Radical preachers offer a magical world for battered believers.

[Shammu]

Radical preachers offer a magical world for battered believers.

The engine that drives the radical Christian right in the United States - the most dangerous mass movement in American history - is not religiosity, but despair. It is a movement built on the growing personal and economic despair of tens of millions of Americans, who watched helplessly as their communities were plunged into poverty by the flight of manufacturing jobs, their families and neighborhoods torn apart by neglect and indifference, and who eventually lost hope that America was a place where they had a future.

This despair crosses economic boundaries, of course, enveloping many in the middle class who live trapped in huge, soulless exurbs where, lacking any form of community rituals or centers, they also feel deeply isolated, vulnerable and lonely. Those in despair are the most easily manipulated by demagogues, who promise a fantastic utopia, whether it is a worker's paradise, fraternité-egalité-liberté, or the second coming of Jesus Christ. Those in despair search desperately for a solution, the warm embrace of a community to replace the one they lost, a sense of purpose and meaning in life, the assurance they are protected, loved and worthwhile.

During the last two years of work on the book American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, I kept encountering this deadly despair. Driving down a highway lined with gas stations, fast-food restaurants, and dollar stores I often got vertigo, forgetting for a moment whether I was in Detroit or Kansas City or Cleveland. There are parts of the United States, including whole sections of former manufacturing centers such as Ohio, that resemble the developing world, with boarded-up storefronts, dilapidated houses, potholed streets and crumbling schools. The end of the world is no longer an abstraction to many Americans.

We as a nation have turned our backs on the working class, with much of the worst assaults, such as NAFTA and welfare reform, pushed through during President Clinton's Democratic administration. We stand passively and watch an equally pernicious assault on the middle class. Anything that can be put on software, from architecture to engineering to finance, will soon be handed to workers overseas, who will be paid a third what their American counterparts receive and who will, like 45 million Americans, have no access to health insurance or benefits. There has been, along with the creation of an American oligarchy, a steady Weimarization of the American working class. And such distortions, as Plutarch reminded us, have grave political consequences for democracies. The top 1 percent of American households have more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined. This figure alone should terrify all who care about our democracy.

The stories believers told me of their lives before they found Christ were heartbreaking. These chronicles were about terrible pain, severe financial difficulties, struggles with addictions or childhood sexual or physical abuse, profound alienation and often thoughts about suicide. They were chronicles without hope. The real world - the world of facts and dispassionate intellectual inquiry, the world in which news and information were not filtered through the comforting ideological prism of radical religion, the world where they were left out to dry, abandoned by a government hostage to corporations and willing to tolerate obscene corporate profits - betrayed them. They hated this world.

And they willingly walked out on this world for the mythical world offered by radical preachers - a world of magic, a world where God had a divine plan for them and intervened daily to protect them and perform miracles in their lives. The rage many expressed to me toward those who challenge this belief system - to those of us who do not accept that everything in the world came into being during a single week 6,000 years ago because it says so in the Bible - was a rage born of fear, the fear of being plunged back into a reality-based world where these magical props would no longer exist, where they would once again be adrift, abandoned and alone.

The danger of this theology of despair is that it says that nothing in the world is worth saving. It rejoices in cataclysmic destruction. It welcomes the frightening advance of global warming, the spiraling wars and violence in the Middle East, and the poverty and neglect that have blighted American urban and rural landscapes, as encouraging signs that the end of the world is close at hand.

Believers, of course, clinging to this magical belief, which is a bizarre form of spiritual Darwinism, will be "raptured" upward, while the rest of us will be tormented with horrors by a warrior Christ and finally extinguished. This obsession with apocalyptic violence is an obsession with revenge. It is what the world, and we who still believe it is worth saving, deserve.

