After all, the heartland has no claim to moral authority. The states whose voters are most obsessed with “moral values” have the highest divorce and teen pregnancy rates. The country’s highest murder rates are in the South and the lowest are in New England. The five states with the best-ranked public schools in the country — Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, New Jersey and Wisconsin — are all progressive redoubts. The five states with the worst — New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, Mississippi and Louisiana — all went for Bush. ~Michelle Goldberg (cited by Joseph Knippenberg, No Left Turns)

This is one of Ms. Goldberg’s bits of supporting evidence, taken from an excerpt from her book Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, that “the heartland” must be disenfranchised as much as possible through the dismantling of the last safeguards against ochlocracy, the Electoral College and giving each state an equal number of Senators. You see, this “anti-urban bias” in our system (which did so much to bring all those Populists to the White House–don’t you remember President William Jennings Bryan?) has to be done away with.

Nevermind that these safeguards also serve as guards of the poor and less populated states against the tyranny of larger and wealthier populations–Ms. Goldberg isn’t interested in whether those people are fairly represented, but whether people like her get to have power. Fair enough–that’s what most democrats at all times have wanted anyway. Tilting the balance back towards urban mobs would probably do wonders for “progressive” electoral success, no doubt, and would always reduce those voters even more to a servile, peon status from which they would never recover. So much the better for a “progressive” agenda.

Nevermind also investigating into the reasons why people in states suffering from the consequences of social and moral disorder would be so “obsessed” with moral values. Perhaps it is because they see the disastrous consequences of a lack of such “values” and are making some desperate gesture, however ineffective, at righting the situation? No, it can only be hypocrisy and proof that these folks should be less well represented than they currently are. And let’s be very clear about that–Ms. Goldberg is talking openly about diminishing the representation of entire swathes of the country because they are allegedly “overrepresented.” Because the inhabitants of Topeka, Boise and Boulder have had such great influence on the course of our politics and culture, and they must be held in check for the sake of the oppressed victims of Los Angeles and New York! Rarely do you get to see metropolitan arrogance and contempt for the provinces so clearly and unabashedly expressed. Take a good look, O ye peasants, at the mind of the urban rulers who see you with nothing but loathing!

But I don’t know which I find funnier–that my home state of New Mexico, a veritable province of the federal government (we are second, I believe, only to Nevada in having our land controlled by the feds), is considered archetypically “heartland” (67% of New Mexicans register as Democrats, half are Hispanic or Indian and both houses in the Roundhouse has been controlled continuously by Democrats since 1928) or that the heartland is identified with support for the Yankee transplant liberal Dobleve. Surely there is something fishy here.

If you really wanted to push the “states that support education are progressive, poor education states are conservative” line, it would be instructive to go by school district and see how people in New Mexico voted. My guess (and I know I’m going way out on a limb with this one) is that Española and its fine school district were not Bush country in 2004. But, hey, anything will do to score a cheap shot at the “Christian nationalists” (who, last time I checked, did not have much influence in Santa Fe and Taos!), who are obviously responsible for the parlous state of schools in New Orleans and Nevada. There has been so much attention to reviving Christian morality in Las Vegas and instilling Christian paideia in the French Quarter!

I don’t say any of this out of any great admiration for Bush voters, much less for Dobleve, who represents “the heartland” as well as I represent Somalia, but to get a few things straight. First of all, “Christian nationalism” is nonsense, a construct of a paranoid mind, as meaningless as Andrew Sullivan’s Christianism and twice as silly. There are Christians who are American nationalists, and some of them believe that America is a “Christian nation,” but they take this as axiomatic and have no program for making it into a “Christian nation”–such nationalists baptise American nationalism with religious language and devotion, but they are in no sense “Christian nationalists” in the sense Ms. Goldberg means it. What does she mean by it? She tells us:

The mass movement I’ve described aims to supplant Enlightenment rationalism with what it calls the “Christian worldview.” The phrase is based on the conviction that true Christianity must govern every aspect of public and private life, and that all — government, science, history and culture — must be understood according to the dictates of scripture. There are biblically correct positions on every issue, from gay marriage to income tax rates, and only those with the right worldview can discern them. This is Christianity as a total ideology — I call it Christian nationalism.

