Praying for Obama to die?: Turning Bible Verse Into Manifesto for Maniacs

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From Brad Blog: The wingnuttery continues to devolve. Last night, Rachel Maddow covered, among other recently related points, the new Rightwing "Pray for Obama" movement supporting, and selling merchandise in support of, Psalms 109:8 which begins this way: "Let his days be few; and let another take his office," and continues with "Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow."

Frank Schaeffer, repentant former rightwing fundamentalist evangelical, and now a contributor here at The BRAD BLOG, was on her show last night to discuss that point, and where it seems to signal that things may be frighteningly headed.(More on Frank Schaeffer...)

Rachel Maddow discusses with Frank Schaeffer the possible threat to the president by a member of the "American Taliban" inspired by the bible verse Psalm 109:8.

SCHAEFFER: Look, this is the American version of the Taliban. The Taliban quotes the Koran, and al-Qaeda quotes certain verses in the Koran, in or out of context, calling for jihad and bloody war and the curse of Allah on infidels. This is the Old Testament biblical equivalent of calling for Holy War.

Now, most Americans will see the bumper sticker and smile and think that it's facetious. Unfortunately, there are 22 million Americans, or so, who call themselves "super conservative evangelicals". Of this, a small minority might be violent, but the general atmosphere here is really getting heated.

And what surprises me is that responsible --- if you can put it that way --- Republican leadership and the editors of some of these Christian magazines, etc. etc., do not stand up in holy horror and denounce this.

Rachel Maddow, Frank Schaeffer, Barack Obama and The Antichrist Rachel Maddow interviewed Frank Schaeffer on September 18, 2009. The starting point was a poll in New Jersey that showed 18% of NJ voters think Barack Obama is the anitchrist. Schaeffer does a brilliant -- and forthrightly provactive -- job of showing why and how religious beliefs matter. Conspiracies, demonizing, scapegoating, and endtime madness.

You know, they're always asking "Where is the Islamic leadership denouncing terrorism? Why are the moderates speaking out?"

Well, I challenge the folks that I used to work with, that I talk about in my book Patience With God, and I would just say to them, "Where they hell are you? This is not funny anymore, and be it on your head if something happens to our President, if you are going to go around supporting, and not speaking out against this stuff"

It's not a question of whose doing it. The bigger question is, where are the people speaking out against these things? I don't hear those voices raised in the evangelical fundamentalist community. And, until I do, my opinion is, they're culpable.

 

 

Psalm 109:8. "May his days be few; may another take his place of leadership."

• 109:9. "May his children be fatherless and his wife a widow."


• 109:10. "May his children be wandering beggars; may they be driven from their ruined homes."


• 109:11. "May a creditor seize all he has; may strangers plunder the fruits of his labor."


• 109:12. "May no one extend kindness to him or take pity on his fatherless children."


• 109:13. "May his descendants be cut off, their names blotted out from the next generation."


• 109:14. "May the iniquity of his fathers be remembered before the LORD; may the sin of his mother never be blotted out."


• 109:15. "May their sins always remain before the LORD, that he may cut off the memory of them from the earth."


• 109:16. "For he never thought of doing a kindness, but hounded to death the poor and the needy and the brokenhearted."


• 109:17. "He loved to pronounce a curse may it come on him; he found no pleasure in blessing— may it be far from him."


• 109:18. "He wore cursing as his garment; it entered into his body like water,into his bones like oil."


• 109:19. "May it be like a cloak wrapped about him, like a belt tied forever around him."

Right-Wing Hatemongering Fueled by Christianity?

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By Frank Schaeffer, AlterNet. Posted September 21, 2009.

The ugly side of Evangelical Christianity is very much to blame for the anti-Obama hyperventilating.

Former president Jimmy Carter went on the record to point out that he believes that racism is at the heart of the great deal of the extreme animosity being leveled at President Obama (NBC News September 15). Carter identified himself as a Southerner with an insider's understanding. There's something he didn't mention however: the special culpability of his own religion -- Evangelical Christianity -- for the anti-Obama hyperventilating and furious reaction to our first black president. And that reaction has less to do with race and more to do with the ugliest side of religion.

The fact is that if you're going to blame one group above all others for the willful ignorance and continuing ugliness of the response to President Obama the best candidate would be the evangelical/fundamentalist community. The angry part of the South Carter spoke of is racist because it's dominated by a certain type of "Christian" culture.

