I was struck by a statement in the Movie documentary Bonhoeffer( I bought it on DVD about a month ago, right after the election—- highly recommended) , about how the German Church really “needed” a new infusion of pride and sense of involvement (it had been increasingly irrelevant— Bonhoefer had observed that the masses were abandoning the Church in droves, and only the bourgeoise remained). Hitler’s rise also included many “enticements” to the Church for it to be given national legitimacy, which made it very tempting (and many took the bait) to heap loyalty and devotion upon Hitler’s government, and Hitler kept throwing out the crumbs of how the Almighty is “working in the background of the German people” , and behind them in their cause.

I thought of how similar that is to the Religious Right today. The conservative portions of the Church (and this is certainly the case in the Southern Baptist Church’s transformation into a largely fundamentalist approach, one which also includes one of the more nationalistic leadership body of leadership in theis country. Richard Land is the guy we see on many panels and highly quoted when the media seeks out statements of religious leaders concerning controversial Bush administration actions. The conservatives of the Southern Baptist Convention had long felt marginalized by the leadership of the Convention up through the 1970’s , and in the late 1970’s, a federal judge named Paul Pressler and some seminiary professors like Paige Patterson began to make waves and start a movement with the clear intent of “taking over” the denomination. With the rise of the Moral majority and the Reagan bandwagon on which Churches were encouraged to jump upon, this Southern Baptist movement picked up steam and the leadership positions within the denomination at many levels began to be transformed, with State Convention presidents, seminaries, and Mission Boards and Sunday School Boards and Publishers under the Southern Baptist umbrella became the scenes of a massive “cleansing” of those who were not of the fundamentalistic, authoritarian, “get the liberals out” and “purge them” kind of approach. There was an air of “you condescended to us for too long, now you’re going to pay” kind of swagger (which is similar to the way the Bush administration basically rid itself of all vestiges and carryovers and hand me downs of the Clinton administration (one of them being the Clinton-Gore administration’s interest and concern with Al-Quieda. They’ll deny it now, of course, but the bush administration never took Al-Queida seriously, and basically ignored Richard Clarke’s warnings. The phrase was often heard in White House discussions: “That was a Clinton thing”.

The Church of America (the Religious Right) seems to be of the same ilk; cut from the same cloth. Part of the mantra of the Religious Right is a palpable disdain for “anything that smells liberal”. I recall that when Sojourners came out with its “God is not a Republican or a Democrat” statement of faith, I heard many conservative Church folks comment “It sure sounds Democrat to me” (referring to references in the statement like “the oppressed” and “inclusiveness” and “seeking peace” (oh , that last one; those “peaceniks” that are “America haters”. This is the major reason given by the Southern Baptist leaders for their withdrawing the denomination from the Baptist World Alliance. “Too anti-American”. That was FIRST on their list. It’s like saying “Jesus wouldn’t DARE criticize us; we are pure, and the rest of the world better see the truth, of which we are the choice of God on earth to relay to the rest of them”

Nationalism , and the accompanying hysteria around it, complete with “blessings of the Church”, we are tryuly seeing a case of what was depicted in Jewish history where various kings had their “court prophets” who told them what they wanted to hear, and then there were the prophets whose message was uncomfortable, confronting, and , well, “prophetic”.