Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Tikun Olam-תקון עולם. March 29, 2008: Make the World a Better Place » Evangelicals: ‘Killing’ Jews With Christian Kindness

A group called World Evangelical Alliance bought a full-page N.Y. Times ad (at least $120,000) this week. A bigger waste of money I’d have a hard time conceiving. Nearest I can tell, the basic message is: “Jews, we love you. But we don’t love you enough to stop proselytizing you or converting you. In fact, we really don’t care what you think of that, since it’s more important to us to keep doing this than it is to respect your wishes that we not do so.” And the real kicker was the evangelical signatories who insisted that converted Jews like Jews for Jesus and messianic Jews are still authentic Jews who despite becoming Christian have a right to call themselves Jews for the purpose of insinuating themselves into the lives of unsuspecting Jews they seek to convert.

The ad is quite a performance. Full of fake love and respect attempting to conceal presumptuousness and condescension toward Jews. The odd thing is that the ad pretends it is directed as a friendly communique to Jews. I actually took it as a declaration of war. So if it was supposed to say anything positive toward Jews it failed miserably on that score. In truth, I think it was meant more for an evangelical audience to reconfirm their certainty that they are right in their efforts to convert the Jews.

The ad begins well enough:

As evangelical Christians, we want to express our genuine friendship and love for the Jewish people. We sadly acknowledge that church history has been marred with anti-Semitic words and deeds; and that at times when the Jewish people were in great peril, the church did far less than it should have.

We pledge our commitment to be loving friends and to stand against such injustice in our generation.

But it quickly goes downhill:

• At the same time, we want to be transparent in affirming that we believe the most loving and Scriptural expression of our friendship toward Jewish people, and to anyone we call friend, is to forthrightly share the love of God in the person of Jesus Christ.
• We believe that it is only through Jesus that all people can receive eternal life. If Jesus is not the Messiah of the Jewish people, He cannot be the Savior of the World (Acts 4:12).

Media Matters - Buchanan on Obama’s race speech: “We hear the grievances. Where is the gratitude?”

In a March 21 syndicated column headlined “A Brief for Whitey,” conservative commentator and MSNBC contributor Pat Buchanan asserted, “America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.” Buchanan was discussing Sen. Barack Obama’s March 18 speech addressing race and controversial comments by his former pastor, Jeremiah A. Wright. He continued, “Wright ought to go down on his knees and thank God he is an American.” Buchanan then asserted that “no people anywhere has done more to lift up blacks than white Americans.” Later in the column, Buchanan added: “We hear the grievances. Where is the gratitude?”

Sharlet, Teenage Holy War, The Revealer, April 12, 2007

This is how you enlist in the Army of God: First come the fireworks and the prayers, and then 4,000 kids scream, “We won’t be silent anymore!” Then the kids drop to their knees, still but for the weeping and regrets of fifteen-year-olds. The lights in the Cleveland arena fade to blue, and a man on the stage whispers to them about sin and love and the Father-God. They rise, heartened; the crowd, en masse, swears off “harlots and adultery”; the twenty-one-year-old MC twitches taut a chain across the ass of her skintight red jeans and summons the followers to show off their best dance moves for God. “Gimme what you got!” she shouts. They dance — hip-hop, tap, toe and pelvic thrusting. Then they’re ready. They’re about to accept “the mark of a warrior,” explains Ron Luce, commander in chief of BattleCry, the most furious youth crusade since young sinners in the hands of an angry God flogged themselves with shame in eighteenth-century New England. Nearly three centuries later, these 4,000 teens are about to become “branded by God.” It’s like getting your head shaved when you join the Marines, Luce says, only the kids get to keep their hair. His assistants roll out a cowhide draped over a sawhorse, and Luce presses red-hot iron into the dead flesh, projecting a close-up of sizzling cow skin on giant movie screens above the stage.

“When you enlist in the military, there’s a code of honor,” Luce preaches, “same as being a follower of Christ.” His Christian code requires a “wartime mentality”: a “survival orientation” and a readiness to face “real enemies.” The queers and communists, feminists and Muslims, to be sure, but also the entire American cultural apparatus of marketing and merchandising, the “techno-terrorists” of mass media, doing to the morality of a generation what Osama bin Laden did to the Twin Towers. “Just as the events of September 11th, 2001, permanently changed our perspective on the world,” Luce writes, “so we ought to be awakened to the alarming influence of today’s culture terrorists. They are wealthy, they are smart, and they are real.”

