The Founding Fathers must have been prescient. They tried to warn us, with their separation of church and state proviso, that dangerous times lay ahead. And a rabidly nationalistic religious zealot with a yen for political power and glory would have been their worst nightmare. I doubt any of them ever envisioned the advent of multiple religious zealots vying for the top spiritual spot, but here we are.
There's a game of Religious Fundamentalist Tag afoot on the political playground. Whoever whacks you on the head hardest and hollers "God'll getcha!" loudest gets sole ownership of the truth and wins the game. If you protest the rules of play you're not Born Again, you don't have a personal relationship with your Savior and you're out. You're listening to Satan, you're a lascivious liberal and you hate our troops.
Praise the Lord and pass the rhetorical ammunition! The hateful, outlandish verbiage has been flying like bullets outside the Green Zone ever since. Jerry Falwell declared that feminists, abortionists, gays, lesbians and the ACLU were partly to blame for the 9/11 tragedy--the Good Lord don't love ugly and America had it coming for bad behavior. Pat Robertson said "I totally concur." Right wing heavenly hyperbole has since promoted everything from homophobia to censorship to political assassination. We've gotten used to it.
But it's hate-speak. Divisive, dangerous, enemy-baiting, intolerant hate-speak. It's nuts, so are those who traffic in it, and they're not about to give up the limelight.
Uber-moralist Pat Robertson very publicly embraced philandering candidate Rudy Giuliani. The Odd Couple appeared together for the formal blessing and Rudy was tickled pink. There was little reference made to wholesale hypocrisy (the Lord can't abide a hypocrite), the media had nothing much to say and no one owed anyone an apology.
John McCain has his own religious nuts in tow. San Antonio's John Hagee, whose aggressive, militaristic pro-Israel-at-any-cost philosophy extends to expanded hostilities in the Middle East which include war with Iran, has hopped aboard the Straight Talk Express. While the fundamentalist view is that all those Israeli Jews we should fight and die for are going straight to hell anyway--because they're Jewish--Hagee needs Israel to be Israel. He can't get to heaven without that real estate in the right hands. Besides, Islamic heathens are satanic and he hates 'em. He doesn't like Catholics much, either. They're a "false cult system", therefore all Catholics must willingly embrace the "great whore." Can those liturgy-crazed Episcopalians and Lutherans be far behind?
Ohio's Rod Parsley has joined Team McCain, too. Candidate McCain says Parsley is "a spiritual guide." Who doesn't need a little spiritual guidance now and again? But this religious nut says "...our country cannot truly fulfill its divine purpose until we understand our historical conflict with Islam..." He maintains that we were founded, as a sovereign nation, "in part, with the intention of seeing this false religion destroyed..." And if that's not reason enough to duke it out to the death ASAP, Christopher Columbus wants us to do it. "It was to defeat Islam," Parsley says, "among other dreams, that Christopher Columbus sailed to the New World in 1492."
While a few eyebrows have been raised at the endorsements of Hagee and Parsley, there's been no public outcry. The MSM and good Americans everywhere seem to accept Senator McCain's word when he says he hates their sins, but he loves these sinners. He needs those votes and he gets a pass.
But when Barack Obama's pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, dares speak ill of the United States all holy hell breaks loose. There's something sinister going on in this man's church. When he rails against the white power elite (and most of them are white)--those corporate multi-millionaires and billionaires who get richer by the day on the backs of the working poor and the mortally wounded middle class--this African American preacher is a diabolical threat to God and country. When, in outrage based on a long, ugly national history of racism and classism, he cries from the pulpit "...God Bless America?...God damn America!", there is no exception to be made for righteous anger. There is no understanding that his anger is deeply rooted in his personal experience, growing up Black in perilous times for minorities. None. If he were a loyal, God-fearing American he would never imagine that the last thoughts of the Black American lynched in the Deep South might be "God damn America!" Nor would Black Americans beaten, hosed, attacked by police dogs for doing nothing more than peacefully marching for equality, think such a thing. Nor would the staggering percentage of young Black Americans rotting in prison because they have no resources to buy better justice.
Certainly, the Clinton campaign tells us, they have done nothing to provoke either African American anger or a raw reminder of the racial divide. You know they wouldn't do that. Not intentionally. Intentional or not, by the time Geraldine Ferraro got through speaking her piece, targeted white America got the hot-button message: Barack Obama is the unqualified Affirmative Action Negro trying to take the job away from the Highly Qualified White Candidate.
The Reverend Wright reacts hotly to these perceived racial slurs; he seems to have a history of occasional raging rhetoric from the pulpit. He's hardly the sole religious leader who's ever taken the hellfire and brimstone path on Sunday morning.
There's nothing in Senator Obama's past, in his voting record or his writing or his rhetoric, to indicate that he shares Jeremiah Wright's rage against the system. He has, in fact, made it clear he renounces this volatile part of his pastor's message. The way Obama has chosen to live his life would indicate he's telling the truth. Many of us, if we're honest, renounce at least some of what our own pastors preach at us. I'm neither evangelical nor fundamentalist; I'm a mainstream protestant. Contrary to form, my pastor believes all abortion is a mortal sin, a crime. He believes stem cell research is an abomination and that Terri Schiavo was murdered. We disagree, totally, vocally and openly, about these issues. But I can still love this man because the core of his ministry and his hands-on pastoral energy are spent addressing the issues of poverty and homelessness both here and abroad. I do not leave my church family when the broader message is one in which I believe.
So maybe Senator Obama deserves the same consideration. Maybe he deserves the same political tolerance given Senator McCain.
And maybe we need to consider which message from the pulpit is truly the more dangerous, sinister one. Pastor Wright's anger about social justice in America? Some of his words are ill-chosen. Some of them are hurtful, even hateful. But he's no Robertson, Hagee or Parsley. He's not using the church or the name of God to incite bloodlust for wholesale war against other nations, other faiths. He's not preaching Islamic genocide. He's not peddling the Apocalypse so he can rise up to heaven, buck-nekkid, in a Rapture of his own design and on his own timetable. The far-right religious nuts need Armageddon sooner rather than later. They're tired of waiting for God to get the job done.
There's clearly sound reasoning behind the separation of church and state. The Founding Fathers were smarter then than some of us are now. Or maybe they had an epiphany on the Road to Democracy and saw what was coming.