This is a chapter from my book FUNDAMENTAL BLASPHEMY aka "Thank You Jesus But No Thank You."
IF YOU LOVE JESUS, BURN THIS BOOK!
Americans and many other people have spent the last few decades winning ground in the fight to obtain certain freedoms and rights in society. Today, more than at any previous time in our country’s history, we risk losing those rights — and not for being black, or women, or gay — we all stand to lose them. In fact, many will not even see it coming. Many will be cheering it on, yelling, “Hallelujah,” while the doors close right before their eyes, because it is going to be done in the name of good, in the name of morality, in the name of stopping crime, in the name of driving out sin, in the name of protecting our daughters from lust, and our sons from iniquity. It is going to be done in the name of God, in the name of creating a lawfully Christian America.
Christian fundamentalists are obligated to believe that every word in the currently approved version of the Holy Bible is true, in the most literal sense possible, in or out of context. Though many more liberal Sunday-social Christians do not claim to be fundamentalists, they nonetheless profess to believe the basic principles of the religion. They believe that the viewpoint afforded by the Christian position is the highest form of truth in the world, and in the final analysis, the only form of good. Fundamentalists must believe that of all the souls who ever took on the flesh to be human, only those who fulfill to the letter all of the qualifications proscribed by their interpretation of the official Scripture are lovingly approved in the eyes of God. All others — those not, like themselves, redeemed by Christ — they must believe are doomed to eternal failure, foredamned to Hell at Judgment, and therefore in their eyes undeserving of the rights and the respect granted to human beings — save of course the right to hear God’s Word, and the inalienable right to make a commitment to Jesus at any moment.
The sad irony is that the Christian way of life is not in itself anything to be despised. It is a good, productive, and honorable family-based lifestyle. Those who live in Christ tend to be socially active participants in good works, and to be caring and generous. A free society of responsible people is an excellent environment for Christian life. Unfortunately, however, fundamentalist Christian society is not an excellent environment for anybody else. A free and diverse society will continually place before Christian eyes the fact that other people do not necessarily conform to those activities which Christian morality (or ideology) demands. In a free society, it is difficult to keep young Christians from seeing that the world presents reasonable, responsible, and successful social and spiritual alternatives to Christianity at every turn. The problem occurs when blindly committed Christians interpret every such alternative as ungodly sinful, and every public display of it a deliberate act of Satanic temptation, a threat to the likelihood that those who are new to the faith will always subject their God-given free will to unreasoning obedience, and make only the Christian choice. I cannot argue with the right of people to so subject themselves, nor even to so subject their children. The problem is what must be done to a free society in order to impose unwilling subjection to the limitations of Christian life upon those people who would prefer to retain their right to choose other ways. To those who place their faith in some other form of worship of God, or who prefer to live by any other lifestyle or cultural orientation, the effect of the enforcement of Christian behavioral codes is as intrusive and oppressive as the Nazis, the Empires of Rome under Caesars and Popes, or the anonymous ant-hill state of Maoist China.
The problem is the built-in bigotry and paranoia typical of the descendents of the Cult of Abraham. In spite of the best intentions of the faithful, the conclusions arrived at by taking the most basic Judeo-Christian tenets of salvation from damnation by blood-sacrifice as absolutely true are (a) the tragic-but-true notion that the rest of the people of the world, ALL of them, are foredamned, and might as well never have existed — that is bigoted at worst, condescending at best, and (b) the horrifying-but-true notion that the rest of the world, ALL of it, is motivated by Satan to deliberately oppose them and thereby to oppose God. That is paranoid at worst, prejudiced at best. The more powerful they declare their devil to be, the more they fear the devil’s world, and the more they feel justified in taking strong measures to defend the faithful from all others.
“Lead us not into temptation,” will be taken as a political mandate by the Saved Administration of Jesus Christ, American, President by Proxy, Lord and Fuhrer of the Righteous Revolution, the Crusade to Get America Going Right. When the Fundamentalist Right takes political control, they will use the power of the law, and of law enforcement, to see that young Christians will not have to suffer the temptations presented by the devil’s alternative lifestyles. From tits on TV to Tsiolkovsky, from Charles Darwin to Gary Gygax, they will purge and scourge all they touch in order to save young Christians from the temptation to make a wrong choice.
