First, you had Roman Catholics declare that evangelicals had BETTER back Mitt Romney or be declared bigots. Second, you had evangelicals going after Mitt Romney. Third you have Pat Robertson endorsing Rudy Giuliani. Fourth you had Mike Huckabee’s rise after his outstanding debate performances, especially the Youtube one. Fifth, you had the hateful Mormon reaction towards Huckabee’s rise, aimed not so much towards Huckabee as his evangelical supporters. Sixth, you had the GOP leadership attacking Huckabee for basically having the same positions as Giuliani and Romney (yes, we know Giuliani openly courted illegal immigrants and blocked enforcement attempts by federal officials, and that Mitt Romney raised taxes and negotiated and signed a $50 abortion universal healthcare plan that will lead to more tax increases in the future, but it was OK when THEY do it because THEY are so like electable or principled or something and Huckabee is not!). Now, we have the clearest example of why the GOP establishment hates Huckabee: the tiff between Roman Catholics and evangelicals. Now the last Vatican Council closed the rift between Catholics and mainline Protestants. Billy Graham and religious right politics brought Catholics and mainstream respectable evangelicals closer together.
But it appears that Huckabee has no interest in being a mainstream respectable evangelical leader like Billy Graham, who sat right before Richard Nixon and did not raise a single voice of objection or even silently get up and leave when Nixon was ranting racist statements in his presence (please keep in mind that Graham is regarded as a civil rights leader) against not only blacks but also the low income whites that made up the bulk of Graham’s most faithful followers. Now if Huckabee were willing to play ball, he could have simply gone to the powers that be and gotten himself a fistful of cash. As it is, Huckabee is going his own way, and it is not a way that pleases the Vatican.
Take Mike Huckabee’s visit to the “church” of John Hagee, whom IndependentConservative has labeled the biggest heretic of 2007 for his preaching a form of dispensational pretribulationism that is so extreme that it denies Christianity. Now Hagee does appropriately oppose the Vatican, but only in a distorted fashion that supports his own devil’s doctrines. But even that is too much for the supporters of the replacement of God on earth, so now we have the National Review’s token minority, Roman Catholic Kathryn Jean Lopez, demanding that Mike Huckabee NOT preach at John Hagee’s church on the grounds that it would divide the Republican Party. Quoting Lopez with my comments, as usual, in italics and parentheses:
With great power comes great responsibility. And Mike Huckabee, once and future Baptist preacher, could afford to watch where he’s taking to the pulpit. That’s “future” because the former evangelical pastor will be at John Hagee’s Cornerstone Church on Sunday. According to a San Antonio Huckabee meetup site, Huckabee will be speaking at two Sunday services at the Texas megachurch. He’ll be making the appearances just days after he told CBS News that “It’s not like [I’m] stepping from the pulpit last Sunday and running for president.”
But maybe next Sunday . . .
The problem with this particular church is its pastor. It is no secret that evangelicals and Catholics have their theological differences. If we didn’t we’d all be under the same church roof like once upon a time. But Hagee has been particularly outspoken beyond his Cornerstone Church, as a supporter of Israel and a prolific writer. His activism has brought some attention to his views on the Catholic Church. In Hagee’s “black history” of the Catholic Church, for example, Catholics were far from only guilty of sins of omission when it came to the Nazis, they also gave Hitler his blueprint, according to Hagee. In a speech this year, Hagee pointed to the Catholic Church as having provided the jumping-off point for the Holocaust, claiming: “That was really drawn by the Roman church. [Hitler] did not do anything differently. He only did it more ruthlessly, and on a national scale.” (This is where Hagee’s doctrinal history is wrong; the Lutheran Church in Germany, which by that time had become a typical secular liberal “Christian values” state church, fully endorsed and supported Hitler to the point where they proclaimed that God had raised up Hitler to restore Germany to greatness. Liberal theologian Karl Barth’s claim to fame was opposing the Lutheran Church in this matter and being proven right by history, even if Barth was right on little else.) The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights has long been concerned about Hagee’s rhetoric, calling him a “veteran bigot,” accusing him of distorting Catholic teachings and misrepresenting Church history. The League has cautioned that, “Tone matters … and Hagee’s tone is nothing but derisive.”
