Given my previous post on Maggie Gallagher's statements - similar statements by convicted felon Chuck Colson who like Gallagher has latched onto the professional Christian financial gravy train can be found here in the Christian Post - comments Andrew Sullivan made on his blog yesterday are very appropriate because the mindset he describes in Norway's mass murder is sadly much the same as the Christianists in this country. The only difference is that they have not resorted to murder and violence on a large scale - at least not yet. But they and their anti-Muslim allies are the ones responsible for creating an atmosphere and a world view fueled by hate that made the step to murder and violence seem the next logical step to someone like Breivik. And frighteningly, there are likely others out in society who may follow his example. Here are excerpts from Andrew's post:*
I coined the term "Christianism" many moons ago to defend Christianity and the gospels from their political co-opters. And I think it's indispensable in understanding the motivations of the terrorist, Anders Breivik. . . .
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One of the core messages of Christianity is a rejection of worldly power. The core message of Christianism is, in stark contrast, the desperate need to control all the levers of political power to control or guide the lives of others.
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But Christianist? Breivik's picture should accompany the term in any dictionary. Christianism is all about power over others, and it has been fueled in the last decade by its mirror image, Islamism, and motivated to fury by hatred of what it sees as is true enemy, liberalism. Both Islamism and Christianism, to my mind, do not spring from real religious faith; they spring from neurosis caused by lack of faith. They are the choices of those who are panicked by the complexity and choices of modernity into a fanatical embrace of a simplistic parody of religion in order to attack what they see as their cultural and social enemies. They are not about genuine faith; they are about the instrumentality of faith as a political bludgeon.
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It is his fear of his lack of real faith that propels him to pragmatically embrace the psychological structure of religion to murder his cultural enemies, to reify "Europe" or "Christendom" or "the Church" in order to defend them and give some meaning to his life.
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Like all such weaklings in the face of modernity, he is obsessed with sexual control of others and the sexual repression of oneself. He literally embraces a return to the mythic model of the 1950s, in which women remain at home, gays belong in the closet, and white Christians are the only kinds of Americans there are. He is obsessed with demography and reads at times like a parody of Mark Steyn, brooding over the out-breeding infidels. He is still angry at Betty Friedan.
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A pseudo-believer, he nonetheless favors the arch-authoritarianism of the Old Catholicism rather than contemporary Protestantism (just like the atheist neocons).
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My point is this: this was about as far from an act of meaningless violence as you can get. It is an explicitly articulated, carefully argued conclusion from a mishmash of every current far right platitude out there. Breivik does not merely claim influence by someone like Robert Spencer, he quotes him and so many others at great length as part of his manifesto! It's a pastiche of vast tracts of the far right blogosphere.
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[I]t does seem to me to prove beyond any doubt that Christianism is indeed a phenomenon in its own right, and that its evolution into neo-fascist violence, like Islamism's embrace of neo-fascist violence, is now something that cannot be denied.
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If you think that contains no lessons for the United States, you might want to open your eyes a little more widely.
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