LEADERS : children see, children do…
I look for a place where people gather and are intent in relating to God on a personal level… where nobody is going to belittle my immaturity or mock my shortcomings, trying to shame me into compliance to their strange code of performance and mislead zeal. I look for the eyes of my Saviour through the acts of my elders, because I may need for them to confirm how God loves me, not just theologically, but in reality. How else could I learn to love my brother and my sister, my neighbour, the poor, the broken, my enemy?
I cringe every time I come across those well-known and (strangely) popular televangelists whose faces contort and voices change as they proceed to mock, amidst roaring laughter, certain ways of thinking that lead many to remain burdened with their old selves and some yet unsanctified areas of their lives. What a pitiful and cruel spectacle, to use the weak among us as the butt of jokes, in a bid to entertain crowds as well as the illusion that they do have a “flock” because people laugh and come back for more.
How sad that so many of our leaders create and maintain a ministry based on mockingly looking down on and making fun of others… and how many people thank them for it by pouring into their buildings every week, sowing their money into their so-called ministries, and ending up being acting just like them with one another… It should not be so.
Why do so many run to these conferences, TV shows, and purchase and feed on the resources they sell? It seems to me that the demands of the traditional entertainment value selected by our leaders and teachers, have caused them to insinuate in the message of the Gospel elements that are not only foreign to it, but have also contributed to disfigure the face of the Lord and His voice.
This deeply affects the message and wrongly turns the attention on the messenger rather than those to whom the message is intended. It certainly would trigger the manifestation of a sense of shame that would remain and affect how we then hear the message, and how we respond to an invitation for change. I submit to you that this is like peer-pressure, and may not lead lasting fruit, but later on come back to discredit the original decision to take action and prove that we’ve changed.
I don’t believe Jesus had time for this type of clownesque representation of the well-meaning immature. He would be stern, yes, but he wouldn’t mock. The enemy is the mocker.
=-=-=
Why am I saying this? I would like this to be an encouragement for us to oppose to this kind of public treatment, the true image of Christ in us and the true essence of our heavenly Father’s heart.
My vision for Soaking.Net is to offer a welcoming place, where we sit or kneel together as equals. No one has it all together. We all are on a journey to have Christ formed in us. The Holy Spirit is doing this work, the Father is guarding it, and Christ our Risen Lord is the image of God in us that we want to reflect unto others.
There is a shoutbox for blessings and prayer requests on Soaking.Net. When we read about a prayer request, something in us jumps right away and reaches out with either of these: compassion, understanding, or unwittingly, rudeness and judgment. Concerning the latter, let me say this: Jesus does not tell us to just pull ourselves by our bootstraps, nor does the Holy Spirit shame us by mocking us. We are not taught by the Lord to be Pharisees, but to “beware” of their leaven, what stirs them.
Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks, and so we do have the opportunity to witness what comes out of our hearts when others share their prayer needs, fears, concerns, and need to be assured of God’s love.
Let us be careful not to ourselves fall as we utter exhortations. That’s why I prefer encouragements to exhortations. Consequently, Soaking.Net isn’t meant to be a replica of the type of contemporary church culture where exhortations are often fleshly, given in arrogance, and devoid of compassion.
Such “exhortations” overlook the divine mapping of the human heart and give precedence to shame, as if it was a proper incentive to encourage a walk of holiness. Clearly we know that Christ bore our shame for the last time, and restored our true dignity in the eyes of God by giving His own life on our behalf. That’s spelled: He bled to death so we could be lead to Life.
PULPIT vs STAGE
As for the flippancy that has at times crept into our churches pulpits and communication channels, I ask: would we stand before God and make clever jokes about someone’s immaturity or weakness, mimicking them in a mocking voice, an act that would essentially be saying that this ridicule caricature represents what the Holy Spirit is telling us about them? Is this how the Holy Spirit speaks? Undoubtedly not.
Holiness and conformity to Christ are of tremendous heavenly importance, and though at times we can enjoy some humor to help lighten our load and not take ourselves too seriously, it should not be at the expense of others or ourselves.
Sometimes, this type of attitude may betray the speaker’s own belief in the power and necessity of shame - deflecting it upon others through a not so clever cover up that simply presents itself in bad taste and poor judgment.
In my opinion, it tells of something deeply wrong in our corporate understanding of eternal life, and our discerning Christ’s body that we tolerate, even encourage and mentor down this type of attitude.
We all have had those humorous “light bulb” moments where God visited us and gave us understanding. No need to turn this into a preferred tool for change. Not everyone has to be told something or see the light the same way we had to be shown. That is to say, we don’t change deeply when we are mocked and shamed. The fruit of such “exhortation” leads right into the trap of conformity, peer pressure and is a tempting invitation to the path of least repentance.
God’s deep work of transformation, on the other hand, is a holy work; He reaches down and takes our hand even when we are surrounded by the enemy’s mocking and demeaning crowd of lies and insults, He reaches for the one who’s hidden in the corner, burdened by rejection and shame, unaccustomed to kindness and compassion. And He lifts their heads up in front of those who have no need, a loud statement of love restoring their dignity amongst their community. He teaches us to love, by loving us the way only He can. Disciples passionately want to learn the ways of their Master.
IMMATURITY ISN’T A SIN
Immaturity isn’t a sin. It is a normal stage of being, Christ being our comparative value, and God’s inner handiwork moving on behalf of our spiritual birth and growth.
We come to love “soaking” because it allows us space to be ourselves before God, alone or among others. No Bible study, no comparative witnessing, bragging rights, no religious exercises or accountability, no public rebuke or case-study, simply being as we are in all honesty, one on one with God, even though others may pray for us (only encouraged where true compassion and wisdom rule…).
In truth, the act of soaking is the age-old abiding quest of a kneeling heart: to know as we are known, to be effectively embraced, and accepted in the Beloved.
We freely drink this love as water of life, as it refocuses us on what is important to God: to be a son or daughter that pleases Him, still anchored in grace, at peace just being “home” with Him, in His arms of love. Isn’t that what we all longed for and isn’t it the thing that convinced us to enter into covenant with God: His love for us manifested through Christ?
“PERFECT” OR GODLY CHILDREN?
God isn’t after flawless people but godly people. Opposed to technical religious performance, he is close to those who know they don’t have it all together and who don’t pretend otherwise.
I share all this because my heart and vision is to maintain an atmosphere of humility on Soaking.Net’s shoutbox, a core place of interaction on the site. It is meant to be a safe and gentle place, without shame or exhortations that, though possibly well-meaning, may only serve to add religious burdens on those already struggling.
For this reason, we again turn our attention back to the power of simple encouragements as we walk shoulder to shoulder with those who seek, not lording anything – including the word of God, our prayers, experiences, teachings or words - above others.
Remember, Jesus didn’t come to us to preach to us out of His divine strength. Instead, He set aside His power and came to us in weakness, becoming one of us, a baby in a manger, affirming humanity as glorious, and thus He continued to relate to us out of unequalled humility.
In the same way, we are invited to minister to people out of an incarnated awareness of our own weakness, our victories being to God’s glory, and not our own. And with this heart attitude, we model our Lord, embracing each other in our humanity and need.
That is why brokenness isn’t a curse to command away with Bible verses or positive thinking, but a refining journey, laying down our lives daily to take up His.
Hence, a humble and inspired preacher of the gospel might inspire change, but will not demand it, and the true minister will walk with the weak and love them, whether or not change manifests itself as they think it ’should,’ even if the cost to pay is the faltering of their present ministry for lack of an “audience.”
We’re to love the poor, not create doctrines to convert them to riches. We’re to lay down our lives for our friends, defer to one another as much as possible. We’re to provide for the orphans and widows. God said that as we treat these well, we are treating Him well, and that is what we all want isn’t it? Treating God right, not as if he was a mere ‘god’ who needs endless summoning and appeasing sacrifices.
SOAKING DOTH REST
Thank you to all who bring this gentle compassion of our Saviour through your understanding, compassion and prayers of encouragement on the site. This washing of one another’s feet brings so much joy to the Father, and in no way does it suggest that a walk of holiness isn’t necessary, but that holiness is to walk and conduct ourselves with God’s heart in this world.
6 With what shall I come before the LORD
and bow down before the exalted God?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,
with calves a year old?
7 Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams,
with ten thousand rivers of oil?
Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression,
the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?
8 He has showed you, O man, what is good.
And what does the LORD require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God. (Micah 6:6-8)
All who come here, the invitation remains: soak, abide, rest, expecting to be inwardly moved and touch Jesus’ garment, as He turns around and validates us in the midst of a noisy and distracted crowd. Let us continue to bless others through the comfort and blessing we receive. Encourage one another in the same manner we’d want to be encouraged if it was done publicly.
In this way, may Soaking.Net continue to be a refuge from the noise and loud demanding voices that weigh on the weary - a place to hear and learn the language of the Father’s heart of love. From there, we won’t really need anyone to teach us, for the indwelling Holy Spirit will remind us of all that Jesus said and did. To live our daily lives beyond that secret room, will be to walk in the dignity of sons and daughters, brothers and sisters. And this is the light that is supposed to shine in the darkness, light that is ours to shine in the sight of all.
Grace and peace,
Andre Lefebvre
http://www.soaking.net
…unto greater works…
Sunday, April 05, 2009
Monday, August 04, 2008
Open letter to C.Peter Wagner and Rick Joyner
OPEN LETTER to WAGNER, JOYNER...
-by Andrew Strom.
I write this as a tongues-speaking, Spirit-filled, prophesying believer.
Dear Rick Joyner and C. Peter Wagner,
I will do my utmost to avoid disrespect in this letter. But I cannot avoid the hard questions which must be asked.
I hope my comments here are not construed as "arrogant". This is certainly not my intent. But I'm sure you have heard the news by now that the tide has turned in what you call your "Civil War". I'm sure you have heard that the Lakeland meetings have dwindled, and the "big tent" has been abandoned in favor of the 700-seat Ignite church once again. I'm sure you have heard that your man Todd Bentley's meetings in England have been cancelled, and that respected leaders even within your own movements have found vast evidence of falsehoods, fraudulent claims, manipulation
and hype of the most blatant kind. The news of it is worldwide. It is not just ABC Nightline. It is your own people saying these things.
I'm sure you have heard the news that has even shocked and saddened me - that the British press is calling Bentley "A US child sex offender turned church minister who tries to cure cancer victims by kicking them" - and that 79% of Britons polled want to keep him out of the country. Where is the glory to Jesus in this? How could Todd even set foot in England under such a cloud?
Sirs, if this really were a 'Civil War', aren't you living in Gettysburg?
Mr Wagner, I am sure you are aware that because of your open endorsement of Todd Bentley, numbers of your own ICA 'apostles' (some very well-known) are already planning an "alternative" network without all your 'Dominionist' trappings or NAR hierarchies. Sir, they are leaving. Are you sure you were right to endorse the Lakeland movement in the very face of your own apostles like that? Wasn't this one of the most crucial tests of your leadership? Sir, if your discernment is such that you could get on a stage and openly endorse one of the most deceptive movements in the history
of the church, then - with all due respect - should you really be heading up the apostles of the entire Charismatic world? Are you aware that you have greatly endangered God's precious sheep all around the globe?
And Mr Joyner, are you conscious of how terribly the Prophetic movement has deteriorated on your watch, sir? As the most influential 'father' in that movement, why have you stood by while the "New Mystics" have taken over - with their gold dust, their portals, their 'orbs', their drunken jerking, their strange "angel" encounters and 'visualization' techniques, etc? In fact, why have you actively encouraged and participated in these very things yourself?
Isn't it true that Bob Jones has been a big mentor for you in these things, just like he was for Todd Bentley? Wasn't it Bob Jones who taught you how to "visualize" your way into the 'Third Heaven', Mr Joyner? Isn't Bob Jones one of the major hidden influences behind your ministry? Where do you get your visions? How do you write your books? How can we ever again trust the "angels" that you see? Sir, what were you thinking - to openly endorse the "New Mystics" as you did with Todd Bentley? Did you not see that it could end so badly?
We all know what Bob Jones said when he stood on the stage with Todd Bentley in front of the whole world:
BOB: "I released my angels to him... this man from Canada asked for my angels; this Wind of Change is most powerful. Except for the arch angels, this 'Winds of Change', this is the most powerful angel..."
BOB TO TODD BENTLEY: "As I watch you, you VIBRATE. You know there are two portals, clockwise and counter-clockwise. When you vibrate you close demonic vibration. Counter-clockwise vibration is demonic. The vibration is healing. Does it seem peculiar?" [He waves his hands]... "I’m releasing it to you."
A very basic question here: Is there anything even remotely biblical about any of this?
Mr Joyner, since Bob Jones is your major mentor, and since you stood on the stage and openly endorsed that whole movement, I guess we have to assume that this is the kind of "Prophetic" that you now represent? Isn't that fair to say, sir?
And now I need to ask some questions of my colleagues overseas: Isn't it true, my friends, that almost every deceptive fad or heresy of the last 25 years has come out of North America? (ie. The USA and Canada)? And hasn't it been growing worse and worse?
