    17

    17

    ont

    o some distant figure.  According to fundamentalist leaders, the

    secular humanists are a massive, well-organized "religious" group.

    They have taken over our radio stations, our television networks, our

    newspapers and our schools.  These diabolical subversives have

    allegedly turned everything from television sit-coms to classroom

    syllabi into anti-Christian weapons designed to enslave the minds of

    decent American children to a Godless, immoral creed.

    Like Orval Faubus and Fidel Castro, the fundamentalists have

    used a spectral enemy to forge a flock that is hungry for power.  Some

    fundamentalist leaders declare that God has made a covenant with his

    true followers.  According to that covenant, He will deliver the political

    power of the presidency and the congress into the hands of the

    believers.24  Other fundamentalist power brokers declare that this is a

    Christian country, erected on Christian principles by Christian

    founding fathers.  As such, the government of our Constitution is

    designed to be placed in Christian control.  Non-Christians should be

    excluded, some of these leaders say, from running for public office.

    After all, non-Christians, in Pat Robertson's words, are "termites"

    undermining the foundations of this country.

    And who are non-Christians?  Non-fundamentalists.  According

    to Jimmy Swaggart, for example, Catholics and traditional Protestants

    are not Christians.  They are the mistaken followers of a "monstrous

    lie."  Some fundamentalist leaders are more blunt.  Catholics,

    traditional Protestants, followers of EST, dabblers in Buddhism, New

    Age fans and others, they say, are followers of Satan.25   In the name of

    God, power must be wrested from the grip of the Satanists and placed

    in the palms of the Godly.26

    A simple perceptual device designed to anesthetize us from the

    nastier aspects of our inner reality has given the fundamentalist

    movement much of its power.   From the sexuality their followers reject

    within themselves, the leaders have conjured up the lechery of a

    Satanic enemy.  From the hostility the faithful hide from themselves,

    the leaders have built a fantasy of an adversary obsessed with violence.

    They have crafted the indispensable tool that pulls together a

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