, and you just— you're not converted, therefore they issue God's judgment upon you. Therefore, it would be this militia that would execute God's judgment. That, I think, would be the real danger. This sounds wild-eyed, but remember, we're dealing with snapped minds here that are operating at some 20% of their mental capacity.

Speaker 4: Well, it certainly makes sense if these people support governments with death squads overseas that they're going to do the same thing in the United States.

Don Crosby: It seems to be happening.

Speaker 3: With the Oklahoma bombing, the connection between the religious right and the militia came under scrutiny. Porteous' undercover agent recorded this tape at a Christian Right meeting 2 days after the bombing.

Speaker 15: The thing is, you know, we're in a war, and in war, you know, there are casualties.

Speaker 4: That's what war is all about.

Skip Porteous: In our research of the radical religious right, about a year and a half ago, we started noticing people from what we might call mainstream religious right groups appearing at patriot and militia meetings. The militia in Michigan is headed by a Baptist minister, and they have a chaplain, and it's pretty much of a Christian organization. And many of the militias are Christian-based. We see a very definite connection between the militias or the patriot movement and the religious right in the United States. Because of the conspiracy theories. For instance, Pat Robertson had a bestseller on the New York Times bestseller list a couple years ago called The New World Order, in which he elaborated on a theme of the UN taking over the United States and a one-world government with Satan behind this. And he talked about certain European bankers who was— who were controlling all this.

Speaker 4: And this is a theme we see throughout the whole Patriot If you have ever heard of the New World Order, you may know that our country is now being used like a tennis ball by the international elitists vying for our money, guns and sovereignty.

Speaker 9: We're hearing noises about a New World Order. We're hearing that the United Nations, which for 25 years was a silly joke, suddenly is going to rule the world, and that we're to cede the sovereignty of America to this organization that voted against our interests 85% of the time from its inception till the Gulf War. And we say, What is happening in the world? And into that void steps an organization called the Christian Coalition.

Speaker 4: What can be done to counteract this? First of all, on an individual basis, how do you de-snap somebody?

Don Crosby: The first thing you have to do is take them away from their group that they're in now and bring them back to their original family group, if there is such a thing. Nearly every community has a fundamentalist anonymous group that they can join and talk to people who have the same problems, that want to be deprogrammed and get their own mind back away from their fundamentalist training. The person needs to be challenged directly by a very intelligent person that knows what he's been taught to believe, and just challenge him and make him answer, make the patient answer on each item, and challenge him in a— not a vicious way, but a serious way, so that he has to realize that what he's been thinking is not right. And then it'll suddenly occur to him that something is wrong with what he's been saying and believing.

Speaker 8: And—

Don Crosby: And he will snap back then.

Speaker 4: How long a period of time can this take?

Don Crosby: It can take a couple months.

Speaker 4: A couple months.

Don Crosby: And then he needs to get with a new support group, maybe the ones he's loved the most in the past, but certainly stay away from the old group that put him in the snapping position in the first place. Now, people after this deprogramming say that they could not maintain a train of thought before. They couldn't put 2 sentences together in a logical way. And another reported that their dog would have nothing to do with them after they had joined this cult. And then after deprogramming, they left the cult and the dog and the patient were friends again. So reprogramming is simply a break with the present. fundamentalist situation, back again in a reconnection with the past. And it can use some intelligent, maybe not professional, but intelligent reinforcement to keep the person back, because he was brain dead then for a while.

Speaker 4: Hmm.

Don Crosby: Now, the cult argument is strong against this. They stand behind the First Amendment, and they've won some court cases on it. The cult agreement, the Christian Coalition's argument against this would be that these people are being violated when you try to snap them back again to the way they were before, because you're violating this person's religious beliefs. Now, this, doesn't it beg the question? Because as long as that patient, that person remains in that condition, he has no rights. He's brain dead.

Speaker 4: No free will.

Speaker 8: He's brain—

Don Crosby: uh-uh. So can the Bill of Rights protect a person that's been violated by this dark side of religion? Does the Bill of Rights protect the dark side of religion? The First Amendment. Is an individual free to give up his freedom of thought? I think not.

