The Public Option and the End Times: Searching for sanity in the health-care debate

Originally published on the November 2009 Issue of Sojourners Magazine

The Public Option and the End Times: Searching for sanity in the health-care debate 

by Tom Sine

“This is about the dismantling of this country … We don’t want this country to turn into Russia,” declared Katy Abram, 35, to prolonged applause. Abram was sharing her concerns at a town hall meeting in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, as the health-care debate began raging in August. I am sure Sen. Arlen Specter, who hosted the gathering, and many others wondered what Russia has to do with the American health-care debate.

To get a deeper picture of what’s undergirding the health-care conversation, it’s important to unpack the “end times” sub-text for millions of conservative Christians who are intent on defeating this initiative. As I explained in Cease Fire: Searching for Sanity in America’s Culture Wars, “To understand the Christian Right, you need to understand not what they think or even what they believe. You need to begin by discovering what they are afraid of.”

Many of these good people, deeply influenced by popular prophecy theories, live in abject terror, in these “last days,” of being collectivized into a one-world Marxist gulag in which their liberties, faith, and guns are taken away and their families are placed at severe risk.

One of the most influential prophecy buffs is Tim LaHaye. His Left Behind series and his first book, The Battle for the Mind, sought to persuade evangelicals that their lives, families, and country will be taken over by the socialists as the first step in preparing for the reign of the Antichrist and the creation of a one-world government. For many religious conservatives, “socialism” has become the code world for this terrifying one-world takeover. I am convinced that politicization of eschatology is one of the major reasons for the migration of so many American evangelicals into the arms of the Far Right over the last 30 years.

In February, Tim LaHaye was interviewed on The Rachel Maddow Show. According to the online magazine Religion Dispatches, “LaHaye repeatedly returned to the dual claim that prophetic scenarios foretell a stage of socialism in which ‘government controls everything’—redistributing wealth from the haves to the have-nots—and that Obama is [such] a socialist working for such a world.”

This fearmongering is used extremely effectively by both the political Right and the Religious Right to galvanize opposition to President Obama’s health-care initiative. Not surprisingly, these conservative activists particularly link the socialist threat to the public option, since it would be government funded.

The Christian Coalition helped defeat the last health-care initiative, during the Clinton administration, by raising the specter of a socialist takeover of America. “Stop the Government Takeover” is a new campaign sponsored by today’s much-less-powerful Christian Coalition to defeat current health-care reform. The Coalition encouraged conservative Christians to download its “fact sheet” to take to town hall meetings this summer. The “fact sheet” reads in part: “It’s socialized medicine, plain and simple ... This plan represents the ‘foot-in-the-door’ to a massive ‘single-payer’ system, where private insurance is completely abolished and all medical personnel work for the government.”

Clearly, it is extremely difficult to reason with anyone who lives with such deeply held fear. But perhaps we can help cast another eschatological vision of hope that transcends right and left and reflects God’s deep and abiding commitment to bring justice, wholeness, and healing to the most vulnerable in our midst in these turbulent times.

Tom Sine is author of The New Conspirators: Creating the Future One Mustard Seed at a Time (www.msainfo.org).