A German moderate’s hatred and fear of American Christianity in the person of Pat Robertson

Lilli writes from Germany:

Perhaps you remember our exchange, “Thanks from Europe—a continent in deep trouble.”

I am not so acquainted with American domestic politics (until recently I had never heard of Pat Robertson), but I like to read your interesting comments about it, for example, “Pat Robertson backs Giuliani.”

But others in Germany seem to be more acquainted with it and more interested in it. Today I came across an article, “Christianism on the increase,” about Robertson’s endorsement of Giuliani, at the weblog of the newspaper “Die Zeit.” This is supposedly a mildly conservative newspaper. (We call it “liberal” but the meaning is different from the American “liberal,” it is used in a much more economical sense, perhaps comparable to “neoconservative.” In any case, the paper is not leftist. Its typical readers are well-off middle-class intellectuals.)

I was shocked by the article’s primitivity and stupidity. Its theme is “Christianists and Islamists—brethren in spirit.” The comments following the article are even worse than the article. Reading them is like visiting a zoo.

Are you interested in a translation of the article?

LA replied:

Yes, I would like that very much..

It’s very odd that this attack on Christians as extremists would occur in the context of Robertson’s endorsement of Giuliani, since, by the endorsement, Robertson is betraying his evangelical beliefs and supporting a candidate who stands for complete sexual freedom, homosexual rights, abortion and so on. It seems the authors of this article have missed the boat entirely.

Lilli replies:

Yes, it is odd, but I don’t think the author has missed the boat. He is on the other riverside. This article reveals a completely different worldview—the European or at least the German mainstream. He fears “Ayatollah Robertson” might influence Giuliani. Christianity seems to be so evil to him, that he does not even comment on the last quotation (the sentences in quotation marks are original English citations). He obviously considers them as self-explanatory and completely mad and scary to his readers. Apparently being scared by the Iranian atomic bomb is not at all on his agenda. Unhappily it’s on mine.

Here is the article that Lilli translated:

Christianism on the Rise
(Christianismus auf dem Vormarsch)
by Joerg Lau
Die Zeit
November 8, 2007

Pat Robertson, one of America’s most influential tv evangelists, backs Rudy Giuliani’s candidacy. Giuliani is the former mayor of New York City and today the leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.

This means the forming of a team that is genuinely suited to put fear into people. Giuliani has made the arch-neocon Norman Podhoretz, the sharpest apologist of a future war against Iran, his advisor on foreign affairs.

And now he additionally takes the Christianist Robertson on board. An evil quack and charlatan who has acted as a “faith healer” and stated that he had prevented hurricanes from devastating American coasts by praying. An evil homophobe, an ultra-reactionist with his own media company. American commentators classify this endorsement as a coup by Giuliani—who has problems because of his advocacy of the right of abortion and gay marriage—which will bring the “social conservatives” to his side. (Giuliani himself is divorced several times, which is not appreciated in this camp either.)

What strikes me most about this mad couple is this: Robertson was one of the meanest hate-preachers following 9/11. He didn’t even shy away from seeing in the jihadists’ mass murder a judgment from God on America’s decadence (abortion, homosexuality) quite similar to the hate-preachers on the other side. Christianists and Islamists—brethren in the spirit. Meanwhile Mayor Giuliani trudged through the attacked city and the ruins, solacing the families of the victims, whom Robertson taunted.

And now the two get together, because Robertson considers Giuliani to be the best man for “the defense of our population from the blood lust of Islamic terrorists”? Giuliani, who has already mentioned that in case of doubt he would use nuclear weapons against Iran in order to hinder Iran from getting the atomic bomb, allies with Ayatollah Robertson: this gives me the creeps. [LA comments: I don’t think Giuliani has said anything about using nuclear weapons against Iran.]

Here is Robertson’s 9/11 theodicy: “We have allowed rampant secularism and occult, etc., to be broadcast on television. We have permitted somewhere in the neighborhood of 35 to 40 million unborn babies to be slaughtered in our society. We have a Supreme Court that has essentially stuck its finger in God’s eye and said, ‘We’re going to legislate you out of the schools, we’re going to take your Commandments from off the courthouse steps in various states, we’re not going to let little children read the Commandments of God, we’re not going to let the Bible be read—no prayer in our schools.’ We have insulted God at the highest levels of our government. And, then we say, ‘Why does this happen?’ Well, why it’s happening is that God Almighty is lifting His protection from us.”

And here is how he talks about gays:

(video)

LA replies:

There are several points to be made in response to Joerg Lau’s article. First, as I mentioned to Lilli earlier, Lau in my view reverses the real meaning of the Robertson endorsement, because, far from Giuliani compromising his secular principles to ally with Robertson, Robertson is compromising his supposed religious principles to ally with Giuliani. Does it need to be pointed out that Giuliani is the candidate, not Robertson, and that it is Robertson who has endorsed Giuliani for president, not the other way around? So Joerg Lau’s hysterical alarm is not based in reality.

