I was raised a Catholic. I still consider myself a Catholic, although it’s been a few years since I’ve been to Mass. I have many problems with the Church, as I do with organized religion in general. I have no problems with God. Or Jesus Christ. Who am I, with my poor intellectual capacity, to question the Creator of everything?
In the mid-1970s, what we used to call “Jesus Freaks” started popping up. I knew a few of them. They were actually pretty cool. I never argued about our foreign policy with them. I even briefly flirted with the “Born Again” thing myself. One of my catchier songs was They Took my Bible Away. One day, I’ll get the courage to play the tapes I have of my songs on YouTube or something. At any rate, at that time “born againers” seemed to me to just be extremely enthusiastic believers. To be more concerned with Jesus Christ than most Catholics or conventional Protestants. It wasn’t until I started meeting more of them, in the workforce, or while coaching youth sports, that I realized there really was a distinct difference between what they believed, and the religious instructions I’d received as a Catholic. I started to understand that “born again” Protestants rely almost exclusively on faith, and seem to harbor a thinly concealed antipathy towards Catholics and their “good works.”
As a child, it was drummed home to me, both at Mass and at home, to “be good.” Catholic “guilt” is a very real but unfairly named thing. It is instead a Catholic conscience. I feel guilt, even when it’s irrational, because my conscience insists that I should have done something differently, or not done it. Should have treated someone better. Done more to help those who need it. It gave me a nice, warm feeling to volunteer with the Special Olympics, or coach severely handicapped kids in the Top Soccer program, or teach basic computer skills to mostly African immigrants. But I’ve heard “born againers” scoff at this as “trying to work your way into heaven.” Well, I suppose maybe I am. I learned that Jesus will “come again, to judge the living and the dead.” I still think a lot about the Day of Judgment. I don’t know what would be more important in such a judgment, than your actions towards others.
It’s only been within the last year or so that my eyes have been truly opened on this subject. I knew that Christian “evangelicals,” which is the kindler, gentler way of saying “born againers,” were supporters of Israel. I understood that they placed far greater importance on the Book of Revelation than Catholics do. I also began hearing more references to “The Rapture,” which was a totally foreign concept to me. If you look at the passages in the Bible that are supposed to support this, it is never directly said that 144,000 people will suddenly be assumed into heaven. As a Catholic, the Virgin Mary is supposed to be the only human being ever assumed into heaven. Everything with evangelicals seems to revolve around the Biblical Israel, and they consider the present corrupt Middle Eastern ministate as this divine land. They interpret Biblical prophecy to mean that Jesus will return in a generation after Israel was restored. In the 1980s, the “born againers” preached that since it was getting close to forty years after the creation of Israel, the Second Coming was at hand. This was believed by many who supported Reagan. Now they have reinterpreted things.
Now, it is a Biblical “generation” we’re talking about, and this would mean the Second Coming will be occurring very shortly. Catholics were taught that no man will know the hour of Jesus’s return, and that he would come “like a thief in the night.” The evangelicals have proven to be quite adept at picking and choosing which Biblical verses to believe. They really hate my favorite, where Jesus said that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” That would pretty much discredit the whole “prosperity gospel” thing, which has made the likes of Kenneth Copeland and Joel Osteen filthy rich. I sense that the “prosperity gospel” mantra runs through much of the evangelical community. Don’t dare say “money is the root of all evil” around them. They’ll quickly correct you; “It’s ‘the love of money.’” The televangelists seem to embrace this rather new “dispensationalism,” and they all certainly appear to have a pretty overt love of money.
Not that long ago, I started hearing a lot about the Scofield Bible, which birthed the evangelical movement just as surely as Joseph Smith’s Book of Mormon birthed theirs. Mormons are scoffed at by all other Christians, but Scofield Christians not only are tolerated, and even respected, they have become the face of modern Christianity in America 2.0. A pastor named Cyrus Scofield, who had a murky past which included abandoning his wife and children, bribery and theft of contributions, was chosen by powerful Jewish financiers like Samuel Untermeyer to add suitably pro-Zionist footnotes in what became the Scofield Reference Bible, which first appeared in 1909. This reference Bible was published and is still owned by the Oxford University Press. The footnotes were carefully selected, to all reflect a pro-Zionist perspective. Although Zionism was largely unheard of at the time, the goal was to make the Bible stress Jesus’s Jewishness, and the fact that the Jews were the “chosen” people of God.
Later, evangelical leaders like Billy Graham concentrated on the Scofield messaging, drumming home the idea that to oppose modern Israel or “the Jews” in general was to oppose God. Terms like “fundamentalism,” “nondenominational” and the oxymoronic “Judeo-Christian” became familiar to all Christians. While Catholic youngsters like me were regularly reminded that the Jews of his time had killed Christ, evangelicals embraced those who had rejected their savior, and insisted they were above criticism. Traditional Catholic priests like Father Charles Coughlin and Leonard Feeney attacked undue Jewish power and influence, as well as that of freemasonry. Billy Graham, meanwhile, had the ear of Richard Nixon as he preached the virtues of “Judeo-Christianity,” and Jim and Tammy Bakker sold gaudiness and materialism almost as shamelessly as the “Reverend Ike” had a few decades earlier. They begged for money, and told gullible old people that God would reward them for donating.
The scandals of Jim and Tammy Bakker, and then Jimmy Swaggart being caught with prostitutes on more than one occasion, did nothing to slow down the televangelists. Every televangelist I’ve ever seen is phonier than the most obnoxious used car salesman. They serve up the same series of Bible verses, to keep their flock tithing- a form of coercion not found in the Bible. They ignore other verses like the plague. Let me know when one of them talks about Jesus condemning the Jewish leaders as the “synagogue of Satan,” and being “just like your father- the first and greatest liar of them all.” Apparently, fundamentalists are taught to study those Scofield footnotes- written by a pastor who was a thief and had abandoned his family- rather than actual Biblical passages. Evangelicals specialize in talking the talk. I have met precious few who walk the walk. Their families are often even more dysfunctional than most. One Biblical admonition they ignore with impunity is “judge not lest ye be judged.”
Have you heard any evangelical pastor question why a rabbi is the head of one of the biggest porn sites on the internet- Pornhub? They love to talk about porn destroying lives, but never mention the one group that has always dominated the leadership positions in the world of pornography, from the days of girlie mags, to X rated films, and now online porn. How often do they condemn the transgender movement? Have any pastors led marches against the mutilation of children? Christian leaders should be leading protests against the tyranny and corruption of our secular state. You may still see a pro-life protest here or there. But the pro-choice people have a point; evangelicals certainly seem to care far more about the unborn than born children in desperate circumstances. Their emphasis is unduly on the sins of the flesh. Unless their own sins are exposed. Then they just keep lecturing others, seemingly more passionately than ever once they are caught with their own pants down.
