Is Bush the Antichrist?

The Christian right and the Christian left are engaged in a debate over
who 'owns' Jesus-and whether Dubya is a force for good or evil.

by Tim Appelo

http://www.seattleweekly.com/features/0449/041208_news_antichrist.php

When President George W. Bush was appointed by five Supreme Court
justices in 2000, right-wing Christians sang hosannas for the triumph
of God's will over the electorate's. "President Bush is God's man at
this hour," said Tim Goeglein, Bush's liaison to evangelicals. Though
the Methodist president dishonestly conceals the whole truth about his
apocalyptic religious beliefs, he has acted as an evangelist in office.
As Esther Kaplan demonstrates in With God on Their Side: How Christian
Fundamentalists Trampled Science, Policy, and Democracy in George W.
Bush's White House, he's doled out millions to far-right Christian
groups, systematically crushed secular left and nonright mainstream
organizations from Head Start to the Audubon Society, and replaced
policy and scientific experts with comically ignorant yet politically
cunning fanatic provocateurs. Out with the American Medical
Association, in with the American Family Association. Before Bush, the
Internal Revenue Service hounded the Christian Coalition; now that Bush
is, in extremist Gary Bauer's opinion, the de facto leader of the
Christian Coalition, the government selectively harasses non-Christian
groups, and a rightist apparatchik tried to sneak through Congress a
bill legitimizing the kinds of politically targeted IRS abuses that
would have made Richard M. Nixon proud.

Televangelist and onetime presidential candidate Pat Robertson once
rallied millions to lobby God for the deaths of liberal Supreme Court
justices, recommending prayers for coronaries and cancer. "We ask for
miracles!" preached Robertson. Today, the judiciary's Clinton-era
moderates haven't even a prayer against the Reagan/Bush rightists.
Author Tim LaHaye, whose Left Behind thrillers based on the Bible's
"end times" stories are America's best-selling books for adults, once
helped destroy the Jack Kemp presidential campaign he co-chaired by
demanding 25 percent of government jobs for the Christian right's 25
percent of the population. Today, no way does Bush's
"Evangetaliban"-which claims responsibility for winning Bush a second
term in 2004-intend to settle for less than 100 percent.

But not every follower of the Prince of Peace is shouting amen to
Bush/Robertson/Falwell's Killer Christians. Granted, the
fastest-growing churches are either evangelical-Bible believers out
to win your soul-or fundamentalists, out to bend your soul to their
bluenose will and so literal when it comes to the Bible that some
insist Christ's parables refer to actual people and events. Fundies
also incline to the authoritarianism of Oswald Chambers, the
19th-century Christian whose harsh sermonettes against rational
analysis and for a gut response to God Bush reads each morning (perhaps
on this Web site: www.gospelcom.net/rbc/utmost).

Yet the more love-thy-neighbor-advocating mainstream church is not
dead. In The American Prospect magazine, Baptist Sunday school teacher
Jimmy Carter charges the fundamentalists with "the abandonment of some
of the basic principles of Christianity." And in his brilliant 1997
book, Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity, author
Bruce Bawer accuses fundamentalism of replacing Christ's Church of Love
with a Church of Law, lamenting "the horrible monster that 20th-century
legalistic Christians have made out of their God and Savior and the
hateful institution that they have made out of his church." He notes
acidly that the movement got its biggest boost in reaction not to the
Supreme Court's 1963 school-prayer ban but to the Carter-era IRS
crackdown on segregated Christian schools. "The Religious Right didn't
grow out of a love of God and one's neighbor-it grew out of racism,
pure and simple."

"Kids growing up in Church of Law families nowadays think that the only
two sins, or at least the only two really, really important ones, are
having an abortion and having gay sex," Bawer told Seattle Weekly. "The
notion that love, tolerance, and inclusiveness are moral values has
been dropped down the memory hole."

A soldier in the U.S. Army e-mailed Seattle Weekly, "I'm just a citizen
who was raised in a Christian community and is tired of having my
values hijacked by a conservative movement that only applies them
selectively at home and hardly at all overseas." The soldier asks to
remain anonymous.

Perversion of Christian Faith?

