Posted on 08/15/2011 12:16:52 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Rep. Michele Bachman officially threw her hat into the presidential ring on June 27. Since then, the Minnesota congresswoman has emerged as a Republican front-runner, riding on a wave of Tea Party support and national media appearances.
New Yorker Washington correspondent Ryan Lizza spent four days with Bachmann and her staff aboard their campaign jet in mid-June. On Tuesday's Fresh Air, he talks about his unprecedented access to the congresswoman, whom he profiles in the Aug. 15, 2011, edition of The New Yorker. The piece looks at the writers, beliefs and books that Bachmann has specifically mentioned as major influences in her life.
"To understand her, you have to understand the movement that she came out of," Lizza tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "Her early ideological roots were formed by opposition to abortion ... and she's always been concerned with social issues, the culture war issues. ... She takes her Christianity very seriously. She comes out of a religious evangelical conservative movement that is very much concerned with developing a biblical worldview and applying it to all corners of one's life."
1. The Influence Of Francis Schaeffer And Nancy Pearcey
Bachmann's road to being born again started when she was in high school. She then went to Winona State University in Minnesota, where she met her husband, Marcus. In 1977, the Bachmanns watched a series of movies that were produced by the evangelical Francis Schaeffer called How Should We Then Live? Bachmann has cited the series on the campaign trail, telling an audience in Iowa that it was a profound influence on her life.
"[In the series, Schaeffer] takes the audience through the entire history of Western culture through Roe v. Wade," says Lizza. "The beginning chapters of this movie are all about where Christianity took wrong turns. For Schaeffer, it's the Enlightenment. It's the Italian Renaissance. It's Darwinism. It's secular humanism. It's any point in history where he believes man turns away from God and turns away from putting God at the center of life."
But in 1973, Schaeffer's focus began to shift from Western art and culture to abortion and the dangers of genetic engineering.
"Schaeffer decides that all of his philosophy and all of the teachings that he had been teaching about the dangers of moving away from a Christ-centered world — everything he warned about — is now coming to fruition with the Roe decision," says Lizza. "That the government is, in his terms, being taken over by an authoritarian elite. ... I emphasize this to show that this is the movie that Michelle Bachmann says changed her life. This is the movie that got her radicalized on the abortion issue. To understand her, I think you have to understand Schaeffer a little bit."
Bachmann was also influenced by a student of Schaeffer's named Nancy Pearcey, a well-known creationist and an advocate of Dominionism, the view that Christians are biblically mandated to occupy all secular institutions until Christ returns.
"Michele Bachmann has mentioned Pearcey's book [Total Truth] as one that was important to her," he says. "[The book] is in line with the Schaeffer-ite view of taking your Christian faith and making sure that it permeates all parts of your life. The key thing here is Christians should not just be go-to-church-on-Sunday Christians. Their religion should permeate all aspects of life."
2. The Influence Of John Eidsmoe
In 1979, Bachmann enrolled in the first law school class at Oral Roberts University. Students at Oral Roberts were required to sign a "code of honor" attesting to their Christian beliefs and commitment.
"It's a law school that taught its students biblical law," says Lizza. "[The school said] 'You need to understand the Bible, you need to understand biblical law and that's what the United States Constitution is built upon. And as a legal mind, you should understand when American law is and is not consistent with biblical law.'"
While at Oral Roberts, Bachmann worked as a research assistant for one of the professors, John Eidsmoe. She has brought up his influence on the campaign trail, telling one audience in Iowa this year that he "taught me so many aspects of our godly heritage."
Eidsmoe's 1987 book, Christianity and the Constitution, tells Christians that "they need to get politically active and they need to get involved with the legal system and they need to make sure American law is more biblically based," says Lizza. "That's what the book ends on, a clarion call for his students to get involved. ... Eidsmoe is someone who believes American law should be based on the Bible. He believes that the United States is a Christian nation, should remain a Christian nation and that our politics and our law should be permeated by one's Christian faith."
Bachmann's Politics
The first time Bachmann got involved in politics was in 1993, when she founded a publicly funded charter school in Stillwater, Minn., with some other parents.
"They signed a charter saying they were not allowed in any way to include a religious agenda at this school and they very quickly violated that and built the school around a Christian sectarian agenda to the point where parents ... became very alarmed." says Lizza. "The school district stepped in and warned them that they were going to lose their charter, and eventually Bachmann and another person who were spearheading this were forced off the board and forced off the leadership of that school."
Bachmann later ran for a seat on the Stillwater school board. She lost but won her first race a year later, in the Minnesota State Senate. In 2006, she was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. Lizza says that her message is shaped largely by the audience she's speaking with at any given time.
