Category Archives: Christian Right

Wright as American as Idi Amin

Africa, America, Christian Right, History

“Hagee’s Hebraic bond goes back to John Winthrop and the New England Puritans. Revivalism, evangelicalism, the faith of happy-clappers—this branch of Protestantism, and its beliefs, is also as American as apple pie. The First and Second Great Awakenings were epochal events in early America, instrumental in the Revolution. And later in Abolition. …

The particularism of Afrocentrism, Wright’s creed, is as American as Idi Amin was. Both alien and idiotic is Wright’s fealty to ‘Black values’ and the Dark Continent—where everywhere black bodies are stacked up like firewood, to paraphrase the talented Keith Richburg, a black American journalist.”

The complete column: “Wright As American As Idi Amin.” Comments are welcome.

Update 4: Huffing Over Hagee

Christian Right, Islam, John McCain, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Neoconservatism

Desperate to create a Rev. Wright parallel in John McCain’s political universe, liberal madmen have been gleeful about uncovering Reverend Hagee’s many controversial statements. Hagee, an enormously powerful evangelical who’d endorsed McCain, has since withdrawn his endorsement.

Keith Olbermann, who barks orders AT his viewers as a Soviet commissar might do—but not as a TV talker ought to—offered up Hagee’s words:

“God sent Adolf Hitler to help Jews reach the promised land”; the Roman Catholic Church is “the great whore”; “Hurricane Katrina was God’s retribution for homosexual sin.”

Olbermann had a giant “gotta moment” when it transpired too that Ohio megachurch pastor and author Rod Parsley, an “evangelical supporter of McCain,” had “sharply criticized Islam, calling the religion [an] inherently violent,” “anti-Christ religion,” and “the Muslim prophet Muhammad ‘the mouthpiece of a conspiracy of spiritual evil.’”

So? Many respectable scholars concur. Many more Americans agree.

As to the first thing that had Olbermann elated: As I understand them, many Christians believe that, good or bad, God controls events and that there is a method in the madness around us, and in unfolding events in general.

Hagee, moreover, is an eschatological scholar. As such, his raison d’être is an overriding concern with “the end of the world or of humankind,” and all that stuff.

Update 1: Obama clearly wants a quid pro quo. He has implied that, just as he doesn’t hold Hagee against McCain, so too should the Arizonan not be encumbered by Hagee. Meanwhile, McCain is bending over backwards to denounce Hagee, which only helps legitimize the media-manufactured parallels between Hagee and Wright. McCain is stupid. (But then I’ve said so before.)

Update 2 (May 23): PARSING PARSLEY. First off, to be anti-Islam is not to be anti-Muslim. This distinction is conveniently collapsed by the left-liberals piling on Hagee. Islam is indeed a violent creed, conducive to violence. Come back to me on that, when you’ve perused our Islam Archive, where you’ll find references to many reliable sources. We’re not going to reinvent the wheel here for those who do not want to do the reading.

Pastor Rod Parsley also said that “America was founded with the intention of seeing this false religion [Islam] destroyed.” We live in the YouTube age, when every botched, unfortunate utterance by a public figure is dissected ponderously, after which denunciations are issued and apologies exacted.

Please calm down to a blind panic.

The estimable Robert Spencer has parsed Parsley’s statement. I take a different tack to the tack taken in the first part of Robert’s assessment: “Statements like that give the anti-jihad movement a wingnut patina that, of course, ABC is happy to perpetuate in this anti-McCain hit piece.”

Parsley, clumsily, was probably referring to the hard-core Christianity that early Americans espoused. They would surely never countenance Islam.

I see Parsley and Hagee, with all their faults, as “ours,” if you know what I mean. They’re warrior Christians. Granted, I’m not; besides being an irreligious Jew, I oppose aggressive wars. Still, Hagee is a crusader of sorts. He belongs squarely within the tradition of a vigorous, fighting Christendom. He’s an anachronism (but so am I in many ways) and he’s indubitably of the West.

