Over at the Beliefnet blog's God-o-Meter (a scale-of-one-to-ten blog that measures how intensely the presidential candidates are displaying their religion cred), Dan Gilgoff re-posted a video of John Hagee and his usual hellfire-based denunciations of the homosexuals, abortionists, Harry Potter, ACLU and the like. I dropped Gilgoff a note, pointing out that Hagee's sermon is not at all out of context or out of character, as documented in my book, God's Profits, which you really should read if you want to know all about John McCain's pals Hagee and Rod Parsley.
I also pointed Gilgoff to a post I did here back in February, discussing much the same sermon shown in the video (but delivered at Jerry Falwell's church, not Hagee's own) and polls that show more than 50% of Americans believe in the rapture (and indeed those numbers are much, much higher among Hagee's Pentecostal brethren). Gilgoff interpreted as meaning that I don't think the video of Hagee will hurt McCain, or that Hagee might be "mainstream."
Just to be clear, there's a difference between "will" hurt McCain and "should" hurt McCain. Obviously a lot of Americans think Hagee is way out of the mainstream, and he is. Yet in spite of that, because of shared political goals (whether they be keeping gay marriage illegal, making abortion illegal, beating war drums with Iran, or opposing a two-state solution) Hagee has made allies with constituencies who don't necessarily share his theological beliefs.
So there are plenty of people (take, for example, AIPAC or Joe Lieberman or Rick Santorum or Bill Kristol, all of whom are speaking at his Christians United for Israel summit in July) who are willing to look past his theology to serve their political ends. And while he's not "mainstream," many more Americans follow his way of religious thinking than, say the religious thinking of Jeremiah Wright. So if Hagee is fringy, yet he has a bigger following than Wright, and his following includes elected officials, opinion-makers, and policymakers, shouldn't that make him scarier and more dangerous than Wright?
--Sarah Posner