When I travel to Africa I find deadly "Prosperity" teaching rampant in the most poverty-stricken of nations. When I travel to Europe I find them bombarded with flakey 'prophets' from the States. When I travel to Australia I find them enthralled with 'Mega-church- Itis' imported from the USA. In every way, North America has become a source of utter pollution, sickness and compromise - both in the church and the world. And I believe God wants to put an end to it.
Personally I love Americans. I lived there for four years, and I have many dear friends in that part of the world. But I do not believe that God is going to allow this pollution to spread any longer.
Why do leaders in Australia or Europe think that their movements must be led by Americans? What nation is most of this pollution coming from? Why do African leaders allow sick money-grubbing telecasts from the USA to be beamed to their people via satellite? Why are any of us allowing any of this garbage? When are we going to stand up and cry, "ENOUGH"? When are we going to cut off this pollution - not just for ourselves - but for the sake of God's precious sheep? Why should we be led by America if they are leading us into deception?
Should North America even be allowed to lead the worldwide church any more?
And finally, let me return to Mr Joyner - who once intimated that it is time to "drive" out those who want to "test the spirits" in the church. Sir, let me say to you that indeed the time has come to drive a particular spirit out. It is the spirit of rampant "Charis-mania". And sir, I have to say with all due respect, that your very own movement strikes me as the primest of prime places in which to start.
Discuss this on our Forum at- http://www.revivalschool.com
Send feedback to- prophetic@revivalschool.com
FEEL FREE TO FORWARD or POST THIS on BLOGS, etc.
God bless you all.
Andrew Strom.
-by Andrew Strom.
I write this as a tongues-speaking, Spirit-filled, prophesying believer.
Dear Rick Joyner and C. Peter Wagner,
I will do my utmost to avoid disrespect in this letter. But I cannot avoid the hard questions which must be asked.
I hope my comments here are not construed as "arrogant". This is certainly not my intent. But I'm sure you have heard the news by now that the tide has turned in what you call your "Civil War". I'm sure you have heard that the Lakeland meetings have dwindled, and the "big tent" has been abandoned in favor of the 700-seat Ignite church once again. I'm sure you have heard that your man Todd Bentley's meetings in England have been cancelled, and that respected leaders even within your own movements have found vast evidence of falsehoods, fraudulent claims, manipulation
and hype of the most blatant kind. The news of it is worldwide. It is not just ABC Nightline. It is your own people saying these things.
I'm sure you have heard the news that has even shocked and saddened me - that the British press is calling Bentley "A US child sex offender turned church minister who tries to cure cancer victims by kicking them" - and that 79% of Britons polled want to keep him out of the country. Where is the glory to Jesus in this? How could Todd even set foot in England under such a cloud?
Sirs, if this really were a 'Civil War', aren't you living in Gettysburg?
Mr Wagner, I am sure you are aware that because of your open endorsement of Todd Bentley, numbers of your own ICA 'apostles' (some very well-known) are already planning an "alternative" network without all your 'Dominionist' trappings or NAR hierarchies. Sir, they are leaving. Are you sure you were right to endorse the Lakeland movement in the very face of your own apostles like that? Wasn't this one of the most crucial tests of your leadership? Sir, if your discernment is such that you could get on a stage and openly endorse one of the most deceptive movements in the history
of the church, then - with all due respect - should you really be heading up the apostles of the entire Charismatic world? Are you aware that you have greatly endangered God's precious sheep all around the globe?
And Mr Joyner, are you conscious of how terribly the Prophetic movement has deteriorated on your watch, sir? As the most influential 'father' in that movement, why have you stood by while the "New Mystics" have taken over - with their gold dust, their portals, their 'orbs', their drunken jerking, their strange "angel" encounters and 'visualization' techniques, etc? In fact, why have you actively encouraged and participated in these very things yourself?
Isn't it true that Bob Jones has been a big mentor for you in these things, just like he was for Todd Bentley? Wasn't it Bob Jones who taught you how to "visualize" your way into the 'Third Heaven', Mr Joyner? Isn't Bob Jones one of the major hidden influences behind your ministry? Where do you get your visions? How do you write your books? How can we ever again trust the "angels" that you see? Sir, what were you thinking - to openly endorse the "New Mystics" as you did with Todd Bentley? Did you not see that it could end so badly?
We all know what Bob Jones said when he stood on the stage with Todd Bentley in front of the whole world:
BOB: "I released my angels to him... this man from Canada asked for my angels; this Wind of Change is most powerful. Except for the arch angels, this 'Winds of Change', this is the most powerful angel..."
BOB TO TODD BENTLEY: "As I watch you, you VIBRATE. You know there are two portals, clockwise and counter-clockwise. When you vibrate you close demonic vibration. Counter-clockwise vibration is demonic. The vibration is healing. Does it seem peculiar?" [He waves his hands]... "I’m releasing it to you."
A very basic question here: Is there anything even remotely biblical about any of this?
Mr Joyner, since Bob Jones is your major mentor, and since you stood on the stage and openly endorsed that whole movement, I guess we have to assume that this is the kind of "Prophetic" that you now represent? Isn't that fair to say, sir?
And now I need to ask some questions of my colleagues overseas: Isn't it true, my friends, that almost every deceptive fad or heresy of the last 25 years has come out of North America? (ie. The USA and Canada)? And hasn't it been growing worse and worse?
When I travel to Africa I find deadly "Prosperity" teaching rampant in the most poverty-stricken of nations. When I travel to Europe I find them bombarded with flakey 'prophets' from the States. When I travel to Australia I find them enthralled with 'Mega-church- Itis' imported from the USA. In every way, North America has become a source of utter pollution, sickness and compromise - both in the church and the world. And I believe God wants to put an end to it.
Personally I love Americans. I lived there for four years, and I have many dear friends in that part of the world. But I do not believe that God is going to allow this pollution to spread any longer.
Why do leaders in Australia or Europe think that their movements must be led by Americans? What nation is most of this pollution coming from? Why do African leaders allow sick money-grubbing telecasts from the USA to be beamed to their people via satellite? Why are any of us allowing any of this garbage? When are we going to stand up and cry, "ENOUGH"? When are we going to cut off this pollution - not just for ourselves - but for the sake of God's precious sheep? Why should we be led by America if they are leading us into deception?
Should North America even be allowed to lead the worldwide church any more?
And finally, let me return to Mr Joyner - who once intimated that it is time to "drive" out those who want to "test the spirits" in the church. Sir, let me say to you that indeed the time has come to drive a particular spirit out. It is the spirit of rampant "Charis-mania". And sir, I have to say with all due respect, that your very own movement strikes me as the primest of prime places in which to start.
Discuss this on our Forum at- http://www.revivalschool.com
Send feedback to- prophetic@revivalschool.com
FEEL FREE TO FORWARD or POST THIS on BLOGS, etc.
God bless you all.
Andrew Strom.
Sunday, February 18, 2007
THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT AND THE RISE OF AMERICAN FASCISM
The following was found on: Theocracy Watch.
You will also find this interview very interesting: an interview with Chris Hedges on The Hour with Georges Stromboulopoulos: interview with Chris Hedges.
---
This is an article by Chris Hedges that no major publication would print.
THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT AND THE RISE OF AMERICAN FASCISM
By -- CHRIS HEDGES - 15 Nov 2004
Dr. James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, told us that when we were his age, he was then close to 80, we would all be fighting the "Christian fascists."
The warning, given to me 25 years ago, came at the moment Pat Robertson and other radio and televangelists began speaking about a new political religion that would direct its efforts at taking control of all institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government. Its stated goal was to use the United States to create a global, Christian empire. It was hard, at the time, to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously, especially given the buffoonish quality of those who expounded it. But Adams warned us against the blindness caused by intellectual snobbery. The Nazis, he said, were not going to return with swastikas and brown shirts. Their ideological inheritors had found a mask for fascism in the pages of the Bible.
He was not a man to use the word fascist lightly. He was in Germany in 1935 and 1936 and worked with the underground anti-Nazi church, known as The Confessing Church, led by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Adams was eventually detained and interrogated by the Gestapo, who suggested he might want to consider returning to the United States . It was a suggestion he followed. He left on a night train with framed portraits of Adolph Hitler placed over the contents inside his suitcase to hide the rolls of home movie film he took of the so-called German Christian Church, which was pro-Nazi, and the few individuals who defied them, including the theologians Karl Barth and Albert Schweitzer. The ruse worked when the border police lifted the top of the suitcases, saw the portraits of the Fuhrer and closed them up again. I watched hours of the grainy black and white films as he narrated in his apartment in Cambridge.
He saw in the Christian Right, long before we did, disturbing similarities with the German Christian Church and the Nazi Party, similarities that he said would, in the event of prolonged social instability or a national crisis, see American fascists, under the guise of religion, rise to dismantle the open society. He despaired of liberals, who he said, as in Nazi Germany, mouthed silly platitudes about dialogue and inclusiveness that made them ineffectual and impotent. Liberals, he said, did not understand the power and allure of evil nor the cold reality of how the world worked. The current hand wringing by Democrats in the wake of the election, with many asking how they can reach out to a movement whose leaders brand them "demonic" and "satanic," would not have surprised Adams. Like Bonhoeffer, he did not believe that those who would fight effectively in coming times of turmoil, a fight that for him was an integral part of the Biblical message, would come from the church or the liberal, secular elite.
His critique of the prominent research universities, along with the media, was no less withering. These institutions, self-absorbed, compromised by their close relationship with government and corporations, given enough of the pie to be complacent, were unwilling to deal with the fundamental moral questions and inequities of the age. They had no stomach for a battle that might cost them their prestige and comfort. He told me that if the Nazis took over America "60 percent of the Harvard faculty would begin their lectures with the Nazi salute." This too was not an abstraction. He had watched academics at the University of Heidelberg, including the philosopher Martin Heidegger, raise their arms stiffly to students before class.
Two decades later, even in the face of the growing reach of the Christian Right, his prediction seems apocalyptic. And yet the powerbrokers in the Christian Right have moved from the fringes of society to the floor of the House of Representatives and the Senate. Christian fundamentalists now hold a majority of seats in 36 percent of all Republican Party state committees, or 18 of 50 states, along with large minorities in 81 percent of the rest of the states. Forty-five Senators and 186 members of the House of Representatives earned between an 80 to100 percent approval ratings from the three most influential Christian Right advocacy groups - The Christian Coalition, Eagle Forum, and Family Resource Council. Tom Coburn, the new senator from Oklahoma, has included in his campaign to end abortion: a call to impose the death penalty on doctors that carry out abortions once the ban goes into place. Another new senator, John Thune, believes in Creationism. Jim DeMint, the new senator elected from South Carolina, wants to ban single mothers from teaching in schools. The Election Day exit polls found that 22 percent of voters identified themselves as evangelical Christians and Bush won 77 percent of their vote. The polls found that a plurality of voters said that the most important issue in the campaign had been "moral values."
President Bush must further these important objectives, including the march to turn education and social welfare over to the churches with his faith-based initiative, as well as chip away at the wall between church and state with his judicial appointments, if he does not want to face a revolt within his core constituency.
Jim Dobson, the head of Focus on the Family, who held weekly telephone conversations with Karl Rove during the campaign, has put the President on notice. He told ABC's "This Week" that "this president has two years, or more broadly the Republican Party has two years, to implement these policies, or certainly four, or I believe they'll pay a price in the next election."
Bush may turn out to be a transition figure, our version of Otto von Bismarck. Bismarck used "values" to energize his base at the end of the 19th century and launched "Kulturkampt," the word from which we get "culture wars," against Catholics and Jews. Bismarck 's attacks split the country, made the discrediting of whole segments of the society an acceptable part of the civil discourse and paved the way for the more virulent racism of the Nazis. This, I suspect, will be George Bush's contribution to our democracy.
DOMINIONISTS AND RECONSTRUCTIONISTS
The Reconstructionist movement, founded in 1973 by Rousas Rushdooney, is the intellectual foundation for the most politically active element within the Christian Right. Rushdooney's 1,600 page three-volume work, Institutes of Biblical Law, argued that American society should be governed according to the Biblical precepts in the Ten Commandments. He wrote that the elect, like Adam and Noah, were given dominion over the earth by God and must subdue the earth, along with all non-believers, so the Messiah could return.
This was a radically new interpretation for many in the evangelical movement. The Messiah, it was traditionally taught, would return in an event called "the Rapture" where there would be wars and chaos. The non-believers would be tormented and killed and the elect would be lifted to heaven. The Rapture was not something that could be manipulated or influenced, although believers often interpreted catastrophes and wars as portents of the imminent Second Coming.
Rushdooney promoted an ideology that advocated violence to create the Christian state. His ideology was the mirror image of Liberation Theology, which came into vogue at about the same time. While the Liberation Theologians crammed the Bible into the box of Marxism, Rushdooney crammed it into the equally distorting box of classical fascism. This clash was first played out in Latin America when I was there as a reporter two decades ago. In El Salvador leftist priests endorsed and even traveled with the rebel movements in Nicaragua and El Salvador, while Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, along with conservative Latin American clerics, backed the Contras fighting against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the murderous military regimes in El Salvador, Guatemala, Chile and Argentina.
