Axis of Logic, MA
Dec 12 2004
Moral Victory : Religious Exploitation, and the New American Creed
By Dom Stasi
`Our moral perils are not those of conscious malice or the explicit
lust for power. They are the perils which can be understood only if
we realize the ironic tendency of virtues to turn into vices when too
complacently relied upon; and of power to become vexatious if the
wisdom which directs it is trusted too confidently.’ – Reinhold
Neibuhr
I remember it as though it were yesterday. I was a young engineer
fresh from a successful and heady seven years in the manned lunar
expedition program called Project Apollo.
Along with thousands of other American engineers, scientists, pilots,
and technicians, people accustomed to working in relative obscurity,
we had found ourselves suddenly at the center of the universe. And
though Albert Einstein had already proven that everything and
anything can rightfully be considered the center of the universe, I’m
speaking less prosaically. For a young man in the morning of his
career, or an old man at its dusk, and today I can speak with
knowledge of both circumstances, Project Apollo was that something we
would remember the rest of our days. Physics aside, Apollo simply was
for a time the center of the universe of men. Anyone who had the
great good fortune and talent to be a part of it, would be changed
for the experience, and changed for the better. Such harmless vanity
is simply human nature. We are all of us creatures who delight in
success however small might be our part in its achievement. Self
esteem is critical to our well being as humans. On Apollo it made us
all work harder and with more passion than any work I’ve known since.
Contributing to Project Apollo, and earning the trust and respect of
project engineers older and wiser than I, and ultimately that of the
astronauts themselves, gave this and so many other young Americans a
special kind of self-confidence. Few have had such an opportunity so
early in their lives and careers. Fewer still might have accepted it,
for failure would have haunted all our days, and with each new
moonrise, our nights as well. It’s been said that experience doesn’t
change a person, but make him more of what he already is. Perhaps
that is so. Think of the challenges you have faced in your own life.
Think of how your responses to them tempered or softened you,
contributed to, or somehow affected your social, intellectual, and
perhaps, spiritual growth and attitudes. Reflecting upon ones life
can be a rewarding or a painful exercise. Yet it is a thing from
which we cannot hide. As Socrates observed, `An unconsidered life is
not worth living.’ Extreme? Perhaps. But keep these concepts of self
top of mind. Remain mindful of self-confidence, self-esteem, and, not
incidentally, self-worth as you read on.
Of course, even the best of good things must come to an end. So it
was with Apollo. But at its close, when few outside the program
really cared about silly-appearing moonwalks anymore, I was one of a
relatively small group of Earthlings who had learned the empirical
science of orbital mechanics and knew about sending moving pictures
home from space. In our seven years of transmitting and receiving
them, all of America had seen those pictures. All of the world would
see those pictures evolve over time from grainy, hardly discernable
monochromatic images to full color, full motion, high resolution
renditions worthy of National Geographic. Yet, in the mid-Seventies,
and the end of manned missions to other worlds, those of us still
with the civilian sector of the US Space Program were developing more
pragmatic concerns about its future and our own. We’d all be looking
for work soon. As for me and my own future, the ability to send
moving pictures back from space seemed an esoteric skill at best, a
skill wholly devoid of commercial value and now, with no new worlds
on the trip sheet, it was becoming boring as well. I grew restless.
As things turned out, I was one of the lucky ones. I could stay on at
the aerospace plant where we’d built the Lunar Lander. But with the
program essentially over, I would have to transfer back to jets, back
to reconnaissance flight test where I’d started out, but in 1975, I
and just about every other American had had his fill of warplanes.
Also, I came to realize that I’d lost my young man’s taste for
dangerous work. I was a husband and father now, and that was a
convenient excuse to rationalize my growing yellow streak. I needed a
change. I needed another kind of job, and we were in another stupid
recession that the equally stupid TV economists never saw coming, yet
dished out advice about to the credulous masses. Some things never
change. Some jobs don’t need a skill or a record of success to
prevail. Unlike the unforgiving field of flight test, TV seemed full
of such performance-free jobs. But I was an engineer, not a TV
economist. I’d learned about video technology flying Air Force
reconnaissance in the Arctic, transferred it to a civilian career. It
was the technology that revealed the Russian missiles in Cuba, and
kept tabs on the Russian bombers poised like coils to spring from
Siberia if things in Cuba went awry. It was that same video
technology in civilian dress that had allowed us to see the moon
walks. But in its private-sector application, the application known
as commercial broadcast television, video was used shamefully.
Commercial television it seemed, was a medium created by our
collective genius only to have it exploit our collective stupidity…at
least stupidity enough to buy the junk they were continuously
peddling from its screens. A career in broadcast television
engineering held little allure.
I was offered a job with the State Department’s Voice Of America
propaganda arm, went through all the loyalty and security checks only
to turn it down – twice. I tried teaching college for a time, but
found myself too young and selfish to be satisfied by teaching others
what I still wanted to be doing myself. But where? Who in the world
needed a guy whose skill was sending movies back from space?
The answer came in a completely unexpected phone call.
Home Box Office was something I’d never heard of before that call
came in out of the blue. Home Box Office. HBO? What’s that? I asked
the eager-sounding `head hunter’ on the other end of the phone.
Next thing I knew I was sitting in a mahogany clad room high in the
Time-Life Building on Rockefeller Center in New York City. This was
no airplane factory. Elegant perfect women glided by, sylphlike and
intimidating. All the men were dressed in white shirt and tie. I was
too, of course. Yet, hidden beneath my jacket, was the only
short-sleeved white shirt in the room. How impractical of them,
thought I. It’s high summer. Why wear long sleeves only to roll them
up? Don’t these guys get it? I’d found another world, it seemed,
right here on Earth.
