COMMENTARY
Christian Right has us speeding toward apocalypse
By David Panisnick
Its compulsion to heighten the contradictions of our culture has provoked people to fight back through an 'unholy coalition.'
One recent editorial, letter and story would invite comment.
The Christian Right's favorite book in the Bible, Revelation, says that the end will come and Jesus will return when things have gotten as bad as they can get. Pat Robertson's lamentation over the Supreme Court reflects just the latest in a long series of setbacks that have probably renewed Revelation's sense of urgency.
If we are indeed living in the final days, you can probably blame the ACLU, gay-rights movements, abortionists, euthanasists, Bill Clinton and Hillary, too, Harry Potter, Halloween, the "axis of evil," college religion professors, intellectuals, MTV, Barney, PBS, evolutionists, atheists, cults, other religions, the pope, San Francisco, Disney World, and women who wear miniskirts.
Cynical? All of the above have in recent history been demonized by American religious zealots. The Christian Right must be asking, "Why are they persecuting us, and why now?" It's a good question.
Even as little as 20 years ago, no one would have filed a lawsuit against the use of "God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, the policeman's oath, in a school prayer or the football huddle. A Christian-dominated Fourth of July parade would have gone unnoticed.
Instead of looking for answers from the Left or from Above, the Christian Right might try looking within. Festering in the darker corners of their consciousness is a compulsion to heighten the contradictions in our culture, increasing the tension, and thus hurrying along the apocalypse.
The most vivid and pernicious example of this in our own state is the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform and its truck displaying images of aborted fetuses. Now it intends to file a lawsuit allowing it to fly similar images over Waikiki. This is a new kind of Christian pornography that will hardly make friends and influence people. It will only alienate and antagonize; it will up the ante in the culture wars.
Then perhaps the ACLU can retaliate by getting rid of Good Friday as a state holiday. A slam dunk.
Most Americans don't like being told by self-proclaimed standardbearers of American values what they can and cannot do. They don't take kindly to blowing up abortion clinics, killing doctors and intimidating patients. They find the posti9-11 adolescent theologizing of the Revs. Robertson and Jerry Falwell, who blamed the disaster on God punishing us because of abortionists and homosexuals, ludicrous and offensive.
It is this "in-your-face Christianity" that, more than anything else, has caused people to start fighting back. The Christian Right has provoked an "unholy" coalition between secularists and left-leaning sober-minded Christians who are embarrassed and resentful of everything from bad taste to atrocity committed in their name.
The enduring irony of the culture wars is that it is the Christian Right, its excesses and lack of civility, as well as its insistence on clinging to a medieval cosmology, that has most contributed to the spread of atheism in our time. They are the architects of their own collapsed credibility.
In this regard, I sometimes think that the true genius of Satan is in his ability to convince followers that he is on the side of their enemies.
David Panisnick is a religion professor at Honolulu Community College.