The Institutes of Biblical Law called for a Christian society that was harsh, unforgiving and violent. Offenses such as adultery, witchcraft, blasphemy and homosexuality, merited the death penalty. The world was to be subdued and ruled by a Christian United States. Rushdooney dismissed the number of 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust as an inflated figure and his theories on race echoed Nazi Eugenics.
"The white man has behind him centuries of Christian culture and the discipline and selective breeding this faith requires...," he wrote. "The Negro is a product of a radically different past, and his heredity has been governed by radically different considerations."
"The background of Negro culture is African and magic, and the purposes of the magic are control and power over God, man, nature, and society. Voodoo, or magic, was the religion and life of American Negroes. Voodoo songs underlie jazz, and old voodoo, with its power goal, has been merely replaced with revolutionary voodoo, a modernized power drive." (see The Religious Right , a publication of the ADL, pg. 124.)
Rushdooney was deeply antagonistic to the federal government. He believed the federal government should concern itself with little more than national defense. Education and social welfare should be handed over to the churches. Biblical law must replace the secular legal code. This ideology remains at the heart of the movement. It is being enacted through school vouchers, with federal dollars now going into Christian schools, and the assault against the federal agencies that deal with poverty and human services. The Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives is currently channeling millions in federal funds to groups such Pat Robertson's Operation Blessing , and National Right to Life, as well as to fundamentalist religious charity organizations and programs promoting sexual abstinence.
Rushdooney laid the groundwork for a new way of thinking about political involvement. The Christian state would come about not only through signs and wonders, as those who believed in the rapture believed, but also through the establishment of the Christian nation. But he remained, even within the Christian Right, a deeply controversial figure.
Dr. Tony Evans, the minister of a Dallas church and the founder of Promise Keepers, articulated Rushdooney's extremism in a more palatable form. He called on believers, often during emotional gatherings at football stadiums, to commit to Christ and exercise power within the society as agents of Christ. He also called for a Christian state. But he did not advocate the return of slavery, as Rushdooney did, nor list a string of offenses such as adultery punishable by death, nor did he espouse the Nazi-like race theories. It was through Evans, who was a spiritual mentor to George Bush that Dominionism came to dominate the politically active wing of the Christian Right.The religious utterances from political leaders such as George Bush, Tom Delay, Pat Robertson and Zell Miller are only understandable in light of Rushdooney and Dominionism. These leaders believe that God has selected them to battle the forces of evil, embodied in "secular humanism," to create a Christian nation. Pat Robertson frequently tells believers "our aim is to gain dominion over society." Delay has told supporters, such as at a gathering two years ago at the First Baptist Church in Pearland, Texas , "He [God] is using me, all the time, everywhere, to stand up for biblical worldview in everything I do and everywhere I am. He is training me, He is working with me." Delay went on to tell followers "If we stay inside the church, the culture won't change."
Pat Robertson, who changed the name of his university to Regent University, says he is training his students to rule when the Christian regents take power, part of the reign leading to the return of Christ. Robertson resigned as the head of the Christian Coalition when Bush took office, a sign many took to signal the ascendancy of the first regent. This battle is not rhetorical but one that followers are told will ultimately involve violence. And the enemy is clearly defined and marked for destruction.
"Secular Humanists," the popular Christian Right theologian Francis Schaeffer wrote in one of numerous diatribes, "are the greatest threat to Christianity the world has ever known."
One of the most enlightening books that exposes the ultimate goals of the movement is America's Providential History, the standard textbook used in many Christian schools and a staple of the Christian home schooling movement. It sites Genesis 26, which calls for mankind to "have dominnion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, over the cattle and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth" as evidence that the Bible calls for "Bible believing Christians" to take dominion of America.
"When God brings Noah through the flood to a new earth, He reestablished the Dominion Mandate but now delegates to man the responsibility for governing other men." (page 19). The authors write that God has called the United States to become "the first truly Christian nation" (page 184) and "make disciples of all nations." The book denounces income tax as "idolatry," property tax as "theft" and calls for an abolish of inheritance taxes in the chapter entitled Christian Economics. The loss of such tax revenues will bring about the withering away of the federal government and the empowerment of the authoritarian church, although this is not explict in the text.
Rushdooney's son-in-law, Gary North, a popular writer and founder of the Institute for Christian Economics, laid out the aims of the Christian Right.
"So let's be blunt about it: We must use the doctrine of religious liberty to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then they will get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God." (Christianity and Civilization, Spring, 1982)
Dominionists have to operate, for now, in the contaminated environment of the secular, liberal state. They have learned, therefore, to speak in code. The code they use is the key to understanding the dichotomy of the movement, one that has a public and a private face. In this they are no different from the vanguard, as described by Lenin, or the Islamic terrorists who shave off their beards, adopt western dress and watch pay-for-view pornographic movies in their hotel rooms the night before hijacking a plane for a suicide attack.
Joan Bokaer, the Director of Theocracy Watch, a project of the Center for Religion, Ethics and Social Policy at Cornell University , who runs the encyclopedic web site theocracywatch.org, was on a speaking tour a few years ago in Iowa. She obtained a copy of a memo Pat Robertson handed out to followers at the Iowa Republican County Caucus. It was titled, "How to Participate in a Political Party" and read:
"Rule the world for God."
"Give the impression that you are there to work for the party, not push an ideology.
"Hide your strength.
"Don't flaunt your Christianity.
"Christians need to take leadership positions. Party officers control political parties and so it is very important that mature Christians have a majority of leadership whenever possible, God willing."
President Bush sends frequent coded messages to the faithful. In his address to the nation on the night of September 11, for example, he lifted a line directly from the Gospel of John when he said "And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness will not overcome it." He often uses the sentence "when every child is welcomed in life and protected in law," words taken directly from a pro-life manifesto entitled "A Statement of Pro-Life Principle and Concern." He quotes from hymns, prayers, tracts and Biblical passages without attribution. These phrases reassure the elect. They are lost on the uninitiated.
CHRIST THE AVENGER
The Christian Right finds its ideological justification in a narrow segment of the Gospel, in particular the letters of the Apostle Paul, especially the story of Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus in the Book of Acts. It draws heavily from the book of Revelations and the Gospel of John. These books share an apocalyptic theology. The Book of Revelations is the only time in the Gospels where Jesus sanctions violence, offering up a vision of Christ as the head of a great and murderous army of heavenly avengers. Martin Luther found the God portrayed in Revelations so hateful and cruel he put the book in the appendix of his German translation of the Bible.
These books rarely speak about Christ's message of love, forgiveness and compassion. They focus on the doom and destruction that will befall unbelievers and the urgent need for personal salvation. The world is divided between good and evil, between those who act as agents of God and those who act as agents of Satan. The Jesus of the other three Gospels, the Jesus who turned the other cheek and embraced his enemies, an idea that was radical and startling in the ancient Roman world, is purged in the narrative selected by the Christian Right.
The cult of masculinity pervades the ideology. Feminism and homosexuality are social forces, believers are told, that have rendered the American male physically and spiritually impotent. Jesus is portrayed as a man of action, casting out demons, battling the Anti-Christ, attacking hypocrites and castigating the corrupt. This cult of masculinity brings with it the glorification of strength, violence and vengeance. It turns Christ into a Rambo-like figure; indeed depictions of Jesus within the movement often show a powerfully built man wielding a huge sword.
This image of Christ as warrior is appealing to many within the movement. The loss of manufacturing jobs, lack of affordable health care, negligible opportunities for education and poor job security has left many millions of Americans locked out. This ideology is attractive because it offers them the hope of power and revenge. It sanctifies their rage. It stokes the paranoia about the outside world maintained through bizarre conspiracy theories, many on display in Pat Robertson's book The New World Order. The book is a xenophobic rant that includes vicious attacks against the United Nations and numerous other international organizations. The abandonment of the working class has been crucial to the success of the movement. Only by reintegrating the working class into society through job creation, access to good education and health care can the Christian Right be effectively blunted. Revolutionary movements are built on the backs of an angry, disenfranchised laboring class. This one is no exception.
The depictions of violence that will befall non-believers are detailed, gruesome and brutal. It speaks to the rage many believers harbor and the thirst for revenge. This, in large part, accounts for the huge sales of the apocalyptic series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. In their novel, Glorious Appearing, based on LaHaye's interpretation of Biblical Prophecies about the Second Coming, Christ eviscerates the flesh of millions of non-believers with the mere sound of his voice. There are long descriptions of horror, of how "the very words of the Lord had superheated their blood, causing it to burst through their veins and skin." Eyes disintegrate. Tongues melt. Flesh dissolves. The novel, part of The Left Behind series, are the best selling adult novels in the country. They preach holy war.
"Any teaching of peace prior to [Christ's] return is heresy." said televangelist James Robison.
Natural disasters, terrorist attacks, instability in Israel and even the fighting of Iraq are seen as signposts. The war in Iraq was predicted according to believers in the 9th chapter of the Book of Revelations where four angels "which are bound in the great river Euphrates will be released to slay the third part of men." The march towards global war, even nuclear war, is not to be feared but welcomed as the harbinger of the Second Coming. And leading the avenging armies is an angry, violent Messiah who dooms millions of non-believers to a horrible and painful death.
THE CORRUPTION OF SCIENCE AND LAW
The movement seeks the imprint of law and science. It must discredit the rational disciplines that are the pillars of the Enlightenment to abolish the liberal polity of the Enlightenment. This corruption of science and law is vital in promoting the doctrine. Creationism, or "intelligent design," like Eugenics for the Nazis, must be introduced into the mainstream as a valid scientific discipline to destroy the discipline of science itself. This is why the Christian Right is working to bring test cases to ensure that school textbooks include "intelligent design" and condemn gay marriage.
The drive by the Christian Right to include crackpot theories in scientific or legal debate is part of the campaign to destroy dispassionate and honest intellectual inquiry. Facts become interchangeable with opinions. An understanding of reality is not to be based on the elaborate gathering of facts and evidence. The ideology alone is true. Facts that get in the way of the ideology can be altered. Lies, in this worldview, become true. Hannah Arendt called this effort "nihilistic relativism" although a better phrase might be collective insanity.
The Christian Right has fought successfully to have Creationist books sold in national park bookstores in the Grand Canyon, taught as a theory in public schools in states like Alabama and Arkansas. "Intelligent design" is promoted in Christian textbooks. All animal species, or at least their progenitors, students read, fit on Noah's ark. The Grand Canyon was created a few thousand years ago by the flood that lifted up Noah's ark, not one billion years ago, as geologists have determined. The earth is only a few thousand years old in line with the literal reading of Genesis. This is not some quaint, homespun view of the world. It is an insidious attempt to undermine rational scientific research and intellectual inquiry.
Tom Delay, following the Columbine shootings, gave voice to this assault when he said that the killings had taken place "because our school systems teach children that they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionized out of some primordial mud." (speech Delay gave in the House on June 16, 1999 )
"What convinces masses are not facts," Hannah Arendt wrote in Origins of Totalitarianism, "and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system which they are presumably part. Repetition, somewhat overrated in importance because of the common belief in the "masses" inferior capacity to grasp and remember, is important because it convinces them of consistency in time." (p.351)
There are more than 6 million elementary and secondary school students attending private schools and 11.5 percent of these students attend schools run by the Christian Right. These "Christian" schools saw an increase of 46 percent in enrollment in the last decade. The 245,000 additional students accounted for 75 percent of the total rise in private school enrollment.
THE LAUNCHING OF THE WAR
Adams told us to watch closely what the Christian Right did to homosexuals. He has seen how the Nazis had used "values" to launch state repression of opponents. Hitler, days after he took power in 1933, imposed a ban on all homosexual and lesbian organizations. He ordered raids on places where homosexuals gathered culminating with the ransacking of the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin . Thousands of volumes from the institute's library were tossed into a bonfire. Adams said that homosexuals would also be the first "deviants" singled out by the Christian Right. We would be the next.
The ban on same sex marriages, passed by eleven states in the election, was part of this march towards our door. A 1996 federal law already defines marriage as between a man and a woman. All of the states with ballot measures, with the exception of Oregon, had outlawed same sex marriages, as do 27 other states. The bans, however, had to be passed, believers were told, to thwart "activist judges" who wanted to overturn them. The Christian family, even the nation, was under threat. The bans served to widen the splits tearing apart the country. The attacks on homosexuals handed to the foot soldiers of the Christian Right an easy target. It gave them a taste of victory. It made them feel empowered. But it is ominous for gays and for us.
All debates with the Christian Right are useless. We cannot reach this movement. It does not want a dialogue. It cares nothing for rational thought and discussion. It is not mollified because John Kerry prays or Jimmy Carter teaches Sunday School. These naive attempts to reach out to a movement bent on our destruction, to prove to them that we too have "values," would be humorous if the stakes were not so deadly. They hate us. They hate the liberal, enlightened world formed by the Constitution. Our opinions do not count.
