"The Fundamentalist Doctrine of the Southern Baptist Convention

In support of my case concerning the extreme dangers of modern American Fundamentalism and the cardinal doctrines of their Holy Chain Reaction-Rapture, Tribulation, Armageddon-WW III, The Second Coming of Jesus Christ, His Millennial Kingdom, as detailed in Vol. II, I would like to credit Harold Bloom's "real bolt of originality," The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation. Bloom's book (1992) offers us nearly unlimited and extremely useful insights into the current conditions of the "true" American religions, of, by and from the North American soil as distinct from the mainline churches, both Protestant and Catholic with European roots and traditions.

A number of Bloom's insights go to the very heart of my thesis that what we are really fighting here is a variety of Christian fascism, American style, that I have labeled Religious Utopianism. These primarily southern and southwestern Fundamentalists have a much larger and more ambitious agenda for America's future that relates directly to their initial split in 1845 with their Northern and Canadian Baptist brethren. And that agenda centers on the lost cause of the Southern Confederacy (1861-65). The Fundamentalists hope, plan, and pray to create eventually through a Born Again Republican Party, a victorious Christian crusading America with a decided southern flavor, accent and culture.

American historians have long noted that the South did a very stupid thing in 1860 when it seceded from the Union, fired the first shot at Fort Sumter, triggering the Civil War and thus playing directly into Mr. Lincoln's strategy. Why? It is a fact that since 1789, the South, with their Southern justices, Southern politicians, and Southern presidents, or northern ones with Southern principles, had largely dominated America and its political, economic, and social agenda.

But in 1860-61 the Southern firebrands and hotheads seized upon the election of the first successful Republican President, Abe Lincoln of Illinois, by trying to change the course of American history. They claimed that by leaving the Union and setting up their independent nation, they were simply repeating the actions of the colonists when they rebelled in 1776. This Second American Revolution of 1860 failed, but the SBCers believe they can win this time around with Jesus Christ taking the place of Jefferson Davis. It must be comforting to old Jeff Davis that the new Republican Party of the South, in February 1998, had their gala celebration at his home in Biloxi, Mississippi, where the "Party of Lincoln" plotted to take over the Union in the year 2000 and hang Al Gore "on a sour apple tree."

The Fundamentalist secret weapon is their doctrine especially that of the Rapture that they believe will give them, the "Real" Christians, the protection of Jesus in Heaven, as will the new SDl on earth. This time God's terrible swift wrath is poured out, not over Confederate soldiers but on the Earth's unbelievers, concluding with Armageddon, the last great battle in history. In this thermonuclear exchange all the Earth's great cities are destroyed. But to the Fundamentalists, Satan has always resided there with those liberal democratic intellectuals, hard-drinking Roman Catholics, money-grubbing Jews, and immoral drug-drenched Blacks-"Nigras."

Bloom incisively dissects the Southern Baptist doctrine:

'The Fundamentalist desperation to reject nearly all of western intellectual history in favor of an inerrant icon, the limp leather Bible as object, hardly even as Scripture to be read and understood, has in it a deep resentment against a great betrayal by history, the death of an independent Southern nation in 1865."

"Much more subtly, the inward turn of the Moderates, a Gnostic knowing of Jesus through direct acquaintance, is also a culminating reaction to God's failure to have performed a saving act in history, the rescue of God's people from catastrophic defeat. Of the three authentic American chosen peoples-Mormons, Southern Baptists, and African-Americans of several denominations-it is the Southern Baptists who sustained total defeat. More even than Southern Presbyterians and Southern Methodists, the Baptists provided the great mass of Confederate enlisted men. Their great defeat reverberates still, and helped unite them for more than a hundred years in the highly uneasy conglomerate of the Southern Baptist Convention now at last coming apart. A coalition formed in 1845 is nearly shattered in 1991, and will be two separate organizations soon enough" (Bloom 195-96).

I would hope that Bloom is correct because it will make it increasingly difficult for the Fundamentalist SBCers to create and lead a far right of center political-religious coalition to victory in the American presidential elections of 2000-12. The Fundamentalists must capture the White House again so they can carry out their radical and revolutionary domestic and international policies and programs. Hopefully, as they get more desperate and frustrated, they will continue to do stupid things like attacking Disney, sending missionaries to the Jews, Mormons and Chicago, attacking feminists and modern women, continue destroying the public schools, undermining American diversity, and plotting for a Christian Nation to replace our multi-cultural democracy.

Hopefully, as we approach the year AD 2000-01 and beyond, the Fundamentalist political manifestations of their prophetic great expectations will confuse, distract, and eventually discredit them, the SBCers and their Conservative Evangelical-Pentecostal allies. The TV Evangelists' sex and money scandals of the 1980s or the Oklahoma City bombing of April 19, 1995, derailed their 1994 election victory plans and the "Contract on America" agenda.

