[Peace-discuss] FW: Michelle Goldberg's Gone To the MegaChurch and She Found Christian Nationalism There

[Lisa Chason]

Michelle Goldberg's Gone To the MegaChurch and She Found Christian
Nationalism There 

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW 

One of the things Hannah Arendt talks about is the way totalitarian
movements construct an entire parallel reality, and then insist that that
reality be substituted for the actual reality. You see this with everything,
from what's going on in the science class, to the construction of foreign
policy, to the promotion of abstinence education to the kind of fictitious
numbers that are given for the Bush tax cuts. It's something quite new in
American politics - this idea almost of radical relativism - the idea that
truth is determined by the person who has the power to impose it.

* * * 

Michelle Goldberg took a close-up look at right-wing religion in America and
has reemerged to tell others just what she found there - a hypnotic mix of
Jesus, community, and ballot box activism. Her new book, Kingdom
<http://www.buzzflash.com/store/items/211>  Coming: The Rise of Christian
Nationalism, explores the parallel universe that threatens our reality-based
world, and indeed, could replace it. We can just hear Thomas Jefferson
rolling over in his separation-of-church-and-state grave. Michelle Goldberg
talked with BuzzFlash about Hitler, Scalia, Christian revisionist history,
and Christian reconstructionism. 

* * *

BuzzFlash: In his remarks at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, Stephen
Colbert said, "Though I am a committed Christian, I believe that everyone
has the right to their own religion, be you Hindu, Jewish or Muslim. I
believe there are infinite paths to accepting Jesus Christ as your personal
savior." How would you take that quotation and apply it to Kingdom Coming:
The Rise <http://www.buzzflash.com/store/items/211>  of Christian
Nationalism?

Michelle Goldberg: As always, reality keeps sneaking up behind Stephen
Colbert's satire. The Christian nationalists, which is a term that I use to
describe people from various denominations, but who believe that the United
States needs to be remade as a specifically Christian nation, includes most
of the leadership of the religious right's huge swaths of the Republican
Party. The vast majority of these people will say that everyone has a right
to practice their own religion. But they'll say, as long as they recognize
that this is a Christian nation. You can do what you want as long as you
kind of know your place. There's one quote in this book that was really,
really telling about this. The Congress was going to have the first-ever
Hindu priest give an invocation. The Bailey[?] Research Council issued this
really angry statement, which says: "While it is true that the United States
of America was founded on the sacred principle of religious freedom for all,
that liberty was never intended to exalt other religions to the level that
Christianity holds in our nation's heritage. Our founders expected that
Christianity and no other religion would receive support from the
government, as long as that support did not violate people's consciences and
their right to worship. They would have found utterly incredible the idea
that all religions, including paganism, be treated with equal deference."
That's from the Family Research Council, which is a spin-off of Focus on the
Family.

BuzzFlash: Dobson's group.

Michelle Goldberg: Right. This is Tony Perkins' group now.

BuzzFlash: I listen to that statement and I think, one, it's a historically
inaccurate one. That is historically inaccurate because the debates over the
Constitution clearly indicated that the intention was to separate church and
state, and there were even those who felt very strongly that if any church
became involved in the state, it would corrupt the church and not
necessarily the other way around. Second of all, the statement just doesn't
make any sense. So, I mean, that they - the Constitution said we would
support - you know, we could support a religion, but only Christianity? I
don't know where that - Where does the Constitution say any of this?

Michelle Goldberg: The Virginia religious liberty statute was written by
Jefferson and is widely seen as the basis for the First Amendment. As
Jefferson wrote in his autobiography, some had wanted to put an amendment
into that statute saying that Jesus Christ was a source of religious
liberty. Jefferson said, "It was rejected by the great majority in proof
that they meant to comprehend within the mantle of its protection the Jew
and the gentile, the Christian and the Mohammedan, the Hindu and infidel of
every denomination." So where do they get this from? Part of what I seek to
do in my book is show that this is not just a political movement, but an
entire parallel reality. It has its own revisionist history, including its
own revisionist American history. There are volumes upon volumes that
essentially rewrite the history of America, cherry picking various quotes
and taking things out of context to try to show that the founders intended
to create an Evangelical Christian America, and that separation of church
and state is something that they never intended, and indeed would have been
appalled by.

