Us Americans can never be satisfied.
So September 11th happened in 2001 and after an entire day of fear and uncertainty (I went through it, I should know! It was scary!) our country did what it used to do best. Despite any and all of our differences and disregarding any areas of thought where we all might disagree, Americans came together in a unified show of support and love for one another after that attack, support and love for their fellow neighbour, for their friends and family, and finally for the greatest country on the face of this Earth, The United States of America (cue wailing guitars shooting out stars and stripes and then exploding into a flock of Bald Eagles).
Back on September 12th, 2009 Glenn Beck’s 9/12 Project march was held in Washington, D.C with, among other expressed goals, to return the country back to the unstable emotional grounds we all experience after being suddenly attacked by terrorists. The march sure encapsulated the “unstable emotional grounds” part of the metaphor, one could also say like our country’s response to 9/11 the 9/12 march lacked any kind of clearly defined purpose or identifiable strategic outcome, but I also understood this idea of harkening back to the dark days after September 11th to mean that as a people who might not otherwise unite around every issue every day, us Americans can simply come together and we should come together around the fact that we are all citizens of the same country, a large group who can do more good if we work together than if we stay seperate and bicker amongst ourselves.
“United we stand” was the motto of the day, wasn’t it? Maybe times were different back then because we had our 43rd old white male Christian president sitting in the Oval Office of the White House, but the same God-loving Americans who just a few short years ago wanted the whole of the country to come together and celebrate the greatness of the United States and it’s overwhelming ability to confront crises head-on and create working solutions to deal with our toughest problems now would rather see the country cleaved into two very separate unions and have our leaders, especially the President, maimed, deported, killed, raped, impeached, or otherwise have his good name sullied.
I don’t like to play cards necessarily (No Limit Hold’em is fun though), but there is a glaring similarity through-out the different factions of the far-Right Anti-Obama movement, and not only does the theme seem to follow along the lines of religion but more specifically it falls along the lines of a particular sects of Christians. Pointing the finger isn’t the point of this post, though it’s obvious enough to see who we’re talking about from all the coverage they’ve been garnering on TV anyway (hint: it rhymes with Smevengelical), but as a non-Christian who has seen some of the amazing and wonderful things that religion can do to help bring groups of total strangers together in love and unity I would really like to know why and how many of these Born-Again believers can continue to call themselves loving Christians without fear of breaking the Commandment of bearing false witness and incuring the wrath of God upon their hides.
As far as I know, Christianity is a religion based on a couple of primary documents that contain all the tenants that good Christians have to follow in order to be accepted into the Kingdom of Heaven. In short, these tenants more or less direct followers to first accept God/Jesus/Holy Spirit/whoever into their lives, as a guiding force in their decision making and outlook on the world, and then thereafter they are instructed to live good friendly lives where they don’t steal from one another, murder one another, lie to one another, commit adultery with one another, and just generally have a basic human respect for every one of God’s creations whether it be someone who holds different ideals, a stranger from a foreign land, or even an adorable little puppy dog they find on the side of the road. Jesus Christ, according to the stories, was a pretty nice guy at the end of the day, but I doubt he’d be all about the ways in which many of his followers who bear his name are promoting their religion these days.
First off we have Pastor Steven Anderson, a Baptist, from Arizona who prays daily for our first African-American president, who was rightly elected by the American people, to be struck down and killed by the hand of God in his sermons to his congregation:
Now, look, if somebody wants me, it somebody twisted my arm and tells me to pray for Barack Obama, this is what I’m going to pray, because this is the only prayer that applies to him: ‘Break his teeth, O God, in his mouth. You know, as a snail which melteth, let him pass away. Like the untimely birth of a woman, that he thinks — he calls it a woman’s right to choose, you know, he thinks it’s so wonderful. He ought to be aborted. It ought to be, ‘Abort Obama.’
…
Nope. I’m not gonna pray for his good. I’m going to pray that he dies and goes to hell. When I go to bed tonight, that’s what I’m going to pray. And you say, ‘Are you just saying that?’ No. When I go to bed tonight, Steven L. Anderson is going to pray for Barack Obama to die and go to hell.
The good pastor has gotten a lot of attention over his comments the past few months, comments which not only incite congregates to want to murder President Obama but comments which also come from a man of God, who if he really is a man of God would clearly know more about the tenants of his own religion. Even if he is defiant in his beliefs and prays to God for the death of Obama wouldn’t it occur to him that God doesn’t condone murder in the first place? He dictated those 10 Commandments word for word to Moses right? Is this like the Constitution where we have the original words written by the primary framers but insist that God or the Founding Fathers actually meant B when they wrote A? Clearly there is something very wrong with a preacher, not only preaching for the death of someone, but preaching for the death of the highest ranking person in the country! I don’t remember ever hearing about Christians preaching for the death of any of the previous 43 presidents.
Then you have the congregates who echo the these Wingnut preachers’ sentiments. No one ever said it was wrong to disagree with the President or that you’re a bad person if you don’t support Obama, that right there is critical thinking and critical thinking is an important component to any right-thinking person. Then again, those who believe in a strict factual interpretation of The Bible and who are blindly led by those of their faith were never much for critical thinking in the first place. This is why when a fellow Christian or a church pastor invokes rhetoric like “Obama is a Socialism” or “Obama wants to force you to get abortions” or “Obama is the Anti-Christ” (a charge so widely believed that Snopes.com had to deticate an article to it) these people take those claims seriously and verbatim, repeating them and repeating them until they believe there’s just no way these claims can be false. Stubborn non-wavering belief is a funny thing like that.
Granted, this is a very small portion of the country I believe. We are a country of 304 million, and considering in their HIGHEST estimate the 9/12 protest was almost 2 million strong (more like 29 times less than that number but let’s keep the judgement fair for now) you still can’t really call that a majority in the United States, and let’s face it, everybody who is anybody in the fringe community attended that dang 9/12 protest. But a believer is a believer, and besides being told the message from up on high every Sunday, there is little to nothing rational human beings can do to change these people’s minds. I’ll even put it in terms they like to fashion their arguments with: A group called THE NAZIS also expressed non-waivering faith to their leaders that defied all logic or bounds too, but they followed through anyway because that’s what they had been instructed to do by the people around them. No, I am not seriously saying that Christians are like the Nazis, I’m merely just talking about the ones who make up this small little fringe community that likes to post on messageboards alot (Hi guys!).
In my mind I really want to believe that it’s one thing to talk about the Westborough Babtist Church in-terms of level of deeply-seeded hatred of fellow human beings and size and talking about the Patriot Teabagging movement, but unfortunately there are a lot of similarities that follow through (namely that there are other generic groups of people living among them that they blame everything on, want to exterminate, and will never come to accept in society ever and their small sizes!). Finally, I don’t want to have to believe that I need to draw this point out any more that I already have in the above. Faith preaches kindness but preachers dictate something entirely different, out of their own interests, and isn’t that like bearing false witness in the end?
