PBS commentator and Economist editor Bill Moyers’s address to the Union Theological Seminary in New York is full of insightful indictments against both Muslim and Christian fundamentalism. Some of the better moments:
The massacre [of the first-born] continues until “there is not a house where one was not dead.” While the Egyptian families mourn their dead, God orders Moses to loot from their houses all their gold and silver and clothing. Finally, God’s thirst for blood is satisfied, God pauses to rest-and boasts: “I have made sport of the Egyptians.”
Violence: the sport of God. God, the progenitor of shock and awe. And that’s just Act II. As the story unfolds women and children are hacked to death on God’s order; unborn infants are ripped from their mother’s wombs; cities are leveled — their women killed if they have had sex, the virgins taken at God’s command for the pleasure of his holy warriors.
Inside that [fundamentalist] logic you cannot read part of the Bible allegorically and the rest of it literally; if you believe in the virgin birth of Jesus, his crucifixion and resurrection, and the depiction of the Great Judgment at the end times you must also believe that God is sadistic, brutal, vengeful, callow, cruel, and savage — that God slaughters. Millions believe it.
For such an hour, America surely needed a godly leader. So General Boykin explained how it was that the candidate who had lost the election in 2000 nonetheless wound up in the White House. President Bush, he said, “was not elected by a majority of the voters — he was appointed by God.”
Not surprising, instead of being reprimanded for evangelizing while in uniform, General Boykin is now the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence. (Just as it isn’t surprising that despite his public call for the assassination of a foreign head of state, Pat Robertson’s Operation Blessing was one of the first groups to receive taxpayer funds from the President’s Faith-Based Initiative for “relief work” on the Gulf Coast.)
We can’t wiggle out of this, people. Alvin Hawkins states it frankly: “This is a problem we can’t walk away from.” We’re talking about a powerful religious constituency that claims the right to tell us what’s on God’s mind and to decide the laws of the land according to their interpretation of biblical revelation and to enforce those laws on the nation as a whole. For the Bible is not just the foundational text of their faith; it has become the foundational text for a political movement.
True, people of faith have always tried to bring their interpretation of the Bible to bear on American laws and morals — this very seminary is part of that tradition; it’s the American way, encouraged and protected by the First Amendment. But what is unique today is that the radical religious right has succeeded in taking over one of America’s great political parties — the country is not yet a theocracy but the Republican Party is — and they are driving American politics, using God as a battering ram on almost every issue: crime and punishment, foreign policy, health care, taxation, energy, regulation, social services and so on.
What’s also unique is the intensity, organization, and anger they have brought to the public square. Listen to their preachers, evangelists, and homegrown ayatollahs: Their viral intolerance — their loathing of other people’s beliefs, of America’s secular and liberal values, of an independent press, of the courts, of reason, science and the search for objective knowledge — has become an unprecedented sectarian crusade for state power.
In recent weeks a movement called the Ohio Restoration Project has been launched to identify and train thousands of “Patriot Pastors” to get out the conservative religious vote next year. According to press reports, the leader of the movement — the senior pastor of a large church in suburban Columbus-casts the 2006 elections as an apocalyptic clash between “the forces of righteousness and the hordes of hell.”
The fear and loathing in his message is palpable: He denounces public schools that won’t teach creationism, require teachers to read the Bible in class, or allow children to pray. He rails against the “secular jihadists” who have “hijacked” America and prevent school kids from learning that Hitler was “an avid evolutionist.” He links abortion to children who murder their parents. He blasts the “pagan left” for trying to redefine marriage. He declares that “homosexual rights” will bring “a flood of demonic oppression.” On his church website you read that “Reclaiming the teaching of our Christian heritage among America’s youth is paramount to a sense of national destiny that God has invested into this nation.”
One of the prominent allies of the Ohio Restoration Project is a popular televangelist in Columbus who heads a $40 million-a-year ministry that is accessible worldwide via l,400 TV stations and cable affiliates. Although he describes himself as neither Republican nor Democrat but a “Christocrat” — a gladiator for God marching against “the very hordes of hell in our society” — he nonetheless has been spotted with so many Republican politicians in Washington and elsewhere that he has been publicly described as a”spiritual advisor” to the party.
There’s much, much more. Read the rest at AlterNet.
(Props: A Call to Action)
