Advance Australia Fair - Building Sustainability, Justice and Peace
Workshop - Women, GLBT and the rise of the Religious Right
Saturday 30th July 2005

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Deborah Kelly

political artist, working on the rise of religious extremism and its aspiration to political influence

Hi, I think Ellen kindly put me on first because I’m the least prepared of the speakers! I am working on a project about the rise of religious literalists and their aspirations to political influence in Australia. I’m using as my model for research what’s happening in the United States, but I’m also looking wherever this phenomena is occurring.

For this session I’ve assembled some material I have found useful and informative. Many of these pieces, and more, are available online on the project website, http://www.bewareofthegod.com/

For people who are really interested in studying this phenomenon is an article called ‘Born Again Ideology’ by Arthur Kroker. He is an editor and theorist on C-net, a Canada-based journal of culture and media. It’s written in apocalyptic language about these people’s desire… for apocalypse and the extraordinarily convenient twinning of this particular kind of Christianity and global neo-liberalism. And the imperial militaristic project of the US. If only I would write like this! It’s very long and dense. But fantastic! Check it out on: http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=451

And here is an interesting new article from Salon.com called ‘In theocracy they trust’. It’s an extensive article, about the American Christian Rights’ specific attacks on the judiciary. Most people in the world think of the American judiciary as republican activists, but they are seen as Satan’s spawn by far right Christian activists in the US. This is a first person report of a conference they had in April this year: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/04/11/judicial_conference/index_np.html

The conference featured people, like Tom DeLay, the speaker of the House in US who belongs to the Pentecostalists who are a group who we need to pay very close attention to in Australia because they have very strong links to the Assemblies of God (AOG) and therefore Family First. Even though they only got the one Senator up, I think we’ll see and hear a lot more of them.

I also recommend an article by Marion Maddox who recently felt the heat generated by her controversial new book God Under Howard. It’s on http://www.bewareofthegod.com as a downloadable PDF, posted August 29 2005.

I’m just going to give you a bit of an illustration of the people that I’m most afraid of, who are the apocalyptic Christians of the United States. Of whom Tom DeLay is one. But many of the other people around George Bush are some of the others. Up to 15% of the voting population in the US believes this stuff, they organised themselves very well in the last presidential election.

I’ll tell you a little bit about the specific prophesies these people believe in. It sounds nutty but it is estimated that 15% of the voting population in the US believe this. Jesus is coming back, after a series of prophecies come true. One of them is Israel occupies all the biblical lands, the third temple is rebuilt on the site which is currently occupied by the dome of the rock and the Al’Aksa mosque. Only two years ago a couple of fundamentalist Christians were arrested in Israel with explosives and the plan to blow up the mosques. After these take place and there is a giant war in the Middle East, Christ will come back. Which gives you some possible clues as to the meaning of the Christian right’s support for Israelis expansionism. This is very frightening. This specific part of the Christian right actually hate the Jews, they believe that if they don’t convert on judgement day, they will simply combust. They help fund some of the illegal settlements because they believe that this will help bring about war, which is going to bring Jesus back which is going to see them flying out of their pajamas back to sit at the right hand of God while we are all devoured by frogs. This is all recounted far better and more convincingly by George Monbiot at: http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2004/04/20/apocalypse-please/

But I am an artist… so I should explain that this research is part of a cultural project I’m doing which I hope will be part of public and private conversations about the threats to secular societies implicit in the rise of the “New Righteous”.

One part of the project is a little plaque for people to put on their houses that says “beware of the god”. There is a metal version, which I am selling, and a sticker version, of which there will be 40,000 to give away. There will be a short animation (which I keep calling a ‘movie’) which will be shown in Sydney Train Stations, an emailable version of which will be downloadable from http://www.bewareofthegod.com when I figure out how to attach it. There are a couple of other parts to the project- of course the website will be the repository for the information and articles I come across. Please feel free to email me if you have leads for interesting material I should link to or make downloadable: moderator@bewareofthegod.com

So that’s a broad picture of my concerns, and now, we’ll go on to the real speakers!

Thanks.

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