One of the crucial figures in spreading this kind of Christian revisionist
history is a figure named David Barton, who's actually the Vice Chairman of
the Texas Republican Party, which I think shows you how much this ideology,
which has departed so far from rationality or scholarship, is rooted and
intertwined now with the Republican Party.

BuzzFlash: I have an issue that I've brought up before with the books we've
carried about the attempt to turn America into a theocracy. A rather small
item appeared in the paper, and we posted it on BuzzFlash, having to do with
Antonin Scalia. He is a proponent of theocracy. He's an Opus Dei Catholic,
which is very close to the Evangelical movement, and when he was speaking at
a synagogue in Alabama last year, he told the members of the synagogue that
they shouldn't fear a Christian nation because Jews have always been safe in
a Christian nation. I'm thinking, how can this man be "brilliant" when
Adolph Hitler ran what he very much celebrated as a Christian nation?

Michelle Goldberg: Hitler's relationship to Christianity is complicated
because he also had all this kind of pagan, Arian mythology. But, absolutely
yes, it's a preposterous statement. The entire history of Europe bears that
out. But at the same time, even if you said, okay, if America's a Christian
nation, they won't persecute you, I would say that that is still not good
enough. You know, prior to the creation of Israel, Jews were by and large
safe in Muslim countries. They kind of had their place, and it was
understood that they weren't weren't quite citizens, but they were
protected. So I would say that being a tolerated, protected minority whose
rights are granted at the pleasure of the majority is a very different thing
than being a full and equal citizen.

BuzzFlash: To carry that a bit further, Scalia himself says that he's a
strict constructionist - only what's in the Constitution. Where in the
Constitution does it say that this is a Christian country?

Michelle Goldberg: The Constitution was very consciously the only founding
national document that does not mention God. There's an excellent book that
looks at this, called The Godless Constitution. That wasn't an oversight. It
was a remarkable thing for the time, and it shows the Enlightenment values
of the founders. One of the things that some of the Christian nationalists
have tried to do is to say that in the end of the Constitution, when it says
"in the year of our Lord," they have tried to say that that was an attempt
to give it the imprimatur of Christianity.

BuzzFlash: You mean merely the dating of it, basically?

Michelle Goldberg: Right. It kind of reminds you of another Stephen Colbert
routine, when he's talking to an atheist, to Sam Harris, and he's saying,
well, what about the money - "in God we trust" - don't use money.

BuzzFlash: One more question, because it just flabbergasts me that he is on
the Supreme Court. Everyone says, oh, I may disagree with him, but he's just
so brilliant and scholarly. So it's not in the Constitution, yet he says
he's a strict constructionist. Where in the world does he get this? Is he
just a liar? 

Michelle Goldberg: Obviously, I can't speak for Antonin Scalia. I will say
that there is a very conservative school of Constitutional interpretation
which is actually adhered to, I think, by a lot of Bush's judicial
appointees, which essentially holds the Bill of Rights don't apply to the
states. They don't say that it says Congress shall make no law. It doesn't
say that the states can make no law. So they'll say what is to stop each
state from declaring themselves to be a Christian state? I don't know where
Scalia falls on that. But there is on the right this kind of radically
circumscribed understanding of First Amendment freedoms that I think would
shock a lot of people. most people take for granted the fact that your
rights are protected on the local level as well as the national level.

BuzzFlash: It's what people like Ashcroft and Scalia bring to the
Constitution - it's not in the Constitution. It makes it ironic to say that
he's a strict constructionist because actually he does exactly what he
accuses other judges of doing that he doesn't like, which is bringing his
own perspective to the Constitution. It 's just not in there that the
Constitution is a divinely given document. 

It's not in the Constitution. But he believes, as Bush does, because
democracy is such a gift, that it must be divinely inspired. Therefore,
since God is Christian, it must be a Christian document. That is why
Ashcroft says, Jesus is our king in America. And Scalia is in the same camp
as Bush - they regard it as a divine document, and since the only divinity
to them is Jesus Christ, therefore it is a Christian document. Therefore, we
are a Christian nation, even though there is nothing in the document that
signifies that and the founders, as you and I have discussed, explicitly
excluded God from the Constitution and explicitly made the decision to keep
church and state separate for a variety of reasons. One of them was to
prevent a backsliding into the monarchies of Europe which largely justified
their power as being divinely selected dynasties. 