"Bush is one of the key figures leading the church away from Jesus,"
says Christian author Bob Miller, who wrote the nonbluenose Christian
best seller Blue Like Jazz. Miller is no pantywaist-he had the balls
to run a ministry at Reed College in Portland, Ore., which is so
godless that its soccer team is said in campus legend to have once
staged a halftime crucifixion in a game against a Christian school. But
he couldn't stomach it when, for instance, Texas Gov. Bush not only
allowed the execution of his fellow born-again Christian, the penitent
ax murderer Karla Faye Tucker, but made vicious fun of her on TV
("Please don't kill me!" Bush said, mocking her prayerful plea for
God's mercy). Miller classifies Bush Christians as modern
Pharisees-the allegedly proud, rigid, legalistic hypocrites John the
Baptist called "a generation of vipers." "The worst condemnation that
Jesus has for anybody, I mean the worst, is for Pharisees," says
Miller. "If you asked Jerry Falwell who the Pharisees are in our
society, they can't point anybody out." There are no mirrors in Bush's
church.

"People of faith-especially those whose moral values differ from the
values exploited this time around-need to figure out a way to be
figured into the political landscape," Philadelphia Presbyterian
minister Cynthia Jarvis editorialized in The New York Times. "Maybe
four years from now, when the number one issue cited by voters in exit
polls is again 'moral values,' those values will have something to do
with economic justice, racial equality and the peaceable kingdom for
which we all were made."

But few have preached harder against the Christian right's wrongs than
the Rev. Rich Lang of Seattle's Trinity United Methodist Church in
Ballard. "This administration is a culture of death, and so is the
religious right," says Lang. In his Open Letter to George Bush,
published in Real Change, Lang thunders, "You claim Christ but act like
Caesar. There is blood all over your hands with the promise of even
more blood to come. You sit atop the nations like the Biblical ***** of
Babylon openly fornicating with the military men of might." His sermon
"George Bush and the Rise of Christian Fascism" (posted like Luther's
theses on the church Web site, www.tumseattle.org) rails that "the
power and seduction of this administration emerges from its diabolical
manipulation of Christian rhetoric . . . the mirror opposite of what
Jesus embodied. It is, indeed, the materialization of the spirit of
Antichrist: a perversion of Christian faith and practice."

Lang is not using "Antichrist" in a tone of bitter sarcasm, as many do.
Google "George Bush is the Antichrist," and you'll get a startling list
of Web sites that argue the case, but with sardonic intent and
whimsical 666-numerological riffs. Unwhimsical pundit Robert Wright,
who attended Calvary Baptist in Bush's Midland, Texas, hometown, uses
modern science to puzzle out what may be God's plan in his bold book
Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. When he notes in Slate magazine
that he supported John Kerry because "He's a long way from being the
Messiah, but at least he's not the anti-Christ," Wright says not to
take this as gospel. "Obviously, I was kidding-Bush isn't literally
the Antichrist. But I do think he could conceivably do some pretty
cataclysmic damage to the world. . . ." Even Christian Bush-basher
Miller urgently distances himself from the Bush-as- Antichrist meme
that's sweeping the Web: "The last thing I want is for someone to say,
'Bob Miller thinks Bush is the Antichrist!'"

"He's not the Antichrist, he's just a cynical, callous politician,"
objects Stealing Jesus author Bawer. "I gather some liberal Christians
have gone off the rails." He refers to Lang's identification of Bush
with the "spirit of Antichrist" warned against in the Bible's 1 John
4:3. "This kind of inane proof texting is the province of the Church of
Law types, the right-wing Darbyites," believers in Left Behind-style
apocalyptic prophecy. "It's depressing to see it practiced by liberal
Christians, too." Bawer is appalled by Bush's attempt, "in the name of
Christianity, to add to the Constitution what would be far and away its
most un-Christian amendment. But I'm also unsettled by the extreme way
in which he's been personally characterized by many people."

Granted, Bawer says the right "worships evil," and has "warped
Christianity into something ugly and hateful that has little or nothing
to do with love and everything to do with suspicion, superstition, and
sadism [and] denies the name of Christianity to followers of Jesus who
reject its barbaric theology." But "when people start calling somebody
the Antichrist, we're in right-wing fundamentalist, Church of Law
territory, and I don't like it one bit. . . . Demonizing (literally)
individuals in this way is ugly, scary. . . . "

Lang, though, stands his ground against his famous accuser, and insists
that he's missing some crucial distinctions. "This is not about George
Bush, this is about this whole administration. It's about Karl Rove,
it's about the neocons, some of whom are Christian, some who aren't,
but who are using Christian rhetoric. James Dobson [of Focus on the
Family] has direct access to the highest echelons of American
government. And Robertson and Falwell."

