Can you say "New American Reich"?
First it was terrorist training camps. Now the ever excellent Dave Neiwert shows us something that looks disturbingly like a Hitler Youth Rally. The scale of these fundamentalist "Battle Cry" events makes it harder to dismiss them as a tiny lunatic fringe. It smells worryingly like Fascism, though as Neiwert points out, they haven't yet progressed to eliminationist violence. They do, however, preach what looks like a totalitarian political ideology that bears little or no resemblance to the teachings of Jesus Christ.
We shouldn't be too smug in England, though. The racist BNP that gained significant votes in a few parts of east London in the local elections a few weeks ago are real McCoy Fascist with no pseudo- or crypto- prefixing it. Despite their attempt to airbrush out their nazi skinhead following, the threat of eliminationist streetfighting violence isn't far below the surface.
Posted by TimHall at May 25, 2006 09:04 PM | TrackBackOkay, you are seriously off your nut and into black-helicopter land now. Hitler Youth? What about these guys, all lined up?
http://thefaithproject.tamilla.com/images/muslim_prayer2.jpg
http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/gallery/0319/031903.jpg
Or wait, we have these people, all foaming at the mouth:
http://www.bruceconkle.com/peace/crowd.jpg
Here's your Nueremburg torch display:
Or look at these whackjobs! They even all wear their little Nazi uniforms!
http://www.newsday.com/media/photo/2005-01/15725463.jpg
Posted by: Phelps on May 25, 2006 10:27 PM
Did you actually *read* the Dave Neiwert article I linked to? Like some of the things that were *said* at this rally?
If you are going to make ad-hominen attacks I don't see why I should make any attempt to take you seriously.
Oh, the reason I banned Gmail is that I was getting bombarded by a comment spammer that used 1000s of randomly generated Gmail addresses.
Yes, I read it, and it was in the same breathless style I would expect from a smear job. It was simply incredible.
It was a religious rally. There was theatrics. The "commandos" were a group of ex-special forces guys who put on a show. The whole thing seems like just another youth organization who has been labled evil simply because it has "Christian" attached to it. People on the other side of the aisle do the same thing when you attach "Muslim" to it.
American Reich it ain't, as much as you might hope against hope that it is.
Posted by: Phelps on May 25, 2006 11:09 PMSorry, but I trust Dave Neiwert's opinion rather more than I trust yours.
Posted by: Tim Hall on May 25, 2006 11:30 PMPerhaps unfortunately, I think the review *was* a little more breathless than was really warranted.
The problem is not that the church is taking over government. The problem is that the church growth movement has discovered that marketing works (if you define success as church growth, which is why it's called the church growth movement) and therefore has increasingly bought into the dominant culture... which, at the moment, has a fair bit of jingoism running loose.
So yeah, it does represent a deep and terrifying problem in (that bloated segment of) the American church, but not quite the one Dave thinks. The whole militaristic thing is just window dressing, pure entertainment, giving the public what they want... pragmatism wins over theology in that camp. It's just another variant of Word-Faith, which is itself just another variant of Gnosticism... which explains why the Da Vinci code and Gospel of Judas so terrify these people.
That the underlying culture is polarizing into baggage-laden pro- and anti-war camps is a whole 'nother issue, but I don't particularly blame church youth group theatrics for that. They're just playing weathervane.
I've always found the militaristic imagery in too many evangelical choruses disturbing, to the extent that I refuse to sing them. Combine that with an aggressive rightwing political agenda, and it starts looking a lot more ugly. I have no idea whether some extreme elements of the religious right might turn violent when the political pendulum swings back and there's a democrat in the White House.
In Britain we didn't pay attention to the violent rhetoric of a small minority of Islamist preachers, dismissing them as nothing more than posturing windbags. We paid a deadly price for that inattention on July 7th last year.
Posted by: Tim Hall on May 26, 2006 06:38 PMOh, I'm not saying there aren't extremists, by any means (dude, I live in the same state as Fred Phelps, albeit on a different planet). I'm just saying that particular batch is all hat, no cattle.
The musical issue in that sort of church isn't that it's militaristic. They're the sort that sing "God is my boyfriend" type songs. You know: Sonicflood, junk like that.
"God is my boyfriend". I know what you mean. Those songs make me want to throw up.
Trouble is, so many people are so wrapped up in a hemetically-sealed evangelical subculture, they don't realise how stupid that sort of song sounds.
Posted by: Tim Hall on May 28, 2006 05:39 PMIt was a contributing factor to us leaving our church (in which we were elders, no less). So we've been visiting northeast-side churches with Mom, who moved back to the area not so long ago, and today we visited a "church of Christ," of the sort that doesn't use instruments because none were mentioned in the New Testament. Neither were hymnbooks, microphones, the English language, and so on, but evidently those are okay.
At any rate, while it may not work so well as a theology, it's a nice tradition... there's something really cool about a few hundred people singing familiar hymns, a capella and by the hymnbook in full harmony.
Especially after the last few months, where we've watched the church we thought we wanted to join (vs. just going with Mom until she felt comfortable there) go from a pretty reasonable sort of Reformed Baptistish place into full-on Willow Creek theater. Heck, even Fanny Crosby starts to sound theologically sound after enough Vineyard-and-its-ilk CCM.
Okay, y'know, maybe the Warrenites have been getting all weird(er) on me when I wasn't looking:
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/5/29/203330/248
I mean, Daily Kos has a freely acknowledged bias, but even allowing for that... great googly mooglies.