tsigprofit,
Re: Le Nouvel Observateur article on Evangelicals.
lenouvelobshebdo.nouvelobs.com
Here's the first 1/3 or so of the article. My translation. No warranty of accuracy, but it is pretty close:
Evangelicals: The Sect That Wants to Conquer the World
They are part of the religious viewpoint which is spreading the fastest today. There are already 500 million who believe in Armageddon, the final and approaching battle between the forces of the Good and the Evil. They are proselytizing on television, the Internet, via video games and science-fiction novels to convert the masses. George W Bush, along with a number of his cabinet secretaries and advisers, speak openly of their Messianic vision of the world and of the future.. Are they extremists?
The Crosses of the Apocalypse
What to make of a man who claims a direct line to the Almighty? Who sees himself invested in a divine mission? Who believes that the Apocalypse is near? What to say when this man is the president of the United States? At the end of the winter of 2002-3, a few weeks before the Iraq War, George W Bush tries one last time to convince the French president with his arguments, to convince him finally that the cause is right and that stuggle for the liberation of Iraq is the will of God. Nothing less. With all his remonstrations, Bush, Jr. fulminates against the "State terrorists", stigmatizing the "axis with the Evil", evoking Gog and Magog. Gog and Magog? Jacques Chirac remains quiet about the latter, struck by the enigmatic reference. An adviser of the Elysée (the French equivalent of the White House), requested to quickly decipher the quotation, ends up finding the reference defined by the Protestant Federation of France. It was meant to say "the End of Time". According to the prophet Ezéchiel, Gog and Magog will break up Babylon for Israel. However Gog and Magog are the incarnation of the forces of the Evil, and Babylon, which is drawn up in the surroundings of Baghdad, was restored by... Saddam Hussein!
The most powerful man in the world is neither a fool of high flight nor insane. He's quite simply faithful to a curious Church, Protestant, expansionist, millenarist and apocalyptic. George Bush is a Born Again Christian, literally a Christian born a second time. Born Again Christians are a movement which make up the very dynamic and very prosperous Evangelical Churches of Jesus Christ, whose followers are called "evangelicals". These Churches, which in many aspects evoke a federation of sects, intend to convert America before conquering the entire world! No more and no less. With a man like Bush in the White House, they're already off to a good start.
The evangelical doctrine, whose home terrain remains America, is today the current cult which has had the greatest growth in converts since World War II. To the detriment of English Catholicism, the historical Protestant Churches (Baptists, methodists) and even of Islam. The figures describing this colossal rise: 4 million evangelicals in 1940 - of a total of 560 million Christians -, the évangelicals are today 500 million, NeoPentacostalists and various Charismatics, out of 2 billion Christians, that is to say one on four! It is estimated that 52,000 conversions occur per day. Already, there are 14,000 evangelical denominations, encompassing about 1 million churches employing 1 million pastors full-time. Harvey Cox, professor of theology at Harvard and the author of the "Return of God: Travel in a Pentacostal Country" (Desclée de Brouwer), predicts that the current evangelical movement should touch, by 2050, one out of every two disciples of Christ and will become the dominant religion of the 21st Century. Born Again Christians, as they identify themselves thus owe their conversion, their second birth, not to a traditional baptism but to a direct contact, with a meeting "of man with man, of man with God" i.e., with Jesus. Jesus, whom George W. Bush met at the age of 40, after he drank too much, and abandoned that life. The Reverend Billy Graham, the "Evangelical Pope", was the ambassador to Christ and translator for the future President. This one ceased drinking and changed life. Being reborn in Christ gave him wings and helped him achieve the post of governor of Texas then on to the White House. From there he can affirm his determination "to promote a biblical vision of the world"
(At this point, I discovered a lot of rehashing of information we've all read before, so I've cut my effort short.)
The concluding paragraphs reiterate the theme of Evangelism being conjoined with a global expansion of the concept of Manifest Destiny, as expanded from the Monroe Doctrine by Senator Beveridge during the Spanish-American War and now incorporating the Moslem world into the intended expansion of the American frontier.
Basically, the Evangelical movement is the most virulent religious mania to have swept the planet since Islam expanded from the 7th to the 10th Centuries. It is a combination of Messianism, tribalism, nationalism and radicalism.
And these lunatics have the keys to 20,000 nuclear devices, plenty enough to fulfill their desires for Armageddon. |