Luce is forty-five, his brown hair floppy, his lips pouty. On the screens above the stage, his green eyes blink furiously. “The devil hates us,” he exhorts, “and we gotta be ready to fight and not be these passive little lukewarm, namby-pamby, kum-ba-yah, thumb-sucking babies that call themselves Christians. Jesus? He got mad!” Luce considers most evangelicals too soft, too ready to pass off as piety their preference for a bland suburban lifestyle. He hates what he sees as the weakness of “accepting” Christ, of “trusting” the Lord. “I want an attacking church!” he shouts, his normally smooth tones raw and desperate and alarming. He isn’t just looking for followers — he wants “stalkers” who’ll bring a criminal passion to their pursuit of godliness.

Media Matters - Will MSNBC devote as much coverage to McCain’s embrace of Hagees support as it did to Obamas rejection of Farrakhan?, Feb. 28, 2008

Also on February 27, John Hagee, founder and senior pastor of Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas –who has made numerous controversial statements about, among other things, homosexuality, Islam, Catholicism, and women — endorsed Sen. John McCain for president.

On the September 18, 2006, edition of National Public Radio’s Fresh Air, host Terry Gross said to Hagee, “You said after Hurricane Katrina that it was an act of God, and you said when you violate God’s will long enough, the judgment of God comes to you. Katrina is an act of God for a society that is becoming Sodom and Gomorrah reborn. ” She then asked, “Do you still think that Katrina is punishment from God for a society thats becoming like Sodom and Gomorrah?” Hagee responded:

HAGEE: All hurricanes are acts of God, because God controls the heavens. I believe that New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive to God, and they are — were recipients of the judgment of God for that. The newspaper carried the story in our local area that was not carried nationally that there was to be a homosexual parade there on the Monday that the Katrina came. And the promise of that parade was that it was going to reach a level of sexuality never demonstrated before in any of the other Gay Pride parades. So I believe that the judgment of God is a very real thing. I know that there are people who demur from that, but I believe that the Bible teaches that when you violate the law of God, that God brings punishment sometimes before the day of judgment. And I believe that the Hurricane Katrina was, in fact, the judgment of God against the city of New Orleans.

Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life U.S. Religious Landscape Survey

An extensive new survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life details the religious affiliation of the American public and explores the shifts taking place in the U.S. religious landscape. Based on interviews with more than 35,000 Americans age 18 and older, the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey finds that religious affiliation in the U.S. is both very diverse and extremely fluid.

More than one-quarter of American adults 28% have left the faith in which they were raised in favor of another religion - or no religion at all. If change in affiliation from one type of Protestantism to another is included, 44% of adults have either switched religious affiliation, moved from being unaffiliated with any religion to being affiliated with a particular faith, or dropped any connection to a specific religious tradition altogether.

The survey finds that the number of people who say they are unaffiliated with any particular faith today 16.1% is more than double the number who say they were not affiliated with any particular religion as children. Among Americans ages 18-29, one-in-four say they are not currently affiliated with any particular religion.

The Landscape Survey confirms that the United States is on the verge of becoming a minority Protestant country; the number of Americans who report that they are members of Protestant denominations now stands at barely 51%.

Richard C. Lewontin, The Wars Over Evolution - The New York Review of Books, October 20, 2005

1.The development of evolutionary biology has induced two opposite reactions, both of which threaten its legitimacy as a natural scientific explanation. One, based on religious convictions, rejects the science of evolution in a fit of hostility, attempting to destroy it by challenging its sufficiency as the mechanism that explains the history of life in general and of the material nature of human beings in particular. One demand of those who hold such views is that their competing theories be taught in the schools.

The other reaction, from academics in search of a universal theory of human society and history, embraces Darwinism in a fit of enthusiasm, threatening its status as a natural science by forcing its explanatory scheme to account not simply for the shape of brains but for the shape of ideas. The Evolution–Creation Struggle is concerned with the first challenge, Not By Genes Alone with the second.

Peter Steinfels, Religious Right May Be Fading, but Not the ‘Culture Wars’ - New York Times, February 16, 2008

On every side, one can read obituaries for the religious right.

Jim Wallis’s new book, “The Great Awakening,” carries the subtitle, “Reviving Faith and Politics in a Post-Religious Right America.” E. J. Dionne Jr.’s book, “Souled Out,” is subtitled “Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right.” The subtitle of David P. Gushee’s new book, “The Future of Faith in American Politics,” poses “The Public Witness of the Evangelical Center” against that of the religious right.