Still, Lang means what he says about Bush. "He has the spirit of the
Antichrist. Literally, break the word apart. It is a spirituality that
is anti-Christ."

Meet the Beast

So what's an Antichrist, anyhow? The concept has evolved bewilderingly
throughout biblical history (see sidebar, p. 25). As definitively
explained in Bernard McGinn's Antichrist: 2,000 Years of the Human
Fascination With Evil and Robert Fuller's Naming the Antichrist: The
History of an American Obsession, the character can be traced to Old
Testament authors' horrified response to the oppression of ancient
colonizers. When Alexander the Great's conquests led to a statue of
Zeus in the Temple in Jerusalem, Jews envisioned a final conflict story
wherein the Syrian Greek tyrant Antiochus, reimagined as a beast, got
burned in God's "fiery stream" on Judgment Day.

Early Christians grafted the Roman Emperor Nero onto the tradition as
the Beast from the Abyss in the Apocalypse, known to current Christians
as the book of Revelation, the Bible's astonishing finale about the
final days. Nero dressed in animal skins to ravage men's and women's
genitals, burned Christians in ghastly dramas, demanded to be worshiped
as a god, and was rumored to have disappeared to the East, threatening
to return one day to rule the world from Rome, or Jerusalem. Actually,
he killed himself, but he lives on in beastly legend. To this day, the
word for Antichrist in Armenian is "Nero."

Though the story of the Beast and various other biblical verses are
associated with the Antichrist, the word itself, "Antichrist," only
appears four times in the Bible, in the letters of John. Christians
have eternally argued about the Antichrist. Revelation was nearly
banned from the Bible, and permitted strictly on condition it should
never be used as it is by fundies today. Church father Augustine
ordered Christians to quit reading apocalyptic Left Behind-style
scenarios into scripture and think of the Antichrist as anyone who
denies Christ-and he said the first place to hunt for him is in your
own heart.

In my evangelical Lutheran childhood I often feared the Rapture had
left me behind, even though my church was liberal with Christ's love.
But now I'm with Augustine-and also with Robert Wright, who finds in
his book The Moral Animal a biological basis for original sin. For a
Darwinist Christian, the Beast is within: the lizard brain fighting the
higher mind for control of one's soul. As Darwin cried out to heaven in
his notebook: "The Devil under form of Baboon is our grandfather!"

But people crave apocalyptic stories and an easy answer to spiritual
struggle. As the narrator says of a character in Left Behind, "He
wanted to believe something that tied everything together and made it
make sense." The most popular story today was concocted by an English
law-student-turned-self-taught-theologian named John Nelson Darby in
the 1840s, and popularized by a Kansas City lawyer named C.I. Scofield
with his best-selling 1909 Scofield Reference Bible. The Scofield Bible
cross-referenced Old and New Testament verses to illuminate the hidden
figure in the bewildering carpet of scripture, weaving the
phantasmagoria of apocalyptic visions into a single system-a magic
carpet of narrative to whisk them safely out of time and into heaven.
Its systematic beauty was designed as a kind of counterscience to
rebuke and refute Darwinism and historical biblical scholarship.

And man, is it a great story. It's not a literal interpretation, but an
imaginative deduction as breathtaking as Charles Kinbote's commentary
on John Shade in Nabokov's Pale Fire, or Charles Manson's prophetic
interpretation of the Beatles' White Album. The Bible describes
Christ's Second Coming and the Rapture of the Saints-the whooshing of
Christians bodily into heaven. Anybody reading it for the first time
would think these are supposed to happen at the same time, at the end
of time. But Darby hawked the notion that the Rapture happens first.
Exeunt Christians. Enter the Beast/Antichrist, who perpetrates a
hellish seven-year Great Tribulation. Then Christ returns, kicks Beast
butt, and reigns for 1,000 years-the Millennium. Fifty-one percent of
Americans voted for Bush; 59 percent believe Revelation will come true.
Without one scrap of scriptural evidence, almost one-quarter of
Americans believe Revelation predicted 9/11.

