False Prophets of the Electronic Age

Unmoored, bombarded with disinformation, and spiritually starved, 

voters turn to electronic hucksters and demagogues who offer simplistic answers and the false hope of a moral revival. 

By Greg Guma

Glenn Beck and Fox News called the August 30, 2010 rally they staged in Washington, DC “non-political.” But that didn’t stop conservative politicians from saying the opposite, describing it as a reaction to Obama administration policies. And the rhetoric appealed mainly to those who already thought the US had been hijacked by godless socialists. 

The result was bizarre, although tame compared to the average Trump rally, and capitalized on the fact that it was held the same day, and in the same location, as Martin Luther King Jr’s historic “I have a dream” speech. Yet it flipped King’s vision on its head. A early example of political trolling.

None of this was really a surprise. Opportunists Beck and Sarah Palin — who had attracted a cult-like following of anti-government Tea Party activities and nativist “Mama Grizzlies” with her fact-challenged approach to politics — had seized the chance to distort public debate and promote themselves as electronic prophets. After all, they had a powerful pulpit on Fox News, whose parent company had just exposed its political preference with a $1 million contribution to the Republican Party. It was just the beginning.

Christian right evangelists had been doing this for generations. Starting with radio in the 1930s, they used each new technology to influence opinion, win elections, and hammer home their theology. One of the first was Aimee Semple McPherson, who pioneered the approach on a powerful Los Angeles radio station. Broadcasting from her temple, McPherson styled herself a modern-day Joan of Arc in a titanic struggle against communism.

McPherson’s crusade reached the boiling point in 1934 during the insurgent Democratic gubernatorial campaign of Upton Sinclair. The socialist author of The Jungle and other novels about the excesses of capitalism had pledged to “end poverty in California.” But the evangelist, in an alliance with Republican leaders, Hollywood propagandists and political consultants, recast the race in apocalyptic terms.

“Someone has cast in the poison herb,” McPherson bellowed on the Sunday before Election Day, “and if we eat thereof we shall all perish and the glory of our nation as it has stood through the years shall perish with us.” Sinclair, at first the front runner in an era of mass unemployment and hard times, became the target of the nation’s first disinformation-fueled “media campaign” and ultimately lost by 200,000 votes. McPherson effectively seized on growing fears of revolution, convincing her flock – many of them poor – that the real enemy was satanic communism and its Democratic messenger.  It sounds too familiar.

First appearing on CBS stations in 1930, Father Charles Coughlin built a similarly ardent following with his volatile mixture of populism, nationalism and anti-semitism. When CBS management insisted that he stop railing against “international bankers,” the evangelist appealed directly to his radio flock, who sent more than a million protest letters to the network. CBS responded by replacing all paid religious broadcasts with Church of the Air, a show that offered free, rotating air time to speakers from the three “major” faiths. This became a standard media approach with religious groups, a time slot for those with enough followers and clout.

Coughlin responded by creating his own network and becoming even more political, and ultimately fascist. Along the way, until losing much of his base in World War II, he suggested that “Christians suffer more at the hands of the Reds than Jews do in the Third Reich” and that Nazi Germany had to protect itself from Jewish communists who were influencing radio, journalism and finance. Attempts to censor him were often decried as “Jewish terrorism.”

Like Donald Trump, the Rev. Jerry Falwell and his Christian fundamentalist movement had an intense love/hate relationship with mass media. After all, the movement flourished on TV with Falwell’s “Old Time Gospel Hour.” By 1980, a tabloid newspaper turned Falwell’s radio and TV pronouncements into syndicated columns. The paper’s reporters gloated about its growing influence. At the same time, however, they despised the “immoral” television networks. It took a while to get one of their own.

For these pioneers of electronic fundamentalism, the real “insiders” were purveyors of “smut” and degenerate lifestyles, a vast group that included most “non-Christian” media and members of the press. Their basic message, which read like a newsy catechism, was that the “moral” can clean up the media by exerting control over it. That meant boycotting specific outlets, while supporting and exclusively consuming Christian media.

Through insistent propaganda, the Moral Majority turned ignorance into strength and sexism into a virtue. This sounds all too contemporary in the post-truth era of bully boy politics.

Still, the electronic fundamentalism of Falwell’s empire was almost moderate in contrast with the outright Aryan arrogance of Christian Vanguard. “Specifically compiled for the Elect,” this religious house organ was obsessed with one big enemy, the Jews. It was a more bullish racism, punctuated with articles like “Sadistic Jewish Slaughter of Animals.”