Hagee is politically active and has had candidates at his church before and is likely to again. It’s probably only natural that Huckabee would be among them. And certainly other candidates have courted or been endorsed by religious figures who are not known for their ecumenical diplomacy. But after weeks of being a divider, not a uniter — pretending to innocently raise questions about Mormon theology to a New York Times reporter, informing Today Show viewers that he is really the choice for evangelicals — Huckabee should be sensitive to his unnecessarily exclusionary tactics.
As the former governor of Arkansas, successor to the Little Rock Clinton administration, Mike Huckabee above all people should understand the importance of having a strong coalition to BEAT HER in the fall. Speaking like a man seeking to be president of evangelical America, not president of the United States, Huckabee told Meredith Vieira earlier this week: “There’s a sense in which all these years the evangelicals have been treated very kindly by the Republican party. They wanted us to be a part of it, and then one day, one of us actually runs and they say, ‘Oh, my gosh! Now they’re serious.’” (Of course, this is precisely how non – evangelical supporters have been acting towards his campaign. None of them have even so much as stated that they want to see an evangelical in this race or any other. Quite the contrary, they have made a point of making it clear that they prefer Mormons or even secular candidates to evangelicals at every turn.)
Huckabee, meanwhile, is leaving some non-evangelical conservatives wondering, “Oh, my gosh. Maybe they never wanted to be allied with us.” (No mention that evangelicals are wondering the same.) Huckabee is working right now, intentionally or not, on breaking down a winning coalition of religious conservatives. (Right. The previous traditions of having religious conservatives voting for necromancers like Ronald Reagan and universalist occultists like George H. W. and George W. Bush was so much better, just like everything would be just fine were religious conservatives to vote for Rudy Giuliani or Mitt Romney now.)
When Pope John Paul II died in 2005, some of the most moving statements coming out of congressional offices were from evangelical conservatives who viewed him as an important leader in defending the sanctity of human life. (Again, you would be fine with evangelicals supporting pro – death Roman Catholic Rudy Giuliani, don’t you? Of course you would.) Many of them had adopted his “culture of life” language and thinking. (Sure, as if evangelicals hadn’t been using that phraseology for decades.) They saw him as an ally and were inspired by his leadership. They joined him, despite theological differences, in important cultural and political fights. It was and is a natural pairing. (It was never a “pairing” but rather Rome using evangelicals to gain power for themselves, a situation that you wish to preserve.) Mike Huckabee, who is not a conservative on all things (Rudy Giuliani is not a conservative on anything but do you mention him? no because he is from New York and a Catholic), but is on social issues, should know that and treasure and protect and foster these alliances. He’s a riveting speaker who could rally social conservatives, at least to whip them up to fight another day. (There. You said it. That is what you want. You have no desire to see an evangelical ever become President or a legitimate leader in the conservative movement. Your only desire is to create another pawn to replace the compromised or fading Pat Robertson, James Dobson, Ralph Reed, etc. to deliver votes to you people.) Instead, he’s executing a divide-and-conquer strategy. (Speaking of “divide and conquer”, what are the many Republican Jews that love John Hagee going to say about your demands that Mike Huckabee not speak at John Hagee’s church because a conservative Catholic insists on a revisionist form of the Holocaust favorable to the Catholic Church be adhered to?)
