"a terrible anger"

Nice.

For at least the past 10 years, the megachurch evangelical movement has been telling its parishioners that Jesus wants them to get rich. That fit rather nicely with the triumphalism of Bush/Rove & Co. as it built its "permanent majority" with their votes, testifying that it was their all-American duty to trample the environment and the poor, and to kill Afghan and Iraqi Muslims, on the way to God's kingdom. In imitation of the way Bush paid for his wars, many of the devout simply loaded themselves up with debt, buying SUVs and McMansions in spanking new developments.

Since the capitalist collapse, of course, that debt has become toxic. Now, in their dismay and confusion over having supported Bush--one of the first governors, by the way, to declare an annual state "Jesus Day"--evangelicals are left with a terrible anger. And they desperately don't want to turn that anger inward.

Instead, some of them want to smite Obama because they can't admit that Bush led them, lemming-like, into a betrayal of Protestantism's founding belief. Debt, trade, and the work ethic were all central to the disputes that launched the Reformation, after all. The Catholic Church preached that bank interest was "usury," that it would corrupt society and impoverish the people, and the early Protestants were sensitive to this criticism. In compensation, they hemmed in their financial speculations with strict condemnations of personal excess--whether through sex, drink, cards, dancing, sumptuous dress, or what have you--in order to project a prudence that would make economic risk seem manageable, even respectable.

And now we have the Great Unraveling. As the waters recede, what's left behind are follies like the "Drowning Jesus" (a/k/a "Touchdown Jesus"), a 62-foot-high sculpture of Christ set chest-deep in a reflecting pool at the Solid Rock Church in Monroe, Ohio, one of the non-coastal states Palin is visiting on her book tour. And who's to blame for that embarrassing excess, constructed in 2004?

(Source: The Nation)