This movement will not stop until we are ruled by Biblical Law, an authoritarian church intrudes in every aspect of our life, women stay at home and rear children, gays agree to be cured, abortion is considered murder, the press and the schools promote "positive" Christian values, the federal government is gutted, war becomes our primary form of communication with the rest of the world and recalcitrant non-believers see their flesh eviscerated at the sound of the Messiah's voice.
The spark that could set it ablaze may be lying in the hands of an Islamic terrorist cell, in the hands of the ideological twins of the Christian Right. Another catastrophic terrorist attack could be our Reichstag fire, the excuse used to begin the accelerated dismantling of our open society. The ideology of the Christian Right is not one of love and compassion, the central theme of Christ's message, but of violence and hatred. It has a strong appeal to many in our society, but it is also aided by our complacency. Let us not stand at the open city gates waiting passively and meekly for the barbarians. They are coming. They are slouching rudely towards Bethlehem. Let us, if nothing else, begin to call them by their name.
Chris Hedges, a reporter for The New York Times, is the author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning . He holds a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School . His next book , Losing Moses on the Freeway: America 's Broken Covenant With The Ten Commandments is published by The Free Press.
Note from Joan Bokaer - Chris refers to a memo I received in Iowa from Pat Robertson's organization. The year was 1986 -- two years before his presidential bid, and three years before the Christian Coalition was formed.
=-=-=-=-=-=
Dominionism actually may answer for the many abusive pulpit antics we've witnessed over the past few years, certainly since 911. Before dismissing this article as another rant against Christianity, it may be helpful to read and listen to what Mr Hedges has to say by considering Christ, as He walked and talked and acted here on earth. Not Christ's "teachings" as spinned by leaders who are hungry for followers.
andre
You will also find this interview very interesting: an interview with Chris Hedges on The Hour with Georges Stromboulopoulos: interview with Chris Hedges.
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This is an article by Chris Hedges that no major publication would print.
THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT AND THE RISE OF AMERICAN FASCISM
By -- CHRIS HEDGES - 15 Nov 2004
Dr. James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, told us that when we were his age, he was then close to 80, we would all be fighting the "Christian fascists."
The warning, given to me 25 years ago, came at the moment Pat Robertson and other radio and televangelists began speaking about a new political religion that would direct its efforts at taking control of all institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government. Its stated goal was to use the United States to create a global, Christian empire. It was hard, at the time, to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously, especially given the buffoonish quality of those who expounded it. But Adams warned us against the blindness caused by intellectual snobbery. The Nazis, he said, were not going to return with swastikas and brown shirts. Their ideological inheritors had found a mask for fascism in the pages of the Bible.
He was not a man to use the word fascist lightly. He was in Germany in 1935 and 1936 and worked with the underground anti-Nazi church, known as The Confessing Church, led by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Adams was eventually detained and interrogated by the Gestapo, who suggested he might want to consider returning to the United States . It was a suggestion he followed. He left on a night train with framed portraits of Adolph Hitler placed over the contents inside his suitcase to hide the rolls of home movie film he took of the so-called German Christian Church, which was pro-Nazi, and the few individuals who defied them, including the theologians Karl Barth and Albert Schweitzer. The ruse worked when the border police lifted the top of the suitcases, saw the portraits of the Fuhrer and closed them up again. I watched hours of the grainy black and white films as he narrated in his apartment in Cambridge.
He saw in the Christian Right, long before we did, disturbing similarities with the German Christian Church and the Nazi Party, similarities that he said would, in the event of prolonged social instability or a national crisis, see American fascists, under the guise of religion, rise to dismantle the open society. He despaired of liberals, who he said, as in Nazi Germany, mouthed silly platitudes about dialogue and inclusiveness that made them ineffectual and impotent. Liberals, he said, did not understand the power and allure of evil nor the cold reality of how the world worked. The current hand wringing by Democrats in the wake of the election, with many asking how they can reach out to a movement whose leaders brand them "demonic" and "satanic," would not have surprised Adams. Like Bonhoeffer, he did not believe that those who would fight effectively in coming times of turmoil, a fight that for him was an integral part of the Biblical message, would come from the church or the liberal, secular elite.
His critique of the prominent research universities, along with the media, was no less withering. These institutions, self-absorbed, compromised by their close relationship with government and corporations, given enough of the pie to be complacent, were unwilling to deal with the fundamental moral questions and inequities of the age. They had no stomach for a battle that might cost them their prestige and comfort. He told me that if the Nazis took over America "60 percent of the Harvard faculty would begin their lectures with the Nazi salute." This too was not an abstraction. He had watched academics at the University of Heidelberg, including the philosopher Martin Heidegger, raise their arms stiffly to students before class.
Two decades later, even in the face of the growing reach of the Christian Right, his prediction seems apocalyptic. And yet the powerbrokers in the Christian Right have moved from the fringes of society to the floor of the House of Representatives and the Senate. Christian fundamentalists now hold a majority of seats in 36 percent of all Republican Party state committees, or 18 of 50 states, along with large minorities in 81 percent of the rest of the states. Forty-five Senators and 186 members of the House of Representatives earned between an 80 to100 percent approval ratings from the three most influential Christian Right advocacy groups - The Christian Coalition, Eagle Forum, and Family Resource Council. Tom Coburn, the new senator from Oklahoma, has included in his campaign to end abortion: a call to impose the death penalty on doctors that carry out abortions once the ban goes into place. Another new senator, John Thune, believes in Creationism. Jim DeMint, the new senator elected from South Carolina, wants to ban single mothers from teaching in schools. The Election Day exit polls found that 22 percent of voters identified themselves as evangelical Christians and Bush won 77 percent of their vote. The polls found that a plurality of voters said that the most important issue in the campaign had been "moral values."
President Bush must further these important objectives, including the march to turn education and social welfare over to the churches with his faith-based initiative, as well as chip away at the wall between church and state with his judicial appointments, if he does not want to face a revolt within his core constituency.
Jim Dobson, the head of Focus on the Family, who held weekly telephone conversations with Karl Rove during the campaign, has put the President on notice. He told ABC's "This Week" that "this president has two years, or more broadly the Republican Party has two years, to implement these policies, or certainly four, or I believe they'll pay a price in the next election."
Bush may turn out to be a transition figure, our version of Otto von Bismarck. Bismarck used "values" to energize his base at the end of the 19th century and launched "Kulturkampt," the word from which we get "culture wars," against Catholics and Jews. Bismarck 's attacks split the country, made the discrediting of whole segments of the society an acceptable part of the civil discourse and paved the way for the more virulent racism of the Nazis. This, I suspect, will be George Bush's contribution to our democracy.
DOMINIONISTS AND RECONSTRUCTIONISTS
The Reconstructionist movement, founded in 1973 by Rousas Rushdooney, is the intellectual foundation for the most politically active element within the Christian Right. Rushdooney's 1,600 page three-volume work, Institutes of Biblical Law, argued that American society should be governed according to the Biblical precepts in the Ten Commandments. He wrote that the elect, like Adam and Noah, were given dominion over the earth by God and must subdue the earth, along with all non-believers, so the Messiah could return.
This was a radically new interpretation for many in the evangelical movement. The Messiah, it was traditionally taught, would return in an event called "the Rapture" where there would be wars and chaos. The non-believers would be tormented and killed and the elect would be lifted to heaven. The Rapture was not something that could be manipulated or influenced, although believers often interpreted catastrophes and wars as portents of the imminent Second Coming.
Rushdooney promoted an ideology that advocated violence to create the Christian state. His ideology was the mirror image of Liberation Theology, which came into vogue at about the same time. While the Liberation Theologians crammed the Bible into the box of Marxism, Rushdooney crammed it into the equally distorting box of classical fascism. This clash was first played out in Latin America when I was there as a reporter two decades ago. In El Salvador leftist priests endorsed and even traveled with the rebel movements in Nicaragua and El Salvador, while Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, along with conservative Latin American clerics, backed the Contras fighting against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the murderous military regimes in El Salvador, Guatemala, Chile and Argentina.
The Institutes of Biblical Law called for a Christian society that was harsh, unforgiving and violent. Offenses such as adultery, witchcraft, blasphemy and homosexuality, merited the death penalty. The world was to be subdued and ruled by a Christian United States. Rushdooney dismissed the number of 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust as an inflated figure and his theories on race echoed Nazi Eugenics.
"The white man has behind him centuries of Christian culture and the discipline and selective breeding this faith requires...," he wrote. "The Negro is a product of a radically different past, and his heredity has been governed by radically different considerations."
"The background of Negro culture is African and magic, and the purposes of the magic are control and power over God, man, nature, and society. Voodoo, or magic, was the religion and life of American Negroes. Voodoo songs underlie jazz, and old voodoo, with its power goal, has been merely replaced with revolutionary voodoo, a modernized power drive." (see The Religious Right , a publication of the ADL, pg. 124.)
Rushdooney was deeply antagonistic to the federal government. He believed the federal government should concern itself with little more than national defense. Education and social welfare should be handed over to the churches. Biblical law must replace the secular legal code. This ideology remains at the heart of the movement. It is being enacted through school vouchers, with federal dollars now going into Christian schools, and the assault against the federal agencies that deal with poverty and human services. The Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives is currently channeling millions in federal funds to groups such Pat Robertson's Operation Blessing , and National Right to Life, as well as to fundamentalist religious charity organizations and programs promoting sexual abstinence.
Rushdooney laid the groundwork for a new way of thinking about political involvement. The Christian state would come about not only through signs and wonders, as those who believed in the rapture believed, but also through the establishment of the Christian nation. But he remained, even within the Christian Right, a deeply controversial figure.
Dr. Tony Evans, the minister of a Dallas church and the founder of Promise Keepers, articulated Rushdooney's extremism in a more palatable form. He called on believers, often during emotional gatherings at football stadiums, to commit to Christ and exercise power within the society as agents of Christ. He also called for a Christian state. But he did not advocate the return of slavery, as Rushdooney did, nor list a string of offenses such as adultery punishable by death, nor did he espouse the Nazi-like race theories. It was through Evans, who was a spiritual mentor to George Bush that Dominionism came to dominate the politically active wing of the Christian Right.The religious utterances from political leaders such as George Bush, Tom Delay, Pat Robertson and Zell Miller are only understandable in light of Rushdooney and Dominionism. These leaders believe that God has selected them to battle the forces of evil, embodied in "secular humanism," to create a Christian nation. Pat Robertson frequently tells believers "our aim is to gain dominion over society." Delay has told supporters, such as at a gathering two years ago at the First Baptist Church in Pearland, Texas , "He [God] is using me, all the time, everywhere, to stand up for biblical worldview in everything I do and everywhere I am. He is training me, He is working with me." Delay went on to tell followers "If we stay inside the church, the culture won't change."
Pat Robertson, who changed the name of his university to Regent University, says he is training his students to rule when the Christian regents take power, part of the reign leading to the return of Christ. Robertson resigned as the head of the Christian Coalition when Bush took office, a sign many took to signal the ascendancy of the first regent. This battle is not rhetorical but one that followers are told will ultimately involve violence. And the enemy is clearly defined and marked for destruction.
"Secular Humanists," the popular Christian Right theologian Francis Schaeffer wrote in one of numerous diatribes, "are the greatest threat to Christianity the world has ever known."
One of the most enlightening books that exposes the ultimate goals of the movement is America's Providential History, the standard textbook used in many Christian schools and a staple of the Christian home schooling movement. It sites Genesis 26, which calls for mankind to "have dominnion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, over the cattle and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth" as evidence that the Bible calls for "Bible believing Christians" to take dominion of America.
"When God brings Noah through the flood to a new earth, He reestablished the Dominion Mandate but now delegates to man the responsibility for governing other men." (page 19). The authors write that God has called the United States to become "the first truly Christian nation" (page 184) and "make disciples of all nations." The book denounces income tax as "idolatry," property tax as "theft" and calls for an abolish of inheritance taxes in the chapter entitled Christian Economics. The loss of such tax revenues will bring about the withering away of the federal government and the empowerment of the authoritarian church, although this is not explict in the text.
Rushdooney's son-in-law, Gary North, a popular writer and founder of the Institute for Christian Economics, laid out the aims of the Christian Right.
"So let's be blunt about it: We must use the doctrine of religious liberty to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then they will get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God." (Christianity and Civilization, Spring, 1982)
Dominionists have to operate, for now, in the contaminated environment of the secular, liberal state. They have learned, therefore, to speak in code. The code they use is the key to understanding the dichotomy of the movement, one that has a public and a private face. In this they are no different from the vanguard, as described by Lenin, or the Islamic terrorists who shave off their beards, adopt western dress and watch pay-for-view pornographic movies in their hotel rooms the night before hijacking a plane for a suicide attack.
Joan Bokaer, the Director of Theocracy Watch, a project of the Center for Religion, Ethics and Social Policy at Cornell University , who runs the encyclopedic web site theocracywatch.org, was on a speaking tour a few years ago in Iowa. She obtained a copy of a memo Pat Robertson handed out to followers at the Iowa Republican County Caucus. It was titled, "How to Participate in a Political Party" and read:
"Rule the world for God."
