Peace Messenger

The Prophetic Word

Excerpts from Pastor Trevor Kinlock's sermon, "I'm Sick of It!", preached at Calvary Seventh-day Adventist Church in Newport News, Virginia, May 10, 2008:

A fiery preacher named Jeremiah…criticized the nation and its smooth-talking pastors and they threw him in jail and burned his sermon notes (Jer. 36:37)….

Beloved, they cannot handle the message of the prophet, they cannot handle the message of truth, when it challenges the structures of power….

[The prophets'] message is universal, and its speaks to nations, social conditions, and religious institutions and orthodoxy.  “Woe,” and “repent” are the two consistent words of the prophet.

And so, church, if we have a prophetic message, we ought to speak out against the nation when the nation contravenes a “thus saith the Lord.”  Help us God!

And so I declare this afternoon, “Woe unto you, George Bush, for lying about weapons of mass destruction.  Woe unto you for invading and destroying a nation, and arrogantly trading the blood of thousands of American soldiers for oil and strategic dominance.  Woe unto you. Shame on you.  There’s a problem with that....

Repent, America, for exploiting the poor and enlarging the rich.  God is not pleased with that….

Woe unto you, America, for glorifying violence, perverting sexuality, debasing the institution of marriage, and worshipping the “almighty dollar.”  Woe! Woe! Woe!  God is not happy with you.  God is not pleased with you.  God is going to deal.  Judgment day is coming….There’s a God that sits in heaven and He deals with those who oppress His people.  So you better repent!

Last day church, don’t be afraid to preach the prophetic word. Remnant church, Seventh-day Adventist church, don’t be afraid to speak truth to power....

Listen to the sermon at PraizeVision.com.

Metastatic Militarism

President Bush will leave to his successor not only "a world marred by war and battered by deprivation" but also "a Pentagon metastasized almost beyond recognition," writes Frida Berrigan at TomDispatch.com.  She identifies seven aspects of the Pentagon's stunning expansion both in size and influence during the past six years:

1. The Budget-busting Pentagon: The Pentagon's core budget -- already a staggering $300 billion when George W. Bush took the presidency -- has almost doubled while he's been parked behind the big desk in the Oval Office. For fiscal year 2009, the regular Pentagon budget will total roughly $541 billion (including work on nuclear warheads and naval reactors at the Department of Energy).

...And that's before we even count "war spending." If the direct costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the Global War on Terror, are factored in, "defense" spending has essentially tripled.

2. The Pentagon as Diplomat: The Bush administration has repeatedly exhibited its disdain for discussion and compromise, treaties and agreements, and an equally deep admiration for what can be won by threat and force. No surprise, then, that the White House's foreign policy agenda has increasingly been directed through the military....

3. The Pentagon as Arms Dealer: In the Bush years, the Pentagon has aggressively increased its role as the planet's foremost arms dealer, pumping up its weapons sales everywhere it can -- and so seeding the future with war and conflict....

4. The Pentagon as Intelligence Analyst and Spy: In the area of "intelligence," the Pentagon's expansion -- the commandeering of information and analysis roles -- has been swift, clumsy, and catastrophic....

5. The Pentagon as Domestic Disaster Manager: ... in the Bush years, the Pentagon has become the official first responder of last resort in case of just about any disaster -- from tornadoes, hurricanes, and floods to civil unrest, potential outbreaks of disease, or possible biological or chemical attacks....

6. The Pentagon as Humanitarian Caregiver Abroad: ...The Center for Global Development finds that the Pentagon's share of "official development assistance" -- think "winning hearts and minds" or "nation-building" – has increased from 6% to 22% between 2002 and 2005. The Pentagon is fast taking over development from both the NGO-community and civilian agencies, slapping a smiley face on military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and beyond....

7. The Pentagon as Global Viceroy and Ruler of the Heavens: In the Bush years, the Pentagon finished dividing the globe into military "commands," which are functionally viceroyalties....

Meanwhile, should the Earth not be enough, there are always the heavens to control. In August 2006...the Bush administration unveiled its "national space policy." It advocated establishing, defending, and enlarging U.S. control over space resources and argued for "unhindered" rights in space -- unhindered, that is, by international agreements preventing the weaponization of space....

Was Jeremiah Wright -- Wrong?

That's the question Frederick Russell, pastor of the Miracle Temple Seventh-day Adventist church addressed in his Sabbath sermon on April 26.  More on that below.

