Varieties of Christian Right sloganeering

Sarah Posner has an column on the efforts by some Christian Right leaders to put a kinder-gentler face on their cause for the 2016 election, Evangelicals Looking for Walker to "Do Nothing" in 2016 Election Religion Dispatches 03/09/2015.

She talks in particular about Scott Walker's approach to signalling the fundamentalist base voters that he's One Of Them:

Speaking in 2012 to a teleconference with activists from Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition, Walker said his faith has enabled him to rise above the “vitriol, and the constant, ongoing hatred” during the recall election he faced in the wake of his anti-union legislation, which has crippled the state’s once-iconic labor movement. Along with the unmistakable contrast of his church-going family with the profane and progressive activists, Walker cited two Bible verses. He didn’t recite them, but for anyone who knows their Bible—as Walker, the son of a Baptist pastor, does—the meaning was clear. The verses that helped him withstand the hatred were Romans 16:20 (“The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet. The grace of our Lord Jesus be with you”) and Isaiah 54:17 (“no weapon forged against you will prevail, and you will refute every tongue that accuses you.”)

Should he run for president, Walker may very well turn out to be the 2016 cycle’s evangelical favorite—not because he ticks off a laundry list of culture war talking points, pledges fealty to a “Christian nation,” or because he’s made a show of praying publicly to curry political favor. Although by no means universal, some conservative evangelicals—those who eschew the fever swamps of talk radio, yet share the same political stances of the religious right—are weary of the old style of campaigning. They’re turned off by the culture war red meat, the dutiful but insincere orations of piety.

But she also reminds us that the "religious liberty" slogan currently so popular with the Christianists is also it's own kind of red meat:

The religious liberty issue is, for evangelicals, a “four-alarm fire,” said Denny Burk, Professor of Biblical Studies at Boyce College, part of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. He said evangelicals expect the candidates “to have the courage of their convictions to persuade people about what’s going on.”

From the Hobby Lobby litigation to cases involving florists, bakers, and photographers refusing to provide services for same-sex ceremonies, the issue has been percolating in the evangelical community for years. In recent weeks, conservative Christians have talked and written prolifically about Barronelle Stutzman, a Washington state florist found liable under the state’s anti-discrimination laws for refusing to provide flowers for a long-time gay customer’s wedding, and Kelvin Cochran, the Atlanta fire chief fired after revelations about anti-gay comments he wrote in a book. ...

Given the level of division over these issues, it’s not clear that voters who aren’t conservative Christians would view the change in emphasis as a tamping down of the culture wars. Legal exemptions to permit florists, caterers, social service providers, or other businesses to refuse service to LGBT people are hotly contested, both in legal circles and in the court of public opinion. In another context, the Hobby Lobby litigation, in which the Supreme Court ruled that the contraception coverage requirement under the Affordable Care Act violated a closely-held corporation’s rights under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, was one of the most scrutinized and debated religious freedom cases in recent memory.

Putin and the New Year

Russian President Vladimir Putin has delivered a New Year's Message for 2015 to Russia.

This gives me the opportunity to post this segment from The Young Turks, which pokes fun at American conservatives in 2014 drooling over Putin's manly manliness. And also has a good discussion about the Ukraine issue, In 2014 The Right Fell Deeply In Love With Vladmir Putin 12/31/2014:

They describe the weird fascination of US conservatives with Putin well. Republicans would be mostly happy to see a new Cold War, with the opportunities it would offer to transfer tax money into the profits and CEO pay of arms manufacturers.

But actual political admiration for Putin in the American right is less clear than among the European right, who Putin is actively courting. There is a small subset of the Christian Right that actively admirers Putin's pose as the defender of Christianity, coming as it does with open hostility to gays and lesbians.

Konstantin Petrenko reported several years ago on the Christianist aspect of Putin's politics in The Kremlin and the Church: Russia's Holy Alliance Religion Dispatches 07/03/2009:

In today’s Russia, religion is in vogue. When the country celebrated Easter two weeks ago, thousands of Muscovites flocked to the magnificent Cathedral of Christ the Savior, the capital city’s main church. This colossal masterpiece of architecture, demolished by Joseph Stalin in 1931 and restored in 2000, symbolizes the reemergence of Russian Orthodoxy after seven decades of state-imposed atheism. The radiant Easter Vigil was a religious event as well as a political one; among those present were Vladimir Putin and Dmitri Medvedev, sharing center stage with Patriarch Alexiy II. “May the Lord grant you strength to continue the heroic deeds you have performed for the good of Russia,” the Patriarch said to Putin and Medvedev during the liturgy, and the two presidents exchanged traditional kisses with the gray-bearded Church leader in front of dozens of television cameras and a jubilant crowd of believers.

The presence of political dignitaries at major Christian events, unimaginable two decades ago, has become an ordinary occurrence in recent years. It underscores the special status of Russian Orthodoxy and harkens back to Russia’s tsarist past when the Church and the monarchy were inseparable. To their credit, Mr. Putin and Mr. Medvedev do not wear religion on their sleeves. When asked in a recent interview whether he believes in God, Putin replied: “There are things I believe, which should not, in my position at least, be shared with the public.” In a similar fashion, Medvedev said to a group of young supporters, “Personal religious feelings are an intimate matter, and this makes them especially valuable.” Nevertheless, both leaders regularly take advantage of the Church’s popular appeal to bolster their image.

But this is a Russian Orthodox Christianism, which regards Protestant churches with suspicion and hostility: "The anti-Protestant rhetoric escalated after many evangelicals took part in the 2004 Orange Revolution in neighboring Ukraine."

And he warned, "Russians have rediscovered religion, but without a strong commitment to religious liberty and secularism, the new fascination with Russian Orthodoxy is more likely to breed hatred and xenophobia than a healthy respect for religious pluralism that is crucial to the development of democracy and civil society."

Joshua Keating looked at Putin's Christianism more recently in Russia Gets Religion: Is Vladimir Putin trying to build a new Orthodox empire? Slate 11/11/2014.

Here is the RT report on Putin's New Year's message, Putin's New Year Address 2015: Reunification with Crimea landmark in national history 12/31/2014:

RT also provides the English text in 'Landmark in Russian history': President Vladimir Putin's New Year address 12/31/2014. The full English text as provided there follows:

Friends,

The New Year of 2015 is about to begin.

As always, we look forward to it with anticipation, making wishes, giving gifts and traditionally seeing in the New Year with family and friends. An atmosphere of kindness, goodwill and benevolence warms our hearts, opening them up to pure thoughts and honourable deeds and giving hope.

Naturally, everyone is concerned primarily about the well-being of their own family, wishing health and happiness to their near and dear ones. The happiness and success of each individual makes up the well-being of Russia.

Love for one’s Motherland is one of the most powerful and enlightening feelings. It has found its reflection in our fraternal aid to the residents of Crimea and Sevastopol, after they made the firm decision to return to their native home. This event will remain a landmark in national history.

Friends,

Now, as we reflect on the outgoing year I would like to sincerely thank you for your unity and solidarity, for your innermost truthfulness, honour, justice and responsibility for the fate of your country, for your invariable readiness to defend Russia’s interests, to be with it both in days of triumph and in times of trial, to strive for the implementation of our bravest and grandest of plans.

Only a few years ago the Sochi Olympics were no more than a dream. Meanwhile, it not only came true: we not only prepared and hosted the best ever winter Olympics, but we also won them. This victory has been achieved by all the citizens of this country, both the Olympic athletes and those who supported them.

In the coming year, we are facing quite a few tasks and the year will be as good as we make it, depending on how efficient, creative and effective each one of us is. There are no other recipes. We need to implement all our plans – for our own sake, for the sake of our children, for the sake of Russia.

