Robert Christgau on America’s Secret Fundamentalists
By Robert Christgau

Any believer in American democracy is obliged to come to terms with a wing of the citizenry few secular humanists have the wherewithal to think about—Christians. Not mainline modernists, so useful for validating progressive pieties when we godless need moral ballast, but the 75 million Americans whose Christianity takes such modifiers as the respectable evangelical, the unapologetic fundamentalist, the doctrinal Bible-believing, the thoughtful convinced and the emotional born-again. Especially the white ones, of course—even black churches that oppose abortion and homosexuality are aligned with the social gospel, while Latino Pentecostals and Korean Presbyterians generally gather in their own congregations. Anyway, secular humanists are inclined to cut African-Americans and immigrants some slack. White Middle Americans they have a problem with.

These generalizations are crude, obviously. For one thing, there are plenty of secular humanists in Middle America, where proximity mitigates incomprehension a little. But in New York, my eternal home, folks are less sophisticated. As someone whose atheism proceeds directly from his demographically unlikely childhood in a fundamentalist church in Queens, and whose brother has spent his life ministering to conservative churches in various distant suburbs, I got on this problem back when my colleagues at The Village Voice dismissed Jimmy Carter out of hand because he was a Southern Baptist. I argued back then that the specifics of Carter’s religious history suggested levels of honesty and compassion unusual in a politician, which turned out to be true—in 2000, Carter quit the by then explicitly right-wing Southern Baptist Convention after a fruitless struggle to moderate it. Other politically prominent Southern Baptists include Pat Robertson, who founded the Christian Broadcasting Network in 1960, and Jerry Falwell, who founded the Moral Majority in 1979. They do not include famed born-againer George W. Bush—or the most devout Christian currently running for president, Barack Obama. Generalizations are often crude.

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