UPDATE VII:Catholic League president Bill Donohue makes the following observation regarding Mike Huckabee's "disappointment and surprise" that McCain received Hagee's endorsement:
If Senator Hillary Clinton and Senator Barack Obama were fighting over the support of Louis Farrakhan, we’d say they’re nuts. So what are we to conclude about McCain’s embrace of Hagee, and Huckabee’s lament for not getting the bigot’s endorsement?
Spiritual Brothers JANUARY 6, 2006 UPDATE:I have an update on John Hagee. The idea that any news channel--even a bottom-feeding operation like Fox News--would hold up an ignorant nutjob like Hagee as an expert on Iran is inexcusable. This guy is scary. (Updated below also) Original Post: Late last week, WorldNetdDaily.com added a new columnist whose rantings fit in perfectly with WND's paranoid worldview: John C. Hagee. Hagee is the pastor of a mega-church,Cornerstone Church in San Antonio and is the CEO of John Hagee Ministries. Hagee is a major-league right-wing nutjob. I became familiar with Hagee back in the 1990's when I saw his show on the Trinity Broadcasting Network but I had to go to the library to do some additional research on Hagee--the reason being that I often confuse the words and actions of Hagee with two other rotund Clinton-bashing right-wing preachers, Jerry Falwell and Billy James Hargis (more on them later). For those of you who come to this site because you generally agree with me, it would not surprise me if you had not heard of Hagee. Nevertheless, Hagee is a key player in the religious right and has had several bestselling books. One book from the 1990's, Days of Deception, has as the first two chapters, "Witchcraft in the White House," and "Who Killed Vince Foster?" (the latter chapter cites heavily from Christopher Ruddy and The Limbaugh Letter).
What causes me to confuse Hagee with the other two preachers is that all three have the same paranoid worldview regarding Bill Clinton. Most people reading this are familiar with Falwell's anti-Clinton conspiracies. Hargis was a radio preacher who was very influential in the 1960's. He was the forerunner of right-wing preachers like Falwell and Hagee. Hargis built a broadcasting empire along with a mega-church. He had a simple message that berated communists, liberals, feminists, and hippies (who were indistinguishable to him). In his book, Why I Fight for a Christian America, Hargis had stern words for the counterculture: "...[B]oys let their hair grow like a woman's, dress in clothing that we used to relate to tramps and bums, and engage in permissiveness on the lowest possible bestial level..." As luck would have it, soon after Hargis wrote those words, some interesting events occurred. Hargis had presided over the wedding of two of his Bible college students, who on their wedding night confessed to each other that each was not chaste at the time of the wedding. What made this particularly odd was that both bride and groom had been deflowered by the same person: The Reverend Hargis. It also came out that Hargis diddled members of his college choir, "The All-American Kids." When confronted about his penchant for buggery, Hargis took the biological determinism approach to homosexuality, attributing his behavior to "genes and chromosomes." Hargis fell from grace but later attempted to make a comeback. In the 1990's, I received his Christian Crusade newspaper in which Hargis wrote about the same Clinton conspiracies as Falwell and Hagee.
Pastor John Hagee's Right-Wing Bloggers John Hagee is one of those people who, at least until recent years, avoided mainstream media scrutiny because he had operated in fringe circles (I only heard about Hagee in the 1990's because I watched him on the Trinity Broadcasting Network--run by Paul Crouch and his Tammy Fay wannabe wife Jan for ironic enjoyment of Hagee's bombast--see addendum; I have written about Hagee before he made the national news with the McCain endorsement--click here, here, here, and here).
