I like to read in twos or threes, and in this case the two books I read on the religious right were Reverend Barry Lynn's “Piety & Politics: The Right-Wing Assault on Religious Freeedom,” and this one. Lynn's comes in first by a nose, but they are both excellent primers on everything going wrong both within the extreme right, and between the church and the state.
The author is a gay Christian minister who was uniquely privileged as a ghost writer for the heavy hitters on the extreme right from Jerry Falwell to Pat Robertson, work done prior to his realizing he was gay.
The author provides a useful distinction, one I often forget, between fundamentalists who are driven by fear and focused on imposing their strict version of faith on others, and evangelicals who are more reasonable and tolerant.
This book is richer in historical content than Lynns, and for that reason alone should be considered a “must read” along with Lynns' book. In addition to history the author describes a broad concern over two Americas emergent, one fundamentalist and one normal. The author takes care to discuss how Bible-based fear and loathing come from the fundamentalists, themselves, not from the Bible.
Brilliant Articulate Documentation of Rank Hypocrisy,
October 19, 2006
David Kuo
This book is a bright shining truth, and after absorbing every single word while flying across America, with copious notes, I have nothing but complete admiration for the author. As he sums it up, the promises made by the Bush-Cheney-Rove team to the evangelical right were a wild ride with a spectacular flame-out. Eight billion was promised for faith-based charities, $30 million was actually delivered. The White House, not Congress, took the tax cuts and tax credits for charity out of the legislation.
This is an extremely thoughtful and well-developed account. The first half of the book recounts the author's journey from Kennedy staffer to pro-life to evangelical Republican, and that first half of the book is essential to understanding the great good of the evangelical right, setting up a better understanding of the great bads that followed.
The author pulls no punches early on in the book in suggesting that the evangelical right punish Bush-Cheney-Rove (strangely, he never mentions Cheney, only Rove and Card) by “fasting” in the 2006 elections, i.e. not voiting.
I was seriously moved and impressed with his account of how and why he accepted Jesus in a pro-active manner, and how he then was able to move beyond lip service and taking Jesus for granted, and into a life of service. He gives Chuck Colson, Nixon's former hatchetman and resurrected evangelist, credit for his awakening.
The history of the Christian Coalition and the Family Research Council, and the manner in which they mobilzed at least ten million but closer to thirty million evangelicals one neighborhood at a time, bottom up and inside out, in less than three years, is both religious and political history at its finest. 40% of the Republican delegates in 2000 were in one way or another connected to “The Fellowship,” itself a fascinating social network.
The author impresses me with his maturity in understanding that faith is an innoculation against corruption, and in seeing the danger of confusing one's agenda with God's will.
The author was in at the creation of Empower America with Bennett, Kemp, and Kirkpatrick, and I found his core theme of the need for a cultural renewal of our values and who we are as a Nation, compelling. He discusses the social pathologies that are decomposing our society (see my review of “The Cheating Culture”).
I especially liked his balanced presentation of how Clinton agreed that we have gotten too secular, and would urge both left and right to read that superb book, “The Left Hand of God,” which is, with this one, a fundamental text for healing our Nation.
The author was with Team Ashcroft on the Hill, and recounts with distress how Gingrich blew off the Christian Coalition and social issues.
The book substantially improved my regard for George Bush as a person, and for John Ashcroft as a person and a politician. I was expecially taken with the author's sincere descriptions of Bush's genuineness, and of AZshcroft's integrity in not pushing his religion on others. The description of how George Bush stops, slows down, and connects to former addicts is alone worth the price of the book. He's been there and it is never far from his mind.
There is one inconsistency. The author claims that the evangelical right is at odds with the pro-business, pro-wealth rest of the Republican Party (actually, as a moderate Republican, I no longer consider these extremists to be real Republicans–more like carpetbaggers). However, while claiming to be anti-greed, they appear to have cut a deal with Wall Street to share power.
The book ends with a sad discussion of how the evangelical right is all too wiling to spend tens of millions trashing the Clintons, but not at all interested in donating $25,000 to a poverty program.
The author concludes that seduction leads to insularity and insularity leads to deceit. He concludes that politics is not the answer, and a return to bottom up neighborhood level faith-based charity might do what politics cannot.