Friends,

The New Year is knocking at our doors. It is time to let it in and say words of kindness to our near and dear ones. Time to thank them for their understanding and reliability, for their patience and care. The more kindness and love there is around the more confident and powerful we become, which means we will definitely be successful.

Happy 2015 to you! [my emphasis]

Paul Pillar warns against mindless triumphalism over low oil prices, which are causing problems for Russia, Iran and Venezuela, all of whom are currently on the United States' least-favorite list:

... the presumed connection between a country's economic discomfort and its regime's diplomatic flexibility considers only one half of the regime's calculations. The other half concerns whether, and how much, that regime believes it can improve its economic situation by making concessions to its adversaries. If it sees no prospect for improvement, it has no incentive to concede.

The point becomes all the clearer when, as with the recent drop in petroleum prices, it is a market that is causing the economic pain. Markets have no mechanism for pain reduction when someone changes a negotiating position or diplomatic posture. If lower oil prices really are making the leadership of Russia more willing to make concessions regarding the conflict in eastern Ukraine, what is supposed to happen regarding the prices and the pain if such concessions are made? That car-owners in the West will be so happy about this development that they will start driving more, thus burning more fuel, sending crude oil prices back up, and repairing the damage to Russian finances?

The NRA and finding Rev. Ezekiel Bittery

Way back in 2005, when it was the Republican President George W. Bush pushing to cut benefits on Social Security and not a Democratic President, I recalled a story from one of Sinclair Lewis' less well known novels, Gideon Planish (1943), about the Rev. Ezekiel Bittery.

I was reminded of it this week, seeing people express surprise at the blithering fanaticism being articulated so proudly and publicly by the National Rifle Association (NRA). Joan Walsh, for instance, asks in Salon, Has the NRA lost it entirely? 01/16/2013 (or at least the headline-writer asks it). She explains what she means:

On the eve of President Obama announcing his gun control agenda, based on Vice President Joe Biden's task force recommendations, the National Rifle Association needed to go big: to remind Americans that the organization protects their gun rights, and to remind politicians that they’re a smart and formidable political force they’d be unwise to cross.

Instead, they showed us the truth: They're part of the vast and increasingly incompetent right-wing conspiracy that's sacrificed its own effectiveness for the pleasure of hating Democrats generally and our first black president in particular.

But, as Steven Rosenfeld explains in The Suprising Unknown History of the NRA Alternet 01/13/2013, the NRA went off the political deep end in 1977. And they've stayed there ever since.

Which brings me to the Rev. Bittery. Plagiarizing freely from my 2005 post here, Sinclair Lewis use the good Reverend to illustrate "Research", which he calls "[o]ne of the most important activities of any liberal educational organization." The example, set in the late 1930s, is the Rev. Ezekiel Bittery. Apparently he had some problems with his formal credentials, because the narrator refers to him as the "ex-Reverend."

The first step in Research is to gather a bunch of stories from newspapers about Brother Bittery and then write him to get some of his pamphlets. Then you have a few people go listen to his speeches live. With this procedure, it becomes well established that:

... Brother Bittery is a flannel-mouthed rabble-rouser who used to be charged not only with stealing the contents of the church poor-box, but of taking the box itself home to keep radishes in, and who at present if he isn't on the pay-roll of all the Fascists, is a bad collector.

After considering the matter for a couple of years, a Congressional committee proceeds to investigation, establishing for the record that "Mr. Bittery used to be a hell-fire preacher and is now a hell-fire Fascist."

More Research ensues, with scholars applying themselves to the phenomenon, which reveals "that Mr. Bittery used to favor lynching agnostics and now favors lynching socialists."

And during all this time, the Reverend Ezekiel himself will, as publicly as possible, to as many persons as he can persuade to attend his meetings, have admitted, insisted, bellowed, that he has always been a Ku Kluxer and a Fascist, that he has always hated Jews, colleges and good manners, and that the only thing he has ever disliked about Hitler is that he once tried to paint barns instead of leaving the barns the way God made them.

That is Research.

We're still rediscovering Rev. Bittery.

Tags: authoritarianism, christian right, christianism, ezekiel bittery, gideon planish, national rifle association, nra, sinclair lewis

The New Apostolic Reformation and today's Republican Party

Forrest Wilder and Rachel Tabachnick have used the occasion of Rick Perry's "The Response" religious rally to take a closer look at the Christian Right network on which he is pinning his apparent Presidential hopes at the moment. The role of the Pentecostal New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) movement is particularly important in this context. The NAR is also the religious trend with which Sarah Palin has been most closely associated both religiously and politically. Forrest Wilder writes about them in the Texas Observer in Rick Perry's Army of God 08/03/2011 and The Mainstream Media's Shallow Coverage of The Response 08/09/2011, and Rachel Tabachnick in Five Points About Rick Perry's Prayer Rally Not Yet in Mainstream Press Talk to Action 08/08/2011. Kyle Mantyla at Right Wing Watch includes Rachel Maddow's news report relying heavily on Wilder's reporting in Understanding The "Apostle" In The New Apostolic Reformation 08/11/2011.

Jezebel: mastermind of the Democratic Party?

Wilder reminds us what a particular and narrow trend the NAR is within American Protestantism, despite their very outsized clout in today's increasingly radicalized Republican Party:

Some of the fiercest critics of the New Apostolic Reformation come from within the Pentecostal and charismatic world. The Assemblies of God Church, the largest organized Pentecostal denomination, specifically repudiated self-proclaimed prophets and apostles in 2000, calling their creed a "deviant teaching" that could rapidly "become dictatorial, presumptuous, and carnal." Assemblies authorities also rejected the notion that the church is supposed to assume dominion over earthly institutions, labeling it "unscriptural triumphalism." The New Apostles talk about taking dominion over American society in pastoral terms. They refer to the "Seven Mountains" of society: family, religion, arts and entertainment, media, government, education, and business. These are the nerve centers of society that God (or his people) must control.

One long-standing temptation of Radical Right groups is to model themselves along mirror-image lines of their enemies do or are imagined to do. The John Birch Society in its early years structured itself in a sort of secret cell manner, which they understood to be the way their main bogeyman, the Communist Party, operated. And for a variety of reason, not least of them concerns about protecting the tax-exempt status of the religious institutions that are their main basis, theocratic religious activists engage in no small amount of double-talk about the nature of their goals.

Baal (old-school version)

The New Apostolic Reformation, as Wilder explains, relies on a real network organized on authoritarian lines, with the leaders understood to be prophets and apostles with direct lines to God in the same way a "literalist"/fundamentalist reading of the Christian Scriptures would understand Biblical prophets and apostles to have. So it's always interesting to see what they have to say about the secrecy and clandestine intentions of the groups they perceived to be active tools of Satan:

Some of these groups' beliefs and activities will be startling, even to many conservative evangelicals. For example, in 2010 Texas prayer warriors visited every Masonic lodge in the state attempting to cast out the demon Baal, whom they believe controls Freemasonry. At each site, the warriors read a decree—written in legalese—divorcing Baal from the "People of God" and recited a lengthy prayer referring to Freemasonry as "witchcraft." Asked whether he shares these views, Stringer launches into a long treatise about secrecy during which he manages to lump together Mormonism, Freemasonry and college fraternities. "I think there has been a lot of damage and polarization over decades because of the influence of some areas of Freemasonry that have been corrupted," he says. "In fact, if you look at the original founder of the Mormon Church, Joseph Smith, he had a huge influence by Masonry. Bottom-line, anything that is so secretive that has to be hidden in darkness ... is not biblical. The Bible says that everything needs to be brought to the light. That's why I would never be part of a fraternity, like on campus."

