by Michelle Goldberg
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Product Description
Michelle Goldberg, a senior political reporter for Salon.com, has been covering the intersection of politics and ideology for years. Before the 2004 election, and during the ensuing months when many Americans were trying to understand how an administration marked by cronyism, disregard for the national budget, and poorly disguised self-interest had been reinstated, Goldberg traveled through the heartland of a country in the grips of a fevered religious radicalism: the America of our time. From the classroom to the mega-church to the federal court, she saw how the growing influence of dominionism-the doctrine that Christians have the right to rule nonbelievers-is threatening the foundations of democracy.
In Kingdom Coming, Goldberg demonstrates how an increasingly bellicose fundamentalism is gaining traction throughout our national life, taking us on a tour of the parallel right-wing evangelical culture that is buoyed by Republican political patronage. Deep within the red zones of a divided America, we meet military retirees pledging to seize the nation in Christ's name, perfidious congressmen courting the confidence of neo-confederates and proponents of theocracy, and leaders of federally funded programs offering Jesus as the solution to the country's social problems.
With her trenchant interviews and the telling testimonies of the people behind this movement, Goldberg gains access into the hearts and minds of citizens who are striving to remake the secular Republic bequeathed by our founders into a Christian nation run according to their interpretation of scripture. In her examination of the ever-widening divide between believers and nonbelievers, Goldberg illustrates the subversive effect of this conservative stranglehold nationwide. In an age when faith rather than reason is heralded and the values of the Enlightenment are threatened by a mystical nationalism claiming divine sanction, Kingdom Coming brings us face to face with the irrational forces that are remaking much of America.
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Do you want a Christian Taliban on our hands?, 2008-10-31
I don't. It's counter to freedom and democracy-- it's a theocracy of one nation under Jesus Christ.
Apparently, a lot of people in the U.S. want just that.
Canada: looking better and better every day.
Thanks to Goldberg for writing about this. Other writers need to draw our attention to this menace.
Come the rapture, there'll be more room for us.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
The Christo-Fascists Want To Take Over The World - Yikes!, 2008-06-22
Another great book documenting the malignant and rapidly-spreading tumor that threatens to destroy not only our great SECULAR nation but the entire modern ( read ADVANCED ) world and all the painstaking progress we humans have made over the past 500 years. Make no mistake: these so-called Christian nutjobs want to turn back the clock to a romanticized vision they have of something called "Biblical Times", when everyone - especially women and slaves - knew their place, and all was right with the world. Of course these modern-day religious freaks are enjoying the fruits of the Enlightenment and scientific progress by living much longer and healthier lives; they fly in airplanes and go to medical doctors, neither of which existed in the good old days. Many of these people live in the deep south, where the heat and humidity are legendary but, thanks to SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS they are comfortable in their air conditioned cars and houses and HUGE Mega-churches - again, none of that in Biblical times. I say let these people live ouit their visions and dreams: send them back to where they think they came from, the roaring-hot Middle East, with no technologies invented after the year 1. See how much they like that, and then they can get back to the rest of us with an update - presumably written on parchment. But - wait! Most people there and then were illiterate. They'll have to make it an Oral Tradition for a few generations before somebody - the world's first used car dealer? - figures out "writing" and "paper". But then that would be "progress", and progress ( and of course Progressives ) is Bad, very Bad.
This book is a great clarion call for all rational and reasonable and patriotic citizens to wake up and turn back the tide of these idiots, before it's too late.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Scary Look at the Fringe Becoming Mainstream, 2008-05-26
Christian fundamentalism has been a national problem at least since the Scopes Monkey trial; it is more or less a development of the past quarter-century, however, that such fundamentalism has gained political clout. Michelle Goldberg, a secular liberal Jewish feminist (one wonders if her being a lesbian would significantly increase the right-wing paranoia these labels provoke) has assembled a terrifying factbook of the history, agenda, and methods of the religious right, all with considerable humanity, felicitous writing, and minimal elitism.
All of her subjects, from Focus on the Family to the wretchedly misnamed Discovery Institute (the main thinktank behind "intelligent design") are easy to oppose. Goldberg's feat is to show how such groups, so naturally objectionable to secularists and the mainstream religious, have ascended to heights previously unthinkable within the Republican party. Her analysis is well-documented and journalistically sound (though plenty of outside sources are used, she also spent much time with primary material, including conference calls with important religious right figures).
I must admit to find it a depressing read. I am, however, cautiously optimistic that the type of lunacy described in the book is at a high water mark; this was written before the 2006 congressional elections, and John McCain (to say nothing of Obama or Hillary) doesn't have near the influence in religious right circles as Bush does. Still, as Goldberg points out, some of their most important advances were made during the Clinton years.
