Hypocrisy and the Christian Right
Who's perverting and promoting what?
 

January 12 2006
Counterbias.com
MEL SEESHOLTZ
  

The leaders of the evangelical Christian Right are constantly attacking gay and lesbian Americans. One of their favorite stereotypes – championed by America’s premier homophobe, Rev. Lou Sheldon and his Traditional Values Coalition – is that gays recruit people into homosexuality. Lou and the rest of the sanctimonious leaders of the Christian Right are also notorious for their claim that religion – specifically their dogmatic Protestant fundamentalism – will prevent or “cure” homosexuality.

Pastor Lonnie Latham, a member of the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention, has spoken out vehemently against same-sex marriage and urged gays to reject their “sinful, destructive lifestyle.”

On January 3, 2005, Pastor Latham was booked into Oklahoma County Jail after being arrested for soliciting an undercover male police officer to join him in his hotel room for oral sex. (Latham’s 2005 Mercedes was also impounded. Apparently the business of religious deceit and bigotry is quite profitable.)

According to a September 12, 2004 LA Times story, Paul Crouch, the president of Trinity Broadcasting Network, paid Enoch Lonnie Ford $425,000 in 1998 in exchange for his silence about an alleged homosexual affair they had had in 1996 at a TBN-owned cabin near Lake Arrowhead, California. Trinity Broadcasting Network claims to be the world’s largest Christian media empire with 24-hour programming via 47 satellites and 12,500 affiliates reaching a total of 92,540,954 U.S. households. In true duplicitous fashion, a statement released on September 22, 2004 by TBN denied Crouch had had a homosexual affair, but confirmed the hush money paid to Ford.

Hypocrites? You bet, and liars as well.

Two books that have not received the widespread attention they deserve make the case, definitively.

To try to briefly summarize Karen Armstrong’s meticulously research 496-page book The History of God would be a gross injustice, but the reviews by Amazon.com and Publishers Weekly make the point. From Amazon.com:

Armstrong, a British journalist and former nun, guides us along one of the most elusive and fascinating quests of all time – the search for God. Like all beloved historians, Armstrong entertains us with deft storytelling, astounding research, and makes us feel a greater appreciation for the present because we better understand our past. Be warned: A History of God is not a tidy linear history. Rather, we learn that the definition of God is constantly being repeated, altered, discarded, and resurrected through the ages, responding to its followers' practical concerns rather than to mystical mandates… [italics mine]

From Publishers Weekly:

This searching, profound comparative history of the three major monotheistic faiths fearlessly illuminates the sociopolitical ground in which religious ideas take root, blossom and mutate. Armstrong, a British broadcaster, commentator on religious affairs and former Roman Catholic nun, argues that Judaism, Christianity and Islam each developed the idea of a personal God, which has helped believers to mature as full human beings. Yet Armstrong also acknowledges that the idea of a personal God can be dangerous, encouraging us to judge, condemn and marginalize others. Recognizing this, each of the three monotheisms, in their different ways, developed a mystical tradition grounded in a realization that our human idea of God is merely a symbol of an ineffable reality. To Armstrong, modern, aggressively righteous fundamentalists of all three faiths represent “a retreat from God.” … [italics mine]

What’s clear is that the concept of “God” is always evolving, and its intelligent designers are humans. What’s also abundantly clear is that today’s “aggressively righteous fundamentalists of all three faiths represent ‘a retreat from God’” and an advocacy of deception, hypocrisy, hate, and self-interest.

In their book Created Equal: Why Gay Rights Matter to America, Michael Nava and Robert Dawidoff exposed the warped “thinking” and tactics of the Christian Right:

Why, one must ask, if heterosexuality is “natural,” is all this effort being expended to promote it? Is it because what is being promoted is not natural sexuality but a form of social organization that excludes those to whom its promotions are not addressed?

 

The anti-gay right, oddly enough, understands this as most of the heterosexual world does not. The theory of “homosexual recruitment” advanced by them to oppose gay and lesbian rights rests on the premise that sexual desire is amorphous and can be channeled into homosexuality as easily as into heterosexuality. Thus, because anti-gay rightists believe that “the homosexual lifestyle is based on the recruitment and exploitation of vulnerable young men,” homosexuality must be suppressed to save all those sad young men.

 

In fact, however, heterosexuals are not recruited by homosexuals; rather, homosexuals are recruited by heterosexuals almost from the moment they are born. The homosexual recruitment fantasy is simply one more instance of how heterosexuals project their own behavior onto the victims of that behavior as a justification for persisting in it.

As Austin Cline noted in commenting on the Nava and Dawidoff study, “the only ‘recruitment’ going on is being done by the Christian Right. These Christians see the traditional structures of power, authority, and privilege being worn away by the winds of modern culture and this disturbs them greatly. There was a time when white Protestant Christians were at the top of the social ladder and defined the common culture which all Americans partook of.”

The message of Armstrong, Nava and Dawidoff coalesce in the so-called “ex-gay” movement that seeks to recruit homosexual and miraculously transform them into heterosexuals through the Christian Right’s dogmatic, perverted version of “religion.” And if that doesn’t work, there’s always electric shock treatment, as Mel White attested. Who’s Mel White? A thorn in their side…

From the 1960s through the early 1990s, the Rev. Mel White played a behind-the-scenes role in the resurgence of evangelical Christianity. While pastoring several West Coast churches and working with national crusades like Youth for Christ, White produced films and ghostwrote books for a “who’s who” of evangelical leaders, including the Revs. Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell, D. James Kennedy and Pat Robertson.

