.....A minor presidential-race controversy that has been making the rounds lately is McCain's endorsement by John Hagee, a megachurch pastor out of San Antonio, Texas. This has struck a dusty chord with me; once upon a time, I used to watch televangelists compulsively, and remember the man well—if not fondly—from almost ten years ago, well before his current mainstream-media notoriety.
.....Hagee's recent fame has been headlined by the foreign-policy implication of his theology; briefly, he believes that only Jesus can make peace in the Mideast. Therefore, believers are obliged to actively strive for the opposite (i.e. war without end). Also, unlike most evangelicals, he opposes efforts to proselytize Jews, as their persistence in their current hellbound state is a necessary component in the convoluted structure of his eschatology (basically, you can't convert and save the Jews and have yourself your Apocalypse, any more than you can have your cake and eat it too).
.....Oddly enough, this somewhat Ahmadinejadian "throw the Jews under the bus so the rest of us can groove with J.C." viewpoint passes for a pro-Israeli position these days, but I digress. The enduring memory I have of the man is not of poisonous policy stances, but something very different, and quite less grand and geopolitical in nature; a single moment in a single sermon. The American Prospect quotes a snippet from that very sermon (here), but it does not do justice to the scene—I remember that particular broadcast very well, and a simple transcript loses virtually all the atmosphere:
.....And the audience rose to their feet and applauded. Laughing. Uproariously. As though the thought vastly delighted them. The camera panned the pews; there were old couples, families, children in their Sunday best, all grinning widely, enormously pleased at the master-stroke their pastor had laid upon the wicked humanists. And I—who had in the past been often left angry or repelled or even dismayed by the sort of things I heard from these quarters—I found myself surprised to be simply ...sad.
.....It's hard to isolate the precise utterly demoralizing quality about the utter, vacant happiness, the casual self-debasement of the human spirit on display; but it struck a deep well of melancholy within me. Even the Communists—or the Nazis, if you will forgive me for Godwinizing myself—never quite managed, in seven decades of repressive conformism and gunpoint-enforced groupthink, to pull off the trick of telling people that they were nothing more than chattel and have them actually laugh and applaud them for it!
