An odd combination of piety and ghosts.
Creepy image, isn’t it? Especially since George Washington was a Deist—so what’s his ghost doing there?
I found this at a Salon.com weblog referring to the Save America Now website. Some Evangelicals are putting together a video that they intend to show lots and lots of times on TV before the election. This is because one of them got a prophecy that 2004 was an important year.
Assuming the prophecy is true (for the sake of argument) I don’t know that this necessarily means the election is what God finds most important about the year. Christians may recall that Jesus never expected the politicians of the first century to fix the problems of society; his message was to the people. Then, as now, politics was an ungodly source of power. When God wants us to pray for things, I think he wants us to pray for elections about as much as he wants us to pray for World Series winners. God could really give a crap.
So these evangelicals are wasting their time and money—sorry, God’s time and money—pushing for Bush. Sure, they say on their site that it’s not important whether you’re Republican or Democrat. (And it really isn’t, so long as you’re voting for Bush.) But if they really trusted God, or their petitions to him, to take care of the election, they wouldn’t be asking for money, would they?
Comments…
Mori commented,
I hold it to be a different thing to pray that one man in particular succeeds over another, than to pray that the best man suited for the job succeeds.
At any rate, if they are so convinced that one man in particular should succeed—must succeed—why is it remarkable that they should pray for him? Furthermore, is it fair that they should ask their creator to bestir Himself on this mission without doing some small part themselves?
What disturbs me is that their actions betray that they’re not looking to God for direction, and that they’ve presumed to know the mind of God—he’s on Bush’s side.
What’s the typical human response to a crisis? Political might or fund-raisers. What’s God’s typical response? Something bizarre and counter-intuitive that obviously shows he had a hand in it. Something that points out that human effort is barely a factor. The “God helps those who help themselves” mentality is very popular, particularly among Americans, but hardly biblical. God helps those who humble themselves.
If the Bush supporters actually did know God’s will in this, they would behave with less panic, less anger, and more confidence. To use Jesus’s terms, their fruits would be different. How are their fruits any different than the Kerry people?