Maybe it's because I'm a daughterless ungay male? Even after decades of seeing the influence of "Christian" politics, even in my own family, I've regarded it as a goofy sideshow taking place far from where real decisions are made, real ideas are debated.
It's only now I'm finally realizing that this twisted caricature of Christianity really has the potential to rival Nazism or Stalinism, and make Islamic terror seem mild.
This goes beyond homophobia, abortion, and Darwin. It's about mass murder. They've already done it. During their one brief experience of controlling a national government, these "Christians" created their own Killing Fields. They did it with the blessings of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.
Whatever happens in November, we can expect the "culture wars" to get a whole lot uglier. How much uglier? The sky's the limit. This ideology recognizes no human limits. They want the whole planet to drop dead, once they get Raptured up into the clouds. Will the End Times need a jumpstart? If so, Rios Montt's rampage through Guatemala was just a little appetizer.
This is from a Guatemala tourists' guide:
...in the 1960s and 1970s a new wave of evangelism took off. Experts say that increased public violence and the breakdown of close-knit communities saw people turning to something that renewed their sense of ties and belonging... It has been said that many Catholics identified themselves as evangelicals to escape death during the worst years of the civil war... In Guatemala, where evangelism has soared, unlike any other Latin American nation, the biggest churches are the Assembly of God... [etc.]... Efrain Rios Montt (1982-83) was Guatemala's first Protestant leader. He belongs to the [evangelical-pentecostal] Church of the Word...
from Guatemala Handbook: The Travel Guide
By Claire Boobbyer, Peter Pollard
Published by Footprint Travel Guides, 2002
ISBN 1903471087, 9781903471081
420 pages [Google Books]
General Efrain Rios Montt, a church elder, was promoted as a hero, almost a saint, by U.S. televangelists; he was doing God's work. His time as military leader of Guatemala was brief but eventful. Even by Guatemalan standards, his wholesale massacres of rural Mayans were remarkable. Lest you think this is all faraway ancient history, note that Rios Montt's son-in-law is Illinois Congressman Jerry Weller (who is now retiring to spend more time with his family, after a questions arose about his Nicaraguan land deal).
Click on Rios Montt link for gory details of his short-lived "de facto Presidency". Hundreds of Mayan villages were wiped off the face of the earth.
More on evangelical activities in Guatemala here.
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From a 2001 U.S. State Department report on Guatemala:
On June 8, a court convicted three military officer... murder of Bishop Juan Gerardi... The murder occurred just 2 days after Bishop Gerardi delivered the final report of the Office's "Recovery of Historical Memory" project, which detailed many of the human rights abuses committed during the internal conflict and held the [government] forces responsible for more than 90 percent of war-related human rights violations...
Prosecutors appear to have dropped the case of Mayan priest Raul Coc Choc who was shot and killed at his home in the department of Chimaltenango. Coc Choc was a leader of the National Association of Mayan Priests; members of the board reported that he had received numerous death threats over the telephone....
Although indigenous Guatemalans outnumber the westernized "Ladino" community, they historically have been dominated by the Ladinos and generally excluded from the mainstream of social, economic, and political activity. The Ladino community long has regarded indigenous people with disdain. Reports of discrimination against indigenous religious practices must be viewed in the context of this widespread Ladino rejection of indigenous culture.... Maya religious leaders note widespread discrimination by evangelical Protestants, and to a lesser extent, by Catholics. For example, despite the large number of indigenous members of evangelical congregations, traditional religious practice often is described as "witchcraft" or "devil worship". Indigenous evangelicals regularly are threatened with expulsion from the church if they should become involved with traditional religious practices.
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The State Department finds that "witch"-hunting is not unknown in Ecuador, where the Assembly of God and Church of the Word are active. As of 2008, there are an estimated one million Protestants in Ecuador (population was 12.2 million in 2001), primarily indigenous converts to evangelical churches. "On August 27, 2006, two military officers... and a civilian... allegedly killed Balti Cadena, a traditional healer (yachak), and injured one of his sons, near the Amazonas Military Fort in Puyo, Pastaza Province. The Public Prosecutor, in a civilian court, charged the two military officers with murder. At the end of the reporting period, the case had not gone to trial."