Fundamentalists are not weekend-Jesus-club Christians. They are consecrated activists, and they take themselves very seriously. They are blind-faith fanatics, taught to respect a death of martyrdom, prepared to lay down their lives, take up arms, or vote as they are told for Jesus, and taught to be swayed by no reason, evidence, or emotion from their evangelical purpose. “Whatever peace man has on earth is won only through waging unending war against sin,” they declare. “Only by our persevering in that holy war is peace to be maintained.” They call for those who would be Christians to submit themselves unreservedly and eternally to their cause, to be bondslaves possessed totally by their God, to “take the awl in the ear”, a sign which identified one as a slave in Jesus’ time. By their own declaration, Christian freedom is slavery. They call for the faithful to “know only Christ, and Him crucified”, and declare secular knowledge to be Satan’s lies, created to weaken their faith. To a believer in their doctrines, ignorance is strength. They call for each of God’s servants to be “his brother’s keeper”, and to watch his every move for signs of error. In a Christian society, every brother is watching you.
The exhortations to “love thy neighbor, and forgive thy brother,” are purged of liberal misinterpretations by the pious declaration, “An unpatriotic commie homo witch is not my neighbor, he is an evil invader, and my brothers are the Jesus-saved Sons of God, not the Goddamned self-serving Sons of Satan who won’t sell everything to buy into the sacrifice of blood the Bible said Jesus said Abraham said God said is the One Way He will let us off the hook for whatever it was Satan talked Eve into talking Adam into doing.”
One God does not mean One Way. One God means Every Way! Come on, give God a little credit. The One Way doctrine is an expedient little white lie to which most pastors accede, in order to motivate the assembling of a fold, a closed congregation. It seems to be on the same order of prevarication as the “last chance” sign on country gas stations, but taken in the fundamentalist sense, it produces rabid and ruthless bigotry, the most self-sacrificing opposition to and the most self-righteous oppression of all others.
Who will be persecuted under the totalitarian rule of the fundamentalist representatives of President Jesus? To begin with, those who would wield Jesus’ cleansing sword will make war upon sex criminals, which will include pornographers, that is, anyone who shows or describes to anyone else his or her own body, or that of any other person, through any medium of publication, and prostitutes, which includes anyone who knowingly and for any remuneration engages in any activity intended, demonstrated, or alleged to be erotically stimulating to anyone, including show dancers, models, actors and actresses who portray people in erotic situations, and those who talk erotically over the phone. Massage and Shiatsu practitioners, acupressurists, aura balancers, and other such persons who claim they can heal with their hands without invoking Jesus will be suspected of covert erotic practices. Male and female homosexuals, adulterers, temptresses, seducers, and other fornicators, masturbators, fellators, cunnilinguists, racially-mixed couples, manufacturers or sellers or possessors of any erotic paraphernalia, and anyone who contracts a venereal disease, will be declared criminals or at the least social undesirables. Of course, rapists and persons engaged in any erotic activity with a virgin will be dealt with most severely. Anyone accused of lustful intentions by a child will carry an uncleansable stigma. Unmarried pregnant women, persons who perform abortions, and women who have them will be chastised, as well as persons who publicly promote abortion, contraception, or sterilization. Child-abuse and wife-abuse investigators, and welfare caseworkers advocating the rights of children and women, and civil liberties activists will be vigorously opposed. Members of cults — that is, of any cult but their own — will be declared the demon-possessed hordes of Satan. This group of God’s enemies, and therefore the enemies of the State, will include witches, spiritualists, occultists, psychics, mediums, Astrologers, Scientologists, Pagans, Rosicrucians, Unitarians, and Ouija-board users, in addition to the Wiccans, Druids, Atheists, and of course the professing Satanists. Black Muslims, and others of Islam, members of the Native American Church (a heathen drug cult), Buddhists, Hare-Krishnas, Yogis, Taoists, Sikhs, Sufis, Hindus, Voodoos, and devotees of other such Godless false doctrines will be encouraged to go back to wherever they came from. Catholics, like the Jews will be dealt with, but never trusted. Israel will be politically supported, but Jews will be covertly persecuted. They will loudly refute and relentlessly strive to silence all heretics, that is, anyone who expresses a theological notion with which they disagree. In addition to sex and doctrine deviates, they