I put the book down with a diagram on the title page, a triangle, with faith at the top, the wealth of knowledge on the lower right, and the poor on the lower left. An arrow from faith to knowledge is labeled with a dollar sign. Our religions must fund the distribution of free cell phones and knowledge, this creates intelligence and usable information for the poor (see my review of C. K. Prahalad, “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid”), and this in turn converts the poor into good souls of faith.
I hold this author in the highest esteem. He spoke truth to the President (Karl Rove did NOT want him speaking that truth), and in giving us all this book, he has given us a bright shinining light on the future. I see this so clearly because of his work: stop funding politicians, start funding the poor's access to knowledge, unleash their entrepreneurship, and harvest their souls.
This is an utterly sensational book, easily in the top rank of the 770+ books I have reviewed here at Amazon, and together with David Johnston's books on “Faith-Based Diplomacy” and the book “The Left Hand of God,” one of the top three non-fiction books I would recommend to every person of faith.
Read with Three Other Books (Or My Reviews of All Four),
August 13, 2006
Jon Meacham
I bought and read this book as part of a series, with The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason being the first book. I recommend both highly. “The End of Faith” depicts the threat to America and the world, while this book is more of a historical treatment of how America has always favored religious tolerance and pluralism, but secular governance. Other interesting books deal with misquoting Jesus and the myths of the Bible. I hope to get to them soon.
This book over all an extraodinarily balanced and vital perspective on the good of religion in American life. It puts extremist ideologies in historical context, and concludes in the final chapter that whenever religions become extremist and exclusive, as have both the extreme right Christian evangelicals in America and the radicalized Muslims around the world; they become a tyranny, and must be fought down at all costs.
This is a history book, but it is vibrant with clear and direct quotations showing how successive Presidents used religion to make important points. The books begins with an explosive characterization of liberty and democracy in relation to freedom of religion, and this sets the stage for the entire book which ends by denouncing religious extremism of any sort.
Immortal quotes:
Page 16. “…the Founders understood the dangers of mixing religious passion with the ambitions of politics.”
Page 17. “If totalitarianism was the great problem of the twentieth century, then extremism is, so far, the great problem of the twenty-first.”
The author, while documenting the need for a separation of church and state, is also careful to note that a shared acceptance of public religion and religiosity in all its forms is very helpful to democracy and essential for civil domestic solidarity.
The author is quite clear in stating that religions become a problem when their practitioners demand conversion to their own faith, or denigrate all who are not of their faith as unbelievers subject to genocide, confiscation of goods or–as the more rabid Jews taught me in college, full licenses to rape and dishonor, since “chicksas” or gentile girls are “free game.”
This book is the single best authoritative documentation for the hard fact that America was founded as a secular Nation providing for religious tolerance, and it is especially strong in pointing out that Judaism and other religions, including Islam, were present in the early years and America is NOT, per se, a Christian Nation in its founding roots.
The author documents how the Constitution and the intent of the Founders specifically forbade any religious requirements or qualification for holding public office.
On page 93 the author discusses how the Founding Father explicitly favored and sought a diversity of churches and faiths to reduce the possibility of any one faith “coming to play too large a role in politics,” (something I believe we can all see has hurt America gravely as the extremist religious right has trashed civil liberties at home and the Nation of Iraq as a whole–never mind global rendition and torture and a refusal to respect the Geneva Convention.
The author concludes that the USA and radicalized Islam are indeed on a collision course, of pluralism versus monotheism, but a careful reading of the book suggests that we must first heal ourselves internally and stamp down the extremist religious right (I am a moderate Republican who segued from Catholicism to high Episcopal to Methodist via two marriages).
The book includes ten extraordinary appendices and one excellent compilation of Presidential scripture citations up through President Eisenhower (I recommend the DVD on “Why We Fight” to better understand the pernicious effects of faith-based decisions to go to war that ignore all facts and evidence).
This is a serious book. Religion is going to be, as the author documents, a key factor in whether we prosper or implode in the 21st Century. For that reason alone, I strongly recommend all four of the books I have cited above, including this one.
Very Important, Objective, Valuable, Relevant to Peace,
August 8, 2006
Sam Harris
Of the 3000 or so books I have read in the past decade, 750 or so them reviewed here at Amazon (almost all non-fiction) this is perhaps the single most important work that declares, and then documents, the “naked Emperor” of religion.