Baal (counter-Trinity version)

The Charisma website reflelcts the NAR outlook. Their brief summary news report of Perry's "Response" rally is Jennifer LeClaire, 30,000 Unite In Fasting, Prayer at The Response 08/08/2011. Except on the most formal and highly-publicized occasions, like The Response rally, leaders of the NAR often don't make much effort to show their partisan preferences based on what they claim is Godly guidance:

Consider Alice Patterson. She’s in charge of mobilizing churches in Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Oklahoma for The Response. A field director for the Texas Christian Coalition in the 1990s, she’s now a significant figure in apostolic circles and runs a San Antonio-based organization called Justice at the Gate. Patterson, citing teachings by Cindy Jacobs, Chuck Pierce and Lou Engle, has written that the Democratic Party is controlled by “an invisible network of evil comprising an unholy structure” unleashed by the biblical figure Jezebel. Patterson claims to have seen demons with her own eyes. In 2009, at a prophetic meeting in Houston, Patterson says she saw the figure of Jezebel and "saw Jezebel’s skirt lifted to expose tiny Baal, Asherah, and a few other spirits. There they were - small, cowering, trembling little spirits that were only ankle high on Jezebel's skinny legs."

Jezebel (new-school version)

Patterson's vision bears a distinct literary resemblance to this:

"Forgive me if I am not justified in what I ask," said Scrooge, looking intently at the Spirit's robe, "but I see something strange, and not belonging to yourself, protruding from your skirts. Is it a foot or a claw?"

"It might be a claw, for the flesh there is upon it," was the Spirit's sorrowful reply. "Look here."

From the foldings of its robe, it brought two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.

"Oh, Man, look here! Look, look, down here!" exclaimed the Ghost.

They were a boy and a girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.

Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.

"Spirit, are they yours?" Scrooge could say no more.

"They are Man's," said the Spirit, looking down upon them. "And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!" cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. "Slander those who tell it ye. Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And abide the end."

"Have they no refuge or resource?" cried Scrooge.

"Are there no prisons?" said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. "Are there no workhouses?"

The bell struck twelve.

That is, of course, from Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol (1843), the concluding scene of the appearance of the Ghost of Christmas Present. It's safe to say that the social vision which Dickens' fictional vision represented is a more humane one that the one embodied in Patterson's.

The dove was a favorite symbol for Asherah

Incidentally, for those not up on ancient Near Eastern religion, Baal was a Canaanite storm god, some of whose attributes were incorporated into the ancient Israelites' concept of Yahweh. Asherah was a female diety whose worship was stubbornly persistent among the ancient Hebrews, much to the consternation of the hardcore Yahwists, whose views are preserved in the Hebrew Scriptures. How Jezebel got promoted among the NAR crowd from a naughty Phoenician queen to a the mega-demon controlling the Democratic Party, I can scarcely imagine. Except that it probably has something to do with Hillary Clinton. Tabachnick calls attention to the following:

Another shocker was that Mike Bickle led part of the event. The event organizers came from Mike Bickle's youth-oriented International House of Prayer (IHOP) and Lou Engle's The Call, based at IHOP Kansas City. After Lou Engle, Bickle is one of the most controversial figures in the movement and source of the "Oprah as forerunner of the anti-Christ" statement that made the news. However, Bickle is a toxic figure in much of the evangelical world. He was the leader of the "Kansas City Prophets" in the 1980 and 1990s and was at the center of a very divisive dispute in Charismatic evangelicalism. Continuing the point about Mike Bickle, this event did not represent all conservative evangelicals. Although the big name family values guys - James Dobson, Tony Perkins, Donald Wildmon, and others - have been joining forces with the apostles for several years, this partnership is very controversial. The apostles plans to revamp Protestantism, eradicate denominations, their radical end times theology, and boisterous Charismatic manifestations are feared, and rightfully so, by many fundamentalists and evangelicals. This event was a organized and led - from the prayer leaders and messaging to the band - by the NAR. It was a duplicate of The Call events that have been held around the country. [my emphasis]

Jezebel's unhappy end, as pictured by Gustav Doré; presumably the "apostolic" Pentecostals who see her as the controlling demon of the Democratic Party are hoping for a replay

Tags: christian right, christianism, new apostolic reformation, radical right, rick perry

Far-right Christianist terrorism, here and in Europe

This is a 24-minute report on far-right extremism in Europe from Aljazeera English's Inside Story - Is the right on the rise in Europe? 07/24/2011.



Like any terrorist attack, the killing in Norway calls for realism rather than a reaction based on fear. Fear and democracy don't go well together, as a rule. But I do hope it will make Americans more aware of the most significant domestic terrorist threat, the one from far-right Christianist groups.

Confessed Norwegian white Christian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik

Frank Schaeffer gives us a glimpse at the worldview of the American Christian nationalists in Christian Jihad? Why We Should Worry About Right-Wing Terror Attacks Like Norway's in the US Alternet 07/23/2011. I have reservations about Schaeffer's conceptual framework, for instance, when he focuses on the Radical Right's challenging the legitimacy of the US government as the core of the problem: "It was in the context of legitimizing our government that actions by domestic terrorists like Timothy McVeigh became thinkable." One can question the legitimacy of some aspect of our government or even the entire form of government without directly encouraging murderous violence against innocents. A more complex mix of white racism, hatred of democracy, sexual authoritarianism and the creation of exaggerated fears only vaguely based on reality produces the poisonous violence of most of the American far-right incidents we've seen in recent years.

But in that context, the deligimation of the democratic features of the American government does justify extreme actions. Schaeffer cites his own father, who was an important leader in the American Christian Right. "In my father's book he called for the overthrow of the US government unless non-violent ways were found to overturn Roe v Wade. He compared America to Nazi Germany."

I pay attention to Frank Schaeffer's work on the Christian Right because he knows it well. Perhaps inevitably, given his own background as a former Christian Right activist and son of an important Christianist leader, he shows a tone of the convert warning the uninformed of the dangers of his former belief system. But he does seem to keep that particular enthusiasm in check most of the time.

And he's right about the role that the Hitler/Nazi comparison plays among the Christian Right, who use abortion (baby-killing to them) to say that American democracy is as bad as or not worse than the government of Hitler Germany. Obviously, the converse of that conviction would be that Hitler Germany's government was as good as or even better than the current American Constitutional democracy. Schaeffer:

In other words, Dad's followers were told that (1) force is a legitimate weapon to use against an evil government; (2) America was like Hitler's Germany--because of legal abortion and of the forcing of "Humanism" on the population--and thus intrinsically evil; and (3) whatever would have been the "appropriate response" to stop Hitler was now appropriate to do here in America to stop our government, which Dad had just branded a "counterfeit state."

There is also a considerable amount of projection at work in such claims. Those who would like an authoritarian government comparable to Hitler's or Mussolini's project the image of Hitler onto those they hate. Their intellectual and political ancestors in the isolationist Old Right of the 1930s and 1940s opposed the US role in the Second World War because of their admiration of Hitler and their hostility to the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union.

Schaeffer captures the Christian Right's fanaticism here:

To understand the extremism coming from the right, the fact that there are members of Congress who seem to be genuinely mentally unhinged leading the charge on the debt ceiling, you need to understand that this hatred of all things government has theological roots that have nothing to do with facts.

Theology is -- by nature -- not about reason but about faith. If God's will is to be served then so be it if America is plunged into chaos!

But this is a careless formulation. Mainstream and historical Christian theology doesn't reject reason or insist on the deniable of physical reality, although some forms stress irrational elements. (I've been wading through a book this weekend dealing with Hegel's early theological writings and their relation to Kant; trust me, Christian theology as such does not reject reason.) But what Schaffer puts his finger on in that passage is that religion, because it assumes that ultimate truth lies outside the world, is particularly well-suited for fanatical ideologies and cults of all sorts.

