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<\/a>Pope Francis<\/p><\/div>\n
WASHINGTON \u2013 In a stunning rebuke of U.S. conservative Christians, two close aides to Pope Francis have drawn comparisons between Islamic terrorists and American evangelicals, accusing the latter of advancing \u201ca theocratic type of state.\u201d<\/p>\n
Marcelo Figueroa, a Presbyterian pastor and editor-in-chief of the Argentinean edition of L\u2019Osservatore Romano, and Antonio Spadoro, editor-in-chief of the Vatican\u2019s La Civilta Cattolica, teamed up to write the blistering attack on U.S. Christians \u2013 including Catholics who embrace the conservative values of evangelicals \u2013\u00a0in the latter periodical.<\/a><\/p>\n The authors characterize Francis as \u201ccourageous\u201d for giving \u201cno theological-political legitimacy to terrorists, avoiding any reduction of Islam to Islamic terrorism. Nor does he give it to those who postulate and want a \u2018holy war\u2019 or to build barrier-fences crowned with barbed wire.\u201d<\/p>\n They say \u201cfear\u201d is what characterizes \u201cfundamentalism.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt is fear of the breakup of a constructed order and the fear of chaos,\u201d they write. \u201cIndeed, it functions that way thanks to the chaos perceived. The political strategy for success becomes that of raising the tones of the conflictual, exaggerating disorder, agitating the souls of the people by painting worrying scenarios beyond any realism. Religion at this point becomes a guarantor of order and a political part would incarnate its needs. The appeal to the apocalypse justifies the power desired by a god or colluded in with a god. And fundamentalism thereby shows itself not to be the product of a religious experience but a poor and abusive perversion of it.\u201d<\/p>\n In fact, the pope\u2019s proxies assign harsh and impure motives to their theological and political adversaries on the right side of the political spectrum that they do not assign to defenders of radical Islam.<\/p>\n \u201cTo maintain conflict levels, their (American Christian conservatives) biblical exegeses have evolved toward a decontextualized reading of the Old Testament texts about the conquering and defense of the \u2018promised land,\u2019 rather than be guided by the incisive look, full of love, of Jesus in the Gospels,\u201d they write.<\/p>\n In addition, the called out \u2013 by name \u2013 President Donald Trump\u2019s senior strategist Stephen K. Bannon, as one of those identified as having \u201capocalyptic\u201d views of geopolitics.<\/p>\n They say Bannon, a Catholic himself, is part of a \u201cfringe group\u201d of U.S. Christians who seek to bring about a theocratic state and that his views are fueled from the \u201cChristian reconstructionism\u201d views of Calvinist John Rushdoony.<\/p>\n