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It is unfortunate that the discussion of prayer at public meetings has been polarized by atheist publicity seekers and reactionary public officials. Common courtesy and the law of the land dictate that public bodies respect the religious beliefs of everyone.
The overwhelming majority of Americans believe in a supreme being whose guidance might well be invoked over any public proceeding. Whether known as Yehweh, Buddha, the Great Spirit, Allah, the Lord God or any other name, I believe the Creator would appreciate an invocation that is tolerant and inclusive.
JEFF WENDLAND
Grand Junction
38 Responses to “Invocation should be all inclusive”
Posted July 31st, 2008 at 4:43 pm Login to Send PM Report this comment
If Mr. Wendland had seen the letter sent by the atheists to the city council, he would have seen that an inclusive invocation was in fact one of the options offered as an acceptable solution.
Posted July 31st, 2008 at 5:38 pm Login to Send PM Report this comment
It’s easy enough to sit quietly and ignore a religous invocation. If a person finds himself or herself out of step with most of the population in a certain place they could always leave. Unless of course they enjoy being a lone crank. This newspaper has a columinst that fits that description.
Posted July 31st, 2008 at 5:56 pm Login to Send PM Report this comment
cs1960,
One of the issues is how the invocations are conducted. Presently, the invocation is conducted right after the Pledge of Allegiance, while everyone is still standing. you can’t “sit quietly” without sitting down, thus drawing attention to yourself. You also can’t leave the room without doing the same. The question is why should non-Christians have to draw attention to themselves in a government setting?
A moment of silence would solve this. No one that I’m aware of objects to a moment of silence to honor the troops, or whatever. It seems to be a good compromise, but it is looking like that may be too much of a compromise for the city council.
Posted July 31st, 2008 at 6:04 pm Login to Send PM Report this comment
sniff, sniff….
“people will look at me and all I want is to be a victim and treated special because deep down inside I’m just a crybabypeepants.”
That about cover your position scott?
Posted July 31st, 2008 at 6:05 pm Login to Send PM Report this comment
Nope. I want donuts, too.
Posted July 31st, 2008 at 6:08 pm Login to Send PM Report this comment
Make your own donuts little boy.
Or go buy some.
Posted July 31st, 2008 at 8:38 pm Login to Send PM Report this comment
The letter writer, Mr. Wendland, while very well intentioned, would seem to miss the central point. The discussion is no longer about ‘god’ or ‘religion’, it consists primarily of ‘political posturing’ by theocrats and public officials seeking votes by picturing themselves as being on “god’s side.” As to the so-called ‘religious’ leaders and churches involved in the controversy, and are always ‘hell bent’ on getting one started, their objective is ‘control because we are superior’. As I have previously stated: “There is way too much pride in too many pulpits.”
Posted July 31st, 2008 at 8:41 pm Login to Send PM Report this comment
…sigh..it’s just as easy to STAND quietly and ignore an invocation. The point being there’s no need to make a mountian out of a mole hill. I was never crazy about how many things were done over there in “Ozzy and Harriet Town” but I never saw any reason to demand that all the Ozzies and Harriets change their ways to suit me. I eventualy moved to a place that suited me better and that’s one of the nice things about a big country like America.
Posted July 31st, 2008 at 8:57 pm Login to Send PM Report this comment
cs1960 stated: “I eventualy moved to a place that suited me better and that’s one of the nice things about a big country like America.”
While the poster may believe he/she is being magnanimous and ‘understanding’, this type of reasoning is nothing new and has been seen before. In fact, I would consider it a real problem in many. It rests upon the assumption that “It doesn’t concern me. Therefore, I can just walk (or run) away.” That is fine for that individual, but what about those who have not the means to do so. Would the poster consign them to the ‘tender mercies’ of oppressors, just as long as they themselves are safe?
No. At some point in time, one has to stand up and be counted. And, those that don’t have no right to expect others to stand up for them, or even to complain about their fate.
Posted July 31st, 2008 at 9:26 pm Login to Send PM Report this comment
I will still stand or sit in respect through a Christian prayer, be it in a home or a place of worship or any other NON-GOVERNMENT gathering.
If it is a government meeting, however, I expect those who work for ALL Americans to act in accordance with the law of the land. If they refuse to do so then they need to get out of government.
Posted August 1st, 2008 at 6:16 am Login to Send PM Report this comment
There is plenty of room for prayer in the closet, where Jesus Hisself recommended followers to go for prayer time. Check your Bibles, so-called Christians!
Posted August 1st, 2008 at 7:35 am Login to Send PM Report this comment
Interesting.
There have been a lot of posts suggesting that the Christian Community should go hide in the closet.
Why is that?
Is it possible that the losers in our society feel they can force the roughly 84% of the population to cower in their closets while the pathetic losers run loose in the streets playing anarchy?
Perhaps there should be a silent protest by the Christians.
