Big George (Billy Bob Thorton): “What's a scourge?”
Sally (Iggy Pop): “It's like when there's something real bad happening, and you can't do nothing to stop it – like locusts or something.” – Jim Jarmusch's “Dead Man”
"We are the chosen of God. I am chosen from the chosen of God. Thus can I tell you that what impedes my happiness is wicked, and that my opposition comes with divine wrath."
I don't believe that. In fact, those sentences are so far from my character that I find them unimaginable, and yet there are people going about making such claims. In the forgettable fifth season of Babylon 5 there is, amongst all the preaching, a joke. A warden takes on an asylum and goes to meet the patients. The first he meets says that he is Jesus Christ. “I see,” the doctor says, “and how do you know this?”
“God told me so,” the inmate replied.
From the next bed a voice shouted, “I did not!”
This is amusing because people who claim to be Jesus are automatically suspect in good old “real America.” In the steak and potatoes America of the fly-over states, we don't do things like that – except, of course, when we do.
The people most likely to proclaim themselves prophets and, more, to announce that events (national, international, parking space availability) are a scourge of God, are most likely to be from 'real America.' They exist on street corners in Manhattan, too, of course, and we can't forget Father Coughlin and the merry lot that the Roman Catholic Church has donated from time to time, but most now are not only Protestant, but a particular variety.
I hope, here, to explain, at least partly, why these mountebanks are self-convicted long before they clamber up onto a stage. I hope to explain how and why they are outside of the traditions of the churches (literally out standing in their field). I would also hope to stir people to oppose them using language that can destroy their force, and recover the person if possible.
You might believe that our political body is infested with these parasites now because it's obvious that these are end times. Few things could be more clear than that these are the last days. Why, “excessive taxes have afflicted us, and storms have very often caused failure of crops; therefore in this land there have been, as is apparent, many years of injustices and treachery everywhere among our people.” (I'll give you the source of the quote in a bit.) What's more, we have messed up the planet with our carbon, our pollution, our hairspray, and our nuclear waste. If that doesn't move you, then think about how preposterously screwed we are by terrorists getting nuclear weapons and our own ability to make terrorists, whoever “we” are. Then there is the earth itself, which is in revolt against us, apparently, and trying to shake us off like a dog with a flea.
I'm an expert at doom, a connoisseur of it. I wanted to put out The Mobil Guide to Most Damned Places, but I picked publishers who went out of business. I've been doomed since a child, and in multiple ways, too. In the 1960's, I got big heaps of Russians wanting to nuke me and my Quisp cereal. As an infant, missiles were rolling down our street to point at Cuba, and as a teen I lived in a first strike target city.
I thought the idea was to push against the darkness, and so it's a bit of a shock to hear about fellow consumers of doom embracing it. What people call “the religious right” wants to have it both ways. They want their Armaggedon and their ephod, too. There are groups trying to breed a red heifer so as to get a new David anointed in Israel, who can be the anti-Christ while other groups do so to gain the messiah, so as to get the end to come, and then they also say that “one world government” must not happen because that's a sign of the anti-Christ. For most Christians, this is pretty weird, as most Christians don't have the “once saved always saved” mentality that they do.
(The idea is this. Grace, for Protestants, is overpowering, as it must be, and grace leads to salvation. Now, every church says that one can sin and must repent of sin. Some very, very weird people say that once you're saved, that's it: you're saved forever, and it doesn't matter what you do. It's all covered by "grace," from then on. I have had sincere young people tell me that, when Jesus said “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone,” that that was an invitation to cast stones, because, being saved once, he was now without sin and could stone all the harlots he encountered. Another told me that “Judge not, lest ye be judged” was an encouragement to judge people, if you're saved, because then, as saved, you'll never not be saved, and so you're supposed to judge others. This is the theology that is spreading through the Southern Baptist churches now.)
Every age has been the end of the world. Any student of history can tell you that. In fact, the quotation I have above is from Archbishop Wulfstan, writing to the English, in 1014 AD. He goes on to say, like any politician or prophet today would, “...the laws of the people have deteriorated entirely too greatly, since Edgar died” and that the English were about to become a degraded and destroyed people like the Celts, if they did not repent (Sermo Lupi Ad Anglos found here in Anglo-Saxon and here in Modern English). Wulfstan tells his English audience that the Vikings preying on the churches and slaughtering people are devils who work as the hand of God, punishing them for their sins.
During the civil war that we call The Anarchy in England, things were absolutely awful. One Anglo-Saxon Chronicle continued, though, and that was in the monastery at Peterborough. Barons were constantly raising money, even though there was no silver anymore, and so they began torturing peasants and robbing people, and the author of the second continuation of the Peterborough Chronicle is quite clear that “men said that Christ slept” and “this and more than we can tell we suffered nineteen winters for our sins.”
Wulfstan and the Peterborough author, although they fear national calamities are punishment, lack the arrogance of scourage. They do not make themselves prophets. For that, we need a special trick.
What we need is Puritanism.
Puritanism would more or less become today's Presbyterians, somewhat sort of, kind of. However, the Puritans of the Geneva school (the “Pilgrim fathers”) were hugely into theocracy. They tried it during the German peasants war with the Zwickau Prophets (Nicholas Storch, who is not to be confused with Larry). They were quite active in their view of prophecy, as well. Not only did they affirm a new “age of miracles,” but they also began reading the Bible for types.
