You Say You Want A Revolution-- No, Not YOU... The Heavily Armed, Violent Freaks On The Far Right

Frederick Clarkson has penned an important essay for Religion Dispatches about calls on the religionist right for revolution. In the video above, NY Times best-selling author Eric Metaxas, is equating Obama with the Nazis and you'll even hear something about "bullets." In Metaxas' fevered mind Obama is Hitler and America needs to stop him now. Metaxas sounds perfectly reasonable-- he isn't drooling and screaming-- until you listen closely to what he's saying and realize he's actually mentally ill. Equating a regulation in the Affordable Care Act that requires employer insurance packages to include contraception coverage with Nazi atrocities probably makes a lot of sense to people who follow Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Michele Bachmann... but it's this kind of hysterical hate talk-- this time is plain vanilla wrapping-- that is tearing the country apart.

“This HHS mandate,” Metaxas warned almost matter-of-factly, “is so oddly similar to where [anti-Nazi German theologian Dietrich] Bonhoeffer found himself” early in the Nazi era. “If we don’t fight now, if we don’t really use all our bullets now, we will have no fight five years from now. It’ll be over. This it. We’ve got to die on this hill. Most people say, oh no, this isn’t serious enough. Its just this little issue. But it’s the millimeter... its that line that we cross. I’m sorry to say that I see these parallels. I really wish I didn’t.”

This is what Clarkson means when he explains how elite Christian Right "thinkers" are imagining revolution and encouraging whoever gets suckered into listening to their bullshit to do the same. Clarkson says that this doesn't necessarily mean that they are organizing or stockpiling bullets. "But it does mean," he says, "that they are trying out giving people a vision." And it's not just Metaxas. Prominent Opus Dei Catholic priest C. John McCloskey has a 30 year look back from the year 2030 describing how the Church was persecuted; that Catholics and evangelicals joined forces in a bloody civil war; and succeeded in breaking up the U.S. into independent regions. If Ayn Rand hadn't been an atheist she and John McCloskey might actually have been parents in more than just a spiritual way to freaks-of-selfishness like Paul Ryan, Alan Greenspan, Ron Johnson, and the idelogues of today's Republican Party-- though not yesterday's Republican Party:

McCloskey recently published an update of his essay. “I-- or perhaps my thesis” he wrote, “received quite a bit of vitriolic criticism from the elite mainstream media and even from the late Tim Russert on Meet the Press. A goodly number of faithful Catholic writers also found it dark and threatening, however, although I had intended it to be positive and optimistic.” “My avatar priest,” he continued, “looked back from the vantage point of 2030 to reflect on recent ‘history’: the story of American Catholics who became confessors and martyrs to the faith as the federal government of the ‘Culture of Death’ persecuted them.” In his original essay, McCloskey’s avatar, Fr. Charles, explained how “the great battles over the last 30 years over the fundamental issues of the sanctity of marriage, the rights of parents, and the sacredness of human life have been of enormous help in renewing the Church and to some extent, society.” McCloskey’s literary device allows him to avoid openly seditious language, while suggesting that conservative Catholics and allied evangelicals should prepare for civil war.

It's another dimension to consider when the national debate on gun control resumes in light of the mass murder in Aurora... if it does. Delusional priests-- and what priest isn't, to one extent or another-- with assault rifles.