"Give the impression that you are there to work for the party, not push an ideology.
"Hide your strength.
"Don't flaunt your Christianity.
"Christians need to take leadership positions. Party officers control political parties and so it is very important that mature Christians have a majority of leadership whenever possible, God willing."
President Bush sends frequent coded messages to the faithful. In his address to the nation on the night of September 11, for example, he lifted a line directly from the Gospel of John when he said "And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness will not overcome it." He often uses the sentence "when every child is welcomed in life and protected in law," words taken directly from a pro-life manifesto entitled "A Statement of Pro-Life Principle and Concern." He quotes from hymns, prayers, tracts and Biblical passages without attribution. These phrases reassure the elect. They are lost on the uninitiated.
CHRIST THE AVENGER
The Christian Right finds its ideological justification in a narrow segment of the Gospel, in particular the letters of the Apostle Paul, especially the story of Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus in the Book of Acts. It draws heavily from the book of Revelations and the Gospel of John. These books share an apocalyptic theology. The Book of Revelations is the only time in the Gospels where Jesus sanctions violence, offering up a vision of Christ as the head of a great and murderous army of heavenly avengers. Martin Luther found the God portrayed in Revelations so hateful and cruel he put the book in the appendix of his German translation of the Bible.
These books rarely speak about Christ's message of love, forgiveness and compassion. They focus on the doom and destruction that will befall unbelievers and the urgent need for personal salvation. The world is divided between good and evil, between those who act as agents of God and those who act as agents of Satan. The Jesus of the other three Gospels, the Jesus who turned the other cheek and embraced his enemies, an idea that was radical and startling in the ancient Roman world, is purged in the narrative selected by the Christian Right.
The cult of masculinity pervades the ideology. Feminism and homosexuality are social forces, believers are told, that have rendered the American male physically and spiritually impotent. Jesus is portrayed as a man of action, casting out demons, battling the Anti-Christ, attacking hypocrites and castigating the corrupt. This cult of masculinity brings with it the glorification of strength, violence and vengeance. It turns Christ into a Rambo-like figure; indeed depictions of Jesus within the movement often show a powerfully built man wielding a huge sword.
This image of Christ as warrior is appealing to many within the movement. The loss of manufacturing jobs, lack of affordable health care, negligible opportunities for education and poor job security has left many millions of Americans locked out. This ideology is attractive because it offers them the hope of power and revenge. It sanctifies their rage. It stokes the paranoia about the outside world maintained through bizarre conspiracy theories, many on display in Pat Robertson's book The New World Order. The book is a xenophobic rant that includes vicious attacks against the United Nations and numerous other international organizations. The abandonment of the working class has been crucial to the success of the movement. Only by reintegrating the working class into society through job creation, access to good education and health care can the Christian Right be effectively blunted. Revolutionary movements are built on the backs of an angry, disenfranchised laboring class. This one is no exception.
The depictions of violence that will befall non-believers are detailed, gruesome and brutal. It speaks to the rage many believers harbor and the thirst for revenge. This, in large part, accounts for the huge sales of the apocalyptic series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. In their novel, Glorious Appearing, based on LaHaye's interpretation of Biblical Prophecies about the Second Coming, Christ eviscerates the flesh of millions of non-believers with the mere sound of his voice. There are long descriptions of horror, of how "the very words of the Lord had superheated their blood, causing it to burst through their veins and skin." Eyes disintegrate. Tongues melt. Flesh dissolves. The novel, part of The Left Behind series, are the best selling adult novels in the country. They preach holy war.
"Any teaching of peace prior to [Christ's] return is heresy." said televangelist James Robison.
Natural disasters, terrorist attacks, instability in Israel and even the fighting of Iraq are seen as signposts. The war in Iraq was predicted according to believers in the 9th chapter of the Book of Revelations where four angels "which are bound in the great river Euphrates will be released to slay the third part of men." The march towards global war, even nuclear war, is not to be feared but welcomed as the harbinger of the Second Coming. And leading the avenging armies is an angry, violent Messiah who dooms millions of non-believers to a horrible and painful death.
THE CORRUPTION OF SCIENCE AND LAW
The movement seeks the imprint of law and science. It must discredit the rational disciplines that are the pillars of the Enlightenment to abolish the liberal polity of the Enlightenment. This corruption of science and law is vital in promoting the doctrine. Creationism, or "intelligent design," like Eugenics for the Nazis, must be introduced into the mainstream as a valid scientific discipline to destroy the discipline of science itself. This is why the Christian Right is working to bring test cases to ensure that school textbooks include "intelligent design" and condemn gay marriage.
The drive by the Christian Right to include crackpot theories in scientific or legal debate is part of the campaign to destroy dispassionate and honest intellectual inquiry. Facts become interchangeable with opinions. An understanding of reality is not to be based on the elaborate gathering of facts and evidence. The ideology alone is true. Facts that get in the way of the ideology can be altered. Lies, in this worldview, become true. Hannah Arendt called this effort "nihilistic relativism" although a better phrase might be collective insanity.
The Christian Right has fought successfully to have Creationist books sold in national park bookstores in the Grand Canyon, taught as a theory in public schools in states like Alabama and Arkansas. "Intelligent design" is promoted in Christian textbooks. All animal species, or at least their progenitors, students read, fit on Noah's ark. The Grand Canyon was created a few thousand years ago by the flood that lifted up Noah's ark, not one billion years ago, as geologists have determined. The earth is only a few thousand years old in line with the literal reading of Genesis. This is not some quaint, homespun view of the world. It is an insidious attempt to undermine rational scientific research and intellectual inquiry.
Tom Delay, following the Columbine shootings, gave voice to this assault when he said that the killings had taken place "because our school systems teach children that they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionized out of some primordial mud." (speech Delay gave in the House on June 16, 1999 )
"What convinces masses are not facts," Hannah Arendt wrote in Origins of Totalitarianism, "and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system which they are presumably part. Repetition, somewhat overrated in importance because of the common belief in the "masses" inferior capacity to grasp and remember, is important because it convinces them of consistency in time." (p.351)
There are more than 6 million elementary and secondary school students attending private schools and 11.5 percent of these students attend schools run by the Christian Right. These "Christian" schools saw an increase of 46 percent in enrollment in the last decade. The 245,000 additional students accounted for 75 percent of the total rise in private school enrollment.
THE LAUNCHING OF THE WAR
Adams told us to watch closely what the Christian Right did to homosexuals. He has seen how the Nazis had used "values" to launch state repression of opponents. Hitler, days after he took power in 1933, imposed a ban on all homosexual and lesbian organizations. He ordered raids on places where homosexuals gathered culminating with the ransacking of the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin . Thousands of volumes from the institute's library were tossed into a bonfire. Adams said that homosexuals would also be the first "deviants" singled out by the Christian Right. We would be the next.
The ban on same sex marriages, passed by eleven states in the election, was part of this march towards our door. A 1996 federal law already defines marriage as between a man and a woman. All of the states with ballot measures, with the exception of Oregon, had outlawed same sex marriages, as do 27 other states. The bans, however, had to be passed, believers were told, to thwart "activist judges" who wanted to overturn them. The Christian family, even the nation, was under threat. The bans served to widen the splits tearing apart the country. The attacks on homosexuals handed to the foot soldiers of the Christian Right an easy target. It gave them a taste of victory. It made them feel empowered. But it is ominous for gays and for us.
All debates with the Christian Right are useless. We cannot reach this movement. It does not want a dialogue. It cares nothing for rational thought and discussion. It is not mollified because John Kerry prays or Jimmy Carter teaches Sunday School. These naive attempts to reach out to a movement bent on our destruction, to prove to them that we too have "values," would be humorous if the stakes were not so deadly. They hate us. They hate the liberal, enlightened world formed by the Constitution. Our opinions do not count.
This movement will not stop until we are ruled by Biblical Law, an authoritarian church intrudes in every aspect of our life, women stay at home and rear children, gays agree to be cured, abortion is considered murder, the press and the schools promote "positive" Christian values, the federal government is gutted, war becomes our primary form of communication with the rest of the world and recalcitrant non-believers see their flesh eviscerated at the sound of the Messiah's voice.
The spark that could set it ablaze may be lying in the hands of an Islamic terrorist cell, in the hands of the ideological twins of the Christian Right. Another catastrophic terrorist attack could be our Reichstag fire, the excuse used to begin the accelerated dismantling of our open society. The ideology of the Christian Right is not one of love and compassion, the central theme of Christ's message, but of violence and hatred. It has a strong appeal to many in our society, but it is also aided by our complacency. Let us not stand at the open city gates waiting passively and meekly for the barbarians. They are coming. They are slouching rudely towards Bethlehem. Let us, if nothing else, begin to call them by their name.
Chris Hedges, a reporter for The New York Times, is the author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning . He holds a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School . His next book , Losing Moses on the Freeway: America 's Broken Covenant With The Ten Commandments is published by The Free Press.
Note from Joan Bokaer - Chris refers to a memo I received in Iowa from Pat Robertson's organization. The year was 1986 -- two years before his presidential bid, and three years before the Christian Coalition was formed.
=-=-=-=-=-=
Dominionism actually may answer for the many abusive pulpit antics we've witnessed over the past few years, certainly since 911. Before dismissing this article as another rant against Christianity, it may be helpful to read and listen to what Mr Hedges has to say by considering Christ, as He walked and talked and acted here on earth. Not Christ's "teachings" as spinned by leaders who are hungry for followers.
andre
Tuesday, September 05, 2006
"Do you know where you and your children are?"
It has been a long time, hasn't it since my last newsletter, hasn't it? Frankly, I just didn't know what to say, plus, we have been without proper domicile for about a year, and just finally settled down in Alberta, Canada. That would take something out of you... Today, with deep concerns that have followed me for a couple years already, have come to the surface again. The wrestling has been emotionally charged and somewhat confusing. Tonight, I'm writing out of a need to express myself with words, rather than art. Because my art is keeping some things hidden from others, ideas that I may one day find artwords for, but tonight, I'm bursting with words, so I will just open the valve and let them flow. I pray and ask for your grace, because I will be touching issues that may sound offensive and sectarian for some, yet for others it will articulate similar mindsets and rejoin their own questions.
I am awakening to this inescapable truth: I am witnessing the emergence of a breed of Christians I am having a hard time reconciling with what I have been able to surmise so far after 30 years of discipleship. I'm referring to the grungy rough looking gansta cool extreme prophetic end-time tattooed pierced screamo heavy metal signs and wonders believers who populate sites like MySpace and who flaunt what would normally repel children and tender hearts as if it was the true fire of the Holy Spirit carrying the new generation across the Jordan of contemporary Christianity.
I have never been one to back off from the strange manifestations of clashes between light and darkness. I've usually been pretty opened as to the weird extremes that faith takes us as I walked the path of a disciple of Christ. I've hanged out in some of the most sordid environments you can imagine in my dark years. Witnessed things untold, been standing upon the ledge of death a few inches from the knife-edge of a crazed out criminal, walked into situations with faith and as much naivete a trusting believer can muster.
I have befriended drug dealers, murderers, thieves, prostitutes, homeless youth, yet, I needed to have a common ground with them in order to belong, and sadly, I was enslaved to drugs and other things I won't mention. I've seen piercings before they were even starting to emerge in the pop culture: baby diaper pins bloodily stabbed through nostrils and ear lobes. The soundtrack to these environments was, at best, punk-rock, and I have no idea what's the worst would be called. Tribal vampire zombie music? Night of the living-dead screaming harpies? Your skin would crawl as the "music" oozed out insinuating itself through your pores, deafening, life itself was a silent movie where you saw enacted gruesome acts stemming from the cesspool of the basest human animality.
I have seen death walking the crowded stalls of human decadence, like a cop on the beat, smiling, pleased with itself, hollering before the abuse young people would inflict themselves, magnificently choreographed by the greed of ruthless murderers of generations and whipped to frenzy by the ever-escaping fading horizon of sought relief deceived.
For the past few months, since I registered on MySpace, I have discovered an underground stream of believers who have been groomed since the Renewal in Toronto, to expect "more" of God. A newfound freedom was short-circuiting the traditional frames that had dealt death to many believers and impaled them on a shish-kebab of religious duties, ever giving their lives and finances away in support to local visions extolling the destinies of leaders who had no business being shepherds. We discovered the Father's heart of God, and millions upon millions were "saved-again", while even more were being born-again, this time not into church, but into the kingdom.
Decades had passed since Pentecostal renewals, the Jesus movement, the hyper-Faith movement, and now finally, we had a movement that could not be labeled anything but revolutionary. It was as if we finally walked past the doors of Wittenberg and St.Peter's into the promised kingdom of God. BEING church, walking with the supernatural power of God being dispensed through the laying on of hands in conferences after conferences. Now that God finally could hold us in His arms, we wanted to run all over the world and play in the river of His bountiful blessings. And we lost sight of Him... our faces to the water for so long, we were gazing into our own beauty, grooming this destiny of ours to be THE final generation, the remnant, the glorified Bride, the Joel generation, the Joshua generation, the Elijah generation, etc.