We talked with Stephanie Hendricks a little bit about dominionism. Can you
explain  what that term means?

Michelle Goldberg: Let me start by explaining Christian reconstructionism,
because dominionism flows from that. Christian reconstructionism is a very
small sect that actually has a quite different eschatology than most
Evangelical Protestants. Most Evangelical Protestants in America are what is
called pre-millennial disfoundationalists, which basically means that they
believe that the rapture and Armageddon will come, that Christ will return
to earth, and then there will be a thousand years of peace. The
post-millennialists believe that they first have to build the kingdom of
Christ on earth, and it has to rule for a thousand years, and then Christ
will return. They're much more activist because there's much more of a role
for humans to play in bringing about the Second Coming. Their philosophy of
government is very, very harsh. It's the closest that anyone comes to
envisioning a real Taliban-style theocracy - the execution of homosexuals,
the execution of women who are unchaste before marriage. But they're a
minority. 

Their political philosophy, dominionism, basically holds that God gave the
saints dominion over all aspects of life and creation, and that Christians
need to retake their proper place and control every aspect of human society.
That's become very, very influential, and it's something that's spread to a
number of thinkers. Some of the most influential are probably Tim LaHaye and
James Dobson. Tim LaHaye is pretty explicitly a dominionist. With James
Dobson, it's kind of implicit in much of what he writes. It's basically an
idea that's central to a lot of what Pat Robertson has done in building the
Christian Coalition. It's central to a lot of these reformation projects,
like the Ohio Restoration Project. They're basically saying we need
Evangelical Christians to take over every aspect of the state political
machinery. This idea has kind of filtered down - it's a part of Christian
reconstructionism that has become popularized. 

The post-millennialists are trying to facilitate the arrival of Christ. But
for the most part, pre-millennialism has bred a certain kind of passivity.
If you really believe that we're in the end times and the rapture is
imminent, then really all you need to kind of do is sit back.

What's happened is that, through people like LeHaye, pre-millennialism in
the 1980s was really politicized. The ideal is that you might only have a
generation or two more, but during those generations, we have to make this a
godly country. It's part of your responsibility as a Christian to spread the
gospel and spread righteousness.

BuzzFlash: Kind of clean house before the Second Coming.

Michelle Goldberg: Exactly.

BuzzFlash: Okay, now let's look at a specific advocacy-slash-think tank
that's facilitating this. Can you explain, for instance, in terms of
intelligent design, the significance of the Seattle based Center for Science
and Culture?It's played a very pivotal role in the development of this
euphemism for creationism, "intelligent design."

Michelle Goldberg: Well, the Center for Science and Culture is housed within
the Discovery Institute, which is a conservative think tank in Seattle. It's
funded in part by Howard Ahmanson, who is actually is a Christian
reconstructionist. We said before that most people weren't, but he actually
is a pretty forthright theocrat. And the Center for Science and Culture
takes creationism and tries to legitimize it in scientific terms, and make
it sound as if it's really just a kind of competing scientific theory. It
hires people with a lot of impressive degrees, although, in many cases, they
got the degrees specifically with the idea of using them to discredit
Darwinism for religious reasons. It'll put someone forward like Jonathan
Wells, who has a Ph.D. from Berkeley, and yet here he is, defending
intelligent design. So they've given a lot of thought to packaging
intelligent design to make it seem like legitimate science. And they've
given a lot of thought to how to try to infiltrate their ideas into the
culture.

One of the most interesting and clearest statements of their intentions
comes from a leaked document called "The Wedge Strategy."  It's a 1999
fund-raising proposal that shows very, very clearly that they want to use
intelligent design as a way to replace the foundations of modern Western
thought. They say they want to do away with "the materialistic conception of
reality." That would be replaced with a supernatural conception of reality.
In the scientific method, you observe things. You test things. You build on
knowledge. When something is discredited, you move on. You find other
hypotheses. This is how most of us understand reality. It's why, when people
found dinosaur bones or discovered carbon dating, they said, oh, the
Biblical account must be wrong. Or at least it must be symbolic or
metaphorical. It's clearly not scientifically correct. 