Since Carter is also an evangelical Christian (as well as a Southerner) he would have done well to use his evangelical insider status to point to not just racism but to scream bloody murder about a bigger problem today: the hijacking of Christianity as the source of the hate and anger directed against all things "other" by a vocal (and health care lobby-organized and funded) angry minority of voters who are poisoning the American body.

American Christianity Is At The Heart Of Our Worst Problems

Are the New Atheists leading us to enlightenment? The problem with the recent New Atheist attacks on Christianity is that they mirror the hostility of the evangelical/fundamentalist subculture toward the secular society that it so disdains. The real answer to the question; "Can Christianity be saved from the Christians?" is not going to be found coming from people like Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris et al. Instead that answer may be found in the life and work of Christians such as former president Jimmy Carter, President Obama, the late writer John Updike, and other public figures from Desmond Tutu to Nelson Mandela who's faith can be taken seriously because of the moral authority given them by their achievements outside the realm of theology.

The people running around calling Obama is "Hitler", the so-called "birthers" and all the rest can't be understood outside of the context of the hermetically sealed world-hating gated community known as Evangelical Christianity. As a former Evangelical and son of an Evangelical Religious Right leader, let me share a little of the insider perspective that I wish Carter had brought to the subject.

What Defines American Evangelicals These Days?

The key to understanding the Evangelicals is to understand the popularity of the Left Behind series of books about the "return of Christ" (and the whole host of other End Times "ministries" from the ever weirder Jack-the-Rapture-is-coming!-

Van-Impe to the smoother but no less bizarre pages of Christianity Today magazine). This isn't some new or sudden interest in prophecy, but evidence of the deepening inferiority complex suffered by the evangelical/fundamentalist community.

Left Behind

The words "left behind" are ironically what the books are about, but not in the way their authors intended. The evangelical/fundamentalists, from their crudest egocentric celebrities to their "intellectuals" touring college campuses trying to make evangelicalism respectable, have indeed been left behind by modernity. They won't change their literalistic anti-science, anti-education, anti-everything superstitions, so now they nurse a deep grievance against "the world."

This has led to a profound fear of the "other." Jenkins and LaHaye (the Left Behind authors) provide the ultimate revenge fantasy for the culturally left behind against the "elite." The Left Behind franchise holds out hope for the self-disenfranchised that at last soon everyone will know "we" were right and "they" were wrong. They'll know because Spaceship Jesus will come back and whisk "us" away, leaving everyone else to ponder just how very lost they are because they refused to say the words, "I accept Jesus as my personal savior" and join our side while there was still time!

The bestselling status of the Left Behind novels proves that, not unlike Islamist terrorists who behead their enemies, many evangelical/ fundamentalist readers relish the prospect of God doing lots of messy killing for them as they watch in comfort from on high. They want revenge on all people not like them--forever.

Generations Of Indoctrination

We are several generations into the progeny of leaders such as James Dobson and his radio show Focus On The Family. These offspring extol the virtues of corporal punishment, patriarchy, applying biblical law to public governance and so forth. Millions of evangelicals have been raised in homes where they've been isolated from the wider culture, home schooled and/or sent to "Christian schools" where they have been indoctrinated to believe that the Federal Government is the enemy of all true believers, that the "End" is near, that secular society is their enemy as is art, learning and culture.

They now form a Fifth Column of the deliberately intellectually disenfranchised. They know they are out of the loop and hate the rest of us for their own self-imposed isolation. I'm afraid they will soon turn to violence.

Here Are The Alternatives To Change the Theologically-Induced Hate Landscape:

A) all sane Americans must become atheists or agnostics,

or...

B) those of us who are Christians must rescue Christianity from the willfully ignorant evangelicals and fundamentalists.

I favor the second alternative. First, having been raised in an evangelical/fundamentalist home I've long since moved beyond my background when it comes to my politics and my theology. That proves something; people can change their minds! I did.

But I believe more strongly than ever that we human beings are spiritual beings with or without the permission of those who take a purely rationalist approach to human existence. The better -- and I think only realistic option -- is to regard religion as an evolving process of human consciousness and work to reform rather than eliminate it

In my soon-to-be published book Patience With God: Faith For People Who Don't Like Religion (Or Atheism) I have very deliberately started a radical conversation through which I hope many of us can carve out a position that embraces religion while absolutely rejecting the type of insanity that has become synonymous with the word "Christian" in contemporary America...

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Frank Schaeffer is a writer and author of Crazy for God: How I Grew Up As One Of The Elect, Helped Found The Religious Right, And Lived To Take All (Or Almost All) Of It Back.