The Fool on the Hill

Now that Mike Huckabee has joined the top tier of Republican candidates, it's worth taking a closer look at one of his chief evangelical supporters, Tim LaHaye, the bestselling Rapturite co-author of the Left Behind series (63 million copies sold!).

As it happens, in researching my new book The Fall of the House of Bush (for more information, go to http://www.craigunger.com, I traveled undercover with LaHaye and about 90 American evangelical Christians to the Holy Land for the "Walking Where Jesus Walked" tour in 2005.

The most astonishing moment of my journey took place when we reached Megiddo, Israel. Alexander the Great, Saladin, Napoleon, and other renowned warriors all fought great battles there. But according to the book of Revelation, the hill of Megiddo--better known as Armageddon--will be the site of the cataclysmic battle between the forces of Christ and the Antichrist. After LaHaye and his colleagues explained the prophecies of the book of Revelation, we walked down the hill overlooking the Jezreel Valley. "Can you imagine this entire valley filled with blood?" one of his followers asked. "That would be a 200-mile-long river of blood, four and a half feet deep. We've done the math. That's the blood of as many as two and a half billion people."

As for when the Final Conflict will take place, LaHaye's followers assured me that the Bible says that "of that day and hour knoweth no man." One of them had especially strong ideas about when the battle would take place, however. "Not soon enough," she said. "Not soon enough."

But even more chilling than these theological fantasies are the political realities LaHaye and his followers embrace. In his 1980 book Battle for the Mind, LaHaye depicted America as a Bible-based country under siege by an elite group of secular humanists conspiring to destroy Christianity. He asserted that secular humanism is "the world's greatest evil and the most deceptive of all religious philosophies." It is characterized by its "particular hatred toward Christianity," and it has been turning our godly nation into one that promotes Darwinism and the mass murder of the unborn, promiscuity, the homosexual agenda, and more.

As LaHaye sees it, the word "secular" is not merely a morally neutral term that means "worldly." It means "ungodly," and, in his view, there are godly people--who are on the road to Rapture--and then there is the rest of the world, which is either complicit with the Anti-Christ, or, worse, actively assisting him. As a result, LaHaye argues, good evangelicals should no longer think of humanists merely as harmless citizens who just happen not to attend church. "We must remove all humanists from public office," he writes, "and replace them with pro-moral political leaders."

These views may sound extreme, but that does not mean they are marginal. The Council for National Policy, a powerful but secretive umbrella group founded by LaHaye more than 25 years ago, has had extraordinary access to the Oval Office during the Bush-Cheney era. As the late Jerry Falwell told me in 2005, "Within the Council is a smaller group called the Arlington Group. We often call the White House and talk to Karl Rove while we are meeting. Everyone takes our calls." Falwell added that they were consulted on crucial issues such as Supreme Court nominees.

Reports of the death of the Christian Right have been greatly exaggerated. This time around, their man is Huckabee.

Comments

[darker]

Ueah, everybody ought to go to church and pray their ass off that this REPUBLICAN PLAGUE be lifted from the USA.

It's been like living in a Sci-Fi horror movie!

Never mind. Just grab your 2nd Amendment rights and your Uzi and drag the bastards out of office by force. Nothing else will work, folks.

[Sundialsvc4]

Perhaps we should remember the lesson of Lot.

According to the story, surely there was no city on earth more deserving of punishment than Sodom and Gomorrah. Yet what did Lot do? He pleaded for mercy... even for those who would "sodomize" his daughter. Again and again he pleaded for mercy, not justice. And, again and again, God relented. "Lot knew God's heart."

If it is true, and I think it is NOT true, that a firey God is going to descend from on-high and whup-ass against billions of people, then perhaps he will turn his hand away for another thousand years if we can find "but one righteous?"

I do not hear these men speaking like that. And so I know that the truth is not in them, whether they know it or not. "By their fruits shall ye know them."

[researcher]

some of the worst warmongers on earth the american evangels. they do jesus proud.

[eplatypusunum]

Fallen Catholic and heretical quasi-Buddhist that I am, I find most doctrine or dogma in ANY religion to be fairly laughable. Magic. I used to play D & D (old pencil and paper) and that was just magic, too. Fiction.

Look. Many tenets of religion are admirable in the abstract; it is when they get particular and insistent about obviously symbolic or metaphorical happenings -- Adam and Eve riding dinosaurs to church or Noah housing every single one of Earth's dizzying number of life forms on his wooden ark, etc. -- that I just have to laugh. But these folks are serious and that's scary.

