Christian Soldier – JOS SANCES
“The emancipation of belief is the most formidable of the tasks of reform, the one on which all else depends.” – John Kenneth Galbraith
Eric Alterman, in The Nation, notes that three great champions of liberalism passed very recently. To read his brief tribute is to feel crushing sadness at the sort of people now driving our public discourse, and to note how completely the debate in this country has been hijacked by extreme rightwing religious fanatics, especially as one reads that two of these lost champions were religious leaders who fought to create connections, NOT erect boundaries and expand destruction:
John Kenneth Galbraith died on April 29 at age 97, ending one of the most consequential liberal lives of the past century. As it happened, his death came just days after those of two other giants of American liberalism: Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg at age 84 and the Rev. William Sloane Coffin at 81. It would take up much of this magazine just to list the scholarly, literary, political, even prophetic achievements of these three, as well as to describe the myriad ways the world is a better place for their having lived in it. Here are just a few highlights
Alterman continues:
Hertzberg ran guns to Palestine in 1946, already a rabbi, an aspiring historian and vice president of the Philadelphia Zionist Region. He published an indispensable intellectual history of the Zionist ideal in 1959 and celebrated Israel’s victory in 1967 but called for a Palestinian state decades before respectable Jewish opinion allowed such talk. He held fast to this position despite serving not only as the rabbi at important Conservative synagogues but also as president of the American Jewish Congress (1972-78) and vice president of the World Jewish Congress (1975-91). In addition Hertzberg condemned the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Israeli beatings of Palestinians in 1988 and Israeli demolition of Palestinian homes in 2004. He even called on America to deduct from its aid to Israel every nickel the Jewish state devoted to its illegal settlements. Israel aside, Hertzberg was large; he contained multitudes. Imagine a rabbi in Englewood, New Jersey, telling his Conservative congregation in 1967, “A vote for the Republican Party…is a vote for racism, and I forbid it as an immoral act!”
As an atheist, I pause at such bald insertions of the demands of faith into assertions of how citizens vote, but in these perilous times, I wish we’d hear more of this from the Religious Left. Alterman goes on:
Like his brother Bonesman George H.W. Bush, Coffin was born fabulously rich and found himself employed post-Yale at the CIA. He joined up, he later said, in an attempt to expiate the guilt he felt over his postwar role, as an Army liaison to the Russian military, in the forced repatriation of Soviet prisoners almost certainly murdered upon their return. This left him, he wrote, “a burden of guilt I am sure to carry the rest of my life.” After his brief stint at the CIA, he was inspired in large measure by Reinhold Niebuhr to enter the ministry, and found himself appointed, at 33, Yale’s youngest chaplain ever. It was a decidedly stormy tenure. In 1961 he was arrested with six others in Montgomery, Alabama, during a civil rights protest. It was the first of many. He was a founder, in 1965, of Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam but grew frustrated with its ineffectiveness. In 1967 he began to offer the chapel at Yale as a sanctuary for war resisters. During the planning of a demonstration against the Pentagon that year, he helped preside at a Boston service in which he accepted 185 draft cards and 175 classification notices to be turned over to the Justice Department. This led to his conviction for conspiracy to counsel draft evasion (later thrown out on a technicality). At the time, Yale president Kingman Brewster told students and parents, “I disagree with the chaplain’s position on draft resistance, and in this instance deplore his style.” Coffin left Yale for New York’s Riverside Church–but continued his moral leadership–before departing in the mid-1980s to head SANE/Freeze and help lead the fight for nuclear disarmament.
He goes on to write briefly of Galbraith, including the quote above. Galbraith, of course, was a sort of cleric working at the main altar of American life — he was an economist. These three men all championed the liberal idea, the founding idea of our nation, that we should work together, despite and because of our differences, to make life better for the next generation … to root out injustice and inequality. Sadly, those men, those ideals, are fading wraiths now, their fragile misty outlines burning away in the firey light of the triumphant and aggressive radical right.
Just recently, Republicans in the House added language to an appropriation bill to help rightwing evangelical chaplains push their particular brand of faith on mixed gatherings of service people:
The House passed a $513 billion defense authorization bill yesterday that includes language intended to allow chaplains to pray in the name of Jesus at public military ceremonies, undercutting new Air Force and Navy guidelines on religion.[…]
Before the bill reached the House floor, Republicans on the House Armed Services Committee added the provision on military chaplains. It says each chaplain “shall have the prerogative to pray according to the dictates of the chaplain’s own conscience, except as must be limited by military necessity, with any such limitation being imposed in the least restrictive manner feasible.”
Air Force and Navy rules issued in recent months allow chaplains to pray as they wish in voluntary worship services. But the rules call for nonsectarian prayers, or a moment of silence, at public meetings or ceremonies, especially when attendance is mandatory for service members of all faiths.
This ridiculous assault on unit cohesion and comity amongst fighters of different faiths was added due to pressure from zealots like Lieutenant Gordon James Klingenschmitt, the Navy chaplain who pursued a hunger strike protesting that the Navy was “discriminating” against him because his superior officer instructed him to stick to ecumenical observances during services attended by broad communities of service people.