Otherworldly or not, TV and motion pictures was the world in which I
would spend the next 30 years of my engineering career. But first I
had to get through this interview, or meeting or whatever it was.
Eventually, I was led to a private corner office where I was
introduced to yet another of the a long-sleeved executives. His
sleeves were not rolled, but terminated in silver cuff links:
obviously a big shot. To my amazement the guy wanted to send movies –
real Hollywood movies – back from space. Looking beyond his obvious
lack of industrial fashion sense, I told him he was nuts. Then I told
him why he was nuts. He dismissed my unqualified psychoanalytic
opinions, but listened intently to my technical ones. To my surprise,
he offered me a job. To my further surprise, I took it. So much for
lofty ideals and even loftier opinions. I was in the stupid
television business, and in it to stay.
Six months later, our antenna hoisted 22,300 miles above the Earth by
a converted Atlas Delta missile, HBO, was sending movies back from
space. It was an idea that caught on quickly in the private sector.
With a single satellite in space, TV signals – in the case of HBO,
movies – could be received at every single inch of the United States
mainland. There would be no 1500 foot towers (which as a pilot I’d
always hated), no million watt transmitters, and no 100 mile contour
limits of the sort that barricade traditional `terrestrial’ broadcast
signals. Nothing of the sort would impede our little 5 watt
transmitter in the sky. Borne upon a satellite channel whose power
was equal to but that of a night-light bulb, one signal from space
could blanket the entire continental US and most of populous Canada.
It was pure brilliance on the part of those long-sleeved executives –
practical physics and military technology now put to private and
peaceful use. No mind-numbing commercials, and no numb-minded censors
either. I liked it here. This wasn’t stupid. This was cool. This was
way cool. Funny, isn’t it, how we’re able to abandon even strongly
held opinions when our self interest is better served by forming new
ones?
Firmly ensconced in HBO’s fledgling engineering department, and with
our early successes a matter of technical record, I suddenly found
myself being invited to speak at seminars on how to do this TV from
space thing. Ironically, I was teaching again, albeit in a different
venue. Over the next couple of years I would visit all 50 states. But
it was a tutorial for TV execs in the deep South that would remain an
event apart from all the others. Though I was a speaker, I was still
new to the entertainment business, so I knew no one in attendance.
But my talk had gone well, the college teaching experience was paying
off, so there would be no problem finding eager dinner companions
among so large an audience.
Descending the podium, I had noticed but a single empty chair in the
entire room. Taking it, I found myself at a table of strangely
egalitarian folk. They were gentle in manner. They welcomed me
expansively. They introduced themselves. To my delight, they spoke
less of arcane technology than they did of their fellow man and their
responsibilities toward humanity that such technology could help them
fulfill. I listened, interested, noting that they all had that sort
of deliberate not quite real Dixie accent that I’d learned to
recognize in actors when playing Southern characters before the
camera. But why here? Their names – remarkable in retrospect, but
hardly noteworthy at the time – were Jimmy Swaggart, Paul Crouch, Jim
and Tammy Faye Bakker, Pat Robertson, Robert Tilton, and a guy named
Billy Batts. I was present, I know now, at American Televangelism’s
Big Bang, or if you prefer, its Genesis. Big league Fundamentalist
Christian TV Evangelism was born at that table that day.
These seemingly gentle folk were fairly voracious in their acceptance
of this new way to spread The Word, nationwide. Worldwide! They were
there to learn of a new way to propagate their version of the Gospel
Of Jesus Christ. They conversed in Biblical quotes, nodding their
heads in profound understanding, `Amen, brother,’ so on. The
experience seems a bit surreal now. It was not. They were there to
buy satellite antennas and anything else they would need to fulfill
their self-proclaimed mission as Christ’s revisionist vicars on
Earth. They each seemed to have a little licensed religious TV
station of their own somewhere in the US, and if they hooked that
signal to the satellite, they would not only be able, but mandated to
have that signal carried by another hot, new medium: cable
television. That mandate would come from a little known federal
communications law known as the Must Carry Rule. It was little known
to you and me, perhaps, but well known to the budding televangelists.
These seemingly innocent people, and the equally innocent seeming
circumstances that brought us together would change the lives of
everyone at that table in the decades to come. And that in turn would
affect the world in a way none of us could have imagined. Because,
and though I had no way of knowing it, America was about to take its
first step on a 30 year journey to the Dark Ages. Today we know it
only as the 21st Century. When looking back upon it, history will
prove less kind.
>From this butterfly effect, would grow e-piety’s perfect storm. It
was the mid-Seventies. Our culture had been reeling from the narcotic
excesses of the Sixties and the sexual intemperance of the Seventies.
The divorce rate was the highest it’s ever been in our nation’s
history. The entire concept of nuclear family was under siege as
never before in America. It seemed as if everything familiar was
changing. And while most Americans were blessed with moderate
appetites, self-disciplined behaviors, and a measure of common sense,
and thus well suited to social change, many others were not. To so
many of our repressed and simplistic countrymen and women every new
experience in this brave new age, however intuitive, however mundane,
seemed an epiphany. So, while most Americans also managed to remain
relatively unaffected by the willingly-acquired excesses that
characterized the period, many others could not. America had also
just emerged from a decade-long war of unspeakable horror, and
dubious purpose. Thanks to a still-relevant news media, a mandatory
draft, and casualty rate topping 200,000 (58,000 KIA) Vietnam
affected all aware Americans. To avoid the draft, countless young
Americans married in haste and conceived unloved children in order to
gain deferment. Millions more enrolled and remained in colleges
though they would not ordinarily have done so but for the student
deferment. (No fewer than 12 deferments were granted to chickenhawks
Dick Cheney (5) and John Ashcroft (7) alone!) Since the college
deferment required actually going to college and studying something,
the experience exposed millions of commonplace minds to the volatile
philosophies of extraordinary – and quite often revolutionary –
thinkers for the first time in their personal, and America’s societal
history. One way or another, every American, regardless of family,
background, intellect, or social circumstance shared in the war’s
trauma and were made to look upon, and confront its distasteful
significance. Drenched in this cascade of social and moral upheaval,
vast numbers of Americans were driven to the edge. Many more went
over that edge and found comfort only in denial or in excess, or
both. Be it drugs, sex, alcohol, violence, or all of the above, there
was a measure of comfort and escape to be found in the sensual
distractions of excess, and it was available and beckoning from
wherever one turned.
