Exorcism and "spiritual warfare" are often accompanied by religious intolerance and attempts to impose theocracy -- at least in the context of the "New Apostolic Reformation," as has been pointed out many times, by Rachel Tabachnick, Bruce Wilson, and others, here on Talk To Action.

Question:  To what extent is this also true of Catholic exorcism?

Recently there's been a flurry of mass media attention to Catholic exorcism, due to the premiere of the movie The Rite, loosely based on the book The Rite: The Making of a Modern Exorcist by Matt Baglio.

Today in the paper, they've actually got an article about Chic-Fil-A and their support of religious right stuff!  for this paper, it's actually a bit critical!

I've been reading Reddit.com a lot lately - it's a great aggregation site (news, and pretty much everything else under the sun)  with unpredictable, quirky content and a young-ish, smart reader base.

Today I noticed a heavily recommended submission attacking attacking the Huffington Post for (allegedly) not being a real news site. Then I noticed a less-well recommended submission with the title of Has the Huffington Post actually ever broken a story?

Well, Huffpo sure has.

In May 2008, a wrote a post titled
Audio Recording of McCain's Political Endorser John Hagee Preaching Jews Are Cursed and Subhuman. It contained audio I'd found from a 2005 sermon (which I initially dated as "late 1990's" to be on the very conservative side) in which Texas megachurch pastor John Hagee, whose political endorsement presidential candidate John McCain had been after "like a dog in heat" (as I put it in a March 2008 post) declared that "God sent Hitler... Hitler was a hunter."

About a week later, Sam Stein of the Huffington Post noticed my post and covered it, in a story prominent on the Huffington Post's front page. From there Keith Olbermann's Countdown picked it up, and pretty soon scandalous audio, from a 2005 sermon, had seriously damaged presidential candidate John McCain's already shaky relationship with the evangelical right, his key base of electoral support.

[below: Keith Olbermann, on Countdown, covers "God sent Hitler."

Within 48 hours of when Olbermann showcased my audio clip of John Hagee bellowing about how God had sent Hitler, a "hunter", to chase Europe's Jews towards Palestine, the clip was being played on news stations worldwide. And, within about 48 hours, John McCain had a national press conference in which he rejected his endorsement from Hagee and denounced pastor Hagee's statement.

This was a blow to the McCain campaign, because in the 2000 election GOP primaries John McCain had repeatedly attacked evangelists such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell as "agent of intolerance." McCain, of course, lost to George W. Bush, who had close ties (or better) with American right wing evangelicals.

McCain began advance work patching things up with Robertson, Falwell and the evangelical right somewhere around 2005, and it took McCain a few years to get to Hagee, who had by 2008 emerged as a major evangelical kingmaker. The McCain-Hagee rift was a blow to McCain's relationship with a major chunk of his GOP electoral base, and it arguably help tilt his campaign advisers towards their choice of Sarah Palin as McCain's VP running mate pick. That, in turn both electrified McCain's evangelical base and scored away independent and moderate voters. The rest is history.  

Below is my writeup of the affair, which I did for my user profile on this website.

Part of the grim underlying reality of this ongoing saga, the stirrings of Jewish protest against the sort of Jew-baiting that Texas megapastor John Hagee and other evangelicals have been doing for years, which Glenn Beck has now picked up, is that the group of 400 rabbis who have written a letter to Fox News Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch, concerning Glenn Beck's attacks on Holocaust survivor George Soros, appear to have taken on an organizational mandate which, once upon a time, was championed by the Anti Defamation League.

The very sort of thing expected from the hate spewed by the Religious Right and their cohorts has happened.  David Kato was murdered.

It's disturbing when you learn that Supreme Court judges violate codes of ethics, and have secret meetings with people before ruling on things that affect those people.  It's even more disturbing when they violate the law.

 In the wake of their recent reading of the Constitution of the United States on the floor of the House of Representatives, Republican lawmakers have announced they intend to do the same with the entire Bible.

 
    “It’s about time that this legislative body, the people’s house, openly recognized the Christian principles this nation was founded upon,” said John Boehner, the new Speaker of the House.  Standing at Boehner’s side, majority leader Eric Cantor hastily added “The Judeo-Christian principles this country was founded upon.”  Speaker Boehner immediately tearfully apologized to his colleague.

Today, I recoiled in fright as I read that Keith Olbermann had been terminated before his contract was finished.  The NY Post, ever acting their character, called him a "Gasbag" on his way out of the eyes, but not minds, of his many liberal fans.  It's important to remember in regards to the dominionist agenda, that Keith has been a persistent, intelligent, and critical voice against theocracy, though at times, perhaps, oblivious or silenced as to its true magnitude.  It is important for those of us who are familiar with the broader goals of the Kingdom Theology adherents to at least question what role this plays in pursuing dominance.

The new governor, Scott, has through his choice of the person leading the agency involved with adoptions signaled that gay rights may be something he opposes.

Various religious right wingers have blamed the Tuscon shootout on Jared Loughner's atheism and/or a highly questionable perception that he has dabbled in the occult.

In  New Theory for Tucson Tragedy: Blame the Atheists by Lauri Lebo, Religion Dispatches, January 11, 2011, the apparently-fake "ex-terrorist" Walid Shoebat is quoted as making over-the-top claims that atheism inherently leads to murder.  A somewhat less fevered version of this same claim has been made on the Human Events site (in "Loughner's Nihilism," January 17, 2011) by Gary Bauer.

Loughner's alleged "occult" connection is based on the New York Daily News story Frightening, twisted shrine in Arizona killer Jared Lee Loughner's yard by Matthew Lysiak and Lukas I. Alpert, January 10, 2010.  As one can easily see by Googling "Loughner occult," lots and lots of right wingers have had a field day with this.

Very few commentators have noticed Loughner's interest in the rather arcane teachings of one David Wynn Miller, a leader in the "sovereign citizen" movenent, which is a branch of the so-called "Patriot" movement.  (For a collection of relevant links, including some debunking of "sovereign citizen" claims, see my earlier post Jared Lee Loughner and the "sovereign citizen" movement here on Talk To Action.)

More widely noted was his fondness for the popular conspiracy video Zeitgeist, which has been aptly described, on Boing Boing, as "the John Birch Society on acid" (Jay Kinney reviews Zeitgeist, the Movie, posted by Mark FrauenFelder, August 6, 2007).  It is a paradoxical blend of hippie attitudes and extreme right wing economic views, plus grand conspiracy claims derived from extreme right wing sources.