As a result of his performance at the National Press Club on Monday, April 28, the condemnation of Rev. Jeremiah Wright has extended even more widely, with many former sympathizers now expressing dismay.  Yet, to a large extent, the controversy remains more about style than substance, about isolated overstatements than the predominant thrust of his message and ministry.

Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, for example, emphatically declares “I’ve had it with Wright” because the pastor’s response to his critics was so “egocentric” and overreaching in identifying his kind of church and ministry with so diverse a reality as the African American church.

Yet, says Robinson, Wright “made some good points yesterday when he entered the lion’s den of the National Press Club. I especially liked this one: ‘My goddaughter's unit just arrived in Iraq this week, while those who call me unpatriotic have used their positions of privilege to avoid military service while sending . . . over 4,000 American boys and girls of every race to die over a lie.’”

It would be to our own spiritual detriment if we were to use Wright’s rhetorical overkill and confrontational style as reason to avoid what he has to say about the “prophetic tradition” of the Bible and what that has to say about race relations, peace, and economic justice in our time and culture.  If anyone is truly interested in finding out who Jeremiah Wright is and what he stands for, the interview with him on Bill Moyers’ Journal is a good place to start.

And whatever we may think about Wright’s views, there are still more fundamental issues at stake for Seventh-day Adventists, as Pastor Frederick Russell brought out in his sermon last Sabbath at Miracle Temple in Baltimore, Maryland.  In his message, “Was Jeremiah Wright – Wrong?,” Dr. Russell addressed “the dangers of patriotism gone awry, so much so that it seeks to destroy anyone who speaks contrary to what it believes about itself.”

He noted that the political and religious culture of Jesus’ day joined together to “take him out, because he dared to speak something against what they perceived as loyalty to the temple, and loyalty to the culture.” This kind of patriotism “can become a religion in itself,” Russell warned, leading us to “unwittingly begin to worship the country itself.”

Will “the church of the living God” be silent while this kind of “dangerous patriotism” leads to the vilification and demonization of a religious community and its pastor based on distortions?  “As a Seventh-day Adventist Christian,” the pastor declared, “I must stand for religious liberty.”

Pastor Russell’s sermon can be view on PraizeVision or at the Miracle Temple blog

Politics, Prophecy and Peace

Politics and Prophecy: The Battle for Religious Liberty and the Authentic Gospel
Christa and Alan J. Reinach, editor
Pacific Press / 2008

In this new book from Pacific Press, nine Adventist authors collaborate to address current issues of religious liberty, building on "the conviction that there is more to modern culture-war battles than can be understood merely through policy analysis or moral discourse -- a conviction that prophetic perspective is essential." The book seeks to chart a way forward, writes co-editor Alan Reinach, that avoids the pitfalls of both "pietism and power politics," instead helping the church "to fulfill a prophetic function: to speak truth to power" (8).

Authors include John Graz, director of the Department of Public Affairs and Religious Liberty for the General Conference, and James Standish, director of legislative affairs for the Seventh-day Adventist Church, along with several others among the church's leading advocates of religious liberty: Barry Bussey, Jonathan Gallagher, Nicholas Miller, Michael Peabody, and Timothy Standish.

Merely in passing, of course, and with a humility worthy of Stephen Colbert, I also note that the book includes a chapter by the editor of this blog and the Peace Messenger electronic newsletter, described as follows by editor Reinach:

Douglas Morgan, an historian who teaches at Columbia Union College, provides a stirring warning about the abuse of American power in his chapter: “Marching to the Call of History.” He reviews the Adventist understanding of the role of the United States in prophecy, and recovers the Adventist imperative to be patriotic critics of the expansion of American power, and the erosion of republican principles.

More on Politics and Prophecy at the Liberty Blog!

Torture: White House-Planned and Approved

An appeal from the National Religious Campaign Against Torture:

We now have strong evidence that, as many of us have suspected, the abuses perpetrated on detainees over the past 7 years were not simply the acts of "rogue" agents or low ranking soldiers, but were instead planned and approved of by top Administration officials - including the President himself, as well as Vice-President Dick Cheney.  ABC News and the Associated Press recently reported that the President's top national security advisors met in the White House, on numerous occasions and with the President's approval, to authorize interrogators to torture high-value detainees (by waterboarding them and subjecting them to sleep deprivation, among other abuses).  Unfortunately, these dramatic revelations have been largely ignored by the media and the public.

Please help inform the public about the fact that top Administration officials were directly involved in planning the torture of high-value detainees by writing a letter to the editor of your local newspaper expressing your deep concern about learning that your leaders participated in the torture planning meetings and your disappointment that the media and the public have not responded to the news about the meetings with the appropriate vigor and outrage.