Rev. Wright, on the other hand, is not “ours” in any way. His thinking is non-western, alien. He comes to destroy the West, as he hates with all his might the men who founded it.

The kind of rabbis who condemn Hagee as an anti-Semite—they’re engaged in grand-scale projection, for they, not Hagee, will help bring about the end of a West, after which Jews will be even less secure. Very many liberal rabbis are honorary Muslims, or dhimmis, as far as I’m concerned. Hagee is an honorary Jew.

Update 3 (May 24): Sigh. There are those who argue against Hagee and all else they dislike by declaring themselves and their opinions as the norm, the magical mean. Evangelicals are, apparently, outside the norm. Now there’s a rational argument. That’s profoundly annoying to this writer, especially when contributors do so in defiance of facts.

Revivalism, evangelicalism, the faith of happy-clappers, whatever—this branch of Protestantism, and its beliefs, is as American as apple pie. Ever heard of the First and Second Great Awakenings? “Historians have debated whether the Awakening had a political impact on the American Revolution [no less], which took place soon after.”

Afrocentrism, on the other hand—Wright’s creed—is as American as Idi Amin. African-Americans, I suggest, are morel likely to be evangelicals than Afrocentrists.

Update 4 (May 25): This is not a statement of support for either tradition, but merely a statement of historical truths vis-à-vis America’s creedal nature. (If I am not wrong, revivalists were active in the abolitionist movement.) Do I personally have more affinity for a Zionist Christian (Hagee) than an anti-Zionist, Afrocentrist of the left (Wright)?

You bloody bet.

But that’s because I’m a woman of the Right, not a neoconservative. Neoconservatives have very little patience or affinity for “their own.” As I’ve written, “Neo-con nirvana is a U.S.-supervised world where Afghani and Israeli alike are fashioned into global democrats, citizens of the world.” (A mold, incidentally, to which Wright would be infinitely more suitable than Hagee.) I’ve long maintained that neocons—they’re crypto-leftists—are as deracinated as any good left-liberal.

Neoconservatives, moreover, have always evinced contempt toward the Religious Right. You’d think the likes of Hagee would have learned. In fact, neocons consider the Religious Right a bunch of rube hicks. I’ll take the rubes any day over the wretched neocons, the two factions’ philosophical overlap notwithstanding.

‘The False Conservative’

Christian Right, Conservatism, Elections 2008

You read it all before here, in “Huck’s for Huck – Paul’s for America.” Now Bob Novak reinforces, in “The False Conservative,” what we’ve already documented about Mike Huckabee the statist:
Who would respond to criticism from the Club for Growth by calling the conservative, free-market campaign organization the “Club for Greed”? That sounds like Howard Dean, Dennis Kucinich or John Edwards, all Democrats preaching the class struggle. In fact, the rejoinder comes from Mike Huckabee, who has broken out of the pack of second-tier Republican presidential candidates to become a serious contender — definitely in Iowa and perhaps nationally.

Huckabee is campaigning as a conservative, but serious Republicans know that he is a high-tax, protectionist advocate of big government and a strong hand in the Oval Office directing the lives of Americans. Until now, they did not bother to expose the former governor of Arkansas as a false conservative because he seemed an underfunded, unknown nuisance candidate. Now that he has pulled even with Mitt Romney for the Iowa caucuses and might make more progress, the beleaguered Republican Party has a frightening problem.

The rise of evangelical Christians as the force that blasted the GOP out of minority status during the past generation always contained an inherent danger: What if these new Republican acolytes supported not merely a conventional conservative but one of their own? That has happened with Huckabee, a former Baptist minister educated at Ouachita Baptist University and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. The danger is a serious contender for the nomination who passes the litmus test of social conservatives on abortion, gay marriage and gun control but is far removed from the conservative-libertarian model of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.

