republican counterfeit christianity
by Andrew Bosworth
Published: January 14, 2008
In a recent Republican debate, Mike Huckabee fielded a “what would Jesus do” question on the death penalty, read by CNN’s Anderson Cooper. Huckabee improvised with a clever deflection: “Jesus was too smart to ever run for public office, Anderson. That’s what Jesus would do.”
Actually, we already know Jesus’ position on the death penalty. It is evident when a crowd, following the Law of Moses, was about to stone a woman for adultery:
“But when they persisted in asking Him, He straightened up, and said to them, ‘He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.’” (John, 8: 5 - 7).
But why didn’t anyone ask Huckabee about the 15-year-old girl? While reasonable people can disagree over abortion, only a Neanderthal would block a Medicaid abortion payment for a 15-year-old girl raped by her stepfather - as Huckabee did. The New York Times headline ran as follows: “Arkansas Governor Blocks Medicare Payment for an Abortion in Incest Case.” This fact alone should sink him in a general election. Indeed, if Huckabee wins the nomination, Kool-Aid will be flowing at the 2008 Convention (will there be snake-handling and speaking in tongues?) as Republicans commit a collective, Jonestown-style “Huckacide.”
Christianity is supposed to about recognizing the divinity in all people and, above all, about being kind. It’s about forgiveness, redemption and salvation. Today, however, a steady stream of Republicans and fire-and-brimstone preachers sell Jesus as everything he was not: pro-war, pro-rich, pro-death penalty and a card-carrying member of the Republican National Committee.
Those pastors who have not turned their backs on their congregations, in order to seek power and glory in Washington, remain inspirational (even to secular people). Consider Rick Warren, for example, or Joel Osteen.
However, when the preacher “goes to Washington” we know what happens:
Remember Ralph Reed? The former Executive Director of the Christian Coalition? He was intimately involved with the Abramoff-Indian gambling scandal. The perpetrators helped close down an Indian casino knowing that the tribe would then pay the lobbyists to help re-open it. It was a diabolical heist: $ 5.3 million dollars!
Remember Pat Robertson? He was the Protestant Ayatollah who issued a fatwa for the assassination of President Hugo Chavez: “You know, I don’t know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It’s a whole lot cheaper than starting a war.” Then Robertson had to “lie” about it: “I didn’t say ‘assassination.’ I said our special forces should ‘take him out.’ And ‘take him out’ can be a number of things, including kidnapping.” OK, whatever.
Perhaps fewer people would laugh at Robertson if they knew that one of his close business partners was a machete-happy and limb-severing warlord, Charles Taylor of Liberia. (Taylor is under indictment by the United Nations’ Special Criminal Court for human rights violations.) The business at hand? It was investing West African gold mines, hellpits of human exploitation and forced child labor.
Remember Jimmy Swaggart? Should he provide advice on foreign affairs perhaps? This televangelist, repeatedly caught with prostitutes, projected his own qualities on the Muslim prophet, denouncing Muhammad as a “pervert” and a “sex deviant.”
Remember Jerry Falwell? His words speak for themselves: “The idea that religion and politics don’t mix was invented by the Devil to keep Christians from running their own country.” And: “If you’re not a born-again Christian, you’re a failure as a human being.”
Remember James Dobson? The leader of Focus on the Family? In a world wracked by war and disease, he found the time to condemn Sponge Bob Square Pants as a cartoon that “promotes the acceptance of homosexuality.” There was precedent for this Inquisition, of course: Reverend Falwell had questioned the sexual orientation of Tinky Winky, a Telltubby: “He is purple - the gay-pride color; and his antenna is shaped like a triangle - the gay-pride symbol.”
What is really going on here? Is there, to use Sigmund Freud’s logic, an “unruly homosexual feeling” at the root of the matter? Falwell and Dobson: “homo fascista?”