What they would essentially say is that you have to start with the Biblical
account as the foundation of truth, and if you find something in the world
that contradicts that, then there's something wrong with your findings
basically. You're either seeing it wrong, you're interpreting it wrong.
Basically, how do you know what truth is? You have to start with the word of
God. So this would mean a huge revolution in the very structure of our
thought and our society. 

BuzzFlash: As Mark Crispin Miller has said, they don't want to take us back
just to before the revolution. They want to take us back to before the
Enlightenment.

Michelle Goldberg: One thing that is important to realize is that, if you
read the words of, say, televangelist D. James Kennedy, who's very
influential, his books very specifically attack the Enlightenment. Not only
does he attack the Enlightenment, he attacks the Renaissance. They see this
battle between the Renaissance and the Reformation, and they believe that
the Renaissance and the Enlightenment are corrupted by the influence of the
paganism of the ancients. They reject all classical knowledge and see, as
opposed to that, a reformation as the closest thing to the kind of society
they would like to create - either a kind of theocracy, such as in the
Calvinist theocracy in Geneva, or the Puritan theocracy in the Colonies.

BuzzFlash: I just want to make an observation about what you described as
creationism/intelligent design. It just reminds me of the political parallel
about fixing the facts - when going into the war with Iraq. In other words,
you find contradictory facts. You somehow make them fit into the game plan,
no matter what.

Michelle Goldberg: I kind of show in my book that the reason this debate is
important is because it's part of a more general contempt for the truth and
contempt for empirical reality.

I describe the movement as proto-totalitarian, not totalitarian. I don't
think that we're anywhere close to the kind of horrors that we've seen in
other countries in the 20th Century. But I think some tendencies are at
least nascent in this movement.

One of the things Hannah Arendt talks about is the way totalitarian
movements construct an entire parallel reality, and then insist that that
reality be substituted for the actual reality. You see this with everything
from what's going on in the science class, to the construction of foreign
policy, to the promotion of abstinence education to the kind of fictitious
numbers that are given for the Bush tax cuts. It's something quite new in
American politics - this idea almost of radical relativism - the idea that
truth is determined by the person who has the power to impose it.

BuzzFlash: And to quote our friend again, Stephen Colbert, about Bush's low
poll numbers. He said Bush, "my hero," doesn't need to worry about this
because these poll numbers merely reflect reality. And as we all know,
reality is a liberal bias. And one of Colbert's opening schticks was about
"I feel it in my gut." I only do what I feel in my gut. There's a lot of
nerve endings there, they tell me. The facts don't matter. All that matters
is what's in his gut. If he believed that Christ is leading him or God is
talking to him, empirical facts don't matter. And they don't matter to some
of  the people he appoints to scientific committees or boards. 

Michelle Goldberg: You essentially have this idea that truth has to be
balanced with falsehood.

BuzzFlash: Yes, that's certainly true. You bring up the interesting and
rather distasteful case of David Hager, who opposed the morning-after pill
and persuaded the FDA to overrule a majority recommendation to make the pill
available over the counter. Then it turned out that his former wife told a
reporter for The Nation that he was - what shall I say? 

Michelle Goldberg: Well, that he had been raping her.

BuzzFlash: And he quietly resigned from his position. 

Michelle Goldberg: He resigned, but I think it's important to keep in mind
that there's a lot of figures like him within the federal health
bureaucracy. So it's not as if he resigned and now all is right.

He's an example in terms of his approach to science and evidence, and his
desire to impose what is often called a Christian world view on the country.
There's a lot of people who have the same backgrounds that are in the
federal bureaucracy. I think it's often very hard for people who don't do
this for a living, or pay attention to politics, to understand the influence
that somebody who's relatively obscure, on a relatively obscure
subcommittee, can have on their actual day-to-day lives.

BuzzFlash: A person we haven't really discussed a lot before, is Marvin
Olasky, a former Jew who became a convert and is a professor at the
University of Texas, Austin. What is his role in the rise of Christian
nationalism?

Michelle Goldberg: I'm not sure whether he actually identifies himself as a
Christian reconstructionist, but he's very close to Christian
reconstructionism. Basically, Marvin Olasky is like David Barton - a kind of
revisionist historian. According to his revisionist history, the welfare
state and the end of church-based charity have led to a decline in America
throughout the 19th and 20th Centuries. I'm sure you've heard the phrase
"compassionate conservatism." That's a phrase that comes from the title of
one of Marvin Olasky's books that George W. Bush actually read the
introduction to. And Olasky was an advisor on Bush's first Presidential
campaign. He definitely very much influenced not just Bush's thinking, but
the thinking of a lot of the Republican Party. 