When Mitt Romney was convinced he had to give a “Mormon speech,” he gave a speech about religious liberty and America. It wasn’t, in other words, about him. Of course, that was, in part, a political calculation — how much could be gained by talking about Mormon theology during a political campaign? But it was also just the right thing. (OK, so willfully deceiving people on matters of faith in order to get them to vote for you is the right thing to do. Gotcha. Thanks for admitting that this is precisely what the GOP has been doing to evangelicals for all these decades and you are angry at Huckabee for not willing to keep the scam going.) It’s a political campaign and people want to hear about his political thinking — what America means to him and how he fits into it all, what he can offer Americans in terms of leadership. (No, evangelicals want to hear him stop claiming that Mormonism is Christianity because unless he does he shows that he has no respect for the same Christians that he hypocritically demands respect from, and is fundamentally dishonest and cannot be trusted in office, as if his betraying the Massachusetts voters by flip – flopping on every single social issue did not demonstrate that already. Ironically, Roman Catholic religious right commentators like yourself and Bob Novak claim that Mitt Romney’s being able to lie and get away with it to the voters of Massachusetts is precisely why evangelicals should support him! In reality, Roman Catholics could care less about whether Romney is going to go back on his promise not to use the White House to promote Mormonism, because they know that relatively few Roman Catholics convert to Mormonism as opposed to huge numbers of evangelicals, and as a matter of fact I would bet they get some sort of perverse pleasure out of seeing evangelicals become Mormons.) Since Mike Huckabee has found himself at the front of the Republican field, it’s been more The Mike Show than not. (And that is different from the other candidates in the race how? Oh, that is right. Only the other candidates are supposed to run races with an actual expectation of winning. Everything evangelicals are supposed to do is to promote the GOP while receiving absolutely nothing in return.) In a treadmill interview with the New York Times earlier this week, he claimed “I’m being questioned about the details of my faith like no one else.” Mitt Romney and Barack Obama might legitimately argue that point, Gov. He’s cast aspersions on another candidate’s religion. (You mean like you are doing his right now?) He’s highlighted hostilities among evangelicals and others in the Republican party. (You mean like you have done with about four or five of your own columns including this one?) If he keeps this up, he’s going to do some unholy damage. (You mean force evangelicals to admit that the GOP is never going to push their agenda and that they have been taken for a ride all this time?)
With all due respect to Hagee and his congregation (who are, of course, entitled to believe and say as they choose), Mike Huckabee should cancel his Sunday plans with Hagee. It can be his Christmas present to his party — to hold it together instead of continuing to tear it apart. (No, even if he does cancel this visit, you will still tear down Huckabee’s campaign by claiming that evangelicals are a bunch of ungrateful dumb bigots like you have been doing for the past month. What you are doing is demanding that evangelicals not fight back.)
This is really what it is all about: Huckabee’s populist economic rhetoric. While Huckabee has not overtly come out against free trade and other forms of economic globalism (regrettably he has done the contrary) Huckabee has been more than willing to rally and exploit the feelings of those harmed and alienated by economic globalism. That was why hypocrite heretic Ron Paul went after Huckabee: he and the Huckster are going after some of the same people. But in doing this, Huckabee is treading on very dangerous ground for the GOP. The left has for years pointed out how the GOP has maintained the support of low – income whites despite their pro – rich and pro – corporate economic views by baiting Hollywood (and our universities) as bastions of anti – Christian elitism. And they are right. But this is the trick. The GOP bashes the liberal PROFESSORS at these universities, not the corporations that endow their chairs and give these universities tons of money. The GOP bashes the liberal Hollywood ACTORS, DIRECTORS, and SINGERS that create anti – Christian movies and songs, NOT Sony, Time Warner, Disney, etc. that have made the conscious decision to pervert the masses.
By keeping the focus on Madonna, they draw the spotlight away from the fact that no one would have heard of this woman in the first place had corporate America not signed her to a record deals, constantly bombarded us with her music, videos, and movies, and continued to keep her in the public eye even after her many artistic and commercial failures (of which she has actually produced more of than her successes). You hate MTV? Good for you. But what about the corporation that owns MTV, and the other corporations that carry it as part of basic cable or satellite? You hate pornography? Good for you. But the Internet pornography industry would dry up overnight if the big banks stopped allowing their credit cards and similar to be used to support this stuff. And then there is the fact that many things vital to conservatism including Fox News are owned by the world’s biggest pornographer Rupert Murdoch!
So when one looks at it, the anti – corporate message (and by that I mean amoral unaccountable global corporations that not only are only interested in money but seem to have figured out that the more they do to destabilize cultures in nation – states the more power they have to control the governments and markets in these nations … if you have a population that is strung out on porn, rock music, sports gambling, and unhealthy foods whether we are talking about the high fat high sugar junk foods or the even more harmful chemically engineered health foods for the body image worshiping diet and exercise fanatics a corporation can easily manipulate it to maximize its power and profits) is actually a pro – Christian, pro – family, and pro – freedom message. What the GOP and the religious right have done is successfully convince white evangelicals that big government is evil (which is true because the Bible says so) BUT THAT BIG BUSINESS IS GOOD (when the Bible says opposite).