will persecute as moral degenerates all marijuana smokers, users of drugs not sold by prescription, and anyone who possesses any controlled substance without written permission. Owners of handguns and other weapons, bikers, hippies, and long-hairs in old Army jackets will suffer constant suspicion (though the Christians will be heavily armed with "hunting" weapons, and their police will be armed for battle with Satan himself). They will not tolerate the presence of vagrants, bums, and indigents, that is, any unemployed persons who have no permanent address, or who cannot name the pastor of the congregation to which they belong. They will gain tremendous legislative power by mobilizing the middle class against the horrors evoked by Rock and Roll musicians, and those who sell or buy their works, artists who paint demonic pictures, or who use demonic symbols in their work, such as inverted stars, astrology symbols, Hebrew letters, or persons with their tongues outthrust. Publishers, writers, producers, and other participants in any "non-J-rated" films and literature, in any medium, will find it increasingly difficult to find work. Scientists will fall out of favor, in particular, pediatricians, evolutionists, psychologists, logicians, philosophers, theologians, and historians, most of whom will be accused of being among the most Godless of all, the dreaded Secular Humanists. Objective journalists will cease to exist. Another group which will feel the pressure severely are women. There are few so hated and feared among Christians as Feminists, that is, any woman who refuses to subject herself to covering (that is, domination) by a Christian male. They will oppose or undercut all women in positions of power, including politicians, ordained ministers, and military officers, and they will vigorously denounce women body-builders and women who demand anything as would-be usurpers of male privilege. Anyone who openly opposes any of their regulations on the basis of restriction of civil freedom will be called a leftist, a communist, or an anarchist. Those who stand upon the Constitution will be called subversives and traitors for attempting to pervert the meaning of the rights guaranteed by that document to condone evil. Anyone who opposes them by expressing anger will be called a terrorist. Anyone who opposes them on religious grounds will be called an agent of Satan, and a promulgator of the doctrines of demons. Anyone who takes a public position of leadership and opposes them successfully on any issue will be called Anti-Christ. I will be called a false prophet.
Fundamentalist Christianity is not a democratic social structure. It is a Kingdom, a monarchy, an absolute dictatorship. Fundamentalists are obsessed with a totalitarian God, by whose authority they are obligated to live under and to enforce an inflexible law, a law not subject to evidence or reason. Their government on earth will be a totalitarian government, an hierarchical bureaucratic monolith of interpreters and executors of the official Word of God. Other than to give rubber-stamp political legitimacy to the rulings of the powerful interpreters of Scripture, there is no reason for a Christian nation to have a legislative Congress. If the responsibility of the Supreme Court is to determine whether the laws conform to Scripture, there is no reason for a Christian nation to have a Constitution. If the basis of criminal prosecution is the judge’s interpretation of the Scriptural definition of sin, or his canonically-acknowledged spiritual discernment of evil, there is no reason to have a jury of people who are merely obligated by faith to agree with him. If office-holders are known to be ideologically pure Christians, and likely called by God Himself to the Ministry of the Pastor, there is no reason to elect new ones every few years, particularly in the highest offices.
If any group other than Christians – Sunnis, Scientologists, or Neo-Nazis, for example — were making full use of the media and the courts to promote the wholesale dismantling of the democratic process by stacking the seats of power with their own fanatical agents, and overtly declaring their intentions to replace basic American freedoms with their own oppressive moralistic doctrines, they would be declared treasonous, and the SWAT teams would be surrounding their temples. Those people who wish for and take action to gain such power as to make the laws of the United States conform to the higher authority of the dogma of their cult, in so doing rendering the Constitution impotent, the Congress ineffective, and law-enforcement a sectarian tool, are in fact conspiring to overthrow the government of the United States. A President who elevates to power a person whom he knows will interpret or change the Constitution so as to make it conform to Scripture or any other religious, occult, or philosophical creed is in violation of his oath to support and defend the Constitution, and is in fact an active member of that conspiracy. Is that not an impeachable offense?