While I agree with the reviewer that sums it up as saying that religion in the form of blind faith does more harm than good, I would hasten to add that faith is an essential part of the American value system, and can do a great deal of good when channeled in partnership with a tolerant secular state. See my reviews of “The Left Hand of God,” “Faith-Based Diplomacy,” and “American Gospel.”
The alternative sub-title of this book could be “The Cost of Intolerance.” However–and I strongly recommend this book to the Information Operations and Public Diplomacy or Strategic Communication professionals–the author is brilliantly on point when he suggests that the third world war now happening is about beliefs–about good beliefs versus bad beliefs, about a need for a morality order of battle. As Robert Garigue sums up in his own original work offered as a technical preface to my book on Information Operations, war has moved to the semantic level, and we have to focus on identifying, containing, and then eradicating belief systems that are totally set against our once-balanced (not now) combination of secular state and diversity of belief.
It merits comment, as discussed in Howard Bloom's “Global Brain,” that belief systems, once embedded in a person older than 30, are not changeable. World War III is a war for the minds of those in elementary and secondary school. We have to contain or kill the adults who believe that martyrdom awaits those who kill “unbelievers.” On a positive note, the disciplines of psychology and neuroscience are now coming together (see my review of “Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and the New Biology of the Mind” by Eric Kandel). At the same time, the discipline of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) is finally about to be funded properly, and we are within arms reach of being able to make sense of all information in all languages all the time.
Over-all the author agrees with those who say we are engaged in a clash of ideologies rather than civilizations. He notes that democracy can NOT be seen as a precursor to changing beliefs, for as we have found in Iraq, given a vote, most rabid Muslims would vote to give up their public liberties in favor of their blind and intolerant faith.
The author is compelling in also noting that poverty, among other high-level threats, is not the source of the conflicts that should frighten us with the prospect of being wiped out. It is about belief systems. He suggests that energy independence is actually a pre-requisite to gaining the economic leverage we need, while depriving the radical Muslim states of oil revenues they have consistently used to finance Al Qaeda and Hezbollah, among others.
Among the varied insights offered by the author I especially appreciated these:
1) Discussion of how evangelical Christians are penetrating the federal and state governments and subverting secular policy to fight “reasoned policy” and channel tax-payer funds to specific evangelical missions and churches.
2) A fascinating review of our skewed priorities, where we spend $4 billion annually to eradicate marijuana, which kills no one, while refusing to spend $2 billion one time to secure our ports, meanwhile ignoring the fact that alcohol kills hundreds of thousands.
3) Priceless quote, on page 165: “And yet, religious faith obscures uncertainty where uncertainty manifestly exists, allowing the unknown, the implausible, and the patently false to achieve primacy over facts.”
4) The author provides a very comprehensive review of both the Koran and the Bible, citing many specific passages, and concludes that even “moderate” Muslims are inherently trained to believe that “unbelievers” are to be converted or killed. This is, incidentally, the first stage of genocide, where the one to be killed is put into a class with vermin to set the stage for acceptable massacres.
The book concludes with a brilliant and provocative call for a science of good and evil, an ethics and science of the mind. The author states that truth is NOT just a matter of consensus or belief, and that some truths, in a human or reality sense, must be absolute. He calls for common sense and a sensibility of tolerance for others, while stating quite clearly that we must identify and kill those who threaten us “blindly.” He concludes that both torture and pacifism are wrong, and that principled moral engagement, one for all and all for one, is what is right. He supports non-violence where it works, but force is still needed for the greater evils that will respond to no other means.
The author documents the origin of the yellow star to “mark” Jews as having been in Baghdad, and only much later adopted by the Nazis.
The paperback version has a Question & Answer section that is not in the hardback original.
This is an extraordinary book, and should be–but of course is not–influencing those who would lead their Nation into a future of peace and prosperity. We have no strategy, no policy, only predatory capitalism fueled by militant unilateralism, and a Vice President who has usurped power from the President to pursue cheap oil at the expense of longer-term prosperity and peace. If ever there was a book to help us understand all that is wrong with America and the Muslims today, this is it.
