Critiquing Coulter

Sightings 6/30/06

Editor’s Note:

Today’s issue of Sightings contains two articles, by Jerome Eric Copulsky and by Robert S. McElvaine,treating Ann Coulter’s best-selling book Godless: The Church of Liberalism. As always, the opinions expressed in these articles are not necessarily those of the Martin Marty Center, the Divinity School, or the University of Chicago.

The Coulter Code

— Jerome Eric Copulsky

Ann Coulter has been much in the news lately. With her recent best-selling tome, Godless: The Church of Liberalism, it seems that the notorious bomb-throwing cover girl for conservatism has turned Grand Inquisitor. The subject matter of her book — the idea that liberalism is a religion — merits a sighting here, and not only because it demonstrates the increasingly “religiosecular” ambivalence of our world that Martin E. Marty wrote of two weeks ago (“<http://marty-center.uchicago.edu/sightings/archive_2006/0619.shtml>Religiosecular Meditations,” June 19).

“Liberalism,” Coulter informs us, is a “church,” complete with its own creation myth (Darwinism), priests (public school teachers), doctrines (infallibility of victims), sacraments (abortion), and so forth. Coulter’s liberals subscribe to a pantheistic doctrine, renouncing the biblical distinction between human beings (made in the image of God) and the rest of creation, thus rendering biblical morality impossible — which, she claims, is the liberals’ true goal. Tossing aside any pretense to Christian charity, Coulter darkly warns that liberals (or Democrats, which are, for Coulter, one and the same) are Pagans (of the Druid denomination), science-hating Darwinists, and tree-hugging supporters of PETA, intent on killing their babies and their grandparents. Some of her invective, like proclaiming that Democrats make up “the opposition party to God,” might make even a Carl Schmitt blush!

A stalwart defender of what she takes to be the Christian faith, Coulter emphatically denies the possibility of any liberal rapprochement with Christianity. Moreover, liberals are theo-political heretics, enemies of the state, “deny[ing] the biblical idea of dominion and progress, the most ringing affirmation of which is the United States of America.” (Such statements, of course, raise serious questions concerning Coulter’s understanding of orthodox Christian doctrine.) In Coulter’s world, it is really the liberal pagans who cause all the trouble (“somehow it’s always the godless doing the genocides”), while devout Christians are peaceful, moral, law-abiding folks. (Coulter conveniently omits the gloomy fact that Christians have managed to slaughter many other Christians and non-Christians well into modern times. Her memory returns, however, to attack “crazy Muslims.”)

Coulter’s inflammatory rhetoric, proclivity for constructing straw men, and reliance on specious and ad hominem argumentation obscures the fact that her convictions aren’t new. In a sense, Coulter is merely reiterating the perennial quarrel between Reason and Revelation, Athens and Jerusalem, Enlightenment and faith — but here in the age of mass media, and for big bucks. Given that the argument of the book is so derivative and so littered with malicious half-truths and insipid humor, the book’s popularity might seem perplexing.

But then I considered the book’s cover. The <http://www.cbsnews.com/images/2006/06/09/imagef90e812f-6091-4de8-b0ae-ccff5df1d9ce.jpg>dust jacket of Godless features Coulter in a black dress with a plummeting neckline, sporting an apparently diamond-encrusted cross that dangles above the shadowy suggestion of cleavage. (One wonders whether the diamonds represent the indestructibility or the riches of her Church.)

Her arm presses upon the final letters of the book’s title, “less,” as through she might crush them, a one-woman suppressor of the atheistic horde. She gazes at the viewer, wearing a sly half-smile reminiscent of Leonardo da Vinci’s <http://www.kodice.com/ancestrum/arte/Mona-Lisa.jpg>Mona Lisa — an impression further enhanced by the resemblance in pose and garb.

Ah-ha! I thought. This is no mere accident. Perhaps her book conceals a secret teaching, one more shocking than those encountered in a Dan Brown novel, and so inimical to the faithful that it could only be conveyed in winks and nods. Given the American obsession with codes and hidden meanings, I speculated that when Coulter writes of what “all liberals secretly believe,” she just may well be hinting to the discerning reader that there is more to her text than what’s on the surface.

As one who has studied with people who studied under <http://www.straussian.org/biography.html>Leo Strauss, and attuned to the art of esoteric writing, I searched. And I searched. And then I noticed, buried in a footnote, a “clue” to the entire work: “Christians,” Coulter writes, “include everyone who subscribes to the Bible of the God of Abraham, including Jews and others.” How very gracious of her! But there is a catch: These “Christians” may not include members of the Episcopalian Church — which, she writes a few pages later, “is barely even a church.” HmmS

Why does she go after the Episcopalian Church (aside, perhaps, from the fact that arch-liberal Howard Dean used to be a member)? Here’s one conjecture arising from my esoteric reading. The Episcopalian Church developed from the Church of England — an established Church, a state religion. Is Coulter, then, launching a cryptic attack on the unity of church and state? Given this, as well as her dismissal of the substance of theological differences (effacing, for instance, distinctions between Christians and Jews), and her claim that true Christians are peaceful and patriotic, one might think she is implicitly invoking the ideas propounded by the theological-political treatises of the seventeenth century, ideas like toleration and separation of religious and political authority — you know, Liberal ideas.