Once again, it became all about us. Our doctrines started sounding humanistic, romantic, mystical, spurred by a gradual awakening to the artistic works coming at us through movies, music, cultural happenings. Gazing into the pool of human creativity, a generation has grown, educated more deeply by countless hypnotic hours of video games, the new cultural anchors being heralded by media-savvy icons pushing gangsta attitude, tough, violent, defiant, lawless, rave-skateboarding-surfing-pot-smoking college kids finding inspiration and justification for their forays into the occult through cult movies and programs, daring, always daring, all of this on the backdrop of our old friend, rebellion. Don't blame the kids. Blame the quest for power in each of us, that survival, animal instinct to belong and be different. What an oxymoron. A tragic truth nonetheless.
We have forgotten the centrality of the cross of Christ, death to self, and replaced it by a seeker-friendly commercial for God's signs and wonders, yet we forget to deeply muse the words of Jesus to those who had achieved such pinnacles of spiritual powers, all done in His name: "I never knew you."
Our societies have now succeeded in suiting us into the straightjacket of intolerable conflicts. Our world is being raped and abused, mutilated, and that's the type of school our children are going to. Leaders shape our minds We live as if we could waste, yet we are bombarded by messages that we are wasting resources and destroying our planet. We are allowing our children to be visually molested by magazine covers in grocery stores after grocery stores: managers are only doing their job and they have no say. So they don't' say anything. Yet, their silence screams in favor of precociously sexualized children. Because actions speak louder. And inaction too. Whose agenda is this serving?
Still, our so-called free world is shifting into higher gear, and the followers of Jesus now swallow from the pulpit and the silver screen even more deception than ever. We dare not question, we assume God's endorsement, and fall asleep at the soothing sound of trigger words like "destiny to the nations" "prophetic" "emergent" "apostolic" as we covet the international leader's blessing as if he/she was an oracle of God. Flattery runs rampant and ensnares many. Yet, we are working hard at becoming relevant to our generation and culture. We forget that the Gospel, the true power of it, reaches for the demonic roots of cultures and hurls them into the fire of demarcation, still burning bright in the heart of the world's midnight hour.
Where do we stand? In the '70s, rockers wanted to have their personal savior Jesus and keep their Rock'n'roll. Today, armies of young believers rush to the stages of screamo bands, believers or not, being rained on by guttural singing and music of a quality that few secular screamo bands can attain to. You can accuse me of anything. I don't buy the rhetoric which seeks to always stretch God's character into one who loves to be surrounded by this type of cleverly designed hellish noise, sweeping both the churched and unchurched in a state of hormonal adolescence.
We have gone from scriptural to cryptural, from inner healing to inner seething, and the pride of life rides again, wearing an old mask, only this time the artists working on its make-up are of higher caliber. Believers can't even lift a finger to change TV channels when faced with lewdness, horror movies, sexual immorality and deviance. They relish in the exploits of movie-makers and the teams who crafted The Lord of the Rings, ignoring the implications of the satanic party they were having on day 666 of the final episode The Return of the King. Death and sexual deviance are now sexy and slick as depicted through TV shows like "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit", where sexual crimes are constantly exposing women, children and teenagers to crimes against their sexual integrity.
Teenagers and children are groomed to produce more and more sexually confused adults, thanks to the media and the law of equal opportunity: many law-makers are pedophiles and homosexual themselves, so you can't win against that. Not on the battlefield of the world. That's why we need to take a good look at what we are pursuing. Are we running after God, or after a modern manifestation of glorious magical powers? I can't judge the heart of anyone, and I don't intend to. However, I am questioning the Church's prophetic leadership wisdom and discernment as we witness the mudslide of values pushing the envelope of what was once much more valued: a sensitive conscience.
Some have intrinsequely lost the faith because their conscience is seared, their lifestyle relying on a self-congratulatory prophetic culture mixed in the world's dough. If you give them a "new age" Christianity, they will run for it and find power without the cross. A lethal combination. Because Jesus never denied we would have that power. That is a most serious test of our maturity: would we take the power and the glory, or embrace death as Christ did, and as the worthy Apostles did? Foundations of the Church, they were... The yeast of the Pharisees is self-righteousness, and burdens they can't carry themselves.
Do we relate to the image of leaders presented to us through glorious cyber-renditions, web design, clever communication skills and media prowess's designing a bigger-than-life portrait that always seems to bring home the fact that we still can't measure up... if only we could go to this or that conference and get an impartation from these super-apostles... and get the latest from on-the-site prophecies that anyone absent could not have partaken in. The sense of historicity of a "prophetic moment" can be spinned as a sign of God's unique blessing on us for bringing us to these events. And the reputation of the leaders bounce off the tribal drums into the distance, and they join together for another great event, having become "ingredients" to a supernatural happening.
I am sick with being silent for so long. My own artistic works don't even begin to express where I truly am yet. As if I'm expected to remain smoothly unabrasive, just because I so enjoy the creative flow of the quiet and soaking Presence I'm longing for. And I speak not a harsh word to the broken and shattered souls who toil daily in the forest of worldly churchianity. They suffer enough abuse already. I speak in order to appease my conscience and to disclose my true heart. Still, I'm afraid I'll fall short. Time, and many more words and thoughts, may offer me the opportunity to articulate through words or art, what I am seeing and sensing.
You may withdraw from our evolving friendship (I hope you won't). You may pinpoint my errors (I hope you do). But tonight I wrote this improvisational rant, pouring out my heart as I face the dark-sided trend that claims to be relevant and God-inspired. I just hope they would simply keep silent for a bit and listen to the still small voice of the Holy Spirit (holy), and see if they should not help to dial down the noise in the world, both visual and sonic, instead of raising the volume of their own megaphone.
I know nothing, but I've seen a lot. I'm still pondering and don't pretend to put judge anyone's heart, I repeat. Only invite to a deeper reflection, one that will allow God's circumcising blade to cut away our heart's fleshly appendix, which represents our state of being without God in this world. I think we all want to not be alone as we would run to the cross and be pierced by it. I share that concern. That's my humanity too. But I think I'd like to see this rant as an encouragement to press forward, through the silver screen in front of us and walk on toward the goal: to know Christ.
I long to see a mature generation who will, as soon as they become aware of it, cut away from using familiarity with God's anointing, apostolic and prophetic callings, the need to put five-fold titles on business cards and cash in on our talents in ways which disfigures God's intended purposes for giving them to us in the first place.
I'll end this here for now. This issue of my newsletter is meant to speak personal truths and reveal my own struggles with this world. It is a canvas for processing and expression. I hope it will have been a meaningful read for you.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
SOLI DEO GLORIA
Andre Lefebvre, September 5th, 2006
www.propheticunderground.com
I am awakening to this inescapable truth: I am witnessing the emergence of a breed of Christians I am having a hard time reconciling with what I have been able to surmise so far after 30 years of discipleship. I'm referring to the grungy rough looking gansta cool extreme prophetic end-time tattooed pierced screamo heavy metal signs and wonders believers who populate sites like MySpace and who flaunt what would normally repel children and tender hearts as if it was the true fire of the Holy Spirit carrying the new generation across the Jordan of contemporary Christianity.
I have never been one to back off from the strange manifestations of clashes between light and darkness. I've usually been pretty opened as to the weird extremes that faith takes us as I walked the path of a disciple of Christ. I've hanged out in some of the most sordid environments you can imagine in my dark years. Witnessed things untold, been standing upon the ledge of death a few inches from the knife-edge of a crazed out criminal, walked into situations with faith and as much naivete a trusting believer can muster.
I have befriended drug dealers, murderers, thieves, prostitutes, homeless youth, yet, I needed to have a common ground with them in order to belong, and sadly, I was enslaved to drugs and other things I won't mention. I've seen piercings before they were even starting to emerge in the pop culture: baby diaper pins bloodily stabbed through nostrils and ear lobes. The soundtrack to these environments was, at best, punk-rock, and I have no idea what's the worst would be called. Tribal vampire zombie music? Night of the living-dead screaming harpies? Your skin would crawl as the "music" oozed out insinuating itself through your pores, deafening, life itself was a silent movie where you saw enacted gruesome acts stemming from the cesspool of the basest human animality.
I have seen death walking the crowded stalls of human decadence, like a cop on the beat, smiling, pleased with itself, hollering before the abuse young people would inflict themselves, magnificently choreographed by the greed of ruthless murderers of generations and whipped to frenzy by the ever-escaping fading horizon of sought relief deceived.
For the past few months, since I registered on MySpace, I have discovered an underground stream of believers who have been groomed since the Renewal in Toronto, to expect "more" of God. A newfound freedom was short-circuiting the traditional frames that had dealt death to many believers and impaled them on a shish-kebab of religious duties, ever giving their lives and finances away in support to local visions extolling the destinies of leaders who had no business being shepherds. We discovered the Father's heart of God, and millions upon millions were "saved-again", while even more were being born-again, this time not into church, but into the kingdom.
Decades had passed since Pentecostal renewals, the Jesus movement, the hyper-Faith movement, and now finally, we had a movement that could not be labeled anything but revolutionary. It was as if we finally walked past the doors of Wittenberg and St.Peter's into the promised kingdom of God. BEING church, walking with the supernatural power of God being dispensed through the laying on of hands in conferences after conferences. Now that God finally could hold us in His arms, we wanted to run all over the world and play in the river of His bountiful blessings. And we lost sight of Him... our faces to the water for so long, we were gazing into our own beauty, grooming this destiny of ours to be THE final generation, the remnant, the glorified Bride, the Joel generation, the Joshua generation, the Elijah generation, etc.
Once again, it became all about us. Our doctrines started sounding humanistic, romantic, mystical, spurred by a gradual awakening to the artistic works coming at us through movies, music, cultural happenings. Gazing into the pool of human creativity, a generation has grown, educated more deeply by countless hypnotic hours of video games, the new cultural anchors being heralded by media-savvy icons pushing gangsta attitude, tough, violent, defiant, lawless, rave-skateboarding-surfing-pot-smoking college kids finding inspiration and justification for their forays into the occult through cult movies and programs, daring, always daring, all of this on the backdrop of our old friend, rebellion. Don't blame the kids. Blame the quest for power in each of us, that survival, animal instinct to belong and be different. What an oxymoron. A tragic truth nonetheless.
We have forgotten the centrality of the cross of Christ, death to self, and replaced it by a seeker-friendly commercial for God's signs and wonders, yet we forget to deeply muse the words of Jesus to those who had achieved such pinnacles of spiritual powers, all done in His name: "I never knew you."
Our societies have now succeeded in suiting us into the straightjacket of intolerable conflicts. Our world is being raped and abused, mutilated, and that's the type of school our children are going to. Leaders shape our minds We live as if we could waste, yet we are bombarded by messages that we are wasting resources and destroying our planet. We are allowing our children to be visually molested by magazine covers in grocery stores after grocery stores: managers are only doing their job and they have no say. So they don't' say anything. Yet, their silence screams in favor of precociously sexualized children. Because actions speak louder. And inaction too. Whose agenda is this serving?
Still, our so-called free world is shifting into higher gear, and the followers of Jesus now swallow from the pulpit and the silver screen even more deception than ever. We dare not question, we assume God's endorsement, and fall asleep at the soothing sound of trigger words like "destiny to the nations" "prophetic" "emergent" "apostolic" as we covet the international leader's blessing as if he/she was an oracle of God. Flattery runs rampant and ensnares many. Yet, we are working hard at becoming relevant to our generation and culture. We forget that the Gospel, the true power of it, reaches for the demonic roots of cultures and hurls them into the fire of demarcation, still burning bright in the heart of the world's midnight hour.
Where do we stand? In the '70s, rockers wanted to have their personal savior Jesus and keep their Rock'n'roll. Today, armies of young believers rush to the stages of screamo bands, believers or not, being rained on by guttural singing and music of a quality that few secular screamo bands can attain to. You can accuse me of anything. I don't buy the rhetoric which seeks to always stretch God's character into one who loves to be surrounded by this type of cleverly designed hellish noise, sweeping both the churched and unchurched in a state of hormonal adolescence.
We have gone from scriptural to cryptural, from inner healing to inner seething, and the pride of life rides again, wearing an old mask, only this time the artists working on its make-up are of higher caliber. Believers can't even lift a finger to change TV channels when faced with lewdness, horror movies, sexual immorality and deviance. They relish in the exploits of movie-makers and the teams who crafted The Lord of the Rings, ignoring the implications of the satanic party they were having on day 666 of the final episode The Return of the King. Death and sexual deviance are now sexy and slick as depicted through TV shows like "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit", where sexual crimes are constantly exposing women, children and teenagers to crimes against their sexual integrity.
Teenagers and children are groomed to produce more and more sexually confused adults, thanks to the media and the law of equal opportunity: many law-makers are pedophiles and homosexual themselves, so you can't win against that. Not on the battlefield of the world. That's why we need to take a good look at what we are pursuing. Are we running after God, or after a modern manifestation of glorious magical powers? I can't judge the heart of anyone, and I don't intend to. However, I am questioning the Church's prophetic leadership wisdom and discernment as we witness the mudslide of values pushing the envelope of what was once much more valued: a sensitive conscience.
