Christian Zionism - John Hagee's War Against Jesus

Weekend Edition

http://www.counterpunch.org/werther07292006.html
July 29/30 2006

Rev. John Hagee's War

The Manchurian Clergyman

By WERTHER

This guy nails it! “Why,” he asks, “is John Hagee amassing fortunes if he is about to be raptured? Can he take his war chest with him?”

His point about Elmer Gantry with a foreign policy hits the nail right on the head…

“Oh, McChurch, you’ve done it again!”

Stan Moody is the author of "Crisis in Evangelical Scholarship" and "McChurched: 300 Million Served and Still Hungry

In the 1920s, explaining the growing phenomenon of religious fundamentalism and how it battened Prohibition upon a suffering nation, H.L. Mencken described Southern Baptism as "a theology degraded almost to the level of voodoo." Eighty years on, we could remark, "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose," but we would be wrong.

Things have not remained the same, they have deteriorated. For if there is one thing worse than Elmer Gantry, it is Elmer Gantry with a foreign policy. Not content with polluting the fields of evolutionary biology and stem-cell research with Stone Age dogmas, these zealots have now tried their hand at statecraft.

The latest specimen in Barnum's traveling museum of oddities is John Hagee, director of Christians United for Israel. As profiled in The Wall Street Journal [1], this dervish from the West Texas wastes seemingly lives, breathes, and excretes but one obsession: his love of Israel, above and beyond anything else, including, apparently, the country of which he is nominally a citizen.

We will not provide a comprehensive summary of the article other than to note that he and his followers are particularly active in cheering on the carnage in Lebanon. To that end, he was in the imperial capital of Washington last week to hound Congressmen about their duty of fealty to Israel ­ as if those gunsels of AIPAC needed any instruction. Apparently, the bigger and bloodier the war, the closer the day of Armageddon looms. And the end of the world is what he seeks. [2]

Two revealing details stand out. The first is that the President of the United States actually sent a message of congratulations to Hagee's Washington clambake. Paradoxically, the chief executive stated that Hagee and his acolytes are "spreading the hope of God's love . . ." This statement is somewhat difficult to square with the fact that Hagee, who held one of his previous séances in an Israeli Air Force hangar, seems to positively lust for bloodshed. He is not only a strong supporter of the Iraq fiasco and the leveling of apartment blocks in Beirut, but has also written a book fomenting readers to put political pressure on their government to attack Iran.

This is a new development in the annals of American politics. While the head magistrate is expected to belong to an organized religion and show ceremonial piety when the occasion demands it, it is unprecedented for a president to take such public interest in a fringe cult. It is doubtful whether the genial, (bootleg) whiskey-drinking Warren Gamaliel Harding ever sent a congratulatory telegram to the spirit-rappings of Aimee Semple McPherson. Nor can we picture Silent Cal bestowing his best wishes on a congregation of snake-handlers in the hollows of the Cumberland Ridge. But, as we have observed, these are different times.

The second interesting detail was the fact that Hagee's convention had a Democratic speaker: Rep. Eliot Engel of New York. Nominally a liberal (with an ADA rating of 90), Engel instructed the multitude of Armageddon cultists that Israel's enemies "do the work of Satan." Just the right words to inflame halfwits; who says the American political system is rigged?

The Zionist "Christian" phenomenon has three interesting aspects, psychological, religious, and political. It is taught in most curricula that man is a mammal, and, that like all others of his phyla, indeed all living things, his most basic instinct is for survival, an instinct that trumps even his incurable vanity. Yet these specimens that we have described evidently welcome physical extinction, indeed, they devote much of their emotional energy to it, as the rest of us look forward to food, or sex, or taking a day off work with an iron-clad and phony excuse. What accounts for this?

To Hagee's motives we may apply a discount. As the Journal article describes, Hagee's IRS filings have been subject to some revision, and he is most assuredly not poor. Which leads to the question: if Armageddon lies at hand, why does he accumulate such earthly dross as mere shekels (to use his preferred unit of currency)? Can the process of Rapture, whereby the saved one is drawn up into the ether, allow him to bring his treasure chest along? Or is he merely a figure squarely in the Gantry tradition, along with his colleagues Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson? The reader will have to draw his own conclusion.

His followers are a more difficult case. They make no material profit from their peculiar obsession; rather, one would wager it is a net expenditure on their financial balance sheets. Why do they do it?

It is certain that being a propane retailer in Plano, Texas, is a transcendently horrible experience. Perhaps such miserable creatures long for the soaring narrative of blood and fire, satanic beasts, and climactic battles, purely to dispel the pointless quotidian grind. But why Armageddon, rather than, say, a Shriner's banquet? Eight decades ago, the burghers of Sinclair Lewis's Saulk City became Elks or Rotarians, rather than Wahabbites devoted to a foreign power. We leave it to psychohistorians to divine why these times are different.