Every where you go in the valley, there could be yard signs, bumper stickers, etc with the message;
“Atheists, we will pray for you in your hour of need.”
Or some other such wording, just to let them know that we love them as Gods Creatures and want them to have good long healthy lives.
We do not have to accept the ‘closet’ idea, nor do we need to cower quietly in the dark, while our elected ‘leaders’ cower in our place.
Posted August 1st, 2008 at 9:30 am Login to Send PM Report this comment
The word is dominionism, and it is the issue here. The movement is real, it is well funded, and it gains traction every time the christianists push something like city council prayer or creationism in schools or ten commandments in a courthouse. Christianist is the term for these supposed christians who want to push their agenda down all of our throats. The movement has nothing to do with ‘conservatives,’ but they have wormed their way into, and taken control of the ‘conservative’ big tent. There’s lots of info out there, I urge all thinking people to check it out and fight against it. Start here:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominionism
The rest of you keep your foolish mythology out of our government, schools and foreign policy!
Posted August 1st, 2008 at 9:39 am Login to Send PM Report this comment
Look here too:http://www.theocracywatch.org/
Scary stuff.
Posted August 1st, 2008 at 9:50 am Login to Send PM Report this comment
this is long, but inspiring and well worth the read, atheists, christians, and everyone else.
—-
Bill Moyers
September 09, 2005
This article is adapted from Bill Moyer’s address this week at Union Theological Seminary in New York, where Judith and Bill Moyers received the seminary’s highest award, the Union Medal, for their contributions to faith and reason in America. Bill Moyers is a broadcast journalist and former host the PBS program NOW With Bill Moyers. Moyers also serves as president of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, which gives financial support to TomPaine.com.
At the Central Baptist Church in Marshall, Texas, where I was baptized in the faith, we believed in a free church in a free state. I still do.
My spiritual forbears did not take kindly to living under theocrats who embraced religious liberty for themselves but denied it to others. “Forced worship stinks in God’s nostrils,” thundered the dissenter Roger Williams as he was banished from Massachusetts for denying Puritan authority over his conscience. Baptists there were a “pitiful negligible minority” but they were agitators for freedom and therefore denounced as “incendiaries of the commonwealth” for holding to their belief in that great democracy of faith—the priesthood of all believers. For refusing to pay tribute to the state religion they were fined, flogged, and exiled. In l651 the Baptist Obadiah Holmes was given 30 stripes with a three-corded whip after he violated the law and took forbidden communion with another Baptist in Lynn, Massachusetts. His friends offered to pay his fine for his release but he refused. They offered him strong drink to anesthetize the pain of the flogging. Again he refused. It is the love of liberty, he said, “that must free the soul.”
Such revolutionary ideas made the new nation with its Constitution and Bill of Rights “a haven for the cause of conscience.” No longer could magistrates order citizens to support churches they did not attend and recite creeds that they did not believe. No longer would “the loathsome combination of church and state”—as Thomas Jefferson described it—be the settled order. Unlike the Old World that had been wracked with religious wars and persecution, the government of America would take no sides in the religious free-for-all that liberty would make possible and politics would make inevitable. The First Amendment neither inculcates religion nor inoculates against it. Americans could be loyal to the Constitution without being hostile to God, or they could pay no heed to God without fear of being mugged by an official God Squad. It has been a remarkable arrangement that guaranteed “soul freedom.”
It is at risk now, and the fourth observance of the terrorist attacks of 9/ll is an appropriate time to think about it.
Four years ago this week, the poet’s prophetic metaphor became real again and “the great dark birds of history” plunged into our lives.
They came in the name of God. They came bent on murder and martyrdom. It was as if they rode to earth on the fierce breath of Allah himself, for the sacred scriptures that had nurtured these murderous young men are steeped in images of a violent and vengeful God who wills life for the faithful and horrific torment for unbelievers.
Yes, the Koran speaks of mercy and compassion and calls for ethical living. But such passages are no match for the ferocity of instruction found there for waging war for God’s sake. The scholar Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer carefully traces this trail of holy violence in his important book, Is Religion Killing Us? [Trinity Press International, 2003]. He highlights many of the verses in the Koran that the Islamic terrorists could have had in their hearts and on their lips four years ago as they moved toward their gruesome rendezvous. As I read some of them, close your eyes and recall the scenes of that bright September morning which began in the bright sun under a blue sky:
“Those who believe Fight in the cause of Allah, and Those who reject Faith Fight in the cause of Evil.”(4:76)
“So We sent against them A furious Wind through days of disaster, that
We might Give them a taste of a Penalty of humiliation In this Life; but
The Penalty of the Hereafter will be More Humiliating still: And they
Will find No help.” (41:16)
“Then watch thou For the Day That the sky will Bring forth a kind Of smoke (or mist) Plainly visible, Enveloping the people: This will be a Penalty
Grievous.” (44:10-11)
“Did the people of the towns Feel Secure against the coming Of Our
Wrath by night While they were asleep? Or else did they feel
Secure against its coming in Broad daylight while they Played
About (carefree)? Did they then feel secure Against the Plan of
Allah?—But no one can feel Secure from the Plan of Allah,
except those (Doomed) to ruin.” (7:97-99)
So the holy warriors came—an airborne death cult, their sights on God’s enemies: regular folks, starting the day’s routine. One minute they’re pulling off their jackets, shaking Sweet n’ Low into their coffee, adjusting the height of their chair or a picture of a child or sweetheart or spouse in a frame on their desk, booting up their computer—and in the next, they are engulfed by a horrendous cataclysm. God’s will. Poof!
