Sunday, Apr 19, 2015 10:00 AM UTC
Marco Rubio’s deranged religion, Ted Cruz’s bizarre faith: Our would-be presidents are God-fearing clowns
Rand Paul, Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton all spout pious religious lies. We must grill them on what they really mean
Topics: Religion, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush, Atheism, Hillary Clinton, Christ Fellowship, Rand Paul, Editor's Picks, Politics News
This story has been corrected since it was originally published.
Aspirants to the White House, both Democratic and Republican, have, as we all know, begun “announcing,” thus initiating, from a rationalist’s point of view, a media carnival featuring, on both sides, an array of supposedly God-fearing clowns and faith-mongering nitwits groveling before Evangelicals and nattering on about their belief in the Almighty and their certainty that if we just looked, we could find answers to many of our ills in the Good Book.
The candidates will cloak their true agendas – serving the Lords of Wall Street far more zealously than Our Father who art (or really, art not) in heaven – in pious patter about “values,” about the need to “restore America” and return us to the state of divinely granted exceptionalism President Obama has so gravely squandered. This Season of Unreason will end with the elections of November 2016, but its consequences – validation of the idea that belief without evidence is a virtue, that religion, and especially Christianity, deserves a place in our politics, our Constitutionally enshrined secularism notwithstanding – will live on and damage the progressive cause.
But it does not have to be this way.
There will almost certainly be no (declared) atheist or even agnostic among the candidates. This is scandalous, given the electorate’s gradual, relentless ditching of religion. A survey just out shows that 7.5 million Americans have abandoned their faith since 2012, the year of the Pew Research Center poll that established that one out of five have no religious affiliation. Nonbelief is trending, and among a sizable, growing demographic.
Professing belief in a fictitious celestial deity says a lot about the content of a person’s character, and what sort of policies he or she would likely favor. So, we should take a look at those who have announced so far, and what sort of religious views they hold. Let’s start with the Republicans. Rand Paul, the eye-surgeon senator from Kentucky, is officially a “devout” Christian, but he has subtly hinted that he really does not believe. He finds it tough to see “God’s hand” in the suffering he encounters as a doctor, citing an example any New Atheist could have chosen to dispel the notion that a benevolent deity watches over humanity: “small children dying from brain tumors.” This gives Paul to wonder if one needs to be “saved more than once,” which implies his faith has failed him at times. Nevertheless, he says, he always does “come back” to Jesus. He closed his announcement speech asking for “God’s help” in getting elected. Whether he meant it, we don’t really know.
With the dapper Florida Sen. Marco Rubio we move into the more disturbing category of Republicans we might charitably diagnose as “faith-deranged” – in other words, as likely to do fine among the unwashed “crazies” in the red-state primaries, but whose religious beliefs would (or should) render them unfit for civilized company anywhere else.
Among the faith-deranged, Rubio stands out. He briefly dumped one magic book for another, converting from Roman Catholicism to Mormonism and then back again. (Reporters take note: This is faith-fueled flip-flopping, which surely indicates a damning character flaw to be investigated. Flip-flopping of a different sort helped sink John Kerry’s 2004 presidential bid.) Yet even as a re-minted Catholic, Rubio cheats on the Pope with a megachurch in Miami called Christ Fellowship. As religion and politics blogger Bruce Wilson points out, Christ Fellowship is a hotbed of “demonology and exorcism, Young Earth creationism, and denial of evolution,” and is so intolerant it demands its prospective employees certify they are not “practicing homosexuals” and don’t cheat on their spouses. (Check out its manifesto under “About Us – What We Believe.”) As regards evolution, Rubio confesses that he’s “not a scientist” and so cannot presume to judge the fact of evolution on its merits, and holds that creationism should be taught in schools as just one of many “multiple theories” about our origins.
Though he magnanimously acknowledges that atheists “have a right to not believe in God,” Rubio has called the Almighty the “source of all we have,” and, worse, stated that “our national motto is ‘In God We Trust,’” which reminds us that “faith in our Creator is the most important American value of all.” According to this logic, atheists are not fully “American.” Rubio also believes “You cannot do anything without God,” which he terms “a profound and elemental truth.” Stephen Hawking, the theoretical physicist known for, among other things, his far more profound and elemental accomplishments in melding the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, and, most recently, for publicly declaring his atheism, would beg to differ. It’s a safe bet, in fact, that most scientists have a better grasp on the vital verities than anyone rummaging around in Rubio’s beloved “sacred” tome of far-fetched fiction and foolish figments.
Yet of the Republicans, the most flagrant irrationalist is clearly Texas junior Sen. Ted Cruz. For starters, Cruz pandered fulsomely to the faith-deranged by choosing to announce at Liberty University, that bastion of darkness located in Lynchburg, Virginia. Once administered by the late Jerry Falwell, Liberty promises a “World Class Christian education” and boasts that it has been “training champions for Christ since 1971” – grounds enough, in my view, to revoke the institution’s charter and subject it to immediate quarantine until sanity breaks out.
Allow me a brief yet significant digression. One wonders, in Cruz’s case, if the malady of faith isn’t acquired, but transmitted genetically. In 2013, his father, Rafael, an Evangelical pastor, spoke at a Second Amendment advocacy meeting in Oklahoma. He declared atheism amounts to a lack of moral absolutes. Hence, “If there’s no god,” then no moral absolutes can exist, “and you can change the rules.” This “leads us to sexual immorality, leads us to sexual abuse, leads us to perversion, and of course, no hope!” At least one of Ted Cruz’s own direr musings — that gays are waging a ”jihad . . . in Indiana and Arkansas, and going after people of faith who respect the biblical teaching that marriage is the union of one man and one woman” — prompt the question: if Cruz is elected, will he classify homosexuality as terrorism and dispatch gay “jihadis” to Guantanamo?
During his 31-minute announcement address, Cruz recounts how his once-truant dad found Jesus and returned home. Otherwise, peppering his talk with references to God, Cruz informs us he will restore a United States brought low under Obama’s maleficent rein by uniting “millions of courageous conservatives” who will rise up “together to say in unison ‘we demand our liberty!’” From whom, exactly? He doesn’t say.
