Posted on 08/24/2007 9:43:29 AM PDT by SirLinksalot
For several weeks CNN has been hyping their miniseries God’s Warriors as an “unprecedented six-hour television event.” The series dedicates two hours each to “God’s Jewish Warriors,” “God’s Muslim Warriors,” and “God’s Christian Warriors.” Prior to the first airing, CNN invited several bloggers to preview a few clips from the series and to submit a question for Christiane Amanpour to be answered during a special webcast.
The three clips provided by CNN each highlighted one of the “fundamentalist” branches of the three Abrahamic faiths: the segment on Jews focused on theocratic Israeli settlers, including the man who assassinated Yitzhak Rabin; the segment on Muslims focused on theocratic British students, including the London subway bombers; the segment on Christians focused on Jerry Falwell and Liberty University.
I asked Amanpour if the juxtaposition could be viewed as guilt by association, equating Falwell with religious fanatics who are driven to murder. Her response was that the intention was to “look at the totality of the spectrum [of religious political involvement], from the violent to the legitimate.” She reiterated that the producers had no intention of creating a “moral equivalency” least of all “in the tactics used.”
Much of the criticism leveled against the series so far has focused on this perceived equivalence of American Christians with suicide bombers and political assassins. But this misses a broader point. The producers of the series are not merely attempting to establish a moral equivalency, but rather promoting an equivalency of ideology. According to their narrative, Falwell, the “religious Right,” and other conservative Christians may not be violent, but like the fundamentalist Jews and Muslims they are attempting to establish a theocracy.
Theocracy, which literally means “rule by the deity,” is the name given to political regimes that claim to represent God on earth both directly and immediately. The role of the theocratic leader is to play the role of both priest and king, implementing and enforcing divine laws.
The term was first used by the Jewish historian Josephus to describe the way the Jews lived under the direct government of God himself. In ancient Israel everyone was a direct subject of Jehovah, who ruled over all and communicated through the prophets. This arrangement was short-lived, and the Jews eventually rejected theocratic rule in favor of an earthly king. While the sovereign did not always enforce all of the laws of the former theocracy, he retained the authority given to him “by God.” During the medieval era a similar version of this concept was adopted by the Roman Catholic Church. The church instituted a form of Caesaropapism — a political system in which the head of the state is also the head of the church and supreme judge in religious matters.
Yet even though the concept of theocracy has its roots in Jewish, Catholic, and even Islamic history, the term has somehow become associated with conservative Protestant Christianity. Part of it can be explained as a result of a misunderstanding of the relationship evangelicals have toward both the church and state.
There is no denying the existence of fringe conservative Christians who subscribe to dominionism and seek to have the nation governed by their peculiar understanding of biblical law. But their actual numbers are negligible and their political influence all but nonexistent. As a group, dominionists slightly outnumber black separatists, though they are dwarfed by the number of “blue state” secessionists. In contrast, more than half of American evangelicals are either Baptists or nondenominational — groups that don’t even want a centralized church government much less a central government controlled by the church.
Despite this obvious fact, the specter of theocracy continues to haunt the secular Left. “Bush gets mandate for theocracy,” cried the Village Voice’s James Ridgeway after the 2004 election. Writing in The Nation, Barbara Ehrenreich claimed that Bush’s faith-based welfare strategy “celebrates the downward spiral toward theocracy.” There is even a project called TheocracyWatch at Cornell University that focuses not on existing theocracies throughout the world but on “the pervasive role of the Religious Right in the U.S. government.” The misuse of the word has become so prevalent that I suspect that theocracy has become a code word for what legal scholar Eugene Volokh refers to as “trying to impose their religious dogma on the legal system.”
Indeed, this seems to be what Amanpour believes:
[I]n the Western and in the developed world, perhaps here in the 21st century we would have expected secularism and governance and politics to be what governs our daily lives,…We would not have expected, and perhaps we still don’t expect, religion to play such a real, present role in our daily lives, politics, and culture.
Amanpour’s dismay encapsulates the difference in perspective between people who believe that their faith informs all of life — including politics and culture — and those who believe religion should be kept secularly locked with the church, synagogue, or mosque. Amanpour and CNN have a peculiar, though increasingly common, view of liberal democracy: Everyone has a right to be heard — until they start listening to God.
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Joe Carter is the director of web communications at the Family Research Council and also blogs at the Evangelical Outpost.
bump
How come Buddhists and Hindus got left out? They should sue or something.
“How come Buddhists and Hindus got left out?”
The left likes them. Their cultures are superior to ours in their eyes.
