[Graphic: Bare Witness (Pat Bagley, Salt Lake City Tribune).]

By Rowan Wolf

What can happen in a lifetime? The erosion of a nation, and the destruction of the planet. Shortly before my birth, the pressure to add the words “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance was enacted into law (6/14/1954). This was followed by adding “In God we trust” to our currency. By 1981, Ronald Reagan became President of the United States and brought the merger of a variant to Christianity and corporate capitalism to the highest office in the land, and importantly to the reconstruction of the Republican Party. I recommend a browser search on “corporate Christianity”. You might be surprised at the results of that search. Other enlightening investigations on Christianity in American politics include works by Jeff Sharlet, Chris Hedges, and Kevin Kruse among many others. In the heart of D.C. politics, we find The C Street Center, referred to by Peter Boyer in The New Yorker as Frat House For Jesus,  and by Jeff Sharlet as the Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy. However, the forces at play stretch far beyond C Street and go to the phenomena of tele-evangelism and megachurches that have grabbed (largely white) evangelical Christianity and become a significant majority of the base of the Republican Party. In fact, by the Republican Convention that selected  George W. Bush as its candidate, more than two-thirds of the convention self-identified as “born again.”

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