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o some distant figure.  According to fundamentalist leaders, the
secular humanists are a massive, well-organized "religious" group.
They have taken over our radio stations, our television networks, our
newspapers and our schools.  These diabolical subversives have
allegedly turned everything from television sit-coms to classroom
syllabi into anti-Christian weapons designed to enslave the minds of
decent American children to a Godless, immoral creed.
Like Orval Faubus and Fidel Castro, the fundamentalists have
used a spectral enemy to forge a flock that is hungry for power.  Some
fundamentalist leaders declare that God has made a covenant with his
true followers.  According to that covenant, He will deliver the political
power of the presidency and the congress into the hands of the
believers.24  Other fundamentalist power brokers declare that this is a
Christian country, erected on Christian principles by Christian
founding fathers.  As such, the government of our Constitution is
designed to be placed in Christian control.  Non-Christians should be
excluded, some of these leaders say, from running for public office.
After all, non-Christians, in Pat Robertson's words, are "termites"
undermining the foundations of this country.
And who are non-Christians?  Non-fundamentalists.  According
to Jimmy Swaggart, for example, Catholics and traditional Protestants
are not Christians.  They are the mistaken followers of a "monstrous
lie."  Some fundamentalist leaders are more blunt.  Catholics,
traditional Protestants, followers of EST, dabblers in Buddhism, New
Age fans and others, they say, are followers of Satan.25   In the name of
God, power must be wrested from the grip of the Satanists and placed
in the palms of the Godly.26
A simple perceptual device designed to anesthetize us from the
nastier aspects of our inner reality has given the fundamentalist
movement much of its power.   From the sexuality their followers reject
within themselves, the leaders have conjured up the lechery of a
Satanic enemy.  From the hostility the faithful hide from themselves,
the leaders have built a fantasy of an adversary obsessed with violence.
They have crafted the indispensable tool that pulls together a
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