CounterPunch
January 4,
2003
Mine Eyes Have
Seen the Glory
Bush's Armageddon Obsession, Revisited
by MICHAEL ORTIZ
HILL
"We are lived by forces we scarcely understand," wrote W.H.
Auden. What forces live us now as America again torques toward
war?
George W. Bush is certainly the plaything of such forces as the
geopolitics of oil but it seems that he is susceptible to other even darker
archetypal concerns. Let me be blunt. The man is delusional and the shape of his
delusion is specifically apocalyptic in belief and intent. That Bush would
attack so many vital systems on so many fronts from foreign policy to the
environment may seem confusing from the point of view of realpolitik but becomes
transparent in terms of the apocalyptic worldview to which he subscribes. All
systems are supposed to go down so the Messiah can come and Bush, seemingly, has
taken on the role of the one who brings this to pass.
The Reverend Billy
Graham taught Bush to live in anticipation of the Second Coming but it was his
friendship with Dr. Tony Evans that shaped  Bush's
political understanding of how to deport himself in an apocalyptic era. Dr.
Evans, the pastor of a large Dallas church and a founder of the Promise Keepers
movement taught Bush about "how the world should be seen from a divine
viewpoint," according to Dr. Martin Hawkins, Evans assistant pastor.
S.R.
Shearer of Antipas Ministries writes, "Most of the leaders of the Promise
Keepers embrace a doctrine of 'end time' (eschatology), known as 'dominionim.'
Dominionism pictures the seizure of earthly (temporal) power by the 'people of
God' as the only means through which the world can be rescued.... It is the
eschatology that Bush has imbibed; an eschatology through which he has gradually
(and easily) come to see himself as an agent of God who has been called by him
to 'restore the earth to God's control', a 'chosen vessel', so to speak, to
bring in the Restoration of All Thingss." Shearer calls this delusion,
"Messianic leadership"-- that is to say usurping the role usually ascribed to
the Messiah.
In Bush at War Bob Woodward writes, "Most presidents have
high hopes. Some have grandiose visions of what they will achieve, and he was
firmly in that camp."
"To answer these attacks and rid the world of
evil," says Bush. And again, "We will export death and violence to the four
corners of the earth in defense of this great nation." Grandiose visions.
Woodward comments, "The president was casting his mission and that of the
country in the grand vision of Gods Master Plan."
In dominionism we can
see the theological source of Bush's monomania. Not to be distracted by the fact
that he lost the popular election by a half a million votes, that the Joint
Chief of Staff at the Pentagon were so concerned about his plans to invade Iraq
that they leaked their unanimous objection, that he has systematically alienated
much of the world, that roughly seventy percent of Americans remain unconvinced
of the imminent threat of Saddam Hussein and the same percentage object to war
if there will be significant American casualties--none of this is in the least
relevant. He believes his mandate toward action is from God.
As humans we
live within stories. Some stories, like apocalypse are thousands of years old.
The scriptured text that informs Bush understanding of and enactment of the End
of Days (Revelations 19) depicts Christ returning as the Heavenly Avenger.
Revelations is the only New Testament book that justifies violence of any kind,
and this it takes to the limit: Christ himself the agent of mass
murder.
"I saw heaven open and there before me was a white horse who is
called Faithful and True. With justice he judges and makes war...He is dressed
in a robe dipped in blood and his name is the word of God...Out of his mouth
comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the Nations. And I saw an angel
standing in the sun who cried in a low voice to all the birds flying in
midair--come gather together for the great supper of God, so you may eat the
flesh of kings, generals and mighty men, of horses and their riders, and the
flesh of all people, free and slave, small and great."
Such is "the glory
of the coming of the Lord." Truth, carnage, and the ecstasy of vultures. In a
ruined world the Messiah slays the antichrist and creates "a new heaven and a
new earth." The dead are judged, the Christians saved and the rest damned to
eternal torment. The New Jerusalem is established and the Lord rules it "with an
iron scepter."
It is not inconceivable that Bush is literally and
determinedly drawn, consciously and unconsciously, toward the enactment of such
a scenario, as he believes, for God's sake. Indeed the stark relentlessness of
his policy in the Middle East suggests as much.
It dishonors the
profundity of the Christian tradition if one doesn't note that Revelations has
always been a rogue text. Because of its association with the Montanist heresy
(which like contemporary fundamentalists took it to be literal rather than
allegorical) it was with great reluctance that it was made scripture three
centuries after the death of Christ. Traditionally attributed to St. John, most
Biblical scholars now recognize its literary style and its theology has little
in common with John's gospel or his epistles and was likely written after his
death. Martin Luther found the vindictive God of Revelations incompatible with
the gospels and relegated it to the appendix of his German translation of the
New Testament instead of the body of scripture. All the Protestant reformers
except Calvin regarded apocalyptic millenialism to be heresy.
But
Revelations is also a rogue text because it is unmoored from its origins, which
are far from Christian. It is a late variant on a story that was pervasive in
the ancient world: the defeat of the wild and the uncivilized by a superior
order upon which a New World would be established. Two thousand years before
Revelations depicted Christ slaying the antichrist and laying out the New
Jerusalem, Marduk slayed Tiamat and founded Babylon.
This pagan myth
recycled as a suspiciously unchristian Biblical test found new credence in the
19th century when John Darby virtually revived the Montanist heresy of investing
it with a passionate literalism. Given to visions (he saw the British as one of
the ten tribes of Israel) Darby left the priesthood of the Church of Ireland and
preached Revelations as both prophecy and imminent history. In this he
inaugurated a lineage in which Bush's mentors, the Reverend Billy Graham and Dr.