Unknown to his friends and colleagues, White was also a closeted gay man who was nearly driven to suicide after two decades of struggling to save his marriage – and, he believed, his soul – with “reparative therapies” including electric shock [treatments]…

Political power and personal gain can easily account for why the deceitful leaders of the evangelical Christian Right hawk their pathological propaganda. The real question is why so many Americans who claim to believe in equality, liberty and justice for all listen to and follow them.

Part of the answers may be the fear resulting from the 9/11 attacks (which Jerry Falwell blamed on gays and those who didn’t believe as he told them to), America’s schizophrenic attitude toward sex, and its fear of enfranchising formerly disenfranchised groups.

September 11, 2001: when fundamentalist religious ideology married to an extremist political agenda redefined “fanaticism.” America responded to the attacks of September 11 with endless choruses of “God Bless America” and a tsunami of patriotism amid a sea of flags. America had been attacked by political-religious fundamentalists who believed they were on a mission from “God.” The evangelical Christian Right has always believed it was on such a divinely-ordained politically mission, but this time they had in place a president who – according to his own words in Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack – also believed he was on a messianic mission from “God.” Maureen Dowd noted in an October 21, 2004 New York Times editorial that “evangelicals call the president a messenger of God.”

The histories of the three Western religions, all of which transmogrified the concept of Divinity into a Being, are saturated with the blood from battles and murders to prove whose God is really God. As Lt. Gen. William Boykin put it during a fight against a Muslim warlord in Somalia in 1993, “I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol.”

Urging to violence, murder and genocide can easily be found in the Bible and the Koran. St. Augustine, one of the most influential Church Fathers, was also the first evangelical Christian to advocate forced conversions and whatever violence – ad majorem gloriam Dei – was necessary to accomplish that holy task.

The lesson of September 11 should have been “Keep God Out of Politics”: the same message that’s been reverberating in Middle East conflagrations for millennia. But the fear that resulted from September 11 consummated the marriage of Christian fundamentalism to American politics. In December 2002, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman reported that then House Majority Leader Tom DeLay – now disgraced and indicted – had openly admitted he was “on a mission from God to promote a ‘biblical worldview’ in American politics.” The terrorists of September 11, 2001 also believed they were on a “mission from God” to do everything possible to enforce their “biblical worldview.” The darkness of religious wars had been reignited. Fear reigned supreme.

When Pope John Paul II met with visiting U.S. bishops and President George W. Bush – who had consulted with John Paul on various matter every year and who, before meeting with the pope, had sought guidance from Focus on the Family’s James Dobson – the pontiff told both bishops and president “you must do everything possible to encourage the laity in their special responsibility for evangelizing culture and promoting Christian values in society and public life.”

No holds barred, “do everything possible.” Any means would justify the ends. The evangelical Christian Right did just that and launched a fear-based, hate-filled propaganda war of lies against homosexuals. It didn’t matter to them that the collateral damage included the ultimate blessing of “God,” a little thing called “love.”

When it comes to gays and lesbians, “love” in the Christian Right’s lexicon means only “sex” because they can use that and America’s schizophrenic love-hate attitude toward sexuality to encourage fear, hate and disgust and thereby enhance their own malignant, Machiavellian political influence and power.

One of the basic fears and hate-based lies the Christian Right propagates in relation to gay and lesbian Americans is that all homosexual relationships are only about sex? Would it be fair to say all heterosexual relationships are only about sex? No, it wouldn’t. And neither is it true about same-sex relationships. In both cases, there are myriad other factors, not least of which are emotional and psychological connections and commitments, and a “love” that transcends carnality.

When truthfully applied, that message sounds nothing like the antigay fear-mongering, hate-based propaganda coming from the Christian Right, as one true Christian recently noted:

Jesus said that the greatest commandment, after loving God, is to love your neighbor as yourself. As a person who has had the opportunity and privilege of marrying the person I love, the best way I can love my gay and lesbian neighbors is to desire for them the opportunity and privilege of marrying the person they love. To be an advocate for sexual minorities, to promote gay marriage, is, for me, a way to live the gospel that Jesus taught.

Historically, one can find unnerving similarities between other hate groups and today’s evangelical Christian Right, all of whom wrapped themselves in their own perverted version of religion and the American flag.

In the 1920s, the Klu Klux Klan was a powerful mainstream Protestant organization – with strong ties to the Republican party, especially in Indiana in 1923-24 – that co-opted more than a few “religious leaders” who used their pulpits to incite fear and hate, and advocate messages of exclusion rather than inclusion. The Klan called the “patriotic American” political candidates they backed “Klandates.” Similarly, the Christian Right call the “patriotic American” political candidates they back “pro-family” even though they and their Republican sycophants do everything in their power to disenfranchise, demean, denigrate and hurt gays and lesbians, their children and their families.

Like their predecessors, the leaders of the evangelical Christian Right profess disdain for non-Christians and homosexuals. And like their predecessors, they recruit new members using a perverted form of Christianity and “American family values.” Some African-American clergy see the historical pattern and fight against it. One of, if not the major reason the southern Baptists split from northern Baptists in May 1845 was because southern Baptists used the Bible as justification for keeping slaves as property.

Sadly, other clergy fail to recognize the historical pattern and fall victim to it. As African-American Baptist minister Gregory Daniels said in a March 2004 New York Times article, “If the KKK opposes gay marriage, I would ride with them.” [link added]

The Christian Right’s September 8, 2005 “Justice Sunday III” was hosted by the Greater Exodus Baptist Church, which is listed on the official Southern Baptist Convention website.

So who’s perverting and recruiting, and for what?