THE best combination of strategy, psychology, & intelligence about REALITY,
July 12, 2006
Ralph Peters
This is without question one of the finest and most ably organized collections of commentaries it has been my privilege to read in all these years. It suffers from one major flaw, not the author's fault: the publisher failed to include an index. The oversight should be corrected in the next printing, and ideally included as an Errata with the books now going out to bookstores.
The author is a world-class strategist, warrior, psychologist, intelligence professional, and writer.
He returns to four familiar themes, with all new refreshing insights:
1. America has no strategy and no official means of getting there. He ends the book by pointing out that drawing lines between the US, Spain, and Portugal to African and Latin American countries with colonial ties to these countries, and then lines of modern immigration and kinship back to the US, would be a de facto strategic network worthy of consideration.
2. America has the wrong military, with too few infantry, military police, and even truck drivers. He is brutally on the mark when he concludes that the current Administration's efforts to out-source everything led to the out-sourcing of America's honor. The author is on target when he revisits his long-standing beef with the U.S. Navy, which is still trying to build to “four carriers on the Kamchatka peninsula” and the rest on China. We need a 450-ship Navy capable of executing peace from the sea, and we need an Air Force capable of two Berlin Airlifts at once, with a budget for the peace goods they will need to carry to the 30+ failed states that spawn terrorism, infectious disease, poverty, environmental degradation, civil war and genocide, and of course crime.
3. Even with the right military–that is to say, a military able to dispatch single terrorists with a single bullet, able to mount punitive “in and out” expeditionary operations, and–where called for–invade and occupy for extended periods, but with proper planning for the post-war transition to peace–military intelligence is completely broken. It cannot find the targets known to exist at the individual and tribal levels, and it cannot anticipate emerging threats. I would add that civilian intelligence is just as broken. The current Director of National Intelligence and his senior agency heads are continuing the Cold War systems that are “inside out and upside down” and have no idea how to create a modern intelligence capability that is founded on multinational and inter-agency information sharing, and on making the most of what can be known from open sources of information in all languages.
4. Faith is a strategic factor. The author is compelling when he slams not just the radical Islamic terrorists, but the ideologically insane evangelical Christians in America, for religious degradation rather than religious charity. David Johnston, author of the very influential book on “Faith-Based Diplomacy” would certainly agree. The author excels at criticism of our mis-placed faith in technology and “precision munitions” while ignoring what Army War College strategist Steve Metz calls “precision psychology.” In this vein the author points out that the fastest way to calm the Earth and increase productivity while reducing poverty is to focus on human capital and the education of the poor. Michael O'Hanlon has pointed out that the single greatest return on investment comes from a dollar spent on the education of women. This is where Google.org might usefully apply it extraordinary capabilities. Free online education in all languages, and donated Internet access centers and study computers in every village across Africa.
There are two portions of the book that are priceless gems worthy of inclusion in the welcoming kits of every War College student: the ten lessons of Iraq, and Occupation 101. Buy the book for these alone, and enjoy the rest as context.
Ralph Peters is a patriot. Occasionally he will rant, occasionally he will be belligerent and unwilling to entertain the reasonable claims and concerns of the enemy, but on balance, there is no other author that I would rather read in the domain of national security, than Ralph Peters. For complementary and sometimes opposing views, I recommend Colin Gray's “Modern Strategy,” Jonathan Schell's “Unconquerable World,” Joe Nye's “Paradox of American Power,” William Shawcross, “Deliver Us From Evil,” and C. K. Prahalad's “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid,” but see my lists for many other suggested top-notch books in the field of non-fiction about reality.
Time to Dust This One Off–Anticipated Radical Islam and Offers Core Ideas for Surviving,
April 9, 2006
Howard Bloom
Buy and read this book if for no other reason than that the author foresaw the global radicalization of Islam against the West in terms much starker than Samuel Huntington's clash of civilizations and much broader than Yossef Bodansky's brilliant tome on “Bin Laden: the Man Who Declared War on America.
Leon Uris is quoted on the cover as saying that this book is “an act of astonishing intellectual courage,” and I will say that the author has pulled together an extraordinary collage of details in an intricately assembled “story” in which he challenges the assumptions of a number of major conventional intellects. There are 58 “parts” to this book, each part between two and six pages long, with an astounding array of multi-disciplinary quotes and footnotes. No scared ox goes ungored.