This esoteric reading of Godless is, of course, preposterous, but no more so, in my opinion, than the book’s actual argumentation — and that’s the point. I’m afraid that the big secret revealed in Godless is that when it comes to the depths and complexities of actual religion, Ann Coulter doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

Jerome Eric Copulsky is Assistant Professor and Director of Judaic Studies at Virginia Tech.

———-

Jesusless: The Church of Conservatism — Robert S. McElvaine

In Godless, her latest and most ill-tempered book-length rant, Ann Coulter asserts that liberalism is a “godless” religion. In fact, however, the most fundamental problem in Christianity in America and the world today is that the “fundamentalist” religion that most loudly proclaims itself to be “Christian” is Jesusless.

Coulter demonstrates how Jesusless she and her cohort who have co-opted the name of Christianity are when she identifies “Americans’ Christian destiny” as “jet skis, steak on the electric grill, hot showers, and night skiing.” For some reason, she fails to cite her source in the Gospels for her definition of Christian destiny,

Read the Gospels from beginning to end and nowhere will you find Jesus suggesting anything like what Coulter sees as the destiny of Christians. Quite the contrary. Indeed, there is no source in anything Jesus said for most of what the best-known “Christians” preach in his name these days. While Coulter fumes that “liberalism is the opposition party to God,” the clear truth is that what passes for “Christianity” today is the opposition party to Jesus. She attacks “the liberal hostility to God-based religions” while exposing her own hostility to Jesus-based religion.

As has been widely reported, Coulter offers “Christian” sentiments about widows of 9/11 victims who are not on her side politically: “These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by grief-arazzis,” the millionaire TV celebrity and right-wing lioness Coulter hisses. “I’ve never seen people enjoying their husbands’ deaths so much.” If Jesus had remained in his grave, surely he would be spinning in it to hear such evil venom being spit out in his name.

“Christians” of the sort who buy Coulter’s books call themselves “fundamentalists,” but their emphasis is entirely upon the word’s first syllable; they’re all about having fun. But when it comes to the fundamental teachings of Jesus, they take a pass. Turn the other cheek? Self-sacrifice? Help the poor? Nonviolence? That stuff’s too hard. They replace the Gospel accounts of what Jesus said with the Gospel according to John and Paul (Lennon and McCartney, that is): “Give me money / That’s what I want.”

The Church of Coulter — and that of the loudest “Christians” today — should be called what it plainly is: Jesusless: The Church of Mammon. Coulter makes millions by calling others treasonous and Godless and saying, “We should invade [Muslim] countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.” Conversion should start at home, and Coulter first needs to convert herself from Mammonism to Christianity.

Like many others in the increasingly dominant and totally misnamed “Christian Right,” Coulter has a persecution complex. Upon the publication of Godless, she used her syndicated column to write a self-review of her book, saying it would be ignored: “If you find Godless without asking for assistance, it’s considered a minor miracle.” This from a woman whose new Jesusless book was at that very moment rising to Number 1 on the New York Times Best Seller list. (That such a patently anti-Jesus book could become the best-selling book in America tells us just how far removed from being followers of Christ most of today’s self-proclaimed Christians are.)

She’s lamenting all the way to the bank, her house of worship.

In my opinion, those who complain about a “War on Christianity” are right. The generals conducting that war include, in addition to Kill-a-Muslim-for-Christ Coulter, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Ted Haggard, James Dobson, and the whole Unheavenly Host of televangelists and megachurch moneychangers and wolves in sheep’s clothing who have expropriated the moral assets of Jesus and turned them to their own purposes. They never met a dollar they didn’t like. They prefer profits to prophecy and pretend that Jesus did, too. They favor the rich over the poor and invert Jesus to contend that he did, too. They favor war over peace and lie by saying that Jesus did, too.

Coulter and millions of her fellow adherents to ChristianityLite — a “religion” that is the equivalent of a “Lose weight without diet or exercise” scam (“Easy Jesus! Be saved without sacrifice or good works!”) — have aborted Jesus and rewritten his teachings to suit their own selfish desires. Their revision of the Beatitudes — what we might call the Be-Ann-itudes — goes something like this:

Blessed are the haughty in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who exult over others, for they shall be further rewarded. Blessed are the arrogant, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for domination, for they shall be satisfied. Blessed are those who show no mercy, for they shall obtain the wealth of others. Blessed are the hard in heart, for they shall see God. Blessed are the war-makers, for they shall be called sons of God. Blessed are those who persecute for their own sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when you revile others and persecute others and utter all sorts of evil against them falsely on my account.

Onward Jesusless “Christian” soldiers, marching others into war.

Robert S. McElvaine teaches history at Millsaps College and is the author of Eve’s Seed (McGraw-Hill). He is currently completing a book manuscript entitled ChristianityLite: Getting to Heaven without the Hassle.

———-

The Religion and Culture Web Forum for June features “Religious Identities of Latin American Immigrants in Chicago: Preliminary Findings from Field Research” by Andrea Althoff. To read this article, please visit: http://marty-center.uchicago.edu/webforum/index.shtml,

———-

Sightings comes from the <http://marty-center.uchicago.edu/>Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

Submissions policy Sightings welcomes submissions of 500 to 750 words in length that seek to illuminate and interpret the forces of faith in a pluralist society. <http://marty-center.uchicago.edu/sightings/index.shtml>Previous columns give a good indication of the topical range and tone for acceptable essays. The editor also encourages new approaches to issues related to religion and public life.

Attribution Columns may be quoted or republished in full, with attribution to the author of the column, Sightings, and the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.