A War God

!(inset)http://static.flickr.com/37/122496352_1954981cd2_m.jpg! There was a “War on Christians” conference here in Washington, DC a little while back. You may have heard something about it — this is the event where Reverend Rick Scarborough blamed all of Tom DeLay’s legal troubles on DeLay’s alledged dedication to Christianity.

Elizabeth Castelli has an “excellent piece in the Revealer”:http://www.therevealer.org/archives/main_story_002500.php about the conference, giving us an excellent view into the impending culture war. It’s more than a little unsettling; she paints a picture of people not only significantly out-of-touch with their faith, but also powerfully out-of-touch with reality.

bq. One critical piece of the puzzle is a traditionalist, triumphalist historical narrative in which the United States was given to Christians by God to establish a providential nation based on biblical precepts … The Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution? Christian documents. The destiny of America? To be a Christian nation in possession of — possessed by? — a special, divine commission. It is, as we learn, a military commission: “God has,” as one speaker at the conference put it, “given us our marching orders.”

The militaristic rhetoric is pretty scary, especially in context of the demonizing rhetoric used to describe everyone Not Them.

bq. “We are under spiritual invasion!” intoned Rod Parsley, an evangelist from Ohio. “Man your battle stations! Ready your weapons! LOCK AND LOAD!” (The audience responded to these imperatives with a raucous and exuberant standing ovation.) Parsley also claimed that those Christian churches not sharing the perspective of the Christians represented at the conference constitute “the devil’s demilitarized zone,” naïvely and fatally embracing “peace at any price.”

I particularly like that last bit — “peace at any price.” These are “Bible-believing Christians” who, somehow, have managed to miss the strong pacifist thread that runs through the Gospel. These folks may call their God Christ, but they are not following the Prince of Peace and the Son of Man. They worship a war god.

bq. “I kind of feel like the Levite,” Ron Luce confessed. And then he uttered a battle cry of his own: “CUT UP THE CONCUBINE! CUT UP THE CONCUBINE! CUT UP THE CONCUBINE!” [ A reference to "Judges 19":http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Judges%2019;&version=31 ]

These people interpret decisions that _do not involve them_ — health decisions, religious decisions, and entertainment decisions — as acts of war. And they use that to justify their violent rhetoric, and, in some cases, actual violence. They are not playing defense in the culture war; they are precipitating it. They _want_ it. And they will undoubtedly be the ones to throw the first stone.

??Thanks to “MacRaven”:http://www.haxton.org/weblog/2006/04/10#cutUpTheConcubine for pointing me to this. Photo by “cstoddard”:http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=122496352&size=m. ??