If there were a mass movement to supplant “Enlightenment rationalism” with an orthodox Christian understanding of man, nature and society, I would be only too keen to admit of its existence. Being one of a relative few who would actually like to make this exchange, I can affirm that there are not very many people who share my view or anything like the separate Theonomist position she describes above. (There is some distance between rejecting Enlightenment rationalism and favouring trying to understand everything in the light of the Gospel, which used to be normal for conservatives to do, and Theonomy and dominionism.)

Are there “millions” of Theonomists in America? There might be one or two million who actually subscribe to this in a pure form, but as a matter of political analysis it is odd in the extreme to view this as a predominant or influential, much less growing, phenomenon. How many subscribe broadly to some kind of dominionism? Perhaps a few million more, but far from being influential or powerful they are routinely relegated to the fringes of every kind of conservative politics. Some people in the Constitution Party might be said to subscribe to some parts of this, but they are in the Constitution Party because they saw no future in supporting the GOP.

Ms. Goldberg is using the most extreme forms of a specific kind of Christian Reconstructionism, to which many who might be very open to creating a traditional Christian society might not fully subscribe, to create her bogey and then lumps in every kind of prominent conservative Christian she can find as part of the “movement.” She even finds room in the big tent of “Christian nationalism” for Marvin Olasky, for goodness’ sake! This is sloppy at best, and dishonest at worst.

If the “movement” contains both Olasky and people from the Constitution Party, let’s say, in the same “movement” would be people who favour the “faith-based initiative” program and those very conservative Christians who reject it as an unwanted intrusion of the secular government into the life of their churches! It would include, I suppose, those who advance Intelligent Design as science and those of us who have actually read some theology who repudiate the idea of ID as science. In other words, it would probably eventually include any Christian who thinks Christianity has even some role in the public square, who believes that everything must be understood in the light of revelation or who believes that unaided reason is pernicious. How far does the “movement” extend? With Ms. Goldberg, the sky seems to be the limit.

We could also have a debate over whether we should measure progress by the standards that the Freisinnigen have always wanted to use, which often skew the results in their favour, but that is not all that Ms. Goldberg is doing. She is using the same club of moral superiority she finds so offensive in the hands of the “Christian nationalists” and uses the same definitions of morality to denounce “the heartland,” as if she actually found divorce or teenage pregnancy particularly troubling or would want social and legal norms stigmatising and punishing these behaviours.

These are the fruits of various forms of “emancipation” that past “progressives” have inflicted on this country–and now “the heartland” is to be castigated for having embraced previous progressive mores too fully! The incoherence of this particular charge is remarkable: don’t heed the moralising of the Christian nationalists, because too many people in Middle America have already succumbed to the moral rot that we have encouraged! Of course, Ms. Goldberg would not align progressivism with moral degeneration, but it has been progressives who have been the ones to stigmatise restraint, repeal “repressive” legislation governing social norms and embrace the sexual revolution.

She might be correctly pointing up an inconsistency in the way many self-styled “conservative” voters live, and that is certainly something conservatives ought to look to as our own problem, but she has nowhere demonstrated that the norms the “Christian nationalists” would instill would perpetuate these habits. Indeed, what frightens her (there is a detectable whiff of panic in her article) is that the “Christian nationalists” are going to bring an end to such habits and the entire ethos that makes them possible. She does say at one point:

The anxieties that underlay Christian nationalism’s appeal — fears about social breakdown, marital instability and cultural decline — are real. They should be acknowledged and, whenever possible, addressed. But as long as the movement aims at the destruction of secular society and the political enforcement of its theology, it has to be battled, not comforted and appeased.