Political Christian fundamentalists declare their intention is to restore and preserve American freedom. However, they often point out that since human beings are all allegedly born wanting to sin, Christian freedom does not mean the right to choose what you want to do, but rather, to do what you ought. Christian freedom is freedom from disobedience (to their image of God, their edition of His alleged laws, and His self-declared personal representatives on earth), freedom from dissent, freedom from disagreement, freedom from diversity, and freedom from the possibility of making an incorrect choice. Such freedom already exists on earth. There is freedom to conform absolutely to regulation even in the Gulag, Russia’s notorious prison camps.
They name their organizations Liberty foundations, but abhor and condemn liberals. They call themselves conservative, preservers of the American way, yet they seek openly to destroy the most basic elements of the movement which created America, beginning with abolition of the religious neutrality which permitted them to exist in the first place, and continuing through the replacement of democracy with the sham of an electorate subject to the scriptural mandate of a totalitarian monarch in absentia they claim acts through them. On secular issues, a Christian Congress will continue to function very much as it does now, and the Christian Administration will proudly declare that the democratic process is alive and well in America. The difference will become apparent on any issue taken to have Scriptural significance.
Some things need not be changed by law for American citizens to lose the freedoms they now enjoy. Political leaders need not take responsibility for social mobilization initiated through the church. The laws of our country guarantee that the citizen may not be harassed by teams of law-enforcement or investigative persons seeking to discover technical transgressions without reasonable cause to believe a crime is being committed, and without a proper warrant so stating. This law has already been stretched a long way in the futile war to control the drug traffic by force, and in the hands of politically-mobilized Christians it will succumb. The police shall not gain the right to casual entry of your homes, but freedom of religion will guarantee the right of your neighbors to make their nightly devotional prayer walks through town and to stop at your house to inquire about your knowledge of Scripture, and to investigate your adherence thereto. If they are not welcomed into your home when they come in the name of Jesus, your name will be marked, and they will return again and again to either convert you or condemn you. Their testimony as to what they have witnessed as missionaries of Christ in your home will be sufficient cause to warrant official investigation.
Likewise, the First Amendment need be neither abrogated nor violated in order for an effective program of censorship to be imposed. They may not be able in the courts to abridge the right of a publisher who can afford legal defense to publish what he wishes, but once it is published, who will protect the local merchant from the pressure local zealot activists can impose in order to gain his voluntary willingness to remove offending material from his shelves? What merchant will risk boycott, pickets, harassment of his children at school, or Carrie Nation-style invasion of his magazine rack by the Christian Wives Club just for the little profit he might make on any publication on any subject, if it offends organized moralists representing the most powerful religious faction in his neighborhood? How long can those merchants who stand on the First Amendment on principle afford to keep their doors open?
Many middle-class American sheep will not seriously oppose the Christians in their campaign to cleanse America of obscenity. Though the definition of what is and is not obscene is very much a matter of opinion and taste, it is the fundamentalists’ definitions which will be argued in court, and people will be forced to attempt to stand on the Constitution for permission to publish their material whether it is obscene or not. Few mainstream Americans — or Christian Supreme Court Justices — will take the stand that the Constitution is intended to defend obscenity, as defined by the figures of authority in their own churches. They will hide their copies of Playboy and the videotapes they got through the mail, and they will piously agree that strong measures are called for to protect our children from the horror of knowing the sinful truth about sex, and their consequent likelihood of becoming deviate sinners themselves. Once they have established the principle that the First Amendment does not protect the right to yell “Fire!” in a theater, nor to place obscenity before the eyes of the innocent, then the problem facing the courts becomes a matter of rendering judgment case by case on the validity of Christians’ determination to declare some practice obscene. The Court will then be reduced to a position of secondary action, responding to confirm or disallow each new inclusion into the lists of obscene practices. Americans who are unwilling to oppose figures of authority who violate the righteous principles for which their offices stand will permit the precedents of censorship to occur in the courts, and they will permit the zealots to obtain the seats of power. When the Christians then raise up the weapon we let them build to free our children of obscenity and undertake to cleanse our textbooks, libraries, marketplaces, the broadcast media, and our homes of subject matter which is blasphemous, and of that which is heretical, it will be too late to stop them.
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James Nathan Post
This is a chapter from my book FUNDAMENTAL BLASPHEMY aka "Thank You Jesus But No Thank You."
