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Between Jesus and the Market: The Emotions that Matter in Right-Wing America

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Linda Kintz is to be commended, first and foremost, for doing something that most on the academic left (I number myself among them) would recoil from in horrow: slogging through the written words in which the increasingly focussed agenda of America's new right-wing finds its expression and lays down its thoughts. In one volume, Kintz goes a long way, I think, toward advancing the possibility of mutual discussion between Right and Left. Those on the Left, she argues, need to quit dismissing and laughing at what appears to be irrationality, cheesiness, and seductive sermonics; to understand the resurgence of the Right, one must get to the heart of exactly how powerful emotions are--emotions which, Kintz argues, are neither wholly rational nor irrational--in its recent success.

Rather than predictably pin American religious and political conservatism on absolutist and narrow-minded interpretations of the (politically instrumentalized) Bible and thus of natural law, Kintz examines the dynamic interaction between such absolutism and the construction of gender roles in the American conservative family structure. This proves a very productive strategy, and enables her to offer astute readings of issues such as gun proliferation (which she links to a wounded masculine pride and budding national fear nascent in the post-Vietnam years) and the pro-life movement (which stems, she claims, from the very fixed role assigned to the power of reproduction in the religious right's imagining of the family).

While reading "Between Jesus and the Market," I almost wished that Kintz had gone to greater lengths to interpret her material rather than provide extensive rehearsals of it, rich with quotes. But then I had to remember that the ground Kintz is covering--publications by right-wing think tanks and pundits--is so new for most of her (presumably left-wing-academic) readers, that the play-by-play really is, ultimately, useful for drawing liberal skeptics into the conservative world she is attempting to read. The reader who has an immediate and unpleasant visceral reaction at the name "Rush Limbaugh" will have a much more informed reaction after encountering large chunks of his actual words in Kintz' fine book. Thus, the prolonged engagement with the texts serves a powerful purpose, and Kintz is right to have recognized this.

Implicit in this entire study is a sharp criticism of the Left. That there is little or no dialogue between conservatives and liberals in America is tragic, Kintz admits, but she quite rightly seems to insist that, if anything is to move forward, we on the acadmeic left must take it upon ourselves to emerge from the safety of our intellectual irony in an effort to understand the Right, and then to bridge the gap. As the only "liberal" in an immediate family that is almost entirely of the conservative bent that Kintz describes, I came away from this book with something even more valuable. Kintz has put the finger on exactly what my difficulty is in understanding where my parents come from--my parents, who, while among the most compassionate people I know, went door-to-door recently at the request of their church, helping to drum up votes in favor of an anti-gay initiative on the California ballots. "What kind of powerful rhetoric," Kintz asks, "can call itself love without recognizing that its effects are the same as if it called itself hatred?" (29) The sooner we can answer that question, the better off we'll all be.

How did the very idea of equality come to be seen by some as a threat to the traditional family - where traditional family means the nuclear family - mother, father, children? Or, to say the same thing, why do some people believe that they have to attack the very notions of equality and privacy in order to defend the traditional family? Professor Linda Kintz set out to explain this in her recent book, Between Jesus and the Market, a study of recent developments in right wing American religion.

I had attended last year's `Road to Victory' meting of the Christian Coalition in Atlanta. Over and over again, speakers vowed to protect famlilies and family values while asserting that liberals, feminists, gay and lesbian activists, and the federal government were the enemies of the family. They portrayed the government as dominated by advocates of equality - between the races, between the sexes, between sexual orientations. Pat Robertson even called for the repeal of ! any right to privacy and dismantling the independence of the judiciary. So much for the separation of powers.

The politics of that movement seemed clear, but the source of the heated emotions was less obvious to me. Religious rage was competing with road rage in its intensity.

This is where Linda Kintz sheds some light. Just what is it, she wanted to know, that drives the Christian Right to openly advocate abolishing the First Amendment, the cornerstone of religious liberty?

In a word, her answer is that we live in a post modern culture - a world in flux where variety has the edge over conformity, where differences are coming to be valued in our social life and where more women than ever before are employed, yes, but also active in civic, professional and political leadership roles.

The Christian Right is stoked by the belief that these are threatening developments which violate the natural law of God and they have nothing to do with the evolution of the economy or! ordinary democratic politics. They believe that the advoca! tes of equality would tear down the family by disrupting divinely ordained sex roles. They see the consequences of these changes in apocalyptic terms unless the evil is stopped. (And evil melts down into evil ones. )

Linda Kintz pays special attention to the critical role played by conservative women in defining the emotions and issues of the Christian Right. She examines books by Beverly LaHaye and Connie Marshner and concludes that they see conservative traditionalism as offering the promise of community, an appealing (if contradictory) sense of female agency, and the security of `responsible' male behavior. The community is their families and their movement. The sense of female agency is defined in terms of heroic submission to God's purpose for the female sex - motherhood. The `responsible' male behavior is cast in the image of the tender warrior, tender towards their women and children, warriors in the cultural battles against the sacrilege of equality. LaHaye ! and others offer an antifeminist Christian movement as the solution to the practical and spiritual complexities of postmodern women. Thus they link the primal feelings of love and affection associated with the family directly to a politics which portrays the government as an imminent threat to families. In short, they offer an idolatry of heterosexuality and the answer to humanism.

Linda Kintz calls this linkage resonance, the almost ineffibleelement that constantly threatens to collapse church into state when politics are made (traditional) family-like. This accounts, in her analysis, for the success of the Christian Right in moving the center of political debate in their direction, a revisionary reconstruction of the role of emotions in political life. They seek to marshal the family feelings of love and affection which most people experience and value highly into a politics of hatred and exclusion for all things egalitarian.

