Again with the Blood: Lew Engle Prays Over Newt and Huck at Virginia Conference

They’re back. With the blood. Or truth is, they have never gone away.

Bruce Wilson has just published a very important article at Huffington Post about the involvement of Lew Engle of TheCall in the media-hyped event at which Mike Huckabee and Newt Gingrich appeared recently in Virginia—a “Rediscovering God in America” meeting at Rock Church in Virginia Beach, to call the faithful to prayer and action as the state’s new election cycle begins.

At the Rock Church (isn’t it interesting how right-wing Christians have been gravitating to those manly slogans—Rock Church, build it on the rock, etc.—in recent years?), Newt informed the faithful that we’re at sea in a culture awash with pagan tides, and Huck told us we Americans belong to God in a special, unique way that transcends the connections of all other nations to the divine.

But as Wilson notes, in focusing on those themes, mainstream media coverage of the recent event at the Rock misses the point: the most significant point to be noted about this meeting is the troubling, overt way in which the Republican right is now claiming its connection to extremist right-wing groups like Lou Engle’s TheCall, with its doctrine of blood atonement and its call for martyrs, and its roots in the New Apostolic Reformation movement, a movement tied to white-supremacist groups using aberrant theological ideas to justify their racist agenda. (And to which Sarah Palin belongs . . . .)

As I noted in a previous posting about Engle, in Wilson’s view, anyone interested in maintaining a viable democracy in the U.S. should pay attention to these dangerous political movements rooted in bloody apocalyptic theology, because they are now seeking to mainstream ideas and rhetoric of anti-abortion terrorist groups previously considered radical fringe groups.

And there, right in the middle of it all, are Newt and Huck, being prayed over by Lou Engle. Listen to Engle in the clip accompanying the HuffPo article about this. Listen, and tell me you aren’t at least a tad bit troubled by this furious rhetoric about blood, the need for blood, the need for martyrs—here, now, in the America in which we live today. Whose blood? Where is it going to come from?

And who’s going to shed it? And why do men like Engle and Newt and Huck have such astonishing confidence that God is on their side, urging them to talk about the shedding of blood, about punishing those who disobey God? Listen to Engle rant on in his minatory, excited gravely voice about the shedding of blood, and tell me you don’t hear echoes of what Scott Roeder’s ex-wife told the media following Roeder’s murder of Dr. George Tiller in Kansas a week ago.

Lindsey Roeder said that, as her husband cast about for a scapegoat to blame for all that disturbed him in contemporary society, he turned from taxes to God and abortion. He developed an extreme “eye-for-an-eye” theology. He became oh so convinced—absolutely certain—that God was on his side, that he and his kind spoke for God. That they own God, that they know God’s mind, that they speak for God in our culture awash with tides of paganism: Lindsey Roeder said, “That's all he cared about is anti-abortion. ‘The church is this. God is this.’Yadda yadda,' she said.”

Absolutist claims by men absolutely convinced of their rightness and preeminence and claims to ownership, angry men who fear the loss of their control of everything, and who invent absolutist, self-serving religious ideologies to justify their bloody attempts to regain control . . . .

The church is this; God is this. We are awash in paganism. We need to reclaim this nation for God—for our God, for the God whom we uniquely own and for whom we uniquely speak. We need, if necessary, to use techniques of intimidation to assure that our way (which is to say, God’s way) prevails in this land awash in paganism, this land that once belonged to God (which is to say, to us, to white heterosexual men like us).

We need, if necessary, to murder to get your attention, to tell you that we mean business, that this land belongs to God (which is to say, to us), that we (which is to say, God) will take it back—by force, if necessary.

What we are seeing now are the first glimmerings—the first open glimmerings—of the fascism that has been lurking inside the soul of the Republican party and its extreme right wing (including the religious right) for some time now, and is being released following the last elections. I use the term with care, and deliberately, knowing it is an overused buzz word that has come to mean almost anything.

I use the term “fascism” here in its classic sense, to mean political gestures designed to put those promoting progressive change—and democracy itself—in their place, to tell them that democracy will be enacted in this particular place and time at a steep price. And that price will include violence, if violence is necessary.

Fascists are people of the fist, the iron fist. When they believe themselves to be in power—when their control is reasonably secure—they cover that fist with a velvet glove, and only those who are easy, convenient prey, or overtly transgressive, see the iron fist inside the glove, smashing down on their heads.

But let these men (and they are men, even when their male-produced and male-dominated and male-controlled movements also draw some women, the women who traditionally belong to these men or who are attracted to their violence) sense that they are losing control, and the glove comes off.

Scott Roeder has just informed us that other acts of violence similar to the one he recently committed are being planned around the nation. And of course they are being planned—if not systematically and in an organized way, then in the dark corners of the collective psyche shared by heterosexually identified white men and all who collude with them, men furious at the sense that they (and their God, the one they uniquely represent, the one on whose behalf they do violence to everyone beneath them) are losing control.

