November 2006 UPDATE:
PASTER TED HAGGARD possessed with gay sex demons!
Soldiers of Christ I
Inside America's most powerful megachurch
26 May 2005, Jeff Sharlet, Harpers
excerpt:
... Linda is an insurance agent, and she and Aaron Michael live in a suburban home. She hears voices, but they do not disturb her. "The Holy Spirit is a gentleman," she told me one morning over a basket of cinnamon muffins still warm from the oven.
Sitting across from me in her kitchen, she closed her big brown eyes and shushed herself. "I’m listening," she said quietly.
"To the TV?" I asked. In the next room, Aaron Michael was watching an action movie; the house was filled with the sound of explosions.
"No," said Linda. "To my Spirit." She opened her eyes and explained the process she had undergone to reach her refined state. She called it "spiritual restoration." Anyone can do it, she promised, "even a gay activist."
Linda had seen with her own eyes the sex demons that make homosexuals rebel against God, and she said they are gruesome; but she did not name them, for she would not "give demons glory." They are all the same, she said. "It’s radicalism."
She reached across the table and touched my hand. "I have to tell you, the spiritual battle is very real." We are surrounded by demons, she explained, reciting the lessons she had learned in her small-group studies at New Life.
The demons are cold, they need bodies, they long to come inside. People let them in in two different ways. One is to be sinned against. "Molested," suggested Linda. The other is to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
You could walk by sin-- a murder, a homosexual act-- and a demon will leap onto your bones. Cities, therefore, are especially dangerous.
[footnote/Jeff Sharlet: the life of the gay man, in the evangelical imagination, seems to be an endless succession of orgasms, interrupted only by jocular episodes of male bonhomie. The gay man promises Christian men a guilt-free existence, the garden before Eve. As such, he is not just tempting but temptation embodied- "the Enemy," to whom Linda often refers.]
Fred Clark at Slacktivist writes:
I'm an evangelical, twice-born and raised, but Sharlet's guided tour of Pastor Ted Haggard's New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colo., introduces me to some weird new quirks in megachurch Americhristianity that I'd not encountered before...
Sex demons? Radical, gay sex demons?
Where do they get this stuff? What on earth is Pastor Ted teaching out there in Colorado Springs? Or, to put the matter in evangelical language: Show me chapter and verse. Have we really reached the point that evangelical megachurches are allowed to just make stuff up and pretend it's in the Bible just as long as it's sufficiently homophobic?
Elsewhere in Sharlet's piece, members of the New Life megachurch discuss the gift of "spiritual discernment." The practice of this gift would seem to be called for before deciding to accept a strange new idea -- demonic Buddy Coles tempting otherwise heterosexual men into the "gay lifestyle" -- on the basis of a single parishioner's vision.
Soldiers of Christ I, continued
- why it matters
excerpts:
Pastor Ted, who talks to President George W. Bush or his advisers every Monday, is a handsome forty-eight-year-old Indianan, most comfortable in denim. He likes to say that his only disagreement with the President is automotive; Bush drives a Ford pickup, whereas Pastor Ted loves his Chevy. In addition to New Life, Pastor Ted presides over the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), whose 45,000 churches and 30 million believers make up the nation’s most powerful religious lobbying group, and also over a smaller network of his own creation, the Association of Life-Giving Churches, 300 or so congregations modeled on New Life’s “free market” approach to the divine.
Pastor Ted will serve as NAE president for as long as the movement is pleased with him, and as long as Pastor Ted is its president the NAE will make its headquarters in Colorado Springs. Some believers call the city the Wheaton of the West, in honor of Wheaton, Illinois, once the headquarters of a more genteel Christian conservatism; others call Colorado Springs the “evangelical Vatican,” a phrase that says much both about the city and about the easeful orthodoxy with which the movement now views itself. Certainly the gathering there has no parallel in history, not in Lynchburg, Virginia, nor Tulsa, nor Pasadena, nor Orlando, nor any other city that has aspired to be the capital of evangelical America. Evangelical activist groups (“parachurch” ministries, in the parlance) in Colorado Springs number in the hundreds, though a precise count is hard to specify. Groups migrate there and multiply. They produce missionary guides, “family resources,” school curricula, financial advice, athletic training programs, Bibles for every occasion. The city is home to Young Life, to the Navigators, to Compassion International; to Every Home for Christ and Global Ethnic Missions (Youth Ablaze). Most prominent among the ministries is Dr. James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, whose radio programs (the most extensive in the world, religious or secular), magazines, videos, and books reach more than 200 million people worldwide.
