Wondering what the religious right’s leaders are telling their followers in the last full week before Election Day? Well, the yeomen at People for the American Way’s Right Wing Watch stumbled on one example. This week, the religious right’s favorite pseudo-historian, David Barton, is appearing on Kenneth Copeland’s show for a series of broadcasts designed to get out the vote for social conservative causes. Barton doesn’t have to go far; his home in Aledo, Texas is about 16 miles west of Copeland’s headquarters in Fort Worth. On a program that aired on Tuesday, Copeland and Barton told their viewers about the importance of praying for those in authority. The discussion quickly turned to praying for President Obama. Copeland suggested that for all the hand-wringing on the religious right after Obama’s reelection, there was actually a method to God’s madness. He says God told him that he allowed Obama to beat Mitt Romney in order to sour the country on socialism.
At the start of the show, Copeland said that before the 2012 election, he huddled with several of his colleagues to analyze the race. Copeland said that God told him, “You’re going to like the way this election turns out.” Copeland was befuddled by this, especially when Obama went on to a second term. Recently, Copeland tried to get a fix on what God meant. As Barton–who is a charismatic, like Copeland (his father founded a nondenominational charismatic church in Aledo, and Barton got his start as the principal of its attached school)–listened, Copeland said that God told him that he allowed Obama’s reelection in order to make this country see what socialism really was so they could understand why it was a bad idea. He claimed that most people were in the dark about “what progressive socialism was,” and didn’t know what its agenda was since “it had been covered up for 115 years.” Copeland added that God told him, “Without a proper diagnosis, it’s very difficult to treat or receive healing from a disease.”
Copeland added that Obama and his cronies “push progressive socialism with everything they got,” and have done so from the time Obama has been sworn in. Barton got it, saying that it was already cropping up in the schools. After six years of full-bore socialism, Copeland said, “now we know why we don’t want it.”? Not to be outdone, Barton said that around the same time, God had told him that God had directed him to Ezekiel 30:9, which said that God is going to “shock us out of our complacency.”
I could go on and on about the evidence that Obama isn’t a socialist in any sense of the word, but that’s an article by itself. I will say this, though. The price of gas in my hometown of Charlotte has been dropping like an anchor for most of this fall. And it’s not because of price controls by that evil socialist Obama–it’s because the price of oil has been on the way down.
If the country is supposedly whipped up into a froth to stop socialism, then why is poll after poll showing the parties tied on the generic ballot? And if an army of born-again Christians is mad enough to storm to the polls and send Obama’s cohorts in the Senate packing, we should be getting ready to say hello to Senators Tom Cotton, David Perdue, Bill Cassidy, and Thom Tillis. But we can’t yet–in large part because the white evangelical population in Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana and my state of North Carolina is tailing off. Not only that, but if God is trying to warn against the evils of socialism, why did France elect a socialist as president just a few months before we held our presidential election?? But then again, Copeland, Barton, and their cronies consider anyone to the left of them to be a frothing-at-the-mouth socialist. And that includes people like me, who are left-leaning charismatics who cringe whenever Copeland and Barton spew this kind of idiocy.
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Darrell Lucus, also known as Christian Dem in NC at Daily Kos, is a radical-lefty Jesus-lover who has been blogging for change for a decade. Follow him on Twitter @DarrellLucus or connect with him on Facebook.
