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The prospect of a meltdown of our economic system, or of endless war bankrupting us, is not met with dread by many of those in power, because so many of our leaders are End Timers, for whom such catastrophes are the best of news. These destructions would surely help to bring about Armageddon and the Rapture, their dream of a “place” blessedly free of riff-raff, Commies, gays, and Arabs.
If ever there was a reason to keep religion out of politics,-or, more accurately, to keep the religious out of politics, it is this. Shouldn’t those people who have such power over our lives be focused on an earthly life, not on a post-Rapture dream of the ultimately exclusive country club? (Amusingly, “riff-raff” End Timers dream of a place free of the likes of politicians and bankers. The more grounded among us hope that our great-grandchildren will get to place mocking bets on this question.)
Reagan’s Interior Secretary, James Watts, told an inquiring Congress that there was no point in preserving the environment, since the world was about to end soon, that this was why he gave wildlife refuges to developers, national forests to loggers. (His frankness doubtless resulted in the tighter lips we see today.) No one asked Watts, if there was no point in preserving the environment since the world was about to end, why was there apparently reason to preserve business interests? The answer would have been: While citizen End Timers may let their homes and yards and lives fall into rack and ruin because it all won’t matter soon, those End Timers in positions of power actively use the might of the US government, and our tax dollars, to speed up the using up and destruction of this Earth, because they’re itching for “the glory of the coming of the Lord.”
As an epistemological position paper, a purely abstract essay re the End Time and how we can do our damnedest to hasten its coming, it might be an interesting intellectual exercise. Bizarre, but interesting. However, actively co-opting governments, communications media, schools (after NCLB eliminates those pesky public schools),-to overcome resistance to global genocide for the sake of a select few, is not what any sane citizenry could want. Remember, there’s only room for 144,000 Raptured. Chubby WASPS with names like Hagee have already booked floors of suites in the post-Rapture Club lodgings. You don’t think that you or your snot-nosed brats stand a chance of getting in, do you?
Again, this isn’t the odd notion of a small group of harmless eccentrics; this is increasingly a core motive for achieving political power in America. Ronald Reagan vivaciously announced, during his 1980 run, that “We may be the generation that sees Armageddon.” And we voted for him anyway. The political right’s positing that it is shrewd foreign policy strategy to present Presidents as unstable religious fanatics has an appalling logic to it. But it can only be a disincentive to cross America’s dictates only until someone calls the bluff. What if it turns out then not to be a ruse, a bluff? What if the President really does fancy apocalypses?
When the question is asked, “Should there be a religious test for presidential candidates,” when it is clear that there most definitely is a de facto test already, the assumption always is that such a test determines if a candidate qualifies as sufficiently religious. Why instead shouldn’t such a test weed out the religious? Should we be any less alarmed when the most powerful person on Earth says he is moved by spirits, holy or otherwise, only on Sundays, than if he said he was always under their influence? Allowing unaccountable, unverifiable sources of influence on global affairs, regardless of the alleged pedigree of these sources, is irresponsible governance. One man’s Holy Spirit is another man’s schizoid phantasm, and there exists not a single touchstone to tell the two apart. One man’s perception of humanity’s ethics of cooperation as a spirit of goodness is as invisible as another man’s perception of God as Inquisitor and destroyer of worlds, and we are firmly barred from any sort of “twenty questions” process of discovery as to which spirit moves our leader. This is inexcusable.
Europeans today have democracies. Despite generous worker protections and universal health care, their economies are doing well. They view Americans as spookily hyper-religious. They are moving ever farther away from their long nightmare of medieval feudalism. Meanwhile, in America, we are economically, politically, socially slipping closer, ever closer, toward that bad dream.
Does anyone want to wake up and smell the coffee?
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