Over at the Washington Post's On Faith blog, moderators Sally Quinn and Jon Meacham ask if John McCain should renounce Rod Parsley because he called Islam a "false religion" that must be "destroyed?"
The responses from the blog's panel are varied, but generally urge looking at the broader landscape rather than focusing on one statement (see some excerpts below or click through to The Washington Post and read them all).
As I've said before, Parsley has problems not because of one statement, but because of his entire body of work, dedicated to lining his pockets on the fears of his followers about scary gay people, secularists, spiritual warfare, Satan, and the end of the world. Using Christianity as a shield, Parsley attempts to immunize from criticism your basic get-rich-quick scheme: sow your seed, he says as he demands that his followers tithe to him in obedience to God, and you will reap a hundred-fold return.
Like other prosperity televangelists, Parsley is no Bible scholar. Just last Sunday, he demonstrated his lack of grasp of hermeneutics -- or of etymology -- when discussing a Bible verse containing the word "vacillate." He asserted that "vacillate" is the root for the word "Vaseline" because you slip and slide around on said petroleum product. When he says that Islam is a "false religion" that has to be destroyed, he's reflecting a very low-brow (but prevalent) view of the end of days which like our foreign policy views real and imaginary conflicts one-dimensionally, and through the prism of Biblical prophecy.
The real scandal is that Parsley gets a tax exemption to run a business (with no transparency or accountability) by exploiting his followers' anxieties and vulnerabilities about perceived enemies identified (they believe) by God's inerrant word. If he didn't have that, he'd have no platform from which to insist that the Bible commands him to proclaim Islam the enemy.
--Sarah Posner