The twisted religion of Blair and Bush – Editorials & Commentary – International Herald Tribune

Both Judaism and Islam suffer from being religions that are synonymous with the construction of states and political power. This was recognized within Judaism by a constant tension between the prophets and the kings, with the former always calling the latter back to a true righteousness untouched by the corruption of power and avarice.

Islam had a not dissimilar distinction, with the imams often limiting the political ambit of the caliphs, directing them to a properly configured vision of an Islamic polity. It is disastrous that both of these critical religious legacies have been lost to a secular politics that now has no limits

These days seem rare anymore.

Nowadays, in camps both left and right, the idea of a “City of God’ is flagged as theocracy, and in its place, the “empty shrine” (as William Cavanuagh puts it) is lifted up as the place where some sort of “gentleman’s agreement” is etched in the consciousness of a nation of people so that distinctions melt into a “freedom of conscience —which the Southern Baptistsnow leadership which authoritatively has moved in to define even more specifically some “boundaries” for that “indvidual freedom” (they’re quite the mess….kind of enslaved in two layers of nationalism and fundamentalism, both of which align them to an ideology such as that of the neocons).

The life and person of Christ is given back seat to the “public” agreement that Jesus was really talkling about a “peace” that we ourselves must “protect”. But obviously (at least for me and many others), there is a bit of self-deception and mass hysteria in play that makes it possible to achieve the kind of self-certainty and blind allegiance exhibited by the Religious Right. The self-deception comes in accepting a cultural, nationalistic Jesus that must “censor” the words that ironically are the same words the fundamentalist, nationalistic churches refuse to take literally alongside all the other places where they insist that Jesus MUST be taken literally (resulting in some confusion on what it means to consider Jesus at all)

Some mighty powerful morsels from the article (emphases mine):

The usurpation of the great faiths by secular ideology is not usually recognized. This process has a historical and a contemporary dimension. For all the major monotheistic faiths, their primary historical distortion lies with their utilization for the purposes of state formation and nationalism.

Christianity had a better start. For almost three centuries it avoided capture by the logic of the state, and was able to form human beings into a community that transcended class, race and geography. This tradition was eclipsed in A.D. 325, when Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. Since states put a premium on conformity and political allegiance, religion became a primary way to ensure mass compliance with state authority.

Christians have been allowed to accept immoral means to achieve anything that can be remotely associated with some variation of freedom or protection of those “freedoms”. “Freedom and liberty” is what Bush says he is interested in spreading. It’s the pious platitude of the secular regime (or , deeper than the “secular” identitiy is the underlying ultinate allegiance of the ideology that says we (the Western democracies) are the center of the moral universe, a nd that only “our kind” and “our way of life” is the one worth “protecting”, and that any means can be used to protect it.

Religious fundamentalism has often been used to justify extreme political ideologies. Currently both sides of the war on terror legitimate their actions by perverted theological reasoning.The neo-cons and their acolytes have launched a unilateral pre-emptive conflict, masquerading as a “just war,” with horrendous consequences. In the name of good versus evil, people are being killed, imprisoned and tortured with impunity. Likewise, in a quest to rebuild and expand the imperial Caliphate, Al Qaeda and its henchmen are engaged in a modern variant of jihad: They have removed all traditional Islamic limits on warfare, propagating instead mass civilian death via the suicide of their followers

The Western empires achieve their goals by hiding the real means of their “successes”, so that the “heroism” of that “cause” can be hoisted upon the masses. By fighting wars far from our soil and keeping out the details of who must die and how they die in order that “we” might “be free” , they have historically maintained the mythology that invigorates the nationalism, a nd enables the country to rationalize and square our theology with our means of wielding power.

this is why Blair thinks the invasion of Iraq is consonant with his Christian beliefs: On television he explained, “The only way you can take a decision like that is to do the right thing according to your conscience.” The trouble is that once liberalism has surrendered any belief in objective truths, all personal subjective beliefs become true. Once all things are equally valid, the only way to attain supremacy is through war and power. Thus does liberalism make fundamentalists out of us all

Once we can be taught to ignore some clear words of Jesus that seem to have no “alternative” meaning other than what they say on their face value, anything is possible.