Read an Excerpt

Soulless

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Chapter One

Godlessness

My book makes a stark assertion: Liberalism is a godless religion. Hello! Anyone there? I've leapt beyond calling you traitors and I am now calling you Godless. Apparently, everybody's cool with that. The fact that liberals are godless is not even a controversial point anymore.
--Ann Coulter

Welcome to Ann's world. And what a mean and nasty world it is. Here she is taking all the decent impulses that make Americans compassionate, hopeful, and generous--real Liberalism--and, with a total disregard for history and humanity, twisting them into the opposite of what they are.

How does she do it? An ounce of sophistry, a touch of misrepresentation, lit up with invective and some sly wit.

But she doesn't do it alone. Not even close.

She does it by using a media that's obsessed with entertainment. For them, long, blond, svelte Ann is the cutely packaged girl next door (if next door is Darien, Connecticut) who can impress the college boys by being able to talk dirty and nasty with the best of them. Venom is what she spills.

And why does she do it?

To amuse herself? So she claims: "Most of what I say I say to amuse myself and amuse my friends. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about anything beyond that."

It goesbeyond amusement, of course. Well beyond.

Ann is not harmless, an amusing conversationalist. Far from it. What she succeeds in doing is dividing us against each other, polarizing us whether we want to be polarized or not (and often we do not), playing to the lowest common denominator, and not only moving the ideological line to the right, but moving it downward in the process.

Social scientists argue, using polling data, that there is no culture war. Ann needs to create one in order to destroy the possibility that a decent progressive majority might ever triumph over the forces of hate.

The book Godless is Ann's latest call to arms for her hordes of true believers. What makes it different than the rest of her rants is that it plays the religion card.

In politics, that's a big card to play.

Welcome to Ann's new worldview: A politicization of God.

Look at the opposition. They have no God.

Look at us. We do. God is on our side.

It's classic stuff. When all else fails, they bring in God. Remember what Lincoln said: "Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God's side, for God is always right."

Ann's view is not Lincoln's. What's clear to everyone except Ann is that the president has failed. The war in Iraq has failed. So what do we have in Ann's world? We have God taking sides, with certain religions preferred over others. Want to guess which ones? You might not be right. And it was just Republicans and Democrats in politics last time I checked; now you have Ann putting God in the mix.

Ironic, wouldn't you say? Here we are, facing religious zealots in the Middle East, and what is the answer? We're arguing about who has God on their side--the Right or Liberals? Do we learn nothing?

First she said liberals were biased.

Then she said we really were traitors.

Now she says we're Godless.

It's a trilogy.

Slander/Treason/Godless. Ann does it all. Attack the New York Times. Defend Joe McCarthy. Declare God to be on your side. Of course.

If Alan Dershowitz hadn't written a book called Chutzpah, Ann could have done it.

This is what Ann writes: "Liberalism is a comprehensive belief system denying the Christian [and Jewish] belief in man's immortal soul. Their religion holds that there is nothing sacred about human consciousness."

No God.

The Episcopal Church "is barely even a church" in Ann's view.

I bet you guessed Episcopalians came out on top. Only at the country club.

"Everything liberals believe is in elegant opposition to basic Biblical precepts."

Nonsense!

In one sense, in the writerly way, Ann uses God as a gimmick. Religion is the spine of her new book. She admits this. She uses God as the organizing principle for her attack.

"Of course liberalism is a religion. It has its own cosmology, its own miracles, its own beliefs in the supernatural, its own churches, its own high priests, its own saints, its own total worldview, and its own explanation of the existence of the universe. In other words, liberalism contains all the attributes of what is generally known as 'religion.' "

By trying to turn liberalism into a religion, Ann makes the old attack feel fresh and clever: Hello again to Willie Horton and partial birth abortion; hello again to gay bashing and good-bye to evolution. Liberalism isn't just liberalism, it's a religion. Teachers aren't teachers, they're priests. The schools aren't schools, they're temples. Abortion isn't abortion, it's a sacrament. . . . Got it?

But God is more than a gimmick for her here. What better source of new political energy than that old standby, religious fervor, particular with a little Muslim-hating and a lot of Charles Darwin thrown in? You can hate liberalism a lot more if it's Godless, after all--and if God is on your side, not to mention signing you up to vote with the help of Reverend James C. Dobson's Focus on the Family, and telling your kid what to think in schools.

Using God is not a new idea in politics. It brings me back, most recently, to the days at the turnstile in the Houston Airport at the 1992 Republican Convention. I had gone to Houston to work for ABC News. This was the convention where Ronald Reagan would be the moderate, where Pat Robertson would give his memorable Religious Right speech, where the platform committee would fight about references to Lincoln. But before any of that happened, I got off the plane, walking very carefully, on doctor's orders, because . . .

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Excerpted from Soulless by Susan Estrich Copyright © 2006 by Susan Estrich. Excerpted by permission.
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