Now initially, Jerry Falwell and a lot of the others understandably signed onto the “business is good for Christianity” message to oppose communism, and that is understandable, as in addition to the external threat of the Soviet Union communism was a huge INTERNAL threat as well. But in the process, these folks forgot that the definition of fascism according to Benito Mussolini is “the corporatization of government power.” If you read Daniel and Revelation, the anti – Christ regime and the regime of the great harlot Babylon is not a communist one but a hypercapitalist fascist one where any filthy perversion that one wants can be had at the right price. Also, consider the figure of the false prophet … the anti – Christ’s rule will not be based on atheist Marxist ideology but will include a false religious ideology that will be very important to it. Religious right leaders at the time claimed that the atheist and Marxist doctrines of communism was a religion in its own right, and while I do not disagree, what the eschatological scriptures of the Bible seem to point to resembles much more closely the emperor/sun worship of the Roman Empire or the state religion of fascist Nazi Germany. So it appears that the Christian leaders that hopped onto the pro – business agenda of the Ronald Reagan (who was the first president to have official diplomatic relations with the Vatican) GOP in their zeal to oppose communism might have actually enabled a worse evil. And then you have the fellows that came up after Falwell: Pat Robertson and James Dobson. Pro – business religious right politics was very much in the interests of building their own financial empires … Robertson is reportedly a billionaire (and you know that with his many oil interests he is not the least bit concerned with how the tripling of the price of gas under the Bush administration has harmed the poor) and though Dobson’s finances are not as well known the fellow is obviously extremely wealthy.
But at what cost? China has cast off Maoism because they have discovered that one can become a more powerful and effective aggressor and imperialist using economics than with a military, and is also experimenting with a version of state – sponsored false Christianity that they find is useful to their purposes, and Pat Robertson is helping them in that regards. In Russia meanwhile Vladimir Putin has for all intents and purposes made the Russian Orthodox Church a state church, and the Through The Bible ministry reports that both are working together to oppose evangelical outreach efforts in that nation, and we also know how aggressively Russia has used economics to pursue its own interests. And yes, some would add Israel to that mix. “Christian Zionists” like John Hagee and Pat Robertson do their best to prevent you from knowing this, but Zionism was originally a secular socialist movement, and as such Israel was originally a secular socialist state, but over the decades Israel has become increasingly theocratic and aggressively capitalist. It is interesting to note that their relations with the Vatican have greatly improved during that time. It is even more interesting to note that so has their relations with supposed anti – Catholic evangelicals such as John Hagee. Prior to this, Israel’s support came mostly from the Christian left and the secularists (who have now largely shifted sides to the Palestinians).
So what does this have to do with Rome? Well, the Roman Catholic Church supports globalism. Always has. Now originally, even after Constantine made Christianity the church of the Roman Empire, the bishop of Rome did not have ultimate authority over the church and considerable influence over state matters. As a matter of fact, no one even claimed that the bishop of Rome should have this authority until Leo the Great in about 450 AD (Constantine’s Council of Nicea was 325 AD), and when he did there was considerable resistance from not only the state but the church also! It was not until 150 years later when Gregory I achieved virtually any of what Leo the Great first asserted for the bishop of Rome, and hundreds of years more until the bishop of Rome achieved primary (though not full) power over the church and enough over the state to crown Charlemagne emperor (by Leo III, the namesake of the first fellow to assert full power for the bishop of Rome).
Leo III had reasons for doing so that fit the modern globalist agenda quite nicely. Not only was there substantial opposition inside the church to the growing power of the papacy, but there was state opposition too. The solution: reduce the number of states! That was the result of declaring Charlemagne the sole political ruler of all of the territories that the church saw fit to lay claim to in the west (the eastern church and its lands was a different, more complex story). All dissenters faced the full force of Charlemagne’s army. This was in the papacy’s interests because even having to deal with one secular ruler that proved to be hostile was preferable to dealing with many rulers with varying degrees of support for and opposition to the bishop of Rome. Propagating the power of the bishop of Rome was what was really important, not the attitudes of a particular leader who incidentally can always be replaced (isn’t that right Saddam Hussein?).
