I’ve been reading Mel White’s book, Religion Gone Bad; The Hidden Danger of the Religious Right and I’m surprised. If you got in my face and asked me why I’m surprised, I suppose I’d try to stammer out I had hidden expectations, but that isn’t quite it.
This book is not going where I expected it to go. It is challenging me in deep places. Did I expect some of the themes in the book? Yes, of course. I expected the founder of Soulforce to speak out about ‘culture’ war and politics and his history. I think what I was not expecting was the how.
White as much as anyone has reason to be angry, discouraged, fed up, entitled to retreat – instead he points over and over again with hope, faith, love, toughness and compassion to a risen Christ.
Fredrick Clarkson at Talk2Action looks at a column in World Net Daily written by Rabbi Daniel Lapin, focusing on 30 books Lapin calls ‘propaganda blitzkreig.’
Whites book is one.
Being an unsalvagable news junkie I’ve followed the Rabbi and dug into his background a bit over the years, particularly his association with the Abramoff scandal in the US. As an editor at Spero News, I asked an outstanding writer - Kathryn Joyce of The Revealer - to find time someday to do a story on what the two of us have workingly dubbed: TBN, the Rabbi trail.
Kathryn is finishing a book and earning her bread and butter with paid pieces, and I hope someday she’ll be able to find time to turn her formidable skills into an article that will not put the bread and butter on her table. But I digress.
Clarkson dissembles Lapin’s column with such ease, it’s almost embarrassing, and gives good background into Lapin’s history. Good post, head on over. I don’t know if I’ll ever understand the endless drive in the anger of the religious right. The anger is expressed in dizzy words…
anti-Christian, truly alarming, seriously jeopardized, proliferation of anti-Christian print propaganda, hate-filled catalog, I fear for, latent anti-Christianism of America’s social, economic and academic secular elites, anti-Christian army of the secular left, carefully constructed campaign, Fervent zealots of secularism are flinging themselves…
Dizzy yet?
I think perhaps it’s more important to understand how to keep one’s head clear and focused in the face of it. I cannot address the majority of the books on his ‘list’ but I can say he is wrong about the couple I have read. They are deciding not anti-Christian, and most certainly not anti-Christ.