Indulgence would yield a temporary comfort, and when the millions who
over-indulged came crashing back to reality, many needed comforting
of another kind. They needed reform, and some degree of certainty in
what seemed an even-more-uncertain society than that which they had
attempted to escape. They needed someone or something to which they
could turn for advice, direction, strength, and inspiration. For
those who survived the fall physically but not emotionally, there
arose a need for some mortal contact, someone who would not consider
them failed humans, someone or something to show them the way back.
Or, more simply stated, millions and millions and millions of
Americans needed a new addiction to wean them from and obviate the
mental scars left by their old addictions of war and sex and drugs,
and social transgression, and violence, and confusion, and behavior
outside the limits of their operant conditioning. Instead of
assessing and accepting their memories, so very many Americans needed
forgiveness for their actions. Those among the multitudes lacking the
resolve to accept and assess and repair their assaulted psyches,
those lacking the strength to pick themselves back up (and their
numbers were legion) needed something more. They needed an emotional
crutch. What people need, people tend to find. If they don’t find it
by themselves, there are always those willing to provide it… usually
for a price. In this case, it appeared literally right before their
eyes. Salvation, forgiveness, aggrandizement, self-esteem, courage,
moral superiority, all of it was beaming to them right from heaven
itself, and onto their television screens. Satellite delivered
televangelism was born on that day back in 1975. I watched it hatch.
Suddenly it was everywhere. There was never a time in modern history
when it was `needed’ more. From the flickering boxes in America’s
living rooms came the siren call to her desperate multitudes. `Hey
you out there in TV land, whatever you’ve done, and to whomever
you’ve done it, no worries. Put down that bottle, throw away that
needle, stop punching your wife, whatever. All is forgiven… or can
be. In fact, you can instantly become superior to those infidels
who’ve not found the light and The Way and have done so much to
degrade you for so long. Just listen to me, then send cash, check, or
money order to the address on your screen. You’ll be the best there
is, brothers and sisters, the best there is. Trust Jesus. Trust me.
Send a check. Halleluiah!
Given that so very many of `Christian’ fundamentalism’s contemporary
American adherents believe that they have failed in the eyes of those
who follow more moderate religious or societal paths, and given the
widespread genetic proclivity toward belonging, they also needed
something more extreme than rational theology to light their way back
from the abyss. They needed to be a part of something so extreme, so
strident that it would also provide them the psychological
wherewithal to dismiss their moderate fellows’ judgments of them.
That would require a system of beliefs and strictures so rigorous, so
abstemonious that it would also serve to obviate or at least
trivialize the beliefs and behaviors of their moderate
Judeo-Christian counterparts, and those of enlightened liberal
practitioners of any religion and religious thought, thus
discrediting those they saw as their mortal judges and despicable
scholarly elites, their betters. Once again, they needed an escape
from reality. They needed a mind fix.
There is but one major creed that has offered such impenitent
forgiveness, even aggrandizement for simply having rejected ones past
transgressions and accepting its tenets. There is but one creed that
associates itself so closely with an Anglo-Protestant American
heritage, despite that no such identity ever existed. (Nature abhors
a vacuum. The vacuum left by most Americans’ ignorance of their own
country’s relatively brief history, is a vacuum easily fill by myth.
Any student of American history knows well that many of the Founders
were religious, but none publicly fundamentalist Christian.
References to God, not to Jesus, prevail in their writings. The
crafters of our Republic were brilliant men. But few would dispute
that the three greatest geniuses among them were Thomas Jefferson,
Benjamin Franklin, and Alexander Hamilton. Franklin and Jefferson
were professed deists, Hamilton a homosexual. From where does the
religious Right’s claim to their legacy stem? It stems from
imagination. Because it simply never was. Religion was a part of the
beautiful fabric of early America, not its foundation. The plurality
of the US Constitution superceded the singularity of the Mayflower
Compact.) There is but one creed that stimulates intolerance while
proclaiming an inclusiveness based on its very antithesis. And
finally, but most critical, there is but one creed that bases its
fundamentalism on an absolutely literal interpretation of a Bible it
considers absolutely flawless. Yet the Bible passed down through the
ages is largely a fabrication. It is laced with revisionist scripture
and distortions of convenience that the most serious of religious
scholars have found to be at best, only 18% historically factual.1 At
best.
Thus, proximate attribution to the approximate Word is the rough
equivalent of a 21st century airline or ship’s captain using 14th
century maps, and only 14th century maps, by which to navigate and
presuming them to be inviolate.
I’ll take the bus.
