warmongering "christians" and ecclesio-leninists

William Norman Grigg has a great post about the State-worshipping, warmongering Evangelical Christian movement and its Rockefeller-funded origins during the years prior to World War I. Excerpt:

America's might, invested in the European conflict, would be used to build a “united world,” predicted Edward Everett Hale, and “the united world is to be one empire of the Living God.” To that end, preached G. Sherwood Eddy, a world-renowned evangelist and Asia secretary for the YWCA, the generation then living had to learn to sacrifice themselves on behalf of abstractions.

The “challenge to our generation,” insisted Eddy, is “sacrificial and heroic, like the crusaders of the Middle Ages, like the battle-charge of Islam, or the communism-or-death alternative appealing to Lenin and his revolutionary followers.”

Mohammedans and Leninists strike me as the least commendable examples for Christian youth.

But then again, I've always understood that Christians worship Jesus, not the State, and I've always believed that feeding young people into the maw of the war machine was a form of child sacrifice every bit as satanic as that practiced by those who worshiped Molech.

World War I represented, in many ways, the triumph of a religious class we could call the “Ecclesio-Leninists”: Clerics who preached submission to the state and support for its wars, as the essence of Christian patriotism. The following poem published by Rev. William P. Merrill in the Christian Century just shortly after US entry into World War I could be used as the Ecclesio-Leninist creed:

The strength of the State we'll lavish on more
Than making of wealth and making of war;
We are learning at last, though the lesson comes late,
That the making of man is the task of the State.

Unfortunately, it isn't limited to Evangelical Christians; the warmongering, state-worshipping mentality has infected many members of the Roman Catholic faith, as well as other non-evangelical Christian denominations.

I know many catholics and protestants that support Bush and his wars without question (as well as many that don't). It boggles the mind that someone can profess to support life and the commandment "thou shalt not kill", unless we're talking about Iraqis and the all-mighty Bush says that killing them is the right thing to do. The fact that civilians are accidentally slaughtered by the thousands is "unfortunate".

It's one thing for the flock to be mistaken, but what about the shepherds? At the sermons in the RC churches I attend, I regularly hear the priests speak about the evils of abortion (as well they should), but the priests are silent regarding anything about war and just-war theory. This is despite the fact that JPII spoke in no uncertain terms throughout his long tenure as Pope about just that, a holy thorn in the side of both Bush's (and ultimately ignored, of course). Don't get me wrong; the priests aren't whooping up hysteria for Bush's wars, and for all I know they may be against them. But their silence on the issue is deafening.