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An Overview of Evangelical Politics in Latin America:
In Guatemala and Bolivia, which along with Mexico, Ecuador and Peru are the Latin American countries with the largest indigenous populations, divisions have also been wrought by differences of religious affiliation, which often merges with support for particular political parties and local authorities. ...
"Many religions have destroyed what we are, and it is sad to see the contempt that the new generations have for what we once were. They think that the traditional beliefs of the Mayans (the main indigenous ethnic group in Central America) are witchcraft, or satanic," he commented to IPS.
According to González Yoc, the Church of the Word and Assembly of God, both of which are evangelical Protestant denominations based in the United States, were implanted in indigenous communities in Guatemala to collaborate with the military dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s.
Sociologist and journalist Roger Pascual of the Spanish non-governmental group Agencia de Información Solidaria maintains that these two churches were backed by the U.S. government to combat anything that appeared somehow linked to communism in Guatemala.
It was during this same period that the Liberation Theology movement within the Catholic Church had come to exercise a major influence in Central America. ...
...In his Analysis of the Incursion of Sects into the Political Spheres of Latin America, Pascual states, "The U.S. government contributed to building up the Assembly of God Pentecostal sect to such an extent that it came to control 1,500 houses of worship, in addition to numerous television and radio stations" in Guatemala.
In addition, he notes, "The (Ronald) Reagan administration (1981-1989) was also behind the establishment of the Church of the Word, which collaborated in the coup d'état led by General José Efraín Ríos Montt in 1982."
Guatemala was engulfed in a civil war from 1960 until 1996. Of the roughly 200,000 people who were killed (including 45,000 "disappeared") by the government security forces, the majority were Mayan Indians. The war also led to the internal displacement of one million people and the exodus of 500,000 refugees to Mexico alone, while 250,000 children were orphaned.
"Religions have an impact on our collective behaviour, and change the essence of the way in which we are organised in communities and families. Because of religion, the traditionally collective nature of indigenous peoples has given way to individualism, and is dividing us," said Macas.
"There are a huge number of sects in Ecuador, I believe over 300, whose role is to pacify, divide and tame the people, subordinating them to the interests of the dominant powers or big corporations, like the oil companies," he added.
from RELIGION-LATIN AMERICA: Indigenous Peoples Divided by Faith
By Diego Cevallos
Inter Press Service
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This Salon article on Sarah Palin's Assembly of God theology has probably been featured and linked already many times at Daily Kos. If you haven't seen it before, check it out. It mentions the belief that war with Iran is part of God's plan. It also quotes this official statement of the Church's Commission on Doctrinal Purity:
Today in our American culture, many people have turned their adoration from the Creator to the creation. They have gone to the extreme and are now worshipping the earth. We believe worship of the land, the sea, the oceans, and other attributes of the earth is an abomination to God the Creator.
Loving nature is "an abomination" — kinda like paedophilia, I guess. (Funny, in my experience, most creators prefer to be known, loved and appreciated through their creations, not in spite of them.) Note that the Creator gets the traditional capital C, but creation is demoted to lower-case. Betcha the Commission on Doctrinal Purity are all real estate developers by day, pursuing their hobby of blasphemy by night.
These folks have one virtue: they practice what they preach.
Mayor Palin helped bring lots of big box stores and acres of asphalt to Wasilla; Guatemala too has recently become an environmental disaster, its rain-forests rapidly replaced by vast pesticide-drenched export-crop plantations.
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Where is all this heading? By chance, I just came across this "Christian Blog" by a big-time Assembly of God dude, John B. Abela, who believes it's time to break free of the shackles of proper behavior, and really cut loose.
His sentiments are clearly heartfelt, and even rather beautiful, in a way, in the unedited original. But the same kind of noble, innocent passion, the same yearning for a reborn world, always illuminates and energizes the movements that leave a legacy of unimaginable horror in the ashes of this world. The recent history of Guatemala is just a dress rehearsal for the devastation they crave.