As long as this tide continues to ris! e, this is a book to be read.

A very useful book for understanding the emotional appeal of right-wing fundamentalism. Kintz is not interested in exposing the many intellectual fallacies, rich as they are, that characterize this movement. Instead, she seeks to unravel the appeal fundamentalism holds for millions of acolytes. Though individual chapters suffer at times from unexplained choices, her approach benefits from leading fundamentalist spokespersons, such as George Gilder, Beverly La Haye, Michael Novak, et. al. , and by wisely adopting a non-condescending and sympathetic commentary -- both of which help bring out the magnetic appeal of traditionalist beliefs for those who have never experienced them. Still and all, the work is informed by a mildly feminist undercurrent and the occasional surfacing of postmodern buzz words such as "binaries" and "encoding", but not to the degree that the text's main purpose is subverted (despite the Kirkus review).

The book's most relevant chapters are those focusing on the reconstruction of traditional gender roles in the face of mounting gender equality, a reaction that amounts to good old-fashioned Let's-put-everybody-back-in-their-proper-place-where-God-intended-them type of thinking. The chapter on Novak and the sacredness of the modern corporation, however, seems so ludicrous that it left me wondering if this really is an accurate account. On the other hand, the genuinely novel chapter "Warriors and Babies" discusses the post-Vietnam reconstruction of masculine pride, and contains an incisive glimpse into the split-thinking that characterizes the soldier-survivor reaction to that conflict. This segment apparently owes a lot to a book by James Gibson, but remains highly suggestive of the new brand of warrior mentality that has since taken hold. In fact, one of the great omissions of social progressivism has been its inattention to reconstructing masculinity in the face of changing feminine roles, a void fundamentalists now happily exploit. It's as if all the attention went into women's liberation without considering the effect on the average Joe, except now the average white Joe is striking back in the guise of the reactionary Bush administration.

Be that as it may, Kintz has filled in many of the emotional dots, while the book's theme has only become more relevant in the years since the 1997 publishing date. Given the fundamentalist cast of the Bush regime, perhaps a new, updated edition is now in order.

According to Linda Kintz in BETWEEN JESUS AND THE MARKET, Christian fundamentalism is part and parcel of the economic ideology that supports the notion of an infallible Market God. She maintains that many sects embrace the Calvinist inspired belief that to succeed in the marketplace is to succeed as a child of God.

Not surprisingly, then, given this finding, the government funding provided to faith-based initiative favors those churches which best enact and support the free market creed. In these faith-based initiatives, this powerful ideological combination - the dualistic divinity of the Market God and the Other God -- redeems social parasites with parables that prove the moral virtues of capitalism according to Ms. Kintz.

The moral virtues of capitalism are somewhat doubtful, Ms. Kintz would maintain. For example, Senator Charles Grassley (R) from Iowa is currently attempting to close a loophole in the tax code that allows hunters on safari to write off the entire cost of their hunting trip as long as they gift their trophies to a museum. Grassley likened this loophole to someone flying to Paris, buying a sweater, donating it to the Salvation Army, then writing off the entire trip to Paris. (NY Times Editorial Page, Friday, Dec. 2, 2005).

According to the editorial, hundreds of glass-eyed trophies gather dust in storage facilities across the U.S., presumably in those precincts that service the special needs of the over privileged; museums have no use for the offerings as they are neither rare, nor of any scientific value: most of these "wild beasts" were raised in private game farms expressly for postmodern slaughter by quasi-Teddy Roosevelts.

This is an example of the kind of entrepreneurialism that our business / corporative elite practices, an entrepreneurialism redolent of the grand old days of the robber barons when Thorstein Veblen christened this kind of activity "conspicuous consumption." This kind of consumption is supported by a type of entrepreneurialism sometimes referred to as government and business being "in bed with each other."

This practice takes two basic forms, the first involving the bribing of government representatives (like "Duke" Cunningham most recently) to get lucrative no bid government contracts, and/or the opening up loopholes in the tax code so that one's masters and oneself can save government all the trouble of collecting it. This is one of the ways that business and government are working together to make government more cost effective. I use the terms business and government interchangeably here. In this case, a loophole was opened so the terminal pleasures of the hunt could remain unsullied by any expenditure other than the lives of the faux "wild beasts." This maneuver must be counted as a real "win win" for the brutalist classes. Not only are the empowered to kill farm animals posing as wild beasts, they let the average taxpayer pay for it all.

This kind of crony capitalism would be taken by strict neo-liberal free marketers as a corruption of the "free market," and rightly so. In this ideology, a truly free market would restrict government to the role of the "night watchman" state, and would not intefere in the production of the miraculous goods provided by that free market. The free market is thus raised up by the neo-liberal free marketers who reign in Wasthington as the absolute arbiter of good and bad, and quite remarkably, good and evil, too. In this simple model of economic value in which all values are essentially economic values, whatever people buy is good; whatever they do not buy is bad. The number of items bought or unbought is also seen as indicative of goodness and badness.

Presumably the instruction in those faith-based initiatives described by Ms. Kintz include the injunction that one must find in oneself the moral discipline required to ascend to the status of billionaire Bwana.

I was raised right-wing fundamentalist.

Ms. Kintz has done nothing in this book except rehash 90% of what I already know. The analysis is so weak as to be nonexistant.

I can only assume she was not raised believing as I was and this is all new, hence the shock and horror at such basic tenants as "a family should a married couple and their children."

Unfortunately this shock clouds her ability to analyze anything.

For a much better piece on the same topic, I suggest Donna Minkowitz's _Ferocious Romance: What my encounters with the Right taught me about Sex, God and Fury_.