Mainstream Evangelical Terrorists

In Europe during the Middle Ages, Easter was always a season of terror for non-christians. Priests and the aristocracy they protected used the performance of "mystery plays" to whip up hatred against Jews and incite murderous riots by the suffering mobs who might otherwise turn on their earthly masters.

A millenium later, religious and corporate leaders use the fear of liberal change to incite riot and murder among frustrated mobs who might otherwise figure out who their real enemies are.

The domestic terrorism of right-wing violence will continue until we acknowledge its fundamental source and continuing support: mainstream evangelical religion.

As the son of well known evangelicals and far right leader Francis Schaeffer I was in the middle of the chain of events that led to the arrests of men prepared to kill cops for Jesus. The rhetoric we in the early pro-life movement unleashed combined, with the apocalyptic fantasies of the fundamentalist evangelicals, is a deadly brew.

As I describe in detail in my books Crazy For God and Patience With God this movement has a deep evangelical background. In fact I've been predicting violence from these people for years now, something I talk about in detail in Patience With God (from which I drew material for this article since I have a whole chapter there about the "Left Behind" cult).

My warnings have been largely ignored by the mainstream media who haven't a clue as to the sort of religious paranoia boiling in the Tea Party and other movements.

SNIP

The key to understanding the popularity of this series (and the whole host of other End Times "ministries" from the ever weirder Jack-the-Rapture-is-coming!-Van-Impe to the smoother but no less bizarre pages of Christianity Today magazine) isn't some new or sudden interest in prophecy, but the deepening inferiority complex suffered by the evangelical/fundamentalist community.

The words left behind are ironically what the books are about, but not in the way their authors intended. The evangelical/fundamentalists, from their crudest egocentric celebrities to their "intellectuals" touring college campuses trying to make evangelicalism respectable, have been left behind by modernity. They won't change their literalistic, anti-science, anti-education, anti-everything superstitions, so now they nurse a deep grievance against "the world." This has led to a profound fear of the "other."

Jenkins and LaHaye provide the ultimate revenge fantasy for the culturally left behind against the "elite." They do theologically what Sarah Palin does politically: divide the world and America into "Them" and Us."

The Left Behind franchise holds out hope for the self-disenfranchised that at last everyone will know "we" were right and "they" were wrong. They'll know because Spaceship Jesus will come back and whisk us away, leaving everyone else to ponder just how very lost they are because they refused to say the words, "I accept Jesus as my personal savior" and join our side while there was still time! Even better: Jesus will kill all those smart-ass, Democrat-voting, overeducated people who have been mocking us!

All the folks in Michigan did was decide to start the killing a little early.

Conclusion:

The truth is that the "crazies" in Michigan are just acting on what millions of evangelicals say they believe and I don't only mean about the so called End Times. I also mean that these days the Tea Party movement is spouting a rhetoric of doom and extremism that holds that the American government and even the nation is no longer legitimate. Add in the theology and you have a self-fulfilling "prophecy" of Armageddon. Sadly we have not seen the last of such actions.

Read the whole thing.