--Linda Gustitus, NRCAT Board President, and Rich Killmer, NRCAT Executive Director

Click here for NRCAT's sample letter and letter-writing guidelines.

The recent revelations about presidential awareness and approval of torture techniques came on the heels of another under-reported development in early March -- President Bush's veto of legislation that would have prohibited the use of brutal techniques of interrogation by American intelligence agents.  About this unprecedented, formal blessing of torture as national policy by the President of the United States, Anthony Lewis comments:

No one should be in any doubt that torture was what President Bush had in mind. No one should be fooled by Orwellian talk of "enhanced interrogation techniques."

What Congress sought to outlaw was such things as hanging prisoners from the ceiling by their wrists, beating them, depriving them of food and water, preventing them from sleeping for days, keeping them in freezing temperatures, using electric shocks on them, and subjecting them to waterboarding—an almost-drowning technique that was used by the Inquisition and by Japanese soldiers who were successfully prosecuted for it by the United States after World War II. Torture....

The corrupting effects of the adoption of torture as an American practice have been widespread. First of all, on the law. The Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, which makes binding interpretations of the law for the federal government, issued secret opinions defining torture away to the vanishing point, saying it must be equivalent in pain to "organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death"—and adding that Congress could not stop the President from ordering the use of torture. (The whole idea of secret official opinions defining the law should be anathema in a free republic, one that has boasted from the beginning of having a government of laws, not men. Secret laws are the hallmark of tyrannies.)

The Justice Department opinions were not abstractions. They were immediately taken up by political appointees at the Pentagon and led directly to the torture of dozens of prisoners and the killing of some at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan....

Lewis concludes his piece with this quote from Colonel Lawrence B. Wilkerson, US Army (Ret.), former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell:

We must start now to recognize our crimes and our complicity. We are all guilty, and we must all take action in whatever way we can. Torture and abuse are not American. They are foreign to us and always should be. We need to exorcise them from our souls and make amends.

(Anthony Lewis, "The Terror President," New York Review of Books, May 1, 2008)

Megachurch Minister Calls for Holy War on Islam

From Martin E. Marty's Sightings column for April 14, "Rod Parsley on Islam":

William Franklin Graham famously called Islam a wicked and evil religion, but I don't think he called for its extinction through violence, as in war.  Colorado congressman Tom Tancredo, a wild politician, did call for the bombing of Mecca to shatter the Muslim center.  Now, Parsley—as in Rod Parsley—is the flavor of the month among the controversial clergy being spotlighted in the camps of the three presidential campaigners. Parsley, pastor of Ohio's mega-est megachurch, twelve-thousand-member World Harvest Church in Columbus, calls for "destroying" Islam.

...As reported in Mother Jones (March 12), Parsley says there is a war and he wants bigger war, as America can only "fulfill its divine purpose" by seeing to it that Islam, "this false religion, is destroyed."  Though he spells out no specific strategy, he writes things like, "We find now we have no choice.  The time has come" to destroy "this anti-Christ religion," inspired by demons who spoke to Allah.

Shall some Muslims be spared—the moderates down the street or anywhere else, for example?  No:  "mainstream believers" in the "1,209 mosques" in America drink from the same well as do the extremists whom all citizens condemn....

... Rather than accuse Parsley of calling for genocide, it is in place to ask him to spell out alternatives.  Does "destroy" Islam mean winning a debate until every last targeted Muslim cries uncle and says, "I give up, you win"?  He may mean that.  Does the "destruction of Islam" mean the deconversion of a billion people and, preferably, conversion to Parsley's "Christian civilization"?  Try converting as many as one in your town, and then take on the millions more in Indonesia.  Does "destroy" mean bombing the 1,209 mosques in America, which number includes only a few of the world-wide total?  As of now, Parsley simply calls for "war."  By most definitions, doesn't "war" mean "killing"?...

Rule by Law or Imperial Decree?

From The Progress Report for January 30, issued by the Center for American Progress Action Fund:

Earlier this week, President Bush signed the National Defense Authorization Act of 2008, which included a statute forbidding the Bush administration from spending taxpayer money "to establish any military installation or base for the purpose of providing for the permanent stationing of United States Armed Forces in Iraq." But Bush quietly attached a signing statement to the law, asserting a unilateral right to disregard the ban on permanent bases in addition to three other measures in the bill. "Provisions of the act...could inhibit the president's ability to carry out his constitutional obligations...to protect national security," the signing statement read. Reacting to the statement, Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Mark Agrast said, "On the merits, for the president to assert that Congress lacks the authority to say there shouldn't be permanent bases on foreign soil is fanciful at best." Bush's "frequent use of signing statements to advance aggressive theories of executive power has been a hallmark of his presidency," writes the Boston Globe's Charlie Savage, who has authored a book on that topic....

