Wright vs. Hagee: Pick Your Crazy

Mark Wolf of the Rocky Mountain News has collected some (shall we say) interesting quotes from two pastors tangentially related to the presidential campaign. Wolf writes, “Jeremiah Wright who recently retired from Obama’s church, married the Obamas and baptized their children.” And John Hagee endorsed John McCain. All links are originally from Wolf except for a link to Hagee’s web page. What do these two Christian leaders believe?

Wolf points to a story from ABC about Wright:

In addition to damning America, he told his congregation on the Sunday after Sept. 11, 2001 that the United States had brought on al Qaeda’s attacks because of its own terrorism.

“We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye,” Rev. Wright said in a sermon on Sept. 16, 2001.

“We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost,” he told his congregation.

So, to Wright, the fact that the U.S. bombed a nation that brutally attacked and waged war against the U.S., and the U.S. failed to side with Palestinian terrorist campaigns, means that the U.S. deserved or invited the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Wright’s views are somewhat similar to those of Ward Churchill, who also used the line about chickens roosting with respect to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Wright’s comments are reprehensible.

Hagee has taken heat for comments that he made regarding the Catholic Church. Hagee claims some of his comments were taken out of context. You can hear these comments for yourself in a video from Veracifier available through YouTube. Hagee’s statements about the Catholic Church hardly reveal the extent of the man’s lunacy. When Hagee makes the following remarks, he is pointing to a figurine of a person riding atop a horned lion:

This [it’s unclear whether Hagee is pointing to the lion or the person] is the great whore of Revelation 17. This [the lion] is the antichrist system. This [the person] is the apostate church. In this cup [held by the person] if you will read it in the book of Revelation is the blood of the saints. This is talking principally about the blood of the Jewish people. Where? From the crusades, that happened back here [earlier on a timeline]. From the Spanish Inquisition. From the Holocaust. When Adolf Hitler came to power he said, I’m not going to do anything in my lifetime that hasn’t been done by the Roman church for the past 800 years, I’m only going to do it on a greater scale, and more efficiently. And he certainly had done just exactly that. God has said, I gave you the time to repent, but you did not. You [the person], this false cult system, that was born in Genesis 10, and progressed through Israel and became Baal worship, God says, the day is going to come, when I’m going to cause this beast [the lion] to devour this apostate system [the person]. So you can see very clearly that, while the church is in heaven, this false religious system [the person] is going to be totally devoured by the antichrist.

The same YouTube video plays a selection of Hagee from a radio interview; Wolf includes the following text:

From an interview with Terry Gross on National Public Radio’s Fresh Air program:

GROSS: I just want to ask you one question based on one of your sermons that — and this isn’t about Israel. You said after Hurricane Katrina that it was an act of God, and you said “when you violate God’s will long enough, the judgment of God comes to you. Katrina is an act of God for a society that is becoming Sodom and Gomorrah reborn.” Do you still think that Katrina is punishment from God for a society that’s becoming like Sodom and Gomorrah?

HAGEE: All hurricanes are acts of God, because God controls the heavens. I believe that New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive to God, and they are — were recipients of the judgment of God for that. The newspaper carried the story in our local area that was not carried nationally that there was to be a homosexual parade there on the Monday that the Katrina came. And the promise of that parade was that it was going to reach a level of sexuality never demonstrated before in any of the other Gay Pride parades. So I believe that the judgment of God is a very real thing. I know that there are people who demur from that, but I believe that the Bible teaches that when you violate the law of God, that God brings punishment sometimes before the day of judgment. And I believe that the Hurricane Katrina was, in fact, the judgment of God against the city of New Orleans.

GROSS: So I know you’re very opposed to homosexuality, but you think that the whole city was punished because of things like the forthcoming Gay Pride parade.

HAGEE: This is true. All of the city was punished because of the sin that happened there in that city.

I don’t think I need to criticize Hagee’s comments in greater depth other than to denounce them completely. Anybody who actually believes what Hagee is saying is so detached from reality that rational discussion is probably beside the point. Hagee represents the mentality of the Dark Ages.