|
|
 |
|
Last Updated: Dec 30, 2007 |
Reviews and Interviews By Scott Lewis
Lewis lives in Dallas, Texas, by way of Houston.
He writes Catching Up With . . . celebrity interviews for This Week in Texas as well as movie reviews .
Scott Lewis can be reached by e-mail HERE
 |
| Reverend Michael S. Piazza, Dean of the Cathedral of Hope and President of Hope for Peace & Justice. |
I have to admit that it was the cover of the new book “The Real
Antichrist” that caught my attention. George W. is the
Antichrist? I was willing to listen. Unfortunately, that is
not what you find when you read this enthralling new examination of
America, and how its direction has changed under our current
administration.
It has been several years that I have been looking for someone to point
out how far away from our own founding fathers intentions we have been
taken as a nation, and now finally I have found him. It is
Reverend Michael S. Piazza the Dean of the Cathedral of Hope, the
largest primarily Gay and Lesbian church in the world. In his new
book, He brilliantly, yet simply points out how far off course this
country has gotten, and how our current administration has equally as
brilliantly used fear to achieve its goals.
I caught up with Reverend Piazza at the Cathedral to discuss his new book…
Scott Lewis: They say you can’t judge a book by its cover.
Your new book’s cover features a photo of George W. Bush under its
title “The Real Antichrist”. The implication is obvious, but why
this photo for the cover?
Michael Piazza: We actually went round and round about this
cover. Ultimately covers are about selling books, but this one
seemed to capture succinctly one of the core messages of the book which
is that the real antichrist in my mind is sort of the conjunction of
fundamentalism and politics. Those two things have come together
in this country in his administration more powerfully and I think more
threateningly than at any other time. Fundamentalism, not
Christianity, is I think the greatest danger in the world right
now. Whether its Christian fundamentalism, Muslim fundamentalism,
or Hindu fundamentalism it has actually been used to govern this
country I think, since September 11th, and probably before because it
was probably what got him (President Bush) elected.
SL: The first line of your new book is as bold as its
cover. You state “I believe the Antichrist is alive on the earth
today.” Who is it?
MP: I think fundamentalism, ancient and modern have incarnated it
to make it into an individual. Modern fundamentalism says that
this individual who will rule on the earth and I don’t think that is
really biblical. I mean the last chapter sort of deals with that
academically. The word antichrist is not actually in the
bible. But the concept that there will be and there is a power on
earth that creates systems and politics and ways that are the
antithesis of what Jesus came to do and teach is what I think the real
antichrist is. The antichrist in my mind is this conjunction of
politics and fundamentalism and is incarnate or it is personified by
people like Dick Cheney and George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld. They
aren’t the antichrist they are just sort of personification of a spirit
in the world that is the antithesis of Jesus and what he taught and did.
SL: You talk about how fear makes us gullible. Tell me how our government has used fear to obtain its objectives.
MP: They have really worked hard at keeping us afraid. All
you have to do is go through the airport and everyone standing in those
lines can see how intrinsically flawed that system is. Here they
are making two year olds take their shoes off and not letting people
take bottled water on the plane; yet the cargo that flies in the hold
of all those planes is completely unchecked to this day. So its
not really about security, its about manipulating us, the public to
make us think that they are doing something to keep us safe and to keep
us aware of the threat.
As a result of feeling threatened or besieged by terrorists what this
administration has done is to strengthen the power of the executive
branch to limit civil liberties, to justify torturing prisoners, just
on and on and on. When you make people afraid they will let you
get away with these things if you make them feel that they are
safer. They have used this fear to redefine who this country
is. In ways that a decade ago would not have been acceptable.
SL: You call the great support of the war within Churches very
disturbing. They preach the message “Support our troops!”
You say the best way to support our troops is through peace.
MP: Obviously the best thing you can do for troops is to keep
them from getting killed and peace does that much more effectively than
war. I think the war in Iraq is the perfect example of those
values gone utterly awry. In the name of pretending to make us
feel safer we have bought this war and what has happened is we have
created a country that is virtually manufacturing terrorists.
You know we couldn’t have been Bin Laden’s ally more effectively if we
tried, I think that it is the perfect symbol that war and
violence only created more war and violence. As a result I think
that is the antichrist strategy for dealing with the attacks of
9/11. The Jesus strategy would have been, well he started in
Mathew with turn the other cheek, forgive your enemies, do good to
those that hurt you. As naive as that may sound, what would have
happened if our foreign policy would have been to try and give food to
the people of Afghanistan and the places that terrorism has taken root
around the world rather than spending trillions of dollars on war.
What if we had taken some of our wealth to help people not be hungry,
to provide medical care for their children or education, could we
change the culture that gave birth to the terrorist rather than create
a more violent region of the world. Terrorism and the hatred of
the United States has only increased in the past six years instead of
decreased. We have actually made our world a much less safe
place.
SL: The loudest voice of opposition to the war in Iraq has to be
Cindy Sheean. You have spoken with her and she told you that the
hardest part of her struggle has been giving up the myth her son’s
death had any meaning. Knowing what we know now, why aren’t there
more Cindy Sheean’s out there?
MP: That’s a really good question. I think that is a very
hard thing for a parent to do in terms of grieving. In order to
deal with the loss of a child, you have to feel like there is some
meaning in that. You know as a pastor I have to deal with that
kind of theology that comes out when there is that sort of tragedy,
that somebody says that God took their child, or God took their lover
and it’s wrong on lots of levels. What it is about is that person
is trying to cope with a pain that seems almost impossible to deal
with, then to make it meaningless it makes it even more difficult.
