Violence, Evangelism, and the Culture War

I've found that the best kind of family time is time spent in front of the television. If it weren't for that glowing beacon of mindlessness, family time could be divided into my parents bickering, my mom talking loudly over the phone, and dad exhaustedly collapsing into his John Grisham novel.

But last night we grew tired of AMC's never-ending cowboy marathon and Comedy Central's senseless failure to play The Colbert Report. We switched from cable to the networks, and my mom stopped my channel surfing at an episode of CBS' 'The Good Wife,' "Parenting Made Easy."

In it, an Evangelical Christian defends her anti-homosexual workplace language as religious speech, citing a passage in Leviticus. When asked by the prosecuting attorney if she also advocated stoning homosexuals to death (as per the passage), she replied that Christ's compassion and forgiveness should stay our hands against homosexuals, but it does not change what's right and what's wrong. 

It's an extremely elegant argument. Christians, it would seem, hold themselves to the highest possible moral standards because their ideal is Jesus, who was ostensibly sinless and therefore the moral paragon. Let God sort the sinners out. The rest of us are left to fight against moral relativism and the pull of our baser instincts. 

But does this reasoning hold up outside of 'The Good Wife?' The answer is a resounding "No." The episode my family watched last night mitigated anti-homosexual violence, but under the surface it presented Evangelicals with an opt-out from The Culture War; and while its plea for tolerance and free speech is touching, it's a weak argument against the hard line stance of Evangelical Christianity. 

The Culture War

The Culture War is the Evangelical reaction to the threat posed by secularism, and just like its moniker connotes, it's tinged with the threat of violence.

The Apocalypse is a period of time when the forces of absolute Good and absolute Evil do battle here on Earth, and moral ambiguity becomes synonymous with moral turpitude. Needless to say, it's a situation in which the non-violence of Jesus' philosophy becomes a mute point. 

Millennialism (the term for the belief in End Times) dispenses utterly with moral relativism, and encourages believers to take an active hand in suppressing it. Thus when social conservatives talk about the Culture Wars, they're talking about the conflict between those who see the Bible and Constitution as living documents, and those who see them as hard and fast laws chiseled in stone. 

So where does the violence come from? Millennialism takes the internal struggle against good and evil out of the mind of the believer and out into the streets. And if you believe that the end of the world is right around the corner or that Barack Obama is the Antichrist, the rivers are already running red with blood and the dragon is at your doorstep.

Eternal Forces PC game pitch takes the "Us vs. Them" approach

When I learned through a friend about "Left Behind: Eternal Forces" from a friend on Facebook, I recognized its overture to Evangelism's violent underbelly immediately.

"Left Behind" is a series of video games based partially on the successful novel series. In it, an Evangelical sect must convert Jews, Muslims, and atheists in the streets of a post-Apocalyptic New York––or kill them should they refuse Salvation. 

When I saw the trailer, I was, like, "Hell yeah, I saw that on TV last week when the police turned out the Occupy Wall Street protesters!"

If ever America was a "Christian country" as so many right wingers claim, it was because Christianity symbolized a general consensus on what was good, civilized behavior. But Christianity has always been divided, and today, it seems like even the most core Christian beliefs are up for grabs. 

The truth is, people will see what they want to see. There are still people who believe Herman Cain never cheated on his wife, that the government destroyed the Twin Towers, and that JFK was killed by aliens. 

The dangerous number of people who believe the Antichrist walks among us are stockpiling guns and canned food in preparation for the signs of the Apocalypse. But the rest of us have a powerful weapon: time. When no Antichrist waves the banner of pure, unadulterated evil; when the Chosen never rise bodily into Heaven; when Jesus fails to show up for his thousand-year reign––that's when these crazies are going to do some hard thinking about the snake-handling laying-on-of-hands specialist radio host they're listening to these days.

They'll just have to accept that Christianity is about faith and not about having your righteousness affirmed by cataclysm. Just ask that failed 2011 Doomsday prophet Harold Camping what he's doing these days.