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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Anybody who's seen 'Days of Thunder' remembers Tommy Cruise illustrating the racing principle of 'drafting' on future-wife Nicole Kidman's inner thigh. For those who didn't, drafting is a technique in racing that deals with resistance. To reach its top speed, a stock car will use the maximum power of its top gear to overcome fight the drag of wind resistance. Drafting is when a second car follows right behind the lead car, making that car absorb all of the wind resistance with it's top gear. This allows the drafting car to run as fast as the lead car without using all of it's available power. This in turn, allows the trailing car to floor it, using his reserve power to 'slingshot' past the lead car at a strategic point in the race.
I thought of this when Kuo asserted that church leaders are essentially star-struck by their association with power, and that they are politically naive in believing that politicians are on their side. The drafting metaphor allows one to picture how the Republicans saw the fundamentalist right as a constituency. Their motive was money and power and they used 'compassionate conservatism' as a kind of Trojan Horse (mixing metaphors is bad) in the arena of public opinion, to infiltrate the evangelical cause of spiritual salvation through political action. So leading up to election time you can see the evangelical leaders revving up to full speed with the Republicans following close behind, nipping their ankles with promises of faith based initiative and scripture-inspired legislation. The Republicans let the religious leaders take the brunt of resistance from the media and the left as they cruised on with their agenda. And then, just when it was sure that a new era of spiritual government would be built form the alliance of evangelicals and conservatives, the Bush team floored the engine and slingshotted ahead, leaving the evangelical cause in the dust.
Is that the evangelicals will just sit on their butts on election day because no party really cares what their group of bigotry fanatics care about. I'm hoping that one day they will be regulated to the staus of the KKK, legally able to exist but discounted by the majority, laughed at and basically sitting around useless.
I'm solidly waiting for the day when being anti-abortion or anti-gay or evolution is nonsense just makes people point and laugh at you except for the few nutbags who were raised into the hate just like when David whatshisface goes on Howard Stern to be the butt of everyone's jokes.
Why weren't *good* Christians picketing Jerry Falwell and shouting down Pat Robertson?
Well, for starters, the "good" Christians like to think of themselves as broad-minded and tolerant, and have taken a loooooong time to begin to realize how scary some of these people are. When one has been taught not to judge, to be inclusive and respectful of differences, and to refrain from rudeness and prejudice and name-calling and insults, it doesn't come all that easily to learn to stand up and say, "No. I do NOT respect your faith. In fact, I think it is a blasphemous heresy, a hideous parody of genuine Christianity. The Jesus you claim is not the Jesus I know." Or, "I think you have been duped, by a slick, fast-talking evangelist who is using your tithes to pay for his Cadillac and diamond cufflinks--and by a bunch of utterly cynical politicians who just want your votes so they can screw you economically and send your kids to be blown to bits in Iraq."
This is not how we were raised to act. We were taught to be polite and respectful, like Garrison Keillor's Lutherans.
Jim Wallis and Co. have begun to help us find a more prophetic voice--but still with laborious politeness and non-partisanship ("God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It"). You're right--we are waiting for a leader, and at the moment I don't see the right person anywhere that I know of. The "good" Christians are way too "nice," and too splintered and dispirited by our own institutional histories and issues, and we don't know how to play the game.
They're perfectly willing to distort, lie, and character-assassinate. I don't want to descend to anything like their level, and they keep running circles around us. Nice guys finish last.
I find it interesting that Dobson had nothing to say about the remarks that specifically refered to him. All he could do is get mad at the messenger. For a man intellegent enough to start a nation wide ministry, he should have been able to figure out that he and his fellow theocrats were being used. The only logical explaination is that he does know, but is so desperate for power that he is willing to get knowingly laughed at behind his back. I don't think the revelations in this book come as a surprise to any of the evangelical leaders, I think they know they are not respected and don't care, largely because they think they have control of the party vote wise, and maybe they do. The culture war is the biggest weapon the republicans have, it's only a matter of time before the people who are it's targets start holding their votes hostage in exchange for actual results.
If these men are truly as intellegent as they seem, then they must also realize that faith through government enforcement isn't going to convince anyone that God exists, so why demand it? Because conversion isn't the real goal, control is. They don't care if you come to Christ, just so long as you obey them. Jesus is only the means to an end. I don't know if Kuo wrote this out of revenge or not, a last "gotcha" before he dies, but I do know that the republicans may have been caught in their own bear trap by courting people who ask for so much. Too much from a party dedicated to "less government".
The Evangelical Christian's used the Republican party to further their "Religious Agenda" of making this a Christian nation! Of imposing their Christian belief's upon every American! Of excluding everyone they deem to be undesirable from the American dream! Of having their every whim catered to by syphocant politician's! What did they expect? Respect from people who were using them and religion to win elections? Get real!!! I can not feel remotely sorry for these people! They got what they ask for! I for one am fed up with the religion in politic's! I am tired of these people shoving their religion down my throat ( I have my own)! It's time to start enforcing the separation of church and state! It's what made this country great! If we don't go the extra mile to get religion out of politic's it's going to destroy us in the end! The fact they put in a incompetent man into office strickly because he was Christian should be telling these people something! But I doubt it does! That's been the problem for 6 years now. George Bush was not qualified to do the job!
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