Sunday is a day for God, church and spiritual reflection, so it is with some regret that I am forced to admit it: Campaign 2008 has turned me into a soulless monster. (Well, perhaps that should properly read, “more of a soulless monster…”) I watched with some dismay as the country spent months focusing on Barack Obama’s church in Chicago and, specifically, his highly controversial and inflammatory pastor, Jeremiah Wright. It didn’t so much annoy me that Wright was singled out for criticism – there’s no question that he left himself open for it. No, my problem was with the way that Obama himself was being tied to the pastor as if he had delivered the sermons himself. With that in mind, I found myself cynically hoping for a similar controversy to strike the GOP. (Turnabout is always fair play, don’t you know.)
True, John McCain had his own issues with Hagee, but they failed to quench my thirst for a Republican Godgate rebuttal. Hagee, while controversial in his own right, simply wasn’t as far out there as Obama’s pastor and, besides, McCain didn’t actually attend his church. Simply put, it left me wanting. That’s why I experienced the guilty pleasure of anticipation when I first heard rumors that Sarah Palin may have attended a rather “radical” church with her own reliably radical pastor, rich with wingnutty goodness.
I located a pair of websites with download-able audio files of sermons given by the various pastors and actually spent part of last weekend playing them while I worked. I felt sure that I would find some sort of fire and brimstone, white supremacist, hate-filled diatribes espousing the virtues of conservatism and damning the godless Democrats to a pit of fire for all eternity. Early in one of the first sermons I played, my nasty little hopes were raised even further. One of the pastors started out by announcing to the congregation that the third largest Hindu temple in the world was in the United States and the “largest Muslim training center in the world” was in New York City.
“Aha!” I thought. “Here it comes! Now we get to the fiery speech about hordes of Islamofascists marching through the streets, with Barack Obama personally supplying them with guns, rocket launchers and highly enriched uranium! And for a bonus, he hates Hindus too!”
Alas, my giddy moment of schadenfreude was to be short lived. The “training centers” he spoke of were for men of the cloth and regular people interested in learning about the religion. He was informing the congregation that other religions were actively conducting missions to draw more converts, but their own church had done little to no work to bring new members into the fold and the light and love of Christ. Rather than condemning anyone, he was calling on the congregants to welcome the lost into the flock. Politics never came into the discussion. Tape after tape produced the same results. Rather than some radical firebrand, he actually sounded like a pretty nice guy. I was devastated.
That’s why I experienced a momentary thrill running up my leg when I saw the title of Max Blumenthal’s recent column, Palin’s Pastor: God “Is Gonna Strike Out His Hand Against… America.” Say… pretty provocative stuff, no? My spirits soared with visions of Jeremiah Wright screaming “God Damn America!” dancing through my head. The pastor, Larry Kroon, could be the answer to my prayers! Sadly, my hopes and dreams were once again squashed under the heel of reality.
Note the clever use of the three dots (known as an ellipsis for you English majors who are keeping score) between the words Against and America. The author uses this device to indicate that a portion of the original quoted text was not included in this version. A brief look at the full text shows that the omitted portion was quite a humdinger and radically changes the tone of the sermon.
“And if Zephaniah were here today,” Kroon bellowed, “he’d be saying, ‘Listen, [God] is gonna deal with all the inhabitants of the earth. He is gonna strike out His hand against, yes, Wasilla; and Alaska; and the United States of America. There’s no exceptions here — there’s none. It’s all.’”
Yes, it seems that Kroon was not warning us that God had specific designs against America, Mom and Apple Pie for our reckless sins in this world. He was warning the congregants that the day of reckoning might be at hand and that everyone, including those in America, were at risk unless they repented and came to the Lord. While it’s true that not all churches teach the Apocalypse, it’s hardly controversial stuff. I had been foiled yet again, and it seems that Godgate for the Republicans has been put on hold once more.
UPDATE: Perhaps all is not lost! The Wasilla Bible Church is apparently promoting programs to “cure” gays through prayer. Now if we can only find some posters in there of Adam and Eve riding to church on a dinosaur…