“Spaceship Jesus:” Keep dreamin’

From Killing the Buddha:

That said… the evangelical/fundamentalists—and hence, from the early 1980s until the election of President Obama in 2008, the Religious Right as it informed U.S. policy through the then dominant Republican Party—are in the grip of an apocalyptic Rapture cult centered on revenge and vindication. This End Times death wish is built on a literalist interpretation of the Book of Revelation. Too bad.

This weird book was the last to be included in the New Testament. It was included as canonical only relatively late in the process after a heated dispute. The historic Churches East and West remain so suspicious of Revelation that to this day it has never been included as part of the cyclical public readings of scripture in Orthodox services. The book of Revelation is read in Roman and Anglican Churches only during Advent. But both Rome and the East were highly suspicious of the book. The West included the book in the lectionary late and sparingly. In other words, the book of the Bible that the historical Church found most problematic is the one that American evangelicals latched on to like flies on you know what.

Given that Revelation is now being hyped as the literal—even desired—roadmap to Armageddon, it’s worth pausing to note that it’s nothing more than a bizarre pastoral letter that was addressed to seven specific churches in Asia at the end of the first century by someone (maybe John or maybe not) who appears to have been far from well when he wrote it. In any case, the letter was not intended for use outside of its liturgical context, not to mention that it reads like Jesus on acid.

The evangelical/fundamentalist literalistic “interpretation” of Revelation is symptomatic of a larger problem: make-it-up-asyou-go-along biblical interpretation suited to hyping whatever the evangelical/fundamentalist flavor of the moment is, in a desperate effort to keep religion relevant. But taken out of the context of being part of a worship cycle, the Bible became something like an extremely sharp butcher knife in the hands of children running around a garden. There’s nothing wrong with the knife per se, but context is everything. Enter semiliterate American evangelical/fundamentalist rubes armed with multiple “kitchen knives” and imbued with a frontier “no bishops or kings!” suspicion of any tradition, scholarship, or hierarchy that might moderate their wild-eyed personal “interpretations” of scripture and their burning desire to make a buck.