Those who lead the movement give their followers a moral license to direct this rage and yearning for violence against all those who refuse to submit to the movement, from liberals, to "secular humanists," to "nominal Christians," to intellectuals, to gays and lesbians, to Muslims. These radicals, from James Dobson to Pat Robertson, call for a theocratic state that will, if it comes to pass, bear within it many of the traits of classical fascism.

All radical movements need a crisis or a prolonged period of instability to achieve power. And we are not in a period of crisis now. But another catastrophic terrorist attack on American soil, a series of huge environmental disasters, or an economic meltdown will hand to these radicals the opening they seek. Manipulating our fear and anxiety, promising to make us safe and secure, giving us the assurance that they can vanquish the forces that mean to do us harm, these radicals, many of whom have achieved powerful positions in the executive and legislative branches of government, as well as the military, will ask us only to surrender our rights, to give them the unlimited power they need to battle the forces of darkness.

They will have behind them tens of millions of angry, disenfranchised Americans longing for revenge and yearning for a mythical utopia, Americans who embraced a theology of despair because we offered them nothing else.

Radical preachers offer a magical world for battered believers.

[Shammu]

I think we should spread the gospel and warnings about the times we live in. We should be careful to do so with an attitude of humility and compassion for those we fear will perish

According to the author if you believe in the Rapture you are a radical. He refers to it as extremism.  By the way, this guy has a book "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America."

[nChrist]

I think we should spread the gospel and warnings about the times we live in. We should be careful to do so with an attitude of humility and compassion for those we fear will perish

According to the author if you believe in the Rapture you are a radical. He refers to it as extremism.  By the way, this guy has a book "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America."

WOW! - This is wild and weird! We have no thought of doing anyone any harm - just the opposite. SO, we are radical and to be feared because we tell people the TRUTH of the HOLY BIBLE! It sounds like some Michael Moore clone clowns have escaped from the box. Maybe we can put them back in the box, but maybe not.

I'm trying to grasp the total depravity of these thoughts. Millions of people are being torn apart by alcohol, dope, AIDS and other diseases related to immorality, broken homes, sex and more sex any way they want it, violence, and the natural plagues that have been brought on by the GODLESS and do anything society that they desperately  wanted. They have gotten much of what they wanted, and things are falling apart - MELTDOWN MODE! Are they trying to make Christians the scapegoat? What evil is responsible for all of these woes, and who is doing these evils - Christians??!!  This sounds like the makings of another Michael Moore documentary, but many poor fools will buy it and believe it.

After all of the misery they have heaped on themselves, they want to talk about how dangerous Christians are??!! We'll give them a Bible or a Bible tract and tell them about JESUS, so we are dangerous fascists??!! The lost are destroying themselves in record numbers, and their misery is great. If they want to see who is to blame, they can look in the mirror. Christians have the answers for their misery, but Christians had nothing to do with causing their misery.

Are they actually trying to sell the idea that their misery would somehow be relieved if Christians were out of the picture? This is OUTRAGEOUS LUNACY, much like the OUTRAGEOUS LUNACY of Hitler talking about the Jews. Does anyone see something coming? If you don't - wake up and take a look. We obviously should have a compassion for the lost, and most Christians do. It appears that those who try the hardest in helping others will be viewed as the most radical and dangerous.

Continued - See Next Post

[nChrist]

Acts 20:16-35 NASB  For Paul had decided to sail past Ephesus so that he would not have to spend time in Asia; for he was hurrying to be in Jerusalem, if possible, on the day of Pentecost.

From Miletus he sent to Ephesus and called to him the elders of the church. And when they had come to him, he said to them, "You yourselves know, from the first day that I set foot in Asia, how I was with you the whole time, serving the Lord with all humility and with tears and with trials which came upon me through the plots of the Jews; how I did not shrink from declaring to you anything that was profitable, and teaching you publicly and from house to house, solemnly testifying to both Jews and Greeks of repentance toward God and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ.