See this page for a discussion of typology. "Type" is like symbol, only bigger. A type recurs in time and has resonance across four levels of meaning. What's important for me and for this discussion is that it was the Puritan habit to look at any and every thing in the Old Testament as a prefiguration of another event and another. Most famously, they saw themselves as the Jews leaving Egypt for the new Canaan of America, and they saw their struggles against the native Americans as the struggle against the Canaanites. As professor Campbell says, some “compared current events directly with Old and New Testament types, discovering parallels that elucidated how the scriptures were being fulfilled daily."
It takes gumption, if not pride, to think oneself Elijah. For most of us, there are clear differences between us and a patriarch.
PAT ROBERTSON: And, you know, Kristi, something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, "We will serve you if you will get us free from the French." True story. And so, the devil said, "OK, it's a deal."
Pat Robertson, by dint of prayer, has elevated himself to the position of prophet. Not only did he discern in that particular earthquake a smiting, but he saw in one particular hurricane, Hurricane Katrina,
a blow against abortion.
Other scrourageous speakers thought it was due to promiscuity, prostitution, and racial crimes, but Pat knew it was not against New Orleans the hurricane struck, but against America. On the other hand, Hurricane Gloria was a test, as it was coming to a particular spot – his home – and he moved it onto Long Island. Tsunamis, though, unlike hurricanes and earthquakes, are not messages, according to prophet Robertson.
Pat Robertson, and every other minister who claims that a particular disease or natural disaster is God's judgment, is attempting to wrest the black hat from Cotton Mather's corpse. He and they are attempting to be prophets of the new chosen people. The number of licensed premises necessary is immense, and the fact that all of this symbolism and typology is coming from the mouths of people who claim to read the Bible literally ought to be enough to make them burst into flames.
I have had an intimate interest in battling these people. You see, I was born with birth defects in my heart that should have meant a short life. I read Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor when I was nineteen, I think, and couldn't believe she was the first to say what was obvious to me. Anyone imputing blame or cause to a disease simply burned me up. Diseases are amoral. Later, I had relatives, and now a parent, falling victim to smoking diseases. Again, there is this idea of “high risk behavior, had to know... it's just desserts.” The hell it is. Disease is amoral. Risk is amoral. Addiction is amoral. I knew in my heart that all of these people wanting, yearning to find blame for disease and disaster were superstitious and, at the same time, not supported by the religion they quoted.
I only read the Bible straight through when I was thirteen. Since then, I've just read what I've wanted to read, which has meant that I've little knowledge of Leviticus or Joel, much more of Luke. I didn't really read Exodus again until six months ago. I was shocked to find that God did not “harden Pharaoh's heart.” In fact, let me recommend all of you to read the thing again in a clear translation. In most of the cases, God gives the only real, true, clear example of an out and out scourge, and Pharaoh says, “Ooof! That's awful,” and then the scourge ends, and he says, “Yeah, but I can't let all these illegal immigrants go, or they'll be used by enemies.” (Read the book again, seriously! The whole reason Pharaoh is rough on the Jews is that they keep having children, and he's afraid of all these "foreigners" in his kingdom.) There is one time, and only one (Exodus 9:12), after Pharaoh has, of his own will, changed his mind several times in a row, that God decides to harden Pharaoh's heart so that there will be an act great enough as to act as a covenant with His people. (In other words, the reason is not to be mean to Egypt or even punish Egypt, but rather to set up Passover and create the Jewish people.)
Other than that, we have the prophets. The prophets don't really talk about the future. They talk about the present, and they act as mediators, explaining to kings and rulers of Israel what God wants. Essentially, they explain what must be done to keep the contract.
When it comes to sufferings, though, I think the authority that Christians like Robertson ought to seek out is Jesus. It makes sense, after all.
Luke 13:2-4: On being told of some men from Galilee whom Pilate had killed and placed on their own sacrifices, “And he answered them, 'Do you think these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans because they suffered in this way? I tell you no! But unless you all repent, you too will perish. Or do you suppose that those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them were worse culprits than all the men who live in Jerusalem?”
Once again, Jesus doesn't seem to support these scourge prophets. He says quite clearly that the people who suffer misfortune are
not bad people. He says that they were just ordinary people and bad things happen, and death comes without warning, and we should all repent, get our lives in order.
You see, the pagan religions that Christianity replaced in the west and the polytheisms that Judaism competed with in the east were superstitious. They had the idea of a quid pro quo. Zeus did not care about you, and Baal did not know your name, and Ra did not want you to make or lose money. Each of them wanted fat to eat and incense to breathe, and so you gave them the fat, and they gave you what you asked for. When they were pissed off, they struck back. They were carrot and stick, push and pull. Their realm was the life lived, because it was primarily mercantile.
So, the next time we hear that AIDS is God's punishment, we need to know the credentials of this prophet. Then we need to know how that person dares to argue with Jesus. The next time some squinting figure in a television studio announces that prayer in schools is what God wants, and the stock market crashed because we haven't had it, we need to find out why that person thinks himself so holy as to be a prophet, and why God would punish the innocent for the guilty's deeds, and why God would show an interest this year rather than 1975.
The hideous scourage – the hubris of thinking oneself not only judge of the world but wielder of God's wrath – is one of the graver sins I see enacted in public.