So while the nations of this world still have their powerful armies, that is not where the real power in today’s world lies. No, that power rests with 1) financial markets and 2) technology. And just as it was in the 9th century, the more distinct economic and political entities there are, the harder it is for any one person or group that wishes to assert central authority. Despite what we still choose to call or regard ourselves, the net effects of things like global corporations, economic integration, participation in international governing bodies, treaties, and open immigration is the removal of these distinctions. The result is that when individual nations – and the people in them – have less power, stateless global rulers have more. The best part is that whether you sign your national sovereignty away by allowing EU style full economic integration, with a series of military and economic treaties to the United Nations NATO and similar, having an open immigration policy (or simply refusing to enforce your border and not punishing nations like MEXICO that commits economic and cultural acts of war by actively encouraging, aiding, and abetting their citizens – and anyone else – in crossing it) or by simply handing the keys over to AOL Time Warner and British Petroleum and allowing them to run the show, the end result is actually the same. Anyone who refuses to play ball, it seems, either winds up assassinated or seeing their nations turn into economic and political basket cases. If you have huge reserves of oil, uranium, or gold you can stave it off for a time, but only for a time. Never forget that Pat Robertson did urge George W. Bush to assassinate Hugo Chavez, for instance.
Now the folks behind all this are rather crafty. They know that universal acceptance of this situation in this day and time will not come. So what do they do? They take half of their agenda (say corporate globalization by monopolies) and promote it to the right, and then take the other half (unrestricted immigration and global warming treaties) and promote it to the left. Then contrive (and contribute to) a bunch of hot – button issues (i.e. racism, which these folks contribute to by disseminating racist images of blacks to through the media that causes whites to fear the images and blacks to conform to them … by the way the founder of Black Entertainment Television Bob Johnson became a very rich man in a short time thanks to federal rules forcing cable companies to carry BET on basic cable, and please note that both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush have Bob Johnson on their speed dials) that keep the two opposing groups so distracted by emotionalism that its members cannot recognize that they were really advocating opposite ends of the same agenda, and causes them to completely ignore it when both groups push precisely the same thing.
The Democrats that opposed NAFTA when George H. W. Bush first proposed it joined in the mocking of H. Ross Perot and later supported it when Bill Clinton enacted it. And the Republicans that called Bill Clinton a communist traitor for working so hard to get China into the WTO – including evangelicals that opposed China’s persecution of Christians not in their state church – either said nothing or supported George W. Bush’s finishing Bill Clinton’s job of getting China into the WTO. NRA – type conservatives that successfully defeated Bill Clinton’s version of the Patriot Act after the Oklahoma City bombings but were either silent or generally supportive of George W. Bush’s Patriot Act after September 11th, which either the Clinton or Bush administration could have easily prevented. Now these same NRA – type conservatives are almost certainly going to back either anti – gun Mitt Romney or anti – gun Rudy Giuliani because one of them is “the most electable” against the even more anti – gun Hillary Clinton. And so on.
Meanwhile, the various interests groups of these camps that think that they oppose each other are conditioned over time to accept just about anything. For instance, had Jimmy Carter signed welfare reform in the 1970s, there would have been a massive leftist uproar. But after the perceived horrors of the Reagan administration and the threat of Newt Gingrich, Bill Clinton was able to invite an overweight black single mother to the welfare reform bill signing without a peep from a single black leader other than Juan Williams. In a similar fashion, had Reagan appointed an openly homosexual man to be his AIDS czar with his vice president refusing to support a political war against gay marriage (and his own homosexual daughter goes on to become “a parent” with her lesbian partner) with Nancy Reagan stating on the Today Show that Roe v. Wade should not be overturned, it would have led to an evangelical walkout from the GOP. But Bush does these things and more and evangelicals remain his most loyal supporters, and now prominent evangelical leaders are lining up behind either $50 universal healthcare abortion Mitt Romney who tried to run to the left of Ted Kennedy on gay rights or late term abortion supporting cross – dresser for gay pride parades Rudy Giuliani. It is also interesting that the frontrunners in both races: Obama, Clinton, Giuliani, Romney, are considered “moderates” whose primary function is to get members of their own globalist coalition to accept as much of the agenda of the (alleged) opposing side as possible.
