Max Blumenthal’s explosive new book, Republican Gomorrah, includes a great description of the Christian Zionists as part of a death cult on the right–political forces that invoke mortality and hellish eschatology as a means of building subservient movements. Here’s a passage:
In July 2007, I covered Christians United for Israel’s “Washington- Israel” Summit. Staged inside the cavernous halls of Washington, DC’s Convention Center, the event was more than a political rally—it was a gigantic vaudeville of doom, despair, and destruction. Speakers from Newt Gingrich to former Israeli Ambassador Dore Gold stoked the anxieties of the nearly three thousand attendees with graphic descriptions of Iran’s fearsome Shihab missile, warning that it could strike as far as Israel, into the heart of Europe, and beyond. After the Cornerstone Church chorus belted out a saccharine rendition of the Zionist folk anthem “Jerusalem, City of Gold,” and evangelical crowd members, many clad in kippas and tallis, blew supersized shofars and danced in the aisles, [Pastor John] Hagee [head of CUFI] waddled to the rostrum.
“It is time for America to embrace the words of Senator Joseph Lieberman,” Hagee rumbled, “and consider a military preemptive strike against Iran to prevent a nuclear Holocaust in Israel!” The crowd leapt to its feet and roared.
When I interviewed summit attendees about their theological views, I was unable to find a single person among them who did not lust for a blitzkrieg of biblical proportions. “I’m looking forward to Armageddon and to the cleansing of the Earth!” exclaimed John G. Rogers, a pastor from California. William Baker, another Californian, told me he was “absolutely” elated about the prospect of “a battle between the Christians and the anti-Christians.” “I got a bag packed,” a man named Walter Farnham revealed to me. “And when we disappear, you better start to worry. Because if you haven’t seen the ‘Left Behind’ series, it’s scary.” Two kindly older women standing beside Farnham nodded approvingly at the mention of Left Behind.
Written by the Reverend Tim LaHaye, a founder of the Council for National Policy, the Left Behind series is the Christian right’s most effective recruitment vehicle. Larded from cover to cover with coded anti-Semitic conspiracies about “international bankers” plotting with UN chief Nicholai Carpathia (the evil characters in Left Behind all have ethnic names), who represents the anti-Christ, Left Behind is replete with descriptions of pornographic violence against unbelievers, whose “bodies burst open from head to toe at every word that proceeded out of the mouth of the Lord.”
According to evangelical pollster George Barna, Left Behind “represents one of the most widely experienced religious teaching or evangelistic tools among adults who are not born-again Christians.” LaHaye’s impact on millions of lives cannot be attributed to his storytelling prowess—his prose is painfully turgid—but rather his ability to mesmerize—or terrorize—unbelievers with the prospect of a gruesome death and eternal anguish in the flames of Hell. By literally scaring the devil out of unbelievers, LaHaye and his acolytes have plumbed the country’s most panic-prone elements within the ranks of the Christian right and thus have expanded their movement in a startlingly rapid fashion.
