RELIGION FOR WAR

By Ernst Meier, Zurich

[This book review published in: Zeit-Fragen Nr.47, 11/28/2005 is translated from the German on the World Wide Web, www.zeit-fragen.ch/.]


In her new book “Prayer in the Oval office,” the American journalist Barbara Victor warns about the influence of so-called “Born Again” Christians on the domestic-, foreign- and war policy of the US. She reveals intensive connections between religion and politics in the Bush administration. This book was first published in France in 2004, not in the US, and now is offered in a German translation.

The “Oval Office” as the workshop of the American president is a part of the White House. “Oval Office” stands symbolically for the center of power of the US.

Who are “Born Again” Christians? According to the author’s description, these are Protestants who consciously distance themselves from the mainstream of the official reformed churches. The “Born Again” pretend to use their whole life for Jesus. Often they can date their decision for Jesus and the circumstances leading to that decision. Other believers criticize them for betraying the principles and values of Jesus in favor of a moral and religious indifference. The “Born Again” have hardly any self-doubt. They claim to know where evil lies and how the soon-expected end of the world will appear. Then the Born Again alone will be saved. All other persons – including the Jews in Israel actively supported by them – will be destroyed in the final battle (“Armageddon”).

Disbelief in their remarkable faith does not disturb them. The arguments of critical human reason and detailed knowledge of history do not count in their thought system. Whatever does not fit in their worldview is faded out.

The “Born Again” are not a little exclusive group in US society. In US television communities numbering countless hundreds of thousands or millions, the narrow worldview of telegenic and more or less credible television preachers is repeated. Group dynamic manipulation is not a rarity here.

Let us focus on the worldview of the new “Born Again.” This worldview is unassailable since everything the Born Again do happens in God’s name even if it violates prevailing law. In this way, the way of thinking of the “Born Again” resembles the mentality of Islamic fundamentalists.

THE DANGER OF HYPOCRISY

At the end of her book, Barbara Victor tells how a born-again Christian woman founded a missionary community “Word of the lord” with the help of legacy hunting, not with honest fundraising campaigns. Her shocked brother ended up with nothing with the death of her parents. The pious culprit has no pangs of conscience. Jesus had “his hand in the plan.” This example could be set in a larger context.

All this would not be so terrible if the “Born Again” were without political significance. But that isn’t the case. Before elections, all US politicians are questioned meticulously by “born again” Christians and their strong lobby about their themes. Whoever gives a wrong answer is out of the race.

THE US – A RELIGIOUS LAND

The US is a deeply religious land. Only 7% of Americans in a 2004 opinion poll admitted to being non-religious. 50% are Protestants and 25% Catholics. The US was originally a land where religion and the state were separated on account of the bitter experiences of immigrants from Europe.

This limit is blurred more and more. Religion was used an expedient to win the population for a certain policy. During the First World War, President Woodrow Wilson claimed the war showed “how America climbed to heights where there is nothing but the pure light of divine justice, a reflection of that glimmer of light from Mount Calvary, that first sunrise announcing the Christian age.” For Abraham Lincoln, Americans were the “chosen people” and America was “God’s land.” War could not be glorified any better.

On the basis of numerous interviews with representatives of the “Born Again,” Barbara Victor analyzes the development of the influence of the pious fundamentalists on American politics especially since 1945. The Clinton years were a setback for the evangelical movement and a time of moral decline for many Americans.

BUSH – A PRODUCT OF THE “BORN AGAIN”

Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush, who leads America into a perpetual brutal (world-) war, speaks the language of the “Born Again” perfectly. He knows his way around in the narrowness and reduction of their conceptual figures. The growing lobby of Christian fundamentalists was crucial in his election, Victor says. Bush was even prepared for the presidential election by fundamentalists. He knew their votes were decisive.

The terrorist attack of September 11 was like a catalysor for the influence of the Born Again on politics and foreign policy. Moderate Jews and moderate Christians were also brought on the (war-) line of the Bush administration. On the domestic front, the civil rights of Americans were greatly restricted and freedom traditions cut off that were long regarded as constitutive for the American body politic. The tolerant democracy is undermined.

