OK this is domination (and Congressional) power-mad Christianists at their worst

Not an elegant title, but I am still blown away by the Rachel Maddow interview regarding The Family, which you can either see or read here.

Only to make it imperative that you visit, I will give you this snippet about a powerful, secretive Washington DC Christianist group that includes Senators and Congresscritters among its converts:

Maddow: Wow. When I read your book, The Family, when it first came out in hardback, my notes on um, I write notes in the flyleaf about what I was thinking about. And my notes about it, I went back and looked, were that it was essentially to promote, it saw its role as promoting American power, world wide, unfettered capitalism with no unions, no programs to help poor people, all with this idea that godly powerful rich men should get as many resources as possible personally, and they should just privately help everyone else. That is the impression that I was left with. Was I close?

[Author Jeff] Sharlet: That's dead on the money. The family began, it's the oldest Christian conservative organization in Washington and it goes back seventy years. And the founder believed that god gave him a new revelation saying that Christianity had gotten it wrong for two thousand years and that what most people think of as Christianity, as being about, you know, helping the weak and the poor and the meek and the down and out, he believes god came to him one night in April in 1935 and said what Christianity should really be about is building more power for the already powerful. And that these powerful men who were chosen by god can then if they want to dispense blessings to the rest of us, through a kind of trickle-down fundamentalism.

Words fail. Tomorrow maybe they won't, but tonight...

wow.

Comments

Nancy Willing said…

I remember watching while reading and pricking my ears a bit when she started this dialogue. Good stuff. WAY WHACK.

July 12, 2009 at 12:16 PM

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