But it is never only the number of dead by which terrorists measure their work. It is also the number of the living— the survivors—taken hostage to fear. Their mission was to invade our psyche; get inside our heads—deprive us of trust, faith, and peace of mind: keep us from ever again believing in a safe, just, and peaceful world, and from working to bring that world to pass. The writer Terry Tempest Williams has said “the human heart is the first home of democracy.” Fill that heart with fear and people will give up the risks of democracy for the assurances of security; fill that heart with fear and you can shake the house to its foundations.
In the days leading up to 9/ll our daughter and husband adopted their first baby. On the morning of September 11th our son-in-law passed through the shadow of the World Trade Center toward his office a few blocks up the street. He arrived as the horrors erupted. He saw the flames, the falling bodies, the devastation. His building was evacuated and for long awful moments he couldn’t reach his wife, our daughter, to say he was okay. Even after they connected it wasn’t until the next morning that he was able to make it home. Throughout that fearful night our daughter was alone with their new baby. Later she told us that for weeks thereafter she would lie awake at night, wondering where and when it might happen again, going to the computer at three in the morning to check out what she could about bioterrorism, germ warfare, anthrax and the vulnerability of children. The terrorists had violated a mother’s deepest space.
Who was not vulnerable? That morning Judith and I made it to our office at Channel Thirteen on West 33rd Street just after the second plane struck. Our building was evacuated although the two of us remained with other colleagues to do what we could to keep the station on the air. The next day it was evacuated again because of a bomb scare at the Empire State Building nearby. We had just ended a live broadcast for PBS when security officers swept through and ordered everyone out. This time we left. As we were making our way down the stairs I took Judith’s arm and was struck by the thought: Is this the last time I’ll touch her? Could what we had begun together a half century ago end here on this dim, bare staircase? I forced the thought from my mind, willed it away, but in the early hours of morning, as I sat at the window of our apartment looking out at the sky, the sinister intruder crept back.
Terrorists plant time bombs in our heads, hoping to turn each and every imagination into a private hell governed by our fear of them.
They win only if we let them, only if we become like them: vengeful, imperious, intolerant, paranoid. Having lost faith in all else, zealots have nothing left but a holy cause to please a warrior God. They win if we become holy warriors, too; if we kill the innocent as they do; strike first at those who had not struck us; allow our leaders to use the fear of terrorism to make us afraid of the truth; cease to think and reason together, allowing others to tell what’s in God’s mind. Yes, we are vulnerable to terrorists, but only a shaken faith in ourselves can do us in.
So over the past four years I have kept reminding myself of not only the horror but the humanity that was revealed that day four years ago, when through the smoke and fire we glimpsed the heroism, compassion, and sacrifice of people who did the best of things in the worst of times. I keep telling myself that this beauty in us is real, that it makes life worthwhile and democracy work and that no terrorist can take it from us.
But I am not so sure. As a Christian realist I honor my inner skeptic. And as a journalist I always know the other side of the story. The historian Edward Gibbon once wrote of historians what could be said of journalists. He wrote: “The theologians may indulge the pleasing task of describing religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian [read: journalist] He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption which she contracted in a long residence upon earth, among a weak and degenerate race of beings.”
The other side of the story:
Muslims have no monopoly on holy violence. As Jack Nelson-Pallmayer points out, God’s violence in the sacred texts of both faiths reflect a deep and troubling pathology “so pervasive, vindictive, and destructive” that it contradicts and subverts the collective weight of other passages that exhort ethical behavior or testify to a loving God.
For days now we have watched those heart-breaking scenes on the Gulf Coast: the steaming, stinking, sweltering wreckage of cities and suburbs; the fleeing refugees; the floating corpses, hungry babies, and old people huddled together in death, the dogs gnawing at their feet; stranded children standing in water reeking of feces and garbage; families scattered; a mother holding her small child and an empty water jug, pleading for someone to fill it; a wife, pushing the body of her dead husband on a wooden plank down a flooded street; desperate people struggling desperately to survive.