The religious aspect also intrigues us. Zionist "Christianity" dates to no earlier than the 1830s, when the English scam artist John Darby inflicted his dispensation upon the world. The word "rapture," needless to say, exists nowhere in the King James Bible. The bloodlust of our End Times fanatics is the polar opposite of the Sermon on the Mount, the summa of Jesus' earthly teachings, an element of the Scripture which fundamentalists seem oddly reluctant to proclaim.

What they profess to believe is a measurably anti-human theology. While Buddhists claim to deny the importance of sensory reality, these anchorites go further, actively welcoming destruction and mayhem. A more accurate comparison might be to the death cult of the Aztecs.

Finally, there are the political ramifications. The crucial plot device (even more significant than brainwashing) in John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate is the identity of the traitors. Those who would subvert the government were able to place themselves strategically to do so by wrapping themselves in the flag and playing the hyperpatriot.

Hagee's mummery is similar, with one important difference. He lauds every disastrous policy of a self-styled patriotic and conservative administration, and plays the yahoo cultural hick on the home front, a sure sign of 100 percent Americanism. Yet unlike Angela Lansbury, the villainess of the Frankenheimer epic, he takes no pains to conceal his real loyalty. It is perhaps a measure of the difference between 40 years ago and now that someone can declare his obeisance to a foreign power and lobby openly on Capitol Hill. But it is downright troubling that such a person should receive encouragement from the President.

When the definitive psychopathology of the American experiment is written, "the Rev." John Hagee may well merit a lengthy footnote.

Werther is the pen name of a Northern Virginia-based defense analyst.

[1] "A Texas Preacher Leads Campaign to Let Israel Fight," The Wall Street Journal, 27 July 2006, p. A1.

[2] Some choice quotes by rapturists enthusing over the war can be found in a recent column by Ken Silverstein of Harper's.

McChurch - Sexual Control Without Compassion

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July 18, 2007

Abstinence Education Faces an Uncertain Future

By LAURA BEIL

I greatly admire this kind of resolve…If you fail at preserving your virginity until marriage, you are thrown up against a human inability to control your destiny…If you succeed, you either will become self-righteous or you will be humbled in some other way…

As the studies indicate, such resolve is a lot like deciding to quite smoking or making a New Year’s resolution – for a certain percentage it works; for others, they are reminded of their human failings and are thrown back on God for forgiveness…

The problem with McChurch is that it equates self-discipline with morality or holiness, failing to deal with the person rather than the behavior…It also encourages deceit on the part of those young people who fall off the wagon, so to speak, and drives a wedge between them and their parents, whose image is on the line with other church folks…

I think that abstinence education and encouragement is a great tool for the state to use in its broad-based sex education…

Stan Moody is the author of "Crisis in Evangelical Scholarship" and "McChurched: 300 Million Served and Still Hungry

HALLSVILLE, Tex. — When Jami Waite graduated from high school this year in this northeastern Texas town, her parents sat damp-eyed in the metal bleachers of Bobcat Stadium, proud in every way possible. Their youngest daughter was leaving childhood an honor graduate, a band member, a true friend, a head cheerleader — and a steadfast virgin.

“People can be abstinent, and it’s not weird,” she declared. With her face on billboards and on TV, Ms. Waite has been an emblem of sexual abstinence for Virginity Rules, which has risen from a single operation in nearby Longview to become an eight-county abstinence franchise.

For the first time, however, Virginity Rules and 700 kindred abstinence education programs are fighting serious threats to their future. Eleven state health departments rejected abstinence education this year, while legislatures in Colorado, Iowa and Washington passed laws that could kill, or at least wound, its presence in public schools.

Opponents received high-caliber ammunition this spring when the most comprehensive study of abstinence education found no sign that it delayed a teenager’s sexual debut. And, after enjoying a fivefold increase in their main federal appropriations, the abstinence programs in June received their first cut in financing from the Senate appropriations committee since 2001.

But the final outcome is in question. Some $176 million in federal support has survived several early maneuvers in the House, and the full House plans to debate the issue July 18 as part of the proposed Health and Human Services budget.

Lost in the political rancor, however, is that teenagers throughout the country are both abstaining more, and, especially among older ones, more likely to use contraception when they do not abstain.

While the reasons are not all understood, government data show the trend began years before abstinence education became the multimillion-dollar enterprise it is today. Through a combination of less sex and more contraception, pregnancy and birth rates among American teenagers as a whole have been falling since about 1991. Texas, however, has seen the smallest decline despite receiving almost $17 million in the name of virginity.

No state has more to lose in this battle than Texas, which draws more abstinence money than any other. Drive through the piney woods of northeastern Texas, and the earnest faces of adolescents appear on billboards with slogans like “No is where I stand until I have a wedding band.”

The Longview Wellness Center, which sponsors Virginity Rules, collects almost $1 million annually in abstinence financing, and serves 33 area school districts.