Second, Lau happens to be exactly right when he points out the supreme oddity that Robertson, who attributed the 9/11 attack to America’s loss of God’s protection resulting from America’s sexual decadence, is endorsing Giuliani, a leading practitioner and proponent of that decadence—the mayor who effectively abandoned his family for a semi-public affair with a subordinate, the mayor who proudly marched every year in homosexual pride parades that included the North American Man-Boy Love Association, the mayor who spent the last two years of his term bunking at the East Side apartment of a male homosexual couple, the mayor who repeatedly dressed as a woman, the mayor who 16 months before the 9/11 attack, on Mother’s Day, 2000, sent out his lawyer to tell the media that the only way the then Mrs. Giuliani, the mother of his children, could be made to leave her home, Gracie Mansion, would be to pry her hands off the chandelier, the mayor who has destroyed his relationship with his own children, who have nothing to do with him.

And now Robertson, who blamed the 9/11 jihadist attack on America’s embrace of unlimited personal freedoms and sexual lieence, has picked Giuliani, the very symbol of that license, as the man best able to defend America from jihadism! Irony is not a strong enough word for this development. Yet Lau, who pointed out the irony, doesn’t seem to realize what it says about Robertson, that Robertson has ceased to be (if he ever was) a sincere exponent of the principles he claimed to stand for.

Third, I must say that while Robertson’s and Jerry Falwell’s comments after 9/11 were too crudely stated and set off a reaction against them, I had pretty much the same thoughts. I had written repeatedly that during the Clinton presidency the American public had explicitly abandoned moral principle as playing any role in our public life, and that this must have fearsome consequences. One of my two main reasons for not voting for Bush in 2000 was his failure to criticize Clintonite amoralism; such failure meant that Bush’s election would not signify America’s rejection of that amoralism and so would not cleanse the country, leaving a cloud of judgment hanging over us.

For Americans to experience the biblical-scale catastrophe of 9/11, and not think of it in biblical terms, not relate it to our own moral state, meant that we had lost the moral consciousness of the Americans of the Founding period and the Civil War, who saw national catastrophes in a religious framework. During the Revolutionary period, America repeatedly had official days of prayer and repentance, because of their shared understanding that the disasters and setbacks that had befallen them were due to lack of piety and morality. It was a constant theme of George Washington’s that America had to be aligned with God’s purposes if it was to receive God’s favor. As he said in his first Inaugural Address, April 30, 1789:

“… Since we ought to be no less persuaded that the propitious smiles of Heaven, can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right, which Heaven itself has ordained.”

Was Washington an “evil quack and charlatan” for saying this? Yet Washington’s thought, while far more sophisticated than that expressed by Robertson and Falwell, is in essence the same. Nor is it true that a preacher like Robertson by saying that the disaster had been brought on by our decadence, was “taunting” America. Only a liberal who doesn’t believe in God could think this. To say that a people’s own rejection of moral order has removed God’s protection from them is not to taunt them, any more when Paul wrote that the wages of sin is death, he was taunting humanity; or any more than the American people, by holding national days of prayer and fasting during the dark days of the Revolution, were taunting themselves. But by Lau’s man-centered logic, they were. Modern godless men think that any talk of God is an attack on humanity, because it means that there is something higher than humanity, and therefore that it is putting down humanity. Serious Christianity therefore comes to be seen as dehumanizing supremacism, and thus as the moral equivalent of white racism and Nazism.

Along the lines of the above points, here are two comments made at VFR in May 2004, on the day when Massachusetts legalized same sex marriage:

… While I do happen to think that the Moslems would hate and fear us less if we were less disgusting and were not spreading our disgusting selves through the cosmos, that is not the primary reason, in the context of the war, that we must reform ourselves. The primary reason is that we do not have hope of winning this war for survival if we are ourselves so corrupt. [Emphasis added.] But, my God, how do we go on using words like “corrupt” or “immoral” or “decadent”? We have entered some new sphere for which the old words are so inadequate. Let’s call it Sodom Plus.

And, as though announcing the new dispensation we are entering on this day, we see a photograph of the daughter of the Democratic candidate for president appearing in public in a see-through dress. Maybe at her father’s inaugural she’ll marry a horse.