BuzzFlash: Olasky was Jewish and a Marxist at one point, and then found
Jesus. He ended up as sort of Bush's Billy Graham. As you say, Olasky is the
godfather of many of his ideas, particularly the phrase "compassionate
conservatism" and the whole faith-based approach that Bush has adopted.

Michelle Goldberg: I'm not sure if he is still close to Bush. He was clearly
the impetus behind the creation of the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives,
which is something that's gotten billions of dollars.

But he's not a Bush advisor any more. He's now the editor of an Evangelical
magazine, The World. He's still very influential in that world, but I don't
know what his relationship to Bush is.

BuzzFlash: Let me ask you about the growth of the mega-church. What is that
phenomenon? I read about churches getting bigger and bigger in size.

Michelle Goldberg: It's not just that they're getting bigger and bigger in
size. They're also getting bigger and bigger in function. A lot of these
churches look more like suburban megaplexes or shopping malls than any
traditional idea of what a church looked like. They're these massive
suburban structures that encompass not just these amphitheatre-type chapels,
but also day care, gyms, coffee shops, dinner places. They tend to sprout up
in these very new suburbs and exurbs that have virtually no organic
community or public space, and where you have the situation where the people
who live there aren't usually from there. 

A lot of these places didn't even exist ten or fifteen years ago. You have
all of these people who don't have roots, and don't have any kind of
community, and the church comes, and it's this instant social world. It's
there to provide everything that you need. Certainly that could be a
positive thing for people. Clearly they are incredibly welcoming. You go in
there and sometimes you almost feel like you're being love- bombed. But the
thing is, often these megachurches also are giving people a very specific
and detailed political ideology. When there's nothing else challenging that,
it takes hold all the more. If there's nothing to contradict them, you have
people living in an almost total parallel reality.

Under the IRS rules, churches aren't allowed to campaign for a Republican
candidate. But they are allowed to campaign for ostensibly non-partisan
issues like a gay marriage amendment. And so through the use of things like
the gay marriage amendment, these churches can basically be enlisted as
massive auxiliaries of the Republican get-out-the-vote machine. In 2004 in
Ohio, they just moved the phone banks and voter registration into the
megachurches. I remember there were stories in 2004 that liberals and
progressive Democrats felt pretty confident because they were out on the
streets, and they weren't seeing the Republican get-out-the-vote machine.
That's because a lot of it was taking place in the churches.

BuzzFlash: A good example of this in the 2004 election is the activity of
the current Republican candidate for governor of Ohio, Ken Blackwell, who
championed the anti-gay marriage amendment in Ohio. There were questions
about the propriety of that. He was and still is Secretary of State. But as
you say, that was a de facto get-out-the-Republican-vote drive

Michelle Goldberg: Yes. Before the election, I went to the megachurches.
There was lots of dancing, lots of lights, and then this incredibly
impassioned sermon. They were all about you need to form a mighty army and
march on the ballot box, and everything was about the homosexuals, and the
decadence and depravity, and they're coming for your children. It would just
go on and on and on, but it was all entirely political. 

BuzzFlash: From what you just described, they have an entertainment
component to them.

Michelle Goldberg: Absolutely. The music sounds much more like soft rock -
it's not hymns. It's kind of soft rock but with "baby" replaced by "Jesus."
And big screens and these kind of psychedelic swirling patterns all over the
place - it's kind of a really impressive light show. 

BuzzFlash: When you were covering the case of intelligent design in Dover,
Pennsylvania - which was eventually defeated - did you find these people
amiable, nice, pleasant?

Michelle Goldberg: Sure. But my experiences of most people everywhere on a
one-on-one basis are amiable, and kind. Having reported a little bit in the
Middle East - it's kind of useful to realize that somebody's ideology can be
violently opposed to you, and they might support politics that would
actually lead to your destruction. But that doesn't mean they won't have you
over for lunch and be a totally gracious host. So on a one-on-one basis, I
met people all the time who were charming and generous. A lot of time, I
didn't really do much to hide who I was, although I wouldn't really
volunteer what I was up to. But I answered questions honestly. I told people
I was Jewish. I didn't try to pass myself off as one of them, certainly.