- - - - -
Free-market economics is a “truth” Ted says he learned in his first job in professional Christendom, as a Bible smuggler in Eastern Europe. Globalization, he believes, is merely a vehicle for the spread of Christianity. He means Protestantism in particular; Catholics, he said, “constantly look back.” He went on: “And the nations dominated by Catholicism look back. They don’t tend to create our greatest entrepreneurs, inventors, research and development. Typically, Catholic nations aren’t shooting people into space. Protestantism, though, always looks to the future. A typical kid raised in Protestantism dreams about the future. A typical kid raised in Catholicism values and relishes the past, the saints, the history. That is one of the changes that is happening in America. In America the descendants of the Protestants, the Puritan descendants, we want to create a better future, and our speakers say that sort of thing. But with the influx of people from Mexico, they don’t tend to be the ones that go to universities and become our research-and-development people. And so in that way I see a little clash of civilizations.”
So the Catholics are out, and the battle boils down to evangelicals versus Islam. “My fear,” he says, “is that my children will grow up in an Islamic state.”
And that is why he believes spiritual war requires a virile, worldly counterpart. “I teach a strong ideology of the use of power,” he says, “of military might, as a public service.” He is for preemptive war, because he believes the Bible’s exhortations against sin set for us a preemptive paradigm, and he is for ferocious war, because “the Bible’s bloody. There’s a lot about blood.”
See also:
The Revealer
HARPER'S magazine
Slacktivist
Paster Ted:
How long before a radical splinter group transforms its hatred into direct action? It would only take a handful of wackos with bombs, a misguided interpretation of an "Old Testament" story or two, and a delusional "voice of God" to create disastrous scenarios in a couple of American cities.
San Francisco and New York- not to mention the entire state of Massachusetts- come to mind as potential targets of "God's wrath" against the evil demons of homosexuality.
And how's that little "clash of civilizations" with our Latin neighbors going to play out- any New Life members on the vigilante border patrol teams?
And by the way, Paster Ted, the Puritans you so admire were awfully fond of burning my ancestors (the Quakers) at the stake. "A lot about blood," indeed. I don't think you should be accusing other groups of "constantly looking back" for inspiration.
The majority of Americans want nothing of your visions of the future. Unfortunately, most evangelical fundamentalists live such insular lives, they probably haven't noticed how distorted the teachings of their church leaders have become.
There is an entire generation of young evangelicals who know no other form of Christianity than that with which they have been indoctrinated by the NAE. It's taken 30 years, but you have managed to transform mainstream American Christianity into something nearly unrecognizable-- and millions are turning away from all religious teaching for fear of being identified with your bigotry.
I am hopeful- although it will take decades to counteract the intrusion of Southern Right-wing politics - that something of the Liberal Protestant Christian tradition will survive.
You are leading a Cult- and all reasonable Christians should openly label you as such. Just as Democrats are finding it impossible to trust or compromise with the radicals in the Republican Party, Ecumenical Christians should not delude themselves that it is possible to work in concert with hate groups such as yours.
RADICAL. FUNDAMENTALIST. THEOCRATIC. CULT.
- glassfrequency
Soldiers of Christ II
Feeling the hate with the National Religious Broadcasters
30 May 2005, Chris Hedges, Harper's
excerpt
I can’t help but recall the words of my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, Dr. James Luther Adams, who told us that when we were his age, and he was then close to eighty, we would all be fighting the “Christian fascists.”
He gave us that warning twenty-five years ago, when Pat Robertson and other prominent evangelists began speaking of a new political religion that would direct its efforts at taking control of all major American institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government, so as to transform the United States into a global Christian empire. At the time, it was hard to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously. But fascism, Adams warned, would not return wearing swastikas and brown shirts. Its ideological inheritors would cloak themselves in the language of the Bible; they would come carrying crosses and chanting the Pledge of Allegiance.
Adams had watched American intellectuals and industrialists flirt with fascism in the 1930s. Mussolini’s “Corporatism,” which created an unchecked industrial and business aristocracy, had appealed to many at the time as an effective counterweight to the New Deal. In 1934, Fortune magazine lavished praise on the Italian dictator for his defanging of labor unions and his empowerment of industrialists at the expense of workers. Then as now, Adams said, too many liberals failed to understand the power and allure of evil, and when the radical Christians came, these people would undoubtedly play by the old, polite rules of democracy long after those in power had begun to dismantle the democratic state. Adams had watched German academics fall silent or conform. He knew how desperately people want to believe the comfortable lies told by totalitarian movements, how easily those lies lull moderates into passivity.
Adams told us to watch closely the Christian right’s persecution of homosexuals and lesbians. Hitler, he reminded us, promised to restore moral values not long after he took power in 1933, then imposed a ban on all homosexual and lesbian organizations and publications. Then came raids on the places where homosexuals gathered, culminating on May 6, 1933, with the ransacking of the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin. Twelve thousand volumes from the institute’s library were tossed into a public bonfire. Homosexuals and lesbians, Adams said, would be the first “deviants” singled out by the Christian right. We would be the next.
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