"_________________ belonged to a little junta which foisted the ______________ War upon the American people. The ambition and vanity which prompted him could be veiled and exalted because the will-to-power of an adolescent nation and the frustrated impulses of pugnacity and martial ardor of the pitiful little 'men in the street' could find in him symbolic expression and vicarious satisfaction."
No, the author was not referring to the "vicarious satisfaction" - recently experienced by so many "pitiful little men" -- of seeing their flight-suited American President co-pilot a fighter aircraft on to the deck of an aircraft carrier. Instead the author, Reinhold Niebuhr, was referring not only to Theodore Roosevelt and the Spanish American War, but also "the frustrations of the average man, who can never realize the power and glory which his imagination sets as an ideal, [which] makes him the more willing tool and victim of the imperial ambitions of his group" [Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, p. 18]
But these two questions raise a third: Where is our present-day Niebuhr? After all, the evil perpetrated by George W. Bush and his "little junta" equals, perhaps exceeds, the evil foisted upon Americans by Teddy Roosevelt and his war party. Moreover, Bush has Dick Cheney.
But the reason why America has not heard from an American Christian with the stature of a Reinhold Niebuhr is because America now appears incapable of producing such formidable Christian heavyweights. Instead, we get "theologians" like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Dobson and D. James Kennedy, who appear incapable of judging the Bush administration's illegal, immoral invasion of Iraq as Niebuhr surely would - in strict accordance with Christian ethics.
Fortunately, at least one thoughtful evangelical Christian, political scientist James Kurth, has done just that: "When George Bush has said that America is the light of the world, that clearly is a heretical paraphrase of the true statement that Jesus Christ is the light of the world. And to persist in that and act upon that belief can only bring about a debacle." ["Debunking 'American Theocracy,'" Interview of James Kurth by Alice Chansan, beliefnet.com]
Unfortunately, Professor Kurth's apology for those evangelicals who believe in biblical inerrancy, especially as it applies to the end times described in the Book of Revelation, constitutes its own form of crackpot Christianity. After all, as New Testament scholar, Burton Mack has observed: "Even after it [the Book of Revelation] was blessed for posterity by inclusion in Athanasius' list of apostolic writings, there were doctors of the church who questioned its authenticity and groused about its theology." [Burton L. Mack, Who Wrote the New Testament? p. 197]
More significantly, Professor Mack asserts that the "twelve disciples who became apostles" were "the fiction" that connected the emerging Christian church to Jesus and guaranteed that, "as a social, historical institution of religion, it started right and had its story straight." [Ibid, p. 225]
Moreover, Kurth failed to mention that Bush has succeeded in supplanting the Apostle's Creed with the American Creed, precisely because many evangelical Christians have succumbed to the widespread secularization of religion. As Kurth himself acknowledges, many supported Bush on Iraq, because they expected his support on the social issues they valued. [Kurth, beliefnet.com]
But, it was Bush, who unwittingly explained why the U.S. today gets Falwells and Robertsons rather that Niebuhrs. While speaking to conservative journalists recently, Bush suggested that the increasingly open expressions of faith that he encountered among Americans not only indicated that these faithful look at the world in terms of "good and evil," but also suggested that America is in the midst of a Third Great Awakening.
(Presumably, neither Bush nor his crackpot supporters ever encountered the warning given by Niebuhr: "Nations will always find it more difficult than individuals to behold the beam that is in their own eye while they observe the mote that is in their brother's eye." [Niebuhr, p 107] Their continued support for the evil invasion and occupation of Iraq is a case in point.)
You see, the first two Great Awakenings in U.S. history saw certain inspired ministers displace of sober Christian reason by "whipping up revivals and preaching emotionally to sell conversions." [Marty E. Martin, Pilgrims in Their Own Land: 500 Years of Religion in America, p. 112] But, they were extreme manifestations of a more general trend.
According to Rodney Stark and Roger Finke: "The religious history of the United States...rests heavily on sectarian emotion and revival - a process...in which churches become establishmentarian, 'compromise their "errand into the wilderness" and then...lose their organizational vigor, eventually to be replaced by less worldly groups, whereupon the process is repeated." [Stark and Finke, quoted in Kevin Phillips, American Theocracy, p. 107.]
"Less worldly," of course, is a gentle euphemism for "dumbed down" in this ever increasingly interconnected and interdependent world. It's also a euphemism resulting from the skepticism that evangelical Christians famously hold about the possibility of reforming the world. And thus, if the U.S. is indeed experiencing a Third Great Awakening, you can virtually guarantee that a few well-timed and well-placed words of biblical "code" by our President will continue to influence the "less worldly" minds of our crackpot Christians in his evil direction - perhaps against Iran.
Thus, crackpot Christians seeking moral improvement might want to consider a few of the universal truths -- given man's fallen state -- found in Reinhold Niebuhr's Moral Man and Immoral Society.
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