Speaker 4: What can be done on a societal and political level?

Don Crosby: The best thing to do would be terribly strong, but we've made some progress in it, and that would be to take the The overt violations of the fundamentalists, like in the Assembly of God, where they have taken their youth group and the ministers, the Assembly of God ministers, have made homosexuals out of the boys in this youth group. The group's called the Royal Rangers. And our court case in California was settled several months ago. The Assembly of God ministers were guilty to the tune of $1.75 million. This money then was paid to the parents of the children who were molested.

Speaker 4: Good Lord.

Don Crosby: But the important thing is the lawsuit was against the church and not the minister. This means that the members of the Assembly of God Church were liable for the action of the minister. So if we can continue this thinking and make people that are snapped by the fundamentalists— to make the congregation liable for that, We've never lost a suit on any psychological basis for improper counseling. There's been many of those, and the churches have all— the fundamentalist churches have always lost because of improper counseling on people. But when those lawsuits then get back to the individual church member, then I think There will be a great straightening out of the low, call them black churches.

Speaker 4: But you're still going to have that stratum up above where the people of the Christian coalition are interlocked with the military-industrial complex, and they have their various structures of power up at the top, and with the ability To raise tremendous amounts of money to continue this this drive for power and counterrevolution.

Don Crosby: Well, if the class action suit works against the fundamentalists, it might well work against the Christian Coalition on a class action suit against them.

Speaker 3: The Messias is niet.

Speaker 9: En kan niet die geweldenaar zijn, die met macht en geweld anderen onder de voet loopt.

Don Crosby: Maar de messias is de zachtmoedige.

Speaker 9: Het is de mens die de wil van God doet door solidair te zijn met de armen, met de zieken.

Speaker 4: Met de gestoorde.

Speaker 3: It amazes me that it took me 15 years to realize how dangerous the Christian fundamentalists are. Convinced that they have God on their side, their intolerance of every other opinion is a threat to the very principle of democracy. Do I think religious fundamentalists have a right to engage in politics? politics? Yes. But I believe their agenda is uncharitable and often cruel. And don't they dare say that I'm therefore not a Christian.

Speaker 9: We want, ladies and gentlemen, as soon as possible, to see a working majority of the Republican Party in the hands of pro-family Christians by 1996 or sooner. We want to strive for the election of a conservative, pro-family majority in the United States House of Representatives by 1996. Next, of course, we want to see the White House in pro-family Christian hands, at least by the year 2000 or sooner. We're going to come back this year. We're going to come back in '93. We'll be there again in '94. We'll be there again in '95 and '96 and '97 and '98 and '99. We're going to keep coming back till we win it all!

Speaker 4: I have a little bit— just 2 or 3 sentences here of conclusion by the authors of Holy Terror. They say, we are left with the same overriding question. What does the fundamentalist right have against human beings? What grudge do they hold against the human mind, human feeling, and our capacity to choose? In their escape from humanity through high technology, would they turn us all into machines programmed by the scriptures? We cannot live as machines surrendered to Christ and computers, nor will the United States long endure as a fundamentalist nation. But neither can we survive as 2 nations, one fundamentalist and the other secular.

Speaker 6: And that brings us to the end of another Alternative Views. Frequently hear from viewers who request A list of news publications which we use on Alternative Views, and also a reading list for U.S. power structure in the mass media. If you would like to have these, send a stamped, self-addressed envelope to the Alternative Information Network, P.O. Box 7279, Austin, Texas 78713. You must send a self-addressed stamped envelope.

Speaker 4: Thank you.

Speaker 6: We would like to thank our crew for help making the program possible: Brian Lynch, Ariel Powell and Susan Millicent. Susan and Ariel were on the cameras, and Brian did everything else. Well, we'd like to thank our people from the Institute for First Amendment Studies, Skip Porteous and Don Crosby.

Skip Porteous: Thank you.

Speaker 6: For bringing us our documentary and for providing us with the interesting interview about the religious right in the United States. And we highly recommend the book Holy Terror, which gives a lot of insight into the religious right. Now let's roll the credits for the documentary you saw, Onward Christian Soldiers.