How’s our media handling Sarah Palin?
In an earlier post, Speaking in Forked Tongues, Sarah Palin insists the media only describe her as “generic Christian”. McCain called Palin a quick study who has sound judgment, but what’s on the record about Sarah Palin when she insists, “We’re just a community church”?
Here she’s sharing the pulpit with senior pastor Ed Kalnins as he spoke about, “tapping into Alaska’s natural resource wealth in order to fulfill the state’s destiny of serving as a shelter for Christians at the end of the world.”
“I believe that Alaska is one of the ‘refuge states’ — come on you guys — in the Last Days,” raising his arm to underscore his point.
“And hundreds of thousands of people are going to come to this state to seek refuge. And the church has to be ready to minister to them.”
As governor, she spoke to a pastor’s conference of Pentecostal Assemblies of God clergy saying Alaska had been dedicated to the Lord — “and I know the Lord is not going to take it back.” Her government created “Christian Heritage Week” “to remind Alaskans of the role Christianity has played in the state’s history.”
Dominionism: A particular school of evangelical political thought that holds Christians as having rightful “dominion” over the earth- including its political institutions.
What do people who study fundamentalist evangelicals say about their fervent and relatively recent penetration into our political life?
Professor Robert Altemeyer at the University of Manitoba says they may be, “The greatest threat to American democracy today.” Christless Christianity by Dr. Michael Horton examines “the train wreck that is so much of popular Christianity”. And Toby Green explains in his powerful study of intolerance.
In 1506 a miraculous light was seen on one of the crucifixes in a Dominican monastery in Portugal. Crowds gathered to marvel at it, but when one man suggested it looked a bit as if a candle had been placed behind the image of Christ he was dragged into the street by his hair, beaten, kicked and burnt by an angry mob.
“You may be more afraid to bring that sentence against me than I am to accept it,” resigns Giordano Bruno in 1600. The inquisitors stripped him naked, tied his tongue and burned him on a stake for his ideas that the universe is infinite and that other solar systems exist. [link]
At the price of our weakness, pulpit forcefulness has cowered millions into mobs of hateful pit bulls. Are we tolerating a 21st Century equivalent of pulling out tongues to keep superstition and cull science?
Is religion in American government merely power, dominance and hierarchy? Yes. And this is all you really need to grasp about right-wing authoritarianism.
- Who Are the Authoritarian Followers?
- The Roots of Authoritarian Aggression, and Authoritarianism Itself
- How Authoritarian Followers Think
- Authoritarian Followers and Religious Fundamentalism
- Authoritarian Leaders
- Authoritarianism and Politics
- What’s To Be Done?
Here’s Professor Altemeyer’s free book: The Authoritarians.
What’s happening lately?
“This Republican Party of Lincoln has become a party of theocracy.” said U.S. Representative Christopher Shays R-CT.
Why is there a mass movement of religious zealots in the USA?
Why now?
The European Tribune tries to explain.
Bill Moyers is angry when he reports, “”Without the Christian right, the corporations that now control Washington would not have had the votes…”
In John Dean’s book “Conservatives without Conscience“, he explains with a warning,
“Briefly these people are unquestioning followers of strong leaders who believe in a hierarchical social structure.
“How many ordinary people do you think an evil authority would have to order to kill you before he found someone who would, unjustly, out of sheer obedience, just because the authority said to?
“What sort of person is most likely to follow such an order?”
Dean is asking, “What kind of official is most likely to give that order?”