Hagee, Donahue and the End of the Religious Right

John Hagee is a recent phenomenon for most Americans, but I can remember watching his sweaty, apoplectic, tremolo-throated sermons since childhood. I have long hoped that just once the madman would slip up and a flurry of profanities would sputter out, mid harangue. It seems that American media can only handle one grotesquely obese evangelical ayatollah at a time, and with the overdue shoving off of Jerry Falwell, 2008 has become the Rev. Dr. Hagee's coming out party. Those of us with a distressing attraction to televangelism have known the for-profit prophet for sometime. My first cousin was even a member of Hagee's San Antonio flock before moving his wife and three home schooled children to Fort Worth for a job with Kenneth Copeland Ministries. I suppose I begin with this to show some kind of credentials in discussing recent news about the Rev. Dr. Hagee's turnaround on the Roman Catholic Church.

From the Associated Press, last week:

John Hagee, an influential Texas televangelist who endorsed John McCain, apologized to Catholics Tuesday for his stinging criticism of the Roman Catholic Church and for having "emphasized the darkest chapters in the history of Catholic and Protestant relations with the Jews."

Hagee's support for McCain has drawn cries of outrage from some Catholic leaders who have called on McCain to reject Hagee's endorsement. The likely Republican nominee has said he does not agree with some of Hagee's past comments, but did not reject his support.

In a letter to William Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Civil and Religious Rights, Hagee wrote: "Out of a desire to advance a greater unity among Catholics and evangelicals in promoting the common good, I want to express my deep regret for any comments that Catholics have found hurtful."

Donohue, one of Hagee's sharpest critics, said he accepted the apology and planned to meet with Hagee Thursday in New York.

Wikipedia has the background on what Hagee said to get the papists in a pox.

Hagee's attack against Christian antisemitism in his book Jerusalem Countdown claimed that Adolf Hitler's antisemitism derived especially from his Catholic background, and that the Catholic Church under Pope Pius XII encouraged Nazism instead of denouncing it. (pp. 79-81) [36] He also states that the Roman Catholic Church "plunged the world into the Dark Ages," allowed for the Crusaders to rape and murder with impunity, and called for Jews to be treated as "Christ killers". (p. 73) Later in the book (pp. 81-2), however, he praises Pope John Paul II for repudiating past antisemitism in the Roman Catholic Church.

(…)

"Anti-Catholic Protestants have long labeled the Catholic Church "The Great Whore", and no amount of spin can change that reality. No one who knows anything about the term would suggest otherwise."[38] Furthermore, Hagee did identify (the Great Whore of) Babylon as Rome in his book From Daniel to Doomsday (1999), in a way that melded reference to the Roman Empire and the Roman Catholic Church: "The evidence would point to Rome...It was Rome where Nero wrapped Christians in oily rags and hung them on lampposts, setting them ablaze to light his gardens. It was Rome that orchestrated the Crusades where Jews were slaughtered...It was Rome that orchestrated the Inquisitions throughout the known world where "heretics" were burned at the stake or pulled in half on torture racks because they were not Roman Catholic." (pp. 10-11)

I find this latest episode a perfect illustration of the complete deficit in honesty that defines political Christianity. Hagee makes two types of claims: historical claims about the Catholic Church and theological claims about the Catholic Church's identity. I say "identity" in the sense that apocalypse simply means "revealing" and Hagee's pervasive spewing of apocalyptic nonsense seeks to make sense of the world by fitting something into all the holes in Revelation. The Whore of Babylon is a pretty important figure in Revelation—if you want to make millions by telling people the most fucked up book in the Bible is as good as a newspaper you better have someone slipped into that slot. Premillinnial Dispensationalists (the school of eschatology—study of end times and afterlife—that believes in the Rapture) have frequently cited the Church of Rome in this spot. They go to great lengths proving that the Catholic Church is not really Christian, to the point that my Texas-bred Baptist ass didn't know that Catholics were considered Christians until I learned it in school in the sixth grade. I always thought they were the bad guys in the Christian story.

So the question must be put to Hagee, who has been peddling his fortune telling schtick since long before I came in puking and mewling. Are Catholics Christian? Will they be in heaven with the saved? Are they among the elect? I don't mean predestination, he doesn't have enough dignity to be a Calvinist. I mean can people who 1) pray to Mary and the saints 2) burn candles to statues and revere graven images 3) accept authorities outside of Scripture, to the point that the Vatican has historically worked to keep Scripture out of lay hands 4) believe that taking the sacraments is a source of salvation as opposed to faith alone 5) practice infant baptism and finally 6) continue the practice of plenary indulgences with masses up for sale really be "Christian" by his definition of the term? Hagee wants us to believe that something he had taught and said and preached and written about and nodded in agreement to for DECADES like every member of his denominational and theological background wasn't what he really meant.

This is the very reason why fundamentalists were adamant about staying away from politics for decades: political considerations would cause them to have to water down or change their controversial beliefs. Hagee's theology changed last week, and it should be asked of him what caused it. Was it that God changed? Or was it that sticking with the things he had preached and had preached to him all his life jeopardized John McCain's chances of being president?

And as to the historical claims that Hagee now repudiates, has history changed? To say that the Roman Catholic Church has historically been anti-semitic, that they were directly responsible for pogroms and ethnic cleansing of Jews and that they were sympathetic to the Nazis (and close collaborators with fascists in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Chile and elsewhere) is hardly controversial. In fact, it is a truth that demands to be spoken. Donahue reminds me of one of those Muslim clerics after the Danish cartoon scandal—he is less perturbed by his own faith's violence than he is with people drawing attention to it. It is a cynical faith that bears a striking resemblance to the Mafia, where loyalty and honor are higher virtues than truth-telling. Having already sold out his faith, Hagee had no trouble ignoring historical facts and negating perhaps the only useful thing to ever come out of his jowly little mouth.

This is simply the latest sign of the death of the Religious Right. The movement has gone from a powerful clique of clerics who forced the GOP to change its policies to fit fundamentalist theology to a group forced to give up its fundamentalist theology in order to protect GOP politicians. Hagee's one-eighty on the Church of Rome is in the same vein as Robertson and Falwell's renunciation of their post-9/11 comments. Robertson and Falwell weren't just pulling stuff from their ass after 9/11—they were speaking in the fundamentalist tradition of taking the Old Testament seriously. The Old Testament makes it very clear that God uses group punishment through natural disasters and acts of war, and while most Christians have moved past that fundamentalists have been distinguished by their embrace of that sort of thinking. For Roberston and Falwell to abandon the vengeful god who is intimately involved in the events of history is for them to abandon the god of fundamentalist Christianity. When they do so, they—the last holdouts in this noisome religion—drive the nails into the coffin of the Old Testament god. There will be the Hebrew god of the Hebrew Bible, but the fundamentalist Christian god of the Old Testament is fading fast. It is a testament to some uptick in our humanity.

Fundamentalist Christians were once among the most vociferous proponents of secular governance and apolitical preaching because to do otherwise was to expose their weak-minded faith to the light of day. They would never have consciously decided that their beliefs were not strong enough to stand the test of modernity, but their religion only survived as long as they stayed out of the public realm. Hagee’s turnaround on fundamental dogma shows the best prophets were the ones who warned of the consequences of a political Christianity. Many millions hold the beliefs Hagee recently renounced. Let us hope their faith goes the way of Mithraism and Baal worship.