When Hagee's anti-Catholicism, anti-gay hate, bigotry against Muslims, and warmongering were given widespread media exposure after McCain enthusiastically accepted Hagee's endorsement, one thing I noticed was that the right's blogosphere was uncharacteristically silent. This is in sharp contrast to when Hagee gave a speech at AIPAC a year ago. I was one of the only people to note Scott Johnson hilariously cloying response to Hagee's bellicose speech. Johnson wrote: "[Hagee's] speech had me crying." In his post on the Hagee speech, Johnson cites another right-wing blogger, Pamela Geller of the Atlas Shrugs blog. Johnson embedded a video of part of Hagee's speech on his blog and noted that Geller was the person who recorded it. She is also the person on the audio portion of the video who can be heard repeatedly shouting, "I Love you! Woo Hoo Hoo!"(below is the video in question). Also, if you go to around the 4:00 mark on the video, Hagee has a message for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: "I have something to say to the president of Iran: 'Mr. Ahmadinejad, don't threaten America!" You can hear Geller shout in applause, "Yeah, baby! Woo Hoo Hoo! I love it! [in a redneck voice] Kiss my Grits![unintelligible]"
Addendum: Gone Camping Were it not for the fact that fundamentalist buffoons like Hagee, the late Jerry Falwell, and Hal Lindsey have been taken seriously by policymakers, they would be good fodder for camp enjoyment, much like crushed velvet paintings of The Last Supper found in Tijuana bazaars.
I realize that many of your reading it consider my intellectual slumming unattractive. It does seem kind of smug for me to have enjoyed Hagee's sermons for their unintentional hilarity. I acknowledge that mocking the uneducated is unseemly. But at least you know where I stand. Let me ask this: what is worse: an ironic, snarky hipster or someone with an Ivy League degree like Johnson who takes a dangerous extremist like Hagee seriously and gives him credibility.
Mike Huckabee Hangs out with Pastor John Hagee Yesterday I was flipping through the channels and noticed that John Hagee's show was on. As I watched, I was so taken aback by his rhetoric that I recorded part of the sermon. It was a Christmas sermon and contrasts starkly with the Christmas sermons I heard when I was a child. Later in the day, I found out that presidential candidate Mike Huckabee was Hagee's guest (I didn't see Huckabee on the broadcast and don't know if it was the one in which Huckabee appeared).
The thing about members of the clergy like Hagee and the late Jerry Falwell is that they graft their own redneck, bellicose, authoritarian, tribalistic, and bigoted views onto Jesus and other biblical figures. For instance, when Falwell was opposing Martin Luther King's call for civil rights in the 1960's, he justified Jim Crow culture by claiming that blacks were stricken with the "curse of Ham" and thus it was biblical that they be subservient to whites.
Likewise, Hagee projects his power-hungry, war-loving, puritanical, aching-for-a-crusade mentality onto Jesus. I have previously written about how policy makers and media people have accorded legitimacy to Hagee's apocalyptic views (click here and here)--developments that are truly frightening. Here are some excerpts from Hagee's Christmas sermon:
And then there's this self-serving, self-absorbed, hedonistic society of ours. People say, "Well, what about my rights?" You don't have any, darling. . .
The idea of a universal peace for a Christ-rejecting, pleasure-loving world, enslaved by greed and materialism is an illusion and an absolute farce. It is never going to happen. . .
The Christmas message is: The baby Jesus in the manger is now the ruling, living, reigning, mighty, all-knowing Son of God-- [Shouting] with power and glory--and he's coming back. [loud applause] He is the lamb that has become the lion of the tribe of Judah. He is the baby of Bethlehem's manger who is now King of Kings and Lord of Lords. . . He's going to rule the world with a wrought of iron. He's not going to ask you if you will obey. He's going to make you obey because he's King of King and Lord of Lords.
Revenge of the Cultic Kitsch-mongers: A Weakness of Democracy In a previous post, I mentioned how I used to watch Hagee's sermons on the Trinity Broadcasting Network during the 1990's (of course, with plenty of ironic detachment from the subject matter to enjoy it as kitsch). I haven't enjoyed his sermons since I learned that Hagee has the ear of the Bush administration and is being taken seriously. This man is a fanatic who bases his foreign policy views on his interpretation of the Book of Revelation that nuclear war is inevitable and desirable because it will usher in the Rapture (allowing Hagee and his tribe to be whisked into Heaven leaving non-fundamentalists to deal with that cosmic buzzkill, the Great Tribulation).
