Victoria Clark: Pastor Terry Jones is a Product of America's Free Market in Religion

The West’s ill-conceived response to the horror of 9/11 has been compounded by men of God spreading fear, hatred and mistrust of the Muslim world

Pastor Terry Jones is a Product of America's Free Market in Religion

by Victoria Clark article link article link

September 11, 2010 | The Independent/UK | CommonDreams

It's taken nine years for the Christian West to throw up a cleric as radically, fundamentally bellicose as some of those produced by the Muslim world. The marvel, I would say, is not that it has, and proved beyond reasonable doubt that any and every religion can breed monsters, but that it has not done so earlier.

Pastor Terry Jones of Dove World Outreach Center church in Florida, the Protestant clergyman who thinks marking this ninth anniversary of 9/11 by burning copies of the Koran is a fine idea, may boast a congregation of no more than 50, but there is one thing I'd be prepared to bet on. It won't be his potentially lethal bellicosity that's stopped him attracting a congregation large enough to fill one of those 50,000-seater megachurches. There'll be other, more humdrum reasons for his obscurity until now.

How can I be so sure? A few years ago, while researching a book about the dangerous dovetailing of Armageddon theology with support for hard right-wing Israeli politicians and Israeli expansionism in the West Bank after 9/11, I encountered a number of Pastor Jones clones: alpha male egocentrics who used their pulpits to peddle a deliciously intoxicating cocktail of literal-minded Bible exegesis aimed at forecasting the future, right-wing political punditry, shockingly irresponsible fear-mongering, straight-talking saloon bar humor, and bloodcurdling threats against the Muslim world.

There was the powerfully rotund and famously Israel-friendly Pastor John Hagee of "Cornerstone" megachurch in San Antonio who thrilled his audience one night back in October 2006 with a public address to Iran's president: "Listen up, Mr President of Iran. Don't threaten America! We're not afraid of you!" before provoking a storm of applause and whistling with, "If you remember, Pharaoh threatened Israel and he ended up fish-food in the Red Sea!" A few days earlier he had assured National Public Radio's Fresh Air program that "those who live by the Koran have a scriptural mandate to kill Christian and Jews", adding, "It teaches that very clearly." He got away with that, but his powerful endorsement of Senator John McCain's presidential candidacy in 2008 backfired badly on the senator; Hagee, it turned out, had let rip against Catholics as well as Muslims.

A year earlier I had visited a megachurch in St Paul, Minnesota, for an event known as a "prophecy conference". Its star speaker was Hal Lindsay, a hell-raising, gun-slinging tugboat captain on the Mississippi until he found God, attended theology college and then, in 1970, penned a bestseller called The Late Great Planet Earth. With the looks and demeanor of an aging pop star, Lindsay perched on the high stool with a microphone in one hand and his Bible in the other to tell an audience of about 4,000 what they could expect and should look out for in the light of Old Testament prophecies. He warned of terrifying disasters: Hurricane Katrina had been bad but "what will happen when someone decides to smuggle a nuclear warhead into one of our ports?".

Lindsay made his audience-cum-congregation laugh out loud by describing Islam as "violent to the core" and the Palestinians' miserably overpopulated and isolated Gaza Strip as a "target-rich environment" for the Israeli army. Next, he invited them to open their Bibles at Isaiah, chapter 17: "An oracle concerning Damascus. Behold, Damascus will cease to be a city, and will become a heap of ruins." "My opinion is that Damascus will be destroyed...," he continued, adding that Syria was "a troublemaker, a terrorist headquarters", musing, "I wish the US would obliterate Syria."

The following spring I joined a large group of Americans on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, led by one Chuck Missler, a retired aerospace engineer who ran an internet ministry, rather than his own church. In Chuck's view, Islam was a "Satanic religion" and he could discern the shape of a devil on one of the gray-veined marble panels on the exterior of the Muslims' Dome of the Rock. On the last morning of the tour, Missler and I fell out badly over breakfast; I had begun questioning his views so he began banging his Bible on the table, telling me that if I did not believe every word it said was true he had nothing more to say to me.

