http://killingthebuddha.com/ktblog/card-check-religion/I first encountered Pryor a few years back when I was researching a story about Battlecry {
http://www.therevealer.org/archives/timely_002836.php } , a militant right youth evangelical movement. Its leader, Ron Luce, explained to me that regulating the market made a mockery of God’s invisible hand, and that unions were a form of idolatry, a substitution of worldly solidarity for the only fellowship that matters, that of Jesus Christ. Luce, such a fierce opponent of “pornography” — a category in which he included not just Playboy but R-rated movies and magazines such as the one I was working for at the time, Rolling Stone — that he was willing to bend his free market fundamentalism in order to ban it all, proposed Wal-Mart, which censors material sold in its stores, as an example of a company following a godly path even without government help. Then he surprised me by naming as one of his chief allies Senator Pryor from Arkansas — Wal-Mart’s home state.
When I called Pryor to ask him about Luce’s claim, he volunteered a deeper association as his real Christian involvement: He was a member of the Family, a group I just happened to be writing a book about at the time.
Luce is a bit of a buffoon; the Family has been fighting organized labor since its formation as a union-busting coalition of Christian business executives in 1935, at the height of the New Deal. The Depression, they believed, was a punishment from God for the nation’s turn toward socialism. By the late 1940s, their membership was equal parts business and political elite, the leadership of the National Association Manufacturers — deeply involved in lobbying against EFCA today — and free market fundamentalists in Congress who united to roll back many of the rights of labor to organize won during the New Deal. Corporate greed wasn’t part of their calculations–at least, not explicitly. They believed then–and now–that business tycoons must be free to lead with their hearts, unbound by regulations or contracts with union. They called their approach “biblical capitalism,” an economic theology I discuss on Bloggingheads.tv {
http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/11164?in=00:19:53&out=00:31:32 } with Will Wilkinson from the conservative Cato Institute, who names it for what it really is: “self-interest by proxy.”
Pryor, a past organizer of the group’s National Prayer Breakfast, is no radical deregulator. A conservative Democrat, he’s still a Democrat, which is to say, he votes along party lines when doing so won’t seriously challenge the interests of big business. The Family doesn’t dictate his politics. But the group does shape them. He credits the organization with helping him to see that the wall between church and state has grown too high and encouraging him to view ostensibly secular issues in religious terms. “People separate
out,” the group’s leader, Doug Coe, preaches { http://www.harpers.org/archive/2003/03/0079525 } . “’Oh, okay, I got religion, that’s private.’ As if Jesus doesn’t know anything about building highways, or Social Security. We gotta take Jesus out of the religious wrapping.”
Then again, maybe the matter isn’t theological for Pryor, who inherited his seat from his father. Nobody ever accused him of being the sharpest knife in the drawer, a fact Pryor actually offered in his own defense when Bill Maher asked him to explain his belief in the “literacy” of the Bible (sic) and his anti-evolution views for his film Religulous. Maher can be a bully, and his understanding of religion lacks subtlety, to say the least, but when Pryor, stumped, declares “you don’t have to pass an IQ test to be in the Senate,” { http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fliFcvGAKk } even Maher seems to feel sorry him.
Pity the poor man no more. Today, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which declares the Employee Free Choice Act a “firestorm bordering on Armageddon,” awarded Senator Pryor { http://arkansasmatters.com/content/fulltext/news?cid=204721 } its Spirit of Enterprise Award.