Pastor Terry Jones is a product of America's free market in religion

[IndianaGreen]

Victoria Clark: Pastor Terry Jones is a product of America's free market in religion

The West’s ill-conceived response to the horror of 9/11 has been compounded by men of God spreading fear, hatred and mistrust of the Muslim world

Saturday, 11 September 2010

It's taken nine years for the Christian West to throw up a cleric as radically, fundamentally bellicose as some of those produced by the Muslim world. The marvel, I would say, is not that it has, and proved beyond reasonable doubt that any and every religion can breed monsters, but that it has not done so earlier.

Pastor Terry Jones of Dove World Outreach Centre church in Florida, the Protestant clergyman who thinks marking this ninth anniversary of 9/11 by burning copies of the Koran is a fine idea, may boast a congregation of no more than 50, but there is one thing I'd be prepared to bet on. It won't be his potentially lethal bellicosity that's stopped him attracting a congregation large enough to fill one of those 50,000-seater megachurches. There'll be other, more humdrum reasons for his obscurity until now.

How can I be so sure? A few years ago, while researching a book about the dangerous dovetailing of Armageddon theology with support for hard right-wing Israeli politicians and Israeli expansionism in the West Bank after 9/11, I encountered a number of Pastor Jones clones: alpha male egocentrics who used their pulpits to peddle a deliciously intoxicating cocktail of literal-minded Bible exegesis aimed at forecasting the future, right-wing political punditry, shockingly irresponsible fear-mongering, straight-talking saloon bar humour, and bloodcurdling threats against the Muslim world.

There was the powerfully rotund and famously Israel-friendly Pastor John Hagee of "Cornerstone" megachurch in San Antonio who thrilled his audience one night back in October 2006 with a public address to Iran's president: "Listen up, Mr President of Iran. Don't threaten America! We're not afraid of you!" before provoking a storm of applause and whistling with, "If you remember, Pharaoh threatened Israel and he ended up fish-food in the Red Sea!" A few days earlier he had assured National Public Radio's Fresh Air programme that "those who live by the Koran have a scriptural mandate to kill Christian and Jews", adding, "It teaches that very clearly." He got away with that, but his powerful endorsement of Senator John McCain's presidential candidacy in 2008 backfired badly on the senator; Hagee, it turned out, had let rip against Catholics as well as Muslims.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/victoria-clark-pastor-terry-jones-is-a-product-of-americas-free-market-in-religion-2076347.html

[xfundy]

1. Nothing is more profitable

than the religion industry.

[ladywnch]

2. why do they keep referring to him as a 'pastor'? My understanding is

he is NOT ORDAINED by ANY CHURCH. He is as much a pastor as I am - and I'm an atheist.

[mjane]

3. and he had what? 50 followers. the "some of those produced by the muslim world"

who are just as bad have MILLIONS of followers.

clearly, our free market in religion works well, better than that in many nations, in that fanatics like this are ostracized.

[SteveM]

4. Gainesville already has a rock star, and Tom Petty is a lot better. nt

[alarimer]

5. No, we have always had preachers like that.

Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, etc.
Father Coughlin and his ilk.

The only difference now is that they have all come out of the woodwork. The internet and the 24 hour news cycle give them way more attention than they deserve. The American people are hateful and bigoted, even though they think they are better than everyone else. In reality they are as bad, if not worse, than the Taliban because they are so hypocritical.

[MisterP]

6. the "Anglosphere" has such a tradition centering on the Puritans,

who were often strongly against the Anglican establishment (Papists all); they also produced a virulently anti-Catholic and -Spanish strain of Protestantism in the 17th century; even when 19th-century Manifest Destiny was pushed by mainstream clergy, it was tied up in the blatantly millennial and exceptionalist idea of The New World, detached from the Old; modern American fundamentalism is tied to the charismatics (in the 1830s they were more progressive) and the Southern Baptists (who split in support of slavery); and the (Puritan) concept of the family Patriarch acting as their absolute monarch and pastor.

A central factor is Luther's ideal of amateur, DIY Bible reading; a preacher sets up their OWN megachurch and seminary, rather than emerges from one; as one can see, fundamentalism is not actually "adhering better" to the word of the Bible, since they're more selective than any non-literalist reading. That's how they miss so many cues on how to read Genesis or the 625 Commandments or Revelations or Job, and why their Bible quotes always cut off before the next verse (which totally changes the meaning of the quote), and how they can deem the KJV to be divine.

in the early 19th century you had Cathophobic Yankee writers like Washington Irving and William Hickling Prescott shaping the beliefs of the new nation; a similar anti-Catholicism, emerging from the scientistic-positivist-anticlerical-sometimes authoritarian strains of the Classical Liberal 1750s-1830s, was John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White's 1870s distortions of history, which you can see in Dawkins, Hitchens, Sagan, post-2007 Hawking, and scads of other people who say that we don't need deep feelings or religion because we have SCIENCE. E.P. Thompson noted that the Luddites were right to fight starvation, even if it meant offending technophiliacs decades later. The point of this being, that the Anglo so-called "New Atheists" are not too dissimilar to the anti-mainstream Puritans of the 17th century (and their reaction to Mooslimes not tepidly "separating" life and religion is similar, though in the defense of "a secular West" or "a Christian nation," respectively). Long story short, "New Atheism" is Protestantism with the serial number filed off--especially evident when they attack parts of Catholicism that present, at best, a second order of concern--all-male clergy, the existence of the Pope, vows of chastity, use of gilt images and icons. Belloc noted that Brit internationalists like Shaw and H.G. Wells thought that transcending petty, provincial national distinctions meant the Queen's English and five o'clock tea.