New
conspiracy theory!
Erik
Rush is a far far right-wing columnist with an obsession about Obama. His
current mania is the notion that Obama, working with the American Psychiatric
Association, is going to designate Christianity as a mental illness. Christians
would then be deprived of their rights and thrown into some ghastly
prison/hospital, or relegated to some second-class citizenship, like Jews in
Hitler’s Germany.
The
mere fact that Rush believes this is the surest sign that he is, in fact,
mentally ill. Obama is a devout Christian himself and has no intent whatsoever
to try to hijack the entire national psychiatric community for such an end.
But
what if he did?
Look
at the pathology. The most severe forms of mental illness are characterized by
personalities who cling bitterly to delusions that have no basis in reality,
contrary to all the evidence. Christian extremists -- the minority within the faith -- are much more likely to believe things
that are provably untrue: the creation myth in Genesis, heaven and hell, the
virgin birth, the resurrection, the ascension into heaven, the imposition of
sin on newborn infants, and the notion that a supernatural being agrees with
them and intends to destroy anyone who disagrees with them. Jesus rode a
dinosaur!
“God
is my special, magical, invisible friend. He can do anything, but you can't see
it. Of all the trillions of creatures in the world, he knows he, he loves me,
and that makes me better than you. When I do something bad, he washes it away.
And he will make me live forever, even after I die, although you won't see that
either. He's magic!”
And
by the same token, extreme Christians are much more likely to listen to Fox and
Limbaugh, slack-jawed, and buy into whatever laughably obvious lies they’re
peddling every day – Obama’s Kenyan birth, his intent to impose both Islam and
Communism on America even though they’re contradictory, Obama’s concentration
camps and death squads, his intent to kill all our grandmothers, etc etc.
Christianity,
at least as practiced by today’s evangelical extremists, is indeed a delusion. A manic
resistance to facing reality. Perhaps in his lucid moments Rush realizes that the
right-wing whackaloons are crazy as a sack of rats.
To truly appreciate the
insanity that accompanies the most potent strains of religious faith in this
country, one must look at the most rabid believers on their own turf.
To understand all this,
it is helpful to be familiar with what I call the White Trash Belt. After the
2008 election in which Obama beat McCain, researchers created a map to compare
the areas of the country where Obama did better in the voting than John Kerry had
done in 2004, and the areas in which Obama did worse than Kerry. In most of the
country Obama outperformed Kerry, because Obama beat McCain by almost 10
million votes, whereas Kerry lost to Bush by 3 million. But there was one
region in which Obama actually did worse than Kerry, because Obama is black:
the White Trash Belt. This Belt runs from West Virginia, down through the
Appalachians into Mississippi and Louisiana, and then up through Texas and
Oklahoma. Folks who just hate black people.
Even outside the White
Trash Belt, extreme Christians exhibit a wide range of debilitating delusions. Inside
the Belt it is worse. The White Trash Belt is home to many of the hard-core
tea-party people and hard-core evangelicals. They are very insular and very
suspicious of the influences of the modern world. Away from the eyes of
outsiders, they show their true beliefs in a wide-open, undiluted manner. Their
religious services can be a bit wild and woolly. And one technique used by
their leaders is to risk death right in the church, daring God to kill them in
front of their flock: doing things like drinking strychnine, or pretending to,
to show that God is on their side.
A particularly
fascinating practice is snake handling: to prove their faith, the preachers
handle poisonous snakes, dance with the snakes, beat tambourines, wave torches,
and speak in tongues, the latter practice being attributed by science to brain
damage, mental illness, hypnosis, and fakery. All this Barnum-and-Bailey
pack-‘em-in-the-pews carrying-on with the snakes is carried out by the same
people who warn that atheists are pagans.
The snake people often
refuse treatment when bitten by the snakes, and count on God to save them.
Sometimes God lets them die. I can’t say I blame him.
