Yahoo! News - GOP Mailing Warns Liberals Will Ban Bibles
a friend read this story and became enraged; it smacked of dirty politics to her. but i understood it.
the time of universal persecution, of christian martyrdom, before the rapture and before the second coming, is central to a certain segment of christian faith. churches will close, bibles will burned, god will be publicly denounced; it will be a second inquisition. all christians will be forced to go underground. this eschatological desire is the center of our religious belief.
we (i include myself because this was my religious culture) tolerate this world and this life only for the reward that is to come. christian history is meant to move inexorably toward this moment of revelation - anything that deviates from this timeline is ignored.
it's strange to build a faith system that pivots on the idea of catastrophe and martyrdom (when Christ shall ultimately be revealed and defeat evil at last), but that's what really lies beneath the evangelical movement.
this is the apocalyptic heart of fundamentalism. with our eyes ever on the End, we eschew everything else. it explains why social problems don't matter; why poverty doesn't matter; why the war in iraq is holy; why crumbling civil rights don't matter; why the hijacking of our culture by terror doesn't matter. it all fits into the timeline.
why should church folk in west virginia care about better environmental laws, jobs, health care and civil rights when all that matters is their final reckoning before God?
unfortunately, democrats have never been able to answer that.
(more on that answer later)
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