Bush: The Destroyer of Christians
Australian mercenaries working for Americans recently gunned down two innocent women who were members of the Christian minority in Iraq. The meaning of this fiasco should not be lost on us. The fact that the Christian women were shot is part of an underreported "small" tragedy within the gigantic tragedy of the destruction of Iraq. (Full disclosure; my son was a Marine from 1999 to 2004 and was deployed several times to the Middle East.)
Bush is an evangelical Christian. And without the evangelical vote he would not have become president. So it might seem ironic that Bush is personally responsible for the persecution, displacement and destruction of the one million, three hundred thousand-person Christian minority in Iraq. (They fared much better under the secular regime of Saddam Hussein and, along with a handful of Christians in Lebanon and Syria, represented one of the last ancient non-Islamic communities left in the Middle East. According to the Times the community has been almost completely displaced and driven from Iraq following the American invasion and the civil war we unleashed.) But actually Bush's destruction of his fellow Christians is not ironic, because to Bush the Iraqi Christians (including those killed women) weren't "real Christians." According to the theology that has shaped Bush they, like their Muslim counterparts, were part of the "other."
Theology matters. And the theology of the President matters when it comes to trying to understand his behavior. Perhaps you have to have been there, done that in order to understand.
I was raised by evangelical missionary parents (Francis and Edith Schaeffer) who also happened to have quite a bit of personal interaction with the Bush family and other Republican leaders. Mom and Dad often met with presidents Ford, Reagan and Bush Sr. and stayed in the White House several times in their capacity as evangelical gurus to the powerful.
Evangelical theology is inextricably linked to the Bush presidency. And evangelicals hold to a born-again world view. To Bush-the-evangelical those murdered Christian women and all the other non-evangelical Christians in Iraq (Armenian, Syrian Catholics, Orthodox and others), are not "saved" because they aren't born-again. Rather they belong to a tradition that sees salvation as a journey undertaken within a liturgical community of faith, not a one time magical individualistic experience.
In public Bush would never call all non-evangelicals lost, nor would many media-savvy evangelical leaders, but the outlook of evangelicals is one of dividing the world into "us" and "them." And non-evangelical Christians are "them" just as much as any other "lost." How could it be otherwise when the bedrock of evangelical theology is to regard anyone who has a different theology than you -- even within the competing historic Christian traditions -- as "unsaved"?
Pat Robertson expressed the evangelical Bush-type theology a few years ago when he dismissed Eastern Orthodox Christianity as just so much "mumbo-jumbo." To the born-again only a Billy Graham-type of one-time salvation experience counts. People who merely continue practicing the ancient traditions of the Church, people just like those Armenian women the mercenaries carelessly shot down, aren't like "us." That belief explains why evangelicals are busy trying to evangelize Greek and Russian Orthodox, Roman Catholics and "liberal" Christians with the same vigor they apply to proselytizing Hindus or Muslims. And that explains why there has not been a massive evangelical outcry against Bush's destruction of the Iraqi Christian community.
According to Bush's theology he has in fact not destroyed fellow Christians. To Bush and other evangelicals the word "Christian" refers only to evangelicals. In the common parlance within the evangelical subculture, "becoming a Christian" is just another way to say that someone has become an evangelical.
The "us" and "them" mentality is instilled in every born-again believer. To evangelicals there are actually two human races; the "sheep" and the "goats" in other words us and them. And the "them" includes all non-evangelical Christians.
Evangelicals may have given up most traditional formal sacraments in favor of a personalized faith but they have developed their own "sacraments." One bedrock sacrament is the aggressive evangelism of the "lost," including all non-evangelical Christians.
The fact that Bush has managed to complete the work of radical Islam, and smash one of the last bastions of Christianity in the Middle East, is just fine with evangelicals: the destroyed people weren't real Christians, just more of those mumbo-jumbo types. It isn't as if we hired those Australians to shoot our fellow believers at some Billy Graham crusade! The murdered women were on their way to see their priest and they wouldn't have needed all that "priest stuff" if they only had accepted Jesus into their hearts and become real Christians like us.