Of course not. Suggesting it isn't creating it.
Yes, it was a very interesting miniseries..
Good for CNN & Amanpour...
It also suggests that God himself is somehow responsible for all of these "warriors". This is another subtle dig at all Theists by the obviously atheist CNN reporter and editors.
So, before I even started watching it I was unhappy. Last nights Christin Warriors segment was appallingly bad, mixed up and dishonest, IMHO. (I fell asleep somewhere near the end of the first hour, maybe it got better.)
Jerry Falwell is a polarizing figure and is not the legitimate spokesperson for many religious people. Why no arch-bishops, or Mormon elders or equivelent actual leaders of large American denominations?
Shambhala Warriorship cannot be pre-empted by anyone. The MSM shouldn't even try.
http://www.shambhalamountain.org/programs/Shambhala_Training
The MSM is trying to equate the Islamic Fascists to having a warriorship tradition. I don't think the fasicsts have any such thing, they are simply barbarians who have gone past devotion in their religion, to bath in megalomania. Thats not warriorship , but its opposite, egocentric insanity, know in the East by the sandskrit term : Rudra.
These CBS programs will secretely try to equate the Islamic version of warriorship to those of the west which are not easilyt equated, because they are founded on the idea of campassion, and its corresponding grace, and blessings from G_D.
This is all an MSM surrpetitious attempt to convince America, that Islam is a religion of peace, in ignorance of its jihadist manifestation ( BARF ALERT!). Submit, Submit, Submit!
Shame, Shame, Shame!
In terms of international coverage, whether it has been of the Balkan situation or that in the Middle East, Amanpour's coverage can only be counted as "Pro-Islamic" and "propagandistic". Her coverage of the Balkan situation was badly slanted against the Serbians, both overstating the absolute numbers of mass graves found, and ignoring the atrocities committed against the Serbian people. When the Croatians ethnically cleansed nearly 800,000 Serbs from Serbian Croatia, she reported nothing. Amanpour's most recent "documentary", "God's Warriors", which aired the week of 20 August 2007, equated Islamic jihadists and suicide bombers with the Jewish and Christian tradition of martyrdom. Her coverage is so distorted that it bears no resemblance to history or modern political reality. In this sense, Amanpour provides a good example of the leftist politicization of the modern press, and its abandonment of standards of accuracy in reporting.
I hope everyone that watched this CNN propaganda noted the
WARM AND EXTENDED EMBRACE of “journalist” Christianne Amapour
with THE WORST PRESIDENT EVER (Jimmy Carter).
Talk about liberal/secular-progressive propaganda.
Hilaire Belloc wrote in 1938:
“Will not perhaps the temporal power of Islam return and with it the menace of an armed Mohammedan world, which will shake off the domination of Europeans — still nominally Christian — and reappear as the prime enemy of our civilization? The future always comes as a surprise, but political wisdom consists in attempting at least some partial judgment of what that surprise may be. And for my part I cannot but believe that a main unexpected thing of the future is the return of Islam”.
Islam has no philosophical, intellectual or revelational kinship with either Judaism of Chrisitanity. Ishmael, the patriarch Abraham’s son by the slave girl, is said to be the progenitor of the Arab peoples, an occurrence that preceded the founding of Islam by centuries, and Arab is not an analog for Muslim.
Inaccurate. Supreme religious authority in the RC Church was vested in the Pope, supreme political authority in Europe was vested in the King or Emperor.
During the Middle Ages, neither was generally able to consistently enforce this supreme authority.
Actual caesaropapism was established in the late Roman Empire and throughout the history of the Byzantine Empire. It re-emerged in the Russian Empire.
There is a decent argument that Western Civ turned out different from Islamic and Orthodox Civ partially because supreme religious and political authority was split.
"Show me respect" .. "SHUT_UP!"
..then he hung up as gun-fire erupted in the background.
1. The protestant reformation rejected the papacy.
2. The Holy Scriptures of Christianity provide no rationale for establishing a singular human head of the church on earth, and Protestants, basically but in varying degrees as regards certain specifics, deem said Scriptures normative.
I kept waiting for her to accuse most Christians of being raging heterosexuals....such was the level of discourse...paraphrasing,(breathlessly) if Christians had their way, there would be no abortion, and there would be prayer in schools....
“rather than any conspiracy theory about what the left likes”
It was tongue-in-cheek, buddy. Lighten up.
Is this a joke? Calling fundamentalist Christians and Muslim soldierd “warriors” like they were the same thing?
CNN is the ultimate bed-wetting liberal latte-drinking volvo driving pansy network.
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