Bloom makes another important contribution to understanding the real nature of the Fundamentalist challenge to America in his discussion of the neo-Fascist, know nothing and-intellectual aspects of contemporary SBC Fundamentalism. Bloom's vision of the SBCers as essentially a proto-Fascist movement also jibes with my analysis of them even though I approach their challenge to out secular democracy and republic from a political-military perspective, while Bloom is much more intellectually, culturally, and specifically religiously oriented. Bloom observes:

"The tragedy of the Southern Baptist Convention is the result of a purely political and social conspiracy that still masquerades as a religious movement. It's reductive anti-intellectualism reminds one of the Spanish Fascism of Franco; the Know-Nothing Baptists are the heirs of Franco's crusade against the mind, and not the legatees of Gresham Machen. But Fascism has never domesticated itself as an American term, so I will continue to employ Know nothing as the accurate counter here" (Bloom 229).

As you are aware I use the term American Christian Fascism much more liberally than does Bloom. I see contemporary Fascist tendencies lurking in the Military Utopians' strategic nuclear policies from 1945 to 1990. They were eager and willing to use American atomic-H-bomb superiority to win a total victory over the pro-Satanic, atheistic, anti-capitalistic, anti-individualistic, antidemocratic, and all the other demonic forces of world communism rooted and flourishing in the USSR and its "ally" Red China. And these same militant forces are once again surfacing in American politics as the blood thirsty old century ends and the AD 2000 election campaign begins focusing on the SDI, the Yellow Peril, Taiwan and rebuilding the military and our defenses.

And in order to achieve that desired total victory over world communism, a perfect weapon already existed: the atomic bomb delivered on Soviet targets with absolute precision by the US Air Force. They called the B-29, "The Plane That Won The War." If the propeller-driven B-29 could defeat Japan and the B-17 annihilate Germany in WW II, imagine what the B-52 and H-bombs could do to Russia Ot China in the next war?

So that became their expressed and hidden mantra: "Total Victory over World Communism through Expanded Air-Atomic power" Thus, nuclear weapons, properly deployed in a preemptive attack, would bring Total Victory to the USA, even after the Soviets had acquired the Atomic Bomb (1949), H-bombs (1954), Jet Bombers (1954), and ICBMS (1958) to deliver them to the American Homeland, providing America developed an effective civilian defense to complement SAC'S offensive bombers and
missiles.

And here is where RAND Corporation, initially fully funded by the US Air Force, Herman Kahn, and the related "Wizards of Armageddon" created their war fighting-war winning scenarios with their nearly constant emphasis on an American first-strike - no matter how cleverly "the scientific-technological elite" and "military-industrial complex" tried to disguise it. And RAND's and Kahn's war winning strategy always included a large, expensive, and Democracy-destroying fascist, civilian defense component as did President Reagan in his first DOD budget of 1981-82.

It is the societal, political economic implications of a fullblown civilian defense aspect of our nuclear strategy that carries within it the seeds of a real Fascist America. The Conservative Utopians, like Barry Goldwater and conservative ideologues whose hatred of communism was stronger than their respect for and belief in American values, should have opposed civilian defense on its need for huge government centralization programs alone. For, in order to carry out the implications of the RAND-Kahn civilian defense recommendations, we would have needed to create a Fortress America and a Garrison State enforced by a Praetorian Guard. The Kahnian concept of an "N' (destroyed cities) and "B" (safe small towns and rural) "countries" to insure US survival in a thermonuclear war would have entailed enormous expenditures, rehabilitation programs, and civilian regimentation. They would have required also presidential determinations of "Perpetual National Emergency," wartime controls, and tremendous federal governmental regimentation, centralization, and expenditures. Or, in other words, a Great Nationalist Bargain must be struck among the military, industry, and the government, which to me smells of National Fascism American-style and all too reminiscent of the "understanding" that Hitler made with the German capitalists and upper classes in the 1930s.

And now in the late 1990s, I see in the resurgence in SDI civilian defense agitation among potential AD 2000 Republican candidates (cheered on by William Safire, George Will and Charles Krauthammer), the very same Military Utopian Fascism of the last half century metamorphosing into Religious Utopian Fascism of the early twenty-first century. It will be fueled by the Southern Baptist Convention leadership, reductionism, and biblical prophetic doctrine, having as its very core Armageddon-WW III and the Second Coming of Jesus. And the Fundamentalist Conservative Evangelical-Pentacostal preacher-politicians will also eagerly accept the SDI promise of a "casualty-free Armageddon." Buttressed with intellectual support of "neo-theo religious" D.C. based conservatives they are willing to sell out our secular democratic-republic for a mess of Christian theocratic pottage and the long-term protection of their capital goods/wealth through the full-blown SDI.

Indeed, they can hardly wait, these southern sons and daughters of the lower middle class, to have their "Royal Church" raptured into Heaven which will symbolize to all the beginnings of the Tribulation and that blessed seven-year countdown to Armageddon-World War III. It will herald the long awaited arrival back on earth of their personal Lord Jesus Christ and their Raptured "Royal Church" to rule with their Lord Jesus Christ in His millennial kingdom for a thousand years of peace, prosperity, and great fornication to make up for the half of the world's people destroyed by Armageddon-WW III. And the weapons that would be used in This Final War, were the very nuclear bombs made possible by that first chain reaction at Stagg Field, the University of Chicago, on December 2, 1942, the same university created by the Baptist billionaire, John D. Rockefeller in the late 19th Century.