And Schaeffer points to the role Christian nationalism plays with the Tea Party and budget issues: "The extreme language of Evangelical/'pro-life' rebellion has now been repackaged in the debt ceiling showdown. It is the language of religion pitted against facts." He also sees something that our punditocracy doesn't, or at least pretends not to see, that the Tea Party "is nothing more than the Evangelical far right repackaged and renamed."

He also comes up with a term new to me that I'll probably make a part of my regular vocabulary, "Jesus Victims." He writes, "As they opened new institutions (proudly outside the mainstream), the Jesus Victims doing this 'reclaiming' cast themselves in the role of persecuted exiles."

Tags: anders behring breivik, christian right, christianism, frank schaeffer, norway attacks 2011, radical right

The "religious left" - do we really have such a thing?

Peter Laarman has an article with the provocative title, Why Liberal Religious Arguments Fail Religion Dispatches 06/20/2011.

Unfortunately, it turns out to be a length exposition of the saying, attributed apocryphally or not to Robert Frost, that a liberal is someone who's so open-minded they can't take their own side in an argument.

Because that what his whole point comes down to: what's the use in making arguments from what is still called the Christian left because you won't convince anybody anyway?

He's referring to making political arguments from a religious perspective.

So, leaving aside theological questions over preferable interpretations of the Christian faith itself, why do political liberals need to counter Christian Right claims with arguments?

Laarman doesn't distinguish well between hardcore Christian Right partisans and those who can be persuaded or heavily influenced by some of those Christian Right arguments and positions. The former group, particularly the more fanatical among them, are not going to be dissuaded of their beliefs by hearing an argument against them. On the other hand, if they are not met by counter-arguments, they will assume that their liberal opponents are weak and unwilling to defend their own positions and that will encourage them to escalate their rhetoric and advocate more extreme positions. Effective counter-arguments won't change their minds; they can help prevent them from proceeding on an uninhibited course of radicalization.

But there is some proportion of the people who can be influenced by Christian Right pitches without being automatically convinced that what comes out of the mouth of Pat Robertson of Tony Perkins is the inerrant voice of God. And arguments matter with them.

Let's start with the fact that Republicans and radical-right militia sorts use Christian claims to incite fear and hatred toward Democrats and liberals (not to mention those more to the left). They aren't always so crass as this Missouri Congressman Todd Akin in saying that liberals hate God in the video at the top of this post.

But it's a kind of malicious posturing and smearing that certainly candidates for public office can't ignore.

Apart from such blatant hate-mongering, Republicans today frame a large part of their marketing appeals in religious or quasi-religious terms, e.g., "family values," "respecting people of faith," concern for the innocent lives of unborn babies, etc. It's difficult to address those arguments without engaging the religion/values elements in some explicit way.

There are also elements of the expressed religious convictions of some politicians that relate obviously and directly to their public duties. Whether a member of Congress believes in the Virgin Birth of Jesus, or the Immaculate Conception of Mary, is unlikely to have any direct effect on their attitudes toward public policy. If they express an endorsement of the idea that the US Constitution is founded on Christian religious law and that the government should enforce Christian religious law, that directly relates to their approach to governance. If a candidate affiliates herself - as Sarah Palin has - with a religious movement like the Pentecostal New Apostolic Restoration which includes the idea that people should follow religious "apostles" who speak authoritatively for God on all aspects of life, then it's entirely legitimate for her to be asked to clarify her views on that matter.

And if the religious left can speak out unambiguously against torture and against the assassination of abortion providers and against rank xenophobia, what use are they anyway? To God or to honest democrats?

Tags: christian right, christianism, radical right

Philosophy and the Huck (aka, Mike Huckabee)

It's kind of painful to think of using the term "philosophy" in connection with Christian fundamentalism. George W. Bush unintentionally illustrated why in his famous response to a dorky question in a Republican Presidential debate on who his favorite philosopher is, "the Lord Jesus Christ." I'm not sure, but that may have made Shrub Bush the first person in history to consider Jesus a philosopher.

John Maynard Keynes once observed that businessmen often p[ride themselves on having derived all their ideas about economics from practical experience, when in reality they are the intellectual slaves of some long-dead economist. American Christian fundamentalists are not a very philosophically inclined bunch - not that any other significant group in the US is, either. But their religious thinking is actually influenced by a school of thought called Scottish Common Sense philosophy, of whom the most famous were George Campbell (1719-1796) and Thomas Reid (1710-1796). You can read a bit more about the general concept in this article by Alexander Broadie of the University of Glasgow.

Like Keynes' practical businessmen, today's Christianists are often running off some philosophy that looks much more like a brand of Social Darwinism than anything coming out of the Gospels. Even though they claim to what they call Darwinism, better know to most people as the science of biology.

Mike Huckabee's recent statement about Obama having been raised in Kenya sounds like a garbled version the claims of Dinesh D'Souza's frivolous book about Obama's alleged anti-colonial obsessions: Sarah Posner, Huckabee on Obama vs. "Average Americans" Religion Dispatches 03/02/2011. As Sarah Posner explains:

The reference to the Brits is by now a storyline that has reached fever pitch among conservatives: as part of the standard personalizing of the Oval Office by new presidents, Obama returned a bust of Winston Churchill -- which was on loan to former President Bush by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair -- and replaced it with a bust of his own choosing, of that notorious un-American figure... wait for it... Abraham Lincoln. [my emphasis]

The American President replaces the bust of a foreigner (Churchill) with one of the American all-but-universally regarded as the greatest President (Lincoln): and conservatives see this as sinister? The Huck's excuse for a clarifying statement included this: "The Governor would however like to know more about where President Obama's liberal policies come from and what else the President plans to do to this country -- as do most Americans."

Between free-market zealots, neoconservatives who believe in the Leo Straussian doctrine of governing by deception, and Christian fundis, more and more of what Republicans say sounds like one thing in American English and another in RepublicanSpeak. Blue Texan (Mike Huckabee a Victim of Epistemic Closure Firedoglake 03/02/2011) thinks the Huck has fallen victim to a philosophical disease. But it's one that is epidemic among his fellow Republicans: "this Obama/Mau Mau talk is perfectly mainstream in right-wing circles, and fruitloops everywhere else. Ditto death panels, the socialist conspiracy behind climate change, and the looming threat of Sharia law being imposed in the US."

Sarah Posner translates the Churchill business into American English for us:

But there's a lot more embedded in Huckabee's comment about Obama's "view of the Brits" and the supposed snub of returning the Churchill bust. First, in suggesting that Obama is anti-imperialist, Huckabee intimates that the president, in what conservatives frame as a civilizational war between the west and the rest, doesn't embrace the superiority of western civilization (which can also be read as Obama doesn't embrace "American exceptionalism.")

Second, and probably even more important, for an evangelical and Christian Zionist like Huckabee, Churchill is a figure of enormous symbolic power. In this scenario, Obama is an appeaser like Chamberlain -- whether it's on Iran's nuclear ambitions, or in failing to address the "Holocaust" of abortion -- Churchill is an Esther-like figure who finally intervened for the Jews (much as Christian Zionists see themselves as protecting Israel from Iran) in a Holocaust (much as ardent anti-choice crusaders see themselves protecting fetuses from what they attempt to portray as genocide). [my emphasis]

She goes on to frame this as "winking and nodding to his base." It looks to me more like an increasingly cult-like alternative political language among the Christian Republican White People's Party.

Tags: christian fundamentalism, christian right, christianism, mike huckabee, sarah posner

Christian Right kookiness

Not that there's ever a shortage of it. But several entries jumped out at me this week.

For starters, Alabama's new Republican Governor Robert Bentley says he shore ain't one of them Jews or Mohammedans or Hindooians. But he did apologize if any of them thar heathens was offended by what he said, he's sorry that they were stoopid enough to be offended. What's next? A speech reassuring everyone he knows he's the Governor of Christ-killers and demon worshippers? (See Alabama's new governor apologizes for Christian comments, rabbi accepts CNN Belief Blog 01/19/2011)

Here's Richard Land, President of the Southern Baptist Convention's (SBC) Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission and a longtime major player in the Christian Right, with Starting Over on Health Care Reform Christian Post 01/19/2011. Short version: God hates health insurance.

