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September 13, 2006

Bush Claims America In "Third Awakening"

President Bush yesterday said that he believes America is experiencing a "Third Awakening" of religious commitment that is tied to our current "confrontation between good and evil." The statement is further evidence that the Administration is using religious rhetoric tied to its aggressive foreign policy activities to keep the faithful in the Republican fold.

"A lot of people in America see this as a confrontation between good and evil, including me," Bush said during a 1 1/2 -hour Oval Office conversation on cultural changes and a battle with terrorists that he sees lasting decades. "There was a stark change between the culture of the '50s and the '60s -- boom -- and I think there's change happening here," he added. "It seems to me that there's a Third Awakening."

The First Great Awakening refers to a wave of Christian fervor in the American colonies from about 1730 to 1760, while the Second Great Awakening is generally believed to have occurred from 1800 to 1830.

We all know the President isn't an avid reader, so maybe he missed the big headlines from just two days earlier reporting that Americans aren't any more religious today than they were before 9/11. The intense surge in church attendance immediately following the 9/11 attacks quickly passed, and by January of 2002, people were back to their normal routines.

I might not be as concerned as I am if I had not just read Testament of the Death Squads: Good Christ, Bad Christ by Greg Grandin. The article tells the extremely disturbing story of how Christian leaders have repeatedly partnered with American political leaders to wage war around the world.

Starting in the 1960s, conservative evangelical theologians such as John Price and Jerry Falwell … not only urged their flocks to fight what would become known as the culture wars … but to get more involved in foreign affairs as well. Ronald Reagan’s crusade against the Central American Left--his patronage of the Contra insurgents in Nicaragua and death-squad states in El Salvador and Guatemala--was the first extensive opportunity to do so, an apprenticeship that gave the Religious Right its first real taste of its own power within the Republican Party and drew it closer to other groups within the Reagan Revolution.

In order to bypass public and Congressional opposition, the White House outsourced the “hearts and minds” component of its Central American wars to evangelicals. Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum sent down “Freedom Fighter Friendship Kits” to the Contras, complete with toothpaste, insect repellent, and a bible. Gospel Crusades, Inc, Friends of the Americas, Operation Blessing, World Vision, the Wycliffe Bible Translators, and World Medical Relief likewise shipped hundreds of tons of humanitarian aid to the anti-Sandinista rebels and Honduran refugee camps, where they established schools, health clinics, and religious missions. In El Salvador, Harvesting in Spanish, Paralife Ministries, the National Association of Evangelicals, the Nicaraguan Freedom Fund (affiliated with the Unification Church) and the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade broadcast radio programs, handed out bibles, ran schools, established medical and dental clinics, and provided moral education to the soldiers. Pat Robertson used his Christian Broadcasting Network to raise money for Efraín Ríos Montt, the evangelical Christian who presided over the Guatemala’s 1982 genocide, which killed over a hundred thousand Mayan Indians. Most of the Guatemalan relief aid raised by evangelicals in the United States, by groups such as the California-based charismatic Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship, went to help the military’s efforts to establish control in the countryside in the wake of its campaign of massacres.

In the United States, right-wing Christians Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Tim and Beverly LaHaye, Phyllis Schlafly and Oliver North, along with evangelical capitalists such as Amway founder Richard DeVos, founded the Council for National Policy in 1981, which, as the Religious Right’s steering committee in the 1980s, was deeply involved in Reagan’s Central American exploits. Christian businessmen raised money for arms and humanitarian work and funded the myriad organizations that worked closely with the White House to sway public opinion and congressional votes in favor of Reagan’s policy in El Salvador and Nicaragua. As part of Iran-Contra’s extensive support network, they deepened their ties with the international Right, with retired military and black ops personal, mercenaries, arms merchants, right-wing public relations experts, ex-agents of the Iranian Shah’s secret policy, international drug traffickers, the Sultan of Brunei, and anticommunist states such as Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, Panama, and Israel. Many of the militarists who executed the Contra war -- John Singlaub, CIA director William Casey, Vernon Walters, and Oliver North -- were themselves members of either Protestant or Catholic ultramontane sects, such as the charismatic Church of the Apostles, Opus Dei and the Knights of Malta. Catholic Casey attended mass daily, and filled his mansion with statues of the Virgin Mary. The Da Vinci Code has nothing on what took place in Central America during the 1980s.

There is much more to be found in the article. This observation is one of the more upsetting ones:

Third World poverty, according to evangelical Ronald Nash, has a “cultural, moral, and even religious dimension” that reveals itself in a “lack of respect for any private property,” “lack of initiative,” and “high leisure preference.” Some took this argument to its logical conclusion. Gary North, another influential evangelical economist, insisted that the “Third World’s problems are religious: moral perversity, a long history of demonism, and outright paganism.” “The citizens of the Third World,” he wrote, “ought to feel guilt, to fall on their knees and repent from their Godless, rebellious, socialistic ways. They should feel guilty because they are guilty, both individually and corporately.”

Evangelical Christianity’s elaboration of a theological justification for free-market capitalism, along with its view of a immoral third world, resonated with other ideological currents within the New Right, laying the groundwork for today’s embrace of empire as America’s national purpose. In a universe of free will where good work is rewarded and bad works punished, the fact of American prosperity was a self-evident confirmation of god’s blessing of US power in the world. Third-world misery, in contrast, was proof of “God’s curse.” David Chilton, of the Institute for Christian Economics, a Reconstructionist think tank, wrote that poverty is how “God controls heathen cultures: they must spend so much time surviving that they are unable to exercise ungodly dominion over the earth.”

Could that be the explanation for why these people prefer spreading Christianity over helping Third World countries get up off their knees? Could it be why these people, who worship a cruel God who promises eternal, conscious torment in hell to all non-Christians, feel justified in raining hell fires of their own down on non-Christian nations, who, they believe, all are destined for hell anyway, and are already suffering for their sins? Grandon seems to believe so.

[T]he kind of moralism that many key fundamentalists used to justify the violence visited on Central America in the 1980s easily led to the kind of righteousness that today legitimates cluster bombing of civilians as an option of first resort.

The results of the mixture of politics and religion are now, as they have always been, horrific. Which is why the Rev. Sun Myong Moon's ties to the Bush family and prominent Republicans and his desire to institute a theocratic one-world government concern me so deeply. And why I was also alarmed to read this article about a global conference on religions in the post-9/11 world being held in Montreal.

There's an urgent need to secularize religion and spiritualize politics, said Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, founder of the India-based Art of Living Foundation.

I could not disagree more.

Posted by Becky at September 13, 2006 09:02 AM