"This spring when she was doing some less headline-making visits to Iowa and speaking at churches — sort of under-the-radar wooing of religious leadership in Iowa — she knows how to speak that language and she knows how to draw on her history at Oral Roberts and her born-again experience," says Lizza. "She knows how to tell all of those stories so that an evangelical audience will bond with her. ... She's transitioned. She's transitioned into a candidate that talks much more about debt and spending and all of the issues that are important to the Tea Party right now."
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Interview Highlights On Bachmann's government benefits
"For someone whose ideology is really defined by a strong dislike for government, if you look at the way she's supported herself over the years, it's mostly through the government. After law school, she works at the IRS, she's there for four years, then in 1992 she starts taking in foster children and does that from 1992-1998 and is paid by the state to do that. She then works briefly for a local charter school and then she starts running for office and becomes first an employee of the state of Minnesota and then a congresswoman, an employee of the federal government. ... Her husband is a psychologist [who] has two counseling clinics that like any other medical professional [clinic] takes lots of money from Medicare and Medicaid — and then on top of that, has received generous farm subsidies for a farm he owns in Wisconsin."
On Bachmann's selection of a Robert E. Lee biography by J. Steven Wilkins as a book recommendation during her state Senate campaign
"For a number of years, Michele Bachmann's personal website had a list of books she recommended people read. It was called 'Michelle's must-read list.' I was looking over the list and noticed this biography of Lee by Wilkins. [I had] never heard of Wilkins and started looking at who he was. And frankly couldn't believe that she was recommending this book."
"Wilkins has combined a Christian conservatism with neo-confederate views and developed what is known as the theological war thesis. This is an idea that says the best way to understand the Civil War is to see it in religious terms, and [that] the South was an Orthodox Christian nation attacked by the godless North and that what was really lost after the Civil War was one of the pinnacles of Christian society. This insane view of the Civil War has been successfully injected into some of the Christian home-schooling movement curriculums with the help of [Wilkins]. My guess is this is how she encountered the guy at some point. ... She recommended this book on her website for a number of years. It is an objectively pro-slavery book and one of the most startling things I learned about her in this piece."
RE: John Eidsmoe
He will be to Bachmann what Jeremiah Wright was to Obama. The difference will be this -— THE MEDIA WILL NOT LET UP ON THIS RELATIONSHIP UNLIKE WRIGHT, WHERE THE MSM PRACTICALLY IGNORED IT.
For those who don’t kow John Eidsmoe... here’s a brief background:
John Eidsmoe is an attorney and a professor of constitutional law and related subjects at the Thomas Goode Jones School of Law, Faulkner University, Montgomery, Alabama, and previously taught at the O. W. Coburn School of Law at Oral Roberts University.
He served in the US Air Force as a Lt. Colonel and is an Alabama State Defense Force Colonel, Headquarters Judge Advocate, Deputy Chaplain and Training Officer.
“When Biblical law conflicted with American law, Eidsmoe said [in a 2011 interview], O.R.U. students were generally taught that ‘the first thing you should try to do is work through legal means and political means to get it changed.’” In his 1987 book Christianity and the Constitution, Eidsmoe wrote that America “was and to a large extent still is a Christian nation,” and that “our culture should be permeated with a distinctively Christian flavoring.”
Eidsmoe has stirred some controversy in his outside lecturing. In 2005, he spoke to the national convention of the Council of Conservative Citizens and in 2010 he addressed an event commemorating Alabama’s Secession Day where he told an interviewer that it was Alabama’s “constitutional right to secede,” and that “Jefferson Davis and John C. Calhoun understood the Constitution better than did Abraham Lincoln and Daniel Webster.”
In April, 2010, he was disinvited from a Tea Party rally in Wausau, Wisconsin, because of these statements and appearances.[2][4] Eidsmoe said in 2011 that he deeply despises racism, but that he will speak “to anyone.”
Congresswoman and presidential candidate Michele Bachmann has described Eidsmoe as “one of the professors who had a great influence on me”, “a wonderful man”, and “absolutely brilliant.” She worked for him while a law student at Oral Roberts as a research assistant on Christianity
The Leftist are so skitzoid.
One day they hate the people and corporations they think pay too little taxes.
The next day they hate the IRS attorneys that go after them.
It’s easy to understand why they hate her for being the foster mother to 23 children, since this reduced the number of kids who were aborted.
It probably drives them crazy to realize that’s 23 more votes for Bachmann too.
Those little aborted lumps of flesh, wouldn’t have voted for her. Just darn.
Obama’s inside circle, “God damn America, and let’s kill all the unborn we can.”
Bachmann’s inside circle, “God bless America, and every one of the unborn.”
Oh yes, she’s a threat alright. Thank heaven.
