Under Reconstructionist rules of engagement, lying, deception, and stealth are considered legiti-mate tactics and are even encouraged. There is no requirement for Christians to be truthful "in acts of war?' Rushdoony wrote. "Spying is legitimate, as are deceptive tactics?' Indeed, deception has proved essential to the success of the Ahmansons' campaign to undermine mainline churches. The National Council of Churches—the governing body of the mainline Episcopal, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches—is one of America's most effective progressive institutions. During the past fifty years, the NCC has advanced civil rights, environmentalism, and peace movements. The NCC's symbolism as a liberal bulwark made it a natural target. Progressive Methodist minister Andrew Weaver explained three years before his death in 2008, "NCC church members' influence is dispro-portionate to their numbers, and [they] include remarkably high
numbers of leaders in politics, business, and culture. . . . A hostile takeover of these churches would represent a massive shift in American culture, power and wealth for a relatively small investment?' In 1981, when the Reagan administration ratcheted up military support for anti-Communist juntas in Central America, a group of anti-Communist Democratic operatives and right-wing moneymen responded by organizing a Washington think tank called the Institute for Religion and Democracy (IRD) to mount an "inside-outside" at-tack on the mainline churches' social activism. In short order, the new outfit shopped material to the mainstream press alleging that the NCC was diverting collection plate donations to Communist guerrillas. In 1982, this propaganda and pressure translated into two devastating and false reports in Reader's Digest and on CBS's 60 Minutes about NCC's purported Communist links. (Twenty years later, 60 Minutes producer Don Hewitt described the broadcast on the NCC as the greatest regret of his long and illustrious career. "The next morning I got a congratu-latory phone call from every redneck bishop in America and I thought, `Oh my God, we must have done something wrong last night and I think we probably did,'" Hewitt told CNN's Larry King in 2002.) In the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse, the IRD changed tactics, replacing Communism with homosexuality as its wedge issue. The group's shift of focus from the red menace to the lavender one was made possible by hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from the Ahmansons throughout the 1990s and by a grant of over $1 million in 2000 and 2001—the same year Roberta Ahmanson told me she was "inveigled" into joining the IRD's board of directors. The Ahmansons' money was promptly funneled into a smear campaign against the Rt. Rev. Eugene Robinson, the first openly gay man ever consecrated as a bishop by the Episcopal Church. The IRD cranked up its Mighty Wurlitzer to full blast in August 2004, generating a column by Weekly Standard editor Fred Barnes titled "The Gay Bishop's Links?' Barnes, who neglected to mention his membership on the IRD's board of directors in his column for the neoconservative magazine, falsely alleged that the website of a gay youth group Robin-son founded contained links to "a pornographic website," and he claimed without independent sourcing that Robinson "put his hands on" a Vermont man "inappropriately" during a church meeting "several years ago." The IRD circulated the column to various cable news networks, but only Fox News (which also employed Barnes as a regu-lar pundit and host of a talk show) agreed to broadcast it. Although a panel of bishops investigating the charges discredited Barnes's smear, it helped widen the rift within the Episcopal Church and divide it from its global affiliates. In May 2007, eleven ultraconservative congregations from Northern Virginia bolted from the Epis-copal Church and joined forces with the Anglican Church of Nigeria, led by the demagogic Archbishop Peter Akinola. In a country where more than 50 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, Akinola has managed to grow his congregation while replacing tradi-tional church concerns about social justice with hysteria about homo-sexuality. Akinola spent much of 2006 lobbying Nigeria's legislature to pass a bill meting out five-year prison terms to any gay people who dared to gather—or even touch one another—in public. As the IRD pressed its exploitation of homosexuality to divide Episcopal congregations, it initiated a parallel campaign accusing the mainline Presbyterian Church of anti-Semitism for its protests against Israel's continued illegal occupation of Palestinian land. The IRD complemented this new tactic by mailing out 100,000 copies of Likud-nik Israeli historian Ephraim Karsh's tract "Islamic Imperialism" to pastors. With this tactic, at an expense of $1.5 million, the Christian Right raised Islamophobia as its new wedge for the post-9/11, post-Bush era. For Ahmanson, the quest to transform the United States into Calvin's elitist "church of the elect," or what Rushdoony called a "spir-itual aristocracy," is not solely a political endeavor. Before Ahmanson and his wife were galvanized into funding conservative advocacy groups, mainline church schisms, and Far Right moral crusades, they had been paralyzed by their own social handicaps and unresolved psychological issues. Emotional fulfillment was unattainable for the Ahmansons until they embraced Rushdoony's inverted vision of free will: "The flight from freedom is always first of all the flight from God, who created man to be responsible and to exercise dominion over the earth under him. The choice is always God or slavery." By exchanging
free will for Reconstructionist mandates—by "doing what God wants him to do," as Roberta Ahmanson told me her husband does—Ahmanson ironically experienced his first sense of liberation. Ahmanson's identification with Tolkien's hero, Frodo, illuminates his sensibility. Both Frodo and Ahmanson were socially withdrawn boys who lost their parents at an early age. Just as Frodo found the childless Bilbo Baggins to nurture him, teach him Elvish, and pass along to him the One Ring that would ultimately have to be de-stroyed to save the world, Ahmanson found Rushdoony. Like Frodo, who gained a sense of camaraderie from the Fellowship of the Ring that was formed to protect him, Ahmanson gathered around himself a wife, a social network, and a community by throwing down the gauntlet against an evil secularism. Without the drama that flowed from their respective missions to save civilization, Frodo and Ah-manson would have never fulfilled many of their most basic needs. In brief, written responses to questions I e-mailed to Howard Ahmanson, he attempted to show his independence and demonstrate his own reasoning by placing special emphasis on his disagreement with Rushdoony's opinion that homosexuals should be executed. "Due to my association with Rushdoony, reporters have often as-sumed that I agree with him in all applications of the penalties of the Old Testament Law, particularly the stoning of homosexuals," Ah-manson wrote. "My vision for homosexuals is life, not death, not death by stoning or any other form of execution, not a long, linger-ing, painful death from AIDS, not a violent death by assault, and not a tragic death by suicide. My understanding of Christianity is that we are all broken, in need of healing and restoration. So far as I can tell, the only hope for our healing is through faith in Jesus Christ and the power of his resurrection from the dead." For crisis-wracked individuals such as Ahmanson, radical Chris-tian conservatism is more than politics and more than a style.
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