Jeff Sharlet talking:
Governor Mike Pence is a Kennedy Democrat. He’s an Irish Catholic Kennedy Democrat who really either lost his way or changed his way back in college at a Christian rock festival that was meant to be sort of an evangelical Woodstock. He decided to accept Jesus and become an evangelical, and that turned him on the path to conservatism, away from the sort of Democratic roots. In 1980, I think he voted for Jimmy Carter. By ’84, he was a Reagan Republican. By the early ’90s, he was running for Congress and losing badly because of his very sort of negative campaigning, and he learned how to be a kind of a smoother, kinder Ted Cruz sort of character. He has the ideological makeup of Ted Cruz. He just doesn’t have the visible venom. And he entered Congress in 2000.
And what’s interesting about him is the way that the press is playing him as sort of Mr. Stability, as this kind of a more moderate—a conservative, but mild-mannered. You go back and you look at his record, and you see that this is easily the most anti-reproductive rights vice-presidential candidate in history, that he is not a man who is using his crusade against abortion as a political tool, but one who speaks of it, and extensively, as the greatest cause of our time, is what he calls it. He says that abortion is worse than slavery and the Holocaust combined. So we have a guy here who everyone is saying is the opposite of Trump, but there’s a common thread between them, and it’s—there’s two: grandiosity and misogyny.
one of the common misunderstandings about American conservatism, is that there’s—on the one hand, there’s social conservatism, and on the other hand, there’s fiscal conservatism, and right-wingers can kind of be either-or. You’ve got guys like Mike Pence, and in that speech and in other speeches where he says what we need is a marriage of moral and fiscal conservatism—you can’t have one without the other. Abortion, as he says, is an economic issue. That comes, for him, from one of his mentors, a guy named Chuck Colson, one of the leaders of the Christian right, died a few years ago, more famous—or infamous—as one of Nixon’s dirty tricks men, who went to prison, was born again and came out as a sort of a house intellectual of the Christian right, where he mentored men like Mike Pence in this idea that all of these things are bundled up.
So when you talk about Planned Parenthood or you talk about same-sex marriage or you talk about the economy, you’re talking about one common enemy. And they do use the word “enemy.” The enemy, to them, is secularism. They want a God-led government. That’s the only legitimate government. So when they speak of business, they’re speaking not of something separate from God, but they’re speaking of what, in Mike Pence’s circles, would be called biblical capitalism, the idea that this economic system is God-ordained. And you hear it right there in the Values Voter Summit. And that’s what made him a really popular man in those circles. This is—you know, everyone is obviously sort of saying this was meant to sort of attract the evangelical base. And I think it’s working, and it’s in a significant way. That base is still wobbly for Trump, but much less so with Pence on board and with the idea that in a future with Pence, that some of these issues that maybe progressives have thought they’d been winning on, the tide is going to be turned, especially, probably for Mike Pence, reproductive rights or abortion.
– Indiana’s highly controversial anti-LGBT Religious Freedom Restoration Act, as it’s called. Mike Pence went on to defend the law in the name of tolerance. Pence also insisted the law does not condone discrimination. sports leagues, the NCAA, to corporations, threatening to boycott Indiana. Angie’s List said they wouldn’t do a $40 million expansion of the company.
heroic Angie’s List may have been the key to breaking its back. The law is—there’s one level on which he’s right, which is saying that there’s laws like this that have been passed elsewhere, in other states and at the federal level. And the rhetoric of religious freedom as a justification for what is questionably discrimination, that’s not something Mike Pence invented. That’s something that has been going on now since the ’90s, and in large part because it’s been able to gain that traction, because of Democrats, who—including the Clintons, who did not want to make an issue of it, who wanted to be seen as religion-friendly, and thought it was a low-cost maneuver. And it turns out to be a very high-cost maneuver in Indiana. And you saw him pushing it there just a little bit further, in the same way that he pushed anti-abortion restrictions just a little bit further than all the other states. He wanted to be the first in this kind of—this kind of Christian right crusade. The corporations? This is—this is not a great progressive victory. This is the corporations fighting back. And he walked back the bill. It’s still not a good thing. It’s still a tool for discrimination. This idea that the bill was undone is false. It’s still there. It has a little bit of language, though, that some of his allies in the Christian right didn’t like.