Now transport those current scenes from our newspapers and television back to the first Book of the Bible—the Book of Genesis. They bring to life what we rarely imagine so graphically when we read of the great flood that devastated the known world. If you read the Bible as literally true, as fundamentalists do, this flood was ordered by God. “And God said to Noah, ‘I have determined to make an end of all flesh… behold, I will destroy them with the earth.” (6:5-l3). “I will bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh in which is the breath of life from under heaven; everything that is on the earth shall die.” (6:l7-l9) Noah and his family are the only humans spared—they were, after all, God’s chosen. But for everyone else: “… the waters prevailed so mightily… that all the high mountains….were covered….And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, birds, cattle, beasts…and every man; everything on the dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life, died….” (7:17-23).
The flood is merely Act One. Read on: This God first “hardens the heart of Pharaoh” to make sure the Egyptian ruler will not be moved by the plea of Moses to let his people go. Then because Pharaoh’s heart is hardened, God turns the Nile into blood so people cannot drink its water and will suffer from thirst. Not satisfied with the results, God sends swarms of locusts and flies to torture them; rains hail and fire and thunder on them destroys the trees and plants of the field until nothing green remains; orders every first-born child to be slaughtered, from the first-born of Pharaoh right on down to “the first-born of the maidservant behind the mill.” An equal-murderous God, you might say. The massacre continues until “there is not a house where one was not dead.” While the Egyptian families mourn their dead, God orders Moses to loot from their houses all their gold and silver and clothing. Finally, God’s thirst for blood is satisfied, God pauses to rest—and boasts: “I have made sport of the Egyptians.”
Violence: the sport of God. God, the progenitor of shock and awe.
And that’s just Act II. As the story unfolds women and children are hacked to death on God’s order; unborn infants are ripped from their mother’s wombs; cities are leveled—their women killed if they have had sex, the virgins taken at God’s command for the pleasure of his holy warriors. When his holy warriors spare the lives of 50,000 captives God is furious and sends Moses back to rebuke them and tell them to finish the job. One tribe after another falls to God-ordered genocide: the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Jebusites—names so ancient they have disappeared into the mists as fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters, grandparents and grandchildren, infants in arms, shepherds, threshers, carpenters, merchants, housewives—living human beings, flesh and blood: “And when the Lord your God gives them over to you, and you defeat them; then you must utterly destroy them; you shall make no covenant with them, and show no mercy to them…(and) your eyes shall not pity them.”
So it is written—in the Holy Bible.
Yes, I know: the early church fathers, trying to cover up the blood-soaked trail of God’s sport, decreed that anything that disagrees with Christian dogma about the perfection of God is to be interpreted spiritually. Yes, I know: Edward Gibbon himself acknowledged that the literal Biblical sense of God “is repugnant to every principle of faith as well as reason” and that we must therefore read the scriptures through a veil of allegory. Yes, I know: we can go through the Bible and construct a God more pleasing to the better angels of our nature (as I have done.) Yes, I know: Christians claim the Old Testament God of wrath was supplanted by the Gospel’s God of love [See The God of Evil , Allan Hawkins, Exlibris.]
I know these things; all of us know these things. But we also know that the “violence-of-God” tradition remains embedded deep in the DNA of monotheistic faith. We also know that fundamentalists the world over and at home consider the “sacred texts” to be literally God’s word on all matters. Inside that logic you cannot read part of the Bible allegorically and the rest of it literally; if you believe in the virgin birth of Jesus, his crucifixion and resurrection, and the depiction of the Great Judgment at the end times you must also believe that God is sadistic, brutal, vengeful, callow, cruel and savage—that God slaughters.
Millions believe it.
Let’s go back to 9/11 four years ago. The ruins were still smoldering when the reverends Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell went on television to proclaim that the terrorist attacks were God’s punishment of a corrupted America. They said the government had adopted the agenda “of the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians” not to mention the ACLU and People for the American Way (The God of the Bible apparently holds liberals in the same low esteem as Hittites and Gergushites and Jebusites and all the other pagans of holy writ.) Just as God had sent the Great Flood to wipe out a corrupted world, now—disgusted with a decadent America—“God almighty is lifting his protection from us.” Critics said such comments were deranged. But millions of Christian fundamentalists and conservatives didn’t think so. They thought Robertson and Falwell were being perfectly consistent with the logic of the Bible as they read it: God withdraws favor from sinful nations—the terrorists were meant to be God’s wake-up call: better get right with God. Not many people at the time seemed to notice that Osama bin Laden had also been reading his sacred book closely and literally, and had called on Muslims to resist what he described as a “fierce Judeo-Christian campaign” against Islam, praying to Allah for guidance “to exalt the people who obey Him and humiliate those who disobey Him.”
