Why Evangelical Christianity is Dangerous

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Courtesy of Andrew, this report from Secular Humanism is completely horrifying, if completely unsurprising.

Incredibly, President George W. Bush told French President Jacques Chirac in early 2003 that Iraq must be invaded to thwart Gog and Magog, the Bible’s satanic agents of the Apocalypse.

Honest. This isn’t a joke. The president of the United States, in a top-secret phone call to a major European ally, asked for French troops to join American soldiers in attacking Iraq as a mission from God.

Now out of office, Chirac recounts that the American leader appealed to their “common faith” (Christianity) and told him: “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East…. The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled…. This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins.”

It would almost be funny that a leader of one of the world's most culturally and technologically advanced nations would invade a foreign country and toss away the lives of over 4,000 soldiers based on a 2,000 year old document, but that, my friends, is what fanaticism does. Having been raised Baptist, I'm pretty familiar with this mindset -- I hear from relatives all the time how we've entered the "end times" and how Obama may be the antichrist. Because their medieval form of religion cannot possibly fit into a modern world order, and because that religion is what they cling to in order to bypass the disorientation and vertigo of contemporary life, the world becomes populated with symbols and dark intimations of apocalypse. Gog and Magog as the USSR and China is so 1980s. There's no need for internal consistency or logic -- somewhere the puppetmaster is pulling the strings in the foretold manner, and all you have to do to get your seat on the Golden Gate Express is shut up and trust what your elders interpret from a really old book.

And it's that closing to logic and clinging to antiquated modes of thought despite countervailing evidence that defines fanaticism, and what, dangerously, links the prevailing form of Protestant Christianity in America to insurgent Islam in the Middle East. The salient point is that there is no difference between Christian fanaticism and Islamic fanaticism -- both are contemptuous of modernity and terrified by it, both are willing to murder in the name of their fanaticism (see: Tiller, George, and the Iraq war), and both contort facts to fit their particular brand of eschatology.

The frightening thing is that Bush didn't even seem to be that much of a zealot -- just a fairly unintelligent, uncurious sort who was content to accept whatever ideology suited him best at the moment. Now that the evangelical movement controls all the levers of power within the Republican Party, the possibility of having a true fanatic (see: Palin, Sarah) is greater than ever. No one who views foreign policy through the lens of a 2,000-year old book of fairy tales is qualified to lead the free world.