Forgive Him, He Knows Not Of What He Writes

As amazing as it seems today, there was a time in this country that if somebody with The New York Times wrote something as totally stupid, if not as insane, as Executive editor Bill Keller’s piece entitled “Asking Candidates Tough Questions About Faith”, it would be news. Now it is just another example of the Bizzaro world of the big time news media acting like Christianity just started a few weeks ago.

Keller begins his piece with this statement: “If a candidate for president said he believed that space aliens dwell among us, would that affect your willingness to vote for him?” Well, there was a candidate that said he saw a UFO and his name was Jimmy Carter. For the record, he did have a space alien in his administration -Zbigniew Brzezinski- but that’s another story.

You don’t have to be a liberal arts graduate to figure out where this is heading. A lot of the GOP candidates are, brace yourselves for this terrible news, Evangelical Christians, which, if you read The New York Times, is the force behind flying planes into buildings, shootings at army bases, and various attempts to blow up planes by using shoes and underwear. No, wait, it wasn’t The Southern Baptist Convention that flew the planes into the North and South towers, it was another religion that begins with an “I” and is a religion of peace.

The cause of Mr. Keller’s concern is Michele Bachmann, who is either an Evangelical Lutheran or a Baptist now. It really doesn’t matter to Keller. In the original publication of his article, Keller identified Rick Santorum as an Evangelical, when Santorum is a Roman Catholic. Every Republican is just one big religious boogey-man to Mr. Keller.

Keller says, “I learned that Michele Bachmann’s influences include spiritual and political mentors who preach the literal “inerrancy” of the Bible, who warn Christians to be suspicious of ideas that come from non-Christians, who believe homosexuality is an abomination”. You could remove the words “Michele Bachmann” and put in these words: “Harry Truman” or “Dwight Eisenhower” or “John Kennedy” or every President since because a major spiritual mentor of each one was Billy Graham. Billy Graham preached the literal inerrancy of the Bible, suspicion of non-Christian ideas and that homosexuality is a sin.

Mr. Keller is worried about “Dominionism” which is supposedly sweeping the nation despite the fact nobody has ever heard of it and nobody really knows what it means. At least Mr. Keller is honest to enough to admit that “(Neither) Bachmann nor Perry has, as far as I know, pledged allegiance to the Dominionists”. Whew, that was a close one.

Keller ends this piece with several questions that he thinks should be asked to the GOP contenders. (It is interesting to note that Mr. Keller apparently doesn’t seem interested in the religious beliefs of Democrats. There was a huge religious controversy in 2008 when Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright, made, at the very least, controversial comments about God. You wouldn’t have known it if you read The New York Times.)

Of course, there is this question: “What is your attitude toward the theory of evolution, and do you believe it should be taught in public schools?” The need for this question baffles me. We have double digit unemployment and the executive editor of The New York Times asks candidates about their “attitude” towards evolution? Really, this is an important question facing the nation? Good grief, you don’t have the executive editor of Christianity Today asking candidates if they are pre-millennial dispensationalists.

God knows this has nothing to do with religion. It has everything to do with the letters that follows the candidates’ names. If there is a “D” beside it, religion is a personal matter that should be between the candidate and his maker. If there is an “R” beside it, well, that’s another matter and we should do everything in our mainstream media power to make sure that people fear religion and religious people.