Last November, Bush announced that he and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had signed a "Declaration of Principles for a Long-Term Relationship of Cooperation and Friendship" that set the parameters for negotiating an "enduring" U.S. occupation of Iraq. The negotiations have drawn fire in part because the administration said it does not intend to designate the declaration as a "treaty," and so will not submit it to Congress for approval. Bush's attempt to waive the ban on permanent bases is seen as one more step in the direction of establishing a long-term U.S. presence in Iraq....

Among the other provisions in the Defense Authorization Act that Bush asserted an unfounded right to ignore were two accountability measures aimed at private security firms accused of wartime abuses. One of these provisions would establish an independent, bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting....

The fourth and last provision of the law that Bush sought to ignore was a requirement of the administration to turn over "any existing intelligence assessment, report, estimate or legal opinion" requested by the leaders of the House and Senate Armed Services committees within 45 days. The New York Times writes, "Clearly, this violates the power that Mr. Bush has given himself to cover up an array of illegal and improper actions, like his decisions to spy on Americans without a warrant, to torture prisoners in violation of the Geneva Conventions and to fire United States attorneys apparently for political reasons."

The Road to Peace Not Taken

Peter Galbraith, in a New York Review of Books article on the book Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States by Trita Parsi, describes how the U.S. spurned an opportunity for a diplomatic breakthrough with Iran that could have de-fused the crisis over nuclear energy which has now virtually reached the point of hysteria.

. . . In May 2003, the Iranian authorities sent a proposal through the Swiss ambassador in Tehran, Tim Guldimann, for negotiations on a package deal in which Iran would freeze its nuclear program in exchange for an end to US hostility. The Iranian paper offered "full transparency for security that there are no Iranian endeavors to develop or possess WMD [and] full cooperation with the IAEA based on Iranian adoption of all relevant instruments." The Iranians also offered support for "the establishment of democratic institutions and a non-religious government" in Iraq; full cooperation against terrorists (including "above all, al-Qaeda"); and an end to material support to Palestinian groups like Hamas. In return, the Iranians asked that their country not be on the terrorism list or designated part of the "axis of evil"; that all sanctions end; that the US support Iran's claims for reparations for the Iran–Iraq War as part of the overall settlement of the Iraqi debt; that they have access to peaceful nuclear technology; and that the US pursue anti-Iranian terrorists, including "above all" the MEK. MEK members should, the Iranians said, be repatriated to Iran.

Basking in the glory of "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq, the Bush administration dismissed the Iranian offer and criticized Guldimann for even presenting it. Several years later, the Bush administration's abrupt rejection of the Iranian offer began to look blatantly foolish and the administration moved to suppress the story. . . . Trita Parsi . . . describes in detail the Iranian offer and the Bush administration's high-handed rejection of it in his wonderfully informative account of the triangular relationship among the US, Iran, and Israel, Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States. . . .

Fareed Zakaria, in his recent column on the disconnect with reality in U.S. discourse about Iran (see previous post), also discusses the Bush administration's repudiation of the path toward peaceful cooperation with Iran in the two years following the 9/11 attacks:

The one time we seriously negotiated with Tehran was in the closing days of the war in Afghanistan, in order to create a new political order in the country. Bush's representative to the Bonn conference, James Dobbins, says that "the Iranians were very professional, straightforward, reliable and helpful. They were also critical to our success. They persuaded the Northern Alliance to make the final concessions that we asked for." Dobbins says the Iranians made overtures to have better relations with the United States through him and others in 2001 and later, but got no reply. Even after the Axis of Evil speech, he recalls, they offered to cooperate in Afghanistan. Dobbins took the proposal to a principals meeting in Washington only to have it met with dead silence. The then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, he says, "looked down and rustled his papers." No reply was ever sent back to the Iranians. . . .

"The American discussion about Iran has lost all connection to reality"

Commentary by Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International:

At a meeting with reporters last week, President Bush said that "if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing [Iran] from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon." These were not the barbs of some neoconservative crank or sidelined politician looking for publicity. This was the president of the United States, invoking the specter of World War III if Iran gained even the knowledge needed to make a nuclear weapon.

The American discussion about Iran has lost all connection to reality....