Frank Schaeffer's memoir, "CRAZY FOR GOD -- How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back," will be in bookstores on October 26 and was reviewed by Jane Smiley in The Nation (Oct 15, 2007).
Follow Frank Schaeffer on Twitter: www.twitter.com/frank_schaeffer
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I don't buy King George W's religious act at all. I don't see why he should care about these deaths any more than any other innocent Iraqi's death. It's largely about the oil.
More to the point about why religion in any form is stupid. "I'm more religious than you are." "My god is better than your god." "My bible is right and yours is wrong."
Here's the truth people... you're all going to die the same way and go to the same place. You're still gonna die and be gone forever. No one will care what you believed.
You forgot "I'm going to have everlasting life and you're not."
All of it is such a bunch of stupidity. I really feel sorry for the people who believe this nonsense, because they are so brainwashed from a young age that they are literally PETRIFIED to even allow one doubt to pop into their head by the time they are adults. It is absolute primal fear in these people. For instance, I had a conversation with someone once whose face literally turned white when they found out I was an atheist. Any and all blood that was in his face drained in a matter of seconds. You could just see in his face what was going on in his mind, i.e. the devil will come to tempt and trick you..BEWAR
Fortunately God is in complete agreement with the shrub and thinks he's really special, too.
Isn't there supposed to be a false and powerful leader who touts the name of Christ before the actual one arrives?
Where's the other false leader, if not this one?
People who go around talking about christianity and morals are always the same people you hear about molesting children, taking away healthcare from children, killing children and taking oil and other resources because God told them to too. In other words, they're hethens!
"I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires."
Susan B. Anthony
That's really amazing. I had no idea that was happening. It's just been drowned out by so much horror and destruction.
The more I look inward at my own Christian past, from the outside now, the more I wonder how it has remained so indelible in our culture even as we denounce the irrationality of other forms of institutionalized bigotry, racism and xenophobia and as the most simplistic science easily explains what was thought to be so different just a few short centuries ago.
Sam Harris suggested that if we could resurrect a person from the 14th century who was highly educated and a religious scholar in his time, he would likely know just as much as we know today about his faith yet we would regard him as an imbecile by our standards. A preschooler of today would know more about our world than this person.
It is frightening to consider that modern religion and faith has no room for empirical modification yet it is so often used as a basis by which to run our modern-day society. Imagine if we insisted on using 14th-century medicine as a basis for modern healthcare, or equally archaic laws as a basis for our contemporary justice system. Actually, one does not have to look too hard to see that much of the world actually does. And we wonder why so many suffer.
'I wonder how it has remained so indelible in our culture'
i wonder about that too. do you think it has to do with the writing down of scripture?
it seems all of these religions began as oral traditions, which were only written down later by devoted followers. while oral traditions may change subtly over time to adapt to changes in the society and environment, scripture, by its concrete nature and wide distribution, does not significantly change.
i think of the druids, who, though they had a script for writing, forbade the writing down of their knowledge for many reasons - one because they didn't want such powerful information falling into the hands of uninitiated, untrained people who may have misunderstood or misused that knowledge.
i also wonder if it was possibly because they knew (maybe unconsciously) that anything worth knowing and passing on will be remembered, and anything that is no longer useful will either have to evolve or be forgotten.
for better or worse, we are stuck with these texts, and therefore will forever be stuck with people who misinterpret them, misuse them and refuse to allow them - and us along with them - to evolve.
The oral traditions, folktales, of a nomadic culture becoming a sedentary culture more than 2,000 years ago should not be our guidelines today. Period.
Is Bush REALLY an evangelical Christian, or does he just play one for the suckers?
Bush is a sociopath. He knew the best path to power was to play to the right wing religious movement. So, he assumed the role. Bush isn't moved to do things by religious principles. He does what works out best for Bush.
I do agree, however, that the evangelicals won't lose any sleep over the suffering of the Iraqi Christians. And it is for precisely the reason you stated.
christianity died on the cross.
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