Michele Bachmann Crazy Like a Fox

When the Washington Examiner’s Byron York asked Michele Bachmann if she was submissive to her husband at the Fox News GOP debate Thursday night, the crowd gasped and booed. That’s because wifely submission -- also known as complementarian theology -- is central to the faith of many evangelicals. York’s question wasn’t about religion per se, but was an attempt to probe whether, if Bachmann became president, America would be getting Marcus' decisions and not hers.


It’s common for Christian politicians questioned about their adherence to submission theology to dodge a scriptural explanation, as Bachmann did. After all, while dominionist-minded evangelicals like Bachmann intentionally set out to bring their "biblical worldview" into politics, they recognize that it’s bad 21st century politics -- especially for a female candidate -- to admit to a theology that could cause the same gasps and boos from voters who would recoil at the image of an obedient wife as president of the United States.


Rep. Daniel Webster (R-FL), the target of then-Rep. Alan Grayson’s "Taliban Dan" ad because of his commitment to submission theology in the 2010 midterm election, similarly refused to explain to his constituents what the theology really is. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Mike Huckabee, a former Southern Baptist pastor, was questioned about his denomination’s official adherence to it, although he never really explained it either.


Bachmann tells it, America's national sovereignty is slipping away, and the sanctity of the family is being overrun by an encroaching nanny state. But we can find hope in the story of the Israelites, who, after drifting from their faith and coming under siege in their own land, shunned their false idolatry and pushed back the invaders with God's help: "The men of Issachar understood the times that they lived in, and they knew what to do," she says, referring to one of the 12 tribes of Israel. "They had the courage to carry it out." Although Bachmann doesn't note this, it's the only episode in the Bible in which men are led into battle by a woman, Deborah.


This is Michele Bachmann's message, in its biblical essence: America will be restored to its founding glory by a righteous few, and it's going to take a fight. "It is my opinion that God has not given up on the United States of America," she says, the crowd beginning to feel it, "and we shouldn't either."


Since her election to Congress in 2006, Bachmann has earned a reputation as one of the lower chamber's biggest bomb throwers. She has accused the president of harboring "anti-American" views, warned that census data could be used to round up dissenters into internment camps, and declared that the Treasury Department is quietly planning on replacing the dollar with a global currency. To her critics, Bachmann is flat-out crazy, a purveyor of, as Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) put it, "psycho talk.


But beneath language that seems cribbed straight from Glenn Beck's magical chalkboard, there is a method to the congresswoman's madness. Her rise was not a fluke, and she is not, as Fox News' Chris Wallace clumsily implied in June, a "flake." Bachmann's candidacy represents the crest of a movement, four decades in the making, to restore faith as the foundation of public life in America—from public schools on up to the White House.


From her days as an abortion protester and conservative foot soldier, she has climbed the ranks, at every step of the way reshaping the political dynamic around her to reflect her own frenzied style. In some respects, her career arc mirrors the president's—a restless youth, a life-changing trip abroad, a stint as a community organizer, and then a rapid rise from the state legislature to the US Capitol. Now she wants Obama's job.