John Whitehead former good guy turns to Satan

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http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=28263

John Whitehead's Radical Turn 
By Mark D. Tooley
FrontPageMagazine.com | May 11, 2007

Long-time religious freedom advocate John Whitehead has taken a sharp left turn on U.S. national security. The founder of the 25 year old Charlottesville, Virginia based Rutherford Institute has long battled secularist attempts to minimize religious expression in public. More controversially, Whitehead helped Paula Jones in her sexual harassment lawsuit against then President Clinton in the 1990’s. Ostensibly, Whitehead was part of the “vast right-wing conspiracy” against which Hillary Clinton inveighed.

But Whitehead was always more quixotic than predictable, and his recent commentaries condemn religious conservatives for their supposed unquestioning support of President Bush’s wars. “With President Bush’s veto of the recent [Iraq War] spending bill, fighting in the Middle East will continue indefinitely—wars not only waged by an avowed Christian president but also backed by the evangelical Christian Right,” was how Whitehead opened his most recent anti-war editorial.


Whitehead seems to have become an inconsistent neo-pacifist, who wants to condemn all U.S. military actions, without acknowledging fully that he opposes all force. “Many who strive to follow Jesus’ teachings find it impossible to do so and still participate in war,” he wrote. “Caesar made use of chains and torture, in much the same way as governments do today.” In contrast, Whitehead asserted, “Jesus’ apostles never advocated violence.”

In his simplistic formulation of “What Would Jesus Do,” Whitehead is following the new creed of the evangelical left, which rejects historic Christian teachings about just war in favor of a Gandhi-like Jesus. “Christ’s crucifixion was a radical repudiation of the use of violent force,” Whitehead wrote, echoing the musings of famed religious pacifism advocate Stanley Hauerwas. Quoting evangelical Left author Brian McLaren, Whitehead surmised that Jesus, through His crucifixion, “had taken the empire’s instrument of torture and transformed it into God’s symbol of the repudiation of violence.”

The evangelical Left likes to besmirch the U.S. as today’s “empire,” no less imperialist than the Rome that crucified Jesus. Whitehead wrote that “one has to wonder what Jesus would say about war being waged in His name today.” Of course, Whitehead accepts the common leftist critique that Bush and the religious right have enshrouded Bush’s wars with Christian rhetoric. Quoting liberal Catholic writer Gary Wills, Whitehead insisted that Jesus “never accepted violence as justified.”

Last year, in another commentary, Whitehead complained about Israel’s attack on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, which “deliberately” targeted Lebanese civilians. “What Would Jesus Bomb?”  Whitehead asked rhetorically. “It is a question for which President Bush, a self-avowed Christian, seems to have no answer, at least if one were to judge by his authorization of bombing campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan and his silence over Israel’s latest military actions in Lebanon.”

For Whitehead, the answer to his own question is obvious: “Jesus would not bomb or kill anyone. But this line of theological reasoning is sophistry. Christians do not believe that Jesus had a military or political vocation. The Savior would not lead troops into battle, any more than He would father a child, marry a woman, own property, hold government office, or transact loans, none of which were part of His messianic calling, but also none of which He forbade for others. 



But Whitehead’s theological depth on this issue is no deeper than his international analysis. “The present administration insists that we are fighting for the freedom and livelihood of the Iraqis, Afghans, etc.,” he wrote. “But what about the freedom of all the innocent civilians who are caught in the crossfire, their deaths explained away as “collateral damage”?

Whitehead praised left-wing United Methodists who condemned their fellow United Methodist, President Bush, for his policies that “starve, strip and bomb.” And Whitehead concluded. “Bombing innocent civilians and using violence to accomplish one’s means is ultimately not an attribute of Christ.” But this American proclivity for blood-thirstiness did not begin with President Bush.  Whitehead explained in another commentary earlier this year: “Starting with the genocide practiced against millions of Native Americans and continuing through the era of black slavery, the Civil War and onward to the present-day conflicts in the Middle East, our nation’s collective history has been indelibly stained with blood.” America, he ruefully disclaimed, needs an “exorcism.”

And the exorcism had better come soon.  In another more paranoid commentary earlier this year, Whitehead warned of an impending American “police state,” imposed by an administration “whose actions over the past six years suggest that the American people are the enemy.” He also warned against potential “militarized police round-ups” and “detention camps” being built by Halliburton. It is all very obvious: “The current administration is laying the groundwork for a military state.”

In 1998, Whitehead told The Washington Post that he and his family no longer worship in a church but practice devotions only at home.  But more revealingly, Whitehead’s political musings reveal a neo-Mennonite separatism that is faddish in some evangelical left circles. They excoriate other non-pacifist Christians as sell-outs to the “empire” and potentially “fascist.” Centuries of Christian teachings about the state’s proper use of force are jettisoned as “Constantinian.” The end result is often an intemperate mishmash of 1960’s left-wing jargon and Anabaptist self-righteousness.