How did this sorry state of affairs come to be? While churches have clearly been involved in the Abolitionist and in the Civil Rights movement, there is another variant of Christianity - backwards, reactionary, fundamentalist and even white supremacist, consisting of the kind of Christians who opposed mixed marriages, for example, back when the Supreme Court faced that issue in 1967.
The Christian fundamentalist captured a chunk of Republican Party (henceforth simply “the Party”) in one generation. For those of you too young to remember: the Radical Right was once insignificant. At the Party’s 1980 convention, the Bible-thumpers were few in number, having somehow pushed passed security to make noise at the back of the hall. Reagan was not entirely comfortable with the fundamentalists and Bush Sr. even less so. But now, a backwoods preacher has a shot at the White House.
It was a marriage of convenience. The Party discovered that religious zealotry could entice working class Americans to vote against their own economic interests. Hot-button issues like school prayer, the pledge of Allegiance, homosexuality, abortion, the death penalty didn’t solve the nation’s most pressing economic and political problems but they sure made people feel better. In 2000 and 2004, Karl Rove built bare electoral majorities on the back of this new Republican God Squad, and for eight years America has been ground between the twin millstones of economic and cultural regression.
So where do Christian fundamentalists get the idea, which keeps coming up, that the United States government is supposed to have a religious orientation? They point to the word “Creator” in the Declaration of Independence, which is not, like the US Constitution, a legal document. That’s a pretty slim basis for a theocracy.
The truth is quite simple: The Founders believed in God, but they had little or even no faith in Church. Early America was a Christian society, to be sure, (in which no sect dominated), but it was a secular republic. If anything, the Framers of the Constitution brought their “Freemasonry” - not their Christianity - to bear upon the early republic. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were all Freemasons, a fraternal order known for its freethinking and “anticlericalism.”
Thomas Jefferson: “In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.”
Jefferson and his freethinking brethren who railed against the Church remembered the “Burning Times” of Europe. They also remembered the Salem Witch Trials, when preachers used the civil courts to hang people for imaginary crimes like cavorting with the devil: “She comes to me at night and torments me!” The Founders knew that to mix Church and State was to “plunge into madness.”
The Founders did not confuse freedom of religion with the freedom to thrust it into the sphere of government. Madison crafted a Constitution balancing freedom of religion with freedom from religion. James Madison: “The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries.” Thus, we have the First Amendment:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” (First Amendment of the US Constitution).
The Constitution does make another mention of religion - to restrict it even further in Article VI, which prohibits any kind of religious test for office: “… but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” (Article IV, Section 3, US Constitution).
Since then, the Supreme Court has decided that there is freedom of religious “belief” but not necessarily of “practice” (polygamy, hallucinogenic use, etc.) The Supreme Court even developed a reasonable “Lemon Test” in 1971 as a measure of when church and state are excessively entangled. To be constitutional, a statute must 1) have a secular legislative purpose; 2) neither advance nor inhibit religion and 3) not foster an excessive government entanglement with religion.
The Lemon Test has produced a series of reasonable, middle-of-the-road decisions, but Justice Antonin Scalia (appointed by Reagan) has compared the test to “some ghoul in a late-night horror movie.” Justice Scalia, by the way, managed to reach the Supreme Court even though he believes in a dusted-off version of the Divine Right of Kings. The mullah-wannabe made evident, during the oral arguments for “Van Orden v. Perry” (2005), that the US government derives its moral authority not from the people, not from citizens, but from God: “And when somebody goes by that monument, I don’t think they’re studying each one of the commandments. It’s a symbol of the fact that government comes.., derives its authority from God. And that is, it seems to me, an appropriate symbol to be on State grounds.”
Not so. The Declaration of Independence (again, not actually a legal document) recognizes the “unalienable rights” of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” as coming from a “Creator,” but the US Constitution stipulates that the US government derives its authority from the bottom up, from the people. The Preamble begins: “We the People…”
It’s time to stop with the “what would Jesus do” questions of the candidates and start with “What would Jefferson do?” and “What would Madison do?”
Matamoros, Mexico: aaabos@gmail.com
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