Harper's Watch!!! May 2005
This is the second installment of Harper’s Watch !!! here at Surfeited With Dainties.
To recap: I’ve discovered that many right of center blogs watch
media outlets in order to scandalize their pious readers with some
outrageous hint of bias against Bush or Christians or Ann Coulter. CBS,
the NY Times - all are being watched by the right blogs! Because I am
too lazy to do this sort of things everyday. I have chosen to keep my
eyes trained on Harper’s Magazine. (published twelve times a year!)
The debut of Harper’s Watch !!!
didn’t go so well.I pointed out that the April
issue featured the great John Lukacs who is a hero on the Right from
George Will to the editorial staff at Chronicles. This month, however,
Harper’s gets back to its bread and butter:
Christian Evangelicals are incipient Nazis! -actually incipient
free-marlet Nazis!!! This may be a long post because of Harper’s
decision to run three articles on Evangelicals this month, but read to
the end. Harper’s crosses a magical line and calls out for repression
(possibly violent) of Evangelical Christians.
Since about 1997 higher brow cultural and political magazines such as
Harpers and the New Yorker have taken to publishing 4,000 -
10,000 words, every few months about Evangelical Christianity. The
readers of these magazines, confined to the Blue States mostly, relish
the investigative reporting.
Harpers has outdone itself this time. Not one article, but THREE!!! The
first is by Gordon Bigelow “Let there Be Markets: The evangelical roots
of economics.” It does recount some of the unfortunate history of the
“social gospel” often adapted by Evangelicals in the 19th century.
Nothing too outrageous there. Moving on.
Next: “Soldiers of Christ: Inside America’s most powerful Megachurch” by Jeff Sharlet. Sharlet edits a website that covers religion coverage in the media
- which leans left, but pays nods to the more intellectually engaged
members of the religious right. The association of Evangelicalism with
free-markets is strengthened in this piece by the appearance of Pastor
Ted Haggard who is said to speak with President Bush often and is
influenced by a “free-market” approach to religion.
As an aside Ted Haggard offers that Protestantism is forward looking, Catholicism backward.
“And the nations dominated by Catholicism look back. They don’t tend to create our greatest entrepreneurs, investors, research and development. Typically, Catholic nations aren’t shooting people into space. Protestantism, though, always looks to the future. A typical kid raised in Protestantism dreams about the future. A typical kid raised in Catholicism values and relishes the past, the saints, the history. That is one of the changes that is happening in America. In America the descendants of the Protestants, the Puritan descendants, we want to create a better future, and our speakers say that sort of thing. But with the influx of people from Mexico, they don’t tend to be the ones that go to universities and become our research-and-development people. And so in that way I see a little clash of civilizations.”
If Teg Haggard wants to use the achievements of research and development as a measuring stick for fidelity to the Gospel. He can be my guest.
Some of the admittedly insipid “liturgy” and art of Evangelical megachurches is recounted:
The sounds like they’re singing in beer commercials, and perhaps this is not coincidental. The worship style is a kind of musical correlate to Pastor Ted’s free-market theology: designed for total accessibility, with the illusion of choice between strikingly similar brands….The drummers all stick to soft cymbals and beats anyone can handle; the guitarists deploy effects like artillery but condense them, so the highs and lows never stretch too wide. Lyrics tend to be rhythmic and pronunciation perfect, the better to sing along with when the words are projected onto movie screens. Breathy or wailing vocalists drench their lines with emotion, but only within strict confines. There are no sad songs in a megachurch, and there are no angry songs. There are songs about desperation, but non about despair; songs convey longing only if it has already been fulfilledI’ve participated in worship services similar to this, though on a much smaller scale. Perhaps it was the emotional promiscuity (and theological vacuity) of these services that sent me fleeing into non-vernacular liturgies with early medieval pedigrees.
While Sharlet’s article is not offensive or ignorant, he dwells repeatedly on militant imagery. These are “Soldiers of Christ” and Colorado Springs is a command center, with cell groups. (Like terrorists?). Spiritual warfare has been a recurrent theme in Christian history from the letters of St. Paul, to the Crusades, to the age of imperialism and now during what is admitted to be a culture war. The Culture War is felt as very real to Christians, and the tut-tutting of Harpers magazine does not assuage their anxiety.
It is in the next pages where Harper’s goes off a bridge, screaming and hysterical. In Chris Hedges’ “Feeling the hate with the National Religious Broadcasters.”
Here is the first line:
Since the reelection of George W. Bush in November, the rhetoric of the Christian right has grown triumphal and proud; rumors of spiritual war are abroad in the heartland, and fervent whispers of revolution echo among the pews and folding chairs of the nation’s megachurches.Rumors of spiritual war- hello Chris?
Hedges wades into theological turf he cannot understand. The thrust of his article is about Dominionist theology. Dominionists make up a tiny fraction of the larger evangelical movement. Many believe their heresy is a kind of post-millenialist Judaizing of Christianity. Dominionist theology is scary to non-Dominionists but Hedges conflates it entirely with the broader Evangelical movement that is engaged in a cultural battle for survival. Hedges finds a solitary figure in Luis Palau to hold in contrast to the Dominists. Palau wants to see regime changes in Central America. If you run into an educated liberal, you can make them fall in love with you by making (however vague) a disaproving verbal gesture in the direction of Latin American governments. It’s like liberal rufies.