The Independent newspaper called Revelation "that earliest of airport
novels." LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins' Left Behind dazzlingly turns it into
one. Planes and cars crash, deprived of pilots by the Rapture. Even
fetuses get Raptured, deflating their mamas' bellies. The Antichrist
becomes Nicolae Carpathia, People magazine's Sexiest Man Alive, seizing
control of the U.N. to impose one world government! The faithful get
saved! The secular humanists get what they deserve! Since latter-day
Darbyites believe end times scripture predicts and mandates Israel's
resurgence to usher in Christ's return and the Antichrist's smackdown,
they help drive Bush's rubber-stamp policy for Israel. The real Middle
East road map may be the Scofield Reference Bible.

"That's a completely foolish and erroneous interpretation of the
scriptures," snaps Jimmy Carter. "But this administration, maybe
extremely influenced by ill-advised theologians of the extreme
religious right, has pretty well abandoned any real effort that could
lead to a resolution of the problems between Israel and the
Palestinians."

"It's deeply dismaying that millions of Americans who call themselves
Christians are believers in something that has virtually nothing to do
with the gospel message," mourns Bawer. "Darby, Scofield, and company
have been a disaster for Christianity in America. Millions of people
think they are adherents of 'traditional Christianity' when, in fact,
they have been roped into a newfangled religion based on bizarre
theological propositions that Jesus would never recognize."

"It's so ludicrous!" laments Lang. "Such a twisting of scripture. That
history is scripted is something that it seems to me Christians ought
to have an instinct to be repulsed against. You follow a code, there's
magical meanings in the text."

But Lang knows why people cling to millennial dreams-like Dubya's,
his life was saved by a fundamentalist church. "It attracted me because
I came out of chaos. Alcohol and drugs; 19 years old and I was dyin'. I
needed a strong fence around my life and people who cared for me, and I
got both. But after about a year of reading what they taught me, I
started to raise questions."

Further study convinced him that Augustine was on the right track,
after all, in reading apocalyptic literature as spiritual advice, not a
sneak preview of tomorrow's headlines. "Revelation is written to the
churches in its time, not to the churches in the 21st century. It's
written to seven churches in Turkey." As for the Antichrist warnings in
John, he reads them not as a literal prediction of Bush but as a
warning against the eternal danger of his hypocritical,
Mammon-worshiping, proudly elitist, heartless, narrowly legalistic
spirit. "1 John seems to be obsessed with language like this: 'How can
you say you love God, who you have not seen, if you do not love your
brother and sister, who you have seen?' Who are in need of food,
clothing, shelter? The implication of the doctrine of the Antichrist is
that there is an economic disparity in the community, and people are
using their religion, not practicing it."

Bush policy is based on what he told his Harvard Business School
professor- "Poor people are poor because they're lazy." Responds
Lang, "Again, anti-Christ. It's just the opposite [of Christ's
teaching]. The thrust of right-wing Christianity-their solution to
poverty is to discipline the poor. Now, there's a lot to be said for
that. I mean, if people would clean up their negative habits. There's
some common ground where we can meet. But the right never addresses
what Jesus called 'that fox Herod'-the systematic problem that has
given rise to homelessness and poverty."

Bringing Back Heresy

Lang argues that followers of Jesus, not Bush, should call an
Antichrist an Antichrist-or rather, its spirit. "The progressive
church should bring back-and this sounds so crazy-the word
'heresy.' The end times theology and this other thing called
Dominionism or Christian Reconstruction-those are heresies." Lang
says not to believe Christian Coalition leader-turned-***** of
Enron-turned Bush/Cheney campaign lieutenant Ralph Reed when he
claims the Christian right has no plans to upend the Constitution and
impose its religion on civic life. "He's a liar," says Lang.
"Dominionism is the notion that God has given the dominion, the
governance of the world, to the church. And so Christians literally are
born to rule, by force if necessary, to bring the Kingdom of God on
Earth. I believe that the theology that drives the Bush administration
affirms this." When Falwell preached, "We must take back what is
rightfully ours," his ambitions did not stop at U.S. borders. This is a
Church of a Law Unto Itself.