By exploiting this widespread proclivity to believe, the Bible has
become a convenient vehicle through which unscrupulous interpreters
can derive a creed, a creed which, if accepted with a zealot’s
fervor, would forgive anything – absolutely anything – one might have
inflicted upon himself or his fellow man, woman, child, beast,
vegetable or mineral in the past, and do so sans active or
substantive non-monetary penance. It is a creed that is conveniently
blind to any dichotomy between intolerance and forgiveness, theocracy
and democracy, benevolence and vengeance, faith and political
corruption. That is the creed that encourages one to be born again,
the Evangelical Creed of Biblical literalism. Or what is alternately
called rightist, conservative, Evangelical, fundamentalist
Christianity. So ill conceived and distorted is this ostensibly
`literal’ acceptance of oft revised, translated and interpreted
scripture, that serious Biblical scholars now consider it fabrication
in the interest of self-servitude and the exploitation of mind-cure.
Noted Biblical scholar and psychologist Edmund D. Cohen postulates
that, `Cast free form its Biblical moorings, Christianity came to
denote anything good or wholesome in American life.’2 Inventing
religions of convenience is characteristic of men, not the province
of man.
Nonetheless, and as usual, legions of credulous, disillusioned,
disconnected Americans fell victim to fundamentalism’s lure. Weather
the adherent fancies a turban, a topknot, or a Stetson, religious
extremism serves a purpose no different from drugs when it becomes a
crutch. Religious extremism has become the simplistic answer for far
too many of our countrymen’s mortal problems. For its `Christian’
adherents, the answers to all life’s problems are found between the
Bible’s covers. There is no need to actually indulge in the human
attribute of reasoning. Intellect is fabricated through rote
memorization of scripture. But were it all that simple.
Unfortunately, as with most other forms of extremism which abdicate
thought to dogmatic obedience, fundamentalism is also the source of
so very, very many more problems than it ever has solved, or ever
will solve.
Recall now, the earlier references to self-esteem, the vacuum it
leaves when it is absent or destroyed through self-destructive
living, excess, compulsive-obsessive behaviors, inflicted or accepted
abuse.
Anyone who would have been addicted to sex, drugs, and anything but
rock and roll, was a candidate for addiction to whatever else suited
his or her self-depreciated fancy. Anyone who needed forgiveness for
the harm he’d done to himself or to others, could find it here.
Christianity – but especially this strange, highly-selective, but
very heady new simplistic form of it – was an addiction about which
they could even feel good. They could even feel better than anyone
else. They could garner immense self-esteem, however ill-placed. That
rush was, and is to this day, a first in so many disturbed lives. In
fact, lets throw in faith-healing of the most desperately ill while
were at it. What’s the harm?
The ensuing decades would see the easily led, easily addicted, easily
persuaded, easily frightened, abused, downtrodden, secret-harboring,
pain ridden – in short, vulnerable – masses drawn to the flickering
images of these fire and brimstone preachers on their cable
televisions and they would be converted by the millions, by the
tens-of-millions. They would belong. All is forgiven. All is well, or
will be shortly. All. Absolutely all. Oh, by the way, don’t forget to
send the check.
If these words seem harsh, I simply make no effort to disguise my
disdain for those who would exploit the vulnerable, nor will I
soft-peddle the obvious abuse by so many, of a system of government
created to, among other things, tolerate and protect religious
freedom. The abuse of that trust by so many televangelists, and the
further misuse of the public electromagnetic spectrum to exploit the
irrational, credulous, impressionable, desperate, and weak who
believe them is an especially vile form of TV indecency. But don’t
look for any scrutiny by our current Federal Communications
Commission. Bush stooge and FCC Commissioner, Michael Powell, will be
too busy looking for bare breasts to keep the citizenry’s pathetic
popular mind from realizing that he’s destroying public interest
protections such as the station ownership cap. That cap remains the
only barrier to the continued expansion by the pious parasites of
televangelism. Powell is bent on destroying that cap in the special
interest of his owners.
FALSE PROPHETS / REAL PROFITS:
Keep in mind that we’re speaking of Christianity, albeit an extreme
form, but Christianity: a belief in the divinity of Jesus as Christ,
as God the Son, and in His teachings and principles upon this mortal
coil.
Keep in mind, too, that we’re speaking of the Old Testament as well,
of the introductory scriptures themselves, the scriptures to which
many Evangelicals adhere dogmatically, the fundament, Genesis
2:16-17, the garden, the forbidden fruit. The Bible virtually begins
with God’s admonitions to man on the virtues of moderation, the
perils of excess. It is the first admonition to Adam… the first! Yet,
somehow, today’s Biblical literalism seems to yield to interpretation
at such uncomfortable junctures as Genesis. The flesh is, after all,
weak. So on, so forth, ad infinitum.
As you read further, please remain mindful that Jesus in his Earthly
manifestation owned virtually nothing. Such modesty must have set a
poor example to TV evangelists. They own a lot of things. Boy, do
they own a lot of things. They want to own a lot more. Michael Powell
will soon allow them to do just that.
Need an example of how lucrative is the televangelist business?
Several examples? Easy.
Most of you know of a religious TV show called the `700 Club.’ It was
founded by presidential candidate, gay basher, and TV evangelist
extraordinaire Pat Robertson. It got its name from Robertson’s
admonition to his initial 700 rural viewers to send him a donation of
$10.00 each. That was the estimated cost of operating his fledgling
`terrestrial’ TV show. Ten years after Pat Robertson made his modest
$7000.00 request, and with his channel now being carried by
satellite, he had 26 million regular viewers across the country.
Operating revenues had grown to a staggering $145,517,000.00 annually
in the US alone.3 Today the `700 Club’ is carried in 66 countries.
