God Is Not On Their Side

I see from Julie Ingersoll’s recent piece that Christianist pop-theology is becoming public once more. In Christianist pop-theology, there is not one God, but multiple gods. There is a God of Christians, a God of Jews, and most threateningly a God of Muslims. We saw something similar after 9/11 when people like Lt. Col. William Boykin said that he knew his God was bigger than the God of Muslims.

As was pointed out at that time by multiple religious thinkers, by arguing that there were at least two Gods, Christian and Muslim, Christianists were following a belief system that was not monotheistic and was not in accord with the Gospels. Now the chairman of the Tea Party Express, Mark Williams, seems to have forgotten this basic point, writing that the Muslim God is a “monkey-god” and that Muslims are “animals of allah,” reports Zachary Roth at TPMMuckraker.

It seems that Christianists and Islamists share a bad theology in this regard. I want to extend Reza Aslan’s suggestion in How to Win a Cosmic War that what these groups share is the belief that all issues are inherently theological. To me, the logical conclusion is if their side is not winning, it’s because their God is being challenged by another God. If their God was truly all-powerful, their enemies should have fallen by now. The only rational recourse, then, is to break with the idea of monotheism and allow for other gods.

These groups then hold that there are other Gods, or powerful idols, or a demonic entity equally as powerful as God. It seems to be easier for these groups to break their basic beliefs than to agree that we all worship the same God. Of course, if you get these “fundamentalists” to agree to that point, than the only logical conclusion as to why their enemies still is exist is that God is not on their side.