This Youtube currently making the rounds in the blogosphere juxtaposes quotes from self-professed Christian elected officials about their love of Ayn Rand and quotes from Rand herself during an interview with Mike Wallace.
That the religious right would embrace not just a self-avowed atheist, but one whose atheism was rooted in the notion that religion was in the illegitimate business of altruism, shouldn’t compute.
Politics, as we know, makes for strange bedfellows, although one doubts Rand would be pleased with the invocation of her name during, say, an alter call.
That god can use nonbelievers for his or her purpose has been a long-standing tenant of the fundamentalist Christian orthodoxy. But for those of us who sat in the pews in the early days of the formation of the Christian right movement [in my case, the pews of the Rev. Tim LaHaye’s Scott Memorial Baptist Church in Southern California] it’s hard to imagine the movement would compromise in such magnanimous ways on its journey toward subsuming the Republican Party.
From its embrace of like-minded conservative Catholics and Jews, who fundamentalist Christians still believe will be spending their eternities in the lake of fire, to its love of elected officials who would treat the 10 Commandments as merely a suggested guide for living, the movement has step-stoned its way to power by rejecting everything it preached when it first started gathering signatures for the Gipper. [Perhaps its support of the nation’s only divorced President, and a non-church-going Hollywood actor at that, was an early indication of what was to come.]
It should be no surprise, then, that the atheist Ayn Rand, with her utter contempt for those whom Jesus most cared for – the poor, the disadvantaged, the outcasts, is up for sainthood while the mere mention of bringing tax rates for the rich back to a level that the movement’s beloved Reagan found acceptable is nothing short of a Stalin-esque attempt to push the country toward communism.
Politics is a dirty business, no doubt. And everyone has a right to play, a right to form a movement that can throw its weight around Washington to seek legislation that reflects its values, but by groveling at the feet of Ayn Rand and its aligning itself with the Tea Party, the Christian right has lost all sense of its faith-based roots. It can no longer claim any distinct value as a god-ordained movement. It’s simply another hypocritical, if powerful, force within the culture.
And a stain on the body politic.
– Mitch Hurst
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEsjo8gt2VY
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5ZKEuRrR3E
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