A pastor from Arizona has prayed for President Barack Obama to die. Steven Anderson, a 29-year-old independent Baptist pastor in Tempe, Ariz, said he hoped the U.S. president would be struck down with brain cancer so that he would die like Edward Kennedy.
It’s worth reading that again.
Mr. Anderson, with Bible open in his hand, told his congregation that he wanted the president to “melt like a snail with salt on it” because of his views on abortion. Describing his sermon, charmingly titled “Why I Hate Barack Obama,” as “spiritual warfare,” the preacher told his congregation at the Faithful Word Baptist Church that Obama should get the death penalty. The day after the sermon, one of his parishioners showed up at an Arizona town hall meeting at which the guest of honor was President Obama. The parishioner was carrying an AR15 semiautomatic assault rifle. As one does.
Pastor Anderson is nothing if not consistent. Two days before Obama’s inauguration, he stated that if he were king he would decree the execution of homosexuals and children who curse their parents. Worth reading that again, too.
But at least he won’t do the executing himself. Declaring that Obama was turning America into a communist nation, he said: “Now, I’m not going to do it. I’m not saying vigilantism. I’m saying there should be a government in this country that under God’s authority takes Barack Obama and aborts him. On television. For everybody to see in the whole world. I wish we had a government that would act on God’s behalf, like the government is supposed to do. You know, the government is supposed to carry out God’s law. That’s the purpose of human government. And so I’d like to see Barack Obama melt like a snail. I’d like to see the teeth knocked right out of his head.”
This is one scary preaching dude.
There are more of them. Take Fred Phelps, pastor of Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kan. His favorite slogan is “God hates fags.” (He’s not talking about cigarettes.) Pastor Phelps says that American casualties in Iraq were due to the fact that the U.S. is a nation full of homosexuals. He says he is a “Five-Point Calvinist.” I don’t think I’ll bother finding out about the other four points. Oh, and he’s an anti-Semitic bigot as well. Nice chap, really.
Pastors Anderson and Phelps are a bit deranged. (Would they have been off the trolley if they weren’t religious? Probably, but there is at least some truth in Steven Weinberg’s view that “with or without religion, you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing bad things. But for good people to do bad things, it takes religion.”)
The problem for the Christian community is that there are some Biblical texts that provide support for extreme views. This is understandable in terms of the evolution of religions. The problems come when sacred Scriptures, from different eras and contexts, are treated as infallible words. On this understanding, the deity gets off the hook for words and actions that would land a genocidal dictator in the dock of the international court of justice.
Six years ago, I spent some weeks as guest theologian in residence in a Bible-belt church in the U.S. White Memorial Presbyterian Church in Raleigh, N. C., has a membership of close on 5,000. It has three services every Sunday morning and offers adult education opportunities. The church encourages inquiry, openness, and commitment. Its young people travel to different countries to study living examples of reconciliation. The congregation engages in a variety of social justice programs. Its minister, Art Ross, is a well-read scholar, a fine preacher, and a much-loved pastor who has been ably supported by his wife, Jan.
Art retired recently. His ministry was never likely to receive the kind of media coverage that attention-seeking religious headbangers get. Yet it was much more typical of mainstream Protestant and Catholic churches throughout the world than the raving, sometimes dangerous, headline-making nutters.
RON FERGUSON is a former pastor and leader of The Iona Community now living on Orkney Island (Scotland) as a writer and broadcaster. The column first appeared in The Glasgow Herald and is used by permission.
