scary...

For Ted, though, the battle boils down to evangelicals versus Islam. "My fear," he said, "is that my children will grow up in an Islamic state." That is why he believed spiritual war requires a virile, worldly counterpart. "I teach a strong ideology of the use of power," he said, "of military might as a public service." He was for preempive war, because he believed the Bible's exhortations against sin set us for us a preemptive paradigm, and he was for ferocious war, because "the Bible's bloody. There's a lot of blood."

-pg. 307 of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power by Jeff Sharlet.
Jeff Sharlet also the wrote the cover story of the May 2009 Harper's entitled "Jesus Killed Mohammed: The Crusade for a Christian Military."

Ted is Pastor Ted Haggard, founder of the New Life Church in Colorado Springs. Jeff Sharlet writes on pg. 294 that -

"He insisted he was an ordinary man, in an ordinary church, in an ordinary city. On the other hand, he also wanted me to know that he talked to George W. Bush in a conference call every Monday...At the time, Pastor Ted presided over the National Association of Evangelicals, whose 45,000 churches and 30 million believers make up the nation's most powerful religious lobbying group."

(I'm reading The Family for a writing seminar I'm taking at NYU themed around "the faith between us," the title of the book my professor co-authored. I've been really enjoying the class alhamdullilah. Now back to reading for tomorrow!)

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