Though an unabashed secularist, Goldberg refreshingly does not withhold support for sensible religious leaders. Most prominent among them is Jim Wallis, the evangelical progressive who has become something of a go-to man for churches that are tired of their right wing captivity.
Topical and urgent, it will also stand as a fine history of a peculiarly American political movement. Read it, wake up, and turn your faith, whether in humanity or the divine, into action.
23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
Incredible Compilation of Facts, 2008-05-11
The organized push from Evangelicals to dissolve the separation between church and state is currently one of the most potent threats to individual rights in the United States. With 'Kingdom Coming', Michelle Goldberg presents a detailed intellectual history of Christian Nationalism as well as documents how Evangelicals have permeated American culture.
This book is rich in intellectual history. In the first chapter, Goldberg explains Dominionism, which holds that Christians have the god-given right and duty to be sovereign over one's country, if not the entire world. This idea derives from Christian Reconstructionism, which argues that American law should be replaced by Biblical law.
You will learn about many important figures in the intellectual origins of Christian Nationalism. This includes the following thinkers and writers:
* R. J. Rushdoony, the profoundly influential prolific writer who wrote that homosexuals, blasphemers and unchaste women should be sentenced to death as well as insisted that Jesus Christ would not return until Christians establish a thousand-year reign on Earth. Rushdoony is the father of Christian Reconstructionism.
* Francis Schaeffer, whose 'Christian Manifesto' argued that history is a contest between two antipodal forces: the Christian worldview and a materialist (secular) worldview, that the U.S. was founded on a Christian Consensus and that any public official who "commands what is contrary to God's Law [abrogates his authority]." Unfortunately, Goldberg only speaks of Schaeffer for a little over two pages.
* David Barton, a Christian revisionist historian who writes extensively on how the separation between church and state is a myth and that the founding fathers intended for basic biblical principles to permeate public life.
* Marvin Olasky, a prolific writer who is considered the founder of Compassionate Conservatism. One of Olasky's major works, 'The Tragedy of American Compassion', argues that there was a golden age of social services provided by churches until the secular government of Franklin Delano Roosevelt made social welfare the government's responsibility. President George W. Bush cites Olasky as his leading influence for funding faith-based initiatives.
This book also thoroughly documents how Evangelicals are changing American culture. This includes, but is not limited to, the following:
* Many widely-read revisionist history books such as Barton's 'Original Intent'.
* Textbooks designed to bring Christian science and morality into classrooms such as the intelligent design championing text 'Of Pandas and People'.
* Television shows that promote Christian ideology such as Pat Robertson's '700 Club'.
* Rock concerts and campus clubs intended to convert and recruit the younger generation.
* Highly influential political activists such as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Dobson and Ralph Reed and their respective non-profit political organizations.
* Active Christian think-tanks such as Answers in Genesis, Discovery Institute and the Family Research Council.
* Media moguls such as the Reverend Sun Myung Moon.
* Many recent/current legislators with openly pro-Evangelical agendas such as Sam Brownback, Tom Coburn, Jim DeMint, Rick Santorum, Jesse Helms and former House Majority Leader Tom Delay.
After the first, each chapter is organized around a specific political campaigns that the Religious Right has embraced: against gays, for intelligent design, for faith-based initiatives, for abstinence-only education and against "activist" judges. The ongoing war on abortion rights is also thoroughly treated.
My only complaint is that, like a waitress who seasons your food without asking, the author rudely inserts her socialist views throughout the book. She even explicitly celebrates FDR's New Deal for "[bringing] socialism to America." As if everyone who is anti-religion is also pro-socialism! Irritating as this is, it does not ruin an otherwise informative book.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Terrifying and enlightening, 2008-04-28
In this excellent, fascinating, and frightening book, Michelle Goldberg brings up the well-known fact that abstinence-only sex education programs for teenagers don't work. But an abstinence-only educator emphatically insisted that it doesn't matter that these programs don't work. What matters, she said, is that these programs tell "the TRUTH" that sex outside of marriage is "a SIN." Apparently, most abstinence-only programs are less concerned with preventing pregnancy and disease than with pushing a religious ideology.
I can't tell you how many times I raised my eyebrows over what I read in this book, nor how many times I had to put the book down in order to digest what I'd just read. Some of what Goldberg writes seems incomprehensible, yet she thoroughly documents all of it.
The Reverend Moon's tremendous clout with the D.C. establishment and the religious right came as quite a surprise to me. I always dismissed him as a crackpot, but no more.
Goldberg's book is about a parallel reality that is alive, well, and growing in the U.S. today--thanks to generous subsidies from the Bush administration and an unquestioning, incurious press. Goldberg is to be commended for providing much-needed insight into this subculture, which is making alarming progress towards the mainstream. This book is also a whole lot scarier than anything by Steven King--because it's true. With all due respect to King, even he couldn't make this stuff up.
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