This is delightfully written (worthy of Mencken)...and scathing; an excerpt:
In the 1920s, explaining the growing phenomenon of religious fundamentalism and how it battened Prohibition upon a suffering nation, H.L. Mencken described Southern Baptism as "a theology degraded almost to the level of voodoo." Eighty years on, we could remark, "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose," but we would be wrong.
Things have not remained the same, they have deteriorated. For if there is one thing worse than Elmer Gantry, it is Elmer Gantry with a foreign policy. Not content with polluting the fields of evolutionary biology and stem-cell research with Stone Age dogmas, these zealots have now tried their hand at statecraft.
The latest specimen in Barnum's traveling museum of oddities is John Hagee, director of Christians United for Israel. As profiled in The Wall Street Journal, this dervish from the West Texas wastes seemingly lives, breathes, and excretes but one obsession: his love of Israel, above and beyond anything else, including, apparently, the country of which he is nominally a citizen.
We will not provide a comprehensive summary of the article other than to note that he and his followers are particularly active in cheering on the carnage in Lebanon. To that end, he was in the imperial capital of Washington last week to hound Congressmen about their duty of fealty to Israel as if those gunsels of AIPAC needed any instruction. Apparently, the bigger and bloodier the war, the closer the day of Armageddon looms. And the end of the world is what he seeks.
Two revealing details stand out. The first is that the President of the United States actually sent a message of congratulations to Hagee's Washington clambake. Paradoxically, the chief executive stated that Hagee and his acolytes are "spreading the hope of God's love . . ." This statement is somewhat difficult to square with the fact that Hagee, who held one of his previous séances in an Israeli Air Force hangar, seems to positively lust for bloodshed. He is not only a strong supporter of the Iraq fiasco and the leveling of apartment blocks in Beirut, but has also written a book fomenting readers to put political pressure on their government to attack Iran.
This is a new development in the annals of American politics. While the head magistrate is expected to belong to an organized religion and show ceremonial piety when the occasion demands it, it is unprecedented for a president to take such public interest in a fringe cult. It is doubtful whether the genial, (bootleg) whiskey-drinking Warren Gamaliel Harding ever sent a congratulatory telegram to the spirit-rappings of Aimee Semple McPherson. Nor can we picture Silent Cal bestowing his best wishes on a congregation of snake-handlers in the hollows of the Cumberland Ridge. But, as we have observed, these are different times....
To Hagee's motives we may apply a discount. As the Journal article describes, Hagee's IRS filings have been subject to some revision, and he is most assuredly not poor. Which leads to the question: if Armageddon lies at hand, why does he accumulate such earthly dross as mere shekels (to use his preferred unit of currency)? Can the process of Rapture, whereby the saved one is drawn up into the ether, allow him to bring his treasure chest along? Or is he merely a figure squarely in the Gantry tradition, along with his colleagues Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson? The reader will have to draw his own conclusion.
His followers are a more difficult case. They make no material profit from their peculiar obsession; rather, one would wager it is a net expenditure on their financial balance sheets. Why do they do it...?
Eight decades ago, the burghers of Sinclair Lewis's Saulk City became Elks or Rotarians, rather than Wahabbites devoted to a foreign power. We leave it to psychohistorians to divine why these times are different....
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