And that goes back to why Huckabee is so hated. Right now, the dogma on the right is that it is completely unacceptable to oppose corporate America even if they replace as many American workers with foreign workers as they can, even if they adopt domestic partner benefits that the government then copies to write their civil union bills, even if they make tons of money by dealing with governments like Russia, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, China, etc., and even if their CEOs are brazen criminals that loot their companies for billions without any accountability. All Huckabee is doing is stating that, you know, maybe it is kinda sorta OK to oppose how these corporations have betrayed not only your personal financial self – interest but are daily committing acts of high treason against your own nation.
And that is making the GOP leadership apoplectic. MAYBE if evangelicals start resenting corporate America for outsourcing his job to India, relocating his son’s factory to China, and refusing to hire his other son for the construction job that would have paid his way through college or trade school because it can hire an undocumented Guatemalan for 1/3 the price, then they will start resenting corporate America for zealously doing business in these Marxist and Muslim nations that treat Christians so bad. And then MAYBE they will stop associating “Brokeback Mountain” and Madonna with the liberal Hollywood talent and media that produces and publicizes these abominations but the corporations that truthfully owns it all.
If that ever happens, the religious right will start thinking “Why am I so dirty, bruised, smelly, and disease – ridden? Oh, that’s right. I got into bed with the Rockefeller Wall Street Republican Party and then allowed it to do with me whatever it pleased.” And then the whole deal falls apart. Since joining up with the Democrats is not an option, you would see evangelicals leading – or joining – an effort to oppose the very sources that are undermining this nation – and let us face it the evangelical movement with it – that they are currently unwittingly supporting. Do not get me wrong, these people don’t REALLY fear a third political party movement. The multiparty parliamentary systems that Europe, Israel, and pretty much every “democratic” nation on earth have has not inhibited the globalist agenda that I am speaking of; if anything it has made it easier for them. Rather, it appears that what they most fear is a large group of unaffiliated yet active, engaged, and involved people. As a matter of fact, Gary North, a person prominent in the founding of the religious right says in The Silence Of The Fundamentalist Lambs at lewrockwell.com/north/north575.html (please read it even if you disagree with his theological views) asserts that the religious right was founded in large part by the same people who founded the religious left (including the civil rights movement!) precisely to make sure that the then – unaffiliated white evangelical and fundamentalist Christians chose a side. Since these people were successfully manipulated into supporting first Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Ronald Reagan in 1980, it really did not matter which side they chose so long as they picked one.
Now do not get me wrong. Huckabee, who is joined at the hip with the people who represent the worst of false evangelical Christianity (see Ties Between Mike Huckabee And John Hagee Discovered! He Also Has Ties To Kenneth Copeland, Tim LaHaye, And Rick Warren!) is not some contender for righteousness. Quite the contrary, Huckabee supported these people by going as far as to give scholarships to the children of illegal immigrants as a way of inducing their parents to move to Arkansas and work for Tyson Foods. Mike Huckabee also supported the Marxist National Education Association’s war against homeschoolers in Arkansas (see here and here). Now please note that Lew Rockwell is a pro – Ron Paul outfit and I regrettably have had to cease supporting him, so view it in that context, but everything that they say about Mike Huckabee is still nonetheless true. The national homeschool association endorsed Huckabee, but this was their reasoning: “When you understand he’s a Baptist minister, you don’t have to ask what he stands for.” With such logic the anti – Christ would be well – pleased! But it is very possible that the RHETORIC of Mike Huckabee might open some evangelical eyes that the GOP would rather remain wide shut.
Then again, it could be part of the game. After all, illegal immigration fighter Tom Tancredo, after helping scuttle an immigration deal that would have shut down the border over the fantasy that we could actually identify and deport 15 million illegal immigrants or even get most of them to voluntarily repatriate to Mexico, did endorse Mitt Romney yesterday. Calling it amnesty is one thing, calling it logistical reality is another.
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