Picking up Where We Left Off. Teabagging Wingnuts, and the Apocalypse-for-fun-and-profit, Angle. Courtesy of Frank Schaeffer.

I am well sure I have posted his stuff before. Frank Schaeffer is a fugee from the Religious Right, who is a Born Again member of the rational world. And yes, Virginia, there are Rational Christians.

Anyway . . . he deconstructs the link between the militiamen (fucking terrorists) picked up this past week, and the evangelical christian cult of victimology and Armageddon. Not Rep. Beohner's metaphoric Armageddon. These crazy bastids (and I don't just mean the militiamen) take that shit literally.

Here is a good description of the shit I speak of (and Schaeffer is kind about it):

Given that Revelation is now being hyped as the literal -- even desired -- road map to Armageddon, it's worth pausing to note that it's nothing more than a bizarre pastoral letter that was addressed to seven specific churches in Asia at the end of the first century by someone (maybe John or maybe not) who appears to have been far from well when he wrote it. In any case, the letter was not intended for use outside of its liturgical context, not to mention that it reads like Jesus on acid.

I just call that the impossibility that some alleged prophet received true prophesy, on account of it reading like a really shitty screenplay written by a crack addict during a particularly violent withdrawal. Perhaps that really is not that much harsher (or less accurate.) Anyway . . . .

One last good bit from the essay and then the link.

The words left behind are ironically what the books are about, but not in the way their authors intended. The evangelical/fundamentalists, from their crudest egocentric celebrities to their "intellectuals" touring college campuses trying to make evangelicalism respectable, have been left behind by modernity. They won't change their literalistic, anti-science, anti-education, anti-everything superstitions, so now they nurse a deep grievance against "the world." This has led to a profound fear of the "other."

Jenkins and LaHaye provide the ultimate revenge fantasy for the culturally left behind against the "elite." They do theologically what Sarah Palin does politically: divide the world and America into "Them" and Us."

The Left Behind franchise holds out hope for the self-disenfranchised that at last everyone will know "we" were right and "they" were wrong. They'll know because Spaceship Jesus will come back and whisk us away, leaving everyone else to ponder just how very lost they are because they refused to say the words, "I accept Jesus as my personal savior" and join our side while there was still time! Even better: Jesus will kill all those smart-ass, Democrat-voting, over educated people who have been mocking us!

All the folks in Michigan did was decide to start the killing a little early.

Knowingly or unknowingly, Jenkins and LaHaye cashed in on years of evangelical/fundamentalists' imagined victim-hood -- something that is now key to understanding the Tea Party movement.

Frank Schaeffer on the Evangelical Death Cult Milita and the Teabaggers.


Ya. As much as I would like to simply pigeonhole the teabagging crazies, there are a lot of ingredients that go into that Psycho Gumbo recipe that makes them the strange brew they are.

Ok. I'll stop there.