Then we have our old friend Brother Al, aka, the Rev. Albert Mohler, Jr., President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and the leading theologian of the SBC, in Redefining Retirement Christian Post 01/19/2011. Short version: Retirement is un-Biblical. And Germanic. Plus, lots of old people are just lazy.

And Franklin Graham in The Moonie Times (aka, The Washington Times) griping about Obama Tucson speech: Prayer service turns to rally 01/18/2011. Short version: Obama's Tucson speech sucked because he didn't talk about God enough. And also because there was some pagan Injun guy there talking with one of them foreign-soundin' names (Carlos Gonzales).

Graham the Younger complains particularly that the service didn't include anything from the Psalms. Apparently not registering that Obama himself quoted from Psalm 46. Steve M at No More Mister Nice Blog notes that this was a bit odd, seeing as how Graham the Younger is "presumably a guy who's intimately familiar with the Bible." (Franklin Graham: A Brazen Liar, or Just Too Lazy to Watch the Whole Tucson Service? 01/19/2011)

"Pastor Dan" Schultz picked up on another conservative's griping along with Graham the Younger about Native American religion being represented in the Tucscon event in Memo To Kathleen Parker on 'Father Sky' Reference in Tucson Memorial Religion Dispatches 01/13/2011.

Tags: christian fundamentalism, christian right, christianism

Tennessean series on anti-Muslim demagoguery

Bob Smietana of the Tennessean has done a multi-article report on what Juan Cole calls "the Muslim-Hating Industrial Complex", including Anti-Muslim crusaders make millions spreading fear 10/24/2010. This page provides links to other articles in the series: The Price of Fear.

Yes, there is a business market for hate. If you get into the right niche, you can make money promoting hatred and encouraging violence.

Tags: christian fundamentalism, christian right, christianism,, islam

The theocracy movement in Hawaii

Bruce Wilson produced the following video describing the involvement of Duke Aiona, Hawaii's Lieutenant Governor and the Republican candidate for Governor there this year with a Pentecostal theocratic movement called the International Transformation Network.



He describes how Aiona's campaign has been squawking about it in Witchcraft again - Aiona, Hawaii Candidate For Gov., Tied to Witch-Fighting Evangelicals Talk to Action 10/21/2010.

Even though I'm used to it, I'm still a bit surprised when I see these politicians who publicly involved themselves with a movement like this try to deny they had anything to do with it. I think it's assumed in many of these theocratic groups that lying about it to unbelievers is perfectly fine.

Tags: christian right, bush doctrine, iraq war, mainstream media

The financial troubles of the Crystal Cathedral and Christian Right outlooks

Looking for enlightened, compassionate theological or social perspectives from today's Christian fundamentalist leaders is like looking for honesty and integrity in Karl Rove, or a conscience in Dick Cheney.

Still, a couple of recent pieces from the conservative Protestant realm of the Christian Post point to a point of friction within the politically conservative Protestant outlook, the question of the Prosperity Gospel, the teaching associated with American Pentecostalism in particular that Christianity teaches us how to get rich and that wealth is a sign of godliness:

Michelle A. Vu reports in Idolatry is Biggest Obstacle to World Mission, Says U.K. Theologian 10/24/2010 on a speech by Chris Wright:

God's people today, like in the Old Testament, have fallen to worshiping the false gods and idols of the world, said the international director of U.K.-based Langham Partnerships as he spoke before the thousands attending the Third Lausanne Congress on World Evangeliziation.

"Idolatry ... is the biggest single obstacle to world mission," said Wright, who will be the main drafter of the much-anticipated Cape Town Commitment that will come out of the weeklong gathering of mission-minded Christian leaders.

According to Wright, the three idols are: power and pride, popularity and success, and wealth and greed.

This is partially a conventional warning against the sin of pride and a caution against arrogance leading to mistaken judgment. But he called out the Prosperity Gospel specifically:

But the Kingdom of God cannot be built on the foundations of dishonesty and lies, such as questionable statistics of success, he said. It also cannot be built based on the false teaching of prosperity gospel, which distorts what it means to be blessed by God and does not properly teach about suffering and the cross, Wright added.

"We are a scandal and a stumbling block to the mission of God," Wright stated. ...

During a press conference Saturday afternoon, Wright explained that his address was inspired by a friend and scholar who visited his home country in Latin America. The friend reported that he attended ten different churches that claim to be evangelical, but not one of them preached the Bible. Furthermore, the pastors of the churches wielded great power with no accountability, and were considerably wealthy.

After hearing his friend’s story, Wright realized that the evangelical movement needed a "reformation" because it was facing similar problems to that of the medieval church before the Reformation.

"This is not just something casual. This is a deep-seated corruption in the Church of Christ," said Wright. "And of course this is not just in Latin America, but all over the world."

Another piece is by Brother Al, aka, the Rev. Albert Mohler, the leading theologian of the Southern Baptist Convention, Bankruptcy in the Cathedral 10/22/2010, gloating (in a holy way, of course) about the bankruptcy of Rev. Robert Schuller's Crystal Cathedral in Orange County CA, as reported in Rebecca Cathcart, California's Crystal Cathedral Files for Bankruptcy New York Times 10/18/2010. Brother Al writes:

Without doubt, the media impact of the news was guaranteed by the fact that Robert Schuller has been so closely identified with his own version of prosperity theology. How does the ministry built on "Possibility Thinking" declare financial bankruptcy? ...

"Possibility Thinking" was Schuller's central message. He told his fellow preachers not to worry about repeating themselves in sermons, insisting that every message (he did not like to call his messages "sermons") must be about the development of a positive mental outlook.

Though ordained in the Reformed Church in America, Schuller minimized historic Christian orthodoxy and stressed instead the message of positive thinking. ...

In his 1986 book, Your Church Has a Fantastic Future, Schuller provided what he called "A Possibility Thinker’s Guide to a Successful Church.” The book is a manual for a ministry built on pure pragmatism, sensationalistic promotion, a therapeutic message, and a constant and incessant focus on thinking positively. ...

In an odd and upside-down way, the news of bankruptcy at the Crystal Cathedral makes that point emphatically. The most significant problem at the Crystal Cathedral is not financial, but theological. The issue is not money, but this ministry's message. The "gospel of success" is not the Gospel of Jesus Christ, therapy is no substitute for theology, and "Possibility Thinking" is not the message of the Bible.

It turns out that Robert Schuller offers the best analysis of this crisis with his own words. "No church has a money problem; churches only have idea problems." The theological crisis in Garden Grove is far more significant than the financial crisis. [my emphasis]

Brother Al doesn't cite any studies to show that churches following his own theological prescriptions fare better financially. In fact, membership growth in the Southern Baptist Convention has slowed and is likely to reverse itself in the coming years if current trends continue.

As far as the money part goes, lots of things can affect the financial performance of such institutions, in this instance a combination of religious operations and entertainment businesses. A lot of it has to do with plain old dollars-and-sense business management: good accounting, making reasonable revenue projections, keeping adequate reserves and insurance, etc. One of my favorite books ever about money and finances in general is The Seven Laws of Money (1974) by Michael Phillips. In it, he writes, "The high priests of money ... are obviously accountants. May we should have a cult in which accountants are worshipped; projects related to that cult would probably be very successful."

Of course, that particular arrangement would be difficult to pass off as conventional Christianity. The point is that Brother Al's gloating over the Crystal Cathedral's money problems as a theological victory is more than a little overdrawn. After all, as the Times article reports, revenue took a dive in 2008, when there was a a major financial crash. Whether or not the church's members had their faith in the Prosperity Gospel shaken thereby, they amount of actual money they have had to contribute to the church's revenue in the last two years has almost certainly been reduced.