Some have intrinsequely lost the faith because their conscience is seared, their lifestyle relying on a self-congratulatory prophetic culture mixed in the world's dough. If you give them a "new age" Christianity, they will run for it and find power without the cross. A lethal combination. Because Jesus never denied we would have that power. That is a most serious test of our maturity: would we take the power and the glory, or embrace death as Christ did, and as the worthy Apostles did? Foundations of the Church, they were... The yeast of the Pharisees is self-righteousness, and burdens they can't carry themselves.
Do we relate to the image of leaders presented to us through glorious cyber-renditions, web design, clever communication skills and media prowess's designing a bigger-than-life portrait that always seems to bring home the fact that we still can't measure up... if only we could go to this or that conference and get an impartation from these super-apostles... and get the latest from on-the-site prophecies that anyone absent could not have partaken in. The sense of historicity of a "prophetic moment" can be spinned as a sign of God's unique blessing on us for bringing us to these events. And the reputation of the leaders bounce off the tribal drums into the distance, and they join together for another great event, having become "ingredients" to a supernatural happening.
I am sick with being silent for so long. My own artistic works don't even begin to express where I truly am yet. As if I'm expected to remain smoothly unabrasive, just because I so enjoy the creative flow of the quiet and soaking Presence I'm longing for. And I speak not a harsh word to the broken and shattered souls who toil daily in the forest of worldly churchianity. They suffer enough abuse already. I speak in order to appease my conscience and to disclose my true heart. Still, I'm afraid I'll fall short. Time, and many more words and thoughts, may offer me the opportunity to articulate through words or art, what I am seeing and sensing.
You may withdraw from our evolving friendship (I hope you won't). You may pinpoint my errors (I hope you do). But tonight I wrote this improvisational rant, pouring out my heart as I face the dark-sided trend that claims to be relevant and God-inspired. I just hope they would simply keep silent for a bit and listen to the still small voice of the Holy Spirit (holy), and see if they should not help to dial down the noise in the world, both visual and sonic, instead of raising the volume of their own megaphone.
I know nothing, but I've seen a lot. I'm still pondering and don't pretend to put judge anyone's heart, I repeat. Only invite to a deeper reflection, one that will allow God's circumcising blade to cut away our heart's fleshly appendix, which represents our state of being without God in this world. I think we all want to not be alone as we would run to the cross and be pierced by it. I share that concern. That's my humanity too. But I think I'd like to see this rant as an encouragement to press forward, through the silver screen in front of us and walk on toward the goal: to know Christ.
I long to see a mature generation who will, as soon as they become aware of it, cut away from using familiarity with God's anointing, apostolic and prophetic callings, the need to put five-fold titles on business cards and cash in on our talents in ways which disfigures God's intended purposes for giving them to us in the first place.
I'll end this here for now. This issue of my newsletter is meant to speak personal truths and reveal my own struggles with this world. It is a canvas for processing and expression. I hope it will have been a meaningful read for you.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
SOLI DEO GLORIA
Andre Lefebvre, September 5th, 2006
www.propheticunderground.com
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
Arts and History: the creative social challenge of Christian counterculture
There was a time where the Arts were an integral part of a church's life, serving as an evangelical window to the Scriptures for those who could not read. For centuries, paintings and sculptures depicting biblical historical scenes have served to convey biblical truth in a way that could grab and inspire the soul more than words could.
The Arts also served to immortalize power and legacy for kings and nobles, recording, or more often than not, interpreting history in their favor. For a period of time in Church history, incredible fortunes were spent commissioning works that would bring glory and honor to God, and the Church. But the vanity reached church leaders as well, and it was not uncommon to see kings and nobles placed within the frame of biblical paintings, frescoes or sculpture, as a testimony to their own piety and dedication to the Church. Truth didn't matter so much as message anymore, and the artists became commodities used to create tools of propaganda for reputations.
True, many of them were well paid. But is this the bottom-line for an artist? Is not freedom to explore and render truth much more precious? And since when do revenues and originality have to be mutually exclusive?
An amazing flood turned the tide of the Arts around the time of the Italian Renaissance in the 14th Century. Not only were the scenarios of themes much more developed, but style also mattered greatly, and a rediscovery and introduction of the Ancient Greece and Rome's styles brought amazing richness, beauty and attention to details.
Not only have various artistic prodigies of that era given the world unique masterpieces, combining innovative techniques and divinely inspired themes, this fire of creative genius ignited beyond the Arts. "The Renaissance was a social, cultural and economic revolution, which began a period of scientific revolution, religious reform, artistic and architectural development, and philosophical openness, and marks the beginning of modern European history. It occurred at the end of the Middle Ages and the start of the Modern Age." (Source: http://www.wikipedia.com).
The Arts marked the end of an era, and the beginning of a new order of things. It brought with it the miracle of the printing press, the construction of architectural behemoths borrowing from the Greeks and the Romans, revolutionary declarations concerning astronomy and the placement of the planet earth in the universe, daring explorations toward new continent that had remained isolated from the European world. The world had become smaller, bigger and transformed all at once.
In the movement that followed the Italian Renaissance, many smaller renaissances occurred over the next few centuries, deconstructing the accepted worldviews and reconstructing new ones, developing societies where those new ways of seeing and being would fuse to create a most vibrant thrust forward into modernity.
I find fascinating how creativity seems to have been a birthing catalyst in so many other fields of life to start chipping away at their limitations. Walking with faith on the waters of the unknown, multitudes of students and teachers were sustained on their quest by the kno wledge that there existed unfathomable properties in Creation that could contribute to our lives as individuals and communities. Our social life and our worldviews would be forever altered. Not only altered, but the very process that leads us to embrace those worldviews would now be an empirical process helping us to make defining choices based on personal experience, restoring to us the power of free-will.
The implications of this reached the very core of God's relationship with each human being, as individuals would bear responsibility to choose their own destinies, and could not simply rely on monarchs or clergy for interpretation of eternal truths. With knowledge came freedom. With freedom came a new era of discovery. And the invention of the printing press during that time contributed to unleash a tsunami of reforms the likes of which the world had never known. Truth was accessible to anyone who could read.
This is now the 21st century. The world has shru nk again, grown larger and been transformed. Once again there is an old order that is pressing against our world's future, and in our exponentially fast-paced era, the future is now. The saying goes: "Success can take you where character cannot sustain you." Meaning: people can elevate you to a place of authority you have not earned by character or rightful promotion. And so when the true pressures and obligations of that position finally overcrowd the privileges that came with it, stealing your time and the energy it takes to continue to play the part, one has to rely solely on the true backbone of his or her genuine character. The real acid test of character is public power.
And so it is with our now post-modern world. For decades we have been groomed to think of the planet as a village, to care about others, to share in the protection, the development, the profits. And so it has been. Great minds migrated from the four corners of the world, and cross-pollinated the boo ming industrial landscape of the richest and most aggressively progressive countries. The opportunities and resources devoted to research and development would be rivaled only by the insatiable hunger for financial success and historical breakthroughs.
Miraculous advances have occurred, often challenging established social beliefs because of the need to redefine parameters allowing this new growth of human over nature and societies. Our Judeo-Christian beliefs in God and the value of human life has also been taken by storm as we strove to establish acceptability of the consequences our genius and successes have brought to us. The sharing of work and profits has not been righteously divided. The sanctity of life has remained a modern issue constantly redefined in light of discrimination and racial profiling, being constantly expanded to include genders and social groups.
The women's liberation movement, in the public arena, has been bringing things to the light as far as the treatment of women is concerned, both socially and privately. Yes, sexual exploitation of women has exploded to include children and teenagers, as well as the use of women's body to promote commercial products. Pornography is a multi-billion industry, crossing the line between humans and animals, and all sorts of perversions. International celebrity Ricky Martin in an interview about his involvement to help Tsunami victims of 2004, that an American man had been arrested for paying $25,000 to have sex with a 6 months old baby.
The more able we are to modify nature, and display ingenuity and creativity, the less we seem to be able to retain any moral compass to anchor our societies so that things don't get out of hand.
I am appalled and shocked at how many times a woman's behind or breast, alluring look or lewd pose are shown on TV, the newspapers an the internet. It is as if women were sending the message that they gave up the fight for decency. Is it all about running the chance of becoming rich by acting that way? Or is it because basic self-respect has been replaced by a message drilled for decades in the psyche of our societies, so much so that we have forgotten how to be free?
Throw-away generation. Children are groomed to become part of a world of consumption, where even our own bodies and sexuality is only but a product on the market. What does that make them? Usable and disposable. Who decided? We all contribute to the disease, as long as we keep silent, afraid to comment or have our own ideas, as long as we conveniently drift on the streams of western culture, leaving moral decision to politics.
Make no mistake: the power to socially enlist us into this kind of morass comes from artists. People in power simply hire them to create those tools they need to maintain and further a global sense of individualistic entitlement, which drains from us any vibrant sense of working today for our children 's legacy, beyond helping them become functional in this world, being conformed to any set model that would ensure their ability to pay the rent.
And so we find ourselves at the door of a new Renaissance. All the sociological elements are presents to unite us in clamoring for change, for integrity and clean environments, be they natural, social, familial, cultural, moral, sexual, or spiritual. The known world has been explored and vandalized. Art brings little novelty beside more visual effects-based commercials and movies, more sensual lines in vehicles and armaments, more deceiving beauty vying for our dollars, forcing us to accept violence and depravity as normal social landscape.
Sexual exploitation, blanket abortion, racism, religious degradation, poverty, cloning, euthanasia, political power, all these need artists to work for their cause. But there is another side, which also brings the power of the Arts in play to "do good." The Live 8 concert held sim ultaneously around the nations of the G8, during July 2005 is a good example of this. It could have worked to bring sensitivity to the political world. Bands played for free, people gathered, sang, danced and chanted so that our collective voices would be heard loud and clear, that extreme poverty is the crime of the century, that we don't need the money from the poor countries who have been stripped from colossal fortunes because of an exploitative industrialization on the part of the west, not caring for their population, using natural resources to build fortunes anywhere BUT in those countries and for those people. We never left the colonial era. Today's extreme poverty is a screaming proof of this.
During that Live 8 concert, promises were made, cameras flashed, headlines poured… Result?
Quote from the Make Poverty History website:
"The World Trade Organisation (WTO) Ministerial meeting in Hong Kong (13-18 December) could have been a turning point in making poverty history. Rich countries had the capability to correct some of the gross imbalances in world trade at a strategically important moment in the so-called Doha 'development round' of trade talks. But the potential for justice for the world's poorest people was squandered.
The WTO meeting failed to deliver the trade justice deal needed in 2005 to make poverty history. The intransigence of rich countries means the agreement reached is far from just for the poor of the world.
The positions taken by the major developed countries in Hong Kong favoured the rich over the interests of the world's poor.
Outrageously, the developed countries, particularly the European Union (EU) and the United States (US), tried to use the WTO meeting to aggressively push forward their agenda to open the markets in developing countries for the interests of their corporations. This shameful abuse of power showed no respect for poor countries' right to decid e their own trade policies to help lift millions of people out of poverty and stop environmental damage."
I believe that by enlisting artists to devote their gift to serving "corporate agendas", the powers of the world and the powers of the Church have endangered the "artistic species" which could bring power for change in our world. Alas, it seems we are satisfied with letting occult societies rule our lives and enslave us, as if humans were cattle sacrificed to the dark gods of annihilation.
I believe the only door left is the one that leads us to our knees, where we call on God to have mercy and bring freedom to our children, freedom from the existential egocentric selfishness that causes us to sleepwalk our way to being dominated, handing over our souls in exchange of a lie.
Pressing against our most optimistic hopes, a gloomy future is being revealed to us through the media: pandemics, terrorism, political corruption at every level of our s ociety, including our Justice departments and law enforcement, sexual grooming of our children turning them into sexual partners at an early age, compliant or not, spiritual abuse that also turns our children into literal bombs, etc.
I am not saying that our only hope lies with artists. But what I am saying is that artists have the power to inspire change in this world, from the inside out.
Our world is in the throws of birth pains. Governments are revealed to be as much dedicated to the quality of human life as corporations are dedicated to the well-being of the people they employ. Without Unions in many cases, low wages and poor working conditions wouldn't bother most of them. It is a world that is ruling the planet. It will not change simply because another political power, run like a corporation, takes over.
But artists, and even more so Christian artists, need to awake from the oppression of conformity that has stifled many a powerful voice. W e need to find our own voices alone with God, let His Spirit carry us alternatively into deserts and public places, to see and hear the human essence of being, with its raw emotions and conflicts, confusions and desires, baseness and grandeur. Record it, and present it, so that we can collectively start hearing again the true voice of God, recognize it, and walk in life according to His promptings.
