And repent of being easily led and manipulated by the moneyed classes:"...one memo highlighted in a Capitol Hill hearing Wednesday that [Michael] Scanlon, a former aide to Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Tx., sent the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana to describe his strategy for protecting the tribe's gambling business. In plain terms, Scanlon confessed the source code of recent Republican electoral victories: target religious conservatives, distract everyone else, and then railroad through complex initiatives.
Here's some of the memo:
"The wackos get their information through the Christian right, Christian radio, mail, the internet and telephone trees...Simply put, we want to bring out the wackos to vote against something and make sure the rest of the public lets the whole thing slip past them."
If you've been following this in the WashPost, you'll know Christian orgs were courted (and paid by a gambling firm) in order to mobilize the unthinking sheep into turning *against* an anti-gambling bill. (Well, that's one scandalous part of what happened.)
Read rest at Salon.
Many of today's evangelicals willfully confuse loyalty to the 'Word of God' (of which most are almost completely illiterate according to evangelical polls) with naive 'loyalty' to any personality who flashes the "Jesus" card.
Why is that? I'll answer with Annie Lenox lyrics (which I've modified): "Some of them want to lie, some of them want to be lied to."
And why do so many enjoy being lied to, or at least setting up the preconditions for such an outcome? The act of allowing others to do one's thinking, of easing back into effortless trust and blind belief in people while assuring oneself you're on the 'winning team' is in itself a sensate experience. It brings to mind C.S. Lewis' description of "the Southerners" in "Pilgrim's Recess" with their fateful edging toward "the smudging of all frontiers, the relaxation of all resistances, dream, opium, darkness, death, and the return to the womb."
Oh I know, these words are only applicable to the "others," the architects of societal decay, such Christians would insist. "We are merely catalog the catastrophe" they would protest, "We don't participate in it."
Those allowing themselves to be manipulated like the way the fantasy feels. For one, such passivity and acquiesence provides a counterfeit sense of the fulfillment of one's (biblical and)societal responsibilities. Counterfeit experiences are always embraced because they offer some sensate benefit.
In this I argue, such evangelicals ironically have the same core motivations as hedonists. So how can they criticize the latter?