Acts of violence by such men are designed not only to tell their traditional targets that said targets are in for a good old-fashioned beating. They are also designed to warn the nation that if it adverts to the suffering of such targets, or decries the violence of the men who own and rule us, or expects too much change too fast, consequences will follow.

These acts of violence are not designed so much to stop progressive change and the rehabilitation of the democratic structures of our society, as to control the rate of that change, to assure that, to every extent possible, it remains managed change. With the men who rule us pulling all the levers and doing the managing, and claiming to do so in God’s name.

And as this happens in the nation with the soul of a church, what do the mainstream media do? Do they analyze the bizarre “religious” roots of this fascist ideology and behavior? Do they warn us about what is taking place? Do they follow through on the many strong indicators that link Scott Roeder to Randall Terry’s Operation Rescue, which brought us the bloody dolls at Notre Dame—Roeder’s comment on Operation Rescue’s website, the fact that an Operation Rescue phone number was found in Roeder’s car and Operation Rescue provided him with information about Dr. Tiller’s comings and goings?

No. The media persist and will persist in reporting about Roeder’s act of violence as an act of an unhinged lunatic acting alone, informed neither by rhyme nor reason. The media persist and will persist in informing us that while Muslims murder, Christians don’t.

The media will continue to hide the clear, patent religious roots of violence like Roeder’s, while playing up the religious roots of violence like that committed by Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad when he shot an Army recruiter in Little Rock last week. Because Muslims murder. Christians don’t.

And why will the mainstream media continue to behave this way? Because they belong, lock, stock, and barrel to heterosexually identified white men and all who collude with them, men furious at the sense that they (and their God, the one they uniquely represent, the one on whose behalf they do violence to everyone beneath them) are losing control. And who want to remind us—as does Scott Roeder, as does Randall Terry, as do Newt and Huck and Lew Engle—that if we do not permit them to control the pace and direction of change in this nation, there will be consequences for our resistance.

The Presidential Campaign and Catholic Chickens Coming Home to Roost

As I noted yesterday, once again, news reports indicate that someone attending a Palin rally has called for Obama to be killed. This happened in Scranton yesterday. And, once again, Sarah Palin allowed the verbal violence to spew forth without a word of reprimand. In response to McCain-Palin's continued playing with fire, Keith Olbermann had this to say last night on MSNBC (www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/14/olbermann-special-comment_n_134714.html):

But on this, you're not only a fraud, Senator but you are tacitly inciting lunatics to violence. If you want to again grand-stand and suspend your campaign here's your big chance. Suspend your campaign now, until you, or somebody else, gets some control over it and it ceases to be a clear and present danger to the peace of this nation.

As these unthinakble scenes unfold, I am not hearing a peep from the U.S. bishops, who have persistently told Catholic voters for decades now to make issues of life central as we cast our votes. The pastoral letter of the Two Kevins came out in the very week in which the shouts of “Kill him!” and “Off with his head!” began ranging out.

To my knowledge, that pastoral letter—or any pastoral letter of any U.S. bishop to date—says not a word to condemn the hate rhetoric that could, in the view of numerous commentators now, end in actual violence, if it is allowed to go on.

The silence of the bishops is shameful. It is scandalous. It totally undermines their claims to be pro-life, and to stand aloof from endorsing any slate of candidates. The longer the silence goes on, the longer we must simply assume that the bishops’ real concern with life issues is limited to the womb, and that they have bargained the soul of the American Catholic church for trinkets and empty promises from a political party that does not represent pro-life values in any profound way.

People are not deceived about any of this. Though individual bishops may question the alliance that the bishops, as a body, have made with the Republican party for several decades now, it is clear to most of us that, as a group, the bishops have a definite political penchant. And that they expect Catholics to share that penchant. As a body, the bishops have done nothing to dispel this notion. They have done everthing to bolster it.

And here in my hometown, two days after the Two Kevins issued their pastoral letter that did all but stand on its head to endorse one slate of candidates in the coming election, reports indicate that at least one Catholic pastor followed suit in his sermon this past Sunday (www.arktimes.com/blogs/arkansasblog/2008/10/open_line_75.aspx). According to a report on the blog of the Arkansas Times, this Sunday Msgr. Francis Malone of Christ the King Catholic church in Little Rock offered his parishioners a

a blistering sermon that is basically a "Vote for McCain" speech. Msgr. Malone says he has a duty as the pastor to tell his congregation how to vote. He can't name any names of candidates, but he said that no one will have any trouble determining which candidate is apparently the only moral candidate on presidential ballot. The entire sermon is devoted to the abortion issue and the Supreme Court.