Still, wouldn't it be fitting and proper if, upon very moment of the Rapture, all of these hypocritical false-Christians got slapped with damnation rather than being taken up? All of the grotesque LaHaye BS with the eyeball-popping, blood squirting, melting-Na­zi-dude-fr­om-Raiders­-of-the-Lo­st-Ark treatment?

It's all BS but even if they are right, they're more damned than the rest of us.

epu

[elkabong]

It's scary that the people who most need to get a grip on the concept of self fulfilling prophecy can't. They're trained to see the power as outside themselves. They subject themselves to the LaHayes and the Haggards and the Bushes and the other snake oil salesmen who make them afraid and pose well as "daddy".

I wish today's fundamentalist Christian would pay more attention to Jesus' sermon on the Mount than he does a few, select passages in Leviticus

I wish today's Evangelical Christian would pray with all their hearts on this:

"The Kingdom of Heaven is within thee. His will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Be not anxious. Seek ye first His Kingdom. Everything will be added unto thee". He was the way, the truth and the light, for all men to follow."

-Jesus Christ

and realize that Heaven and Hell are within themselves.

Until they do, they'll follow madmen, idiots and thieves over cliffs in search of miracles or self fulfilled Hells on earth.

[NelsonJohnson]

Religions are created by royals: pharaohs, kings, emperors and so on. Religion makes the secular leader "divine." The leader in turn grants special privileges to followers of the religion he created.

This was the pattern throughout the history of Christianity, until the Reformation. Now the pattern has been modified to the point that the "believers" actually have a say in the religion. This was by no means ever the case in most of history going back to the Scorpion King.

Today Christianity is used by our current brand of royalty - the President of the United States. It is used for all the good old-timey reasons; to control the hearts and minds of the governed. But what is new is the participation of the believer as priest. Anyone can say anything about Jesus, and no priest or king can slap them down. Thus we have the entertaining circus of weirdness we see today.

Ronald Reagan eliminated the mental institution as a place where insane Christian zealots could go to receive therapy, at least off the streets and away from our children. Now they hope for Armageddon!

Jesus, please protect me from your followers!

Nelson

[SubparDude]

If Jesus returned and saw folks wearing crosses, he'd wonder why this means of torture and death was worn...and whatever it might symbolize. It would look to him as people wearing jewelry in the form of an electric chair -- or noose.

Amen.

[Unsui]

Now that Mike Huckabee has joined the top tier of Republican candidates­...

Are you freakin' kidding me?! Have you seen Huckabee's numbers in New Hampshire? Huckabee is a blip in this election as is Ron Paul because neither candidate will attract any serious money and neither candidates history, and policy positions, can withstand any serious scrutiny.
As to the crackpot Religious Right: their heyday as a major American political force has already past its peak and Huckabee's, laughingly inept, candicacy will prove it.

[DanBest]

"This series touts the Rapture, which is a word that appear nowhere in the Bible. It's a made up doctrine which originated about 1830 in Scotland by a woman who was delirious, Mary McDonald."

Damnit! I just knew those kilt-wearing caber-tossers were somehow to blame.

[pmprescott]

Premelineal Dispensationalism is the escatological theory that Tim LeHaye, John Hagee, Hal Lindsay, Oral Roberts, Jerry Falwell, Herbert W. Armstrong, Dwight D. Pentacost, and a long list of others have been vomiting over the pulpits and airways for over a hundred years. Preach death and destruction (but that only happens to the ungodly, believers are raptured -- hense the title Left Behind) and people will put more money into the offering plate, they'll buy your books, audio tapes, movies, the snake oil salesmen are promising them a way out of the coming destruction.
Why are they is lock step with the political thugs? They both preach the same thing -- FEAR. Fear of the future, fear of those who are different, fear of losing your wealth.
Why do the Democrats have such a hard time fighting the fearmongers, they try to instill fear of what these people are doing into a public already saturated with fear. FDR countered the Republican fear machine by saying, "The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself."
His theme song was, "Happy Days Are Here Again."
He knew the only way to fight the negative was with a positive.

