Kudos to Keloland contributor Bob Schwartz, who brings our attention to the Reverend John Hagee. Hagee, I gather, is the closest thing anyone has found to a Jeremiah Wright standing anywhere near John McCain. Bob concedes that Hagee is not McCain's pastor; the connection is that the one has backed the other for President. Bob gives us some juicy quotes, with confusingly arranged quotation marks, linked to a site with little atomic mushrooms superimposed on McCain's head. I gather from a New York Times interview that Hagee has made some very controversial remarks, but I haven't yet found a list of them I would trust. No, wait, here is something at Salon.
Well, based on a quick survey of sound bites, produced mostly by people who are no more fond of McCain and Hagee than the conservative press is of Obama and Wright, I'd say Hagee is pretty much way out there, and McCain would be well-advised to keep his distance from him. Based on the image to the right, he surely cuts a less attractive figure than Jeremiah Wright.
Hagee is not an unmixed bag. On the one hand, he represents a position that Jews and liberal Christian theologians have been calling for for a long time. When I attended an international conference on the Holocaust in Oxford, England, in 1988, the most frequent item on the agenda was a call for Christians to put aside their attempts to convert the Jews. The so-called "replacement theory" held that God replaced the Old Testament religion with Christianity, and therefore all Jews should come to Christ. A lot of Jews think that this idea is one of the prime historical drivers of antisemitism, and that Christians should drop the idea if they want to oppose antisemitism. Well, Hagee has dropped it. He believes that God intended for the Jews to remain as a distinct people with their ancient religion intact. That represents a significant bit of progress where one does not usually look for it. He is also a strong backer of Israel, which is also a good thing, in my view.
On the other hand, this is part of his belief that the apocalypse is coming, and that Hagee knows how it is going to go down. He thinks he knows what part God intends Israel to play in the final drama. That strikes me as pretty far outside the mainstream, as they say. His view that the U.S. and Israel should launch a preemptive strike against Iran can be defended on rational grounds, but the apocalyptic vision altogether discredits this reasoning.
He seems to believe that Hurricane Katrina was an act of God aimed at punishing New Orleans for its sins. Now I have the same problem with this sort of thing that I have with the Anti-Christ mythology. I am in no position to tell conservative Protestants how to interpret Biblical doctrine, but when they start scribbling contemporary people and place names into the text of Revelations, they presume to know the mind of God. That, as I judge it, is inconsistent with the very heart of the Bible's teaching, and it shows that they have left the path of wisdom (if indeed they, or anyone else, was ever on it).
Now all this is subject to the caution that I have not read any of Hagee's sermons in part or in whole. It may be that Hagee's positions have been distorted by a hostile press, just as Wright claims his were (as he went about confirming what his critics had said). I gather that McCain has denounced some of Hagee's views, and he ought to be very careful not to be associated with them.
But one reason that McCain has so far had little trouble on this score is that he has no history of any close association with Hagee. There is simply no reason to suspect that McCain believes any of the strange things that Hagee believes. He didn't spend twenty years in his church. He didn't bring up his children in that church. He didn't mention Hagee in his autobiography.
Another reason that Hagee is less trouble is that, judging by the New York Times interview, he is capable of embarrassment. When he recognizes that what he is said or said to have said is offensive and alarming to the world outside his church walls, that it may damage political allies like McCain or Joe Lieberman, he knows when to back off and disown himself. This kind of embarrassment is a political virtue in a religiously diverse republic. Reverend Wright seems altogether immune to it.
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