Thus the Religious Utopians of the Southern Baptist Convention would be able to bring total victory to Fundamentalist Protestant Christianity at a time of worldwide relative decline of Christendom's believers. This Last Christian Crusade of the early third millennium, preached by these Bible-thumping fanatics/zealots to the City of "the Bible wills it" and "Prophecy demands it' would most assuredly end secular history and civilization as we know it and destroy Nature as well. Whether it actually would bring Jesus back for his Second Coming or not, God only knows. But the SBCers, Know-Nothings, Christian Reconstructionists and American Christian Fascists are determined to create those historic conditions in the Mideast and especially in Jerusalem centering around the building of the Third Temple that finally fulfills the prophetic events of the End Times of "Days of the Lord." Then if the 144, 000 Jews are converted, the resulting Rapture triggers the Holy Chain Reaction, the religious equivalent of the atomic chain reaction at the University of Chicago on December 2, 1942. (And if they fail to create the great Armageddon-causing incident in Palestine, there's always Taiwan and the new Yellow Peril to trigger WWIII.

That's the Fundamentalists' game plan; their declared strategy that they have made very clear in thousands of publications and sermons. It's their God-ordained, sacred, and holy struggle against the satanic forces of modern science, democracy, and socialism, and liberalism.

Fortunately for our constitutional freedoms and individual liberties, the Fundamentalists' ultimate triumph is not written in the stars or in the King James Bible either, but will depend upon their electoral success in acquiring political power in the US by the ballot box or through the bullets and bombs of domestic terrorism, a.k.a., Oklahoma City, 1995, or secret organizations like "The Army of God." and the World Church of Creation. And, especially how successful The Rev. Jetry Falwell is in his Christian "People of Faith 2000" voter registration campaign to sign up 10,000,000 new voters for the November AD 2000 elections. It's an open question as of mid-2000 whether Falwell and Company will be as successful in AD 2000 as was the Christian Right-NRA in the revolutionary-reactionary elections of 1994.

It's up to the men and women of the Vital Center to constantly challenge the highjacking of our American institutions like political parties, the media, and public schools-all nationalizing institutions. We must also renew and reinvigorate continually our democratic-republican institutions so that religious Fundamentalists are never able to subvert or overthrow our democracy and create that Christian, American, Fascist theocracy waiting not too patiently in the far right-wing of American society and politics. We must also never forget that it could happen here with the Manchurian Candidate II as their president, assisted by another American Great Depression or another Lost War, the result of a new and fruitless "Expedition to Sicily," seizes total police-military power in these no longer free United States of America.

Will the Center hold? Or, in the words of an old Baptist hymn, "Will your anchor hold?" against the rising tide of Christian fanaticism? Let us pray to God, any God will do, that it does hold, for the consequences of failure are too horrible to contemplate: a global holocaust to end all holocausts.

What will eventually split the SBC, as Bloom hopefully predicted in 1992, is the handling of the doctrine of Biblical Inerrancy and their general anti-intellectual, know nothing, protoFascist attitudes on social problems and above all their doctrinal rigidity. The Fundamentalist Orthodox Doctrine flies in the face of traditional Baptist creedal traditions (little or no doctrine at all), every church and every member an interpreter of the Bible according to his or her own inner light, the priesthood of all believers and soul liberty. Historically, the Baptists have been given credit, and rightly so, and were proud of their church's vital contribution to the key doctrine of our democracy: the separation of church and state, or in Jesus' wise admonition to "render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's" (Matthew 22: 21). The insistence of the SBC leadership (and other Fundamentalist preacher-politicians like Robertson/Falwell) to actively mix religion and politics (probably illegal) and essentially create an adjunct, partisan, religious right-wing of the Republican Parry is definitely not in the main Baptist tradition.

The Baptists' moderate wing must rebel against the Fundamentalist vision, which makes the Second Coming of Jesus absolutely dependent on the outbreak of Armageddon-WW Ill. And while they are at it, they should also renounce the bloodthirsty, war loving, humanity-hating philosophy of the SBCers favorite popularizer and world champion of biblical prophecy, Hal Lindsey, in his infamous but madly popular, The Late Great Planet Earth. The fusing of Armageddon and the Second Coming of Jesus have two objectives: an attempt to hasten the arrival of the Messiah and with Him the enormous destruction of Armageddon-WW III and a brazen attempt to blasphemously force God to intervene again in history for His Sixth or Seventh Dispensation (depending on which Fundamentalist authority you are following). This personal intervention of God and Jesus is intended to save mankind from its own self-induced destruction. That is my conspiratorial theory of what the Fundamentalist Grand Strategy is and I'm sticking with it."