Thank God for blogs--Else I would feel all alone in this craziness

From the parish we find that people are repeating more stupidty over and over, like Jesus loves private property, and our founders never intended for religious freedom to extend to anyone but Christians.

"Had cause to interview a theocrat yesterday for an upcoming story. He called himself that. Just like that: 'I'm a theocrat.' He wanted to qualify what that means, which I appreciate, although I wasn't real comfortable with the qualification, especially as it included the statement: 'The founding fathers never meant to give religious freedom to Wiccans, satanists, and atheists.' Yeesh...

Dude. Greg, if you didn't have an impulse to slap this guy, then you are a bigger man than me. I wonder if he has any sense of how many of the more fundamentalists sects that are "mainstream" today would have been on the list had our founders decided to pick and choose religions. Baptists might have made that list. Certainly Mormons would have. Probably Catholics as well. Oops.

He also mentioned an idea I've been hearing quite a bit about lately. Capitalism is biblical. That's right, the idea of private property is in the Bible and therefore God-ordained. The best way to run a country is according to biblical principles, and since private property is a biblical principle, why then, capitalism is God's chosen form of government. As I recall, and Kristen will have to help me here because she has the article now, Jeff Sharlet has a quote from Ted Haggard in his Haper's piece about economics and evangelicalism. I expect to see quite a bit more about this in the next year or two. It seems to be a growing trend. The theocratic spin-machine is in fifth gear and roaring away. Pretty soon we'll be hearing from mainstream pundits that America should be a 'soft' theocracy and that capitalism is the heart of Christianity (or vice versa). Never was Barth more necessary to a Church's theological identity than right now in America."

I am afraid Greg is right. Bruce has written about this a lot lately, and we are hearing the theocratic language coming more and more from people who should know better. Grownups? Time to speak.

Favorite quote of the day comes from Micah and Kristen's blog: "What Flannery called Christ-haunted, I'm beginning to feel is Christ-bludgeoned." Me too.