THE HICKERBILLY ANTICHRIST: Bush and His Accidental Religious Dictatorship in America

UPDATE: Kevin Phillips, the Nixon conservative who draws a clear picture of the roots of the poisoned Bush family tree in American Dynasty, has just released American Theocracy, describing the rise of the asforementioned Religious Dictatorship in the United States. Bush as Antichrist, anyone?

I can tell you from my own experience that these emergent "evangelical Christians" are anything but Christ-like. They spend a good deal of time defining who is, and is not, a "Christian". It will amuse my friends to hear that I am not a Christian, and apparently hate Christians. This means that I am not THEIR kind of "Christian", and never will be.

Will there one day be a "Night of the Long Knives", in which they separate the wheat from the chaff and send the Catholics and the Quakers into exile with the pagans and the Buddhists and the homo-sexuals? Unlike the evangelicals, I'm don't pretend to know who's in and who's out, but I do know who gives the best parties.

Suggestion: When someone asks you if you're "born again", tell them you're still in labor. I used that on a childhood friend who had become an evangelical, and it shut him up.

This answer has the unusual virtue of being true; as a sort of Graham Greene Catholic, I'm always going to be wrestling like Jacob, squealing like Job, avoiding responsibility like Jonah and complaining about the Pharisees of the established church, the only Christ-like trait in my repertoire. The spiritual quest is not for sissies who need pat answers and reassurances, and that omits radicals, evangelicals and jihadists. I know there is more divinity in a woman's naked mound of Venus than in Jerry Falwell's smile, more warmth in a Beltaine fire than in George Bush's America, more awe in the revelations of science than in the stupidity of the Kansas school board, more joy in the muscles of a leaping cat than in any of Dr. Mengele Frist's grotesque experiments. Maybe instead of "What Would Jesus Do", we should ask "Who Would Jesus Rather Hang Out With?"

UPDATE ON AN UPDATE:
This week Bush was speaking in Ohio, and he got that animal-in-the-headlights-look again when a woman asked an unrehearsed question about Kevin Phillips' book, which "makes the point that members of your administration have reached out to prophetic Christians who see the war in Iraq and the rise of terrorism as signs of the apocalypse. Do you believe this? And if not, why not?"
Bush: "Hmmm." [Long pauses; this answer took perhaps 70+ seconds] "Uhh, hah -- ummm -- I, the answer is -- I haven't really thought of it that way, heh, heh. Heh. Here's how I think of it. Ummm -- heh heh. First I've heard of that, by the way, I, ah -- uhh -- the, uhh -- I, I guess I'm more of a practical fella. Uhh. I vowed after September the 11th that I would do everything I could to protect the American people. And, uhh -- my attitude, of course, was affected by the attacks. I knew we were at a war. I knew that the enemy, obviously, had to be sophisticated, and lethal, to fly hijacked airplanes, uhh, into -- facilities that would, we would, killing thousands of people, innocent people, doin' nothing, just sittin' there goin' to work."
One would hope that the President of the United States would immediately assure us that our dear little babies are not going to be swept up to Heaven or cast into Eternal Fire anytime soon. Throw us a bone here, Mr. President Ya Crack-Ass Cracker, Sir! (Respect the office, if not the man). Maybe this isn't Heinlein's theocracy or Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale, but Bush as Greg Stillson in Stephen King's Dead Zone.

See also: Remember When? , Christopher Hitchens and "The Case for Mocking Religion", Grateful Children with Missing Arms, Memo from Jesus to Torture Caucus, Cognitive Dissonance, others.