And again, we’re seeing a narrative in the press that maybe Mike Pence isn’t really going to activate the base, because they turned on him. That, to me, is a sign of not following the Christian right and not understanding these kinds of spats and how they understand their politicians. No politician is 100 percent. Ted Cruz is not 100 percent to them. It’s more whether this politician is being used by God. They see Pence as being used by God. They will get over their disappointment in Pence watering down the bill a little bit, because they have the language and the history. They have—when he says he’s against—he’s for tolerance, they understand. Mike Pence is a man who has compared himself to Martin Luther King, to—he’s got a long list of sort of his icons that he seems to be in the tradition of—Abraham Lincoln, William Wilberforce, the 18th and 19th century British parliamentarian who ended slavery and is an absolute icon of the Christian right. Pence sees himself in that tradition, fighting for what Wilberforce called a reformation of manners, what Pence sees in the same way. And that has to do—so, laws like this religious freedom act are just icing on the cake of a much larger project.
– Family Research Council, its relationship with Pence.
there’s the Family Research Council. There’s Focus on the Family. Family Research Council is Tony Perkins in Washington. It’s a sort of a—maybe the top open lobbying shop of the Christian right. Tony Perkins was, in fact, one of those guys who said, you know, “I feel a little bit brokenhearted by Mike Pence walking back this bill,” that was going to be even better at discriminating against LGBT people. He will come around. He has a long history of coming around. He’s a very canny political operator. There’s guys like David Barton, who was a sort of a historian of the Christian right. There’s a whole universe.
One of the ones that I’m interested in is the Fellowship Foundation, sometimes called The Family or C Street. Viewers may remember that back in 2009, 2010, a number of presidential hopefuls—Mark Sanford, Senator John Ensign—were all caught up in affairs that were covered up by this evangelical organization. Mike Pence has been moving in those circles for a long time, using the National Prayer Breakfast, their annual event, as a kind of a backroom lobbying place for him. That’s his foreign policy experience, his meeting with delegations from other countries that are looking to do business with America, often in terms of military funding, and they are going to do that under the cloak of prayer. And Pence has been a really skillful operator in that sense. And I think that’s why he’s liked by conservatives, because he is this moral zealot in the vein of Ted Cruz, but he’s also an operator. He’s also a man who cuts deals. And I think there’s that question of, is he a hypocrite, or is he a true believer? And I think the answer is, yes, he is both, absolutely. And that’s what makes him a potent force.
I think there’s been a big misunderstanding about what Trump is and how evangelical—conservative evangelicals view politicians for a long time. There’s always this idea: “How can they tolerate this guy? He’s a hypocrite.” To which there’s a ready response, was—”And I’m a sinner.” That’s in the vernacular. But there’s also, especially in those elite evangelical circles, where you see guys like Christian right leader David Barton saying, “Trump wasn’t my first choice or my second choice, but I now realize that it seems that God has chosen him for this”—they don’t see him as a godly man; they see him, as David Barton, Christian right leader, says, as God’s man, as the tool that God is using. And there’s a long, long history of that. They love going through history and finding examples of leaders who were not exactly moral exemplars, who were used. And it’s a theological moment. It goes back—you hear evangelicals citing King David. Secular viewers forget that King David wasn’t always such a nice guy in the Bible, but he was God’s chosen man. So there’s a coalescing idea that somehow, obviously, God is doing something with Trump. It’s hard to quite understand what it is, but let’s, you know, let go and let God and get yourself on the ticket, so that you can be there to influence him in the right direction.
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Jeff Sharlet
associate professor of literary journalism at Dartmouth, author of several books, including C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy and the best-seller The Family. His most recent book is Radiant Truths.
— source democracynow.org