Tony Evans are recent heirs. Revelations is much beloved by Muslim
fundamentalists and like their Christian compatriots they also thrill to
redemption through apocalypse. Jewish fundamentalists of course do not believe
in Revelations but have nonetheless made common cause with the Christian Right.
"It's a very tragic situation in which Christian fundamentalists, certain groups
of them that focus on Armageddon and the Rapture and the role of a war between
Muslims and Jews in bringing about the Second Coming, are involved in a folie a
deux with extremist Jews," said Ian Lustick, the author of For the Land and the
Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel. The Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition
(and yes it is a single tradition) is being led by its fringe into the abyss and
the rest of us with it.
The world has been readied for the fire but the
critical element is the Bush Administration. Never in the history of Christendom
has there been a moment when this rogue element has carried anything like the
credibility and political power that it carries now.
Michael Ortiz
Hill is the author of Dreaming
the End of the World (Spring 1994) and, (with Augustine Kandemwa)
Gathering
in the Names (Spring Journal books, 2002). The companion to this
essay, The Looking Glass War, is posted at http://www.gatheringin.com/. He can be
reached at [EMAIL PROTECTED].
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, April 01, 2003 1:19
PM
Subject: [Futurework] Religion in
War
This article by Garry Willis in this
weekend’s NYT Magazine provides a snapshot of the American history of religion and
politics in wartime. Willis is
the author of Why I am a Catholic, Papal
Sin, and St. Augustine’s
Memory.
In addition to some disturbing echoes about
the battle between pacifist clergy and militarist clergy, it will answer some
questions, make a few angry and plant a few seeds, I think. – Karen Watters
Cole
With God on His Side,
by
Garry Willis, NYT Magazine, March 30, 2003
(Excerpts
below and attached in full)
Religion
in America is much like Nature in the famous saying of Horace: ''Nature,
pitchfork it out how you may, keeps tumbling back in on you, slyly overbears
your shying from it.'' In
the same way, no matter how much Jefferson and Madison tried to pitchfork
religion out of official governmental actions, it has kept sneaking back in,
beating down attempts to contain it.
Madison said that religion is ''not within the cognizance of civil
government.'' He did not even want ministers of religion to list their
profession in the government's census, since ''the general government is
proscribed from interfering, in any manner whatever, in matters respecting
religion, and it may be thought to do this in ascertaining who and who are not
the ministers of the gospel.''
Madison
would be surprised at how much religion gets ''cognized''
in, say, Karl Rove's Rolodex. The nation's executive mansion is currently
honeycombed with prayer groups and Bible study cells, like a whited monastery.
A sly dig there is ''Missed you at Bible study,'' as David Frum reported in
''The Right Man'' with a ''twitch,'' since ''Bible study was, if not
compulsory, not quite uncompulsory, either'' when he was in
Bush's White House. Friends going to intimate dinners with the Bushes should
be prepared to lead the prayer said before the meal.
The
answer to Madison has implicitly been this: a nation with no cognizance of
religion has no cognizance of God, and without national recognition of his
authority, it will not come within his protection. That is not an advantage a
country can do without, especially
in times of peril.
It is unpatriotic to expose the nation to its enemies without taking every
measure possible to insure the divine blessing. In the minds of the devout, it
is therefore a politically dangerous act to teach ''godless'' evolution in our
schools rather than biblical ''creationism.'' It is tempting the divine wrath
to let a ''massacre of the innocents'' go forward in abortion clinics.
Pornography offends God and therefore forfeits his benevolence. Nor can we be
safe from terrorists unless we see that a ''blessed country'' (to use the
president's words) must extend God's will of liberty for other countries, by
force if necessary.
…
The
deep roots of these quintessentially American impulses are in our religious
history. We believe, on the one hand, that the individual must save himself or
herself. One of the people in Karl Rove's Rolodex, for instance, undoubtedly
told him that help
for people to get housing ''ran counter to compassionate conservatism''
because it undermines ''personal responsibility.''
So do affirmative
action programs, which include people as part of a social group rather than in
terms of individual merit.
No Congregationalist church sent people out to struggle for their souls more
stringently than do religious conservatives when it is a matter of state
action to help people cope with their problems. They are their problems, their
souls to save.
On
the other hand,
when it is a matter of recognizing God's authority, the
state can impose uniform standards of prayer.
It can quash pornography, forbid the choice of an abortion, dictate the way
evolution is taught (if at all). At
this point, the communitarian becomes the authoritarian.
The people as a whole must be saved
from the consequences of their own sin.
They have souls we all have to save for them, to pay homage to the authority
of God.
…
This
communal sense arose, most recently, in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, when
the president declared war on terrorism. His initial reaction was to call this
a crusade, the war whose motto was ''God Wills It.'' The
sense of peril was heightened by the loss of the Columbia, suggesting the
fragility of our national efforts. Like the Sept. 11 event, that one led to
prayer vigils and stronger expressions of national unity.
At the memorial service held at the National Cathedral after the attack on the
towers, ''The Battle Hymn of the Republic'' was sung as a closing anthem. It
has been a perennial favorite in wartime, despite its odd lyrics: ''Let the
Hero born of woman crush the serpent with his heel.'' Religion can get
bloody-minded when we go to war, with many serpents who need crushing.
(end
of excerpts)
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