Some of the history in this book, of the origin of Mohammed as a possible lunatic and then a vengeful warrior using religion to grab real estate, and of the early split between Sunni and Shiite over the issue of the succession, is very useful today.
The author centers the disparate and very broad-ranging pieces of the book on three core ideas: Earth as a superorganism within which a tribe or religion is itself a superorganism; memes as unifying ideas that create us versus them for the sake of changing the pecking order and feeding off weaker tribes, and–in the only optimistic note in the book, at the end, of collaboration and information sharing as the only means to break out of the pattern of dog eat dog.
He specifically slams religion, and especially fundamentalist religion, as a false god that substitutes faith for control, and as a tool of controlling elites who need to keep the impoverished masses from waking up to the raw fact that masses of people can indeed “take over” factories and estates.
On page 94 the following quote struck me as applying equally to George Bush and Osama Bin Laden: “Leaders like Orville Faubus and Fidel Castro have skillfully manipulated a few basic rules of human nature: that every tribe regards outsiders as fair game; that every society gives permission to hate; that each culture dresses the demon of hatred in the garb of righteousness; and that the man who channels this hatred can rouse the superorganism and lead it around by the nose.”
There are numerous gifted phrases throughout this book, and I can understand the frustration of some in absorbing this dizzying array of data points, but it is surely worth making the effort.
He makes much of the evolution of the brain from reptile (survival) to mammalian (social) to primate (individual) and emphasizes that even the most advanced humans still have all three brains in some form, with the lower forms subject to arousal.
Overall I rate this book one of the ten most useful books relevant to understanding and defeating radical Islam, which the author says is “a meme growing ravenous,” a sleeping giant that has been awakened. He goes back in time to look at how the US, in forcing the French and English to give up the Suez Canal, actually helped inspire Arabia to plan for a day when the West might be sent packing. Similar, the first Gulf War, when the Coalition defeated Iraq, undermined secular Moslem regimes, and further inspired Islamic fundamentalists.
In the author's view we erred gravely in not understanding the asymmetric scope of the threat of Bin Laden and post-Taliban Afghanistan, and we appear to have erred in a truly gigantic way in not seeing that the second Gulf War was in fact doing Iran's bidding and accomplishing something Iran could never have done on its own. The author views Bin Laden as having replaced Russia as a “friend” to the Third World, and anticipates both a rapid spread of Islam among the poor, and a plague of animosity toward to the USA specifically.
The book includes a fascination discussion of psycho-social aspects of nations and tribes and other social groups including religions. While some have been derisive of his discussion of “pecking orders” I believe–having lived overseas most of my life–that he nails it. Not only does instability cause the accepted pecking order to go out the window, but prosperity actually destabilizes established pecking orders. When we eventually implement the grand vision of Jeffrey Sachs (see my review of “The End of Poverty” we will need to be very mindful of the animal force that will be unleashed at the same time, and not make the mistake we made in Iraq, of failing to plan for stabilization and reconstruction.
The last two ideas in this book that really grabbed me are from page 292, on how America began a perceptual shut-down and decline from 1973 onwards, culminating in the cheating culture and lazy obese children and parents that are the bane of most teachers' lives today. America is in “slow” mode and has lost its competitive drive.
The book was hugely ambitious, and it is easy to be snide, as some reviewers are, but I for one found this as close to genius and as close to breath-taking intellectual derring-do as any book I have read in a while. If America is to survive the multiple threats to the Republic, it will take leaders capable of reading and understanding this book, and implementing a 100 year strategy for winning the six front war, beginning on the home front with a draconian reform of our educational and information sharing and distance learning environment.
Slams Left for Unilaterally Disarming and Fearing its Compassionate Side,
March 29, 2006
Michael Lerner
I have little patience for one and two line reviews that praise (or condemn) a book without any substantive evidence that the book was actually read. My reviews are summative and evaluative, and this is a book that merits careful reading and carefully articulated reviews.
The author provides an absolutely top-notch discussion of how the extreme religious right was able to align with the corporate and media right to seize power and sideline the much larger middle class population. At one point the author notes that the wealthy can afford to be sanctimonious, they can afford to get their abortions in other countries. The book subtitle could be modified to say “from the Religious Right and the Immoral Politicians and Corporate Magnates that Bribed Them.”
