The spookily “dejavu” feeling I get when I read this account by Mike James on Howard Ahmanson Jr., whom he calls “The Avenging Angel of the Religious Right” (taken from the same-title article found on Salon

This is the same triumphalistic, Theocratic, we-have the “final authority” and everybody else MUST see it or be “excommunicated” kind of approach that the Southern Baptist Convention has taken. I subscribe to Albert Mohler’s weblog (or the long treatises thathe spews out on a daily basis using Weblog technology). I subscribe because he often provides me with an “Antichrist” story that I feel compelled to debunk, and one of the things that drives me to do this is that he’s so damnd sure of himself (How could he, or anyone else like him, be otherwise, when it’s apparently their God-given task to correct everybody else’s corrupted worldview and tell them what “God’s worldview is”.

I try to figure that out contantly (God’s worldview), but I realize how vast the territory, and how treacherous the terrain we travel when “Truth” seems like something we can “capture”. “Inerrancy of scripture” is their cause to , since they themselves know which interpretation is the “correct one” (It’s all just “right there, plain as day in the Bible”) and it always coincides with their system of Right that continues to be increasingly driven by right wing politics and the GOP. Bush becomes a Pope-like figure, and his references to God have the Religious Right falling to their knees and blessing and increasing percentage of Bush administration decisions.

A while back, Jim Wallis of Sojourners wrote a book called “Who Speaks For God?” and was questioning the hijacking of the “Christian voice” by the Religious Right and Raplh Reed and other descendents of the “Moral Majority”, who naturally gravitated toward self-assured, smug “apostles” of “Take Back America for Christ” (a term that is theologically and evangelically sound, in my view, but totally dicredited by the loudest of its proclaimers). There are MANY MANY other “Christian voices” who may franly begin to be wondering if they shouldn’t choose other terms than Christian, such is the “blaspheming” (giving God a bad name) by people who ……well, people who I think have it all wrong, and who miss a lot of the message of the Gospel, and whom I think would be closer spirtual descendents of the Scribes and Pharisees who opposed Jesus’ radical message on the basis of their “more pure theology”.