Note that she says that the anxieties are real, not that there are real problems behind them or that the realities these anxieties arise in response to are really problems to be solved. I suspect she would no more want to have progressives stressing the importance of marriage or the need for preserving a vibrant culture than she wants “Christian nationalism” to succeed. These are merely “anxieties” to be “addressed,” fears in the mass psyche that need to be soothed and ameliorated. This is not a call for progressives to take the problems of social and moral disorder seriously, but a call to find a way to finesse away the anxieties about this disorder. It is as cynical and transparent as the recent Democratic initiatives to start talking about “faith” all of a sudden.

Where Ms. Goldberg becomes truly comical is in her agitation over the overrepresentation of the peasants (here I am using peasant to refer to those who live “in the country”–no derogation is implied):

According to Steven Hill of the Center for Voting and Democracy, the combined populations of Montana, Wyoming, Nevada, North and South Dakota, Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arizona, and Alaska equal that of New York and Massachusetts, but the former states have a total of nine more votes in the Electoral College (as well as over five times the votes in the Senate). In America, conservatives literally count for more.

Yes, the poor New Yorkers, I really feel for them. How will they have any clout in such a biased system? Of course, New York alone almost has more representatives in the House (29) than all eleven of those states put together (35). That is to be expected in the house that is designed to represent the people, since there are far more New Yorkers than there are Dakotans, Nebraskans and the like. However, it must be some kind of sick joke to claim that the balance of power in this country somehow tilts in favour of “the heartland” and conservatives when California and New York by themselves make up a huge contingent of the House, the media centers of the country are all located in staunchly liberal cities, and the financial and business capitals of the country are either on the coasts or solidly in the grip of the Democratic Party or both. In practical terms today, the greatest effective clout at election time is in swing states, most of which are not the small, predominantly rural and relatively poor states of “the heartland,” but the populous Florida, Ohio and the like. By definition, the swing states (including New Mexico) are contested ground and do not reliably follow one direction or another at every election.

In many respects, the political and economic supremacy of the coastal cities and the Eastern establishment has never been greater than it is today. This is all the more the case when Mr. Bush himself is nothing other than a representative of the Eastern establishment and its interests, as has ever been the case with the GOP at least since the Gilded Age, and yet he allegedly represents “the heartland” that is growing in strength. Arguably, the last time there was a candidate representing what Ms. Goldberg calls “the heartland” was in 1908 when Bryan last ran for office.

One also has to question the wisdom of Ms. Goldberg’s proposal from the progressive side. As the Senate serves as a buffer against popular enthusiasms, which it admittedly does much less well since the passage of the 17th Amendment (one of those blasted progressive amendments), it is the naturally ally of progressives who want to blunt the impact of any rising “Christian nationalism” in the countryside, assuming that there was such a thing out there marching towards greater power. If demographics are indeed on the side of the “Christian nationalists” (and if “Christian nationalists” include exurban Christians who vote Republican, I suppose we can say that they are), surely Ms. Goldberg would see that it is a losing strategy for her side to destroy the institutional barriers to populist enthusiasms if the people she regards as her enemies are going to continue increasing in numbers, wouldn’t she?

There is also no guarantee that urban populations will be immune to the religious appeals of the “Christian nationalists.” Ms. Goldberg has based her madcap strategy on the assumption that urban voters, because they have traditionally been Democratic, will also remain reliably secular or at least resistant to the appeals of a more expressly religious kind of politics. But if Ms. Goldberg’s analysis were correct that atomised and disconnected people are most responsive to the claims that the “Christian nationalists” are making, surely most modern urban Americans, as atomised as can be, would be just as responsive to these claims, wouldn’t they? If her plan to destroy the Electoral College, remake the Senate along even more popular lines and divide some of the larger states came to fruition, she might very easily be empowering the cities that could become the future fortresses of the “Christian nationalists” in the future.

The largest metro areas would probably stay largely secular, but there could always be phenomena like Vienna’s Christian Socials, who made up a decidedly secular mass movement but which identified itself, at least superficially, with religious and moral rhetoric. I doubt Ms. Goldberg would be pleased if she had barred the door to evangelicals and let Karl Lueger in! If there were strong concentrations of new, religious immigrants in the major metro areas, it is conceivable that we would see a non-secular, non-conservative Christian socialism (perhaps based around a variant of liberation theology?) of some kind emerge that would be just as hostile to Ms. Goldberg’s secularist world but would have entirely different priorities in policy.