"And now, behold, bound by the Spirit, I am on my way to Jerusalem, not knowing what will happen to me there, except that the Holy Spirit solemnly testifies to me in every city, saying that bonds and afflictions await me. "But I do not consider my life of any account as dear to myself, so that I may finish my course and the ministry which I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify solemnly of the gospel of the grace of God. "And now, behold, I know that all of you, among whom I went about preaching the kingdom, will no longer see my face. "Therefore, I testify to you this day that I am innocent of the blood of all men. "For I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole purpose of God.

"Be on guard for yourselves and for all the flock, among which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to shepherd the church of God which He purchased with His own blood. "I know that after my departure savage wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock; and from among your own selves men will arise, speaking perverse things, to draw away the disciples after them. "Therefore be on the alert, remembering that night and day for a period of three years I did not cease to admonish each one with tears.

"And now I commend you to God and to the word of His grace, which is able to build you up and to give you the inheritance among all those who are sanctified. "I have coveted no one's silver or gold or clothes. "You yourselves know that these hands ministered to my own needs and to the men who were with me. "In everything I showed you that by working hard in this manner you must help the weak and remember the words of the Lord Jesus, that He Himself said, 'It is more blessed to give than to receive.'"
______________________________

1 Timothy 6:12-19 NASB  Fight the good fight of faith; take hold of the eternal life to which you were called, and you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses. I charge you in the presence of God, who gives life to all things, and of Christ Jesus, who testified the good confession before Pontius Pilate, that you keep the commandment without stain or reproach until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ, which He will bring about at the proper time--He who is the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone possesses immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no man has seen or can see. To Him be honor and eternal dominion! Amen.

Instruct those who are rich in this present world not to be conceited or to fix their hope on the uncertainty of riches, but on God, who richly supplies us with all things to enjoy. Instruct them to do good, to be rich in good works, to be generous and ready to share, storing up for themselves the treasure of a good foundation for the future, so that they may take hold of that which is life indeed.
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2 Timothy 4:1-8 NASB  I solemnly charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by His appearing and His kingdom: preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort, with great patience and instruction. For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires, and will turn away their ears from the truth and will turn aside to myths.

But you, be sober in all things, endure hardship, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry. For I am already being poured out as a drink offering, and the time of my departure has come. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith; in the future there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that day; and not only to me, but also to all who have loved His appearing.

[Soldier4Christ]

These are the very ones I spoke of in the other thread and the ones we are told about in the Bible. Such things as this will bring about the persecution of Christians.


Gal 2:4  And that because of false brethren unawares brought in, who came in privily to spy out our liberty which we have in Christ Jesus, that they might bring us into bondage:


Jud 1:3  Beloved, when I gave all diligence to write unto you of the common salvation, it was needful for me to write unto you, and exhort you that ye should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints.
Jud 1:4  For there are certain men crept in unawares, who were before of old ordained to this condemnation, ungodly men, turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness, and denying the only Lord God, and our Lord Jesus Christ.

[Shammu]

Well brothers, we knew this was coming.

[nChrist]

YES Brothers, we did know it was coming, and we've really been expecting it for some time. I wonder if GOD will still have a need for a bull in a china closet from time to time. If not, GOD still has considerable work left to do on me. I've always believed that GOD has work for all of us to do, and I know that HE will equip us for HIS Purpose.

Love In Christ,
Tom

Romans 5:1-2 NASB  Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom also we have obtained our introduction by faith into this grace in which we stand; and we exult in hope of the glory of God.

[Shammu]

YES Brothers, we did know it was coming, and we've really been expecting it for some time. I wonder if GOD will still have a need for a bull in a china closet from time to time. If not, GOD still has considerable work left to do on me. I've always believed that GOD has work for all of us to do, and I know that HE will equip us for HIS Purpose.

Love In Christ,
Tom

Romans 5:1-2 NASB  Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom also we have obtained our introduction by faith into this grace in which we stand; and we exult in hope of the glory of God.

AMEN brother AMEN

[Brother Jerry]

AMEN