Robertson and his Christian Coalition purport enormous influence in
American politics. This lofty pulpit allowed Robertson to predict
that Armageddon would arrive in 1982. This prospect would of course
leave faithful viewers with no practical need for such things as
green bananas, nor incidentally, their retirement savings, but that’s
just speculation by this jaded writer. When, despite Ronald Reagan’s
best efforts, the world failed to end, it didn’t matter much to
Robertson’s flock, no one was complaining or seeking a refund,
instead they were told to thank Jesus. They did. Later, Robertson
actually had his television crews preparing to televise the Second
Coming. That was in 1990. Why would Robertson believe that he and he
alone knew this? Are the TV crews still on location? Where might that
be?
Eventually, his lackluster performance as a prophet led Robertson to
abandon prediction in favor of the safer and more politically potent
practice of hindsight. For example, he has recently proclaimed credit
for George W. Bush’s `re’ election. However dubious a distinction
that might be, Bush believes him, so little else matters. As such we
can expect Robertson’s influence to increase in these four dismal
years ahead as Bush continues distributing our US Treasury’s contents
to his friends, and promotes his `Faith Based Initiative’ program.
Initiative indeed.
Robertson is not alone. Fabulous wealth and power would be visited
upon many of this new breed of high-tech missionaries, and now it
seems they and their fiscally less impressive sycophants are
everywhere one turns. There is no admission prerequisite to the
salvation club, and no barrier to moral superiority. All one need do
is buy it at the two-for-one sale that’s always going on. (Call the
number on your screen). State it aloud with some reference to Jesus,
wave your hand in the air, and back the rapt gestures with cash,
check, or money order, and you’re on the Heavenly Express. But don’t
forget that check. God don’t save no deadbeats. The tax-free American
dollar is still worth plenty in heaven.
Another dinner companion that fateful night was Paul Crouch. Like
Robertson and Jesus, Crouch, the televangelist, and story telling
founder of Trinity Broadcast Network (TBN), started out with
virtually nothing. Using a rented studio in southern California and a
set made from his living room furniture and shower curtain, Crouch
went on the air from Burbank. He claims that later, in 1975 to be
exact, he was visited by God one night. God projected a map of the
United States on Paul’s ceiling, and told him about satellite
technology. God went on to tell Paul Crouch how the satellite (No,
not the moon. God forgot to put batteries in that satellite. We’re
talking modern here.) would allow him to broadcast to all those
cities all across America.
Thanks to God’s little slide show on Paul Crouch’s ceiling, Paul
would have no further need of his living room sofa and shower curtain
as a set. In fact, today he sits upon a golden throne in a
velvet-curtained studio, all of it generously funded by the
$126,000,000.00 in annual donations from his faithful viewers in
satellite television land.4 I often wonder why Paul Crouch came to
that seminar at. Why listen to dopes like me babble on when God
Himself had already told Paul about satellite television? Funny how
Crouch never mentioned his nocturnal visit from God. It would have
been great dinner conversation. Because, except for that smelly guy I
always see at the corner of Hollywood and Vine, I’ve never met anyone
who’s been visited by God.
Yet another of these people is Robert Tilton. Tilton was flying high
with his TV ministries beaming forth from Texas or Oklahoma to
America’s living rooms, thus pulling in $800,000.00 per month in
donations. But an industrious dumpster-diving reporter would find
thousands of prayer requests intended for the preacher’s attention,
in that dumpster unopened and unread except to extract the checks and
cash enclosed. The story got to ABC-TV and put a temporary crimp in
Reverend Tilton’s style. He’s back on the air again though, and doing
just fine.8 Today’s media takes no notice.
There were more. Everyone remembers Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. We all
of us endured their spectacular public implosion, so I won’t drag it
out here. But they, of course, had a TV ministry too. They called it
Praise The Lord. Its letters, like those of TBN, were PTL. Remember
PTL? It was not long, however, before their intemperately flamboyant
lifestyle had the FBI wondering whether PTL stood for Praise The
Lord, or Pass The Loot. They found out. When Bakker went to jail,
Jerry Falwell took over the ministry. Falwell would shortly be
accused of swindling his new flock out of $73 million in a bond
scheme.5 Falwell also claims credit for Bush `re’ election. Only
history will decide which was the more heinous offense.
Of the seven people at that fateful dinner table, most would be
embroiled in scandals. They would stand accused or proven guilty of
behavior violating their very admonitions and those of their
professed god. One would be indicted for fraud, another convicted,
two would be involved in extramarital affairs with prostitutes and
another accused of sexual harassment by a same-sex employee.6 The
preacher accused of this laying on of hands would pay that employee
nearly half-a-million dollars to keep his silence. Another would
enter drug rehab. One I would personally witness attempting to pass a
worthless check for $2,000,000.00 of satellite equipment and
services. Nice bunch.
Yet they prevail. One multi-millionaire not mentioned previously, is
Armenian-born preacher, Benny Hinn. Clad in a strange,
cassock-emulating Nehru suite, Hinn is a player’s player.
An Elmer Gantry style faith healer, to this day Hinn has been unable
to show concrete admissible physical evidence of having healed anyone
of anything at any time, anywhere. No problem. (Though he has not yet
been able to re-attach the slugger’s ear, Hinn does accept credit for
curing Evander Holyfield’s heart problems. While most overly-muscular
athletes simply stop taking steroids to accomplish this, Holyfield
credits Benny Hinn with his miraculous recovery.) But to the point,
Hinn takes a salary of $500,00.00 per year for his medical miracle
work. That’s actually modest by many standards. But there’s no mal
practice premium, and it’s taxable. His ministry, however, takes in
$80,000,000.00 a year in donations. He says the donations go back
into the ministry, but Hinn refuses to join the Evangelical Council
for Financial Accountability. (Ministers such as Billy Graham are
members in good standing, but membership requires revealing ones
finances.) Hinn does not make any apologies. `I don’t need gold in
Heaven,’ Hinn says, `I got to have it now.’ Benny Hinn owns several
homes, including his multimillion dollar residence in Dana Point,
California. He travels in a $7 million Gulfstream jet between
$2000.00 a night hotel rooms. He rarely quotes from Genesis 2:16-17.