For Barbara Victor, the honest concern of many born-again Christians to bring about renewal is understandable on the backdrop of the moral decline in the US (violence in schools, food culture, unemployment and so forth). Her interviews and background information show that America’s “rebirth” is in no way harmless in foreign policy. A brutal war policy like the attack on Iraq against international law is waged against “evil” in God’s name – like the crusades in the Middle Ages. The state of Israel is strongly supported by reborn Christians and their organizations for ideological reasons, not for reasons of sympathy for the Jews. They will be destroyed at the end of time like all others who are not converted although they were originally God’s chosen people, according to the ideology of the Born Again.

There is no support for the Palestinians of whom many are Christians. The influential son of the Reverend Billy graham, Franklin Graham, explained to the book’s author the purpose of a “humanitarian” journey to conquered Iraq: “Operation Iraqi Freedom was a windfall for Jesus.” “We go there to extend our hand in love to the Iraqis. I do this as a Christian in the name of Jesus Christ.” A US soldier was a witness when one of Graham’s evangelical pilgrims offered fresh water to a group from Iraq only under the condition that they would be baptized as Christians. All the distress and misery of the innocent population did not interest any of the “born again.” Their leaders conceal the facts. As Christians, they are for war and against human dignity and human rights.

All these pious war supporters and warmongers should carefully read the 1919 letter of Hermann Hesse “To a Young German.” Hesse wrote a year after the dreadful First World War whose consequences on all of Europe were unforeseeable:

“You wrote to me that you are despairing and do not know what to do, believe, know or hope. You don’t know whether there is a God or not. You don’t know whether life has any meaning or not, whether the Fatherland has a meaning or not, whether it is better to strive for intellectual goods or simply fill one’s belly since everything seems so evil in the world.

I find your state of mind completely genuine. That you don’t know whether there is a God and whether there is good and evil is much better than if you knew this exactly. Five years ago, if you can remember, you knew thoroughly what was good and evil, did what seemed good and marched into war. Since then for five years in the best years of your youth, you did what was good, shot, stormed, took it easy and buried comrades. Very gradually the good became dubious. At times it was no longer clear whether what you did was the gloriously good or fundamentally evil, stupid and a great nonsense.

That was also true. The good that you knew so exactly at that time was obviously not the true good, the indestructible, timeless good and the God whom you knew at that time was obviously not the true God. It was presumably the national god of our councils and war poets, that god who reverently relies on cannons. […]

It was a god, a powerful, enormous god, greater than Jehovah. Hundreds of thousands of bloody battle sacrifices were brought to him. Hundreds of thousands of stomachs were torn open and hundreds of thousands of tongues mangled to his honor. This god was bloodthirsty and more brutal than a puppet and idol. During the bloody sacrifices, the priests, our theologians, sang their paid hymns of praise. […]

Did anyone notice and wonder how our theologians in these four war years carried their own religion, their own Christianity, to the grave? They served love and preached hatred.”
(From: Hermann Hesse, Political Meditations)

A POWERFUL LOBBY: 80 MILLION VOTERS

Barbara Victor summarizes: “Rules become trivial and invalid. All laws can be violated to fulfill God’s desires. Everything is possible if it only rests on faith and religion. The social contract can be broken with impunity. The United States presently runs the risk of transforming itself from a democracy into a theocracy in which the religious dogma of a very powerful group of the population becomes the law. With the help of their financial resources, their political force and the mere number of followers, evangelicals try to annul the constitution, bend the domestic political agenda of the US and orient foreign policy to fundamentalist goals.” (Pp.327-8)

WHAT UNDERLIES THIS?

In reading the book of the journalist, one has a strange impression. What if all this misanthropic ideology was artificially designed in the name of Christianity by some think tanks? Was the fundamentalist religion set on a broad war course with a powerful “spin”? Even if they are still secretly Trotskyites at heart, neoconservative representatives of the Bush administration cultivate a misanthropic end-time ideology. To them, war is the father of all things, the father of permanent revolution up to “redemption” for the elect.

The question of these think tanks is: How can a believing, religious population with honest intentions be won for a destructive world war that violates their own principles? How can a religious and ideologically motivated opposition against the war be paralyzed? How can the rules of human rights and international law be annulled? How can all humanitarian tradition arduously developed by humanity be broken – without dying of shame? What is concocted there is extremely dangerous for world peace.