1 Boring Old Man

Hard-liners for Jesus

As Christians across the world prepare to celebrate the birth of Jesus, it’s a fitting moment to contemplate the mountain of moral, and mortal, hypocrisy that is our Christianized Republican Party. There’s nothing new, of course, about the Christianization of the GOP. Seven years ago, when debating Al Gore, then-candidate George W. Bush was asked to identify his favorite philosopher and answered "Jesus."…

…it’s the gap between the teachings of the Gospels and the preachings of the Gospel’s Own Party that has widened past the point of absurdity, even as the ostensible Christianization of the party proceeds apace.

The policies of the president, for instance, can be defended in greater or (more frequently) lesser degree within a framework of worldly standards. But if Bush can conform his advocacy of preemptive war with Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount admonition to turn the other cheek, he’s a more creative theologian than we have given him credit for. Likewise his support of torture, which he highlighted again this month when he threatened to veto House-passed legislation that would explicitly ban waterboarding…

We’ve seen this kind of Christianity before in America. It’s more tribal than religious, and it surges at those times when our country is growing more diverse and economic opportunity is not abounding. At its height in the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan was chiefly the political expression of nativist Protestants upset by the growing ranks of Catholics in their midst. It’s difficult today to imagine KKKers thinking of their mission as Christian, but millions of them did…

The most depressing thing about the Republican presidential race is that the party’s rank and file require their candidates to grow meaner with each passing week. And now, inconveniently, inconsiderately, comes Christmas, a holiday that couldn’t be better calibrated to expose the Republicans’ rank, fetid hypocrisy.

A friend wrote me yesterday of his thoughts about the Democratic race. He’s wearing out with Hillary, and trying to decide between Obama and Edwards. I felt a pang of envy reading through his thoughts about the various candidates, because I’m unable to even think about such things. I’m afraid to. I have P.T.S.D. [post traumatic stress disorder] from Bush’s re-election in 2004 – a monsterous trauma to me and our country. I place the blame for it squarely at the feet of the Christian community that insured his election – in spite of the clear evidence by that time that this Administration had become the Axis of Evil and their policies were more like a Reign of Terror than a War on it.

I was fretting the other day, thinking "Can they do it again? Rally the Christian vote and elect another Bush-like figure?" Will they parlay chauvinism [Hillary] or bigotry [Obama] or pseudo-conservatism [Hillary, Obama, Edwards] into another nightmare for America. I realized that they had turned me into someone who only looks at this kind of superficial quality – only in reverse. I’m worried about what those other voters will fall for in the coming campaigns.