Paranoia and the Progressive Press: A Response to WaPo’s Religion Columnist | Politics | Religion Di

Paranoia and the Progressive Press: A Response to WaPo’s Religion Columnist www.religiondispatches.org Last week, Lisa Miller, religion writer and editor (Newsweek and the Washington Post) filed an op-ed in which she fulminated against “the left” and journalists who have raised concerns about the influence of dominionist thinkers on Republican presidential candidates like Michele...

So... I grew up a fundie. Not exactly dominionist, mind you: at the time, the pulpits of the First Assembly of God in Hammonton, N.J. and the First Baptist Church of Egg Harbor (City), N.J. still resounded with the various sermons and sayings by Jesus and All Those Girls on humility, subservience, and keeping one's Christian proboscis out of the secular world's business, lest ye end up tempted by greed and filth and such. The sort of righteous insistence that the Christian's rightful place is in the legislature is a movement that saw its first major victory in the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Not coincidentally, this followed a decade of the crazy-fast-rich ascendancy of televangelists. Suddenly nobody had JUST a humble little Sunday morning pulpit as the source for inspiration about how to live a good life—now Oral Roberts and Jerry Falwell and Rex Humbard and other demonstrably acquisitive, dishonest fucks started sharing the bill and infecting the poor, unsuspecting... well, the poor, unsuspecting Geises, among others.

By now, we really do have a situation where some people unabashedly believe they have a monopoly on the will of their deity—needless to say, the only real deity in existence—therefore a monopoly on good and evil. These people believe it is their deity's will that they exercise dominion over the entire earth, because that was more or less the instruction when the species got kicked out of Eden, and because some asshole with a private jet and 17 Caddies told them they deserve a private jet and 17 Caddies too, and the unerring path thereto is from trusting the the LORD and voting for only His servants, which, here's a quick list. Ok, it's not all about the Caddies; some of these dominionists earnestly believe they can hasten the second coming of Christ by establishing an earthly government in his name; others just believe they have a sacred obligation to God to promote his supposed wishes in the public sphere: legislating prayer, marriage, antigay laws, etc.

My own personal view? I don't quite buy the authenticity of the current batch of dominionists—Bachman, Perry, et al.—or, really, any of them since they started mounting the national podia in the late 1970s and saying the words "God" and "bless" an embarrassing lot. I believe there's some behind-the-scenes business going on whereby the electorate is being manipulated. Somebody figured this out: Citizens with this mindset—roughly, Christian fundamentalists—will always vote for the candidate that sounds most like a Christian fundamentalist, that seems to share their desire that everything in American public life be as "Christian" as possible (often in direct opposition to that other adjective, "Christ-like"). Now, somebody like Carl Rove (but much longer ago than Rove) looked at this religio-political phenomenon and said, "Wow! These people are so very ridiculously, profoundly stupid! In order to make ourselves and our rich friends even richer, all we have to do is convince these stupid fucking Christians (SFCs) that our candidates are good little fundies, and these SFCs won't even notice that they're being fucked daily by the very people they've elected with every piece of federal legislation that deregulates industry, ruins the fiscal and physical environments with equal abandon, robs them of centuries-old constitutional and legal rights, flushes American jobs down third-world sweat-shop toilets, and takes poor and middle-class people's money and hands it pretty much directly over to Wall Street, without so much as a reach-around or thank-you card."

Yep. That's what I think.