Reverend Hillary and the protestant left

"Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all." (Johnson)

During the reign of Bill Clinton,Murray ROTHBARD, of the VonMises school penned some nearly interesting essays on "left millennialism": the Von Misesians may have been wrong-headed on some things (the Keynesians of FDR's time were not as demonic as some libertarians claim), but their secularism and skepticism towards statism of all sorts is deserving of some respect. According to Rothbard, Clintonocracy represented a sort of christian socialism, the aim of which concerned not merely political or economic efficiency, but a type of religious state. Taking on the techno-oligarchies may not be the worst thing a politician could do (really, the Clintons have been content to appease corporations), but the success of authentic anti-trust efforts should not depend on religious zeal.

The liberal reformers' enthusiasm generally assumes the forms of their faith, usually of the calvinist variety (someone might term that "populism" of a sort--while remembering that populism and biblethumping works for conservative yokels like Huckabee as well as it does for Dame Hillary). We here at Contingencies would include Rev. Obama--who campaigned in churches all of Fall '07 (40 Days of Faith and Phamily, y'all), and has questioned the separation clause of 1st Amendment---- along with The Right Reverend Hillary in that category of "leftist millennialists". (Other writers, even fairly liberal figures such as Bertrand Russell, noted this puritanical tendency in leftist and marxist reformers. Marxist or multiculturalist dogma substitutes in quite nicely for methodist tracts).


And here's.........Murray:

"""""Which brings us to our beloved First Couple. I have already mentioned that Slick Willie, in addressing a black Gospel church in Maryland on behalf of God's alleged commandment to pass his crime bill, revealingly told the assembled congregation that the goal of his "ministry" is to bring about "the Kingdom of God on earth." That should have sounded the fire alarm throughout the nation. Unfortunately, to an American public possessing little knowledge of history or theology, Clinton's remarkable statement went unreported.

But, as we all know, it is Hillary, not Slick Willie, who [was] the hard-core ideologue in the White House. Hillary's theological agenda was perceptively unveiled recently by the knowledgeable, if admiring and liberal, Kenneth L. Woodward, religion editor of Newsweek. (Kenneth L. Woodward, "Soulful Matters," Newsweek (Oct. 31, 1994) pp. 23–25) In a lengthy exclusive interview with Hillary, Woodward reports that our Lady Macbeth simply considers herself "an old-fashioned Methodist."

Hillary's pronouncement is not as absurd as it might first seem. Hillary Rodham was born in northern Illinois Yankee country, in the Chicago suburb of Park Ridge. Her grandparents told stories about their Methodism in early-nineteenth-century England, not many generations removed from the founding of Methodism by John Wesley. Hillary's family were pious Methodists, and Hillary herself was inducted into the Social Gospel by the Rev. Donald Jones, the then youth minister at her Park Ridge First United Methodist Church. I am sure that we are all gratified to learn how Hillary got her start in the cause of "social reform"; as Woodward fondly puts it, the Rev. Jones "developed his privileged suburban students' social consciences by taking them to visit migrant workers' children."

The most important passage in Woodward's article is his explanation of the importance of Methodism within the American Protestant spectrum: "More than other Protestants, Methodists are still imbued with the turn-of-the-century social gospel, which holds that Christians have been commissioned to build the Kingdom of God on earth."

.........

Now obviously, and of course, a lot of this is Hillary's drive to "reinvent" herself, that is, to create a duplicitous false image, to make herself less threatening to the angry American public. And surely the late-nineteenth-century Social Gospelers would be horrified at the current multi-gendered, condomaniacal Clintonian left, to say nothing of the rapid revolving of poor John Wesley in his eighteenth-century English grave. But there is definitely a direct line of descent from the Methodist Social Gospelers of the nineteenth century to St. Hillary and the monstrous Clintonian left. Mix into "old-fashioned Methodism" liberal doses of Marxism, the New Left, the pagan pantheist New Age, and the multicultural and sexual revolutions, stir briskly, and you get the current ruling horror that we all face, and are trying to roll back out of our lives. We face, in short, regardless of what hairdo or persona she affects next week, the evil Witch in the White House.""""

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Hallelujah! Kudos for the Lady Macbeth riff too, Mssr. Rothbard (Lady Macbeth might serve as a template for many American political mollies, really--it works for Hillary or DiDi Feinstein or Annie "The Mormon She-wolf" Romney). Rothbard may have gone a bit overboard here, but he was not so far from the mark in terming the Clinton agenda a sort of marxist-methodism (with corporate support, as well. Rev. Obama also gets some help from good American muslims). One notes that marxist-methodist tendency in many contemporary whiny-ass democratic scum leftist scribblers, say, in the PC sanitorium of DailyKOS.

Indeed, one might argue that Hegelianism (sort of the basis for statist tyranny, whether Xtian rightist or secular-marxist) affirms a certain antinomian approach to political theory: Hegel it should be recalled often praised Martin Luther (and Machiavelli for that matter), and Luther's essential objection against Catholicism hinged on an insistence on "sola fide." Catholic tradition (yes, chockful of hypocrisy and superstition), at least understands the danger posed by the doctrine of "sola fide" (common to protestant-robots of all sorts): the absurdity of salvation by "faith" alone.