Even in this state, where President Bush acquired his loyalty to the policy, abstinence cannot be typecast. Megan Randolph of Dallas, who like Jami Waite just finished high school, believes in the abstinence message. But she is bothered by courses that try to scare teenagers with harrowing talk of ruined lives. “In those classes, there are going to be kids who have had sex and that hasn’t happened,” Ms. Randolph said. “So they’re going to think that doesn’t apply to them.”

Teenagers, she said, crave unfettered information — the kind restricted under federal abstinence education law, which discourages intimacy outside marriage but provides no instruction for safer sex.

At her school, Ms. Randolph, 19, was the “sexpert,” the one girls often called late at night, asking questions. And this year, before leaving Dallas to attend the Air Force Academy, Ms. Randolph was hailed as volunteer of the year by the area’s Planned Parenthood — part of abstinence education’s axis of evil.

In northeastern Texas, advocates of abstinence education vow to fight for their mission because to them, it is not just a matter of sexuality or even public health. Getting a teenager to the other side of high school without viruses or babies is a bonus, but not the real goal. They see casual sex as toxic to future marriage, family and even, in an oblique way, opposition to abortion.

“You have to look at why sex was created,” Eric Love, the director of the East Texas Abstinence Program, which runs Virginity Rules, said one day, the sounds of Christian contemporary music humming faintly in his Longview office. “Sex was designed to bond two people together.”

To make the point, Mr. Love grabbed a tape dispenser and snapped off two fresh pieces. He slapped them to his filing cabinet and the floor; they trapped dirt, lint, a small metal bolt. “Now when it comes time for them to get married, the marriage pulls apart so easily,” he said, trying to unite the grimy strips. “Why? Because they gave the stickiness away.”

Shoring up marriage was Robert Rector’s vision a decade ago. A fellow at the Heritage Foundation, Mr. Rector wrote the first bill that legally defined abstinence education, and got it attached as a stowaway to the 1996 welfare overhaul, backed with $50 million for the states. A later Congress, irked at states’ finding loopholes in the original intent, designated a second pool of abstinence money in 2001, now the lifeblood of the movement.

Mr. Rector says viewing abstinence primarily through the lens of public health distracted the focus from marriage. “Once you understand that that’s the principal issue,” he said, “you understand that handing out condoms to a 17-year-old is utterly irrelevant.”

Strengthening marriage this way may resonate with teenagers like Ms. Waite, whose conviction is planted in a deeply held marital value, but not necessarily with Ms. Randolph, who says she is more preoccupied with succeeding in the Air Force than with marriage.

In abandoning abstinence education, states have largely said that comprehensive sex education programs, which discuss contraception beyond the failure rates, have a better scientific grounding. New laws in Colorado, Iowa and Washington state that sex education must be based on “research” or “science” — which is often interpreted as code for programs that include discussions of safer sex.

Much of the data cited in support of the efficacy of abstinence programs are from surveys taken immediately before and after a program. These commonly find an increase in intentions to stay abstinent, but do not necessarily mean that a year later, high on emotion, teenagers will follow the script.

Most studies so far have found no significant impact on behavior, and the few that do see only modest changes. In April, Mathematica Policy Research released a report that was nine years and $8 million in the making. Scientists followed middle school children enrolled in four separate abstinence programs for about five years, and found no difference in the age of first intercourse between them and their peers.

Opinions vary on whether the absence of evidence — to borrow from Carl Sagan — is evidence of absence. One of the leading experts on sex education programs, Dr. John Jemmott of the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, says some abstinence education programs in the future might show promise. He is hopeful about an abstinence curriculum that he has designed which, unlike many, tries to get teenagers to think long-term about their behavior and its consequences, questioning, for example, whether a boyfriend would really love you if you had sex with him. Many programs dwell on the risks of sex, not the reasons.

Dr. Jemmott knows many colleagues view abstinence education as a failed experiment. “I think that is unfair,” he said. “I think what they should say is there is not enough evidence to state whether it is efficacious.” On the other hand, he said, it is also unfair to say that sex education that discusses — without maligning — condoms encourages sex. Data from many programs, in fact, find the opposite.

[Those who thought abstinence education financing would decline swiftly under a Democratic watch were wrong: On July 11, the full House extended state grants through September — a reprieve at the edge of expiration. That same day, the House Appropriations Committee increased spending, a political move to make the proposed Health and Human Services budget more appealing to Republicans, said Representative David R. Obey, Democrat of Wisconsin, the committee chairman.]

While the future of abstinence education is unclear, Mr. Love, back in Longview, believes “the message will go on, whether the government decides to fund it or not.”

Just ask Jami Waite. The former cheerleader is carrying her resolve to college, where she is on her way to becoming a nurse. One day she plans to wed. Until then, she says, virginity will rule.

Jacqueline Palank contributed reporting from Washington.

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