[The new generation of U.S. "Christians"] will want a real life experience of the power of God.
They will want truth in action, not truth in teachings...
They will want the Bible spoken, taught, and lived out - and in a way that the church hasn't seen for hundreds of year, and likely never here in America.
They [sic] church of America in the present generation, and more so in the ones to come, are going to want a passion, a truth, a burning desire - like what we see in ... South America ... right now!
The 'Church of America' ... has lost its power for the sake of properness.
...So, what will the church be like in the next 10+ years?
That my dear friends, is the question of this century, being asked within the walls of but a few churches who truly desire to break out of the shell and into freedom.
Will the church 'wake up'?
...Forget not that God gave even Sodom and Gomorrah a chance to get right.
God also gave the keepers of Solomon's and David's temple a chance to clean things up.
And God went too far [sic] as to even gave the Pharisees of Christ's time a chance to get things right. [WtF? Is this a Freudian typo? God "went too far" in his patience and mercy?!? Is God a liberal wimp or what?]
Throughout history, God has given men [sic] the chance to get and keep their temples (churches) clean and running in the ways He set before them.
And yet, throughout history, very few have not failed to do so [sic].
Throughout history we have seen them all fall to the ground: Sodom and Gomorrah, Solomon's & David's temple, and the Pharisees....
...The church must see the kingdom that is 'thy kingdom come, thy will be done'...'on earth'....
It's very interesting that Mr. Abela's profile explains how he came to the Assembly of God through investigating his own Native American heritage; he spent ten years exploring (and never rejecting) traditional spirituality.
It's important to remember that these folks are not aliens or robots. They have souls, sometimes very good souls; they have brains, sometimes very good brains (in an advanced state of disrepair, usually, but capable of resurrection). Some can be saved; some will save themselves when they open their eyes. Bear in mind that great motto from the cross: Father forgive them, for they know not what they do. They don't even know what they believe. It's our job to prevent them acting on their silly beliefs, but we should do so with compassion and understanding, as well as steely resolve. They have chosen to become children, childishly committed to their fantasies. We choose to be adults. Adults should be firm but never abusive as they guide children towards realism and maturity.
This is indeed a holy war — for common sense, for all of life, for the future of this old earth. These silly people leave us no choice but victory or death. Victory through peaceful and legal means seems to be within our reach right now.
(And by the way, don't worry about declaring war on Christianity. I've yet to find one these poor fools who even knows what's in the battered black books they carry around. Their preachers tell them Jesus loves hydrogen bombs and wants more of them; they have no idea the Bible begins and ends with the Tree of Life — and if that ain't a sacred image of ever-evolving Creation, I'm a monkey's uncle, not nephew.)
Postscript 1: After piecing this together, I found there are no less than 59 Stories or Diaries here that mention Rios Montt, including several recent discussions of fundamentalist politics by Dogemperor which look as if they offer more and better information than what I hastily collected here.
Postscript 2: It would be a mistake to think a Palin presidency is the only real danger. As you may recall, McCain, who clearly finds Palin's opinions acceptable (fundamentalist bombings and shootings at abortion clinics are not terrorism), was a big supporter of a global network of death squads headed by his buddy General Singlaub. The guys on our side (Obama's side, that is) are not saints either. Zbigniew Brzezinski dabbled in death squads and dictatorships, and Colin Powell's memoirs include a nice justification for picking off civilians in rice paddies from helicopters. The moral difference may be negligible; the danger from "Christians" is greater because neither logic nor strategy (nor even this plane of existence) are deciding factors in their apocalyptic worldview, assuming they actually believe the stuff they say.
Postscript 3: The greatest danger from these far-out "Christians" is that their God is a total abstraction who hates his own "creation", AND they have a symbiotic relationship with an equally perverse caricature of capitalism, which values (or worships) totally abstract money that grows by wasting and destroying everything of real value. How can this planet keep body and soul together when it's pulled apart by unreal abstracted spirituality and unreal abstracted materialism? God and money are supposed to be enemies, but in America today they're united in their crusade against real life.