Bush’s Crusaders
December 23, 2007
A friend tells me that he used to be an atheist until he visited Guatemala after a major earthquake, where Christian missionaries from the US arrived dispensing aid, but only to those who were willing to accept Jesus Christ as their ‘lord and saviour’. Since then, he tells me, he has turned an anti-theist.
The possibility cannot be discounted that those who were merely not-Christian may turn anti-Christian as a result of the following.
Southern Baptist evangelism is well advanced in Central Asia too.In places like Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan the business-based missions model is preferred.
Strangely(ahem!),the evangelists seem to have followed the oil money,particularly in Kazakhstan.Democrats who served under Clinton accumulated vast wealth by fronting up the bids of US oil companies who began making inroads into the former Soviet republics when the USSR imploded.The evangelists seem to have jumped on for the ride.
As far as SBC’s evangelizing technique goes-where the business-based missions model serves in Central Asia- according to this German news report-the method in Iraq is one of dyeing their hair to appear indigenous and then blowing their cover by speaking in tongues
and singing the praises of The Great Leader!
Such a high-risk strategy puts SBC crusaders on the front-line to say the least!
Back in the US,SBC ousted moderates some twenty years ago.These were fruitcakes (with fewer sultanas and cherries?)who were alienated by the leadership’s publishing prayer guides targetting Jews,Muslims and Hindus for conversion on their holy days.
Such was the pasting the moderates suffered in these internal holy wars in the 1980s at the hands of politically savvy activists insisting on the Bible’s infallibility on matters historical,scientific and theological,they are still trying to regroup.
When they do regroup-Iraqis keen to be evangelized better look out!
The oil-religion link to their evangelizing in Central,and latterly,SW Asia is quite suggestive of the provenance of these Christian Right evangelist fruitcakes.
Presumably,if there are still any sensient Americans left in the beknighted Republic they failed to notice that these religious movements are heirs to the fascist right wing that conspired to reverse FDR’s New Deal and are currently organized under the banner of the Bush cabal’s new state religion.
Curiously,as in the 1930s,Bush’s state religion interfaces Catholicism and Protestantism including as it does the hallmark southern revival meeting and the catholic fascism of the 1930s epitomised by the notorious Fr Coughlin.
As in the 1930s the movement crosses the Republican/Democrat party divide too.
Although Democrats have had a thin time of it of late,this is down to Bush and Rove having used the vast corporate resources behind the religious movement to organize a vote suppression campaign that has handed them two elections on a plate.
Both parties are in the grip of the Wall St.-backed conservative movement and New Right.These are but latter-day reincarnations of the,again,Wall St.-backed fascist Liberty League of the 1930s.
Bush’s political base in particular comprises 25m hardcore fundamentalist Christians,chiefly our Southern Baptist friends.The ones who haven’t got the balls to evangelize in Iraq,I suppose.
At home since Goldwater’s 1960 campaign the right wing movement has especially since Nixon/Schultz Presidency seen the rapid advance of its imperial Presidency/national security state agenda.These goals have been significantly advanced since 9/11.
In foreign policy the goals are to advance the national greatness of the US by through war and conquest by means of certain key concepts.Permanent enmity and enemies are desirable and the necessity for “states of emergency” and an Arc of Crisis across the region to be dominated are the key ideas.
Rather than fascism returning to Europe that so concerns rather effete and irrelevant liberal commentators,we on the left should be thinking more about the advance of corporate fascism in the US.It has after all been going on for decades supplemented by the machinations of finance capital and the religious right.
We can be sure Iraqis will fight back even if we don’t.