He’s apparently getting it now.7
In fact, nearly all of them are. These TV preachers prevail and
flourish regardless of their obvious transgressions against their
own, and their gods’ admonitions. And why wouldn’t they? All they
have to do is go back on the air, shed a few tears, promise to be
good, proclaim their love of Jesus, and everyone believes them,
starts crying, hugging one another and writing checks again. Like the
battered wife who believes the `never again’ lies and keeps going
back for more, America is a society ever-more driven by faith and the
dependencies which rationalize it. We’re constantly told what a good
thing faith is. Yet Webster’s defines faith as a belief in something
for which there is neither evidence nor proof. What makes that a good
thing? Imagine if the Justice Department operated on such a premise.
They could jail whomever they wanted to jail, for whatever reason
they chose, with neither evidence or proof of wrongdoing…oh,
they’ve already started doing that? Sorry. My mistake.
We are the most religious advanced society on earth today.9 A recent
poll showed that 59% of Americans consider God and religion very
important in their everyday lives. Compare this to Italy’s 23%, or to
Japan’s and France’s 12% and you start to get the picture.
Surprising, isn’t it? It doesn’t change much between the oceans
either. While we might fondly consider ourselves socially and
economically more similar to our progressive northern neighbors than
we do those to our south, the similarities begin and end with
language. Mexicans answered the same question with 57% of them saying
that religion plays a very important part in their lives. That
compares tightly with the 59% of Americans, while only 30% of
Canadians considered this to be so. Thus, with the most moneyed
country in the world publicly proclaiming its citizens’ faith – or
more simply stated, their eagerness to believe things without
supporting evidence – it’s no wonder the preachers of prey find their
way to our shores, while their bank accounts remain off-shore. It’s
no wonder they have become ever wealthier in material things, ever
more revered by their faith-filled-flocks. They prevail and have been
joined by many others, with doubtless many more yet to come. In
Isaiah 1:18, the Bible tells us – and them – exactly why: `Though
your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.’
Despite their record of apparent hypocrisy, scandal, and evident
deceit, the televangelists prevail, and have become ever more
powerful a political force in a no-longer secular US government. The
empire of influence – real or perceived – has been built by the TV
preachers on the faith, fortunes, and fealty of the credulous,
desperate, terrified. That it has been founded upon and in violation
of the American Creed is of no concern to them or their
history-oblivious flocks. Now, it is welcomed and even nurtured by
one of the most irrationally faithful among them. In their poster boy
of the moment the fundamentalists have found a man who believes the
world is doomed to destruction in our lifetime, so take what you can
get, and throw the wrapper in the river. And what’s worse, with his
return to power, the idiot-king seems bent on fulfilling that false
prophecy of doom himself if only to prove it correct. I am speaking
of course of extremism’s repentant, born again Christian
fundamentalist and reformed party animal, deserter, tooter, boozer,
stock manipulator, and president, George W. Bush.10, 11, 12, 13
It’s important to know that Bush recently said, `If you want to
understand me, you got to go to Midland Texas.’ I did. What I learned
there is this. George W. Bush bottomed out in Midland, Texas in the
mid-Eighties. But in doing so, he was by no means alone. Midland,
Texas in the Eighties was filled with failed oil men. Not even the
competent ones could make a go of it then. The town was wracked by
suicides and drunkenness as a result of its one and only industry
going bust. When one does not have work in Midland, there are few
alternatives to idleness. One alternative is drink. The other is
Church. Among troubled men the alternatives often proceed one to the
other, and in that order. When George W. Bush, despite his background
of incalculable privilege, found himself just another drunken and
failed oil man in Midland, he had run his string full out. Cocaine
had failed him, business had failed him, drink had failed him. He had
called himself the Bush family’s black sheep. Small wonder. Despite
being the fortunate son of the incumbent Vice President of the United
States, the fortunate heir to a fortune his grandfather Prescott Bush
had amassed as a banker to such luminaries as Adolph Hitler, despite
massive investment from the bin Laden family in his Arbusto oil
business, George could not make a go of it.14, 15 He couldn’t find
oil in Texas. There was little left for the hapless drunk but God.
Midland might have run out of customers, and George might have run
out of other people’s money, but God was everywhere here, still is
despite the town’s economic upturn.
Skip Hedgepeth, a contemporary in the Midland Men’s Community Bible
Study group explains Bush’s epiphany thus, `Hard times have a way of
making people draw closer to God. When we’re faced with troubles, we
realize we’re not in charge of everything. So we start looking for a
power greater than ourselves to help us in our troubles.’
While most of us realize we’re not in charge of everything at about 3
months of age, it takes others a bit longer. For them, there’s God.
So, in the Fall of 1985, his cocaine and alcohol abuse no longer a
viable escape, his Arbusto Energy company now just plain busto,
George W. Bush joined the Midland Men’s Community Bible Study Group.
Here he would be introduced to daily Bible readings and the emotional
security found through hugging other men, crying, and dogma. To the
surprise of few who knew him, George’s addictive personality was
about to take control of his ever-smaller brain yet again.16
In Evangelical Christianity, George W. Bush found a culture
supporting non-judgment and unearned forgiveness of ones past deeds.