In the Greek, the word "anti" doesn't just mean "against." It also
contains the meanings "equivalent to" or "a substitute for." Nero was
anti-Christ because he falsely claimed to be God. The idea of deception
is crucial. The Antichrist isn't the devil, the opposite of God. He's
an evil human masquerading as a golden god. The Antichrist appears to
humanity not as the hideous Beast but as handsome Nicolae Carpathia,
who resembles Robert Redford without the facial erosion. "That could be
our next Republican president," quips Lang.

In this sense, the Bush church is Antichristlike indeed. It is
institutionalized deception, anti-American ugliness with a beguiling
face, a neocon job. Only when necessary does it employ the perilous
bald-faced lie, the outrageously transparent duplicity-the political
equivalent of Robertson arguing that "Do unto others" indicates
Christ's support of capitalist selfishness. More often, a smoothly
dissembling surface is preferred. Rove notoriously emulates
Machiavelli; the Christian right is a stealth movement, infiltrating
school boards and mainstream churches and every institution of
democracy like a thief in the night-in order to undermine, overthrow,
and replace democracy with theocracy. Bush is the father of lies. The
Union of Concerned Scientists proclaims Bush's lies about science
"unprecedented." In With God on Their Side, Kaplan concludes, on
mountainous evidence, "The goal is not to engage your opponents in the
public square, but to kneecap them, or send them into exile."

"It is a conspiracy in the sense that they have not been public and
accountable to their ideology," says Lang. "Follow the money! The same
filthy-rich foundations that have funded the rise of neocons are
funding the rise of the religious right." He suggests that you check
out the expos=E9 Web site www.yuricareport.com for the terrifying
particulars.

But-to cop a line from the late Christian-right author Francis
Schaeffer, how then should we live? Should we turn the other cheek to
the Antichrist? Forgive LaHaye for saying that "Old Testament capital
punishment" was less cruel to gays than modern acceptance is? Or
counter Robertson's prayers for a divine Supreme Court fatwa with our
own? As a self-scrutinizing Christian, isn't Lang in danger of
succumbing to hate?

"Yeah, I'm there. I have a physical, visceral reaction to Bush, to his
image, to when he speaks. I mean, I think the guy is evil. They are
willfully deceptive people, and I'm very angry. But . . . hatred is not
a very useful strategy of resistance, nor is it very useful to create
an alternative."

Bawer preaches that the alternative must not employ the church as a
weapon. "For liberals to join in the right-wing game of bashing one's
opponents with the Bible only further erodes the wall between religion
and government. This, to me, is a major concern-and Bush's reckless
contribution to this erosion is, for me, a major offense. It's
especially offensive in light of 9/11, which was the work of people who
hate the West because it is secular, tolerant, inclusive, and
democratic. What distinguishes America and the West from most of the
Muslim world is those values. I wish we had a president who recognized
this fact and helped Americans recognize it, too."

So does Lang. But he thinks the secular left has to inspire its own
flock-with better ministers than dull, brainy Parson Kerry of the
Church of God's Frozen People. "Even though I don't like him, Bush is
probably a funner person," Lang admits. He insists that the Christian
left has its own work to do in saving what he calls "the nation with
the soul of a church." "The right has won. I mean, they've seized the
language of the church. So against Bruce, I would say, no, the
progressive wing of the church has got to reclaim its language and
redefine those words. Turning the other cheek wasn't passive, oh, hit
me, it hurts so good-it was a form of resistance. You're turning your
cheek to strengthen your backbone."

Lang is convinced that secular efforts alone can't reverse the
Antichrist tide. "Evangelical churches have a sense of urgency about
the doing of 'good' in the world that the mainline church has lost. If
the church can't show a positive, enticing, seductive vision of the
future, where people fall in love with God and fall in love with this
community, then it really doesn't have anything to say." Revelation
teaches us what happens to lukewarm Christians.

It won't be easy. The political and religious left are not organized.
"And part of the reason it cannot organize is that the people in the
pews benefit from the system as it is," says Lang. "They can't work up
any kind of passion to change it. As those benefits stop, we'll see the
left arise. But it might be too late."

Ultimately, despite his despair, Lang is a man of faith. "I really do
believe that we're in for several decades of a very dark time. But
that's not the end of the world."

---
Stop Elmer Fudd web site: http://www.ElmerFudd.US/
Covert text file server: http://www.notserver.com/