JOSEPH GELFER

I just received a newsletter from Focus on the Family who are pleased as punch that Walmart are stocking back-to-school supplies carrying Christian slogans such as, “God Recycles. He made you out of dust,” and “John 3:16. This message is illegal in 53 countries.”

Focus on the Family rightly notes that, “Such messages are perfectly legal and they conform with court rulings that give wide latitude to students who want to express religious views in public schools.”

Yes, it’s true. Freedom to express personal values is a great thing. It’s a shame, however, that Focus on the Family doesn’t extend the same courtesy to others. As I write in the forthcoming encyclopaedia Religion and Politics in America, “Focus on the Family has campaigned vigorously against abortion, homosexuality, pornography, [and] sexual activity outside the sanctity of marriage.”

One rule for all of us.

I can’t quite tell if the sword-wielding Catholic gentleman in the above video is joking or not when he complains about feminists and homosexuals making a mockery of modern men: I fear not.

The sword is a recurring theme in men’s ministries, as I note in Numen, Old Men:

‘Once men have been released from “mediocre lives into lives of excellence” by Real Man Ministries, the men receive a Real Man Sword symbolizing the Sword of Truth.  A sword is also the emblem of Faithful Men Ministries.  Both Faithful Men Ministries and Real Man Ministries swords are Richard Lionheart swords, an aesthetic beloved by extremist right-wingers with a propensity to violence. Honorbound, a significant men’s ministry of the Assemblies of God has a logo of a crusader shield and they continue the theme with their “Raise an Army” conferences.  Honorbound’s accompanying music CDs Raise an Army and Take the Nations again carry graphics of crusader swords. Some Honorbound promotional material is quite fanciful in this respect. Their Rise Up and Do Battle poster depicts a clean-cut individual in a battle stance with his sword: he stands upon an apocalyptic scene of ruin, above him ascends a muscular Aryan angel, also carrying a sword.  Champions of Honor ministry also use a shield as their logo and their founder, Chuck Brewster (the ex-United States Secret Service Special Agent), is shown wielding a sword.’ (pp. 64-5)

And if you connect the dots to where wielding shiny swords leads…

‘Ann Burlein (2002) charts the intersection of the Christian Right and white supremacists, whose strategies share some disturbing commonality with men’s ministries. Burlein looks at two case studies, one “hard” and one “soft”: Pete Peters of Christian Identity and James Dobson of Focus on the Family. Dobson has written several books about Christian masculinity (Dobson 1975, 2001, 2003 and 2005) and is often referred to within men’s ministry material. We have already seen how men’s ministries have a penchant for swords and knights, and it is possible to identify a similar attraction with Christian Identity-aligned ministries similar to Peters’. Church of the Sons of YHVH/Legion of Saints employs the “sword of truth”.  Kingdom Identity Ministries shows a sword-wielding knight.  The Scriptures For America logo employs a sword, as does The Church of Jesus Christ Christian/Aryan Nations,  not to mention the crusader aesthetics of those others upholding white Christian ideals: Stormfront and the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.’ (p. 66).

Then you got yourself some family values!

One of the things that tends to happen when researching 2012 is noticing how patterns and coincidences/synchronicities start abounding which give folks the impression that 2012 is clearly of special significance. My favorite is the 2012 election, which clearly has an eschatological spin to it when the lovely Sarah Palin is involved:

I picked this theme up back on the last election day at Religion Dispatches:

Numerous commentators have highlighted the recent “open letter” from James Dobson of Focus on the Family regarding an America under Obama. The 16-page letter is sent from the year 2012 and lists the many ways Obama has brought America to its knees after four years of anti-Christian rule. Clearly, this temporal message-in-a-bottle is another example of the right-wing apocalyptic imagination at work, a politicized Rapture. But perhaps Dobson is also trading upon that other apocalypse prophesied to arrive in 2012, which is believed to mark the end of the thirteenth B’ak’tun cycle in the Long Count of the Mayan calendar? Popular appropriations of this meme find noticeably white middle-aged messianic men returning in the guise of the winged serpent Quetzalcoatl or Pahana, the “Lost White Brother” of the Hopi, to restore order to a lost world. When the Conquistadors first arrived in the Americas, a Christian appropriation of indigenous spiritual symbols was not uncommon in the expansion of white power: perhaps Dobson is better read in history than one might imagine.