This is known as Motivated Belief. Further, Evangelicals quite
deliberately separate themselves from moderate Protestants by their
belief in the Bible’s absolute unerring accuracy as the written word
of God. Unless God has continually edited it vicariously, that stands
in stark contrast to logical and rational religious belief and
learning. It stands in equal contrast to Anglo-American concepts of
jurisprudence. It profanes science. But it thrives because it serves
a purpose, and that purpose is self-delusion. It has no place in
enlightened government or philosophy, yet today it dominates
America’s. It is the primary reason Bush won or stole this election
despite his abysmal performance as president these last four years,
and it is the primary reason that he, just like the tainted
televangelists who sent their legions of faithful lemmings out to
vote for their born-again miscreant, can get away with just about
anything in the conditioned minds of his and their followers.
The point of all this is simple. After all, if these American `value
voters’ cannot find it within themselves to ignore the mountains of
evidence and FORGIVE their very leaders of dastardly deeds, and do so
unconditionally, how can they expect to be forgiven themselves? Yet
there is a sinful dichotomy at play here. They will forgive one
another, but condone the vengeance-killing of 100,000 Iraqis without
evidence that any of these slaughtered men, women, or children were
guilty of anything – anything other than being different, that is. To
me, such inconsistent beliefs as forgiveness and vengeance,
sanctifying life while taking it indiscriminately, do not pave the
way to Heaven. Such beliefs are the road to Hell. Unfortunately we’re
all on it together and the kooks are driving.
To Bush and his ilk, life, despite its being a gift from God, is
trivialized as nothing more than a dress rehearsal for the afterlife.
Here you make your mistakes, and here you correct them in order to
achieve salvation. The misused concept is emphasized in the New
Testament, and called upon often by preachers, `…he that shall endure
unto the end, the same shall be saved.’ In the Evangelical
interpretation, it’s not where you start, it’s where you finish after
you’ve finished. This removes the fear of `salvation doubt’ if
believed with vigor and absolution. To the literalists, the Bible
teaches that everyone should be judged only after they’ve died.
Consider how sainthood is ascribed but posthumously. Only thus are
mortals afforded full opportunity to repent and be saved. However,
inconsistent in this interpretation is how the Religous Right’s
dogmatic adherents, such as George W. Bush, deny other potential or
wayward Christians this chance by their vindictive actions. Bush sent
147 convicts to the death chamber in five years as governor. That’s a
record. Nearly all called themselves Christians. Were they given the
opportunity to `endure unto the end,’ and achieve repentance by their
actions, or was Bush better suited to determine their temporal end
than was God? While the wholesale execution of prisoners is an
extreme example, to Bush’s mind, it seems once you’re born, you’re
kill fodder for a greater good independent of your past deeds. He
spent as little as four minutes deciding who lives and who dies. In
this context then, once again, consider the bloodbath that is Iraq.
When and where did Jesus Christ teach this stuff to anybody? Simple.
He did not. Mortal men of purpose made it up. Mortal men find purpose
by acting on those beliefs.
Sigmund Freud writing in his 1927 postulation, The Future Of An
Illusion, says of conservative Christians, `Their acceptance of a
universal neurosis spares them the task of constructing a personal
one.’ Can there be a better explanation of why fear is so liberally
used in our theocratic government’s message today? Can there be any
doubt as to whom they are speaking?
As Americans, as members of what was so recently called the most
advanced society in human history, should we not be looking forward?
Why then do we reward those who always look backward for guidance,
backward to a time and place and a circumstance that never existed
but in their fantasies and the imagination of those who foist such
false ideas about America’s religious heritage upon them? The
Evangelists’ version of That Old Time Religion is, in reality, a very
new concept. But unless we’re about to start burning witches again,
and offering our daughters into slavery, it’s just another bill of
goods they’ve sold themselves…sold being the operative word.
As a culture, we will be made to understand the perils of blind faith
and of retrospection without reference, perils we’ve already loosed
on a more rational world. It has never been stated more succinctly
than wherein Proverbs 29:18 observes how, `Without vision the people
perish.’ Yet by its very definition, blind faith is without vision.
Could there be a more profound misinterpretation of scripture than
that manifest by this administration and the fundamentalist
sycophants who’ve not only rewarded its crimes, but assured their
continuance? They ask us to have faith while they take the lives of
our young in exchange for oil. They ask us to have faith because if
we were intelligent or courageous enough to demand evidence we would
ask them why they’ve embarked upon an illegal war with no plan for
termination; a daily slaughter of Iraqi innocents within their own
homes, a slaughter devoid of honest objectives or reasonable
justification; a daily desecration of the most holy of places without
concern for mortal suffering or divine retribution; a national
security plan that breaks the bank while obviating national security;
a financial deficit with no plan for recovery; a Social Security
privatization plan with no vehicle for funding it other than robbing
an entire generation of retirees and borrowing $2-trillion from
foreign nations; a headlong rush to deny the weak among us aid and
comfort in violation of Christ’s teachings; a national economic model
equal to that of the second worst economy in the hemisphere,
Argentina; a policy of spend and borrow that will leave our children
bankrupt and beholden to the children of other nations; an energy
policy leading to fatal global climate change with no plan for
counteraction or survival of the human race; a collapse of the U.S.
Dollar on world markets with no plan for recovery; a spiraling
national debt with no ability to repay so much as its interest
without selling our country to the Chinese at wholesale; and finally,
the deliberate and pointless alienation of the 6.4 billion people who
did not vote for George W. Bush but whose lives will be affected by
his actions and to whom we will owe trillions of the US dollars our
children must repay.