Every aspect of American life is coming under pressure from fanatics on the far fringe of theological belief. Over at Truthdig, in a piece called Battle Cry for Theocracy, Sansara Taylor reports:
If you’ve been waiting to get alarmed until the Christian fascist movement started filling stadiums with young people and hyping them up to do battle in “God’s army,” wait no longer.
In recent weeks, BattleCry, a Christian fundamentalist youth movement, has attracted more than 25,000 people to mega-rally rock concerts in San Francisco and Detroit, and this weekend it plans to fill Wachovia Stadium in Philadelphia.
The leaders of BattleCry claim that their religion and values are under attack, but amid spectacular light shows, Hummers, Navy SEALs and military imagery on stage, it is BattleCry that has declared war on everyone else. Its leader, Ron Luce, insists: “This is war. And Jesus invites us to get into the action, telling us that the violent–the `forceful’ ones–will lay hold of the kingdom.”
The next generation is getting whipped up into a righteous frenzy, new Christian Brown Shirts groomed to take the culture war to the streets. Oh, and on America’s playing fields? Don’t worry, the Pharisees have that covered too (note – watch ad before reading):
Today, more pro athletes than ever are using their respective fields of play as pulpits to express, and promote, their faith. Unknown to many fans, though, there’s often a “coach” behind the post-game prayers and testimonies. In the Sixers’ case it’s Kevin Harvey, the team’s volunteer Christian chaplain and, by day, a staff member of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, the oldest and largest Christian sports organization in America. It was Harvey who first encouraged the players to hold the post-game prayers. “I look for ways to challenge the guys all the time — everyday things they can do with the platform God has given them,” he says. “So last season, I told them, ‘Guys, I know God is doing good things on this team.’ I brought up the way some teams in the NFL gather up after the game and give thanks to God for the opportunity to compete. The guys said they wanted to do it. So now, after all games, they circle up and pray.”
Chaplains like Harvey are embedded, with rare exception, inside each of the nearly 100 teams in the Big Three major-league sports: baseball, football and basketball. Coming almost exclusively from the conservative end of the religious and cultural spectrum, the chaplains and their ministries are a main reason for the forceful presence of evangelical Christianity in professional sports. Indeed, it’s no accident that fans today are witnessing public proclamations of Christian faith by players through seemingly nonstop religious gestures on and off the field. The players are coached in evangelism, in many cases from their days in high school, by the Kansas City-based FCA, Athletes in Action, based in Xenia, Ohio, and similar ministries. Both AIA and FCA have relationships with political powerhouses Focus on the Family and Campus Crusade for Christ International, which have long crusaded to infuse American society with conservative Christianity, and are perennial backers of the Republican Party.
The Fellowship of Christian Athletes, which claims the Bible is “the only infallible, authoritative Word of God,” strives to “see the world impacted for Jesus Christ through the influence of athletes and coaches.” Similarly, AIA states that it “exists to boldly proclaim the love and truth of Jesus Christ to those uniquely impacted by sport.” Houston Astros third baseman Morgan Ensberg, who has worked with AIA, put it succinctly in an interview with Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network. “The entire reason that I play baseball is so that I get a chance to speak about Christ,” he said.
Salon has been doing great work tracking these front in the culture war over the past many months (ad watching required), and today they also add this overview of the movement, focusing mainly on the struggle of Roy Moore to keep a monument to the Ten Commandments in his courtroom. The piece notes ominously:
Fascism isn’t imminent in America. But its language and aesthetics are distressingly common among Christian nationalists. History professor Roger Griffin described the “mobilizing vision” of fascist movements as “the national community rising Phoenix-like after a period of encroaching decadence which all but destroyed it” (his italics). The Ten Commandments has become a potent symbol of this dreamed-for resurrection on the American right.
True, our homegrown quasi-fascists often appear so absurd as to seem harmless. Take, for example, American Veterans in Domestic Defense, the organization that took the Ten Commandments on tour. The group says it exists to “neutralize the destructiveness” of America’s “domestic enemies,” which include “biased liberal, socialist news media,” “the ACLU,” and “the conspiracy of an immoral film industry.” To do this, it aims to recruit former military men. “AVIDD reminds all American Veterans that you took an oath to defend the United States against all enemies, ‘both foreign and domestic,'” its Web site says. “In your military capacity, you were called upon to defend the United States against foreign enemies. AVIDD now calls upon you to continue to fulfill your oath and help us defend this nation on the political front, against equally dangerous domestic enemies.”
According to Jim Cabaniss, the seventy-two-year-old Korean War veteran who founded AVIDD, the group now has thirty-three chapters across the country. It’s entirely likely that some of these chapters just represent one or two men, and as of 2005, AVIDD didn’t seem large enough to be much of a danger to anyone.
Still, it’s worth noting that thousands of Americans nationwide have flocked to rallies at which military men don uniforms and pledge to seize the reins of power in America on behalf of Christianity. In many places, local religious leaders and politicians lend their support to AVIDD’s cause. And at least some of the people at these rallies speak with seething resentment about the tyranny of Jews over America’s Christian majority.
