A Whore that Sitteth on Many Waters:The Left Behind Series (Bageant)

A Whore that Sitteth on Many Waters
What the Left Behind Series Really Means
by Joe Bageant

That is the sophisticated language and appeal of America’s all-time best selling adult novels celebrating the ethnic cleansing of non-Christians at the hands of Christ. If a Muslim were to write an Islamic version of last book in the Left Behind series, Glorious Appearing, and publish it across the Middle East, Americans would go berserk. Yet tens of millions of Christians eagerly await and celebrate an End Time when everyone who disagrees with them will be murdered in ways that make Islamic beheading look like a bridal shower. Jesus -- who apparently has a much nastier streak than we have been led to believe -- merely speaks and “the bodies of the enemy are ripped wide open down the middle.” In the book Christians have to drive carefully to avoid “hitting splayed and filleted corpses of men and women and horses,” even as the riders’ tongues are melting in their mouths and they are being wide-open gutted by God’s own hand, the poor damned horses are getting the same treatment. Sort of a divinely inspired version of “Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.”

This may be some of the bloodiest hate fiction ever published, but it is also what tens of millions of Americans believe is God’s will. It is approximately what everyone in the congregation sitting around me last Sunday at my brother’s church believes. Or some version of it. How can anyone acquire and hold such notions? Answer: The same way you got yours and I got mine. Conditioning. From family and school and society, but from within a different American caste than the one in which you were raised. And from things stamped deep in childhood -- such as coming home terrified to an empty house.

One September day when I was in the third grade I got off the school bus and walked up the red dust powdered lane to my house only to find no one there. The smudgy white front door of the old frame house stood open. My footsteps on the unpainted gray porch creaked in the fall stillness. With increasing panic, I went through every room, and then ran around the outside crying and sobbing in the grip of the most horrific loneliness and terror. I believed with all my heart that The Rapture had come and that all my family had been taken up to heaven leaving me alone on earth to face God’s terrible wrath. As it turned out they were at the neighbor’s house scarcely 300 yards down the road, and returned in a few minutes. But it took me hours to calm down. I dreamed about it for years afterward.

Since then I have spoken to others raised in fundamentalist families who had the same childhood experience of coming home and thinking everyone had been “raptured up.” The Rapture -- the time when God takes up all saved Christians before he lets loose slaughter, pestilence and torture upon the earth -- is very real to people in whom its glorious and grisly promise was instilled and cultivated from birth. Even those who escape fundamentalism agree its marks are permanent. We may no longer believe in being raptured up, but the grim fundamentalist architecture of the soul stands in the background of our days. There is an apocalyptic starkness that remains somewhere inside us, one that tinges all of our feelings and thoughts of higher matters. Especially about death, oh beautiful and terrible death, for naked eternity is more real to us than to you secular humanists. I get mail from hundreds of folks like me, the different ones who fled and became lawyers and teachers and therapists and car mechanics, dope dealers and stockbrokers and waitresses. And every one of them has felt that thing we understand between us, that skulls piled clear to heaven redemption through absolute self-worthlessness and you ain’t shit in the eyes of God so go bleed to death in some dark corner stab in the heart at those very moments when we should have been most proud of ourselves. Self-hate. That thing that makes us sabotage our own inner happiness when we are most free and operating as self-realizing individuals. This kind of Christianity is a black thing. It is a blood religion, that willingly gives up sons to America’s campaigns in the Holy Land, hoping they will bring on the much-anticipated war between good and evil in the Middle East that will hasten the End Times. Bring Jesus back to Earth.

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Dec05/Bageant1217.htm

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I was sure it was the Rapture.

Of course I was; I had been in a fundamentalist church listening to "Dr." Adrian Rodgers unveil the "End Times" in a sermon series.

If you hew to the fundamentalist demand of "bringing every thought into captivity of the obedience of the Lord", then you are, in a very real sense, brainwashed.

I have a feeling that this hate and death cult will be full of people who are in for a horrible surprise.

What I find far likelier is that one of their own, maybe even Sutpid, himself, will get into a position where he feels he has nothing to lose by unleashing Armageddon and push the nuclear button.

If that happens, I intend to go to the closest fundy church. I know I will be about to die rather horribly. I just want to see their stupid faces as it dawns on them that all those books were fiction.

www.joebageant.com

Can't wait for his book to come out this spring.

The book of revelations was meant to encourage the followers of Christ as they were being persecuted. When read in this context, it makes more sense. Those who read it in any other light are deceived.

