May 14, 2007--McCain's Apocalypse

Both presumptive nominees have their reverend problems.

Barack Obama’s has been on more prominent display. Perhaps it deserves to be. At least to this point. Reverend Wright was his pastor for 20 years and Obama should have known before a few months ago about the full scope of Wright’s views—the good, the bad, and the ugly. Especially the ugly, which, whatever one thinks about the total context of Wright’s ministry, were and are at the very least politically damaging. Perhaps very damaging as some of the exit polls from yesterday’s West Virginia primary suggest.

But on the same day that Clinton was trouncing Obama in Appalachia, John McCain’s reverend was finally back in the headlines. True, those headlines were, as in the case of the New York Times, buried deep in the papers, but there was the Rev. John Hagee back in the news. (See linked article.)

He, recall, is the Evangelical minister with a wide television following who was exposed after he indorsed McCain (with the Straight Talker by his side) as having called the Catholic religion “the great whore.”

Now among some Republicans (and a few Democrats) there is nothing wrong with prostitutes. Quite the contrary. But Hagee’s views of Catholicism have been well known among Catholics for many years; and for whatever good Hagee’s endorsement did for McCain among Fundamentalists, as he has been attempting to pander his way into their favor, it has caused him grief among Catholics who comprise a significant percentage of so-called Reagan Democrats, another constituency McCain needs to cozy up to if he is to have a chance to win in November.

Thus, McCain, who it is important to note actively sought and did not just receive Hagee’s support, got himself caught between an Evangelical rock and a Catholic hard place.

So it was good news for McCain, right, that Hagee yesterday apologized to Catholics for being misunderstood about what he said about their religion?

Not exactly since it will only be good for McCain if the media continue to pay attention to the phony as opposed to the real Hagee and continue to give McCain a free pass while parsing the last details of the struggle between Obama and Clinton. And only if the media, like McCain, “accept” Hagee’s apology at face value and move on—back to Obama’s Rev. Wright problem. Because the true Hagee view of Catholicism is buried deep in his eschatology—how he and his followers see the End Times: the Rapture, the Apocalypse, the Antichrist, the Millennium, the Last Judgment, and all those good other good things.

Because it is at that time, when the world comes to a final end, that those Catholics (and Jews) who haven’t seen the light and converted to Hagee’s form of Christianity, it is then that they will be viewed to be “whores,” and thus suffer the consequences—a holocaust like we’ve never seen before and eternal damnation in the fires of hell.

So, though Hagee is perversely theologically “correct” to say what he said yesterday (if I can elevate these kinds of crackpot and extra-biblical view to theology and correctness)—that Catholics are not whores. But if he were being fully open and honest about his beliefs he would have said that Catholics are not yet whores. But wait, he would have added, your time will come.

I wonder if John McCain is OK with this. Maybe now that Obama is wearing an American flag pin, when the two debate, George Stephanopoulos will have the time to put it to McCain. It will take some fancy dancing, as opposed to straight talk my friends, to explain that one. And maybe then the Rev. Wright will recede to the background where he belongs.