by ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Thirty years ago, driving across the hill country in the South, every 50 miles I’d pick up a new Pentecostal radio station with the preacher screaming in tongues in a torrent of ecstatic drivel – “Miki taki meka keena ko-o-ola ka” – the harsh consonants rattling the speakers on my Newport station wagon. I had a friend, a “shouter” – whose trailer featured by way of cultural uplift only the Bible and a big TV set tuned to the Christian Broadcasting Network, on which Pat Robertson used to denounce New Age paganism on an hourly basis.
Last time I visited, a few months ago, my friend’s nice house still featured the Bible. Next to it is a thick manual of astrological guidance – could Geminis pair up with Scorpios with any hope of success, and kindred counsel – and he and his wife surfed through a big menu of channels. Out on the highway my radio picked up Glenn Beck spouting drivel, but the old Pentecostalists had vanished from the dial. These days, my friend told me, he and his wife didn’t tithe to any particular church and pastor. “All crooks,” he said dryly. They stay home and hold their own Sunday service there.
It’s still God’s country, but all the landmarks are different. There are millions in the Bible belt steering not just by God’s compass and the Good Book, but also by the stars and natural forces of a pagan spiritual outlook.
The Bible’s had a rough time of it these past forty years. In 1967 came William Whyte Jr’s famous 1967 essay “The Historic Roots of our Ecologic Crisis” denouncing God’s okay to Adam on planetary pillage in Genesis 1: 26-28: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion… over all the earth… Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth and subdue it,” a mandate also unpleasing to the population controllers, always a powerful force in American environmentalism (and surging anew today, since every mewling infant means a hateful new carbon lungprint. One can imagine Paul Ehrlich shuddering like a vampire at the sight of the crucifix, every time he trips over yet another “begat” in the Pentateuch.)
In the Judaeo-Christian tradition, only man had reason and a soul. The rest of creation was mechanical and could be subdued with a clear conscience. Down the road lay the Descartes and the Jansenists claiming that the howls of tortured animals was merely the noise of breaking machinery.
Feminists found much to deplore in the Bible too, whether it was God’s tough talk to Eve in the Garden of Eden — “In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee” — or St Paul’s terse “The head of every man is Christ and the head of the woman is man.”
Nor did the Six Day War help the Bible’s standing as God’s revealed truth and as Zionism’s anchor. As Israeli archaeologists led by Yigael Yadin fanned out across the newly conquered West Bank and the heart of biblical Judea they searched for evidence of the historical homeland, in a quest that had its roots, as brilliantly excavated by Shlomo Sand in his recent The Invention of the Jewish People (Verso), in the appearance of prenationalist Jewish historiography from the mid- nineteenth century, starting with Heinrich Graetz’s History of the Jews from the Oldest Times to the Present. Graetz believed with every fiber of his being that the Pentateuch was historically accurate.
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