What you have to understand about the fundamentalist mindset is that it isn’t just gay people they hate.  It’s everyone.

For those who believe that Sinclair Lewis’ Elmer Gantry–and its portrayal of evangelical preachers as hypocritical frauds–offers the last word on conservative Christianity, Rick Warren cannot possibly be a force for good. I have yet to let Jesus enter my life, but I admire Warren. We once appeared on a panel together along with Harvard’s Peter Gomes at the Aspen Ideas Festival. When it came time for questions, a woman stood up, proclaimed her Judaism, and asked Warren if she was going to burn in hell. He paused before responding–and then answered her question the only way it could be answered. Yes, he said to audible gasps. My reaction was that either you believe that Jesus is the savior or you do not, and I found myself impressed that Warren remained true to his convictions, knowing full well that the audience would not like what he said.

–Alan Wolfe, The New Republic

Emphasis mine. You can suppose Wolfe would be equally impressed that Al Capone remained true to his conviction that crime pays.  Anyone who thinks that all Sinclair Lewis did in Elmer Gantry was paint a shallow two-dimensional picture of the fundamentalist herd as a bunch of cynical hucksters never read the book.  Lewis is hard to read sometimes for the brutally clear eye he lays on American life in the early twentieth century, and his relevance to the America we live in today becomes crystal clear the moment you start reading him.  The picture he painted of American populist fundamentalism was so spot-on accurate to the practice of it I knew as a kid in the late 20th, not so much in the particulars as in the culture and mindset, that reading it made me squirm uncomfortably.

The church provided his only oratory, except for campaign speeches by politicians ardent about Jefferson and the price of binding-twine; it provided all his paintings and sculpture, except for the portraits of Lincoln, Longfellow, and Emerson in the school-building, and the two china statuettes of pink ladies with gilt flower-baskets which stood on his mother’s bureau.  From the church came all his profounder philosophy, except the teachers’ admonitions that little boys who let garter-snakes loose in school were certain to be licked now and hanged later, and his mother’s stream of opinions on hanging up his overcoat, wiping his feet, eating fried potatoes with his fingers. and taking the name of the Lord in vain.

If he had sources of literary inspiration outside the church–in McGuffey’s Reader he encountered the boy who stood on the burning deck, and he had a very pretty knowledge of the Nick Carter Series and the exploits of Cole Younger and the James Boys–yet here too the church had guided him.  In Bible stories, the the words of the great hymns, in the anecdotes which the various preachers quoted, he had his only knowledge of literature–

The story of Little Lame Tom who shamed the wicked rich man that owned the handsome team of grays and the pot hat that led him to Jesus.  The ship’s captain who in the storm took counsel with the orphaned but righteous child of missionaries in Zomballa.  The Faithful Dog who saved his master during a terrific conflagration (only sometimes it was a snowstorm, or an attack by Indians) and roused him to give up horse-racing, rum, and playing the harmonica.

How familiar they were, how thrilling, how explainatory to Elmer of the purposes of life, how preparatory for his future usefulness and charm.

…

He had, in fact, got everything from the church and Sunday School, except, perhaps, any longing whatever for decency and kindness and reason.

Hypocrisy isn’t in knowing you are a fraud.  That’s Hollywood’s fundamentalist and it exists to reassure actual ticket-buying fundamentalists that Hollywood still loves them and will keep selling them all the blue-eyed white anglo-saxon Jesuses they want.  Yes, it’s a safe bet that many in the upper ranks dispise the flock.  But not all of them do.  The mindset both in the pews and behind the pulpit is that they are a better class of miserable sinner then you are and that makes them the right hand of God Almighty.

This particular strain of Americana is the fountainhead of American anti-intellectualism and know-nothingness and the reason for that isn’t because they understand that intellect without conscience is a very dangerous thing.  Conscience is the first thing you have to kill within yourself to join the tribe.  They hate any and all human achivement because it shows that humans Can achieve.  The sight of human kindness and compassion, the kind that comes straight from the heart, without strings attached, simply out of love, terrifies them, because that kind of selfless whole hearted love is utterly unfathomable to them. How can anyone possibly love their gay son for the person they are?  Ney…’tis a greater love to stick a knife in their heart…  The common complaints about "elitism" from the kook pews isn’t a complaint about vanity and arrogance…it springs reflexively from that deep hatred within for anyone with a bigger brain and a bigger heart then their own.  H.L. Menkean pegged the type perfectly in his obiturary of William Jennings Bryant.  He might as well have been talking about Warren when he wrote the following…

This talk of sincerity, I confess, fatigues me. If the fellow was sincere, then so was P.T. Barnum. The word is disgraced and degraded by such uses. He was, in fact, a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without any shame or dignity. What animated him from end to end of his grotesque career was simply ambition–the ambition of a common man to get his hand upon the collar of his superiors, or, failing that, to get his thumb into their eyes. He was born with a roaring voice, and it had the trick of inflaming half-wits against their betters, that he himself might shine. 

Warren has none of the vitriolic bombast of a Bryant or Falwell or Dobson, but so what?  When you can look a jewish person in the face and tell them they’re going to burn in hell for all eternity, does it really matter that you do it with a smile verses a snarl?   Does calling down God’s wrath on Jews really command respect when it’s done out of conviction?  Then I guess the millions who went to the ovens in the Holocaust died for nothing after all, and all the millions who died in anti-Jewish pogroms before them too.  We know how many Jews were alive in the days of Christ, because their Roman overlords kept good population records.  By the standards of natural population growth, or so I’m told, there ought to be around 280 million Jews walking this good earth right now, right this moment.  In fact there are about 19 million.  And Hitler didn’t do all that…

We shall see how defenders of the Church take pains to distinguish between "anti-Judaism" and "antisemitism"; between Christian Jew-hatred as a "necessary but insufficient" cause of the Holocaust; between the "sins of the children" and the sinlessness of the Church as such.  These distinctions become meaningless before the core truth of this history: Because the hatred of Jews had been made holy, it became lethal.

-James Carroll, Constantine’s Sword

Rick Warren is a hate monger, and the fact that he is willing to stick to his religious conceits over the humanity of one Jewish woman standing right in front of him isn’t proof of integrity, it is proof that he’s taken his own humanity around behind the barn and killed it.  Is sincerity really being able to look a person in the face and deny the common human heart you both share?   Doesn’t blind obedience to dogma of any sort involve a necessary amount of self-deception?   What you have to keep in mind, is that just because you are a charlatan that doesn’t mean you don’t see yourself as being sincere.  The first person you have to fool after all, is yourself.