There is a growing movement in America that equates godliness with hatred of our government — in fact, hatred of our country.
By Frank Schaeffer / AlterNet / July 23, 2011
The Norwegian police on Saturday charged a 32-year-old man, whom they identified as a Christian fundamentalist with right-wing connections, over the bombing of a government center and a shooting attack on a nearby island that together left at least 91 people dead.
In my new book “Sex, Mom and God” I predicted just such an action. I predicted that right wing Christians will unleash terror here in America too. I predict that they will copy Islamic extremists, and may eventually even make common cause with them.
There is a growing movement in America that equates godliness with hatred of our government in fact hatred of our country as fallen and evil because we allow women choice, gays to marry, have a social safety net, and allow immigration from other cultures and non-white races.
According to the Guardian newspaper, the killer wrote:
“Today’s Protestant church is a joke,” he wrote in an online post in 2009. “Priests in jeans who march for Palestine and churches that look like minimalist shopping centres. I am a supporter of an indirect collective conversion of the Protestant church back to the Catholic.”
It seems Anders Behring Breivik longed for a “pure” and ultra conservative religion. He was a man of religious conviction, no liberals with their jeans need apply! Liberals beware.
Norway is just a first taste of what will happen here on a larger scale.
A HISTORY of VIOLENT ACTION
There is a history to the far right, religious right extremism on the rise today, extremism so extreme that in its congressional manifestation it is risking the good faith and credit of the US in the debt calling fiasco. The Tea Party activists also want purity of doctrine.
My family was part of the far right/violent right’s rise in the 1970s and 80s when we helped create the “pro-life” movement come into existence that in the end spawned the killers of abortion providers. These killers were literally doing what we’d called for.
The terror unleashed on Norway – and the terror now unleashed by the Tea Party through Congress as it holds our economy hostage to extremist “economic” theories that want to destroy our ability to function — is the sort of white, Christian; far right terror America can expect more of.
THE “CHRISTIAN BROTHERHOOD”
Call this the ultimate “Tea Party” type “answer” to secularism, modernity, and above all our hated government. Call this the Christian Brotherhood. From far right congress people, to far right gun-toting terror in Norway and here at home, our own Western version of the Taliban is on the rise.
Foreigners, visitors from another planet and Americans living in a bubble of reasonable or educated people might not know this but the reality is that the debt ceiling confrontation is by, for and the result of America’s evangelical Christian control of the Republican Party.
It is the ultimate expression of an alternate reality, one that has the mistrust of the US government as its bedrock “faith,” second only to faith in Jesus.
To understand why an irrational self-defeating action like destroying the credit of the USA might seem like the right thing to do you have to understand two things: that the Republican Party is now the party of religious fanatics and that these fanatics — people like Michele Bachmann — don’t want to work within our system, they want to bring it down along the lines of so-called Christian “Reconstruction.” (See my book for a full account of what this is.)
In the scorched-earth era of the “health care reform debates” of 2009 and beyond, Evangelicals seemed to believe that Jesus commanded that all hospitals (and everything else) should be run by corporations for profit, just because corporations weren’t the evil government. The right even decided that it was “normal” for the state to hand over its age-old public and patriotic duties to private companies — even for military operations (“contractors”), prisons, health care, public transport, and all the rest.
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Breivik probably didn’t qualify as a Christian Fundamentalist in the American sense – he wasn’t out campaigning against abortion, gays, etc… he was obsessed with fundamentalism Islam, which he regarded as a “strong” monoculture as opposed to the “weak” humanistic mix of beliefs that characterize the modern West.
However I believe your assessment is probably correct, we will see more of this kind of thing here in the US. The far right is seeing a huge resurgence here and in Europe.
When you have 25-30% of the population convinced that the President is some kind of Islamist or Marxist secret agent from Kenya or Indonesia (they can’t seem to decide which or where) out to “destroy America from within”, violence is almost inevitable.
I think we’re likely to see a big uptick in this kind of thing over the next few years – we might find ourselves nostalgic for the good old days when all we had to worry about was the occasional Sunni zealot getting through – unlike Islamists, these people are here in large numbers, and have the access and resources to do significant harm.
Well here is Ander’s own statements on the matter:
“If you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and God then you are a religious Christian. Myself and many more like me do not necessarily have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and God. We do however believe in Christianity as a cultural, social, identity and moral platform. This makes us Christian.”
“When you have 25-30% of the population convinced that the President is some kind of Islamist or Marxist secret agent from Kenya or Indonesia (they can’t seem to decide which or where) out to “destroy America from within”, violence is almost inevitable.”
So to have peace, what you’re saying is…..we need a Republican president? Great success!
I was thinking more of a better educated public ;)
Don, I can’t determine which is worse. Its either killing in the name of or killing for the cause of. What I do know is here in the Good Ol’ USA the killings in the name and the cause of god increase regularly. From a president that heard god’s voice to antichoice fascists to “them damn mooslims” to mothers drowning their children.