But criticisms like these from Brother Al are unlikely to lead to a lot of conservative white Christians in the US rejecting the Prosperity Gospel for a prophetic notion of solidarity with the poor in the their struggles against the wealthy and the injustices of class society. Brother Al promotes a variety of Calvinism, which is presumably why he made the reference quoted above, "Though ordained in the [Calvinist] Reformed Church in America, Schuller minimized historic Christian orthodoxy."

Brother Al's brand of Calvinism is, I suspect, largely about John Calvin's theocratic side, which viewed the Church as the secular law-giver. But Calvinism with its doctrine of predestination can serve well as an ideology for acceptance of existing social conditions as God-ordained and out of the control of individuals. And for conservative white Protestants like Brother Al, the current system of plutocracy and growing inequality of income and wealth that prevail in the United States are not something that should be challenged. The evils of the secular government, on the other hand, particularly government by the Kenyan revolutionary Antichrist Barack Obama, are something to be challenged - especially when they challenge the claims of plutocracy and restrained corporate power.

Brother Al's theological objection to the Prosperity Gospel he states as follows:

Dennis Voskuil, a professor of church history at Schuller’s alma mater, Western Theological Seminary, placed Schuller within the context of the New Thought movement. "Robert Schuller is indirectly related to a long line of popular religionists who have proclaimed the gospel of this-worldly well-being through positive thinking," he wrote. "His lineage includes such disparate figures as Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, Mary Baker Eddy, Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, Ralph Waldo Trine, and Norman Vincent Peale. While there are many ideological branches on this family tree, all of its members have stressed a utilitarian message of self-help through some form of mind-conditioning."

Russell Chandler in his factually very useful book Understanding The New Age (revised edition 1993) also links the Schuller approach to the New Thought movement of which Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science was the most famous in its early days in the 19th century. Chandler, Voskuil and Brother Al are right in making that connection. Chandler does note, though, that Schuller himself partially objected to that association. Giving a different example of a Prosperity Gospel advocate, Chandler writes:

It is closely akin to the teachings of the Church of Christ, Scientist, founded by Mary Baker Eddy in 1879, and bears striking resemblance to the self-esteem theme of Reformed Church in America minister Norman Vincent Peale, whose Power of Positive Thinking was an immediate smash in 1952 and remains so to this day.

It is also echoed in some of the preachments and writings of another Reformed Church minister, Robert Schuller, whose giant Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California, has become synonymous with "Possibility Thinking." Ever since the ebullient prophet of happiness mounted the tar-paper roof of a drive-in theater snack shack in 1955 and launched the nation's first year-round drive-in church, Schuller has pronounced that a lack of self-esteem separates the average believer from fully understanding God.

After reading the first edition of this book, Schuller telephoned me, objecting strongly to being classed as "a fellow traveler" with New Agers. "I don't deserve that," he chided. "And I categorically deny that I believe in pantheism, reincarnation, channeling, astrology or crystals." Schuller added that he was "frustrated with the New Age movement" although, in his opinion, too much of the "anti-New Age work today is simply condemning it." Schuller went on to defend his concepts of "self-esteem" and "self-potential" theology, saying they are biblical ideas taught by Jesus.

It appears that Schuller specifically wanted to distance himself from other esoteric practices. But Chandler's quote doesn't have himself objecting specifically to placing his version of the Prosperity Gospel in the tradition of New Thought.

William James discussed earlier version of this optimistic, positive-thinking approach of which the Prosperity Gospel is part in The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902; Library of America edition 1987). He identified it with the "healthy-minded" religious attitude of those possessing what he called the "once-born" religious consciousness. Its opponents, who expressed similar criticisms to those of Brother Al, James included among those of the "twice-born" religious attitude, characterized by an intense awareness of the prevalence of Sin in human affairs. James considered the Epicureans and Stoics the highest expressions of the "healthy-minded" attitude in the ancient Greek world.

James meant terms like "healthy-minded" and "twice-born" to be descriptive, not judgmental or pejorative. He observes of the twice-born type, in a comment pointing to the attitude of passive acceptance of existing evils, "Envy of the placid beasts seems to be a very widespread affection in this type of sadness" or "religious melancholy". At least in relation to preserving the power and privileges of billionaires, "envy of the placid beasts" is the kind of perspective Brother Al's Calvinism promotes.

But he also observes of the once-born with the "healthy-minded" religious attitude, "If religious intolerance and hanging and burning could again become the order of the day, there is little doubt that, however it may have been in the past, the healthy-minded would at present show themselves the less indulgent party of the two."

James found constructive aspects to both kinds of religiosity. Affirmation of life and nature are prominent characteristics of the "once-born". Awareness of the tragedies and evils of life are pronounced among the "twice-born". James was writing before the two world wars and the Holocaust. But the importance of being keenly aware of the presence of evil in the world was already abundantly evident in 1902.

So there are theologically, socially and politically progressive aspects that can be found in both of William James' broad types of thinking. But with the Pentecostal and non-Pentecostal variants of the Prosperity Gospel, we're dealing with a fundamentally conservative brand of Christianity that celebrates narrow individualism and largely ignores or is hostile to considerations of human solidarity and social justice. With Brother Al's brand of Calvinism, we're dealing with an authoritarian form of Christianity which promotes acceptance of social and class conditions that should be intolerable, and even encourages fighting for the maintenance of those conditions at the expense of the poorest and most socially vulnerable - including many of the adherents of that religious outlook.

Social justice, the rights of humanity and especially of the poor, the need for compassion toward others, obligations to the community and rejection of bigotry and racism and xenophobia can never be fully read out of the Christian Gospel. So there will always be individuals from the Prosperity Gospel and the conservative-Calvinist camps who adopt a more humane and forward-looking religious and social stance. But conservative Protestants criticizing the Prosperity Gospel isn't in itself a sign of some new progressive tendency emerging. And it is certainly not a sign of a political split between the Christian Right and the Country Club Republicans who identify far more with the Kochtopus than with the Christian Savior.

Tags: calvinism, christian right, christian theology, christianism

Christian Right fears of Obama - 2008 looking at 2012

James Dobson's Focus on the Family Action published a gloom-and-doom letter during the election in 2008 about the dreadful future awaiting us if Obama were elected. Here are some quotes from this wingnut classic, here from the World Nut Daily site, entitled "Letter from 2012 in Obama's America". This first one is heartbreaking to read now:

In his first week in office, Obama followed President Clinton’s precedent and fired all 93 U.S. attorneys, replacing them with his own appointments, including the most active members of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). President Obama argued this was not a selective political action like what President Bush had done, because Obama had fired all of them, conservatives and liberals alike.

The Justice Department soon began to file criminal and civil charges against nearly every Bush administration official who had any involvement with the Iraq war.37 During his campaign, Senator Obama said, “What I would want to do is to have my Justice Department and my Attorney General immediately review the information that's already there and to find out are there inquiries that need to be pursued.”38 In order to facilitate these proceedings, President Obama rescinded President Bush’s executive order that had prevented presidential papers from being released, and millions of pages of previously secret White House papers were posted on the Internet. ACLU attorneys have spent four years poring over these papers looking for possible violations of law. Dozens of Bush officials, from the Cabinet level on down, are in jail, and most of them are also bankrupt from legal costs.

Let's just say that prediction was spectacularly wrong.