Here is the reality. Iran has an economy the size of Finland's and an annual defense budget of around $4.8 billion. It has not invaded a country since the late 18th century. The United States has a GDP that is 68 times larger and defense expenditures that are 110 times greater. Israel and every Arab country (except Syria and Iraq) are quietly or actively allied against Iran. And yet we are to believe that Tehran is about to overturn the international system and replace it with an Islamo-fascist order? What planet are we on?...

We're on a path to irreversible confrontation with a country we know almost nothing about. The United States government has had no diplomats in Iran for almost 30 years. American officials have barely met with any senior Iranian politicians or officials. We have no contact with the country's vibrant civil society. Iran is a black hole to us—just as Iraq had become in 2003.

Fareed Zakaria, "Stalin, Mao And ... Ahmadinejad?" Newseek.com, October 29, 2007.

Unilateral and Unchecked Power

The October 26 broadcast of Bill Moyers' Journal explores the roots of the Bush-Cheney administration's "unitary executive" doctrine. Excerpts from the transcript:

BILL MOYERS: . . . President Bush and Vice President Cheney espouse the theory of the unitary executive. That means the President's orders can't be reviewed, questioned, or altered by the other two branches of government. He alone can say what the law means, or whether or not it will be enforced or ignored. In effect, George W. Bush says his powers must be unilateral and unchecked.

Critics claim the President has used the war on terror to put himself above the law and that he has created a secret presidency of classified decisions and orders, that approve extraordinary renditions, torture, illegal detentions, and wiretapping without warrants with the collaboration of big telecom companies. This boundless secrecy and surveillance evokes images counter to American values. . . .

Thirty two years ago, at the end of the Vietnam War, Congress turned over the rock and found all kinds of things squirming under it — lethal activities from electric pistols and poison pellets to Mafia connections and drug experiments. As well as illicit acts by the executive branch ranging from secret attempts by the CIA to subvert foreign democracies to unlawful domestic spying under such code names as Chaos, Cable Splicer, Garden Plot and Leprechaun. The Select Senate Committee headed by Frank Church found, no mailbox, no college campus, no television had been safe. The Church Committee led Congress to reject presidential claims of 'inherent authority' and restore some checks and balances, including putting an end to electronic surveillance without warrants.

WALTER MONDALE: This kind of unrestrained, illegal, secret intimidation and harassment of the essential ability of Americans to participate freely in American political life shall never happen again.

BILL MOYERS: But advocates of presidential prerogatives chafed at the restrictions and began then to try to reverse them. One of the people who argued most vociferously that a president could exceed the laws was a former White House Chief of Staff who had been elected to Congress. His name. Dick Cheney. Look at this excerpt from the documentary 'Cheney's Law' that was broadcast on FRONTLINE last week:

NARRATOR: Cheney had learned some hard lessons early in his political career. . . .

NARRATOR: Thirty-three-year-old Dick Cheney saw it firsthand.

RON SUSKIND, AUTHOR, THE ONE PERCENT DOCTRINE: He viewed the searing moments of the Nixon administration, which he was there in the front seats for, as a diminution of what the president ought to be.

NARRATOR: Then in 1975, he became President Ford's Chief of Staff. . . .

NARRATOR: Cheney watched Congress assert its authority over the president.

JAMES MANN, AUTHOR, RISE OF THE VULCANS: You have a wave of Congressional investigations . . . and Cheney is trying to fight off these investigations.

PROF. JACK GOLDSMITH, UNIV. CHICAGO LAW SCHOOL, 1997-'02: He's talked about how Congress unduly burdened the president and in a way that he believed was unconstitutional.

DAVID GERGEN: And Dick came out of that absolutely committed to the idea of restoring the powers of the presidency.

BILL MOYERS: When the terrorists struck on 9/11, Dick Cheney was Vice President, with the opportunity to claim extraordinary power in the name of national security. The FRONTLINE documentary showed how he did it.

JAMES RISEN, THE NEW YORK TIMES: They began to spy on Americans in an unprecedented way, in a way that they never had done before, by creating a special program to eavesdrop on Americans without warrants on their international phone calls and also by mounting a massive data mining operation.

NARRATOR: The data from billions of telephone calls and emails were being captured by The National Security Agency. But in the 1970s, Congress had prohibited such activities without the approval of a special court. . . .

BILL MOYERS: The stakes are still enormous and the argument over presidential power has grown more contentious because Democrats in control of Congress keep calling administration officials to testify only to be rebuffed by claims of executive privilege.

The entire broadcast can viewed online at the program's web site.