Ron Ferguson

In a Christian America, where is the Christian spirit and reflection?

So, Who Would Jesus Bomb? That’s a serious question I’m asking. In fact, it promises to become more and more serious as time goes on in this mad and ever madder world we happen to inhabit, in the Year of Our Lord, two thousand and seventeen.

This is not just a question for the Disunited States of America. It has a particular resonance there, though, because America sees itself – or often describes itself – as a Christian country.

Now I don’t believe there is such a thing as a ‘Christian country’. Never has been, never will be. But that’s an argument for another day. If we’re spared.

Yes, if we’re spared. It’s far from being guaranteed that we will be. The times they are achanging, as we speak.

When my wife Cristine and I drove coast to coast across America in 1979, the odd couple who were running the country were Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew. They were often reviled. Tricky Dickie earned his nickname. He was a master of the political black arts – though that was ultimately his undoing. Watergate. Unforgettable.

As a journalist, I was proud to be a member of a (sometimes noble) craft that, by painstaking investigative journalism, exposed the black deeds in the White House.

Even then America prided itself as being a ‘Christian country’. National evangelist Billy Graham – a man of genuine personal faith but also of stunning naivety – didn’t realise that tricky Dickie was using him as a kind of human shield.

Eventually Graham became disillusioned with Nixon, not because of the president’s scorched earth policy in Vietnam but because he learned from the Watergate tapes that Nixon was a foulmouthed liar.

Yes, the nation’s favourite evangelist became tired of Nixon not because the napalming of children might have been an offence against the Lord he professed to serve, but because the president swore.

When Nixon and Agnew were in their pomp, pundits would sometimes declare that surely the White House would never again be home to such devious and incompetent boors.

Well, in comparison with the current inhabitants, Nixon, pictured, and Agnew now seem like moral and spiritual giants in the land.

And what of the hapless Mike Pence, a spouter of utterly vacuous religious pieties, a disseminator of unspeakable, brain-rotting pseudo-religious cliches that leave one crying for mercy.

What is most worrying about this avalanche of idiocies is the fact the lunatics who have taken over the asylum hold the nuclear codes in their tiny hands. And they often say they do what they do in the name of Jesus.

More tea, Doctor Strangelove?

They invoke the name of Jesus Christ to justify the current gun culture of the USA. Whit? They say that members of Christian congregations should arm themselves.

Could this Jesus they talk about with such ease be the person who told his followers to put

“Billy Graham, the nation’s favourite evangelist, became tired of Nixon not because the napalming of children might have been an offence against the Lord he professed to serve, but because the president swore

away their swords, who said that those who live by the sword die by the sword?

Could this be the Jesus who entered the holy city of Jerusalem not on a war horse but on a donkey: the same one who threw the moneychangers out of the temple, overturning the money-tables as he cried, “You have turned my father’s house into a den of thieves”.

Could this be the servant Jesus who allowed himself to be executed naked by the powers of church and state in order to show what the kingdom of heaven, the kingdom of justice and peace, looked like?

The president of so-called Liberty University – a great favourite of Mr Trump – told his students that they should always carry weapons. And as he spoke, he smiled and patted the gun in the back pocket of his trousers.

So this is what we have come to? In Christian America, it would appear that the Christian faith has been co-opted by gun-toting television hucksters with welded-on smiles who, when presented with evidence of serial-wrongdoing in high places simply smile and parrot, “Fake News”.

So who would Jesus bomb? Anybody, it seems, as we inhabit a moral marsh in which the crass, idolatrous mantra “America First” has silently replaced a profound sense of genuine Christian reflection.

When composer Andre Previn was on a flight in which the captain suddenly announced that the passengers should adopt the brace position, some ghastly ‘Muzak’ was played over the speaker system.

Previn asked the flight attendant to switch off. “I refuse,” he said, “to die to this music.” America has known some great music. We need to hear it in these strange days. If, that is, we are spared. it