“What do you think the Devil is going to look like if he’s around? Nobody is going to be taken in if he has a long, red, pointy tail. No. I’m semi-serious here. He will look attractive and he will be nice and helpful and he will get a job where he influences a great God-fearing nation and he will never do an evil thing.”
- James L. Brooks, “Broadcast News”

With these words writer/director James L. Brooks raises the valid point that the greatest evil is sometimes disguised as the greatest good. Even more tragically ironic, the evildoer likely has a self-image of earnest righteousness. Nowhere is this more true than in religious leaders who have decided that not only do they know God’s mind better than most, it is their sacred duty to impose “God’s will” on others. And when they get involved in politics or they disregard all societal norms for humane much less polite conduct they not only hurt other people, they turn people away from God or even spirituality. They help create new atheists.

Most recently in the news is Pastor Steven Anderson, whose Faithful Word Baptist Church is based in Tempe, AZ. During a recent sermon he equated gay people with murderers stating, “The biggest hypocrite in the world is the person who believes in the death penalty for murderers and not for homosexuals” and went on to vilify gay people as child molesters, including Congressman Barney Frank. “The sodomites are recruiters and you know who they are after? Your children. They are being recruited by the sodomites. They are being molested by the sodomites. They recruit through rape, they recruit through molestation, they recruit through violation.” Later he said, “Our country is run by faggots. You know who was the man who was the architect of the bailout? His name is Barney Frank, he is a pedophile… That’s who sold out our country, a faggot!”

Anderson is apparently either not too bright or too scared to tread close to the federal law against threatening the President of the United States when he said in his August 16th sermon, “God Hates Barack Obama, I hate Barack Obama. I hate Him. God wants me to Hate Barack Obama” and preached to his congregation that God wanted them to hate Obama and that as a supporter of abortion rights, he was a murderer who deserved the death penalty, just like the gays. According to US CODE Title 18 § 871, he could be imprisoned for up to five years. One must wonder how much of a deterrent that is to a fanatic like Anderson. On April 14th he was tasered and arrested but the U.S. Border Patrol and Arizona DPS for failure to cooperate at an inspection station. Judging from the comments on his youtube account of the incident, Baptist pastor beaten + tazed by Border patrol, he’s not getting much sympathy, however he is helping paint Christians as lawless, hateful crackpots.

Then there is Ted Haggard, former pastor of the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, CO with 14,000 members, a Christian leader who used the bible to condemn homosexuality but in 2006 resigned from all of his church leadership positions after he admitted soliciting a prostitute for homosexual sex and methamphetamine. He denied all of it initially but as a media investigation proceeded he began to admit it. This kind of hypocrisy from religious leaders is hardly anything new. In 1987 televangelist Jim Bakker 1987 was forced to resign over a sex scandal with church secretary Jessica Hahn. Also in 1987, Assemblies Of God televangelist Jimmy Swaggart was photographed in a Louisiana motel with a prostitute and suspended from his ministry. What makes Swaggert especially hypocritical is his role earlier that year in exposing fellow televangelist Jim Bakker’s sexual indiscretions, appearing on Larry King Live and stating that Bakker was a “cancer in the body of Christ.”

However, nothing quite takes the fruitcake like the Westboro Baptist Church whose leader Fred Phelps hosts websites GodHatesFags.com and GodHatesAmerica.com. They have a national reputation for picketing public events and funerals, often those related or peripherally related to gay people or soldiers in the military. They praise the 9/11 attacks on the United States and praise the existence of the AIDS virus. Phelps and Westboro are so extreme that even conservative and fundamentalist Christians (including those who oppose homosexuality, such as the late Jerry Falwell), have denounced them. Nonetheless, their high visibility and media-savvy makes them an unwanted symbol of religion.

Finally there is the trend of religious incursion on the political process and undue influence on government. Much could be written about the United States’ founding fathers desire for a government insulated from religious influence and the slow erosion of that principle since 1776. While religion’s intrusion of sociopolitical policy is hardly new, one can regard the Anita Bryant crusade of 1977 to deny civil rights to homosexual people as the turning point in a whole new era of religious meddling. The most notable of the Christian political organizers was Jerry Falwell, who gained unprecedented power in the political process by helping organize conservative Christians into a mighty voting bloc. Thirty years later this bloc still evidenced power when an organized effort between the Mormon and Catholic churches helped pass Proposition 8 in California, which codified discrimination against gay people into the state constitution.

The tragic thing is that all of this anger, hatred, hypocrisy and even insanity is not lost on a coming generation of adults, teenagers and twenty-somethings so disgusted by these visible religious leaders and their fanatical followers that they embrace atheism. How sadly ironic that by trying to make over society in the image they believe best for it, these Christian leaders and their followers are only turning people away from spirituality. When not accompanied by authoritarian, socially conservative and backwards-looking dogma, spirituality has the potential to be a great force for bringing peace and comfort to the world, to give people courage and strength to get through challenging time and to heal divisions among people.

There have seldom been more critical times in this world’s history then right now when peace, courage, strength and unification are badly needed. Yet instead of working toward that end, people supposedly of faith are only driving people further apart and denying them the potential comfort of a spiritual connection with some sort of Higher Power. In doing that, whether by design to increase their power or by misguided belief, these religious people are far more effective agents of evil that all of the agents of “Satan” they rail against.