Messianic Militarism

So Rove is packing up his black bag and leaving town, having accomplished pretty much everything he set out to when he goose-stepped into the White House with his faux cowboy boss in 2000. The mainstream media is taking his departure rather well and has actually been running creepily laudatory stories about his career in politics. The Republicans now have a permanent majority, in ideology if not in numbers. Can anyone argue that the political atmosphere in this country hasn’t tacked hard to the right since Bush took office?

After recently finishing Joe Bageant’s Deer Hunting With Jesus, the Patriot has gotten his panties in a twist about fundamentalist Christians again. Every time I try to ignore them they keep traipsing, uninvited, back into my life. For example, lately a very annoying man on the Staten Island Ferry has taken to preaching the gospel at the top of his lungs on the 7:45am boat. That asshole is lucky I’m a free speech absolutist or I would have tossed him over the side days ago.

Over the last six years, fundamentalist Christians have been allowed to set the terms of the debate on a host of social issues in the media and their positions are reported with due consideration, as though believing in the rapture is the most normal thing in the world. The fall out from this sort of acceptance is that speech is banned, abstinence is taught in the schools as sex education and even papers as supposedly liberal as the New York Times are publishing “debates” about intelligent design and evolution. Lest we forget, 79% of Americans surveyed in 2004 by Newsweek believe that as the Bible says, Jesus Christ was born of the Virgin Mary, without a human father. Curiously, a mere 63 percent of Americans believe the Bible is literally true and the Word of God. I guess this means that 16% of those that don’t believe the bible is the word of God make an exception for the part about the virgin birth.

When broken down into different demographics, the poll somewhat unsurprisingly showed 77 percent of Republicans believe in the literal truth of the Bible as do 59 percent of Democrats and 50 percent of those not affiliated with either major party. These numbers are not encouraging for the rationalists among us who would rather base our middle-east foreign policy decisions on something other than the Book of Revelations. Which brings us, somewhat circuitously, to the concept of Christian Zionism.

Christian Zionism is a belief among some Christians that the return of the Jews to the Holy Land, and the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, is in accordance with Biblical prophecy. Christian Zionists also believe that Christ cannot return to earth until certain events occur. The Jews must return to Palestine, (done) gain control of Jerusalem (not yet), rebuild a temple, and then we all must engage in the final, great battle of Armageddon, after which the righteous will be brought up to heaven and the heathens (including, one assumes, any Jews left hanging around after the conflagration) sent off to push heavy stones around with the devil. Which Christians believe in this nonsense, you might ask? Well, I hate to break it to you but, well, lets just say that the Bush administration’s foreign policy is heavily influenced by the writings of a cave-dwelling hermit who had apocalyptic visions some 2000 years ago.

So while Rove took great pains to court the fundamentalist Christians, who are, after all, the largest voting bloc in the Republican Party, he chose to ignore the danger of coddling messianic militarism. This may well end up being Rove’s true legacy. Granting unprecedented political access to Christian Jihadists and allowing them to govern-from the oval office-using the Bible as a roadmap.