Bubblehammerblog

Watching Christian broadcasting from the US on satellite makes me glad to have been born in a country that was never fully christianised. Christianity was always a minority concern in England, now more than ever - there are more Muslims here than practising Christians. In the neighbourhood where I grew up, in an industrial city in the North of England, there was only one family that went to church. Significantly, they were also the only family that owned a car. We used to watch them on Sunday mornings, getting into their gleaming Morris Traveller in their Sunday best, the two kids looking utterly miserable. It was assumed that, as the owners of a grocery shop, they went to church to distinguish themselves from the steelworkers, bus drivers & skivvies they lived amongst.

Even among English churchgoers the sort of religious enthusiasm you see in the huge congregations in American megachurches has been viewed with suspicion, probably because of the religious & political turmoil we experienced in the Civil War. The Church of England has never really been concerned with religious belief, being an instrument of class politics, ignored or despised by the bulk of the population. For much of it's existence it was 'the Tory Party at prayer'. In the later 20th Century, as a survival tactic, it developed the charming trait of becoming tolerant to the point of self-extinction, welcoming avowed atheists into the clergy, & turing a blind eye to vicars who delivered Buddhist sermons while bollock naked.

This explains why I've always found Christian observance slightly shocking & disturbing. I once found myself in Dublin early one bright Sunday morning, having spent the night showing some Irish mates how to drink pints of Guiness. While wondering why there were so many people about at that time of day, & discounting a football fixture, I realised that they were all herding into these great ugly church buildings. I'd never seen anything like this before, & the experience left me feeling so queasy that I had to find some open green space, & a park bench to sit on while I waited for the pubs to open.

American Christian broadcasts, though, bear no resemblence to any kind of religious practice I've ever experienced. Coming from a land of many beautiful but deserted & hushed churches, that smell of furniture wax & Brasso, it's startling to see these vast crowded astrodomes, where men in immaculate business suits & expensively coiffeured women strut & fret before the audience, microphone in hand, harranguing in bizzare intonations. It takes a while to work out they're speaking English.

It seems they worship an entity called Guard. Clearly, Guard & Jesus are the same entity. Both of them speak directly to these men in suits, in the manner of a robust & commonsensical bank manager, instructing them in the conduct of various activities, often involving grandiose construction projects for which cash must be raised. Obviously, Guard/Jesus is a bloke, & the Supreme Being at the same time. This is a religion without mystery.

My friend who is a Muslim scholar tells me this crude theology is blasphemous, & an example of what Muslims call shirk, or associating Allah with something created. As the Catholic theologian Paul Tillich has written:

"The concept of a 'Personal God' interfering with natural events, or being 'an independant cause of natural events', makes God a natural object beside others, an object among others, a being among beings, maybe the highest, but nevertheless a being. This indeed is not only the destruction of the physical system but even more the destruction of any meaningful idea of God."

As an atheist I have to agree.

These people would be just depressing or laughable were it not for the grotesque politics they've dreamed up, using the authority of the Bible to justify belligerence & destruction to the credulous. I watched one 'minister' telling his flock that climate change was a 'hoax', quoting scripture to justify the continued rape of the planet on the grounds that 'Guard wants you to be rich beyond your wildest dreams'. Another, calling himself 'Pastor' Somethingorother, stood before a map of the world, behind which were draped many imperial star-spangled-banners, expounding a biblical 'prophesy' that predicted the destruction of Russia, the expansion of Israel up to the Euphrates, the routing of the Satanist Muslims, the second coming of Jesus in Jerusalem, resulting in the conversion of the Jews, & the establishment of the Kingdom of Guard.

What's just as saddening is that some people claiming to be Muslims espouse similar nonsense. Some 'Neo-Taliban' are talking about a "Battle of the End of Time", also centred ultimately on Palestine, which will herald the coming of the Mahdi. See, http://www.counterpunch.org/shahzad10122008.htm

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