Sometimes stated outright and sometimes between the lines is the hope that the decline of the religious right will ease what Americans have come to know as the culture wars.

There is no question that many evangelical Christians and conservative Roman Catholics have grown disenchanted with both the political agenda and what they see as the strident style of the organized religious right. Some have been convinced, by their own Scriptures and by new leaders, that poverty, human rights, genocide, sex trafficking and global warming must be no less matters of Christian concern than abortion, homosexuality and embryonic stem-cell research. Even more have reacted against their faith being enlisted in partisan politics.

Biography of Jesse Helms Reviewed, New York Times, February 10, 2008

Appearing on “Larry King Live” in 1995, Jesse Helms, then the senior senator from North Carolina, fielded a call from an unusual admirer. Helms deserved the Nobel Peace Prize, the caller gushed, “for everything you’ve done to help keep down the niggers.” Given the rank ugliness of the sentiment — the guest host, Robert Novak, called it, with considerable understatement, “politically incorrect” — Helms could only pause before responding. But the hesitation couldn’t suppress his gut instincts. “Whoops, well, thank you, I think,” he said. With prodding from Novak, he added that he’d been spanked as a child for using the N-word and noted (with a delicious hint of uncertainty), “I don’t think I’ve used it since.” As for the caller’s main point — the virtue of keeping down blacks — it passed without comment.

William A. Link, a historian at the University of Florida, recounts this incident in “Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism,” his hefty life of the blunt, bullheaded, hard-right leader who — more than anyone besides Ronald Reagan — embodied conservatism in the 1980s and beyond. Summoning a measure of sympathy for his rather unsympathetic subject, Link can be overly diplomatic in discussing, as he calls it, Helms’s “racial insensitivity.” But it’s to his credit that even when engaging Helms’s more odious views, he shuns stridency while still managing to demonstrate the centrality of Dixie-bred racism to Helms’s career — and to the book’s larger tale of Southern-style conservatism’s ascent since the 1960s.

By the 1990s, to be sure, this racism was rarely articulated so starkly, or even manifested so consciously, as it was by the talk-show caller. But for more than four decades in public life — first as an influential journalist defending Jim Crow in the 1960s in North Carolina, then as “the most important conservative spokesman in the Senate” — Helms was obsessed with race; it was his political weapon of choice. In 1972, as a recent convert to the Republican Party, he won election to the Senate on school busing and kindred issues. In 1990, he aggressively played the race card — broadcasting a TV ad that showed white hands crumpling a job rejection letter — to repulse a challenge from Harvey Gantt, an African-American. And in his five Senate terms Helms led most of the major fights against racial change, opposing the creation of a Martin Luther King holiday in 1983 and the civil rights bill of 1991.

Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times
A prayer circle formed in the room where the Huckabee campaign holds a Caucus watch party.

Evangelicals not on same page - Los Angeles Times, Jan 18, 2008

GREENVILLE, S.C — The Christian heart of the Republican Party beats fiercely on the broad boulevard where one finds both the gated entrance to Bob Jones University and the headquartersof His Radio network, home to an AM Christian station and a sister music station, “FM With Love From Jesus.”

But the two bastions of Southern evangelism mirrored the split in the ranks of conservative voters before the state’s Republican primary Saturday.

Host Tony Beam of the network’s “Christian Talk” became a warrior for former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee from the moment he turned on his microphone at 6 a.m. Thursday.”We need a leader in America who has the core value system that’s built on the eternal truths of the Bible,” Beam told listeners. “We need a lighthouse, a guiding force to get us in the right direction.”

Prominent conservative and Bob Jones University dean Robert Taylor made an opposing pitch on the university’s radio station earlier in the week.”Mitt Romney is the only candidate who shares our values and can win in November,” Taylor said. “That’s why it’s so important that conservatives rally around him.”

Evolution Book Sees No Science-Religion Gap - New York Times, January 4, 2008

In 1984 and again in 1999, the National Academy of Sciences, the nation’s most eminent scientific organization, produced books on the evidence supporting the theory of evolution and arguing against the introduction of creationism or other religious alternatives in public school science classes.

On Thursday, it produced a third. But this volume is unusual, people who worked on it say, because it is intended specifically for the lay public and because it devotes much of its space to explaining the differences between science and religion, and asserting that acceptance of evolution does not require abandoning belief in God.

