Marsh is one of the best writers I've seen on how religious views can affect people's attitude toward politics and political action. His book God's Long Summer (1997) takes a careful look at the religious beliefs of those of people taking a wide variety of positions on civil rights during the "Mississippi Summer" of 1964.
His autobiography The Last Days (2001) also deals with some of the same subjects. I particularly related to that one because he spent much of his childhood in Laurel, MS, where his father was pastor of the First [Southern] Baptist Church. That's about 40 miles from where I grew up.
In this column, Marsh goes back three years to look at the statements of various fundamentalists leaders on the then-impending Iraq War:
Charles Stanley, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Atlanta, whose weekly sermons are seen by millions of television viewers, led the charge with particular fervor. "We should offer to serve the war effort in any way possible," said Stanley, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention. "God battles with people who oppose him, who fight against him and his followers."In other words, the Christian Right constituency is also a mainstay of public support for the Iraq War.
In an article carried by the convention's Baptist Press news service, a missionary wrote that "American foreign policy and military might have opened an opportunity for the Gospel in the land of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob." Both Franklin Graham, the son of Billy Graham, and Marvin Olasky, the editor of the conservative World magazine and a former advisor to Bush on faith-based policy, echoed these sentiments, claiming that the American invasion of Iraq would create exciting new prospects for proselytizing Muslims.
Tim LaHaye, the co-author of the hugely popular "Left Behind" series, spoke of Iraq as "a focal point of end-time events," whose special role in the earth's final days will become clear after invasion, conquest and reconstruction. Jerry Falwell declared that "God is pro-war" in the title of an essay he wrote in 2004.
The war sermons rallied the evangelical congregations behind the invasion of Iraq. An astonishing 87 percent of all white evangelical Christians in the United States supported the president's decision in April 2003.
Recent polls indicate that 68 percent of white evangelicals continue to support the war. But what surprised me, looking at these sermons nearly three years later, was how little attention they paid to Christian moral doctrine.
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