Rebranding Jesus

As a Christian nation America has worked miracles with the faith. It bears repeating that when Church and State wed, Hell pays for the reception for the child of the union is Death.

Actually. were not really a Christian nations, we're a Christianist nation. Christians follow the teachings of Jesus and do good work; Christianists use the faith as a launchpad for their power trips. The "God" in "In God We Trust" is a Christianist creation.

Christianism is not easy for a religion whose founder preached a doctrine of peace and humility. (Though there is a rumor making the rounds of the religious right that Christ’s injunction to turn the other cheek was a mistranslation. What he really said was, “Turn the other's cheek with a fistful of knuckles.”) However, with God, all things are possible, s0 Jesus has been tranformed into a religious warrior marching to the stirring beat of "Onward Christian Soldiers."

America was not the first to pick up the scourging sword of Christianism. The conquistadors who swarmed over Latin America bought missionaries with them who gave the indigenous people the classic choice between salvation or the stake. Salvation brought with it the redemptive act of being worked to death in the mines, thus speeding up the joyous reunion between the saved soul and God.

It’s the “mission” thing that does it. Woodrow Wilson believed America had a mission to “Christianize the world,” which he tried to do from the deck of a gunboat and in the trenches of World War I. His predecessor,

Theodore Roosevelt, spoke of the “long struggle for the uplift of humanity,” an uplift the Filipinos got a taste of in the wake of the Spanish American War when several hundred thousands of them were cut down in a noble effort to teach them the benefits of the American Way.

This missionary zeal is driven by the conviction that the White, Anglo Saxon male of northern European descent represents the acme of evolutionary development.

We sit on quite a peak, one that has given the world nukes, death camps, a bloated military-industrial complex, the redefinition of freedom as economic exploitation, Gitmo, a prison population second only to China’s, the Patriot Act, permanent warfare, a thoroughly corrupted Congress, the installation and support of despots, the Washington Consensus and feral capitalism.

Is it any wonder that the world is beginning to think that maybe we don’t set a very good example.