I am, frankly, a bit tired of hearing some commentators suggest that the bishops really stand aloof from politics, and that their finely reasoned and carefully nuanced documents about the obligations of citizens really mean that they do not endorse a particular political party. This is simply not how the majority of Americans today perceive the political stance of the U.S. Catholic bishops. And that perception is hardly likely to be dispelled by sermons such as Msgr. Malone's; it is only going to deepen, in fact, as the bishops continue to hold their tongues while cries ring out at political rallies of a major American party to kill and behead the candidate of the other major party.

We have come to a sorry pass. And as I noted yesterday, the bishops—as a body—have brought American Catholics to this pass. And they are doing nothing to get us out of it. No matter how carefully they and their defenders qualify the finely spun theoretical arguments of documents about voting, people can see the bottom line, the real implication of the political alliance the bishops have made, the practical consequences of their political guidance.

And those practical consequences are what count now, as calls for violence are occurring at political rallies with a regularity that threatens to desensitize us to this unprecedented turn in American culture and politics. What I posted yesterday is an extended reflection on how the pro-life politics of the U.S. bishops have had practical implications that include the current bold assertions of racism and xenophobia (and homophobia) at political rallies of “pro-life” candidates, along with appeals for outright violence. For murder.

All of this is not an aberration from the bishops’ pro-life politics. All of this is part and parcel of the pro-life politics the bishops have crafted for several decades now. It is interwoven with the pro-life stance and the handful of “non-negotiable” issues on which that pro-life stance is fixated because, simultaneous with their development of this hard-line approach to the political sphere, the bishops have also deliberately shut down thoughtful inclusive conversation about the non-negotiable issues, about what the pro-life ethic really means in American culture today, and, yes, about abortion itself.

At the cul-de-sac at the end of the pastoral path the bishops have chosen to lead the American Catholic church down for several decades now, we now see an intellectually impoverished collective of Catholic voters who can shout slogans with the best of 'em, but who lack the intellectual tools to explain or even understand what the pro-life “answers” they’ve been given really mean, in the culture at large. People whose intellectual and religious life revolves around slogans are sitting ducks for hate groups.

When the slogans a hate group chants seem eerily reminiscent of the “values” a religious group claims as its own, it is far too easy for a group of haters (of racists or xenophobes or homophobes, for instance) to pull the religious sloganizers into its camp. This is precisely what see happening in American Catholicism today, and the bishops should have anticipated it. Not to mention, should hve provided American Catholics with intellectual tools to critique and resist such alliances with those who hate.

In light of all that is happening in this presidential election, and in light of the pastoral strategy the U.S. Catholic bishops have been following for some time now, it is not surprising to read that Randall Terry’s Operation Rescue plans to blanket Catholic parishes in swing states next Sunday with brochures arguing that good Catholics have no option except to vote for McCain-Palin (http://ncronline3.org/drupal/?q=node/2211). The brochure echoes the intellectually insulting approach of the simple questions, simple answers catechesis the bishops have encouraged for American Catholics for some time now.

For instance, it notes that some key Catholic political thinkers including Douglas Kmiec have endorsed Barack Obama, and asks if this is possible for a Catholic to do. It provides the following answer: "No. They are not correct. Endorsing, support, or voting for Obama in the 2008 Presidential election flagrantly violates Catholic teaching."

The bishops may wish to disavow Mr. Terry. They may tut-tut about his divisive (and deceptive) political use of pro-life issues. But they cannot justifiably disassociate themselves from this kind of political activity. Our chickens do come home to roost eventually, and Randall Terry is a Catholic chicken, the bishops' chicken, one whose rhetoric so closely matches that of the bishops that it is difficult to claim he has not been given a place—and a sumptuous one—within the contemporary American Catholic church.

And that’s even with his checkered history, which includes his censure by a previous church when he divorced his wife of 19 years in 2000 and remarried, failing to support his previous wife and his children by her. Or his repudiation of his gay son in 2004, and his statements that he can no longer have an openly gay son in his home. Or the premarital pregnancies of both of his daughters. None of which should matter, except that the rhetoric of the political party we’ve been told to accept as the only pro-life party has been rife with condemnation of premarital pregnancy and of broken families. Family—traditional family, the kind Mr. Terry's life story makes a mockery of—is one of the big non-negotiables of the bishops' pro-life pastoral strategy, is it not?

Randall Terry is a Catholic chicken. And it is hard to deny that he is coming home to a cushy roost the American bishops have created for him, as he blankets Catholic parishes with his leaflets, even if the bishops utter faint cries of protest against this activity.

After all, Mr. Terry has found enough of a home in the Catholic church that he converted to Catholicism not too long ago. For many of us who sit silently through the homilies of the Church of the Two Kevins, and whose conscience leads us to vote differently than we're instructed to vote, that home is less secure.

In fact, we've been politely shown the door.