Suddenly we were immersed in the pathology of a “holy war” as defined by fundamentalists on both sides. You could see this pathology play out in General William Boykin. A professional soldier, General Boykin had taken up with a small group called the Faith Force Multiplier whose members apply military principles to evangelism with a manifesto summoning warriors “to the spiritual warfare for souls.” After Boykin had led Americans in a battle against a Somalian warlord he announced: “I know my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his God was an idol.” Now Boykin was going about evangelical revivals preaching that America was in a holy war as “a Christian nation” battling Satan and that America’s Muslim adversaries will be defeated “only if we come against them in the name of Jesus.” For such an hour, America surely needed a godly leader. So General Boykin explained how it was that the candidate who had lost the election in 2000 nonetheless wound up in the White House. President Bush, he said, “was not elected by a majority of the voters—he was appointed by God.” Not surprising, instead of being reprimanded for evangelizing while in uniform, General Boykin is now the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence. (Just as it isn’t surprising that despite his public call for the assassination of a foreign head of state, Pat Robertson’s Operation Blessing was one of the first groups to receive taxpayer funds from the President’s Faith-Based Initiative for “relief work” on the Gulf Coast.)
We can’t wiggle out of this, people. Alvin Hawkins states it frankly: “This is a problem we can’t walk away from.” We’re talking about a powerful religious constituency that claims the right to tell us what’s on God’s mind and to decide the laws of the land according to their interpretation of biblical revelation and to enforce those laws on the nation as a whole. For the Bible is not just the foundational text of their faith; it has become the foundational text for a political movement.
True, people of faith have always tried to bring their interpretation of the Bible to bear on American laws and morals—this very seminary is part of that tradition; it’s the American way, encouraged and protected by the First Amendment. But what is unique today is that the radical religious right has succeeded in taking over one of America’s great political parties—the country is not yet a theocracy but the Republican Party is—and they are driving American politics, using God as a a battering ram on almost every issue: crime and punishment, foreign policy, health care, taxation, energy, regulation, social services and so on.
What’s also unique is the intensity, organization, and anger they have brought to the public square. Listen to their preachers, evangelists, and homegrown ayatollahs: Their viral intolerance—their loathing of other people’s beliefs, of America’s secular and liberal values, of an independent press, of the courts, of reason, science and the search for objective knowledge—has become an unprecedented sectarian crusade for state power. They use the language of faith to demonize political opponents, mislead and misinform voters, censor writers and artists, ostracize dissenters, and marginalize the poor. These are the foot soldiers in a political holy war financed by wealthy economic interests and guided by savvy partisan operatives who know that couching political ambition in religious rhetoric can ignite the passion of followers as ferociously as when Constantine painted the Sign of Christ (the “Christograph”) on the shields of his soldiers and on the banners of his legions and routed his rivals in Rome. Never mind that the Emperor himself was never baptized into the faith; it served him well enough to make the God worshipped by Christians his most important ally and turn the Sign of Christ into the one imperial symbol most widely recognized and feared from east to west.
Let’s take a brief detour to Ohio and I’ll show you what I am talking about. In recent weeks a movement called the Ohio Restoration Project has been launched to identify and train thousands of “Patriot Pastors” to get out the conservative religious vote next year. According to press reports, the leader of the movement— the senior pastor of a large church in suburban Columbus—casts the 2006 elections as an apocalyptic clash between “the forces of righteousness and the hordes of hell.” The fear and loathing in his message is palpable: He denounces public schools that won’t teach creationism, require teachers to read the Bible in class, or allow children to pray. He rails against the “secular jihadists” who have “hijacked” America and prevent school kids from learning that Hitler was “an avid evolutionist.” He links abortion to children who murder their parents. He blasts the “pagan left” for trying to redefine marriage. He declares that “homosexual rights” will bring “a flood of demonic oppression.” On his church website you read that “Reclaiming the teaching of our Christian heritage among America’s youth is paramount to a sense of national destiny that God has invested into this nation.”
One of the prominent allies of the Ohio Restoration Project is a popular televangelist in Columbus who heads a $40 million-a-year ministry that is accessible worldwide via l, 400 TV stations and cable affiliates. Although he describes himself as neither Republican nor Democrat but a “Christocrat”—a gladiator for God marching against “the very hordes of hell in our society”—he nonetheless has been spotted with so many Republican politicians in Washington and elsewhere that he has been publicly described as a“spiritual advisor” to the party. The journalist Marley Greiner has been following his ministry for the organization, FreePress. She writes that because he considers the separation of church and state to be “a lie perpetrated on Americans—especially believers in Jesus Christ”—he identifies himself as a “wall builder” and “wall buster.” As a wall builder he will “restore Godly presence in government and culture; as a wall buster he will tear down the church-state wall.” He sees the Christian church as a sleeping giant that has the ability and the anointing from God to transform America. The giant is stirring. At a rally in July he proclaimed to a packed house: “Let the Revolution begin!” And the congregation roared back: “Let the Revolution begin!”