There is no doubt about Huckabee’s record during a decade in Little Rock. He was regarded by fellow Republican governors as a compulsive tax-and-spender. He increased the Arkansas tax burden 47 percent, boosting the levies on gasoline and cigarettes. When he lost 100 pounds and decided to press his new lifestyle on the American people, he was hardly being a Goldwater-Reagan libertarian….

Read the rest here.

Treeless In Seattle By Rabbi Daniel Lapin

Anti-Semitism, Christian Right, Christianity, Conservatism, Judaism & Jews, Religion

8 Replies

A weakening of Christianity in America is a huge threat ~ Rabbi Daniel Lapin

By now you know that Barely a Blog endeavors to bring you some very fine thinkers (Search “BAB’s A List” category). My guest today is the prolific Rabbi Daniel Lapin. Read more about Rabbi Lapin on Wikipedia. Rabbi Lapin and I are both from South-Africa. However, the prescient Lapin was never enthusiastic about the dreadful ANC’s takeover. We both believe Christianity is central to the endurance of Western civilization–and Judaism. Rabbi Lapin has provided extraordinary leadership in this respect. Here is an example:

TREELESS IN SEATTLE

Jews Strive to Restore Sea-Tac Airport’s Christmas Trees

By Rabbi Daniel Lapin

Well here we go again. It is so utterly predictable. Like clockwork. It’s December and time for another skirmish in the annual battle against Christmas. What compels me to comment is that this time it’s not the usual secular fanatic who’s responsible for doing things that evict Christianity from the culture. No, on this sad and alarming occasion it’s a deeply religious, well-intentioned rabbi who has unwittingly stumbled into a situation that will place his denomination (and mine) ”Orthodox Judaism” in a terrible, negative light. For at least ten years, Sea-Tac Airport near Seattle has displayed several large, beautifully decorated Christmas trees each December. With lawyer in tow, a local rabbi recently threatened to sue the Port of Seattle if the airport didn’t add a Chanukah menorah to the holiday display.

Yielding to the ultimatum was not an option for airport management, skittish at the best of times since 9-11. Understandably, they interpreted the rabbi’s threat as only the first. It would not be hard to imagine Seattle’s Islamic community stepping forward with their own lawyer to demand a Moslem symbol be included as well.

With deft turn of phrase, Sea-Tac public affairs manager Terri-Ann Betancourt explained that at the busiest travel time of the year, while Sea-Tac was focused on getting passengers through the airport, she and her staff didn’t have time “to play cultural anthropologists.”

Threatening a lawsuit, I feel, violates the Jewish principle known in Hebrew as Kiddush HaShem, interpreted in the Talmud, part of ancient Jewish wisdom, as an action that encourages people to admire Jews. One need only read the comments on the Internet following the news accounts of the tree removal, to know that most people are feeling indignant and hurt. They certainly are not feeling more warmly toward Jews as a result of this mess.

Here I disclose that I know the rabbi involved, am friendly with him, and am sure that he didn’t intend this outcome. I like him, which makes it painful for me to point out that when one throws a punch (which is what bringing a lawyer and threatening to sue is equivalent to) and one gets decked in return, one cannot plead that one didn’t intend that outcome.

The outcome, whether intended or not, is that now vast numbers of passengers, most of whom are probably Christian, will be deprived of the cheerful holiday sight of pretty Christmas trees. What is more, they will know that their deprivation was caused by a Jewish rabbi. The rabbi’s lawyer told a television reporter, “There is a concern here that the Jewish community will be portrayed as the Grinch.”

No, Mr. Lawyer, it is not that Jews will be “portrayed” as the grinch. Sadly, now we are the grinch. You made us the grinch. Now what is to be done? I have three requests:

I am asking every reader of this column to sign a petition on the Toward Tradition website beseeching Sea-Tac management to restore the Christmas trees. I am asking every reader of this column to forward it to others who might be willing to sign this petition.