Yup, and so it begins. Everything we know about her is superficial (she’s not the only one of the current field). Philosophically she is spot on. I certainly don’t expect someone with no flaws, nor does the rest of the country. But she’s got to be strong enough to withstand the coming onslaught. Time will tell if she can. That’s what primary season is for.
Cindie
I am wondering if the issue of Michele Bachmann’s “submission” to her husband will become as big an issue as the idea of Pres. Kennedy’s submission to the Pope was during his campaign?
My reasons for supporting her must really send them off the rails.
I trust her.
Nothing they can do with that.
That would be about right.
and that what was really lost after the Civil War was one of the pinnacles of Christian society
Plus the 9th and 10th Amendments.
I just have to laugh at the hypocrisy and double standards of the MSM.
A CBS News reporter broached the foster parent subject with Michele in what appeared to be an effort to coax her to explain claims that she “raised” 23 foster children, into admitting she simply hosted most of the kids for a limited amount of time.
Those who accept “the right to privacy” as the right to destroy innocent life suddenly have become STICKLERS on the proper definition of the word “raised.”
They even challenged Bahcmann on the exact time frame she took care of these kids.
It seems that when pro-life women promote motherhood, those who defend abortion as a “privacy” issue feel more than justified in prying into their personal lives if doing so provides a solid platform upon which to falsely portray a female conservative Christian politician as a fraud.
RE: I am wondering if the issue of Michele Bachmann’s “submission” to her husband will become as big an issue
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Trust me, if Bachmann is the nominee ( and even if she were a serious challenger ), the MSM is going to NITPICK every single nook and cranny of her life to death and make almost everything an issue — from the 23 foster kids she claims to raise, to how secession sympathizing john Eidsmoe influneces her view, to the influence her husband will have on her in the White House, to her health issues.
Her 23 foster kids will have to be prepared to be hounded by the press.
If you haven’t read Francis Schaeffer, you do not understand Western civilization.
Seriously.
We already know more about Michelle her husband than we do about Obama.
I hear ya, and you’re right.
FoxNews had Obama’s first stop today on, and the first questioner spent a minute or so thanking BamBam for changing how things are done in Washington (or some such, paraphrased).
Can you believe people still trust this guy? Holy cow!
I’ll bet there’s no one at Nipper who isn’t a secular humanist.
But then, this is politics, and the NPR staff is about as big a bunch of liberals that you’ll find in DC.
I agree. And anyone who actually has a grasp of what foster parents do, knows the period of help they often provide, is temporary in nature.
On Extreme-Home Makeover (ABC) (I may have the exact name wrong), they have championed foster parents by rebuilding at least one home for a foster parent family.
Now Bachmann is bad for being a foster parent.
The only time charity is good, is if the Left can take credit for it.
Churches that are the largest single private enterprise helping people out across this nation are demonized constantly, with hardly ever a mention of the good they do. They don’t just give away money either. They provide clothing, food, help with connections to put people back to work.
Let a leftist give $2.50 to a poor person on a corner, and it’s film at eleven.
I assume the leftmedia will be questioning Michele Bachmann, directly, about her praise of John Eidsmoe. He seems to have some controversial ideas but nothing close to the kind of insanity Jeremiah Wright preached in Obama's former church. Frankly, I can't see voters getting too wrought up over this but that may depend on how Bachmann handles the inevitable attempt from the leftmedia to gin up her association and praise of Eidsmoe into a faux 'scandal'. I think she'll handle the situation with aplomb and media attempts to hammer it will backfire because they allowed Obama to skate on his much closer relationship with the racist firebrand, Jeremiah ("GD America!") Wright. We'll see.
NPR is an employment opportunity, that is “Nut-job Progressive Required”. Why do we allow government funds to be used for blatantly political propaganda like this?
That was one of my biggest complaints about the Republicans from 1994 to 2006.
They had 12 years to correct this situation, and they didn’t do squat. Then they preach the wonders of giving them back the majority. Total B. s.
Go Tea Party. I do have some reservations re the Tea Party though.
Does any lib (progressive) seriously think that Bachmann would submit to her husband’s will on affairs of state? Of course they don’t.
It's sad and ironic that his son Franky is now a liberal mouthpiece for the Huffington Post. His criticisms of the Republicans will become more and more interesting to watch as Rep. Bachmann grows in stature.
RE: Franky
In 1990 Franky Schaeffer became an Orthodox Christian as a member of the Orthodox Church, which he says “embraces paradox and mystery.” He converted in 1992 at a Greek Orthodox Church in Newburyport, MA.
I wonder what the Greek Orthodox church has to say about his view that the religious right’s position on abortion, is a fear of female sexuality.
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