God, Mammon and the Christian Republican Wrecker Party

The Worship of Mammon (1909) by Evelyn De Morgan

If the "Christian" part of the Christian Right groups were anything meaningful and constructive in this world, they would be screaming about the current bipartisan austerity economics being ungodly. Past popular leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Cesar Chavez, both of whom were motivated in large part by their Christian religious convictions (Baptist and Catholic, respectively), would also be leading resistance against it. And, no, the ethnicity of the President would make no difference to them.

Glenn Smith in The Big Lacuna Firedoglake 04/10/2011 mostly doesn't use explicit religious language. He relies more on psycho-social concepts, e.g., the Congressional Republicans are "brutal sociopaths." But he makes the moral case against it very clear and he does mention the sin of idolatry:

Last October, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer signed a Medicaid cost-cutting bill that ended funding for life or death organ transplants. After two people died, the state restored the funding.

To rave reviews from the centrist Village idiots, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan took the Brewer/Arizona plan much further. His "courageous" proposal will abolish Medicare in favor of health-care vouchers experts already know will be worthless. It's a certain death sentence for many American seniors.

Let me repeat that. The bold Ryan plan will kill Americans so the wealthy can have their tax cuts. People’s lives will be sacrificed for gold.

But that's the lacuna. The thieves of America's wealth talk in endless abstractions. Numbers, numbers, numbers. The national debt, which they make an incarnate monster, has more reality to them than the people who will die at their hands.

They want to be seen as tough-minded pragmatists, but they are really weak-minded true believers and fantasists who have a hardened faith that sacrifices must be made to the God of the Market.

For all the ecumenicism a liberal Christian theologian might be able to muster, Mammon is still a destructive deity. Especially when worshipped fanatically by mean white people.

Tags: inequality, us economy