The book of Revelations is included in the Bible primarily because the early church considered it a story of prophecy fulfilled. It describes the persecution of the Christian faith, the fall of the Roman Empire and the ascendancy of the Catholic (I.E. Universal) Church. Yes, there are things related to the end times. But the majority of the book is not.

The rapture is also not biblical. It is something that developed in the 1800s during the first surge of Fundamentalism both here and abroad. Most mainline Protestant, Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox denominations do not believe in the rapture.

Very insightful piece. I'm gunna' read some of his other stuff.

That said, this is really alien to anybody who was raised Catholic. It had its own set of problems, but one thing for sure is that we never, ever were taught the whackjob notion of faith being a "get out of jail free" card.

...but Yurica Report is a great site as well.

I first read their 'Dominionism' piece about a year and a half ago, and it knocked me on my ass.

and don't remember it. The Catholic bible is a little different from the Protestant Bible and doesn't have exactly the same Books in it, as I recall..

Unfortunately, I don't have a copy available so I can't check it out. I'll try Googling.

OK, I found out. It is part of the Catholic Bible. It's the last book. A good explanation is at http://www.usccb.org/nab/bible/ and the last book listed is Revelation. Th Introduction to Revelation is at http://www.usccb.org/nab/bible/revelation/intro.htm.

--about it. Not part of the Catechism at all.

The hypocrisy and utter hatred for those that disagree with them is a travesty of Jesus actual teachings.Fundies scare me,I've met a few.I'd like to see this on the greatest page.

the Rapture?"

Of course, we're in the Northeast, which is full of Catholics, so the few folks left in the office don't always get the joke.

"This kind of Christianity is a black thing. It is a blood religion, that willingly gives up sons to America’s campaigns in the Holy Land, hoping they will bring on the much-anticipated war between good and evil in the Middle East that will hasten the End Times. Bring Jesus back to Earth."

As if a God who created heaven and earth without any outside help really needs any help now. Do they really think they can push God around?

The people who write and read this are most definitely NOT Christian.

They are, however, certifiable sociopaths.

He seems like a perfectly normal, reasonable guy, but he got a couple of pebbles of bad ideas thrown into his thinking that diverted him into a course that was disastrous for others.

I was involved in evangelicalism through my college years and liked and respected many of those people. While I can't imagine them actively hurting others, I can imagine them sitting idly by the harm was presented in the right way.

"I was involved in evangelicalism through my college years and liked and respected many of those people. While I can't imagine them actively hurting others"

I can imagine them hiding in the safety of the voting booth, voting for politicians who promise to incinerate 100s of thousands in order to somehow keep them safe from commies, muslims, or any other monster that their minds have been programmed to fear.

As a child I was hypnotized this way. But nowadays, I tell these so-called Christians that unless they repent and ask forgiveness from the victims of their maimings and murders, that they will be held accountable at the Final Judgement.

As long as pastor wally says what they are doing in righteous, there's very little chance they will feel guilty with all that social reinforcement.

... of the local video store. I've been doing some research on "end of the world" scenarios in mythology, so I thought this might make an interesting addition. But I've been scared to watch them (especially after reading the Bill Moyers article on how groups like these actually want the world to end).

invented by a mid-western snake oil salesman in the 19th century. It is looked on as a ridiculous superstition outside the US. Almost as loony as that mormon fellow who got messages from god from his magic hat.

From Bageant's article:

"One September day when I was in the third grade I got off the school bus and walked up the red dust powdered lane to my house only to find no one there. The smudgy white front door of the old frame house stood open. My footsteps on the unpainted gray porch creaked in the fall stillness. With increasing panic, I went through every room, and then ran around the outside crying and sobbing in the grip of the most horrific loneliness and terror."

In my case I distinctly remember walking home from my 3rd grade class during the 1967 6-Day Israel/Arab war. In previous weeks, the millenialist evangelist at my nutty right wing fundamentalist church had been doing a great job terrorizing me into believing that these latest Amer-Israel imperial provocations were proof that we were on the brink of Armegeddon.

I recall being scared shitless that I'd get home and find that I'd been "left behind" as they say nowadays. Then I remember arriving and feeling relieved that my family was still un-raptured. And then I remember going immediately to that day's newspaper and reading with great "Christian" satisfaction the map of Israel on the front page with little lightning bolts marking all of the spots that the Israelis had bombed the day before.

By the way, "Left Behind" is now some sort of a giant psychological-terror industry that I wish I had had the foresight to buy ground floor stock in back in 1967!!