God, I love Pink Dome.
There’s no more entertaining place to keep up with what’s really going on in Reichstag-on-the-Brazos (yes, y’all, I know Austin’s on the Colorado, but these days I’m doing all I can to stay rooted) than the deliciously seditious and nutritious PD.
Now, along with an account of Little Ricky’s bill-signing service last Sunday with that hate-peddling Pharisee Rod Parsley, PinkDome treats us to a peek at self-described “Evangelical leader” Ted Haggard‘s e-mailed instructions to his flock at Colorado City’s New Life Church on how to try their best to pass as “normal” during an upcoming opportunity to be on TV.
Let PinkDome tell you all about it. You’ll be glad you did.
As Mrs. Patrick Campbell so famously said, one shouldn’t frighten the horses, let alone Barbara Walters — but this bunch just might.
Thanks again to PD for this look behind the blinkers (emphasis added):
To: [e-mail address deleted]
Date: May 10, 2005 6:51 PM
Subject: Media Attention
Dear New Lifers and friends of New Life Church:
I just received the following e-mail and thought you ought to know about some developments. Yesterday a small team of Evangelical leaders (Sunday Adelaja from Kiev, Michael Little, President of CBN, Jay Sekulow from the Center for Law and Justice in Washington, Brian and Bobbie Houston from Hillsong in Sidney, Australia, and Dr. Brent Parsley from the great New Life Church in Colorado Springs, CO, USA) and myself spent just about three hours with Benjamin Netanyahu, Minister of Finance for Israel near/on the Sea of Galilee in Israel. Then we were in Jerusalem and in two hours we’re leaving to meet Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
[snip}
I wanted you to see this e-mail about some upcoming media attention that was just forwarded to me so you can help me.
[snip]
Here are a few tips:
- If a camera is on you during a worship service, worship; don’t dance, jump, etc. Secular people watching TV are touched with authentic worship, but jumping and dancing in church looks too bizarre for most to relate to. Remember, people watching TV news are not experiencing what you are experiencing. They are watching and thinking. Worship indicates sincerity, dancing and jumping looks like excessive emotionalism.
- If reporters want to interview you, talk with them, but use words that make sense to them. Speak their language. Don’t talk about the devil, demons, voices speaking to you, God giving you supernatural revelations, etc. Instead, tell your personal story in common sense language (I was a drunk but God changed me and now I’m sober, I’m grateful, etc.).
- Don’t be nervous. Be friendly and open. Reporters typically don’t have an agenda, they authentically want to know what we do and why we do it. For example, Barbara Walters is working on a story about heaven and will interview me [snip] if she talks with you, don’t be spooky or weird. Don’t switch into a glassy-eyed heavenly mode, just answer, “Heaven is real. It’s the place where God will be fully present with his people. He will reward people in heaven. Heaven is better than Colorado Springs.” Say it straight and clear. Don’t worry (Yeah, sure!).
Okay, Brent and I are
[snip]
going to a meeting on Thursday night in Washington, then on Friday morning we’ll fly to New York to interview with Barbara Walters and then appear on the O’Reilly Factor Friday evening. Then we’ll zip home on Saturday to be with YOU on Sunday. Saints, I need your strength. I would love to see you all on Sunday so we can just have a wonderful family time together. I LOVE you!
And I love being your pastor,
Ted
I don’t know about you, but what spooks this old gray mare even more than what Haggard preaches is the company he keeps
Next time you see Brother Rick, be sure and tell him Brother Ted said hello.
Crossposted at The Daily Kos and Come and Take It
The media access and political access these guys have is mind-boggling. If, instead of being fundies, with the voices and spirits and stuff, and were instead, say, convinced the trip to the moon didn’t happen because the voices told them that, do you think they’d be getting media time?
I’m still trying to figure out why claiming that you’ve got a direct line to G*d, that evolution is a fake, yada yada yada, gets you access to power.
And yet a lot of us here, who say things like “we should all love one another and be respectful”, can’t get the time of day.
