George W. Bush: A Brother in Christ?
By Dr Gerry Lower - 27 February 2003 News Insider (www.newsinsider.org)

When President Bush attended the recent February 10th convention of the National Religious Broadcasters in Nashville, Tennessee, he was introduced as "our friend and brother in Christ," a man who "unapologetically proclaims his faith in the Lord Jesus Christ."

This is a remarkable introduction for a man who thrives on executions, utter secrecy, international belligerence and unprovoked declarations of war, a reformed alcoholic and born again "christian" who did not find Christ but only found Abraham's god in the Judeo-Roman mindset. This is precisely the kind of "christian" charade that has long given "christianity" a rotten name, to the point that the mere mention of the term in thoughtful circles can bring scorn to the user. Why? Well, why not?

The term simply reeks of Old Testament holier-than-thou religion, absolute legalism, vengeance-based punishments and executions, religious wars, control and conquest. In other words, when one mentions the term "christian," many people identify the term with the hard-line Judeo-Roman church and the attitudes which drove Western imperialism and colonialism. As a result, the Western church has continuously produced atheists and agnostics to keep the political world in something resembling a balance. It is also the case that these alternative believers, no matter how justifiable their dislike of "christianity," have uniformly thrown out the baby with the washwater.

Archbishop Robert Bowman has provided a trenchant discussion of the failure of the modern church to teach Christian values (CounterPunch). Their curriculum amounts to a lot of talk about a spooky ethereal Christ and no talk at all of the real person who stood up to the Jews and the Romans and their inadequate versions of deity and morality and political philosophy. Even then, as now, it was more than a disagreement over policies and procedures. It was a disagreement about the attitudes motivating those policies and procedure, the attitudes these people had toward their fellow humans.

The nascent Christian attitude embracing compassion was compromised out of sight in the early 4th century AD when Constantine reunited Christianity with Judaism in the name of Roman dominion. It had always been the case, up to that time, that nations could launch wars in seeking a vengeance-based "justice." This approach actually works well both ways, of course, and if no one had committed assault upon one's business, one could always stick one's nose into someone else's business and, when they took offense, one could then respond with religious vengeance.

Nevertheless, Constantine set an altogether new standard for declaring war, i.e., self-righteousness. Hence forth, it was possible, in the name of a universal god and authority, to launch war in the name of Christian compassion, and a good deal of "christianity" was spread about the Western world at the tip of a double-edged sword. Here we have the beginnings of bad religious attitude, i.e., taking action against others because you are better than they are.

It got worse in 1054 AD when the Bishop of Rome decided that he alone ought rule over Western "christendom." Up to that time, the sovereignty of the church had been vested in five bishops overseeing Jerusalem, Antioch, Constantinople, Alexandria, and Rome. Rome, long having appreciated the power that comes from a church united with its state, got what it wanted, supreme authority in the Roman Pope. It allowed its greed and lust for power to strike its own church asunder, the Orthodox branch never again answering to Rome. The very next project for the Catholic church was the infamous Crusades to control the "holy lands." So, we can add an additional component of bad religious attitude, the notion that one ought be in total political control, no matter what the cost.
The next step was to solidify the power of the imperialistic Catholic church. This was accomplished when it decreed itself infallible. This final component of bad religious attitude was enacted by the Vatican Council of 1870 AD as a dogma which all "christians" were bound to accept as an article of faith. This desperate effort to acquire absolute control was largely in response to the emerging Western world, the Newtonian revolution in science, the emergence of American Democracy, the Industrial Revolution and Darwin's 1857 evolutionary explanation for human origins, seen as a dire threat to Old Testament doctrine.

Sensing the growing intellectual freedom of Catholics everywhere, the supporters of papal infallibility felt that only by an absolute dictatorship over the thoughts and conscience of the faithful could Rome regain its former power over the occidental world, a power weakened by the Lutheran and Protestant Reformations. In other words, from 1054 AD to the very threshold of our own times, the question of defining papal authority continuously occupied the leadership of the Roman church.

By modern times, the Judeo-Roman attitude was well ingrained, based on a "christian" self-righteousness, which brought with it the divine right to control and the divine right to be right even if not. Most Catholics in the West were raised, to one extent or another, within this holier-than-thou attitudinal mindset, a mindset taken as "christianity" even though it has no Christian content, a mindset which is above challenge, even though it makes no logical sense or is overruled entirely by scientific knowledge.

If one breaks away from the one and only church, as did the Protestant denominations, then one must have created a new version of the one and only church. In other words, this self-righteous attitude spilled over into the reformist religions it initially spawned to ultimately drive European colonialism and the conquest of the western hemisphere. Now, in the US, it has spawned neo-fundamentalist Republican crony capitalism, out to turn the world into a wholly-owned US subsidiary by implementing a religiously "controlled society." Just ask Dick Cheney.

Bush claims that America's enemies "hate the thought" that "we can worship the Almighty God the way we see fit." What Bush means, of course, is that we all ought worship in the Old Testament Judeo-Roman way. In this, Bush has simply lumped every branch of Western "christendom" into one rotten heap, as if there had been no change in religious attitude since Constantine, as if the Lutheran and Protestant reformations never happened. Bush is not a Christian but a rather classic Old Testament tyrant, crusading in Christ's name. That nascent Christianity has nothing at all to do with Western religion has been recognized for centuries, throughout the Euro-American enlightenment beginning with Newton and Spinoza, running through John Locke, and culminating in Thomas Jefferson. As an inspired Deist theologian, Jefferson took a pair of scissors to the King James Version, the resulting "Jefferson Bible" now residing in the National Museum and a copy being provided to every Senator upon taking office.

In keeping with Enlightenment views of Christianity, the entire Old Testament went straight into the wastebasket. After all, the entire publication was pre-Christian and represented the legal/penal value system which the first Christian was hoping to eliminate in favor of an ethical morality based in honesty and compassion. Jefferson, in these footsteps, likewise saw compassion as the proper bottom-line in political philosophy and he proceeded to write his Declaration of human rights as, perhaps, the most Christian document yet penned.

The Bush administration has hauled every one of the despotic Judeo-Roman religious attitudes directly into the Oval Office. This was done because it provides the supernatural assumptions upon which Americans might see themselves as chosen people destined not to civilize but to pacify the world. It also provides the assumptions which allow the American people to abide self-righteous, belligerent leadership in their names.

Like it or not, American Democracy was built upon nascent Christian values without a hint of bad religious attitude. American Democracy was also built upon the values of Science, Democracy being the only political philosophy which springs therefrom. All we need to do is return to the values that made America possible and leave go the bad attitudes that made Rome despotic. It does not matter what we call it, just as long as we return to compassion and honesty as bottom lines in thought.

© The News Insider 2003