Most ads are interactive -- click on them to visit the folks who make The Panama News possible

opinion

Also in this section:
Bernal, the "MAMIocracy"
Leis, Panama's indigenous comarcas
What they're saying about the Iraq War and the protests against it
Cooper, The United States vs. reporters in Iraq
Armington & Birns, Roger Noriega's sorry Latin American policy legacy
Gutman, Grooming politicians for Satan
Silié, From the Cold War to the War on Terror
Avneri, Likudnik gladiators
Stimson, China's new leader isn't the right man
Sliwa, Freeing Africa's child soldiers
Jackson, Putting campus radicals to the test
Lettieri & Birns, University of Panama's mess gets worse

Grooming politicians for Satan

W. E. Gutman

They endorsed Bush. Now they demand that he deliver --- more accurately hand over --- all of America. Emboldened by the ascendancy and clout of political conservatism, evangelicals have jumped on deck, intent on sharing in the captaincy of the ship of state. President Bush's self-styled messianic persona, his appointment of reactionary cronies in key positions, and his supercilious disdain for the secular values that underpin democracy further account for the rapid and virtually unchecked intrusion by religious and ultra-conservative elements into the body politic.

Most evangelicals view their rising influence not as indulgences or dispensations but as a legitimate first step in a long-range scheme to leverage their mushrooming numbers into unfettered political muscle. Borrowing from the capitalist catechism, a new phalanx of entrepreneurial evangelicals is using good old hucksterism to sell religion, gain new disciples and add to their already prodigious wealth.

But visions rooted in scriptures are strategic and cultivated to serve long-term objectives. Not content to hijack America's soul, far-right dital -  anteproyecto de lay sobre territorios insularesevangelicals now seek to mold a new generation of politicians who will answer not to voters, not to the laity, not to national consensus, not the to Constitution, but "to God."

God help us.

Everywhere in America, young people, some moonlighting as Congressional aides --- most of them politically ambitious --- now spend hours plumbing the Bible for insights on foreign relations, taxes, war, education, art, abortion and stem cell research, gay rights, capital punishment, same-sex marriage and the immortality of the soul.

High-octane seminars led by conservative university professors and pious members of Congress teach the "Christian men and women who will lead the nation [that] patriotism means first and foremost serving Christ." There are a dozen such "leadership" indoctrination programs in which aspiring politicians learn that "compromise is sin."

"If we let man decide what's good and evil, there will be chaos," is a popular if sinister leitmotif.

Homework, which includes recitations from Scriptures, also encourages perusal of the works of Nietzsche, Marx and Engels, Machiavelli and Heny Kissinger.

Kissinger? A man so contemptuous of democracy that he endorsed apartheid in South Africa, condoned the mass killing of civilians in Indochina, recommended the assassination of Chile's Salvador Allende and Cyprus's Archbishop Makarios, incited and enabled the genocide in East Timor and personally engineered the kidnapping and murder of a foreign correspondent in Washington?

The evangelical manifesto includes the abolishment of the Department of Education. "This is not just a Republican objective but a Christian imperative. The Bible gives parents --- not some distant bureaucracy --- the primary responsibility for raising children. It is our duty to arrest society's moral decay."

Torquemada said pretty much the same thing. So did St. Francis and St. Dominic. And heretics fed the flames of a holy bonfire that blazed for three centuries.

How long before:

• a large cross, along with the ubiquitous Stars and Stripes becomes
• obligatory decoration on America's front lawns?
• grace, the pledge of allegiance and communal readings of the Bible are
• declared de rigueur?
• circumcised men who can't prove they're not Jewish or Muslim are
• castrated so they can't reproduce?
• the God police arrest those who fail to cross themselves every time
• they pass by a church?
• people lose their job or fail to obtain one because they're not
• backsliding diehards and refuse to attend religious services?
• the Un-American Activities Committee is resuscitated, and an
• Un-Christian Activities inquisition resumes its ghoulish work?
• a strange amalgam of zeal and demagogic muscle leads the new
• inquisitors to find heresy in innocent people and enables them to convince
• others of their guilt?
• repentant heretics are turned over to the secular arm --- if one ever
• survives?

How long before America becomes a theocracy --- paranoid and repressive,

vindictive and bloodthirsty?

And how long before the likes of Pat Robertson, a close ally and herald of the Bush administration issues another "fatwah," this time against freethinkers? The "outrage" his recent gaffe elicited, it must be understood, was perfunctory and sham --- as sham as was his half-hearted and clumsy apology. The Christian Coalition receives federal funding from the President's faith-based initiatives and has carte blanche within the administration and the right wing of the Republican Party.

Modern United States is as distant from its early beginnings as contemporary Rome is remote from its classical Caesar-ruled imperial era.

While our founding fathers may have been imbued with "Christian principles," this nation was built with Jewish money and African blood, sweat and tears and over the remains of the continent's native peoples. Indentured Chinese laborers laid the railroad tracks. America's strength, character and intellectual diversity is a distillate of successive generations of European, African, Asian and Latin American pioneers, all of whom shared, despite their dissimilar ethnic, national and religious backgrounds, a common ideal and destiny. To claim that America is a Christian nation and that its glory and salvation can only be secured through Jesus Christ is a monumental insult to those of us who are not Christian but love America no less.

There is no formula that can deliver all truth, all harmony, all simplicity. No universal theorem can provide total insight, not even religion. To see everything through a single lens, as evangelicals would have us do, will leave us seeing nothing at all.

Meanwhile, the founding fathers must be doing triple somersaults in their graves.

W. E. Gutman is a veteran journalist on assignment in Central America since 1991. He lives in southern California.