Posted by: Lawrence Auster on May 17, 2004 12:23 AM

Seriously though: Remember how Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell were excoriated for daring to suggest that 9/11 might have been brought down on this country by our toleration, if not fostering, of such abominations as abortion and sodomy? I was really surprised that even Christians joined in the chorus, asserting that what Robertson and Falwell said was completely beyond the pale. I thought what they said was eminently reasonable. Given that willful murder and the sin of Sodom are two of the four sins crying to Heaven for vengeance, why *wouldn’t* we expect such vengeance to fall on us? Not long after Robertson and Falwell were denounced, I was in church listening to the scripture in which the prophet Jeremiah was denounced in much the same way, for a similar offense of making “unpatriotic” comments about the sins of his people. Jeremiah, of course, was not really unpatriotic. He didn’t hate his country, nor did he think the Babylonians were justified in attacking and conquering the Kingdom of Judah. He did, however, think that Nebuchadnezzar was an instrument of God’s vengeance, and that his own people really couldn’t in justice expect any better. The next time some jihadists destroy a building, or even a city, in our country, we should remember that God didn’t spare His own chosen people when they offended Him, and that we have no right to expect to fare any better.

Posted by: Seamus on May 17, 2004 10:45 AM

- end of initial entry -

Kristor writes:

I am bewildered by the seeming inability of otherwise intelligent people to draw the most straightforward, obvious conclusions about religion. If God exists, he is the most powerful thing of all, is by far the most important element in everything that happens. That’s what “God” means. How on earth could one expect to contravene his commandments, and prosper? That would be like arguing with gravity.

Liberals don’t seem to get this idea at all. They want everything to be fair and nice, and everyone to get his way, and have lots of self-esteem, and no pain. But unfortunately for the fearful—i.e., the selfish—God is the only one who is going to get his way; that’s why the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Everyone else will get their way only insofar as they domesticate themselves to God’s, and even then only insofar as is consistent with his overall project.

I hasten to add that I say all this from bitter experience. Mea maxima culpa.

LA replies:

Let’s stipulate that up to a certain point, the hostility to religion is often understandable. People’s experience is that religion is a form of suppression of ourselves, an anti-life thing, and so they are frightened and repelled by it. And let us be frank that some religions do appear that way. The answer to this is that of course all human activities manifest at a variety of levels, at a variety of degrees of intelligence and success, and the same is true of religion. What today’s anti-religion people do—Heather Mac Donald is a prime example—is to take as representative of religion per se the most obviously narrow or unintelligent expressions of religion. And the fact that the anti-religious people do this shows their bad faith in this debate, shows that they are not interested in the truth of the matter, but that they are acting out of bias; or, which is hardly better, that they are acting out of indefeasible ignorance.

But Kristor is making a more essential point. If God exists, then obviously he is the most important thing that exists and the most important thing in people’s lives. Therefore to object to religious people because they make God’s desires more important than man’s desires is absurd. One could argue that the religious people are mistaken, that God doesn’t exist and that the Bible is false. But once one grants the existence of the Bible and of religious belief (even if one doesn’t share that belief), then one has got to accept the fact that religious people will say that God’s law rules over us. Therefore, at the very least, the religious people are not sick or weird or evil, they are religious. The anti-religion campaigners will not grant this basic respect to the religious.

Janet R., an Englishwoman long resident in Brazil, writes:

A few years ago I was listening to an interview with a vicar on BBC radio 4. The vicar was the son of a famous British atheist; unfortunately, I can’t remember their names. The interviewer asked the vicar if it wasn’t strange that he had become a clergyman even though his father had been a militant atheist. The vicar replied that the difference between he and his father was that he, unlike his father, had fought in a war and that “when you are being shot at you tend to pray!”

But then I wondered why hadn’t there been a religious revival in Europe after the 2nd World War? Surely after the war most people were aware of the reality of the existence of evil? Couldn’t the fact that the allies had won the war at such great odds have been put down to Divine Providence? Surely many people owed their survival to Providence?

If the Second World War didn’t result in the Europeans turning to God what else could?

LA replies:

Great question. In fact, the belief in Providence that Janet says should have been stimulated by the course of World War II was my own experience. When I was a kid, I was struck by the dramatic structure of the war. For a while, everything that Hitler did worked like magic, everything fell at his feet. He marched into the Rhineland, and the French, who could have crushed him and prevented World War II, did nothing. Over and over, his audacious aggressive acts, which his generals warned against, worked. He never made a wrong move. His generals came to be in awe of him, and stopped questioning his judgment, and he also felt that his judgment was infalliable. Then suddenly he began to make unforced, fatal errors. His invasion of Russia, the irrational and disastrous decisions he made in his leadership of the Russian campaign, his declaration of war on the U.S., all of which led to his defeat and death and the destruction of the Thousand Year Reich. Such an amazing course of events cannot be readily explained in rational terms. When I was a teenage and studying World War II (and reading William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich), it struck me that there was some higher power directing this story, allowing terrible evil and destruction to occur up to a point, but then not letting the evil triumph completely.

However, on the other side, the vast destruction wreaked on Europe by the war left the Europeans in no mood to believe in God. It had just the opposite effect.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 09, 2007 08:43 PM | Send