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Militant Christianists · Nov 14, 10:04 PM
There was some skepticism in the comments on my previous post about my sanguine attitude toward home-schooling Christianists. I’ve just read this essay by Kathryn Joyce in The Nation & I must say it give me pause. The people Joyce describes are hopelessly delusional, but probably ought to be considered a threat to American secularism.
Isn’t it intellectually lame that a Holocaust denier like Charles Provan would have to depend on three verses from the Hebrew Bible to support his Christianist understanding doctrine that contraception is sinful? Where is his New Testament source? How does his Holocaust denial square with the radical Christianist right’s obsession with supporting the the Israeli state? That he also utterly misreads the verse about Onan simply confirms his inability to make fundamental distinctions about the actual world, as opposed to his fantasy. The language that these people use is so disconnected from reality that if it were not protected as religious speech they would be in danger of being declared mentally incompetent. That guy’s dream about an angel pointing a sword at his dick pretty much establishes the truth of Freud’s notion of the castration complex, or whatever he called it.
They are so delusional that one cannot help but think their poor ability to deal with reality will doom them to irrelevance. If you think like a cartoon character, the real world is going to be a challenge. Actually, I’ve met cartoon characters who have more subtle thought processes than the people Kathryn Joyce describes in the Quiverfull movement, whose name would have been impossible prior to Freud, by the way. According to Joyce, these are not socially or economically successful people. Are the children raised by working class Christianists, kids who will grow up in or near poverty, going to become “mighty warriors” for Christ in American political institutions? How many of those children will actually grow up to attend Patrick Henry College? Precious few, I’d wager. (Though those few will bear watching: they are tomorrow’s domestic terrorists.) The militancy of the Christianist right is no joke & it has been around for a long time. I remember singing “Onward Christian soldiers / Marching as to war / With the cross of Jesus / Going on before” in Sunday school fifty years ago.
Still, let’s do a thought experiment: 100 years in the future the Quiverfull movement has taken over the United States, turning it into a veritable Handmaid’s Tale, teaching creationism in the schools & enforcing a strict Christianist theocracy. (There will be schools, instead of home schooling, because the government will be a Christianist government that outlaws the Darwinist heresy.) Now, imagine that nation competing with the Chinese. I’d bet on the Chinese. The Chinese are interested in science. A Christianist US, even should it come about, will be a third world country. Maybe American capitalism has become so weak & degraded that it will allow the Christianist movement to take over, but I don’t think so. I’m not predicting an American secular-humanist paradise, mind you. I think there is a good chance that in a hundred years the US will be ruled by the Carlyle Group, but that’s another discussion.
Update: Digby & Tristero have posts on this subject at Hullabaloo, each with long comment threads.
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Hey Joe,
In response to, “How does his Holocaust denial square with the radical Christianist right’s obsession with supporting the the Israeli state?” I heard a great NPR interview with the author of a book called something like _The_End_Of_The_World_ (wish I could remember the exact author/title) in which the author purports that some Christian groups support Zionism because they believe it will precipitate Armageddon (in which all non-Christians, e.g. Jews, will be sent to hell).
He further purports that similar beliefs guided Ronald Regan, who was overt in his view that his foreign policy was related to Armageddon, and also carried over to the current Bush, who is more covert in his governance by such beliefs. Not sure if I believe the conspiracy story about the conspiracy story, but it’s an interesting if bizarre theory.
That said, I have long thought a Manichean view of the universe in which a struggle for the salvation of souls is paramount has necessarily negative and violent implications for society. To me, the greatest misprision of traditional Christianity is this concept of the perishable soul and punitive God.
— Robert 11/16/2006 02:04 PM #
this sort of shit only becomes menacing when you factor in the possibility of an environmental/economic catastrophe which leads to the general & irrevocable failure of the federal government, unfortunately not so fantastic in these post-Katrina, Global Warming, Peak Oil days. in fact, it doesn’t even require the continued hegemony of the Red Assed Baboons (i. e. Republican Party): simply continuing to pretend away the crisis will get us there lickety-split; & then, just as it was the Russian Mafia that moved into the power vacuum left by the Soviet debacle, it may well be militant Christianists with carefully-hoarded armories ending up the most aggressive of regional authorities.
yeah, the 21c. is turning into bad science fiction, right before our eyes.
m.
— graywyvern 11/16/2006 02:09 PM #