I am asking Jews in the Puget Sound region to join national radio host Michael Medved and me in offering our volunteer labor to Sea-Tac. We hope they will allow us to provide the labor necessary for replacing the trees so that airport staff need not be deflected from their important duties.

Why am I, an Orthodox Jewish rabbi, so concerned about a few Christmas trees? Not for a moment do I believe that American Christians will react to this insult with a flurry of anti-Semitic activity. But I do feel certain that perhaps in some small way, expelling Christmas symbolism from the airport makes it just a little harder to protect America’s Christian nature.

For centuries, we Jews suffered in a Europe governed by ecclesiastical authority. We suffered no less under the secular tyrannies of communism. Now, in post-Christian Europe, where both government and population are increasingly secular, anti-Semitism is dramatically on the rise. In short, we have never thrived under religious government or within secular cultures.

During the past two thousand years of Jewish history Jews have never enjoyed a more hospitable home than we enjoy here in the United States of America. This is because we have a religiously neutral government and a largely religious Christian population. Most American Christians love Jews and support Israel unconditionally because of their commitment to the Bible and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Evidence from across the Atlantic persuades me that our lot will deteriorate if America’s population gradually becomes secularized and removing the Christmas trees makes that disturbing likelihood, over time, more probable.

Yes, public symbols are very important. Years ago we Jews advocated for full equality. Today, with thirteen Jewish United States senators, over thirty Jewish congressmen, two Jews on the Supreme Court, and disproportionate Jewish representation in media and entertainment, one could reasonably say we have achieved it. But back then, the only culture in America was Christian. Today, however, America is home to many faiths, not all of them friendly towards Judaism.

Today, agitating for Jewish religious representation in the culture inevitably results not in equating Judaism with Christianity but the removal of both Judaism and Christianity. In other words, pushing for the menorah means removal of the Christmas tree and the triumph of secularism. Europe, both past and present, teaches us that if America becomes secularized, Jews suffer.

For fifteen years I have insisted that for Jews to oppose Christianity in America is a mistake. The world today is populated by millions who harbor festering hatred for Jews. There remains one group of people who love and support us and they are America’s Evangelical Christians. What possible sense does it make to fight your friends by stripping their symbols from sight?

When the Moslems invaded Spain, one of their first actions was the removal of all Christian symbols from public view. Secularism’s invasion of America is attempting exactly the same strategy. I implore American Jews not to ally themselves with this ill-fated campaign.

We are less than a week from the Jewish holiday of Chanukah during which our most important religious observance revolves around the blessings we say over the Menorah. In doing so, we oppose the still prevalent and ever more dangerous force of secularism.

When times change, unlike dinosaurs, wise organisms adapt. We should recognize that we all have a stake in protecting Christian symbolism in the village square (or the airport). The only alternative will be no religious symbolism at all and make no mistake, secularism’s rise is Judaism’s decline.

I spoke to the rabbi involved today and he is genuinely unhappy with the decision of Sea-Tac airport. I invited him to join the Toward Tradition petition and I hope he will do so. I urge you also to do whatever you can to help bring back Sea-Tac Airport’s Christmas trees. Let us all show that we care.

Exactly thirteen years ago, a brick was thrown through a Jewish home’s window in Billings, Montana because inside that window was displayed a menorah. Within days, over six thousand Christian homes in Billings protested that anti-religious bigotry by displaying menorahs in their windows. Within days, over six thousand Christian homes in Billings protested that anti-religious bigotry by displaying menorahs in their windows.

I am not suggesting that Jews express their support by displaying Christmas trees in their windows but I am suggesting that Jews fulfill the spirit of Chanukah by supporting public expressions of the other Biblical faith. I don’t think that the airport was guilty of anti-religious bigotry but a weakening of Christianity in America could become a huge threat. For a start, let us try to restore Sea-Tac Airport’s Christmas trees.