Jesus Reaches for the Barf Bag

That's taken from a line by a commenter on this post at Bene Diction Blogs On. It's all in regard to the disbanding of an association of Christian booksellers in Canada. What's wrong with being a Christian bookseller, well nothing really, except the material you have to carry. A sample:

"I had friends that started a religious bookstore and sold it in deep discouragement some years later. They got fed up having to sell Jesus junk and CCM and way to many sappy religious greeting cards and Christianity lite bestsellers like Joel Osteen."

The whole post is worth reading.

With Friends Like These...

One of the more curious trends of the past couple decades is the increasingly uncritical support that more and more evangelical Christians are prepared to give to the most militaristic, pro-settler strains of Israeli society. Why. For a great deal of them this is all about hoping for the pre-millenialist rapture and holy war that wipes out most of the Jews (all but 144 000 according to some of these groups I think).

In other words, some (but not all) of these groups are aligning with the most right-wing, hawkish elements of Israeli society because they apparently want world history to culminate in the wiping out of most of the Jews during a war that wrecks their homeland. Question: is it possible for support of Israel to actually be anti-Semitic?

Edit: Here's the Max Blumenthal video on Christians United for Israel.

Karl the Grand Inquisitor

There is a section of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov where one character tells a story about a church official (The Grand Inquisitor) whose interest in religion only goes to the extent that he can use it to control people.

In that sense it would seem that Karl Rove is the Grand Inquisitor, at least if you believe Christopher Hitchens and/or Wayne Slater. Whether Rove is agnostic, atheist, or something else, I think you have to put him in the non-believer column on this one. It certainly casts his attempts to get evangelicals to vote GOP in another light.

It's probable that this will simply add to the evangelical disillusionment with the GOP in the US.
Picture: Dostoevsky hadn't seen anything yet!

Monopolizing Jesus

This morning I came across this post on the word "Christian" and how it is used. The problem is that the media has tended to pretty much go along with the evangelical protestant vision in which evangelicals get to own the word "Christian" and therefore exclude mainline protestants, Roman Catholics, et cetera.

Rome has always claimed that it's the one true church, but it hasn't got the sort of uncritical press support that the evangelicals have gotten:

"It made news when James Dobson said of Fred Thompson, a baptized member of the Church of Christ, that 'I don't think he's a Christian.' But his spokesman explains Dobson's point: “We use that word—Christian—to refer to people who are evangelical Christians.” So it's not just Catholics and Mormons: now all of mainstream Protestantism is "non-Christian" in the view of the Republican ayatollahs. It would be nice if political reporters made that clear to their readers."

There is a real danger here that evangelicals with their politcal clout and their media savvy could make a new protestant orthodoxy that would become increasingly unrecognizable in mainline churches. All this would be aided by press whose ambivalence about understanding (not necessarily endorsing, just understanding) religion allows it to take everything that Dobson says at face value.