... As Vice President Joe Biden had predicted on Oct. 20, 2008, some hostile foreign countries "tested" President Obama in his first few months in office. The first test came from Russia. In early 2009 they followed the pattern they had begun in Georgia in 2008 and sent troops to occupy and re-take several Eastern European countries, starting with the Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. President Obama appealed to the United Nations (UN), taking the same approach as he had in his initial statements when Russia invaded Georgia in August 2008 and he said, "Now is the time for Georgia and Russia to show restraint, and to avoid an escalation to full scale war," and "All sides should enter into direct talks on behalf of stability in Georgia, and the United States, the United Nations Security Council, and the international community should fully support a peaceful resolution to this crisis," But Russia sits on the Security Council, and no UN action has yet been taken.

Then in the next three years Russia occupied additional countries that had been previous Soviet satellite nations, including Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Bulgaria, with no military response from the U.S. or the UN. Meetings of NATO heads of state have severely condemned Russia’s actions each time but they could never reach consensus on any military action. Liberal TV commentators in both the US and Europe have uniformly expressed deep regret at the loss of freedom of these countries but have also observed that "the U.S. cannot be the world’s policeman."

Their view of Latin America is comic-book silly:

President Obama has also moved to deepen U.S. ties and U.S. trade with Communist regimes in Cuba, Venezuela, and Bolivia, regimes that had long enjoyed the favor of far-left factions in the Democratic Party. Several other Latin American countries now seem ready to succumb to insurgent Communist revolutionary factions funded and armed by millions of petrodollars from Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.

And if fantasy can be dishonest, this is a good example. Let's just say it's a preposterous scenario:

In mid-2010 Iran launched a nuclear bomb which exploded in the middle of Tel Aviv, destroying much of that city. They then demanded that Israel cede huge amounts of territory to the Palestinians, and after an anguished all-night cabinet
meeting, Israel’s Prime Minister agreed. Israel is now reduced to a much smaller country, hardly able to defend itself, and its future remains uncertain. President Obama said that he abhorred what Iran had done and he hoped that the UN would unanimously condemn this crime against humanity. He also declared that the U.S. would be part of any international peacekeeping force if authorized by the UN, but the Muslim nations in the UN have so far prevented any UN action.

This one is almost funny to read now. Or just sad:

The new Congress under President Obama passed a nationalized "single provider" health care system, in which the U.S. government is now the provider of all health care in the United States, following the pattern of nationalized medicine the United Kingdom and Canada. The great benefit is that medical care is now free for everyone -- if you can get it. Now that health care is free it seems that everybody wants more of it. The waiting list for prostate cancer surgery is 3 years. The waiting list for ovarian cancer is 2 years. Just as the Canadian experience had shown prior to 2008 with its nationalized health care, so now in the US only a small number of MRIs are performed — only 10% of what they were in the U.S. in 2008 – because they are just too expensive, and they turn out to discover more problems that need treatment, so they are almost never authorized.

It's worth noticing that the writer's Christian priority was not to see that people without health insurance get it. Their Christian priority was to oppose any such program and instead to defend the 2008 framework. And oppose a new program with dishonest scare tactics, at that.

Michael Lind's article Is Barack Obama a socialist? Salon 11/01/08 (accessed 10/31/08) provided some useful, quick antidotes in real time to some of the crazier accusations in the "2012" paper.

Tags: christian right, christianism, radical right

Peter Daou is right: Dems are getting "played" on freedom of religion

I'm not a witch, but I hate the First Amendment

Peter Daou has a good post on Christine "I'm not a witch" O'Donnell's supposed lack of understanding of the First Amendment, Democrats getting played: O’Donnell successfully shapes dialogue about First Amendment 10/19/2010. For the kind of reaction to which Daou is responding, see Alex Pareene, Video: Christine O'Donnell forgets her Constitution at debate Salon.

I'm going to try to be a good Lakoffian here and "frame" this in the democratic way, which is also the Democratic way, rather than put it in the negative by refuting O'Donnell rightwing talking point.

The First Amendment says, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" - this is known as the Establishment Clause, meaning there should be no state church, i.e., keeping the Church out of the business of government - "or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" - to keep the government out of the business of the Church.

The 14th Amendment extended this and other provisions of the Bill of Rights to the states, as well. I'm not making a legal point here about the nuances of some obscure case. This is the basic Constitutional framework of our government.

The Founders, in this case the first Congress which passed the Bill of Rights, understood the First Amendment to separate religion and government, Church and State. The defining background for them was the Wars of Religion in the 16th century, the Thirty Years War of 1618-1648 and the English Civil Wars of (1642–1651). Sectarian religious considerations were major factors in those bloody conflicts, the 30 Years War being the bloodiest conflict in Europe prior to the First World War.

For perspective, 1791 (the year the first Congress convened) was 143 years after the end of the 30 Years War. The end of the American Civil War was 145 years ago, and our contemporary political discussions still include active discussion of that war, what it means, and the legal changes that emerged from it. It wasn't that they just thought picking out a state church was too much trouble. They understood separation of church and state as a positive good, for both government and religion. It was part of their understanding of democracy, as it is today in most democratic countries.

O'Donnell in what many progressive commentators took to be a gaffe was elaborating a favorite Christian theocratic talking point, dumb and annoying but popular. Daou gives an illustration from Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle, which is to point out that the phrase "separation of church and state" does not appear in the First Amendment. Ironically, the more someone knows about the law concerning freedom of religion, the more likely they are to stumble over that point if they aren't prepared for it. The First Amendment does separate church from state for the mutual benefit of both.

Daou quotes from an interview with Angle a couple of months back, in which she makes the theocratic talking point:

RALSTON: Oh, it doesn't? The Founding Fathers didn't believe in the separation of church and state?

ANGLE: Thomas Jefferson has been misquoted, like I've been misquoted, out of context. Thomas Jefferson was actually addressing a church and telling them through his address that there had been a wall of separation put up between the church and the state precisely to protect the church from being taken over by a state religion. That's what they meant by that. They didn't mean we couldn't bring our values to the political forum.

She's referring to a famous statement by Jefferson about having a wall separation church of state; the phrase "wall of separation" is often used in discussing this concept today. (See 'A Wall Of Eternal Separation' TPM 10/19/2010)

Here she makes a gotcha point that's typical of the dissembling manner of Christian Right candidates. No one that I've ever heard of, including Jefferson, argued that "we couldn't bring our values to the political forum." The Christian Right in more friendly context likes to talk about "putting God back into the public square."

But Democrats and supporters of freedom of religion do do argue that legislation must have a legitimate secular purpose. And it's perfectly legitimate to call out Republicans on exactly what they are their fellow Republicans mean when they talk about enacting religious values into our secular law.

Because, as we've seen for decades with the issue of teaching creationism in the public schools, the fundamentalist Christian Republicans do want to impose their specifically religious views through the power of the state. And they have gotten away for decades with campaigning to the Christian right on the basis of religion and then ducking questions about exactly what that means by saying such questions are illegitimate because they concern their very personal religious convictions.

The press has let them get away with, and there's no reason to think the press on its own will change. But Democrats have also let them get away with. And it's high time that candidates like Jack Conway in his Senate race in Kentucky against the unctuous and deceitful Rand Paul started calling them on it. Good for you, soon-to-be-Senator Conway!

And, if you are in any doubt about that line being Republican Party dogma and Constitutional scholarship, Limbaugh Defends O'Donnell: Separation Of Church And State Not In The Constitution TPMDC 10/19/2010.

Tags: christian dominionism, christian right, christianism, radical right, republican party

Foreign reporting on Glenn Beck's Whitestock rally

"By the time we got to Whitestock...": Pro-democracy demonstrators showed a presence, too

The Süddeutsche Zeitung (Munich) reports in Sarah Palin hat einen Traum (Sarah Palin has a dream) 28.08.2010:

Zwei Monate vor den Kongresswahlen in den USA machen Ultrakonservative und die religiöse Rechte mobil: Zehntausende Demonstranten haben sich am Samstag vor dem Lincoln Memorial in Washington versammelt, um gegen den angeblichen Zerfall nationaler und religiöser Werte zu protestieren. Damit dürfte - entgegen der Beteuerungen der Veranstalter das politische Establishment gemeint sein, vor allem Präsident Barack Obama.