These practices are so
dangerous that even the local yokels in their statehouses had to take action. After
people kept getting kille by the snakes, Tennessee and Alabama banned
snake-handling. Kentucky only allows it in private homes. In West Virginia it
is still legal. In the old days they were hiding all this nonsense from
outsiders and policemen, but now they’re putting it all on display, in a
reality TV show.
Ironically they base
this on an extremely literal interpretation of scripture, and then go out and
eat picnic foods which a literal interpretation of the Bible would ban, such as
hot dogs made of pork, and cheeseburgers which involve meat and dairy on the
same plate.
In the Biblical tale
they use to justify speaking in tongues, Acts 2, some neutral observers drily
comment “I think they’ve had too much wine”, another reminder that
non-Christians have a better sense of humor than the believers.
Another practice
associated with the same hard-core Protestants is faith healing. This is a con
game which has been debunked many times; many children have died and their
parents have gone to jail for forbidding medical treatment: ever wonder why the
most unhealthy children are in the most devout Christian families? One of these
faith-healing con men, Oral Roberts, actually built a medical school, which thankfully
was shut down.
Closely related to
faith-healing is the belief that paranormal demons exist in the real world, and
that they can possess humans until they are exorcized. Demonic possession and
exorcism occurred so often in Israel during the time of Jesus that you have to
wonder if Satan had a gigantic franchise right in Jerusalem. Even today, some
people undergo exorcism weekly for years. Piyush Jindal, governor of Louisiana
and a potential presidential contender, believes in this stuff and took part in
an exorcism. Modern science classifies this stuff as dissociative identity
disorder, which is very severe and very difficult to treat.
So religious belief
really is a form of insanity that can really cause death.
Other religious strains
exhibit other signs of similar behavior. Like the primitive Protestants in
Appalachia, the illusions of some primitive Catholics can manifest themselves in
reenacting the martyrdom and passion of their church heroes, having themselves
whipped and scourged and crowned with thorns and crucified, indulging in hair
shirts and flagellation like the saints, and so forth. Shiite Muslims also whip
themselves to commemorate the martyrdom of the ancient Imam Hussein, and Sufi
Muslim dervishes do ecstatic dances.
A truly alarming facet of this mass insanity of Christianity is the question of The Rapture. The hard-core Jesus People disagree on the details, but apparently there will be a Rapture, in which God’s Chosen will physically fly into heaven, and then a terrible period of Tribulation on earth for everyone else. After that the world will see either the Second Coming or Third Coming of Jesus, long after his death, and then his physical reign on earth as king, for a thousand years, and then Judgment Day wherein a huge majority of mankind will be consigned to eternal hellfire.
The believers disagree on when all this will happen, and on what order these events will take place, and on how many times Jesus will rise from the dead, and on how long he will reign, and on who will be saved. But they believe that all this will literally, physically happen.
All of this apparently requires that these Jesus People load their cellars with guns and ammunition, as they comb the pages of the Book of Revelation, looking for clues as to what will happen: all the disasters which will befall the earth, the attack of the multi-headed animals, the fight with the dragon, the fight with Satan.
At the center of their fears is a chaotic vortex of conspiracy theories involving Obama (as an Anti-Christ figure), the IRS, gun confiscation, FEMA-run concentration camps, scary gay people, the UN, the Federal Reserve, Israel, Iraq, Iran, and the usual conspiracy-theory all-stars -- Jews, Communists, Masons, the Pope etc. Essentially the conspiracy-mongers sweep together everything that low-information white trash are afraid of, and tell these mouth-breathers that “It’s all connected! Jesus is coming to sort them all out, so be ready to join the fight!” A significant portion of this movement believes that a supernatural being is telling them to take their guns and rise up against the Usurper in Washington.
Absorb that for a minute: thousands and thousands of heavily-armed insane people, peering out their windows, clinging to their rifles, looking for multi-headed animals and dragons and Kenyan Muslim Marxists to slay. This is the rock-hard-core of the tea-flavored conservative movement that controls the Republican party, and in turn controls our Congress.
