It’s easy enough to dismiss evangelical Christians as paranoid and hysterical – take Harold Camping of Family Radio Worldwide who has made the news for his Bible-based calculations that the world will end May 21, 2011. Or one could easily think of them as a smarmy but harmless expression of all-American hucksterism, ranging from the scandal-plagued donation grubbing of Jim Bakker, Oral Roberts, and other television ministries and the bizarre perversity known as “Prosperity Gospel” to the bland positive-thinking ministries, such as Rick Warren’s, whose theology seems to owe more to Dale Carnegie than Christianity. One might be able to shrug off the residue of queasy feeling induced by proto-totalitarian movements that occasionally spring out of the movement, such as the Promise Keepers or Quiverfull, to note that lately evangelicals in many areas of the movement have moved away from social conservatism and begun to work for more appropriately Christian endeavors such as a return to social justice or the growing conviction that stewardship of creation entails an environmentalist, or at least conservationalist, activism.
Great! But how about evangelical Christian desires for mass graves and brutal despotism? The New York Times is reporting that it was in fact leaders of the American evangelical movement who were directly behind the recent Ugandan efforts to make homosexuality a crime punishable by death, potentially setting off a witch-hunt and bloodbath. Continue reading
Wood Thrush 