Crusading-Crackpots Push For Armageddon

We don't tend to be anti-religion around here. At least, none of us ever have been, before.

But these last 6 years have strained everyone's patience, and caused every one of us to re-think.

Even those of us who have never spent so much as an hour in any church, recognize the good religion can do. We have seen churches take the lead on issues like AIDS, before Elizzabeth Taylor made it popular and before Ronald Reagan would even utter the word. We have seen some churches give women their rightful place among the followers of Christ, as Deacons, Priests, Ministers and such. We have seen some churches follow the true, authentic teachings of the Christ; feeding the poor, ministering to prisoners, visiting the sick and offering hope to thousands of people who were without hope of any kind, and all this without preaching, pontificating or demanding that the people they help believe in any creed or dogma.

However, the people and movement described in this article are not anything like what we have seen and value about religion. As a matter of fact, they represent everything destructive and wrong with religion and they certainly go out of their way to be anti-Christ in their teachings and actions.

While billing themselves as "pro-life," they support the death penalty and push wars that have and will kill hundreds of thousands of people directly, and millions more indirectly, through starvation and disease, while billions, which could be spent preventing such horrors, is spent on creating more.

They are anti-science, therefore threatening more life; even the life of our planet, yet they seem to have no problem with the science that created the atom bomb and, even now, is busy creating more hideous, terribly destructive weapons.

They are members of a conspiracy to force their twisted beliefs on all of us through legislation, at every level of government.

We don't see a lot of difference between groups like the Taliban and the religiously insane in this country.

There is a big difference, however, in their circumstances. Here, in the U.S., we have a system of government which forbids the formation of any national or state religion. Our founders had seen with their own eyes that national religions can and do lead to persecution of a most heinous type.

The seperation of church and state is under attack, in ways we have not seen, certainly in modern times, if not in our entire history. This poses a danger to every American, be they religious or not and, unfortunately, to the rest of the world, in this nuclear age.

Christian Zionists are dancing the hora in San Antonio.

Armageddon appears to be at hand.

As George W. Bush sets his sights on Iran, even Republicans are wondering how to constitutionally contain the trigger-happy king. But for an influential group of Christian fundamentalists -- White House allies that garner not only feel-good meetings with the President's liaisons to the "faith-based" community but also serious discussions with Bush's national security staff -- an attack on Iran is just what God ordered.
Biblical literalists, convened together through San Antonio megapastor John Hagee's Christians United for Israel (CUFI), are now seeing the fruits of their yearlong campaign to convince the Bush administration to attack Iran.

Hagee came to Washington last summer on the warpath, and many Republicans -- and even a few Democrats -- welcomed him as an alleged supporter of Israel. More than 3,500 CUFI members fanned out across the Capitol to meet with their congressional delegations. Televangelist power brokers, like rising star Rod Parsley of Ohio, who serve as directors of CUFI, now proudly display photographs of their meetings with senators, brows furrowed over the seriousness of the task at hand. But probably Hagee's most important meeting was smaller and not public, at the White House with deputy national security adviser and Iran Contra player Elliott Abrams.

Did the two men talk dispensationalism or diplomacy? That the president's top national security advisor on Middle East policy met with the popular author of a best-selling book that claims that God requires a war with Iran demonstrates just how intensely politics trumps policy (and human lives) for this unhinged administration. Emboldened, Hagee returned to San Antonio fretting that "most Americans are simply not aware that the battle for Western Civilization is engaged" and "don't want to believe that Iran would use nuclear weapons against mighty America. They will!" As the bloody fighting between Israel and Hezbollah raged last August, Hagee organized a grassroots lobbying campaign to blitz the White House switchboard with callers opposed to a cease-fire. Members were urged to call the White House to "congratulate" Bush on using the term "Islamofascists" and on his "moral clarity."

Armed with blood-red rhetoric and the hubris of the politically connected, Hagee filled his 5,000-seat church for a weekend-long event culminating in his Night to Honor Israel in October. To an eager audience preparing for the end times, analogies to Hitler and denouncement of "appeasement" were flying. Anti-Muslim rhetoric was at a fevered pitch. All of it was dressed up as love and benevolence for God's chosen people. But what masqueraded as Biblically mandated generosity toward the Jews was nothing more than a political rally for a war not just against Iran, but against Islam, and for the dominance of Christianity (Hagee's brand, of course).

By the end of the year, Hagee was warning his followers that Iran was "reloading for the next war," claiming that he had "reason to believe that Iran will face a military preemptive strike from Israel to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons," and denouncing the Iraq Study Group as "anti-Israel." Although he had spent nearly a year claiming that Iran intended to destroy Israel, Hagee, in rejecting the ISG's recommendation to diplomatically engage Iran, fumed, "America's problems with Iran have nothing to do with Israel. Iran's president has said he intends to use nuclear weapons against the United States of America. My father's generation would have considered this statement a declaration of war and bombed Iran by this time."
Bush knows Hagee's minions are locked and loaded for a war to end not only all wars, but the world. He might have already signed a secret executive order authorizing military action against Iran. But last week Bush nonetheless lamely tried to bring the rest of the country on board with his tried (but by no means true) device of uttering the words "Iran," "nuclear weapons" and "9/11" in the same breath.

His saber rattling won't work for the majority of Americans outraged by his conduct of the Iraq war and opposed to its escalation. But for his listeners gearing up for the end times -- a segment of American evangelicals increasingly united around this issue -- Bush fired up the grandiose rhetoric of a final showdown: "The challenge playing out across the broader Middle East is more than a military conflict. It is the decisive ideological struggle of our time."

Sarah Posner has covered the religious right for the American Prospect, the Gadflyer, and AlterNet. She is at work on a book about televangelists in politics.