This site has been arguing for several weeks that the nomination of Sarah Palin as Republican VP candidate amounts to the creation of a blasphemous idol. The clear cut election results just announced seem to validate this view.
I am not a supporter of the democratic party. Definitely not. I was no more a supporter of Obama than the average Judean was a Nebuchadnezzar supporter in 597 BC. But my feelings towards the Republican party, and towards the Christian-Evangelical faction that has aligned itself with it for the past 30 years, are the same as as those many Jews must have had towards the fallen Kingdom of Judah, and towards Jerusalem its capital, after it had fallen to the Babylonian armies. Nowhere are these feelings better captured than in the Book of lamentations:
Lamentations 1:5 Her foes have become the head;
her enemies prosper,
because the Lord has afflicted her [Jerusalem]
for the multitude of her transgressions;
[For an audio recording of the full chapter of Lamentations 1, please click here.]
The book of Lamentations does not specify the nature of the transgressions for which Judah is being punished so severely by God. But the book of Ezekiel, placed immediately after Lamentations in the Bible, leaves no doubt as to what it was that triggered God’s action against Jerusalem:
Ezekiel 6:3 [...] You mountains of Israel, hear the word of the Lord GOD! Thus says the Lord GOD to the mountains and the hills, to the ravines and the valleys: Behold, I, even I, will bring a sword upon you, and I will destroy your high places. 4 Your altars shall become desolate, and your incense altars shall be broken, and I will cast down your slain before your idols.
At first, it pays to be an idolater, as the boastful celebrations of image worship inspire awe and fear into the souls of your friends and foes alike. But eventually, who can succeed by challenging God ? The idolater always receives the reward of his rebellion in due course. This is the message God sent mankind through the ordeal He imposed on His own people. And it appears we are hard of hearing since God seems to have felt it necessary to send us a reminder through the recent discomfiture of John McCain. The graph below is a perfect illustration of what idolatry brings to those who yield to its temptations. At first, brilliant success. Eventually, utter defeat. Just after the announcement of Sarah Palin’s nomination as his running mate, John McCain scored a stunning 5% rise in opinion polls and, for the first time in months, overtook his opponent. But this situation lasted only for a short time and eventually, Barack Obama’s lead in the polls ended up higher than it had ever been before the whole Palin episode.
In the coming months, a lot of soul searching will take place and a multitude of pronouncements will be made to try to make sense of the election results.
From a God-fearing perspective, I believe that we need not look further than the First Commandment. We Christians, and especially we English-speaking Evangelical Christians, have allowed idolatry to enter in our midst and we are being punished (quite mildly, to be fair) for it. Let us not blame others for the misfortune that has befallen us. Let us not say “Idolaters? Us? Look at how Democrats worship Obama!” Sure enough. Obama’s victory is yet another triumph of media-generated idolatry. But does the crime of others justify our own? Did Babylon’s idolatry, which was far worse than that of the Hebrews, provide any excuse to Jerusalem? I think we should resist the temptation to beat the bushes for an easy way out. We should instead thank God for the mild nature of the punishment he has meted us and accept to acknowledge the message he is sending us: the Evangelical movement is now finished. It did a lot of good at a time when godlessness was on the rise. But it is now dead and as rotten as the Roman Catholic Church was in 1500. As branches of the universal Church rot, they always seem to end up in the same configuration: pharisees at the top and idolaters at the bottom; with the ritualistic pseudo-righteousness of the pharisees trying to cover up the stinking idolatry of their congregations. Evangelicalism has by and large reached that stage now.
Has God deserted mankind? Certainly not. How arrogant it would be to assume that because God has just humiliated our particular form of religion, it means he has rejected us altogether. What we need to do is to allow God to lead us to a newer, truer, way to understand and worship him; just as the Reformers allowed themselves to be led to a better understanding of Christ and of God than what the Roman Catholic Church was able to provide them with in the time they lived in.
To be fair, I am a recent convert. As such, it is easier for me to say what I just said than it is for someone born and raised in Evangelical Protestantism. Nonetheless, I think someone, and hopefully more than one, need to say it. This website is both an account of some of my own experience with the Christian Faith and of the way I understood the emergence of Sarah Palin as the Republican VP candidate in the 2008 US presidential elections. The latter is linked with the former from my point of view because Sarah Palin is such a gross caricature that it provides me with an opportunity to express with clarity the kind of uneasiness I had felt on many other occasions as I moved through the Evangelical milieu since my conversion in september of 2006. I hope that this website may prove to be helpful to others who strugle in their Faith and above all that it may glorify God.