And so they're good people. But that doesn't mean that they won't support
policies that would make this country unlivable, or that would destroy
everything that people like me value in this country. It doesn't mean that
when they're in groups and being fired up, and being told that homosexuals
and secularists and atheists and feminists are a menace to their family -
that they're not capable of getting caught up in that kind of hysteria. That
was something I saw as well. People, totally sweet on a one-to-one basis,
but in the megachurch cheering about we're going to defeat the homosexuals.
And you see the gay people in the areas where these kind of anti-gay
measures were used to get out their vote - what they're feeling is real
terror. They're looking around and they're thinking these are my neighbors.
They've always been nice to me. We've always smiled at each other. Who are
these people?

BuzzFlash: I think for many years, progressives and cosmopolitan people,
contemporary post-Enlightenment people, saw America as this great country
and society that seemed to be moving forward. Maybe there were people of
different ideological stripes, the Archie Bunkers, the middle America Nixon
saw, and there might be some morality differences. But as you write s in the
Preface to your book, we really have two different societies now. We have
this alternative reality and then we have like contemporary America that's
like contemporary Europe in many ways. It's part of the modern world. And
then we have a parallel society in America which is really, in its religious
extremism, not that different than Islamic fundamentalists . They both
reject contemporary society and resent contemporary morality. They both
reject the Enlightenment. What happened? 

Michelle Goldberg: My feeling is that they were always there - they just
weren't organized. There have always been fundamentalists in America,
although I think this kind of Evangelical upsurge is something different.
But the fundamentalists that were there kind of withdrew after the Scopes
monkey trial, where they felt that they were humiliated. So they  organized
their parallel society in a way that made it easy for people on the Coast or
in the cities to completely overlook it. Then starting in the late
seventies, with the creation of the Moral Majority, going into the Christian
Coalition, and now into this much more dispersed Christian nationalist
movement, they've just gotten much, much more organized, while Democrats and
the left have become completely disorganized. And increasingly they are no
longer part of any kind of civic organization or trade organizations. The
unions fell apart and the megachurches bloomed. It's been abetted by
population shifts and redistricting, which really electorally disempowered
people in big cities, which tend to be located in the most progressive
states. The voting power of somebody in New York is just such a tiny
fraction of the voting power of somebody in Miami. And redistricting has
just kind of crowded urbanites together into single districts and spread out
conservatives more so that they have vastly more electoral power. That's
part of it.

Another part of it is just existential. I think a lot of people feel despair
or find modern life meaningless. Somebody said to me at one of these school
board meetings, if evolution is true, then life has no meaning. If God
hasn't put you on this earth for a purpose, and if He doesn't love you and
think you're special - if you're just a product of random chance, some
people see that as intolerable meaninglessness.

BuzzFlash: Has technology contributed to this?

Michelle Goldberg: Technology has had two roles, I think. On the one hand,
it undermines the sense of traditional community. A lot of the people that I
talk to seem to have this incredible nostalgia for their towns - and they
refuse to have towns. Rather, they're just these kind of suburban nodes. So
there's a sense of something profound that has been lost, and they feel kind
of adrift. Then the megachurch kind of fills that need that nobody else is
filling. That's part of it. Technology has also allowed for the creation of
this entire parallel media. It used to be that most people got pretty much
the same news. People had access to pretty much the same entertainment.
Technology has allowed this completely fictitious world to become an
all-encompassing bubble. 

BuzzFlash: Thank you, Michelle. It's a wonderful book.

Michelle Goldberg: Thank you so much.

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

Interview Conducted by Mark Karlin. 

* * * 

RESOURCES:

 <http://www.buzzflash.com/store/items/211> Kingdom Coming: The Rise of
Christian Nationalism (Hardcover), by Michelle Goldberg, a BuzzFlash
premium. 

What is Christian <http://www.tpmcafe.com/node/30059>  nationalism? by
Michelle Goldberg (TPMCafe Book Club) 

Saving Secular Society,
<http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/2649/>  by Michelle Goldberg
(In These Times) 



-- 


Things are not as they appear. Nor are they otherwise.

Lankavatara  Sutra 

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