We are in the midst of a culture war that only one side is fighting, that only one side takes seriously. Those of us who try to raise the alarm are often chided to be “tolerant” of these dangerous radicals, pressed by those of milder faiths to remember that religion has a kind of protected status in this cold and hard country as something that demands we “respect” it. Meanwhile, the elimanationist language on the right spreads, women’s rights are curtailed, gays are browbeaten back out of the public square, all in the service of a distorted and hateful religion that preaches division and hatred.
Tim LaHaye, who is most famous for putting a Tom Clancy gloss on premillennialist theology in the Left Behind thrillers that he co-writes with Jerry Jenkins, was heavily influenced by Schaeffer, to whom he dedicated his book “The Battle for the Mind.” That book married Schaeffer’s theories to a conspiratorial view of history and politics, arguing, “Most people today do not realize what humanism really is and how it is destroying our culture, families, country — and, one day, the entire world. Most of the evils in the world today can be traced to humanism, which has taken over our government, the UN, education, TV, and most of the other influential things of life.
“We must remove all humanists from public office and replace them with pro-moral political leaders,” LaHaye wrote.
As premillennialists grew to embrace the goal of dominion, they made alliances with Reconstructionists. In 1984, Jay Grimstead, a disciple of Francis Schaeffer, brought important pre- and post-millennialists together to form the Coalition on Revival (COR) in order to lay a blueprint for taking over American life. Tim LaHaye was an original member of COR’s steering committee, along with Rushdoony, North, creationist Duane Gish, D. James Kennedy, and the Reverend Donald Wildmon of the influential American Family Association.
Between 1984 and 1986, COR developed seventeen “worldview” documents, which elucidate the “Christian” position on most aspects of life. Just as political Islam is often called Islamism to differentiate the fascist political doctrine from the faith, the ideology laid out in these papers could be called Christianism. The documents outline a complete political program, with a “biblically correct” position on issues like taxes (God favors a flat rate), public schools (generally frowned upon), and the media and the arts (“We deny that any pornography and other blasphemy are permissible as art or ‘free speech'”).
In a 1988 letter to supporters, Grimstead announced the completion of a high school curriculum “using the COR Worldview Documents as textbooks.” Since then, there’s been a proliferation of schools, books, and seminars devoted to inculcating the correct Christian worldview in students and activists. Charles Colson accepts one hundred people annually into his yearlong “worldview training” courses, which include meetings in Washington, D.C., online seminars, “mentoring,” and several hours of homework each week. “The program will be heavily weighted towards how to think,” Colson’s Web site says. It’s intended for those who work in churches, media, law, government, and education, and who can thus teach others to think the same way.
Those who don’t have a year to spare can attend one of more than a dozen Worldview Weekend conferences held every year in churches nationwide. Popular speakers include the revisionist Christian nationalist historian David Barton, David Limbaugh (Rush’s born-again brother), and evangelical former sitcom star Kirk Cameron. In 2003, Tom DeLay was a featured speaker at a Worldview Weekend at Rick Scarborough’s former church in Pearland, Texas. He told the crowd, “Only Christianity offers a comprehensive worldview that covers all areas of life and thought, every aspect of creation. Only Christianity offers a way to live in response to the realities that we find in this world. Only Christianity.”
Speaking to outsiders, most Christian nationalists say they’re simply responding to anti-Christian persecution. They say that secularism is itself a religion, one unfairly imposed on them. They say they’re the victims in the culture wars. But Christian nationalist ideologues don’t want equality, they want dominance. In his book “The Changing of the Guard: Biblical Principles for Political Action,” George Grant, former executive director of D. James Kennedy’s Coral Ridge Ministries, wrote:
“Christians have an obligation, a mandate, a commission, a holy responsibility to reclaim the land for Jesus Christ — to have dominion in civil structures, just as in every other aspect of life and godliness.
But it is dominion we are after. Not just a voice.
It is dominion we are after. Not just influence.
It is dominion we are after. Not just equal time.
It is dominion we are after.
World conquest. That’s what Christ has commissioned us to accomplish. We must win the world with the power of the Gospel. And we must never settle for anything less…
Thus, Christian politics has as its primary intent the conquest of the land — of men, families, institutions, bureaucracies, courts, and governments for the Kingdom of Christ.”
President Bush, their leader, that hateful little man born of a New England brahmin, recipient of an ivy league education he scorns, prideful little gamecock strutting about the world stage, continues to steal from the poor and give to the rich. He continues to slaughter Afghan, Iraqi and soon Iranian civilians in the name of his vengeful and hateful God. He shreds our liberties and spies upon our personal lives. No matter how much he divides and is abandoned by the majority of Americans, he can count upon this dangerous segment of the body politic, and as his fortunes continue to decline the danger becomes greater that his holy crusaders will take their culture war to the street in earnest.
Attention must be paid. Confront these people when you are able. Our freedom, and the future, depend upon it. Each of us must take up the struggles that were pursued so faithfully by Gailbraith, Coffin and Hertzberg.
Sick of the fundies over at Liberal Street Fighter