If potential presidential candidate and current Texas Governor Rick Perry had ties to a religious leader who said, “Stop voting for Catholics,” or “Stop voting for Jews,” those ties would be eliminated immediately – or else he would be swallowed in a firestorm of controversy that would all but destroy his chances.
However, today I find myself uncertain whether any controversy, or even mainstream media attention, will arise from Texas pastor John Hagee telling an audience, in his talk “America: Titanic of Tomorrow” at last year’s Word Explosion Conference in Tulsa, to “Stop voting for pagans and putting them in public office.” Hagee, deemed too extreme by John McCain during his Presidential run in 2008, doesn’t seem too extreme for Rick Perry. Hagee has signed on as an endorser of Perry’s upcoming prayer event “The Response,” and according to the Dallas Morning News, Perry has “worked to cultivate” a relationship with him.
No doubt defenders of Perry, and of Hagee, will assert that the pastor uses “Paganism” as a generic term for anyone who isn’t Christian – who doesn’t follow, in his words, “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” I’m not convinced, for while he uses a broad brush to damn many faiths, explicitly making an example of Muslims, Buddhists, Catholics and Christian Scientists, his invective against all things non-Christian seems clearly focused on contemporary followers of Pagan and non-monotheist religions. Hagee cites Paul’s “Epistle to the Romans,” attacking non-Christian religion, adding “and they as a generation will be damned.” He expounds that Paganism “drives environmentalism in America,” listing “birds, animals and bugs” as among the things that are “not God.” He even asserts that we have “allowed the worship of Satanism in the U.S. military.” While Satanic groups are a different religious phenomenon from modern Paganism, in the minds of people like Hagee, they seem intrinsically linked.
Tags: non-monotheistic faiths, Pagans, pluralistic nation, presidential candidate, Rick Perry
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