“We wanted to produce a report that would be valuable and accessible to school board members and teachers and clergy,” said Barbara A. Schaal, a vice president of the academy, an evolutionary biologist at Washington University and a member of the panel that produced the book.

The panel, convened by the academy and the Institute of Medicine, its medical arm, was headed by Francisco Ayala, a biologist at the University of California, Irvine, and a former Dominican priest.

The 70-page book, “Science, Evolution and Creationism,” says, among other things, that “attempts to pit science and religion against each other create controversy where none needs to exist.” And it offers statements from several eminent biologists and members of the clergy to support the view.

In the book, which will be available on the Web site of the National Academies (www.nas.edu), the panel reports that evidence for the theory of evolution is overwhelming and growing. It cites findings from DNA research, fossil discoveries and the observations scientists have made about emerging diseases, like SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome.

God vs. Science - TIME, November 5, 2006

There are two great debates under the broad heading of Science vs. God. The more familiar over the past few years is the narrower of the two: Can Darwinian evolution withstand the criticisms of Christians who believe that it contradicts the creation account in the Book of Genesis? In recent years, creationism took on new currency as the spiritual progenitor of “intelligent design” (I.D.), a scientifically worded attempt to show that blanks in the evolutionary narrative are more meaningful than its very convincing totality. I.D. lost some of its journalistic heat last December when a federal judge dismissed it as pseudoscience unsuitable for teaching in Pennsylvania schools.

But in fact creationism and I.D. are intimately related to a larger unresolved question, in which the aggressor’s role is reversed: Can religion stand up to the progress of science? This debate long predates Darwin, but the antireligion position is being promoted with increasing insistence by scientists angered by intelligent design and excited, perhaps intoxicated, by their disciplines’ increasing ability to map, quantify and change the nature of human experience. Brain imaging illustrates–in color!–the physical seat of the will and the passions, challenging the religious concept of a soul independent of glands and gristle. Brain chemists track imbalances that could account for the ecstatic states of visionary saints or, some suggest, of Jesus. Like Freudianism before it, the field of evolutionary psychology generates theories of altruism and even of religion that do not include God. Something called the multiverse hypothesis in cosmology speculates that ours may be but one in a cascade of universes, suddenly bettering the odds that life could have cropped up here accidentally, without divine intervention.

Perrspectives Blog: Huckabee Proclaims Ignorance of Iran NIE, Evolution, December 5, 2007

As the Arkansas Times detailed in 2006, the teaching of evolution in state classrooms reached a crisis of biblical proportions (pun intended) during Huckabee’s tenure as Governor. One teacher reported his public school prohibited the use of the “e-word” and that “I am supposed to say that these rocks are VERY VERY OLD…but I am NOT to say that these rocks are thought to be about 300 million years old.” In a survey of public school instructors attending professional science education workshops in Arkansas, “80 percent of the teachers surveyed are not adequately teaching evolutionary science.”As the Arkansas Times detailed, then Governor Huckabee claimed not to know that schools in his state were pressuring instructors not to teach evolution in the classroom. In its article titled “Scientists Discover That Evolution is Missing from Arkansas Classrooms,” the paper documented this shocking July 2004 exchange between Huckabee and a pupil on “Arkansans Ask,” his regular show on the Arkansas Educational Television Network:

STUDENT: Many schools in Arkansas are failing to teach students about evolution according to the educational standards of our state. Since it is against these standards to teach creationism, how would you go about helping our state educate students more sufficiently for this?

HUCKABEE: Are you saying some students are not getting exposure to the various theories of creation?

STUDENT (stunned): No, of evol…well, of evolution specifically. It’s a biological study that should be educated [taught], but is generally not.

MODERATOR: Schools are dodging Darwinism? Is that what you…?

STUDENT: Yes.

HUCKABEE: I’m not familiar that they’re dodging it. Maybe they are. But I think schools also ought to be fair to all views. Because, frankly, Darwinism is not an established scientific fact. It is a theory of evolution, that’s why it’s called the theory of evolution.

