Three interesting/fun things about the US election

I’ve been feeling a certain amount of shameful joy/glee that the state of Colorado went Democrat. It’s the home of Focus on the Family and various other militantly-Republican Christian organisations, so the fact that more people there voted for Barack Obama means something significant I think.

I’m wondering how the editorial in the next edition of Focus’ ‘Citizen’ magazine will react to the results and whether Focus will now concentrate their efforts on living up to the demands of this Biblical injunction. Somehow I doubt it.

The swing to Obama was massive across the Republican heartland. I work with a guy who spent some time in Texas working for a Christian organisation and became very pro-Republican as a result. In 2004 he said that he admired George W Bush’s stance on “values” (a hard-to-define term much in use among those who have the Christian = Republican = Christian mentality).

However yesterday this same guy told me he was glad Obama won. If Obama is winning over staunch conservatives, then maybe there’s a chance the cultural battle-lines are blurring and the polarisation of American culture (which has led to Christianity marginalising itself through unblinking support by many vocal Christians for one particular party) may reverse.

The third thing is that Cathy told me Obama had promised his daughters that if they moved to the White House, they could have a puppy. How happy must they be now? No wonder as the results came in they were still beaming from ear-to-ear despite looking like they so needed to go to bed!

“Yay, Daddy’s become president! Can we get a puppy now, Mom?”

On the eve of All Hallows

Given that it's Hallowe'en, it's perhaps fitting that we watched a truly frightening film in life group tonight - the documentary Jesus Camp. As an outsider, it was incredibly worrying to see full-on 'children's ministry', complete with speaking in tongues, extended prophetic prayer times and so on. Watching the children pray over a life-size cut-out of George Bush left me feeling incredibly uncomfortable. And that wasn't the only part of the film which had my skin crawling.

I guess I could sum up why it was frightening for a number of reasons.

1) Realising that, although far more extreme, there wasn't much difference between what was in the film and my own childhood experiences.
2) The stat that 75% of home-schooled children in America are Evangelical Christians, but in the film 'education' looked more like 'indoctrination'.
3) The way young children were frightened by stories of the devil and convinced they were sinners because sometimes they found it hard to believe what was in the Bible.
4) Because it left me unsure what the difference is between finding a faith and being brainwashed. (And hearing that 43% of evangelicals were 'born again' before the age of 13, doesn't help either.)
5) The absolute certainty with which highly debatable concepts were presented as fact, e.g. America is a Christian nation and should return to it's Christian roots; George Bush has been raised up by God and is surrounded by "godly" and "righteous" people.
6) The doom-laden prophecies of the semi-narrator radio host who warned of a religious take-over any time now.
7) The way it reminded me so much of the book The Handmaid's Tale, which describes what happens when the fundamentalists take over.

Jongudmund's rating on Jesus Camp: 7/10 (Be afraid. Be very afraid...)