Pastor Dan has a great riff on God's Profits, showing how Kenyan preacher Thomas Muthee's expression of the prosperity-gospel message through his prayer over Sarah Palin shows that John McCain can't run or hide from the theology of his ex-friends John Hagee and Rod Parsley. As I wrote in God's Profits, and as Pastor Dan highlights, the prosperity message is a perfect fit with Republican free-market dogma: If you don't prosper, it's your own damn fault.
Muthee's prosperity prayer, in which he calls for Christian men and women to take over and run the economy, is a standard dominionist command -- the same basic ideology that underlies the Christian right's efforts to get its candidates elected, its judges appointed, and install "godly" men and women into media, law, and other professions.
Just for good measure, Muthee throws in a bit of philo-Semitism as well -- very common, in my reporting, among adherents to the prosperity gospel. "If you look at the Israelites, that's how they work. And that's how they are, even today." (If the Jews are all rich, you see, they must be doing something right.)
Part of Pastor Dan's point is that McCain can't seem to get away from these religious extremists, whether it's Hagee or Parsley or Palin's circle of pastor friends. That's because, for the past three decades, the Republican Party has validated countless scandalous religious figures -- generals, as Family Research Council's Tony Perkins referred to Parsley -- for the purpose of marching their troops to the voting booth.
Back in George W. Bush's heyday of consolidating the religious-right vote, McCain was calling the granddaddies of the religious-right agents of intolerance. Now that he's realized that without them, winning the presidency is impossible, he's embraced Palin, a home-grown product of the movement that was just getting underway when she was a teenager.
I'm not sure McCain realizes the many varieties of theology -- like exorcisms, faith healings, and prophecies about battling Satan by self-appointed prophets and apostles -- swirling around in the Pentecostal/charismatic circles of the religious right. All that stuff would shock and embarrass the rest of the Republican base, no doubt. But that's obviously of no consequence to the flailing McCain. If voters believe that government is run by godless bureaucrats and that what we need is a Christian government that has vanquished those satanic regulators, who is he to argue? It's not like he has a better plan.
--Sarah Posner
