Frightening stuff! Link To The Idolatry of America Article
Some things: pictures of Jesus Christ on the cross WITH GEORGE BUSH’S NAME ON THE NAILS! And this passage exposing Bush’s blasphemy:
Consider Bush’s speech at Ellis Island on the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks. In his remarks, the president described the United States as the “hope of all mankind” and asserted that this “hope still lights our way. And the light shines in the darkness. And the darkness will not overcome it.” Marsh bristles at this passage, which alludes to the prologue to the Gospel of John but modifies its message in a crucially important respect. Whereas the New Testament describes God as the light that will not be overcome by the darkness that surrounds it, Bush ascribed divine agency to America. For Marsh, this substitution is unforgivable–nothing less than the idolatrous “identification of the United States with Christian revelation.”
And how “Christian values” led to the Holocaust:
The most intellectually stimulating pages of Marsh’s book concern the theological antecedents of this troubling transformation. Relying heavily on Karl Barth’s classic workProtestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, Marsh tells the story of how German Protestant theologians responded to the skepticism of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment by jettisoning much of Christian orthodoxy and refashioning a rump Christianity in which faith was based on subjective feeling instead of the objective truth of revelation and religious worship was defended in terms of its social utility. Before long, this “liberal” theology was all the rage, teaching modern men and women that they could continue to enjoy the psychological comfort of religion while embracing scientific discoveries that seemed to undermine the authority of the Bible, and that it was unnecessary for them to choose between political freedom and the political establishment of religion. In Europe the churches became, in effect, ministries for moral edification, administered and regulated by the state for the sake of inculcating virtues that contributed to the well-being of the nation. Marsh delights in the irony that, despite their boundless contempt for “liberalism” in all its forms, right-wing American evangelicals think about God in a way that marks them, in the decisive sense, as liberal Protestants. As Marsh mischievously puts it, “It strikes me as a noteworthy turn of events that our patriot preachers and court prophets remain our most zealous proponents of the liberal theological tradition.” Just as nineteenth-century German theologians tailored God to fit the psychological needs of the rising bourgeoisie and the political needs of the Rechtsstaat, so twenty-first-century American evangelicals take their theological cues not from the Bible or the Church Fathers but from Karl Rove and Michael Gerson.
Genuine Christian faith, by contrast, begins and ends with Jesus Christ, who “comes to us from a country far from our own.” In order to adopt the otherworldly standpoint of Christ, believers must lay their “values, traditions, and habits at the foot of the cross.” The Christian then begins his life anew as a citizen, first and foremost, of the city of God, with his “unholy nature … infused with God’s holiness.” From the perspective of this genuine follower of Christ, the profane faith of American evangelicals, which worships American power in the name of God, fails to confess “Christ as Lord” and ends up “incarcerating Christ in our own ideological gulags.”
Not a fan of Karl Barth, whose theology I find to be unorthodox and I regret far too influential on evangelicals, but check this out:
Which is not to say that Marsh adopts an explicitly anti-political position. Rather, he champions those who, in his judgment, bring the stringent moral teachings of Christ most fully to bear on political life. Once again Barth serves as an admirable example. Although Barth’s early formulation of neo- orthodoxy, in his various editions of the Letter to the Romans, appeared to counsel an abandonment of politics altogether, the triumph of National Socialism in Germany, and even more the collusion of the Protestant churches in Hitler’s rise to power, led him to reconsider his position. Less than a year after the Nazis seized control of the German state, Barth took a courageous stand in writing and disseminating the Barmen Declaration, which firmly rejected the Nazification of German Christianity, and in helping to organize the Confessing Church, which went on to play an important role in resisting Hitler. As punishment for his political activities–including his refusal to swear an oath of loyalty to Hitler–Barth was first forced to resign his professorship at the University of Bonn and then was expelled from Germany.
How interesting that one of the issues that George H. W. Bush used to defeat Michael Dukakis was Dukakis’ refusal to sign a bill THAT WOULD HAVE FORCED PUBLIC SCHOOL CHILDREN TO PLEDGE ALLEGIANCE TO THE AMERICAN FLAG!
“Even more dramatic is the example of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor and theologian who organized and led the Confessing Church, joined the resistance movement against the Nazis, and even participated in a failed plot to assassinate Hitler–an act for which he was sent to a series of concentration camps and eventually executed by hanging in April 1945. Marsh discusses Bonhoeffer in the first paragraph of his book, and returns to him again and again in later chapters. In starkest contrast to the obsequiousness of American evangelicals, who eagerly prostrate themselves before political power, Bonhoeffer risked and ultimately gave his life rather than bow down before evil. Here, Marsh means us to conclude, is an example of authentic. Christian piety in action.”
Again, not a fan of Bonhoeffer, but still, so many evangelicals, to borrow from 1 Timothy 6, take godliness for gain, a prosperity doctrine of money and POWER. Scripture calls such people perverse rebellious reprobates.
And how about the many millions of evangelicals who voted for Bush in 2004–are they the moral equivalent of the “German Christians” who added a swastika to the cross, incorporated Nazi racism into Christian theology, and sought to form a unified German Protestant “Reich Church” under the leadership of the Fuhrer? The author of this piece says no, the Bible says YES. Ever hear of the anti - Christ, people?
Consider Marsh’s treatment of Daniel Coats, the former American ambassador to Germany. In the months prior to the invasion of Iraq, Coats was invited by the Lutheran bishop of Berlin-Brandenburg to read the Sermon on the Mount–including its admonition to “bless those who curse you and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you”–at a commemorative service for (you guessed it) Bonhoeffer. Coats, an evangelical Protestant, turned down the invitation, according to Marsh, “out of respect for the evangelical president’s mission in Iraq.” Once again, an American Christian had placed hi
