Au rayon « nos valeurs » – opposées aux fondamentalistes qui mènent des guerres barbares au nom d'une…

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Au rayon « nos valeurs » – opposées aux fondamentalistes qui mènent des guerres barbares au nom d’une lecture littérale de la religion : nos amis les Américains…

Extrait de America Right or Wrong - An Anatomy of American Nationalism, d’Anatol Lieven

The link between millenarianism and radical nationalism was exemplified by Lieutenant General William G. “Jerry” Boykin, a Pentecostalist believer appointed in 2003 as deputy under-secretary of defense for intelligence. A minor scandal developed in that year when the content of some talks Boykin had given to U.S. evangelical church groups made their way into the national media. (President Bush eventually condemned General Boykin’s statements, but did not dismiss him from his post—one which, it may be noted, later involved a measure of responsibility for the intelligence-gathering strategy which contributed to the abuses of Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.)
Among other things, General Boykin declared that America is a “Christian nation” and that George Bush had been elevated to the presidency by a miracle—an idea with which many Democrats would agree, but not quite as Boykin meant it. Of judgments by the U.S. Supreme Court of which he disapproved, Boykin said, “Don’t you worry about what these courts say. Our God reigns supreme.” He informed his listeners that in examining photographs of Mogadishu, where he served as a special forces officer, he found an unexplained black mark, which he explained as a manifestation of evil; and that on 9/11 terrorists actually took over two more planes, but they were "thwarted by the hand of God."129
America’s enemy in the war against terrorism, he said, is Satan, and Satan will be defeated only “if we come against him in the name of Jesus.” Most famously, Boykin said, of a Somali warlord, “I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol.” This last was widely described as “crude machismo,” which it may have been, but it was also a straight biblical reference, to the victorious contests of Hebrew Prophets with the priests of Baal.130 Similar statements concerning Islam have emanated from several leaders of the Christian Right like Franklin Graham (son of Billy), Jerry Falwell and the Reverend Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals.131
Concerning the United States itself, leading officials of the Bush administration made no secret of their belief that the American state rests on essentially religious foundations, that “the source of freedom and human dignity is the Creator,” in Ashcroft’s words.132 Even Vice President Dick Cheney sent a Christmas card in 2003 with a message asking, in the words of Benjamin Franklin, "And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?"133
Boykin’s remarks indicate two salient features of this sector of American society, as discussed above. The first is their intense nationalism. As for the English and Scottish Puritans of the seventeenth century, from whom they derive their religious culture—as indeed for the Israelites of the Old Testament—their God is essentially a tribal God, a Cromwellian “God of Warre” who fights for them against Amelekites, Irish papists, Red Indians, Mexicans, Spaniards, Germans, Japanese, Communists, Russians, Chinese, Vietnamese, Muslims and any other enemy who comes along.
The second is that their religion-based culture is to a very great extent premodern and definitely pre-Enlightenment. A comparison of Boykin with his equivalents in other contemporary Western armed forces is instructive. A great many French, British and Russian officers would feel more comfortable in the nineteenth century and some surviving aristocratic elements in the eighteenth. British officers in particular sometimes have an affection for horses which trembles on the brink of impropriety. However, the golden ages which they yearn for are still post-Enlightenment. Unlike General Boykin, they would not feel at home in Cromwell’s New Model Army. The extent of this ideologically premodern sector in the United States is greater than almost anywhere else in the developed world—except for Northern Ireland. This kind of religious nationalism is fueled both by religious moralism and by a paranoia fed in turn by a feeling of cultural embattlement. In the words of Richard Hofstadter: "Since what is at stake is always a conflict between good and evil, the quality needed is not a willingness to compromise but the will to fight things out to the finish. Nothing but total victory will do. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and utterly unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated....This demand for unqualified victories leads to the formulation of hopelessly demanding and unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s frustration."134

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Sur la lecture littérale de la Bible :

A Pew poll of March 2004 indicated that 40 percent of Americans believed in the literal, word-for-word truth of the Bible, with another 42 percent declaring that it is the word of God, but not necessarily true.85

Sur les fantasmes millénaristes :

Of the American evangelicals, significant numbers also hold millenarian beliefs, beliefs with frightening implications for their holders’ attitudes to the world outside the United States. In 1977 the number of American premillennialists alone was conservatively estimated at 8 million. A Pew poll of May 2004 had 36 percent of respondents declaring that the book of Revelations is no metaphor but “true prophesy.” Premillennialists believe in Christ’s bodily return before his thousand-year earthly reign; postmillennialists (a majority of the mainline Protestant churches), on the other hand, believe in his return only after the Millennium has already been established by the power of God working through his people. This is a distinction with crucial implications for attitudes to politics, history and the possibility and desirability of Christians seeking to bring about positive social change in this life.109 The great majority of the leaders of the Christian Right have been premillennialists, and often from a more extreme variant of this belief known as dispensationalism. In 1987, 63 percent of Southern Baptist pastors declared themselves to be premillennarian.110
A very much larger number of Americans have some belief in “prophecy”: that the Bible—and especially the Book of Daniel and the Revelations of St. John— provides accurate predictions of future events.111 The widespread nature of this belief is indicated by the popularity of millenarian religious fiction, such as Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth (35 million copies sold by 2004) or, more recently, the Rapture series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. To date, this series has sold more than 62 million copies, putting the Harry Potter series to shame and making it by a long stretch the most successful series in the history of American print fiction. LaHaye was a cofounder (with Jerry Falwell) of the Moral Majority, the pioneering Christian Rightist group which laid the foundations for the later and much more successful Christian Coalition.112
These readership figures demonstrate once again a profound distance between a considerable part of the American population and modernity as the rest of the world understands it, as well as the rationalist and universalist principles of the American Creed. Not only is this tradition deeply and explicitly hostile to the Enlightenment and to any rational basis for human discourse or American national unity, it cultivates a form of insane paranoia toward much of the outside world in general. Thus The End of the Age, a novel by the Christian Rightist preacher and politician Pat Robertson, features a conspiracy between a Hillary Clintonesque first lady and a Muslim billionaire to make Antichrist president of the United States. Antichrist, who has a French surname, was possessed by Satan, in the form of the Hindu god Shiva, while serving with the Peace Corps in India.113
These books are also utterly, shockingly ruthless in their treatment of the unsaved — in other words, the vast mass of humanity. In accordance with one strand in prophetic belief, the Rapture series begins with God’s elect being taken up to heaven in an instant, and dwells lovingly on the immense casualty rates that results as pilotless planes and driverless cars crash all over the world—with most of the victims presumably going to hell.114
The moral tone of such attitudes has real consequences for how these believers think about the world today. Thus I remember the words of my born-again landlady during a stay in Washington in 1996-97. When challenged that the Bible cannot be literally God’s word, for in this case sections of the Books of Exodus and Joshua in particular would make God guilty of ordering genocide, she replied, in honey-sweet tones, “But don’t you see, if those people had been wiped out 3,000 years ago as God ordered, we wouldn’t have all these problems in the Middle East today.” Some millenarian language achieves a kind of pornography of hatred in its description of the fate of the damned, especially those from nations hostile to the United States.115
As these words suggest, one of the most important effects of millenarian thinking in the religious conservative camp in recent years has been to help cement the alliance of this camp with hard-liners in Israel — a subject explored in Chapter 6.

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