I couldn’t have said it better myself! It continually astounds me as to how some of these people have any credibility. Cultism on a grand scale as I see it.
and political access really amount to the same thing, when both media organizations and politicians become wholly owned subsidiaries of the same corporate conglomerates.
The relationship between the New Christianist leaders and our current administration is just as symbiotic, harking back to a time when the church legitimized the state by delivering to a ‘God-anointed’ ruler the allegiance of the masses, and in return was rewarded ‘state religion’ status and was allowed to enrich itself with impunity.
We’re not quite there yet, but we’re headed in that direction. And that is why people like Ted Haggard have access to media, to politicians … and to power.
Darwin defines success as increasing numbers. These people’s numbers are increasing so therefore by rational, measurable criteria, they have a successful approach to life.
We on the left think that we live in an Enlightenment world in which society is harmed by superstition and a lack of education, and helped by an educated, informed population. We call ourselves the party of reality–and yet the the world we believe in has ended and we don’t recognize it.
The reason that enlightenment succeeded was because, in its day, the economy was owned by the common people. By definition, anything that helped the common people helped the economy. That began to end with the industrial age, when the people became simply a resource and therefor a cost for the economy. The last major sector to go was family farming during the 20th century.
Since the economy is no longer owned by the common people, it no longer needs them to be informed, skeptical and innovative. It needs job skills but not education, or where it does need education, in this world of globalized hyper-sized corporations, it only needs very tiny numbers of people to be educated.
And yet a lot of us here, who say things like “we should all love one another and be respectful”, can’t get the time of day.
No, we can’t, because this is an unsuccessful philosophy. It doesn’t make anyone rich and in fact it threatens to restrict wealth.
Fundamentalism is common in primitive and underdeveloped societies whose people don’t understand their world very well and have little power to influence it. That description increasingly fits the United States which in many ways is becoming history’s most powerful 3rd world society.
Another fantasy of us on the left is that the peoples’ worth and power constantly evolve upwards. They don’t. What’s happened is that the march of technology has complicated the world enough that ordinary people cannot understand it very well, and in fact they never will again. Meanwhile the economy has solved the problem of distributed ownership, and it’s returning to the historic norm of most production being owned by a tiny nobility.
So the people can’t understand their world, and they can’t predict or influence events very well, and so they return to fundamentalism. Fundamentalism gives them community, gives them support, and keeps them cooperatively engaged in those opportunities the nobility has to offer them.
Education doesn’t offer most poeople the benefits that fundamentalism does in the modern world.
Hmmmm… Where to start?
I agree that centralized wealth, centralized power, poor education, and religious fundamentalism are all mutually-reinforcing traits of a society. And that for much of history these conditions have been the norm that defined the world of most people. However, I don’t agree that these trends are irreversible / inevitable, especially if we are aware of them.
The internet in particular is a technology that would seem to offer opportunities for decentralization of power, undermining authoritarianism of all sorts, and opportunities of education. It’s a resource that society as a whole is still underutilizing. The USSR fell, and all folks there had to work with was print, radio and cassettes to surreptitiously disseminate truth.
IMHO, the key to breaking the negative cycle for the long term is widespread education, but that won’t happen without a middle class that has sufficient money to afford such luxuries. This administration’s anti-intellectualism and economic policies squeezing the middle class must be reversed if the negatively reinforcing cycle is to be broken. But I still have hope, if we can just get a critical mass of intelligent people elected.
Of course, should that prove impossible through a few more election cycles, then it’s time to pack up & consider emigration. I’ve had frank talks with my children about that. Not everywhere seems to have the problems you mention, and the example of the US may help other countries avoid a decline into darkness.
There are a lot of reasons for this, but I think one of the biggest reasons is that self-righteous hatred is easy and gives a quick, short-term boost to the ol’ ego but really loving one another is friggin’ hard work and requires an ego healthy enough for humility.
(And honestly, how many folks here and elsewhere who say things like “we should all love one another and be respectful” consistantly practice what they preach? Consistantly? Not me, I’m shitty at it.)