My fellow Telician Mike Gene found a wonderful article by "Carolyn Baker, Ph.D." that just begs to receive the Henry Rollins Award for Supreme Threatiness. The fun already starts with the title: Christian Fascism: The Jesus Gestapo of St. Orwell.

I don't know which part I find the most hilarious: The mental image of a "Jesus Gestapo" or the fact that George Orwell, whose novels still stand as some of the best literary critiques of totalitarianism, is somehow seen as a bad guy. Maybe the latter has something to do with the fact that Carolyn Baker's article is published at something called "Political Affairs Magazine – Marxist Thought Online", and that although she agrees that all totalitarian regimes – whether nazist or communist – are equally bad, some totalitarian regimes are more equally bad than others.

But the threatiness continues. In a paragraph of breathtaking hysteria, surpassed only by its divorce from reality, Baker frets:

One not need be a licensed mental health professional to find the emotional manipulation, indoctrination, and outright brainwashing of the Jesus camp both repulsive and enraging. Its squeaky-clean, almost exclusively white, puerile participants mouth all the right jargon, concepts, and scripture verses impeccably and robotically like good little Christian boys and girls – or more chillingly, like Hitler youth. Jesus Camp is nothing less than childhood spiritual abuse on steroids, leaving me personally and eternally grateful that as a child growing up in fundamentalism, I wasn't subjected to anything worse in the context of religious services than the raspy screams of bible-thumping preachers.

Joe Carter and Macht deal nicely with the Jesus camp, so I need only chuckle at the inanity of comparing kids praying for God to stop abortion to the Hitler Youth. But nothing beats this passage:

Cristo-fascism is overwhelmingly a white Anglo-American movement. While one sees growing numbers of African Americans and Hispanics joining their ranks, the movement remains predominantly white and rabidly Islamophobic. Most outspoken on this issue is San Antonio's megachurch pastor, John Hagee, who perceives Islam as the new Satan which must be destroyed by Israel and the United States.

Let's see… the only actual theocracies are Muslim, and Islamist leaders like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are calling for the destruction of America and Israel – the Great Satan and the Little Satan, respectively – yet Baker prefers ranting at the "Islamophobic" Christians and their Israeli co-conspirators. Talk about keeping things in perspective.

Such superb threatiness is a rare find. And that is why we have the Henry Rollins Award.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 10th, 2007 at 5:11 pm and is filed under Henry Rollins Award, Religion, Threatiness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.