As if she is intent on driving even more Catholics and some religious minorities further away from the progressives, she makes one of her winning local “wedge issues” the mandatory requirement of pharmacists to fill contraceptive prescriptions, which would put her on the side of forcing pharmacists who object to providing such prescriptions to violate their own religious scruples and their conscience. Apparently she thinks this would endear local people to the progressive side by bringing oppressive anti-Catholic EU measures, recently imposed on Slovakia, to your local neighbourhood pharmacy. It might be added that more than a few Hindu pharmacists in this country also routinely refuse to fill contraceptive prescriptions–Ms. Goldberg would apparently like to alienate them as well.

Her article is beyond alarmist–it is hilariously ill-informed. Take this gem, for instance:

They need to realize that the Republican Party has become the stronghold of men who fundamentally oppose public education because they think women should school their kids themselves.

She has got to be kidding. Those who might be most inclined to take their children out of public schools in favour of homeschooling and who would have the mother raise and educate the children, such as some of the “crunchy cons,” are so far from having influence in the GOP that many of them abjure it and politics all together. Once upon a time the GOP at least used to oppose the Department of Education–now it throws money at the deparment like there’s no tomorrow! “School choice” and bashing the teachers’ unions will always get you applause, but that is all they are: applause lines with nothing behind them. (It is also worth noting that “school choice,” ever the enemy of the public school establishment, is wildly unpopular among middle-class, white Republican voters, whose school systems work perfectly well, because their districts are usually better funded, and whose school systems they want to keep intact and free from the diversion of funds inherent in “school choice.”) Certainly if some “crunchy cons” continue to vote the GOP line, it is not because it has become a “stronghold” of homeschooling-loving men, which is an embarrassingly false and easily checked claim, but for other more traditionally social conservative reasons. On this, as on much else, Rick Santorum, the one GOP pol she does cite, is not representative of the party, though he is right about public education; also, Santorum, in case she missed it, is trailing badly in his re-election bid. So much for the rise of “Christian nationalism.”

If I were a progressive and believed that “Christian nationalism” on the right existed and was on its way to ruin my life, I think I would have to laugh at Ms. Goldberg’s strategy as hopelessly deluded and short-sighted. Since this phenomenon doesn’t exist, the strategy doesn’t really matter, except that it is helpful in revealing the contempt and disgust secularists have for Christians and any attempt of Christians to bring their faith to bear on public affairs and the amazing lengths to which they are willing to go to gut what remains of the Constitution to have their way.

Ms. Goldberg’s final exhortation is a powerful statement of secularist spite for religion and revelation, and it is worth remembering:

Our side, America’s side, must be the side of freedom and Enlightenment, of liberation from stale constricting dogmas. It must be the side that elevates reason above the commands of holy books and human solidarity above religious supremacism.

This comes at the end of her section on how she advises the progressives to avoid giving the impression that they are engaged in a “war against Jesus.” She has routinely attempted to distinguish the “Christian nationalism” she attacks from Christian fundamentalism or Christianity in general, but here she gives the game away. But for a great many Christians, the “stale constricting dogmas” and “the commands of holy books” are part and parcel of the Gospel of Christ–they are either His own words, or teachings that the Church has elaborated based on His words, which makes the lumiere hatred of them hatred of Him as well. In the very same breath that she pretends there is no “war against Jesus,” she declares war against those things that Christians rely on to know and understand Him and the Gospel. Elevating reason above “the commands of holy books” shows an inveterate pride and ultimately a rejection of the truths of revelation–that is Ms. Goldberg’s professed ideal, her call to arms. Instead of her brand of liberation, we should have liberation from stale mantras of emancipation, the destruction of the idols of false ideologies and the extinction of the impious fires of the Enlightenment.