All three of these men had created lucrative religious business enterprises. Undeniably charismatic, funny, red-blooded and energetic people, they were all blessed with a boundless self-belief. Pastor Terry Jones admirably fits the same template; the difference is surely only in degree. In the wake of the horror of 9/11, the West's ill-conceived response to which so many now regard as another catastrophe, these men of God have deliberately compounded the problem. Spreading Western Christian fear, hatred and mistrust of the Muslim world, they talk their frighteningly facetious talk, but Pastor Terry Jones has gone out and tried to walk it too.

And there is nothing new about the template. Nineteenth-century American history is littered with tales of men like these who founded breakaway sects that defined themselves by some ludicrously literal reading of something in the Bible and then led their followers into absurd or dangerous adventures.

There were the 156 followers of a Pastor George J Adams, members of the Church of the Messiah in Maine, whom he persuaded to take ship with all their "houses, our agricultural implements, also our mechanical implements and our furniture" for the Holy Land in 1866. An alcoholic and a fantasist, Pastor Adams let everyone down. Within a year of their arrival in the Holy Land, the colony of "Regenerators" was riven with strife, many had died, and Adams himself was found lying in the middle of a road in Jaffa, "in the most degrading state of drunkenness".

John Nelson Darby, the founder of the Plymouth Brethren sect, was an Irish-born example of the same type. But on trips to the US and Canada in the 1860s and 70s, even he complained of the North American ecclesiastical scene resembling a garden "overrun with weeds, some plants set free". It pained him to encounter so much "looseness as to practice and doctrine". Darby's teachings, including an over-literal interpretation of one line of the Bible now popularly known as "The Rapture", has found a much wider audience in the United States than in Britain.

The cause of the abundance and proliferation of churches and sects in the US today has its roots in the fact that theirs is a society that was founded by members of European sects dubbed heretic by the established churches of their countries, by people forced to flee to practice their faith in freedom - starting with our own Puritans. Unfettered by any supervising umbrella institutions of established churches such those of Rome and Canterbury, American churches have been free to grow tough and worldly and as much defined by the personality and talents of their preachers as any Muslim mosque in the fight to survive against the ferocious competition. The American pastor has a valuable tax-exempt charity status to help him but the onus is on him to gather and galvanize a bigger congregation than his rivals; better sound systems and seating and crèches, more jokes, more excitement, more thrills and more fun are what it is often about.

My guess is that a bonfire of the Korans just sounded like a lot of fun.

Victoria Clark's books include 'Allies for Armageddon: The Rise of Christian Zionism', published by Yale.

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Allies for Armageddon: The Rise of Christian Zionism

Review (Amazon Site)

"An insightful and readable book on Christian Zionism. . . . [Clark] adds freshness to the story through her travels and interviews with the principals. . . . Recommended." -Choice (Choice)

Guided by a literal reading of the prophetic sections of the Bible, Christian Zionists are convinced that the world is hurtling toward a final Battle of Armageddon. They believe that war in the Middle East is God’s will for the region. In this timely book, Victoria Clark first explores the 400-year history of this powerful political ideology, laying to rest the idea that Christian Zionism is a passing craze or the province of a lunatic fringe. Then Clark surveys the contemporary Christian Zionist scene in Israel and in the United States, where the influence of the religious fundamentalists has never been greater.

Clark engages with Christian Zionism directly, interviewing leaders, attending events, and traveling with Christian Zionists in the Holy Land. She also investigates the Christian Zionist presence in Israel. She finds that the view through the Christian Zionist lens is dangerously simple: President Bush’s War on Terror is a mythic battle between good and evil, and Syria and Iran represent the powers of darkness. Such views are far from rare—an estimated fifteen to twenty million Americans share them. Almost one in three Americans believes Israel was given to the Jews by God as a prelude to the Battle of Armageddon and Jesus’ Second Coming. Clark concludes with an assessment of Christian Zionists’ impact on American foreign policy in the Middle East and on America’s relationships with European allies since the attacks of 9/11.

Victoria Clark: Pastor Terry Jones is a Product of America's Free Market in Religion