Pretending to intellectual rigor, one article attempted to prove that the enemy was plagued by a “devastating sense of inferiority.” In another report, covering an Aryan Nations Movement conference, the publisher of a sister publication, Zion’s Watchman, came out strong against humanism, marxism and “the seed of the serpent.”

Yet the Aryans remained hopeful, according to another contributor, because “the various right wing movements will come together, and unite as never before once we understand the importance of rallying under the Law of God, making what we call Germany’s WWII ‘Nazism’ seem tiny in comparison.” It was scary stuff, yet crept into public discourse.

Like many movement house organs of the pre-Internet 1980s, Christian Vanguard had a mail order clearinghouse for books, with listings under headings like “secret societies,” “the money question,” and “the Jewish world conspiracy.” Another heading covered “self defense and survival,” and included books on explosives, combat and surveillance. This was an early warning of the armed and dangerous nativism and survivalism to come. 

Clearly, the “Elect” were prepping for a future war. Reading their paper also offered solid proof that Nazism was alive in Louisiana and other places in the ’80s. In 2017 it ultimately re-emerged publicly and violently in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Not much has changed since the radio years except the targets. Speaking on his own TV network, Pat Robertson made the goal absolutely clear years ago:  “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 at the bottom of our political system.” In a country founded on the principle of church-state separation, this sounded unlikely — for a while. Yet Beck, Palin and millions of others embraced this “dream.”

To call Beck and Palin evangelists, or even propagandists, isn’t a stretch.  Promoted by Fox and backed by corporate conservatives like the Koch family, they and others normalized an extreme, religiously-infused ideology and immersed viewers in a false reality. Specious arguments were presented as history, biblical truth or scientific fact. At first these “electronic “prophets” disguised their political calls as sermons or attempts to “restore” integrity and honor. Too often “mainstream” media legitimized and mainstreamed their messages. Now the mask is off.

Working with idealogues and opportunists, the religious right created a distorted picture of contemporary reality that millions of people, insecure and hungry for guidance, came to embrace. As former Christian Coalition director Ralph Reed explained before the election of George W. Bush, the short-term objective was to force candidates to endorse their religious right’s agenda, an effort that frequently proved successful. But the ultimate step was to turn the agenda into national policy, a goal that first came into view when candidates for president in 2000, most notably Bush, inserted religious right rhetoric into the presidential election.

A foundation had been laid during the previous decade. Although their candidates faltered in the 1990s, Christian Right “wedge” issues – school prayer, family values, sex, abortion, and gay “lifestyle” – skewed the debate, eclipsing the competing views of progressive Christians and others who opposed an intolerant and paranoid theology.

“Our time is coming,” Pat Buchanan told the faithful during the 1996 presidential primaries. Having lost every race on Super Tuesday, he nevertheless predicted victory for the fundamentalist forces he helped catalyze. Buchanan’s gospel of “cultural war” struck a chord with the Christian right and Howard Phillips US Taxpayers Party, which wanted to restore the “Christian republic,” end welfare, scrap the civil service and IRS, and withdraw from international organizations. 

In 2000, candidates like Steve Forbes, Allen Keyes, and Gary Bauer built on this foundation, linking jeremiads about political corruption and moral decay with calls to overthrow Roe v. Wade. Once Palin emerged during the 2008 presidential campaign Buchanan looked positively gleeful on TV as his gospel was embraced by a new generation.

In response, progressives put their faith in exposure. When more people understood the extreme views of the Christian Right, went the logic, their candidates would be rejected. But too many people, uncertain about their futures and the safety of their families and friends, were already vulnerable to the politics of paranoia and blame. 

From time to time, Beck and others would also point to a secret conspiracy supposedly bent on subjugating the nation to some form of mutated socialism or fascism.  The idea that Barack Obama was a Muslim Manchurian Candidate fit well within this theory. It echoed the sermons of McPherson and Father Coughlin. In a time of distrust and decadence, when more and more believe their institutions don’t work and leaders are usually greedy crooks, it isn’t hard to accept such a prophecy. Then came birther-ism and Donald Trump.

Unmoored, bombarded with disinformation, and spiritually starved, too many people have turned to electronic hucksters who offered simplistic answers and the hope of a moral revival. Although some spiritual traditions offered more constructive answers – tolerance, equality, harmony with nature, and social justice, among others – their spokesmen don’t often reach so vast an audience.

But endlessly repeating lies and distortions, while sometimes effective for a while, doesn’t make them true. Even a manipulated public must eventually face the contradiction of a movement that poses as patriotic and “pro-family” and the divisions and destruction it promotes. There is still hope that the hypocritical moralizing of opportunists — from Beck and Palin to Trump — will be exposed for what it is, a false prophecy that no amount of repetition can conceal.