I urge you to read the whole thing, but here are some highlights:
LA: But you have moved away from that history or perhaps a better way to put it is that the movement moved entirely away from you -- from Conservatism to extremism?
FS: Dad and I were mixing with a new set of people that had not known much, if anything, about my father. If they had even heard of Dad before he came on the pro-life scene in the mid-seventies, they probably hadn’t liked the sound of him. These people included Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Dobson, James Kennedy and all the rest of the televangelists, radio hosts, and other self-appointed “Christian leaders” who were bursting on the scene in the 1970s and early eighties.
Compared to Dad these slick media figures were upstarts. They were “not our sort of people,” Dad often said. What people like Robertson and Falwell got from Dad was some respectability.
Dad had a unique reputation for an intellectual approach to faith. And his well deserved reputation for frugal ethical living, for not financially profiting from his ministry, for compassion, openness and intellectual integrity, was the opposite of the reputations of the new breed of evangelical leadership, with their perks, planes, and corner offices in gleaming new buildings and superficial glib messages. Empire builders like Robertson, Dobson and Falwell liked rubbing up against (or quoting) my father, for the same reason that popes liked to have photos taken with Mother Teresa.
<snip>
LA: Have we not seen angry rhetoric before or is this something new, something different?
FS: David Gergen recently said that the racial attacks on Obama are reminiscent of the atmosphere leading to the killing of President Lincoln. Thomas Friedman wrote in the New York Times that he saw this same disturbing play of religious hate shortly before Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in Israel. And Roger Ebert warned of the rise of the fringe in the GOP and how they are undermining democracy.
(Read more at Huffington Post.)
Of course in [President] Roosevelt's time the far-right was pro German and called him a Jew.
<snip>
LA: A good thing? And what does Zionism have to do with this movement?
FS: Christian Zionists, led by many "respectable" mega-pastors -- including Reverend John Hagee -- believe that war in the Middle East is God’s will. In his book Jerusalem Countdown: A Warning to the World, Hagee maintains that Russia and the Arabs will invade Israel and then will be destroyed by God. This will cause the Antichrist -- the head of the European Union -- to stir up a confrontation over Israel between China and the West.
LA: Wait a moment. Aside from the obvious of the real geopolitical allegiances and resource interests -- making this scenario less likely than all of us packing up and moving to Mars soon -- they believe this is a good thing?
FS: Yes. It will "prove" that they will "inherit the earth." In other words they’ve spent their lives feeling left behind by culture and scholarship. If the "End" comes, they get the last laugh. So they cling to this like an addict clinging to his last fix.
Perhaps, in the era of Obama, Hagee will do a fast rewrite and say that President Obama is the Antichrist, because the same folks who are into Christian Zionism are also into the far, far loony right of the Republican Party represented by oddities like Sarah Palin.
These are the same people who insist that President Obama is a "secret Muslim," "not an American," and/or "a communist," "more European than American," or whichever one of those contradictory things is worse -- not like us anyway, that’s for sure. Christian Zionists support any violent action by the State of Israel against Arabs and Palestinians because the increasingly brutal State of Israel is, in the fevered evangelical/fundamentalist mind, the nation presently standing in for Jesus as avenger on evildoers everywhere, by which they mean Arabs and others not like us.
Christian Zionists are yet another reason why I and countless other Christians, including many of the more moderate evangelicals, mainline Protestants, Roman Catholics, and Orthodox are hesitant to be labeled "Christian." Who wants to be confused with some of the most dangerous and stupid people in the world: nuclear-armed, paranoid evangelical/fundamentalist Bible-thumpers rooting for Armageddon on and worrying in paranoid "official" documents about being forced to become like "the Europeans"? (Just a thought: does that make high-speed rail service a tool of the Devil?)
LA: Being a Jew, this idea of Christian Zionism sounds very much like anti-Semitism. Would you say that Christian Zionism -- and the whole end-times philosophy -- is anti-Semitic or am I misunderstanding it?
FS: Yes. The "purpose" of the Jews is to be there to be killed after the Second Coming. Christian Zionists love Israel the way oncologists love cancer. It's a good living. Jews who play footsie with evangelicals in return for the "support" of the State of Israel are fools.
<snip>
LA: What do you fear will happen? Who or what do you fear will be targeted?
FS: I don't fear large scale violence. I fear another Oklahoma type bombing, and most of all the assassination of President Obama.
Sadly that line from the "Godfather" sticks in my brain about the fact that anyone can be killed. The scary thing is that there are a number of pastors on record as saying they are praying for the President’s death. Can you imagine what some gun-toting paranoid who hears that in a sermon is thinking and might do? And to them the fact that "the world" likes this black man is reason enough to hate him. You wait. The reaction to Obama winning the Nobel Prize will be entirely negative from the far Religious Right. "See the world, all those socialists like him that just proves he’s a -- fill in the blank -- communist, secret Muslim, the Antichrist, whatever."
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Read the whole thing here.