Summary:
Satellite television today allows the majority of those billions and
billions of foreigners to see America and her government’s actions in
her people’s name. This has never before been so. We’ve always known
that power corrupts. But corrupt leaders have been able to shield
themselves from the world’s view in past generations. They’ve often
been able to do so long enough to amass great wealth and power at the
expense of their peoples before running off. But they cannot do so
any longer, not with impunity. America’s actions affect the whole
world. Today, the entire world is watching us. They’re nervous. Their
multitudes will not allow their `values’ to cloud the truth unfolding
before their very eyes on the planet they are willed by God to share
with us, the `superpower.’ For the moment, we’ve abdicated our nation
to delusional screwballs. Many nations have done this before. They
already `get it.’ We don’t The world will not follow our lead. They
will bankrupt us this time. This time they can.
Conclusion:
We’ve examined but a few of the shortsighted, self-serving and
visionless prospects for our America under its current irrational,
faith driven `leader.’ On Saturday he told us that `God is guiding
our nation.’ So I guess Bush has delegated even that task to faith.
Call it charm, lunacy, ignorance, stupidity, or just call it what it
is, policy, Bush’s attributes work wonders with many Americans. As
one wag put it, `I like Bush `cause he’s as dumb as me.’
Bush’s style appeals to what the TV ministers call their `Value
Voters.’ So, let the exit polls be damned, the Evangelicals carried
the day for their poster boy. If they didn’t, they at least gave the
Republican crooks who own this president a plausible vehicle to which
they might attribute the otherwise inexplicable vote counts in this
year’s national election. They have changed our country into
something its founders never intended it to be, a virtual theocracy,
and they did it through abuse of the very system first designed to
prevent it.
Though 30 years ago they had no substantive national influence,
today, by their own literally incredible estimate, born-again
Evangelicals represent 38% of voting age Americans. This year they
appeared in record numbers casting, according to Barna Research, an
estimated 53% of the total vote. That’s a majority however you cut
it. Their votes went overwhelmingly to George W. Bush and his
anti-gay, anti-science, anti-pluralist, anti-social, anti-secular,
anti-Earth, backward-looking, blind faith agenda.
Evangelicals have been convinced that they were the spoiler in this
election. They equate Bush’s victory with their infantile ideas about
morality. They think they exhibited free will, imposed it upon the
Liberal infidels by sending the Bush numbers over the top. In reality
all they did was fall for the Republican line the same way they fall
for their TV preachers’ baloney. They responded as a herd. As always,
it’ll cost them. That’s expected, and it’s old news. What’s really
troubling is this. The TV preachers have shown the manipulators in
the Bush administration how easy it was to use the credulous masses,
to direct them to ends that most would consider outrageously stupid
at the very least. The faithful herd will now be led to the
slaughter, double crossed, deserted, and robbed of something they
consider valuable, as have so many others the Bush administration has
used and discarded during these four graceless years. Perhaps they
deserve it. Perhaps we all do. For, after all, haven’t the rest of
us, those who so fondly consider ourselves enlightened, behaved no
better? Have we not silently and passively ignored the empirical
evidence of exit polls? 17, 18 It was these very exit polls which
caused my source to hear one White House official exclaim, `We’re
being creamed,’ before it miraculously changed in their favor.19 Have
we not ignored the mathematical improbability that nearly every error
uncovered accrued to Bush’s advantage? The laws of probability demand
that multiple random errors trend toward even distribution, but only
if they are truly errors. Are we questioning the electronic `news’
media’s absence from this story? Nope. So, having seen all this
before, are we not therefore, accepting the nearly impossible results
of this election on blind faith?
Blind faith is not a plan for any society’s future survival; neither
is it cognition worthy of the fully developed human mind. Blind faith
is just a pretty mask that hides the ugly face of ignorance. Today,
America wears that mask, and it does not represent the moral or
ethical or religious `values’ of its most rational citizens. Neither
is it fooling anyone but other Americans.
It is said that of all God’s creatures, only humans can deliberately
consider any but their immediate future. Humans and humans alone have
the power of mind to appreciate the implications of their present
actions upon their long-term future and the welfare and survival of
their children. Despite these unique gifts of mind, we are told and
apparently believe that 59,054,087 Americans voted to continue a
dismally failed presidency. Despite that presumably cognitive
understanding, despite that ability to anticipate disaster, another
estimated 80,000,000 voting age Americans chose to stay home on
Election Day altogether. They chose not to vote. One can only ponder
upon what kept them away from the polls, and what might be the values
they consider important, but not important enough to get them get out
of their easy chairs in the interest of saving their lives. There is
but one conclusion to be drawn from these disparate behaviors.
America has suffered a crisis of intellect. We are become a people no
longer adequate to the rigors of sustaining an ethical and equitable
democracy.
As Thomas Paine said at America’s birth, `A people gets the
government it deserves.’
Oh, well. God save America! Her citizens, it seems, are all watching
television.
Footnotes
Please have no faith in anything you’ve read here. Unless and until
you check the facts for yourself, that’s all they are, some
stranger’s written words. The following references are provided to
start you on that road – or as an aid to sleep, whichever you prefer.
(DS)
1/
2/ The Mind Of The Bible Believer; by Edmund Cohen, Prometheus Books,
2003
3/
4/
5 /
6 /
7 /
8/ ond_coming.htm
9/ An Anatomy Of American Nationalism, by Anatol Lieven; Oxford
University Press, 2004.
10/
11/
12/
13/ 37.htm
14/
01/Bush___Bin_Laden_-_George_W__B/bush___bin_laden _-_george_w__b.html
15/ ler.htm
16/ s/view/
17/
iscuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address3x79760
18/
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