God and His Demons by Michael Parenti

God and His Demons by Michael Parenti

Author:Michael Parenti [Parenti, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2010-06-13T10:47:00+00:00


FOR GOD AND CAPITALISM

Christianists worldwide are involved in a "renewalist" movement involving Pentecostals and charismatics who practice "the gifts of the Holy Spirit," such as glossolalia and prophesying. Renewal- ists generally concentrate on supernatural pursuits, but in recent times they have boosted conservative political leaders who promise to reverse the "moral decline" of modern society.28

Political involvement by the Roman Church hierarchy has centered on opposition to abortion, birth control, and gay rights. In the 2004 presidential election many leading Catholic bishops threatened their own congregants with excommunication if they voted for the liberal Democratic candidate John Kerry, who himself was a Catholic.29 On this occasion, the Protestant fundamentalists discarded their age-old concerns about "papist influence" in American politics. The papists, after all, now shared the same reactionary agenda as the Protestant right-wingers. Politics is thicker than faith.

This was certainly true of televangelist Pat Robertson, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 1988. In 2007 Robertson endorsed Rudy Giuliani for president, putting aside Giuliani's religion (Roman Catholic) and even his permissive position on abortion and gay rights, giving priority to his rightist politico-economic agenda. This same Robertson asserted that feminism "encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians."30 He once praised the "enlightened leadership" of Guatemalan CIA-supported, military dictator General Efrain Rios Montt, notorious for his slaughter of tens of thousands of people.31 In 2005 Robertson gave us another glimpse of his loving Christianist side when he called for the assassination of Venezuela's elected socialist-minded president Hugo Chavez: "If he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it."32

A leading light of the religious Right and a kingmaker in the Republican Party was televangelist Jerry Falwell, who died in 2007, leaving a full trough of retrograde utterances from which his followers might feed. On the issue of segregation, Falwell pronounced as follows: "Facilities [for whites and blacks] should be separate. When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line." Years later he determined that "AIDS is the wrath of a just God against homosexuals"; Jews could not enter heaven unless they converted to Christianity, "God doesn't listen to Jews"; and Americans who are not devout Christians are "foes."33

Supporting the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, Falwell determined that "God is pro-war." Like most other right-wing clergy, he paid little attention to actual Christian moral doctrine regarding just and unjust wars, preferring to rally around President Bush, whom he pictured as "a brother in Christ," who "has discerned that God's will is for our nation to be at war against Iraq."34

As for global warming, many far-right religionists agree with Falwell, who called it an issue "created to destroy America's free enterprise system and our economic stability." Fundamentalist reactionaries believe that concern for our planet's future is senseless because it has no future; we are on the eve of the Apocalypse when Jesus will make a grand reentry, and



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