Paul Gottfried is a political scientist always worth reading, his books and his short writings on the Internet. In this article, What Drives the Religious Right , he made some good points about the nature of the religious right, predominately Evangelical Protestant though I know some Catholics who’ve taken up with their way of thought, or their way of intellectual laziness as Professor Gottfried describes their way of thought or non-thought or feeling good about themselves or whatever. I hope to find something good and serious to say about the overall thrust of the article but I reached these sentences and had to comment on one issue that’s been bothering me for a while:
Pat Robertson touted Giuliani as a presidential candidate on his television program, despite Giuliani’s enthusiastic advocacy of a pro-choice position throughout his career. Robertson liked Giuliani because he was good on Israel. Leaders of the Religious Right have also had many nice things to say about Joe Lieberman, whose Zionism and advocacy of foreign wars seem to trump his support for third-term abortion. Bill Bennett backed Lieberman for president in 2008, without forfeiting (as far as I know) his credentials as an opponent of abortion beloved to the Religious Right.
So far as I can tell, there are a lot of my fellow Catholics, and maybe others, who describe themselves as pro-life but in practice are only opposed to killing babies in certain ways. They’re fine with killing babies so long as it’s done in a morally and theologically proper way — shooting them with sprays of machine-gun bullets or dropping napalm on them or starving them to death or depriving them of important medicines.
We have to realize there are governments and other human institutions, even pro-life organizations, which have become parasites and/or cancers inside the Body of Christ, and some outside the Body of Christ as defined by the historical boundaries of regions predominately Christian — I know the problems with politicized or nominalistic Christianity but we have to start somewhere to understand this problem. I’ve written about these parasites and cancers with regard to governments in particular in Freedom and Structure in Human Life — Criminal and Not Satanic which is a short addendum to Freedom and Structure in Human Life — What is a Conspiracy?. And we must remember that where there are powerful governments, no matter how evil, there will be many human beings ready and willing to do their bidding or fighting to take control.
The point I really wish to emphasize, what I’d like to keep in my personal scope of attention, is that the real issue is the Body of Christ. Compassionate might be the Lord, but He is clearly willing to tell a story in which the most innocent of creatures suffer. Human beings, including the sweetest of babies might be torn apart by vicious predators or they might have their skin stripped off their bodies by diseases that cause their own immune systems to attack the flesh just below that skin. God does what He does for His own reasons, but the most important reason from our viewpoint is: He is forming the Body of Christ by way of this story which is a world. This leads to a claim that there is something going on which is still more important to a Christian than even the mass murder of innocents — the American government in particular, but other Western governments as well, are acting as if to systematically destroy the Body of Christ starting with the outer (though often more ancient) churces in Asia. They say it’s dangerous to be an enemy of the United States but fatal to be a friend. Enemy or friend, it seems fatal to all ancient Christian communities when the American military or intelligence services enters your country.
Many years ago, I read a story in which a Senator or Congressman was asked if he were accusing a colleague of being a Communist agent and he responded something like this, “No, but I am saying that if he were a Communist agent, he wouldn’t have to act any differently.” I’ll say along those lines, “I’m not accusing the American people and their leaders of trying to destroy the Body of Christ, starting with the ancient Christian churches of Iraq and Syria and others in Southwest Asia, but I am saying that they wouldn’t have to act any differently if they were engaged in such an evil effort.” [In fact, a little digging on the Internet will produce testimony that Western European countries and the United States also regularly betrayed the Christians of Poland and Russia and other Eastern European regions, often for the flimsiest of payments by Stalin or Hitler.]
The ancient Jews used to honor pious non-Jews with the title Friend of God. Perhaps the leaders of the United States, and all who march behind them, should honor each other with the title Enemy of God.
Or, perhaps we Christians in the United States should be watching our leaders more carefully and calling them to account when they act in evil ways.