We have climbed our own pedestals and lived as gods in our own images. But soon discovered that people wouldn't bring the sacrifices we required. While we throned, the world around us collapsed, and now we have to climb down or be thrown down, walk again or be dragged, awaken or be shaken, release our prisoners or be stripped down. In that place of involuntary humility, our hearts and minds will reconnect with the human family, and we will desire to be welcomed again at their table, speak on equal terms, telling the story of our own redemption, articulating the tragedy of unrep entant pride, of that unforgettable moment where our lives are slammed on the anvil of destiny.
Christian artists hold a key, a very precious one, a sacred one. As the Levites of old had bells around the hem of their robe to alert people that they were still alive in the Holy of Holies, so we need our lives to ring out the message that we are still alive as we minister before the Lord in the calling of our giftings, that we are not simply ministering for the sake of traffic at the books and CDs tables. But that as priests and intercessors in the holy place of His eternal love, the human family be represented by us faithfully, and that we will go back and share His holiness and presence with all.
Only by grace are we saved. Only by grace do we stand. Only by grace are we gifted. Only by grace can we be freed to turn from ourselves toward the Source of our talents and become, in an act of loving abandonment, a lump of living clay He can shape to His liking, in s incere communion and obedience, our free will brilliantly redeemed through this act of surrendering embrace. After all, He is God, the Creator, the Divine Artist, Redeemer, and to Him is Authority, Power and Dominion.
A true Renaissance will transform this generation, and Christian artists will once again be at the center of it, not as hirelings for mere human agendas, but as piercing prophetic voices resounding in the desert of this hour, cutting through the chaotic cacophony of this world's agony as it is being slaughtered on the altars of the devil's slaves.
Let there be light!
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Soli Deo Gloria...
Andre Lefebvre
=-------=-------=0=-------=-------=
www.soulcanvas.com
www.soaking.net
www.propheticunderground.com
=-------=-------=0=-------=-------=
The Arts also served to immortalize power and legacy for kings and nobles, recording, or more often than not, interpreting history in their favor. For a period of time in Church history, incredible fortunes were spent commissioning works that would bring glory and honor to God, and the Church. But the vanity reached church leaders as well, and it was not uncommon to see kings and nobles placed within the frame of biblical paintings, frescoes or sculpture, as a testimony to their own piety and dedication to the Church. Truth didn't matter so much as message anymore, and the artists became commodities used to create tools of propaganda for reputations.
True, many of them were well paid. But is this the bottom-line for an artist? Is not freedom to explore and render truth much more precious? And since when do revenues and originality have to be mutually exclusive?
An amazing flood turned the tide of the Arts around the time of the Italian Renaissance in the 14th Century. Not only were the scenarios of themes much more developed, but style also mattered greatly, and a rediscovery and introduction of the Ancient Greece and Rome's styles brought amazing richness, beauty and attention to details.
Not only have various artistic prodigies of that era given the world unique masterpieces, combining innovative techniques and divinely inspired themes, this fire of creative genius ignited beyond the Arts. "The Renaissance was a social, cultural and economic revolution, which began a period of scientific revolution, religious reform, artistic and architectural development, and philosophical openness, and marks the beginning of modern European history. It occurred at the end of the Middle Ages and the start of the Modern Age." (Source: http://www.wikipedia.com).
The Arts marked the end of an era, and the beginning of a new order of things. It brought with it the miracle of the printing press, the construction of architectural behemoths borrowing from the Greeks and the Romans, revolutionary declarations concerning astronomy and the placement of the planet earth in the universe, daring explorations toward new continent that had remained isolated from the European world. The world had become smaller, bigger and transformed all at once.
In the movement that followed the Italian Renaissance, many smaller renaissances occurred over the next few centuries, deconstructing the accepted worldviews and reconstructing new ones, developing societies where those new ways of seeing and being would fuse to create a most vibrant thrust forward into modernity.
I find fascinating how creativity seems to have been a birthing catalyst in so many other fields of life to start chipping away at their limitations. Walking with faith on the waters of the unknown, multitudes of students and teachers were sustained on their quest by the kno wledge that there existed unfathomable properties in Creation that could contribute to our lives as individuals and communities. Our social life and our worldviews would be forever altered. Not only altered, but the very process that leads us to embrace those worldviews would now be an empirical process helping us to make defining choices based on personal experience, restoring to us the power of free-will.
The implications of this reached the very core of God's relationship with each human being, as individuals would bear responsibility to choose their own destinies, and could not simply rely on monarchs or clergy for interpretation of eternal truths. With knowledge came freedom. With freedom came a new era of discovery. And the invention of the printing press during that time contributed to unleash a tsunami of reforms the likes of which the world had never known. Truth was accessible to anyone who could read.
This is now the 21st century. The world has shru nk again, grown larger and been transformed. Once again there is an old order that is pressing against our world's future, and in our exponentially fast-paced era, the future is now. The saying goes: "Success can take you where character cannot sustain you." Meaning: people can elevate you to a place of authority you have not earned by character or rightful promotion. And so when the true pressures and obligations of that position finally overcrowd the privileges that came with it, stealing your time and the energy it takes to continue to play the part, one has to rely solely on the true backbone of his or her genuine character. The real acid test of character is public power.
And so it is with our now post-modern world. For decades we have been groomed to think of the planet as a village, to care about others, to share in the protection, the development, the profits. And so it has been. Great minds migrated from the four corners of the world, and cross-pollinated the boo ming industrial landscape of the richest and most aggressively progressive countries. The opportunities and resources devoted to research and development would be rivaled only by the insatiable hunger for financial success and historical breakthroughs.
Miraculous advances have occurred, often challenging established social beliefs because of the need to redefine parameters allowing this new growth of human over nature and societies. Our Judeo-Christian beliefs in God and the value of human life has also been taken by storm as we strove to establish acceptability of the consequences our genius and successes have brought to us. The sharing of work and profits has not been righteously divided. The sanctity of life has remained a modern issue constantly redefined in light of discrimination and racial profiling, being constantly expanded to include genders and social groups.
The women's liberation movement, in the public arena, has been bringing things to the light as far as the treatment of women is concerned, both socially and privately. Yes, sexual exploitation of women has exploded to include children and teenagers, as well as the use of women's body to promote commercial products. Pornography is a multi-billion industry, crossing the line between humans and animals, and all sorts of perversions. International celebrity Ricky Martin in an interview about his involvement to help Tsunami victims of 2004, that an American man had been arrested for paying $25,000 to have sex with a 6 months old baby.
The more able we are to modify nature, and display ingenuity and creativity, the less we seem to be able to retain any moral compass to anchor our societies so that things don't get out of hand.
I am appalled and shocked at how many times a woman's behind or breast, alluring look or lewd pose are shown on TV, the newspapers an the internet. It is as if women were sending the message that they gave up the fight for decency. Is it all about running the chance of becoming rich by acting that way? Or is it because basic self-respect has been replaced by a message drilled for decades in the psyche of our societies, so much so that we have forgotten how to be free?
Throw-away generation. Children are groomed to become part of a world of consumption, where even our own bodies and sexuality is only but a product on the market. What does that make them? Usable and disposable. Who decided? We all contribute to the disease, as long as we keep silent, afraid to comment or have our own ideas, as long as we conveniently drift on the streams of western culture, leaving moral decision to politics.
Make no mistake: the power to socially enlist us into this kind of morass comes from artists. People in power simply hire them to create those tools they need to maintain and further a global sense of individualistic entitlement, which drains from us any vibrant sense of working today for our children 's legacy, beyond helping them become functional in this world, being conformed to any set model that would ensure their ability to pay the rent.
And so we find ourselves at the door of a new Renaissance. All the sociological elements are presents to unite us in clamoring for change, for integrity and clean environments, be they natural, social, familial, cultural, moral, sexual, or spiritual. The known world has been explored and vandalized. Art brings little novelty beside more visual effects-based commercials and movies, more sensual lines in vehicles and armaments, more deceiving beauty vying for our dollars, forcing us to accept violence and depravity as normal social landscape.
Sexual exploitation, blanket abortion, racism, religious degradation, poverty, cloning, euthanasia, political power, all these need artists to work for their cause. But there is another side, which also brings the power of the Arts in play to "do good." The Live 8 concert held sim ultaneously around the nations of the G8, during July 2005 is a good example of this. It could have worked to bring sensitivity to the political world. Bands played for free, people gathered, sang, danced and chanted so that our collective voices would be heard loud and clear, that extreme poverty is the crime of the century, that we don't need the money from the poor countries who have been stripped from colossal fortunes because of an exploitative industrialization on the part of the west, not caring for their population, using natural resources to build fortunes anywhere BUT in those countries and for those people. We never left the colonial era. Today's extreme poverty is a screaming proof of this.
During that Live 8 concert, promises were made, cameras flashed, headlines poured… Result?
Quote from the Make Poverty History website:
"The World Trade Organisation (WTO) Ministerial meeting in Hong Kong (13-18 December) could have been a turning point in making poverty history. Rich countries had the capability to correct some of the gross imbalances in world trade at a strategically important moment in the so-called Doha 'development round' of trade talks. But the potential for justice for the world's poorest people was squandered.
The WTO meeting failed to deliver the trade justice deal needed in 2005 to make poverty history. The intransigence of rich countries means the agreement reached is far from just for the poor of the world.
The positions taken by the major developed countries in Hong Kong favoured the rich over the interests of the world's poor.
Outrageously, the developed countries, particularly the European Union (EU) and the United States (US), tried to use the WTO meeting to aggressively push forward their agenda to open the markets in developing countries for the interests of their corporations. This shameful abuse of power showed no respect for poor countries' right to decid e their own trade policies to help lift millions of people out of poverty and stop environmental damage."
I believe that by enlisting artists to devote their gift to serving "corporate agendas", the powers of the world and the powers of the Church have endangered the "artistic species" which could bring power for change in our world. Alas, it seems we are satisfied with letting occult societies rule our lives and enslave us, as if humans were cattle sacrificed to the dark gods of annihilation.
I believe the only door left is the one that leads us to our knees, where we call on God to have mercy and bring freedom to our children, freedom from the existential egocentric selfishness that causes us to sleepwalk our way to being dominated, handing over our souls in exchange of a lie.
Pressing against our most optimistic hopes, a gloomy future is being revealed to us through the media: pandemics, terrorism, political corruption at every level of our s ociety, including our Justice departments and law enforcement, sexual grooming of our children turning them into sexual partners at an early age, compliant or not, spiritual abuse that also turns our children into literal bombs, etc.
I am not saying that our only hope lies with artists. But what I am saying is that artists have the power to inspire change in this world, from the inside out.
Our world is in the throws of birth pains. Governments are revealed to be as much dedicated to the quality of human life as corporations are dedicated to the well-being of the people they employ. Without Unions in many cases, low wages and poor working conditions wouldn't bother most of them. It is a world that is ruling the planet. It will not change simply because another political power, run like a corporation, takes over.
But artists, and even more so Christian artists, need to awake from the oppression of conformity that has stifled many a powerful voice. W e need to find our own voices alone with God, let His Spirit carry us alternatively into deserts and public places, to see and hear the human essence of being, with its raw emotions and conflicts, confusions and desires, baseness and grandeur. Record it, and present it, so that we can collectively start hearing again the true voice of God, recognize it, and walk in life according to His promptings.
We have climbed our own pedestals and lived as gods in our own images. But soon discovered that people wouldn't bring the sacrifices we required. While we throned, the world around us collapsed, and now we have to climb down or be thrown down, walk again or be dragged, awaken or be shaken, release our prisoners or be stripped down. In that place of involuntary humility, our hearts and minds will reconnect with the human family, and we will desire to be welcomed again at their table, speak on equal terms, telling the story of our own redemption, articulating the tragedy of unrep entant pride, of that unforgettable moment where our lives are slammed on the anvil of destiny.
Christian artists hold a key, a very precious one, a sacred one. As the Levites of old had bells around the hem of their robe to alert people that they were still alive in the Holy of Holies, so we need our lives to ring out the message that we are still alive as we minister before the Lord in the calling of our giftings, that we are not simply ministering for the sake of traffic at the books and CDs tables. But that as priests and intercessors in the holy place of His eternal love, the human family be represented by us faithfully, and that we will go back and share His holiness and presence with all.
Only by grace are we saved. Only by grace do we stand. Only by grace are we gifted. Only by grace can we be freed to turn from ourselves toward the Source of our talents and become, in an act of loving abandonment, a lump of living clay He can shape to His liking, in s incere communion and obedience, our free will brilliantly redeemed through this act of surrendering embrace. After all, He is God, the Creator, the Divine Artist, Redeemer, and to Him is Authority, Power and Dominion.
A true Renaissance will transform this generation, and Christian artists will once again be at the center of it, not as hirelings for mere human agendas, but as piercing prophetic voices resounding in the desert of this hour, cutting through the chaotic cacophony of this world's agony as it is being slaughtered on the altars of the devil's slaves.
Let there be light!
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Soli Deo Gloria...
Andre Lefebvre
=-------=-------=0=-------=-------=
www.soulcanvas.com
www.soaking.net
www.propheticunderground.com
=-------=-------=0=-------=-------=
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