"The delusional is no longer marginal"

Jim Gilliam has an extract from a recent Bill Moyers speech. He quotes a huge chunk about the power Dispensationalists have been able to amass. Bill Moyers doesn’t use that term in his speech but he’s talking about Dispensationalism. It’s a way of looking at Christianity from the back-end. Start at the Rapture and work your way backwards to figure out what you’re supposed to be doing now. Based on hermeneutic study this means supporting the state of Israel so it can be destroyed and thus bring about the Second Coming, the Rapture, the Tribulation and so forth.

I don’t understand how an apocalyptic cult counts House Majority Leader Tom Delay, Senator James Inhofe and others as members. These people want to sacrifice Israel to the Anti-Christ in order to bring about the Second Coming. All personal religious beliefs aside, because there is certainly wackier stuff out there, this is a disregard for the majority of Americans that don’t believe in this stuff. They build policy based on their dispensational beliefs.

Tom Delay has no room for non-Christians as he has previously stated:

Only Christianity offers a way to live in response to the realities that we find in this world – only Christianity.

Inhofe characterized the battle for the end times with these words:

This is not a political battle at all. It is a contest over whether or not the word of God is true.

If you were unclear as to why we went to war in Iraq President Bush has said

God told me to strike at al-Qaida and I struck them, and then He instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me, I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them.

Apparently he misheard God about solving the problem in the Middle East because he backed out of the road map when it angered Dispensationalists according to Pentecostal minister Robert G. Upton:

Within a two-week period, getting 50,000 postcards saying the exact same thing from places all over the country, that resonated with the White House. That really caused [President Bush] to backpedal on the Road Map.

I don’t think President Bush is a Dispensationalist since he’s a Methodist. I personally disagree with his overt mixing of religion and politics but I don’t think he wants to destroy the world for God. The two Congressmen I mentioned do believe in it. It’s fine to believe this on your own time, but they create foreign and domestic policy based on these doomsday beliefs. Moyers is right “the delusional is no longer marginal.”