[Two months before the Congressional elections in the USA the ultraconservatives and the Religious Right are mobilizing: tens of thousands of demonstrators assembled before the Lincoln Memorial in Washington on Saturday to protest against the alleged collapse of national and religious values. That, despite the claims of the organizers that the political establishment was meant, was mainly directed against President Barack Obama.]

El Mundo (Spain) headlined, La ultraderecha toma Washington 47 años después del sueño de Martin Luther King (The ultra-right takes Washington 47 years after the Dream of Martin Luther King) 28.08.2010

Der Standard (Vienna) Washington: Rechte mobilisiert gegen Obama (The right mobilizes against Obama) 28.08.2010 with the caption "Ausgerechnet Sarah Palin will die 'Ehre Amerikas wiederherstellen'" (Sarah Palin of all people wants to "restore America's honor")

El País (Spain) Los ultraconservadores hacen una demostración de fuerza ante la estatua de Lincoln (Ultraconservatives have a strong demonstration in front of Lincoln's statue) 28.08.2010

Der Spiegel (Hamburg) Massendemo für Ehre und Glauben: US-Rechte mobilisieren Tausende gegen Obama (Mass demonstration for honor and faith: US rightists mobilize thousands against Obama) 28.08.2010. The caption says:

In Washington haben sich Tausende Ultra-Konservative versammelt, ausgerechnet am Jahrestag der "I have a dream"-Rede Martin Luther Kings. Die Hardliner demonstrieren gegen Präsident Obama - und für die "Ehre" der Nation.

[In Washington, thousands of ultraconservatives assembled, of all times on the anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech. The hardliners are demonstrating against President Obama - and for the "honor" of the nation.]

Polémica y demostración de fuerza de la derecha conservadora en Washington (Polemics and a large demonstration by the conservative right in Washington) Clarín (Argentina) 28.08.2010 with the caption:

A pocos meses de las elecciones, una multitud del movimiento popular conservador "Tea Party" acusó a Obama de "racista contra los blancos". "No queremos una dictadura y el presidente está intentando eso en nuestro país", acusaron. Martin Luther King dio allí su discurso más famoso 47 años atrás.

[A few months before the elections, a multitud of the conservative popular movement "Tea Party" accuses Obama of being "racist against whites". "We don't want a dictatorship and the President intends to make one in our country," they accused. Martin Luther King gave his most famous speech there 47 years ago.]

Die Zeit (Hamburg), Zehntausende demonstrieren gegen Präsident Obama (Tens of thousands demonstrate against President Obama) 28.08.2010, with the caption:

In Washington protestieren Ultrakonservative und die religiöse Rechte – ausgerechnet am Lincoln Memorial. Vor 47 Jahren hielt Martin Luther King hier seine berühmte Rede

[In Washington, ultraconservatives and the Religious Right protest - of all places at the Lincoln Memorial. 47 years ago, Martin Luther King held his famous speech here]

La Journada (Mexico) Marchan conservadores en Washington a 47 años del "sueño" de Luther King (Conservatives march in Washington 47 years after the "dream" of Luther King) 28.08.2010:

La manifestación del Tea Party, agrupación de conservadores derechistas de tendencia populista, tenía lugar en el Lincoln Memorial, en el corazón de la capital ...

[The demonstration of the Tea Party, a group of rightwing conservatives with populist tendencies, took place at the Lincoln Memorial, in the hear of the Capital ...]

El Universal (Mexico), 'Anti Obama' inicia su protesta (The "Anti-Obama" begins his protest) with the caption:

Glenn Beck, comentarista del Fox News , reunió a varias personas para desacreditar la agenda de cambio del presidente Barack Obama y restablecer el honor y los valores en EU

[Glenn Beck, commentator for Fox News, assembled various figures to discredit President Obama's agenda of change and to re-establish the honor and values of the US]

Cadena SER (Spain) Miles de conservadores estadounidenses se manifiestan en Washington (Thousands of American conservatives rally in Wshington) with the caption:

La ultraderecha se ha manifestado en el mismo lugar en el que Martin Luther King pronunció su famoso discurso "Tengo un Sueño" hace 47 años

[The ultra-right demonstrated in the same place in which Martin Luther King made his famous "I Have A Dream" speech 47 years ago]

Tags: christian right, christianism, glenn beck, radical right

Calvinism and American conservatism (Updated)

John Calvin (1509-1564)

The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) has been having an internal debate for years over Calvinism and what role it should play in SBC theology. I've always suspected that underlying the mind-numbing theological generalization, that "Calvinism" in this debate actually stood for a Christian dominionist view of government and politics.

The following article by Burke Gerstenschlager doesn't specifically address the SBC debates: The Kids Are All Wrong: Texas Tosses The Enlightenment Religion Dispatches 07/08/2010. But Gerstenschlager does give a good idea of how Calvin's hardcore theocratic view could would find favor among Christian Dominionists:

Throughout The Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin, a lawyer by training, comprehensively establishes and describes God’s authority and action as complete in every moment of human existence. He opens his volume with these words: Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and ourselves.

If there ever was an anti-Enlightenment axiom, this is it. ... Calvin's Divine Providence, through the exclusive salvific death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, is absolute. Everything is predestined for God's own glory and has been manifested in the Gospel for humanity's salvation and damnation. In light of this, in his very last chapter, Calvin offers his concept of government. Basically, it is The Institutes put into civil practice.

With his high view of inerrant, god-breathed Scripture, Calvin employs story after biblical story to establish God's choice in the determination of every ruler from David to Nebuchadnezzar and beyond. By Divine Providence and holy decree, God—not the people—chooses the rulers, though the people may think they have some sort of democratic power. And those who believe that laws do not come from God Calvin calls "seditious."

He writes, "the first duty of subjects towards their rulers, is to entertain the most honorable views of their office, recognizing it as a delegated jurisdiction from God, and on that account receiving and reverencing them as the ministers and ambassadors of God."

Later, he writes "let no man here deceive himself, since we cannot resist the magistrate without resisting God." In The Institutes, Calvin begins with our knowledge of God the Creator and ends with the complete manifestation of God’s will in our governments and social lives. [italics in orginal; my emphasis in bold]

On the surface, this notion that all laws come from God looks like a kind of quietist view, holding that Christians should adapt themseves to whatever legal regime under which they find themselves living.

But while Calvin would have assumed God's sovereignty even in ungodly governments, his arguments there are essentially applicable to godly government. Like, for instance, the rigid theocratic regime that Calvin eventually headed in Geneva - though it was not nearly so ferociously rigid as that of the Anabaptists in Münster. [bolded update, 07/02/2012] And Calvin understood it to be part of the duty of Christians to actively seek to realize godly government here in the fallen world.

Gerstenschlager accurately observes, "So comprehensive and extensive is Calvin’s concept of predestined government, it effectively invalidates the concept of the Separation of Church and State before it is even introduced!"

Gerstenschlager isn't just using hyperbole about Christian fundamentalists rejecting the Enlightenment. That's really the case when it comes to Enlightenment ideas of science, individual freedom and representative government. Fundamentalist theology from the start was particularly hostile to historical-critical methods of Biblical research, which was a prominent feature of classical German philosophy and scholarship of the early 19th century.

But even fundis are free of Enlightement thinking. John Maynard Keynes famously observed, "Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist." Or, as he also put it, "Even the most practical man of affairs is usually in the thrall of the ideas of some long-dead economist." And Christian fundamentalists are in many ways in thrall to the Scottish Enlightenment, from which the so-called literalist reading of the Scriptures is derived.

Tags: christian dominionism, jean calvin, christianism, christian right