Saturday, May 21, 2005
PowerLine misses a point
I don't usually dig inter-blog interchange; seems a little too convoluted and incestuous. Normally I'd put this as a comment, but PowerLine doesn't do comments. So it's sort of pointless to write this, since Powerline has a half-million readers and I have a half-dozen. (Yes, I know you're there, and I do appreciate you!) Still, the topic is important and PowerLine seems to have misfired.
Here, PowerLine discusses a nasty accusation that the Left has been using for several decades against the charismatic section of Christianity. They quote an op-ed by James Watt, who was the personal target of the attack:
-----
The religious left's political operatives have mounted a shrill attack
on a significant portion of the Christian community. Four out of five
evangelical Christians supported President Bush in 2004 ... Political
opportunists sought a wedge issue to weaken the GOP's coalition of Jews,
Catholics and evangelicals and shatter its electoral majority.
They passed over obvious headliners and landed on a curious but cunning
choice: the environment.
-----
The Left's standard line is that Pentecostals and Charismatics believe there's no point in conservation because the end is coming soon. This is false, but the wedge issue still works. Why? Because a sizable faction of the end-timers do focus on environmental issues as a key sign of the immediate conclusion. If you Google for Hal Lindsey or Jack Van Impe, you'll see who I'm talking about.
These environmental end-timers basically agree with the Left's passive view of apocalypse, not the supposedly active version imputed to Watt. So they are easy targets for a "peel-off" by the religious left.
I've seen this happen with an old friend named Larry, who played a large part in leading me out of leftist darkness in the '80s. Larry has been Pentecostal for a long time, but in more recent years he's fallen into the enviro-apocalyptic tendency. He now listens more to NPR than to Rush (for instance), because NPR hits the same themes as Hal Lindsey. ¶ 9:15 AM
Here, PowerLine discusses a nasty accusation that the Left has been using for several decades against the charismatic section of Christianity. They quote an op-ed by James Watt, who was the personal target of the attack:
-----
The religious left's political operatives have mounted a shrill attack
on a significant portion of the Christian community. Four out of five
evangelical Christians supported President Bush in 2004 ... Political
opportunists sought a wedge issue to weaken the GOP's coalition of Jews,
Catholics and evangelicals and shatter its electoral majority.
They passed over obvious headliners and landed on a curious but cunning
choice: the environment.
-----
The Left's standard line is that Pentecostals and Charismatics believe there's no point in conservation because the end is coming soon. This is false, but the wedge issue still works. Why? Because a sizable faction of the end-timers do focus on environmental issues as a key sign of the immediate conclusion. If you Google for Hal Lindsey or Jack Van Impe, you'll see who I'm talking about.
These environmental end-timers basically agree with the Left's passive view of apocalypse, not the supposedly active version imputed to Watt. So they are easy targets for a "peel-off" by the religious left.
I've seen this happen with an old friend named Larry, who played a large part in leading me out of leftist darkness in the '80s. Larry has been Pentecostal for a long time, but in more recent years he's fallen into the enviro-apocalyptic tendency. He now listens more to NPR than to Rush (for instance), because NPR hits the same themes as Hal Lindsey. ¶ 9:15 AM
