Frank Schaeffer Explains Why Dominionists Are Driving Debt Ceiling Brinksmanship
As Debt Ceiling Theatre begins an new week, we may well find this installment beginning with Asian markets crawling in the tank as further evidence of how far our treasonous right wing politicians are willing to go in order to serve their hedge fund managing Wall Street overlords. But as a prologue, we had John Boehner yet again prove his unseriousness by proposing a 2-tier solution with a “serious” face. Because he hasn’t already tried this before, don’t you know? Boehner proposed to Pelosi and Reid a plan to raise the debt ceiling through 2011, with a second raise in the beginning of 2012. Because somehow in his whiskey-addled brain, Boehner thinks Obama and the Democrats have somehow said they would be amenable to that? Opposite land is where Boehner is living. Or maybe not. As Frank Schaeffer explains , much of the brinksmanship is also being driven by right-wing fundamentalists. Theology is — by nature — not about reason but about faith. If God’s will is to be served then so be it if America is plunged into chaos! This debt ceiling fiasco is just another chapter in the “culture” wars. The extreme language of Evangelical/”pro-life” rebellion has now been repackaged in the debt ceiling showdown. It is the language of religion pitted against facts. And the anti-government charge is being led by people who are either true believers, thus unable to reason, or people catering to the true believers so that they can remain in the good books of the Tea Party, which is nothing more than the Evangelical far right repackaged and renamed. Well yes. In this regard he’s not telling us anything we don’t already know, except that I’m not sure I’d be so quick to wrap up the Tea Party as evangelicals only. It is an unholy alliance of evangelicals and agnostics whose religion is the Almighty Dollar. But he goes on, and here’s where it gets interesting: A Willingness To Destroy America In Order To Save It George and Colson and the others who wrote and then signed the “Manhattan Declaration” (like Kreeft before them) also called for fundamentalists to unite if need be for civil disobedience to stop the U.S. government from passing laws that did not comply with their religious “values” and/or to undermine those laws if they were enacted. Here’s the actual text of that section of the Manhattan Declaration : Going back to the earliest days of the church, Christians have refused to compromise their proclamation of the gospel. In Acts 4, Peter and John were ordered to stop preaching. Their answer was, “Judge for yourselves whether it is right in God’s sight to obey you rather than God. For we cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard.” Through the centuries, Christianity has taught that civil disobedience is not only permitted, but sometimes required. The rest of it, as you may know, is a structured list of the culture war issues: homosexuality, gay marriage, abortion, etc. But as Schaeffer points out, this particular section grants them (in their own minds) the moral authority to demand that the government be destroyed in order to save it from these terrible things. The debt ceiling is just their current lever, like the Affordable Care Act was, and like all of the ridiculous votes to defund Planned Parenthood were earlier this year. As I consider the victims in Norway who were assassinated by a gunman with views quite similar to these , I am rapidly concluding that this is an ungovernable nation with these insane, irresponsible, dogma-guided people pretending to lead. It could be that the markets will agree with that, too, in which case we may all find ourselves locked in the curse of interesting times .
Frank Schaeffer Explains Why Dominionists Are Driving Debt Ceiling Brinksmanship
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on July 25, 2011. Filed under