I once sat in the audience for a Jimmy Swaggert revival (Don't ask!). This was before his "fall from grace" and the place was packed. I will never forget seeing a young man sitting by himself, a full twenty minutes before the circus started, holding his bible up above his head, pulling at his shirt, and crying his eyes out! I have to imagine that this Justice Sunday thing is packed to the rafters with people just like that guy.
The event reached its climax when William Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights stomped onstage determined to deliver the evening's most bombastic attack line. Donohue was going to tell the crowd exactly who their enemy was, in no uncertain terms. He was going to name names. And so, in booming basso profundo, Donohue denounced "the atheist, anti-Catholic bigot" Christopher Hitchens. His salvo was greeted with befuddled silence. If there were a name with which the country-music-capital crowd had less familiarity, Donohue couldn't conjure it.
Zell Miller followed Donohue at the microphone. The turncoat former Democratic governor of Georgia had been the keynote speaker at last year's Republican National Convention, where he shouted that Democrats wanted to arm the military with "spitballs." Now he engaged in what seemed like a game show whose point appeared to be to yell at the top of his lungs as many mixed metaphors in the shortest time possible. Liberalism, Miller said, had "kidnapped the baby Jesus's halo," "treat[ed] marriage like an outdated Hula-Hoop" and "hauled off" the Constitution "in a garbage truck."
The true underlying agenda of Justice Sunday II was undisguised in the rousing speech given by Bishop Harry Jackson. "We need to tell both parties, 'It's our way or the highway,'" Jackson told the cheering crowd. "You and I can bring the ruling reign of the cross to America."
I have to wonder, where are the normal Christians? You know the ones who fed me graham crackers in Sunday school. The ones who have rummage sales and bake offs? Why would such kind giving people let these nutjobs speak for them? Are there no moderate Christians left in the world?
