Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [21]
Homer’s book also propagated the same three tactics that O’Reilly favored. To support his belief in a conspiracy to destroy Christianity, Homer quoted at length from a newsletter by R. J. Rushdoony, a paranoid extremist theocrat who advocated the public stoning of homosexuals, among other enlightened ideas:
• Slippery slope: “These efforts are directed at present mainly against small or independent groups, those least able to defend themselves. Meanwhile, major church groups are not disturbed or upset. Legal precedents established against these smaller groups can later be applied against all others.”48 (Rushdoony)
• Secret plot: “It is a well-planned war. When virtually all 50 states embark on a common program, in unison, and appear with federal directives in hand, it is no accident. Of course, they declare themselves innocent of any attempt to control a Christian School, church, missions agency, or organization.”49 (Rushdoony)
• Persecution: “I am now strongly convinced that the aim of Humanism is to completely destroy Biblical Christianity.”50 (Homer)
The same year, Dr. Tim LaHaye, another founder of the Moral Majority and the future creator of Left Behind, the bestselling apocalypse- pulp fiction series, published his own book on what he simply called “humanism.” LaHaye dedicated his book, The Battle for the Mind, to theologian Francis Schaeffer, whom many regard as the intellectual father of the religious right. With his nape-length white hair and protuberant goatee, Schaeffer looked like a pasty version of an Indian guru; and from his retreat in the Swiss mountains, Schaeffer played the part perfectly, treating Christian evangelicals and counterculture hippies alike to his theological disquisitions on the conflict between traditional Christianity and humanist modernity. An evangelical version of C. S. Lewis, Schaeffer was erudite and cultured, as comfortable with modern art and French existentialism as he was with the Bible. He criticized the use of “humanism” as a buzzword, carefully defining the term in a way that religious humanists like John Dewey might have appreciated, even if they fiercely opposed his position.
But if Schaeffer was the intellectual father of the religious right, LaHaye is the crazy uncle who dropped out of school, joined the army, and came back from the war . . . different. He seems gentle enough at first glance. With his carefully brushed Leave It to Beaver hairstyle and the paternal manner of an elementary schoolteacher, LaHaye resembles Mr. Rogers in a polyester suit. So it is a bit jarring when he sweetly tells you that the Rapture is imminent, and you’re going to die in agony and then burn in hell for eternity, you humanist scum.
Where Schaeffer immersed himself in Western philosophy, LaHaye simply dismissed the West’s entire intellectual tradition as a Satanic plot. From Schaeffer’s elaborate history of the struggle between Christian and secular ideas, LaHaye gleaned that the Greeks were evil (and gay), the Romans were corrupted by the Greeks and thus rendered evil (and gay), the Catholics were evil (but not gay . . . well . . . not most of them), the Renaissance was evil, the Enlightenment was evil, modern science was evil, and the intellectual ideas of the twentieth century were the evilest of all. (And yet, Dr. LaHaye takes tremendous pride in the ideals upon which the United States was founded.)
In his book Battle for the Mind, LaHaye transformed Schaeffer’s humanists from ideological opponents into grotesque plotters of world domination. He wrote:
Most people today do not realize what humanism really is and how it is destroying our culture, families, country—and one day the entire world. Most of the evils in the world today can be traced to humanism, which has taken over our government, the UN, education, TV, and most of the other influential things in life.51
In addition to controlling the government, LaHaye revealed that humanists