(The Revolution’s first goal, by the way, is to elect as governor next year the current Republican secretary of state who oversaw the election process in 2004 year when a surge in Christian voters narrowly carried George Bush to victory. As General Boykin suggested of President Bush’s anointment, this fellow has acknowledged that “God wanted him as secretary of state during 2004” because it was such a critical election. Now he is criss-crossing Ohio meeting with Patriot Pastors and their congregations proclaiming that “America is at its best when God is at its center.”) [For the complete stories from which this information has been extracted, see: “An evening with Rod Parsley, by Marley Greiner, FreePress, July 20, 2005; Patriot Pastors,” Marilyn Warfield, Cleveland Jewish News, July 29, 2005; “Ohio televangelist has plenty of influence, but he wants more”, Ted Wendling, Religion News Service, Chicago Tribune, July 1, 2005; “Shaping Politics from the pulpits,” Susan Page, USA Today , Aug. 3, 2005; “Religion and Politics Should Be Mixed Says Ohio Secretary of State,” WTOL-TV Toledo, October 29, 2004].
The Ohio Restoration Project is spreading. In one month alone last year in the president’s home state of Texas, a single Baptist preacher added 2000 “Patriot Pastors” to the rolls. On his website he now encourages pastors to “speak out on the great moral issues of our day…to restore and reclaim America for Christ.”
Alas, these “great moral issues” do not include building a moral economy. The Christian Right trumpets charity (as in Faith Based Initiatives) but is silent on social and economic justice. Inequality in America has reached scandalous proportions: a few weeks ago the government acknowledged that while incomes are growing smartly for the first time in years, the primary winners are the top earners—people who receive stocks, bonuses, and other income in addition to wages. The nearly 80 percent of Americans who rely mostly on hourly wages barely maintained their purchasing power. Even as Hurricane Katrina was hitting the Gulf Coast, giving us a stark reminder of how poverty can shove poor people into the abyss, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that last year one million people were added to 36 million already living in poverty. And since l999 the income of the poorest one fifth of Americans has dropped almost nine percent.
None of these harsh realities of ordinary life seem to bother the radical religious right. To the contrary, in the pursuit of political power they have cut a deal with America’s richest class and their partisan allies in a law-of-the-jungle strategy to “starve” the government of resources needed for vital social services that benefit everyone while championing more and more spending rich corporations and larger tax cuts for the rich.
How else to explain the vacuum in their “great moral issues” of the plight of millions of Americans without adequate health care? Of the gross corruption of politics by campaign contributions that skew government policies toward the wealthy at the expense of ordinary taxpayers? (On the very day that oil and gas prices reached a record high the president signed off on huge taxpayer subsidies for energy conglomerates already bloated with windfall profits plucked from the pockets of average Americans filling up at gas tanks across the country; yet the next Sunday you could pass a hundred church signboards with no mention of a sermon on crony capitalism.)
This silence on economic and political morality is deafening but revealing. The radicals on the Christian right are now the dominant force in America’s governing party. Without them the government would not be in the hands of people who don’t believe in government. They are culpable in upholding a system of class and race in which, as we saw last week, the rich escape and the poor are left behind. And they are on they are crusading for a government “of, by, and for the people” in favor of one based on Biblical authority.
This is the crux of the matter: To these fundamentalist radicals there is only one legitimate religion and only one particular brand of that religion that is right; all others who call on God are immoral or wrong. They believe the Bible to be literally true and that they alone know what it means. Behind their malicious attacks on the courts (“vermin in black robes,” as one of their talk show allies recently put it,) is a fierce longing to hold judges accountable for interpreting the Constitution according to standards of biblical revelation as fundamentalists define it. To get those judges they needed a party beholden to them. So the Grand Old Party—the GOP—has become God’s Own Party, its ranks made up of God’s Own People “marching as to war.”
Go now to the website of an organization called America 2l (http://www.america21.us/Home.cfm ). There, on a red, white, and blue home page, you find praise for President Bush’s agenda—including his effort to phase out Social Security and protect corporations from law suits by aggrieved citizens. On the same home page is a reminder that “There are 7,177 hours until our next National Election….ENLIST NOW.” Now click again and you will read a summons calling Christian pastors “to lead God’s people in the turning that can save America from our enemies.” Under the headline “Remember—Repent—Return” language reminiscent of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell reminds you that “one of the unmistakable lessons [of 9/11] is that America has lost the full measure of God’s hedge of protection. When we ask ourselves why, the scriptures remind us that ancient Israel was invaded by its foreign enemy, Babylon, in 586 B.C. ….(and) Jerusalem was destroyed by another invading foreign power in 70 A.D. …. Psalm l06:37 says that these judgments of God …were because of Israel’s idolatry. Israel, the apple of God’s eye, was destroyed … because the people failed… to repent.” If America is to avoid a similar fate, the warning continues, we must “remember the legacy of our heritage under God and our covenant with Him and, in the words of II Chronicles 7:14: ‘Turn from our wicked ways.’”
