C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy by Jeff Sharlet

Author:Jeff Sharlet [Sharlet, Jeff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Religion & Spirituality, Politics & Government, Conservatism & The Right
ISBN: 9780316091077
Google: vKOCatOFvTgC
Amazon: 0316091073
Publisher: Little, Brown
Published: 2010-09-27T04:00:00+00:00

Prophecy isn’t kind, but Bahati was brave. He knew his bill, if passed—and in Uganda, voters wanted it passed—would lead to a great forsaking, indeed: of foreign aid, the lifeblood of what passes for an economy in a country where job seekers outnumber jobs fifty to one. People would starve. There would be no medicine for AIDS. And it might be worse than that. The dictator was old, his grip was weakening, and war might be coming. It was hard to conceive, after at least three hundred thousand dead under Amin and as many as half a million lost in the fight that brought Museveni to power, that Uganda would ever return to slaughter. But they would do what God asked of them, Bahati believed. They would be a God-led nation, a light unto the world.

Even as the American brothers of the Family shied away from controversy, Bahati’s African brothers in reconciliation gravitated toward him. He was in demand; Bahati and a pastor ally whom he’d put on the government payroll said Fellowship groups in the governments of countries across the continent—Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, Zambia, Congo—had requested copies of his bill or, better yet, a personal appearance. The message was spreading, with Bahati as its apostle, suddenly the most famous Ugandan since Idi Amin.

Bahati wanted to bring the message back to the source. “If I came to America, what do you think would happen?”

“I think there would be protests,” I said. In 2010, there’d been protests at the Prayer Breakfast for the first time in five decades based just on the possibility that Bahati might show.

“I want to come one of these days and see. What do you think is the best way to come in? Eh?”

“I wouldn’t make it public.”

“Ah! So the best way would be to sneak in?”

“Just go as a regular traveler.”

“But they wouldn’t hurt me?” He claimed to have survived several gay poisoning attempts already. “I will be coming to America very soon. To do something very private. I will not announce it to the world. I will just come. To our friends in Washington. I will tell private people, whom I’ll visit. There are people willing to host me.”

Not Hunter, he added. He no longer trusted Hunter, though he didn’t blame him for what he saw as cowardice. The Family, he’d been told, was also under gay attack. In Uganda the gays used poison; in America, “blackmail.” How did that work? He couldn’t explain. The gays, he said, have secret ways.

“Spiritual warfare?” I asked.

“Mm-mmm.” Bahati smiled, pleased that I had invoked the dark side of reconciliation, the invisible work of the spirit that selects between right and wrong, men of God and those outside His circle. Spiritual warfare is a concept as old as the Bible, but, through the literalist filter of twentieth-century American fundamentalism, it has taken on magical meaning, imbuing the actions of its believers with supernatural power. “Imagine a small bill in a small country like Uganda,” he said. “Sponsored by a Bahati.

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