What you are seeing is a lot of veterans who have come back from Iraq
are starting to speak out. There were several hundred of them at
the Capital recently lobbying against the surge. They have come
back and realized that it was all for nothing. They are suffering
the death of their colleges which was for nothing.
SL: One of the great messages that I got out of your book was
that the Antichrist isn’t really a person so much as it is the
behaviors and the policies of people who are doing things that Christ
would not have done. That is Antichrist. I want to talk
about a few examples of this that you talk about in your book.
Tell me abut “Minding the Gap”.
MP: This goes back to the fundamentalism that has sort of taken over this country.
It’s number one accomplishment, at least in the first part of this
administration was to cut taxes for the very richest. This
creates a great deficit so in the latest budget the things that are
being cut are Medicare and Medicaid and the services for the very
poor. We are creating and enhancing this huge disparity in wealth
where we are becoming a country of two classes and there is no middle
class.
What I think is blasphemous about that is that it is being supported by
Christian fundamentalism in this country. It baffles me, I keep
asking myself, why is it that the poor in this country and especially
in the south support the Republicans, who clearly don’t care about
them. Who are there representing the values of the rich and of
corporations. I am not a fear monger so I won’t suggest there is
going to be a revolution. But I do think there is going to be
this increasing tension in terms of the differences in class.
Dallas is a city that perfectly epitomizes that. This morning I
took my daughter to school and the program we were listening to on NPR
was sponsored by Saab. She asked, “What’s a Saab?” I said,
“You don’t see Saab’s in this part of town.” She is certainly not
poor, but she has grown up in Oak Cliff where people don’t tend to
drive Saab’s or Beemer’s. This city is divided by class, much
more than by race now. I think that is where the country is
headed. We will be increasingly more divided by class than race.
SL: You say the fight for Lesbians and Gays to have the right to
marry is not about marriage, it’s about discrimination. Explain.
MP: A personal example is that my partner and I had gone to
California last weekend, and last night at dinner one of our daughters
said, “Why couldn’t we go with you?” “Well because you don’t get
flight benefits.” My partner works for the airlines and they
said, “Well as your children why shouldn’t we?” I said, “Because
we are not legally married and this is one of the ways that this
impacts you. If we had been legally married your right, you would
have gotten to fly for free, but we are not. Just like if he
dies, I don’t get his pension benefits, or his Social Security.”
My real point about this is, and I think that this is really important
for GLBT folks to get, we have let the religious right frame this
argument and they have kicked our butts. We have to take the
argument back and reframe it. They cannot stop us from getting
married. What they can do is discriminate against you and that’s
what it’s all about it’s about discrimination. It’s not about
marriage but we have let them make it about marriage, a sacrament will
be a civil right every time. We have let them make it about a
religious sacrament that we are trying to take away from them when what
is really happening is that we already have the sacrament, what we want
is the civil right. We have let them frame the argument and we
have lost every time, except Arizona.
SL: An interesting fact that I learned from your book was that
while Jesus never spoke about gay marriage, he spoke very clearly about
divorce and remarrying (this is adultery). The scripture you
reference is so clear, yet this doesn’t seem to be an issue with the
same people that are so opposed to gay marriage. Why?
MP: Well it’s a selective reading of the bible which everybody
does, conservative or liberal. The difference is that I think
liberal people are more honest about their selective reading and
conservatives pretend to be literalist when reading the bible.
While clearly they don’t read that part of the bible literally.
SL: There is a chapter that talks about retaliation as justice. Why is our prison system Antichrist?
MP: When was the last time we executed a multimillionaire in this
country? It doesn’t happen. Only the poor get killed in
this country. Primarily, only the poor who have killed white
people. That is who we execute. Even if you believed the
death penalty was right, which I don’t, in the end no one can argue
that it has ever been equitably applied.
SL: Tell me about Hope for Peace & Justice.
MP: It is a very new organization that does two things
primarily. One is we have a faith based conflict resolution
program. We are trying to teach churches to help actually
physically do peace. Our goal is to have every church, synagogue
and masque in America to have a trained conflict mediator so that
people will turn to their house of worship when they have a conflict
rather than always to the courts. Everyone is in favor of peace,
but nobody knows what to do about it so we tried to create a specific
concrete way that we could go about making peace.
The other thing that we are trying to do is to train and equip
progressive people of faith to talk about issues at the water
cooler. The fundamentalist have heard the lie on Sunday Morning
whether it’s about gay marriage, abortion, the environment, or the war,
so at the water cooler, the fundamentalist people start spouting off
all this stuff and Gay and Lesbian folks or progressive people just
sort of sit down and shut up and they avoid talking about it.
That hasn’t gotten us anywhere. It really has resulted in the
fact that we are people without values or religion and that is simply
not true. What we are trying to do is equip people to be able to
articulate those issues. The book is a piece of that but we send
out news letters every week trying to get people to articulate their
values more passionately and more articulately. The bible belongs
to us as well.
This past Friday night at a weekly dinner with friends I gave my review
copy of “The Real Antichrist” to my friend Charlie, who proceeded to
glance at the first pages of the book. Before long I realized
that he was completely enveloped, and that his partner Skip should look
for no love this evening, because Charlie would probably finish the
book before retiring for the evening. This book is that
good. If you read the first pages, you will be hooked, and I
think that is a good thing, because there is a whole lot of truth
inside these pages, and it’s a truth that needs to be heard.
Recently an anonymous donor underwrote the purchase and shipment of
this book to all members of Congress, the Senate, all 50 Governors,
Dick Cheney, and yes, George W. himself. Good for him! I
encourage you to read this book, and then pass it along to a friend it
is a message that needs to be spread.
To get more information on Hope
for Peace and Justice and buy the book visit the website here: www.h4pj.org
This Week In Texas
Top of Page
|
|
|
|
|