Just what does this have to do with the president’s political agenda praised on the home page? Well, squint and look at the fine print at the bottom of the site. It reads: America2l is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to educate, engage and mobilize Christians to influence national policy at every level. Founded in l989 by a multi-denominational group of pastors and businessmen, it is dedicated to being a catalyst for revival and reform of the culture and the government .” (emphasis added).
The corporate, political and religious right converge here, led by a president who, in his own disdain for science, reason and knowledge, is the most powerful fundamentalist in American history.
What are the stakes? In his last book, the late Marvin Harris, a prominent anthropologist of the time, wrote that “the attack against reason and objectivity is fast reaching the proportions of a crusade.” To save the American Dream, “we desperately need to reaffirm the principle that it is possible to carry out an analysis of social life which rational human beings will recognize as being true, regardless of whether they happen to be women or men, whites or black, straights or gays, employers or employees, Jews or born-again Christians. The alternative is to stand by helplessly as special interest groups tear the United States apart in the name of their “separate realities’ or to wait until one of them grows strong enough to force its irrational and subjective brand of reality on all the rest.”
That was written 25 years ago, just as the radical Christian right was setting out on their long march to political supremacy. The forces he warned against have gained strength ever since and now control much of the United States government and are on the verge of having it all.
It has to be said that their success has come in no small part because of our acquiescence and timidity. Our democratic values are imperiled because too many people of reason are willing to appease irrational people just because they are pious. Republican moderates tried appeasement and survive today only in gulags set aside for them by the Karl Roves, Bill Frists and Tom DeLays. Democrats are divided and paralyzed, afraid that if they take on the organized radical right they will lose what little power they have. Trying to learn to talk about God as Republicans do, they’re talking gobbledygook, compromising the strongest thing going for them—the case for a moral economy and the moral argument for the secular checks and balances that have made America “a safe haven for the cause of conscience.”
As I look back on the conflicts and clamor of our boisterous past, one lesson about democracy stands above all others: Bullies—political bullies, economic bullies and religious bullies—cannot be appeased; they have to be opposed with a stubbornness to match their own. This is never easy; these guys don’t fight fair; “Robert’s Rules of Order” is not one of their holy texts. But freedom on any front—and especially freedom of conscience—never comes to those who rock and wait, hoping someone else will do the heavy lifting. Christian realism requires us to see the world as it is, without illusions, and then take it on. Christian realism also requires love. But not a sentimental, dreamy love. Reinhold Niebuhr, who taught at Union Theological Seminary and wrestled constantly with applying Christian ethics to political life, put it this way: “When we talk about love we have to become mature or we will become sentimental. Basically love means…being responsible, responsibility to our family, toward our civilization, and now by the pressures of history, toward the universe of humankind.”
Christian realists aren’t afraid to love. But just as the Irishman who came upon a brawl in the street and asked, “Is this a private fight or can anyone get in it?” we have to take that love where the action is. Or the world will remain a theatre of war between fundamentalists.
Posted August 1st, 2008 at 10:01 am Login to Send PM Report this comment
Western Colorado Atheists and Freethinkers NEVER SOUGHT publicity. We simply wrote a letter to City Council pointing out their invocations violated the law, asking them to understand that there are people of different faiths and no faith among us, and seeking ways to more courteously accommodate all citizens. We NEVER went to the media and never sought their attention; the media have always approached US.
Posted August 1st, 2008 at 10:09 am Login to Send PM Report this comment
good stuff toaaron — thanks for sharing, it is most appropriate here.
Posted August 1st, 2008 at 10:18 am Login to Send PM Report this comment
Thanks Ash. I dig your your tag!
Posted August 1st, 2008 at 10:18 am Login to Send PM Report this comment
Your new tag. oops
Posted August 1st, 2008 at 10:58 am Login to Send PM Report this comment
Posted August 1st, 2008 at 11:10 am Login to Send PM Report this comment
Oh, come on. it can’t be that bad. Willis said no Christains were trying to establish a theocracy. And Willis can’t be wrong…
Posted August 1st, 2008 at 12:39 pm Login to Send PM Report this comment
Thanks T. I missed this speech (did not see it anywhere in print) So I appreciate your posting it. This view from a moderate Christian is exactly what needs to be said and flies in the face of some of those who call themselves Christian on this forum.
Posted August 1st, 2008 at 12:40 pm Login to Send PM Report this comment
Oh class, you overbloated elitist snob.
You slandered a variety of well respected scientists in the Global warming forum, and you have yet to respond to the facts you requested.
Why is that?
Afraid to admit that you lied about those people in a failed effort to make yourself appear intelligent?
You pompous ass classless.
