Of Right Wing Evangelical Super Law and My Ham Handed Efforts to Address It.

All apologies to my Muslim and Evangelical/Pentecostal friends for my new use of "evangelical Sharia" in describing the world that the extreme Christian Right in this country wants to impose on the rest of us. It does not do justice to long history of Islamic Jurisprudence, nor does it imply an unappreciative stance towards the complexities of the interaction of this form of religious law with modern governmental systems. Likewise, it does not reveal the subtleties of an evangelical tradition that has in the past, and for many still does, echo the best of what Christianity offers (community, morality, social consciousness, and prophetic truth to power).

What it DOES do, however, is bring radically to the fore the fact that the new Christian Right wants to bring about a Christian version of the world they claim that Islam wants to bring about in America - using a mutated and unrecognizable "Sharia" as the whipping boy for their project. They assume that if Americans are terrified of "Sharia," they will be open to the application of a radically redefined, heretofore nonexistent, and mightily misogynistic religious law - one that at every point echoes the one they act all terrified that the "MOOSLIM" bogeymen are going to impose on them! Of course, this leads us to the obvious point that their worry isn't really Islam or its philosophical and judicial underpinnings. What they are actually afraid of is a) women with any real power whatsoever, b) men that don't agree with them, and c) dominance by anything other than white American males or any of the "other" that promotes the continued dominance of the current CCRWRSWAM (Conservative Christian Right Wing Republican Straight White American Males - all regards to Todd Snider) in power.

So, my use of "Evangelical Sharia" is not a slam on either Sharia or Evangelicals as a whole - but rather an attempt to address in a directly satirical and mildly offensive way the fact that these bobble-headed giggle-twits (thanks to Lee Camp for that one) are not afraid in any real way that some radical form of Islam is coming to ensnare America. Instead, they are using a hopped up fear of some artificial mish-mash of Islam, secularism, science, education, and "Satanism" to attempt their own power grab - one that looks amazingly like the bogeyman they are scaring the public with. The Pentecostal world from which I arose had its issues, but its origins were radically communitarian and pacifistic. The heroes of my youth stood against killing, refused to vote so as not to be involved in worldly politics, and cared for the least among them. While there was inherent racism in the system, I was taught early on to avoid decisions based in prejudice, and that the value of each person was in their behavior and contributions as individuals. The founders of our movement stood up against wealth and power as ungodly, and stood up for humility and egalitarianism as models of a Christian civilization. I have watched sadly as the movement has lost it's socially conscious voice, suppressed the prophetic voice of its women, rejected its teachers, abandoned its pacifism, bought into the current frantic fear-mongering that passes for Christianity today, and - with open arms - embraced as models the very wealthy, prideful, arrogant, whited sepulchers that they rose up against in the beginning. Someone needs to say this. I have said it, am saying it now, and I will continue to say it. If it is offensive, I apologize - but not to those it was intended to offend. To them I say, "If it hurts, it must be striking a nerve."