Alternet: Christians are the Real Haters
By Matthew Philbin | September 22, 2009 | 09:25
It takes a breathtaking lack of self-awareness, or selective amnesia, or just bald hypocrisy for the left-wing blogosphere to speculate on the cause of “right-wing hatemongering.” But there it was on Sept. 21 – an article asserting that the “anti-Obama hyperventilating” was the result of … Christianity.
Appearing on Alternet.org, Frank Schaeffer’s “Right-Wing Hatemongering Fueled by Christianity?” suggested that resistance to the Obama program comes from “the ugliest side of religion.”
“The fact is,” wrote Schaeffer, “that if you're going to blame one group above all others for the willful ignorance and continuing ugliness of the response to President Obama the best candidate would be the evangelical/fundamentalist community.”
Schaeffer wrote that former president Jimmy Carter was correct when he recently asserted that racism was behind the passionate anti-Obama reaction. But Carter fell short in not explicitly linking that racism to his own religion – Evangelical Christianity. “The angry part of the South Carter spoke of is racist because it's dominated by a certain type of ‘Christian’ culture,” Schaeffer wrote.
In case there was any doubt about Schaeffer’s message, he went on: “The people running around calling Obama is ‘Hitler’, the so-called ‘birthers’ and all the rest can't be understood outside of the context of the hermetically sealed world-hating gated community known as Evangelical Christianity.”
Then, like an anthropologist reporting on a strange, primitive tribe, he went on to describe evangelicals as having been “left behind by modernity” and couldn’t resist the standard left-wing comparison of evangelicals to jihadists.
“The bestselling status of the Left Behind novels proves that, not unlike Islamist terrorists who behead their enemies, many evangelical/ fundamentalist readers relish the prospect of God doing lots of messy killing for them as they watch in comfort from on high. They want revenge on all people not like them – forever.”
Furthermore, Schaeffer said, all these home-schooling, federal government-hating end-timers pose an imminent threat. “They now form a Fifth Column of the deliberately intellectually disenfranchised. They know they are out of the loop and hate the rest of us for their own self-imposed isolation. I'm afraid they will soon turn to violence.”
To Schaeffer, who wrote that he grew up evangelical and still calls himself a believer, the only answer is to rescue Christianity from the “willfully ignorant evangelicals and fundamentalists.” Oh, and to buy his soon-to-be-released book, “Patience With God: Faith For People Who Don't Like Religion (Or Atheism).”
And once you’ve read his book, Schaeffer would like you to join him in reclaiming Jesus for the Left. If you join him to “build a better vision … Perhaps a generation from now the image of a typical Christian won't be a hate-monger like James Dobson but rather a lover of peace such as Bishop Desmond Tutu, or a literary giant like John Updike, and yes, a President Obama.”
Appearing on Alternet.org, Frank Schaeffer’s “Right-Wing Hatemongering Fueled by Christianity?” suggested that resistance to the Obama program comes from “the ugliest side of religion.”
“The fact is,” wrote Schaeffer, “that if you're going to blame one group above all others for the willful ignorance and continuing ugliness of the response to President Obama the best candidate would be the evangelical/fundamentalist community.”
Schaeffer wrote that former president Jimmy Carter was correct when he recently asserted that racism was behind the passionate anti-Obama reaction. But Carter fell short in not explicitly linking that racism to his own religion – Evangelical Christianity. “The angry part of the South Carter spoke of is racist because it's dominated by a certain type of ‘Christian’ culture,” Schaeffer wrote.
In case there was any doubt about Schaeffer’s message, he went on: “The people running around calling Obama is ‘Hitler’, the so-called ‘birthers’ and all the rest can't be understood outside of the context of the hermetically sealed world-hating gated community known as Evangelical Christianity.”
Then, like an anthropologist reporting on a strange, primitive tribe, he went on to describe evangelicals as having been “left behind by modernity” and couldn’t resist the standard left-wing comparison of evangelicals to jihadists.
“The bestselling status of the Left Behind novels proves that, not unlike Islamist terrorists who behead their enemies, many evangelical/ fundamentalist readers relish the prospect of God doing lots of messy killing for them as they watch in comfort from on high. They want revenge on all people not like them – forever.”
Furthermore, Schaeffer said, all these home-schooling, federal government-hating end-timers pose an imminent threat. “They now form a Fifth Column of the deliberately intellectually disenfranchised. They know they are out of the loop and hate the rest of us for their own self-imposed isolation. I'm afraid they will soon turn to violence.”
To Schaeffer, who wrote that he grew up evangelical and still calls himself a believer, the only answer is to rescue Christianity from the “willfully ignorant evangelicals and fundamentalists.” Oh, and to buy his soon-to-be-released book, “Patience With God: Faith For People Who Don't Like Religion (Or Atheism).”
And once you’ve read his book, Schaeffer would like you to join him in reclaiming Jesus for the Left. If you join him to “build a better vision … Perhaps a generation from now the image of a typical Christian won't be a hate-monger like James Dobson but rather a lover of peace such as Bishop Desmond Tutu, or a literary giant like John Updike, and yes, a President Obama.”
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