Talk radio show host Michael Savage claims to have ten million listeners. From his home in the affluent San Francisco suburb of Larkspur, he sends out a constant stream of anti-immigrant, anti-gay, and, oddly, autism-scorning diatribes that are more popular than they ought to be. One of his listeners apparently was Jim Adkisson, the man charged with shooting eight people in the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville on July 27. Two of them died.

In the hours after Adkisson was thrown to the floor and arrested and roughly 200 congregants had been evacuated, police said they found copies of Savage’s Liberalism is a Mental Disorder , Let Freedom Ring by conservative talker Sean Hannity, and The O’Reilly Factor by Fox Television’s Bill O’Reilly in the shooter’s home.

Follow up:

Since then, information about what they found— except for a four-page rant blaming liberals for his inability to find a job, losing his food stamps and from impeding the progress of the war on terror—has been downplayed.

As a Unitarian Universalist, however, my curiosity was piqued. Being a member of a liberal denomination that officially numbers fewer than a quarter of a million people, I wondered if Savage (a name he adopted as an adult so he must mean it) had us in his cross-hairs. I visited a large chain bookstore where no one knows me and sought Savage’s book. There under Current Affairs was a cover in red, blue and yellow with a broad-shouldered, bearded man with a microphone in front of the Golden Gate Bridge. Savage touts this book as one of a trilogy.

The publisher of Mental Disorder, Thomas Nelson, neglected to include an index, but after considerable scanning, I found no references to UUs, as we affectionately refer to each other. There are, however, end notes of various sources from which Savage quotes, sort of, and his glossary for terms he claims to have coined, such as compassionate conservative (definition: me) and Islamofascists (dirty nightshirt-clad radical Muslims who walk with a Koran in one hand and a bloody, rusty knife in the other). Other definitions cover such useful appellations as Houses of Porn and Scorn (today’s “liberal” colleges) and one of my favorites, Baggy-eyed Bolshevik (PBS’s Jim Lehrer).

In Savage’s The Enemy Within: Saving American from the Liberal Assault on Our Churches, Schools and Military, he singles out Episcopalians for their ordination of Bishop Gene Robinson and attacks South Africa’s Bishop Desmond Tutu for condoning it. No mention there of UUs, though.

Like Rush Limbaugh, who at the height of his popularity claimed 20 million listeners, Savage has a gift for jab and for reducing anyone with whom he disagrees to a slogan or a joke. His explanation of why liberalism is a mental disorder is a study in circular logic and hyperbole. Needless to say, he didn’t consult any mental health professionals. As Michael Alan Weiner, Savage earned a doctorate from Cal Berkeley in nutritional ethnomedicine, so let’s assume he’s capable of serious scholarship. This must be a whole lot more fun. Certainly, it’s far more profitable. Limbaugh’s latest eight-year contract reportedly earns him more than $400 million. Even a fraction of that would support Savage in a lifestyle people like Jim Adkisson can only imagine. No wonder the talk clan is opposed to any hint of redistribution of wealth.

I’m not sure why Savage calls himself compassionate. Imagine yourself a 58 year-old unemployed trucker, under court restraint from seeing your last wife and about to be cut off from food stamps when you read these words:

There is still much work to be done. The enemy is not only at the gates; the enemy is at our throats.

It is time to come out of your sleep. It is time to put your hats on forward. It is time to throw your pornography in a bonfire. It is time to turn off your sports and entertainment.

You will not have a nation unless you wake to the reality that America has become pacified, America has become feminized, and America is being compromised from without and within. You cannot let them get away with this.

Can America be saved? Is it too late?

I believe that with God’s will and with your determination to confront the mental disorder of liberalism whenever and wherever it is found, America can both survive and thrive.

Jim Adkisson said that he realized he could not get to liberal public officials, so he decided to attack the people who elected them. He didn’t target the group of children performing songs from the musical “Annie” but their audience. Among its eclectic offerings the church hosted social events for gay and lesbian teens, and members helped found a chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (which Savage calls “the head of the snake” and the Fourth Branch of government.) In the aftermath of his attack, Adkisson was surprised to remain alive; he had counted on police to kill him. The public defender says he will make a case for guilt by reason of insanity.

Certainly, he’s unlikely to receive any resistance from Unitarian Universalists, who on August 10 ran a full page ad in The New York Times referring to Adkisson as a “man beset by his personal demons” and proclaiming “Our Doors and Our Hearts Will Remain Open.” It mourns the loss of UUs Greg McKendry and Linda Kraeger, whom Adkisson shot, celebrates the bravery of members who rushed to disarm him, and offers a prayer that he may find peace and reconciliation. The church has been rededicated, and the denomination promises not to give in to fear, to meet hatred with love, and to continue to work for justice.

Would that the same kind of soul searching were going on in the studios of talk radio. Even if you argue that Adkisson was an aberrant listener and reader, how do we account for the millions of people who tune in to talk radio and cable news programs that play upon their fears and fantasies and repeat what they hear as gospel?

Coincidentally, the Knoxville shootings came just as I was digging into Harvard psychologist Martha Stout’s latest book, The Paranoia Switch: How Terror Rewires Our Brains and Reshapes Our Behavior—and How We Can Reclaim Our Courage. Dr. Stout argues that events like the attacks of September 11, 2001, cause such a shock to the brain’s limbic system that we are thrown into a state of paranoia. In such a state, where trauma remains raw and unprocessed, the slightest reference to some association with that trauma can trigger paranoid behavior. And trauma makes us vulnerable to the manipulation of people she calls fear brokers. When you start to hear words like evil, revenge and cowardice, you know someone is appealing to your most primitive fears.

Stout identifies shame over sex as another of the key markers of a fear broker. Of course, talk radio was a political force before 9/11. Along with the internet’s Drudge Report, it spread and reveled in sexual accusations about President Clinton that led to his impeachment. In 2004, the right discovered that same-sex marriage was even more highly charged in many people’s minds than marital infidelity. Savage, and many others, claim that the marriage of gays and lesbians makes heterosexual marriage “meaningless.” How they do not say. It isn’t necessary, Stout would probably counter. Once the fear has been triggered, it takes on a life of its own.

The good news is that these shocks to the nation’s psyche eventually lose their power over us. The bad news is that it can take a long time. Think of the Ku Klux Klan’s sway a century after the Civil War, McCarthyism’s virulence throughout the Cold War, and the only recent apology to Japanese-Americans for their internment after the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

In the months ahead, Savage will pour out even more attacks on the liberal menace, and it might be good for all of us to clean up those remaining bits of paranoia that may have stuck to our brains like the duct tape we were encouraged to purchase. Stout offers an inventory to measure the level of fear we walk around with.

And while we’re at it, we might express our displeasure to sponsors who make talk radio and shout TV so lucrative for these fear brokers. Citrix, the software developer, dropped Savage after so many people complained about his anti-Muslim rants, and I’m sleeping better on my TempurPedic since that mattress maker bowed out as well.

Sponsors vary from region to region, but you can get an updated list at http://highboldtage.wordpress.com/2008/07/21/a-current-list-of-michael-savage-sponsors/

One of these days, Michael Savage, like Senator Joseph McCarthy, is going to have his “Have you no shame?” moment. Too bad I won’t be listening.