You slander good honest people in your retarded tirade on global warming and in order to gain any credibility you are just going to have to break down and admit that you lied for purely political reasons.
Would you care to see how many times I can post this demand before you give up and apologize for your dishonest behavior?
Posted August 1st, 2008 at 12:50 pm Login to Send PM Report this comment
‘52, yes, I found Moyer’s speech to be pretty powerful, too. Unfortunately, the people who really need to read and understand it will just write it off as some liberal drivel before even reading it.
Posted August 1st, 2008 at 12:54 pm Login to Send PM Report this comment
“52, or anyone else, feel free to take it over to the free press blog.
Posted August 1st, 2008 at 1:11 pm Login to Send PM Report this comment
T., Several of us met in the offices of the Free Press this morning where we set up the new blog: The Bagel Street Irregulars.
Should be operating by Monday, free of trolls like the pipsqueak. But I also intend to continue posting here since a lot of decent folks with good ideas expressed in civil language continue to read these forums and I just ignore anything written by the offender. Perhaps some day Todd and the Sentinel will come to realize that a forum likes this needs to be moderated so as to prevent WLJ type garbage from getting in the way of an appropriate exchange of ideas.
Posted August 1st, 2008 at 1:12 pm Login to Send PM Report this comment
Oh class, you overbloated elitist snob.
You slandered a variety of well respected scientists in the Global warming forum, and you have yet to respond to the facts you requested.
Why is that?
Is it because every one of those REAL SCIENTISTS each have more accomplishments than you were ever capable of?
Is it because you have grown old and bitter because, late in life, you realized that you are, and always have been just another miserable failure with nothing of value to offer society?
Posted August 1st, 2008 at 3:26 pm Login to Send PM Report this comment
“Invocation should be all inclusive”
Sounds like a good point to make.
I haver never heard any invocation that did not include everybody present.
ie; ending with “except for those people over there.”
Nor have I ever heard one that required any attendee to perform in any manner, such as “bow your heads”. “Join me in prayer”, etc.
I also have never heard of any person, atheist, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Jew, or any other belief systems that was struck down by a bolt of Lightning for being in the same room during an invocation.
The only damage so far has been, “well, it makes us FEEL” some specific way.
so?
Posted August 1st, 2008 at 3:59 pm Login to Send PM Report this comment
Willis,
“The only damage so far has been, “well, it makes us FEEL” some specific way.
so?”
Well said. I think that sums up the problem most people have with you perfectly.
Posted August 1st, 2008 at 4:01 pm Login to Send PM Report this comment
C52 - Congratulations on going over to the Free Press blog. I look forward to reading your positions and being able to respond in a mature, civil manner. Hot damn, a blog for mature, educated grown-ups, how refreshing!
Posted August 1st, 2008 at 4:06 pm Login to Send PM Report this comment
Willis - You said, “Nor have I ever heard one that required any attendee to perform in any manner, such as “bow your heads”. “Join me in prayer”, etc.”
If that’s true, you haven’t been to, or watched, a Mesa County Commissioners meeting since Meis and Rowland were elected - what you describe is EXACTLY the kind if thing they say, as well as intoning the name of the baby Jesus (highly illegal under current law) several times during their invocations.
You need to unhook from your concentrator and get out more!
Posted August 1st, 2008 at 4:32 pm Login to Send PM Report this comment
Willis,
Ever time I read something that GJBubba writes, he reminds me of a guy I met at the gun range a few weeks ago, who bought a pull through cleaning kit for his muzzle loading rifle.
Posted August 1st, 2008 at 5:01 pm Login to Send PM Report this comment
AP - Hey man, always nice to hear from you, but you got my name wrong. To the world I may be GJBubba, but YOU may call me MAGUA!
Posted August 1st, 2008 at 5:04 pm Login to Send PM Report this comment
Your memory may be a little off American_Patriot.
That wasn’t a cleaning kit, it was his fly rod.
Posted August 1st, 2008 at 5:05 pm Login to Send PM Report this comment
I’m not sure what Magua means in Huron, but in ancient Sumerian it means “waste of oxygen”.
Posted August 1st, 2008 at 5:09 pm Login to Send PM Report this comment
This may have been covered, but what bothers me is the false choices presented to non-Christians. Pray, stand silent, leave the room.
Now what if I want to sing during this spiritual moment? Maybe we should all go and give a rousing chorus of “Louie Louie”. I suspect we would be told to shut up and leave. Removing once and for all the idea that this is not about power and control.
Posted August 1st, 2008 at 5:10 pm Login to Send PM Report this comment
Hey, if that trips your trigger dude, go for it.
Posted August 1st, 2008 at 5:19 pm Login to Send PM Report this comment
Willis,
Magua is Huron means “loon” which in Dutch is “Luen” and means Homo-stupidus. For more information, see the third one from the left on the evolutionary scale.
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