Monday, July 09, 2007
God and Country
As the agony of Iraq is prolonged to prevent our president from suffering the indignity of admitting he's been wrong, fewer and fewer people have been willing to go along.
Over the weekend, three more Republican senators -- Pete Dominci, Judd Gregg, and Lamar Alexander -- joined Richard Lugar, John Sununu, Susan Collins, Gordon Smith, Norm Coleman, and Chuck Hagel in calling for an end to the Iraq fiasco.
In what may prove an even more ominous sign of the erosion of support for the president and his Iraq adventure, evangelical Christians are also beginning to rethink their support for the war.
In Saturday's Boston Globe, Charles Marsh, a professor of religion and director of the Project on Lived Theology at the University of Virginia, draws a parallel between "the church in Germany as it lay in the ruins of its fatal allegiance to Hitler" and Christian fundamentalist support, in this country, for the war in Iraq and all the things -- extraordinary rendition, secret prisons, torture, suspension of habeas corpus, and wiretapping -- that go with it.
"Conservative evangelical elites," writes Marsh, "in exchange for political access and power, have ransacked the faith and trivialized its convictions. It is as though these Christians consider themselves to be recipients of a special revelation, as if God has whispered eternal secrets in their ears and summoned them to world-historic leadership in the present and future."
Marsh sees "signs of hope as an emerging generation of Christian leaders holds out the promise of a more comprehensively just and moral account of faith than the narrow agendas of the Christian right."
Red State Rabble certainly hopes Marsh is right. We can't share his faith but I feel certain that many of the ragtag bunch of skeptics who water here at Red State Rabble share his values.
This is an important read, RSR urges all of our readers to follow the link above and read with an open mind what Marsh has to say.
Over the weekend, three more Republican senators -- Pete Dominci, Judd Gregg, and Lamar Alexander -- joined Richard Lugar, John Sununu, Susan Collins, Gordon Smith, Norm Coleman, and Chuck Hagel in calling for an end to the Iraq fiasco.
In what may prove an even more ominous sign of the erosion of support for the president and his Iraq adventure, evangelical Christians are also beginning to rethink their support for the war.
In Saturday's Boston Globe, Charles Marsh, a professor of religion and director of the Project on Lived Theology at the University of Virginia, draws a parallel between "the church in Germany as it lay in the ruins of its fatal allegiance to Hitler" and Christian fundamentalist support, in this country, for the war in Iraq and all the things -- extraordinary rendition, secret prisons, torture, suspension of habeas corpus, and wiretapping -- that go with it.
"Conservative evangelical elites," writes Marsh, "in exchange for political access and power, have ransacked the faith and trivialized its convictions. It is as though these Christians consider themselves to be recipients of a special revelation, as if God has whispered eternal secrets in their ears and summoned them to world-historic leadership in the present and future."
Marsh sees "signs of hope as an emerging generation of Christian leaders holds out the promise of a more comprehensively just and moral account of faith than the narrow agendas of the Christian right."
Red State Rabble certainly hopes Marsh is right. We can't share his faith but I feel certain that many of the ragtag bunch of skeptics who water here at Red State Rabble share his values.
This is an important read, RSR urges all of our readers to follow the link above and read with an open mind what Marsh has to say.