Hedges does get one thing right. The disturbing alliance between Evangelical Christians and the most radical Zionists. The convention center hosted Bus #19 - an Israeli bus destroyed by a Palestinian suicide bomber. Such a display is morbid and serves less to educate than to incite. For those interested, you can contact Jerusalem Connection International and bring Bus # 19 to your Community.” Hedges, being theologically illiterate cannot explain the genesis of this type of Evangelical eschatology. Instead he makes the culprit an Israeli tourist industry desperate for Evangelical dollars.
Hedges thankfully gets the pressing Spongebob issue right - reporting that Dobson did not “out” Spongebob as the media gleefully and falsely charged, but rather questioned the group that was using Spongebb to promote a message of tolerance. That Chris can report this, and then mockingly report that Christians falsely feel under attack is astounding. The most prominent Evangelical is made a laughingstock from CBS news, to Keith Olbermann’s Countdown to massive e-mails - all based on a false reporting.
Hedges however does a larger more hypocritical job on Dobson. Criticizing him for likening “the proponents of gay marriage to the Nazis”. He turns around and calls the Evangelical movement fascist. It begins with Hedge’s recounting how he left Anaheim to attend the funeral of Chris Marquis, a colleague of his at the New York Times who died of “complications brought on by AIDS” - the thought of the bigotry he had seen against homosexuals at the conference was more than he could stomach.
Hedges is not immune to a little end-times prophecy himself. He relates that a professor of Ethics at Harvard Divinity School, James Luther Adams, had warned him in the 70’s that when Chris grew up to be his wizened age “We would all be fighting Christian fascists.” Chris is haunted, and the page on which this text appears features a black and white Christo-Nazified drawing of an agit prop poster: a fist raising a bare cross. The last paragraph is so embarrassing to Chris Hedges as a writer and thinker - its almost uncharitable of me to reproduce it here. But this is Harper’s Watch!!! - a trust I have with you the readers.
“Adams told us to watch closely the Christian right’s persecution of homosexuals and lesbians. Hitler, her reminded us, promised to restore moral values not long after he took power in 1933, then imposed a ban on all homosexual and lesbian organizations and publications. The came the raids on the places where homosexuals gathered, culminating on May 6, 1933, with the ransacking of the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin. Twelve thousand volumes from the institute library were tossed into a public bonfire. Homosexuals and lesbians, Adams said, would be the first “deviants” singled about by the Christian right. We would be the next”I could rehearse passages from “The Paranoid Style of Politics” for a long time with this one. The argument ad-Hitlerum is especially stupid. Hedges, inadvertently makes valid the National Rifle Association’s argument that gun control, because Hitler did it, means gun control advocates are Nazis. Only they don’t prelude their hysteria with political liberal takes of prophecy from the oracles of Harvard Divinity School. And who is “We” in the last sentence? Graduates of Harvard? Students of Adams? Readers of Harpers? What have the Evangelicals actually done to deserve the Hitler label? Not much really. They support President Bush and the war in Iraq, yes. But as for going “after” homosexuals? The Christian right has merely used its lobbying efforts to try and keep cartoon characters from invading the public school and contradicting their private home religious instruction.
The delusion of Hedges is just hand-over-open-mouth-rolling-eyes staggering. The only recent attempt, on a national level to shut down places where homosexuals congregate, did not originate in Wheaton Ill. or Colorado Springs or in any Evangelical hothouse of theology, but rather with the Center for Disease Control and their rebuffed attempts to shut down homosexual bath-houses in reaction to the AIDS crisis.
His warning of Christian fascism is also laced with a bone-chilling undertone of violent repression of Christians. Hop-sipping and jumping through fascist history and tenuously connecting Mussolini, Evangelicals and Fortune magazine Hedges details Adams warning:
“Then [in the 1930s] as now… too many liberals failed to understand the power and allure of evil, and when the radical Christians came, these people would undoubtedly play by the old, polite rules of democracy long after those in power had begun to dismantle the democratic state.”
I want you to read that again, carefully. Christians are falling prey to evil (i.e. traditional Christian beliefs about sexuality), and this scourge cannot be stopped in any nice way. The sub text of Hedge’s piece is that liberals need to snuff out Christians (fascism) now and to not constrain themselves with the polite rules of democracy. Do you get it yet? Hedges is calling for a pre-emptive purging of Evangelicals. This is Harper’s magazine, in 2005, fighting the Evangelicals by implicitly calling for violence. Will we see, a radical liberal in the future, heeding Hedges warning against Fascism (the most evil thing in the world!), and decide to blow up one of these megachurches with nitrate? Will the feds find a copy of Harpers May 2005 under his pillow?
I doubt it. I am not even sure Hedges, being so ignorant, understands the import of his own published words. But Harper’s magazine, respected since 1850, has published a man whose words call for repression of Evangelical Christians. Randi Rhodes plays a skit joking about shooting the president, Tom Delay wonders whether Constitutionally scrupulous people will start shooting judges. Harpers now calls for repressing the subversives in the megachurches. The radicalism of political rhetoric has not been this ratcheted since the month after Waco. Let’s pray 2005 does not mark the American Culture War’s 1850.
Posted on 4/30/2005 05:09 PM
by
Michael Brendan Dougherty
in Harper's Watch!!!
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2 Comments
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Michael Brendan Dougherty
in Harper's Watch!!!
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Reader Comments (2)
Remember that WAR is the sacrament of the devil, and the right-wing worships war, even if they are too chickenhawk, from recent Army recruiting statistics to sign up to fight it. How about you Brendan, under 39 yrs old?? The Guard has a spot for you-
Al, did you vote for John "knowing what I know now I would still go to war" Kerry?
If you did, would you understand if I didn't take your juvenile taunts about being a chickenhawk (when I'm a dove) seriously?
Thanks for adding your unique voice to the discussion.