Although Hagee's foreign policy views are cartoonish and dangerous, that doesn't prevent him from being courted by national politicians and the media. Why is this the case? Authoritarian cult leaders use their power over people to attempt to seize even more power. For instance, Hagee has used the mass media to gain a sizable congregation and, thus, political power. Similarly, Sun Myung Moon has used his religion (through fraud and deception) to become a billionaire who can line the pockets of influential politicians and media figures. Thus, in today's society, we have a situation in which dangerous megalomaniacs like Hagee and Moon exert power because of the number of people they control or the amount of cash they can spend on unprincipled politicians. This is scary.
UPDATE: This January, Sarah Posner's book God's Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters will be published. The book looks at Hagee and other Rapture-ready preachers and their relationship with the GOP. The forward is by Joe Conason.
Shocking--Even For Fox News: Neil Cauto Invites Demented Loon to Discuss Life-or-Death Issues I like David Corn's work (disclosure: I link to his blog) but I disagree with his and other progressives' decision to go on Fox News and give legitimacy to this pro-GOP political operation. Doing this gives many uninformed and/or casual viewers the unwarranted impression that Fox News is a journalistic outlet. My view was underscored yesterday. Corn appeared on Fox's Your World with Neil Cavuto and it was surreal. The issue was the situation in Iran and Cavuto paired Corn with John Hagee--whom Cavuto called "an expert on Iran."
Hagee has several books that address foreign policy--the only one I was familiar with before today was Beginning of the End: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Coming Antichrist. Here's a brief abstract of the book (which is kind of unnecessary because the title itself doesn't exactly indicate the basis for it was sober empirical analysis):
John Hagee explorers the eschatological implications of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the peace process Israel is heading towards. Hagee continues with a long series of citings that show that Jesus is the Messiah and that he will come again. The last part of his book is dedicated to his interpretation of prophetic literature in the Bible. With his interpretation he creates a sequence of events that he believes will come to pass that will ultimately lead to the creation of a New Heaven, New Earth, and New Jerusalem.
It's scary that an international platform would be given to someone who believes that if a catastrophic nuclear exchange occurs then he and other true believers will be magically whisked into heaven (leaving people like me to remain on Earth to dodge the suddenly unmanned cars of born again drivers on their way to their reward).
What should Corn have said? I don't know. I only know what I would have said had I been in his position: "Having a raving loon like Hagee on to discuss deadly serious policy issues is just one more reason out of thousands not to trust Fox News."
John Hagee is Really, Really Scary I've written about Hagee before (click here and here). Sarah Posner has an update on Hagee. The man is a maniac. Hagee reminds me of something Blaise Pascal said over 300 years ago, "Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."
In other news about the sectarian right, Jerry Falwell uses his NewsMax column to promote his indoctrination camp for children--Falwell once quipped that "Christians [referring to his flock], like slaves and soldiers, ask no questions.
UPDATE: I forgot to mention this in the original post. Last Sunday, when I got up to watch the Sunday Morning political shows, I tuned into Hagee's television program in which he preaches to his San Antonio congregation and witnessed something odd: he told a joke that was at Henry Kissinger's expense. The joke is an old one (I heard of variation of it when I was a kid) and went like this: There was a plane with the pilot and Henry Kissinger, a hippie, and a Catholic priest. The pilot told the passenger that there was engine failure and that the plane would crash but there were only three parachutes. The pilot took the first parachute and jumped out of the plane. Henry Kissinger told the two remaining passengers that he was the most brilliant person alive and that the world needed him so it was necessary for him to live and grabbed the second parachute and jumped out of the plane. The priest and the hippie were apparently left with one parachute between them when the hippie told the priest to relax becasue, "The most brilliant person alive just jumped out of a plane with my knapsack."
Old News But Important I discovered something on the net: back in January, John McCain had a secret meeting with the Reverend John Hagee who is aching for for nuclear war with Iran because that will lead to The Rapture, a joyous event in which Hagee believes that he and other fundamentalists will be instantaneously whisked into heaven by Jesus--leaving non-fundamentalist Christians, Buddhists, freethinkers, and unbaptized babies to fend for themselves in The Great Tribulation.