[outnow]

Part 2

With a born-again Christian in the White House, the Christian Right has much to be happy about. President Bush preaches about saving America "soul-by-soul" and waging a "crusade against evil doers" such as the non-Jesus loving countries on the "Axis of Evil," two of which are oil-rich. "A day of fire" or "the maker of heaven and earth" are phrases woven into his speeches, "America proclaims liberty throughout all the world and to the all inhabitants" in the Second Inaugural Address; "And ye shall...pr­oclaim liberty throughout the land unto the inhabitants thereof."

Bush introduced his faith-based initiatives using religious groups to carry out social programs from food aid delivery to drug counseling to anti-AIDS abstinence only programs relying not on a barrier method but on not having sex.

Billions of dollars went to the Rev. Moon's and to Pat Robertson's churches. Watergate figure Chuck Colson received millions.

Refuting Darwin's theory of evolution, discriminating against gays, use of prayer to eliminate menstrual pain, anti-abortion, anti-birth control are all goals of many. School prayer and the Ten Commandments in the courtroom are others.

Courts would be stripped of power to adjudicate cases where religious issues are presented. Government hiring of born-again Christians would be preferential, as we saw with Liberty Law School graduates being given large responsibility in the US Department of Justice or in the reconstruction of Iraq.

The agenda doesn't stop at these issues, rather a crusade against Islam and sinners everywhere would be played out as the forces of good and evil clash until the rapture with the accent of the 144,000 saved would tale place after an Armaggedon. This will take place after the Return of the Jews to the Holy Land, Jerusalem.

[ljsfolly]

Huckabee is like a snake oil selling preacher and he has spent years doing his small town good ol' boy best selling his beliefs and they are like the small minded who never leave the mountain beliefs. Lock up all aids patients is just one of his famous saying. Who else would be locked up. The Left Behind books are taken as gospel by many who attend church and I read them as fiction which led others to think I was turning their direction. Fanatics are who they are who can take the unknown and base it on the bible which isn't a sure bet for everyone and make it how they want to live. Huckabee has been advanced by the sad field of republicans and the religious right. Not the best qualifiers.

[outnow]

59 percent: Proportion of Americans who believe the "End Times" are here or coming soon.

42 percent: Proportion of Americans who attend church at least once a week.

25-36 percent: Proportion of Americans estimated to be born-again Christians.

37 percent: proportion of Americans who endorse religious leaders influencing government decisions.

1 million: Number of Children being home-schooled.

America is the most religious country in the world, with churches full, evangelicals on the march and the Almighty popping up all over public policy. The profiteering Prophet, Tim LaHaye is linked to the John Birch Society formed in the 50's. So anti-communist were they that they accused President Eisenhower of being a Commie. LaHaye at first was consultant for the Jack Kemp 1987 presidential campaign until Roman Catholicism was deemed a "false religion." The UN is part of the "Anti-Chri­st."

77% of American view themselves as Christians, 33 1/3% or more are born-again Christians. 64% of those who attended church voted for Bush.

The agenda includes but is not limited to:

Strong male dominated families, requiring "tithes" to Christian charities to provide welfare services, death penalty for sodomy, witchcraft, incorrigibility in children, Sabbath breaking, cursing, not being Christian, murder or rape, closing of public schools, reducing role of government, making ten Commandments the law of the land, stripping women of their rights, impeachment for judges recognizing separation of church and state.

The Christian Taliban supports Huckabee, do you?

[SamanthaJaneSalem]

I didn't hear that the Christian Right was dead-- but that the neoconservative movement was in its last throes (if "last throes" are ever really last throes anymore).

The success of Democrats in 2006 was due in large part to the scandals that turned off so many Christian conservatives, the Mark Foley scandal in particular.

What is dying is the neocon vision of reshaping the Middle East to benefit oil companies, defense [sic] companies and Israel (as opposed to Jewish Americans-- so no anti-Semitic connotation).

Because even fundamentalist Christians don't like to be bogged down in endless wars. Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol, Dick Cheney-- their imperialistic ambitions are now received with (almost) universal scorn.

Yet superstition will live on in Freedom's land. Huckabee really can't be singled out for being a "religious nut" because as many as 60% of decent, "normal" Americans think exactly the way he does.

Progressives will have to do more than win an election to change America's evangelical mindset, and pretending it doesn't exist goes against our own values of 1) open-mindedness and 2) not shying away from uncomfortable truths (instead of just blaming them on Satan's influence).

[research]

"right wing Christian" == Oxymoron.

Why do we let these crazies claim they are Christians?

They stand for everything Jesus was against, and they are against everything Jesus was for.

How DARE the claim to be Christians.