The book is most valuable for providing a common sense indictment of the Democratic leadership, labeling them corrupt and ignorant for thinking that they can only win by being “Right Lite” and failing to distinguish the Loving Left from the Rich and Religious Right.
Especially helpful to me was the author's detailed discussion of how the Left went “secular” after the 1960's, that brief moment when a critical mass of America believed that “love not war” was in fact the right guiding principle. He points out how the elite intellectual left estranged itself from the labor left while also being secularly scornful of the religious left.
He praises Martin Luther King and the original civil rights movement that welcomed white support as embodying all that was good about spiritually-bonded social activism.
He goes on to note that in later years, as black activists excluded whites, feminists excluded men and alienated normal moms, and anti-war and environmental activists became angry and critical rather than loving and embracive, it all went down hill. The Left disintegrated as a socially and politically relevant force.
Among his strongest points is his assertion that the Left has “unilaterally disarmed” and given up its most powerful weapon, a spiritual vision of a world in which the Golden Rule prevails, and America stands for morality, generosity, and non-intrusive nurturing.
He lambastes the Left for being afraid of its softer feminine side, fearing to appear weak when that strong feminism or the generous side is precisely what is required to confront the radical “rational” right (rational in this case means de-humanizing, for people are treated as “trade goods” not as humans with spiritual and minimal mandatory quality of life needs). Indeed, the author cites Kant's statement that true rationality must be universalized, i.e. American “exceptionalism” is NOT rational, simply imposed.
Other books have talked about the need to add environmental and social bottom lines to the economic bottom line; this author integrates those ideas here.
His bottom line is that love and kindness and championing both a spiritual vision and the primacy of human rights and dignity are an intangible value that should not be restricted to church or family, but should characterize all aspects of the economy and the political decision process.
He demands–and I buy into this completely–that the Left, armed with faith (not nutty faith, but community-oriented faith) must refuse to accept the “collateral damage” that comes from predatory immoral capitalism or unilateral imperialist militarism.
He touches on the difference between science and scientism; the latter devoid of any sense of the humanities or faith (see my review of E. O. Wilson's Consilience for that great author's discussion of why the sciences need the humanities).
A few unique observations from the author before summarizing his public policy goals:
1) Bill Clinton got it, Hillary Clinton tried it as a spouse and abandoned it as a Senator (why she will not win as a Presidential or Vice Presidential candidate), and Al Gore, ubber secularist, never got it at all. Left unsaid, but clear to me, is that Senator John Edwards does get it, and his current focus on poverty is perfectly matched to this book's vision for a caring new left that is embrasive of the bottom and the center.
2) Marx had more spiritual wisdom in his early writings than most people realize, and was originally founded in a moral revulsion against the costs of capitalism on the commoditization of humans (see my review of Lionel Tiger, Manufacture of Evil: Ethics, Evolution, and the Industrial System). Where Marx went wrong, and where the post World War II Left went wrong, was in secularizing itself and failing to use religious faith as a catalyst and sustaining element for activism.
The author ends with some very specific prescriptions that I consider to be sensible, implantable, affordable, essential, and-and-contrary to those reviewers who demean the author-to be a absolutely vital to those seeking to restore balance and sanity to this country in the 2006 and 2008 elections. Any candidate who fails to integrate this book and its vision into their campaign is going to be fighting blind in one eye, with at least one arm tied behind their back. The varied covenants, the separation of church, state, and science (see my review of the The Republican War on Science), the Global Marshall Plan, the Nonviolent Peace Force, these are all ideas that are validated by just about every one of the 600+ books on national security that I have reviewed for Amazon these past six years.
The author ends on a reflective note, stating that no candidate, no elected President, can achieve the needed change on their own. There must be a considerable body of public opinion that stands up and demands the change, that holds the Wall Street and Enrons and Exxons of the world accountable, that holds Congress accountable for bribery and holds Dick Cheney accountable for lying and for no-bid multi-billion awards to Halliburton.
While there are other books that are meaning to me with respect to the future of this country, this is the one single book that I do not believe can be ignored by any candidate hoping to restore democracy and morality to America.