State Rep. Jason Bedrick, left, hosted a house party for presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, right, in October 2007. Rabbi Moshe Bleich of the Wellesley Chabad also attended the event. (Yeshiva World News)

Munson: Huckabee makes some seemingly sensible statements in his article in the January-February issue of Foreign Affairs. For example, he writes: “The Bush administration’s arrogant bunker mentality has been counterproductive at home and abroad. American foreign policy needs to change its tone and attitude, open up, and reach out.” He also writes that if the US “attempts to dominate others, it is despised.” These statements are reminiscent of the seemingly sensible things George W. Bush was saying when he ran for the GOP presidential nomination in 2000. But other parts of Huckabee’s Foreign Affairs article could have been written by a neoconservative. As for Huckabee’s advocacy of a Palestinian state in Egypt or Saudi Arabia, the Yeshiva World News notes that “when asked about a Palestinian state, Gov. Huckabee stated that he supports creating a Palestinian state, but believes that it should be formed outside of Israel. He named Egypt and Saudi Arabia as possible alternatives.” That one of the leading candidates for the Republican presidential nomination–according to recent polls –should spout such nonsense is disturbing. But the rhetoric of his main competitors is equally obtuse when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Huckabee’s rise puts focus on religious rhetoric - JTA, December 24, 2007

NEW YORK (JTA) — Mike Huckabee was a barely known former governor of Arkansas when he attended an October house party on his behalf at the home of Jason Bedrick, New Hampshire’s first Orthodox Jewish state representative.

Despite the candidate’s long odds, Bedrick was brimming with confidence in an interview he gave to an Orthodox news Web site.

“No one had ever heard of the last governor from Hope, Ark., Bill Clinton, the summer before he was elected,” Bedrick told Yeshiva World News. “Huckabee is polling well in all the early states. He’s a long shot, but he’s the best shot we’ve got.”…

To boot, the New Hampshire lawmaker added, Huckabee is pro-Israel: He has visited the Jewish state nine times, and told the crowd at the Bedrick house party that he favored the establishment of a Palestinian state — in Egypt or Saudi Arabia.

Jonathan Martin, Huckabee runs as GOP rebel, Politico.com, December 24, 2007

SHELDON, Iowa - To spend a day with Mike Huckabee on the campaign trail is to hear echoes of his three insurgent predecessors.

He has the fervent evangelical following in this state that Pat Robertson had in 1988, he deploys populist rhetoric like Pat Buchanan and, just like John McCain eight years ago, he is not afraid to diverge from party orthodoxy in speaking to Republican audiences….

“Well, he is not afraid to say, ‘Merry Christmas,’” Gary Thies of Mapleton said when asked after the Sioux City event why he’s supporting Huckabee.

And why is that important?

“Because that’s the most important thing in my life,” Thies responds with an icy glare. “That’s what we’re doing here. Those are the principles that made this country great.”…

His supporters are unmistakably Christian conservatives.

The boys are typically dressed in their Sunday best, the girls wear modest, ankle-length dresses, and the parents offer Christmas blessings after speaking with a reporter.

“It has the feel of a revival meeting,” George Schneidermann explained after Huckabee’s appearance in Orange City.

Elizabeth White, Huckabee defends religious tone in ad, Associated Press, Boston Globe, December 24, 2007

SAN ANTONIO - Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee made no apologies yesterday for the religious tone of a recent holiday campaign commercial and said it is important to look for Jesus at this time of year.

“You can find Santa at every mall. You can find discounts in every store,” Huckabee said from the pulpit of Cornerstone Church. “But if you mention the name of Jesus, as I found out recently, it upsets the whole world. Forgive me, but I thought that was the point of the whole day.”

Huckabee was referring the ad airing in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina that shows him in a red sweater in front of a Christmas tree.

In the ad, Huckabee asks: “Are you about worn out by all the television commercials you’ve been seeing, mostly about politics? Well, I don’t blame you. At this time of year sometimes it’s nice to pull aside from all of that and just remember that what really matters is the celebration of the birth of Christ and being with our family and friends.”

“And I hope that you and your friends will have a magnificent Christmas season. And on behalf of all of us, God Bless and Merry Christmas. I’m Mike Huckabee and I approved this message,” he says in the spot….

Huckabee, a former governor of Arkansas and an ordained Southern Baptist minister, has been on the defensive in recent weeks because of the ad and his rise in the polls, particularly in Iowa, where he has taken away the top spot from Republican rival Mitt Romney.

Speaking at a later church service, Huckabee said: “I got in a little trouble this last week because I actually had the audacity to say ‘Merry Christmas.’ Isn’t that an odd thing to say at this time of year?”