LIBERADIO(!)

What Michael Delgiorno says on a daily basis on the Nashville powerhouse talk radio station 99.7 WTN is so offensive that it can make your insides ache. If you’re a patriot, you know it is offensive. If you’re rational, you know it’s offensive. If you’re a real Christian, you know it is offensive.

Yet, day after day, week after week, he gets away with calling the President of the United States the ‘antichrist.’

These are just two instances of many. First, on August 19, 2009 he said:

MICHAEL DELGIORNO: Like I said, he’s the most failed one-term president or he’s the antichrist. But I can tell you this right now, he’s pro-Palestinian, he’s anti-Israel, he’s anti-Christian. That much I know for sure.

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Then, on August 20, he said:

MICHAEL DELGIORNO: Ken, on dating.
CALLER: I was just going to say that even if Tommy is a complete moron all he’s gotta do is the exact same thing Barack Obama did and he’s in the saddle.
MICHAEL DELGIORNO: Ice cream? Oh, I’m thinking literally on his first date with Michelle.
CALLER: Heh heh heh heh.
MICHAEL DELGIORNO: Take her for ice cream and reveal that he’s the antichrist.

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I’ve been trying to analyze why this is especially offensive and also work on a message to counter it, but I had nuthin’.

So I asked several friends of mine who self-identify as Christians.

One friend suggested I read “Naming the Antichrist: The History of an American Obsession (Paperback)” (it’s on my wish list) of which publishers weekly wrote:

While the word “antichrist” – the figure who ushers in the apocalypse of Christian end-time – appears but briefly in the Bible (1 and 2 John), the term has been all too frequently used throughout history by one group as a means of vilifying another group that appears to threaten the accusing group’s worldview. Fuller, professor of religious studies at Bradley University, argues that naming the antichrist became a prevalent custom in the U.S. first because of the Puritans’ apocalyptic tradition and subsequently because of feelings of vulnerability fanned by Native Americans and later by waves of immigrants who seemed to threaten the establishment of God’s kingdom on earth. Fuller robustly explores the writings of those who at various and sundry times have railed against Catholics, Freemasons, and Jews (and even rock music and bar codes, for that matter) and seen them all as signs of the beast from the sea. He offers cogent psychological and sociological explanations for the hold of the idea of the antichrist upon the American imagination. If those explanations do not seem quite conclusive, however, it is because the extraordinarily arcane reasoning in naming the antichrist, so ably discussed here, ultimately itself escapes explanation.

So that made me feel a bit better. I mean, if a professor of religious studies can’t explain it then how can I?

Then my friend said:

DelGiorno’s attitude is responsible for 2,000 years of religious warfare. During the Reformation, Martin Luther called the Pope the Antichrist, sparking a feud between Catholics and Protestants that lasted for centuries. The Pope, in response, excommunicated Luther.

A certain subgroup of Evangelicals are rabidly Zionist, believing that the restoration of Israel (with the Old Testament borders!) is essential, and that all non-Jews need to be cast out of the region.

To get honest about this… Fundamentalist Christians are interested in starting a war on Islam, and they are afraid and angry that Barack Hussein Obama is trying to stop them.

This kind of religious elitism divides Christians, and creates the kinds of schisms, divisiveness, and hatred that is condemned repeatedly in Scripture.

So DelGiorno is part of a elitist fringe group of extremist faux-Christians who will stop at nothing to further their own agenda, which is to more quickly usher in the second coming (the rest of us be damned.) Or, as as Josh Marshall puts it, “because its existence will hasten the apocalypse when God will vanquish the Jews en masse in hellfire and turn Israel into a vast evangelical theme park is to usher in the end of the world and ensure that they go to heaven at the expense of the rest of us.”

Fringe? Check. Extremist? Check. Selfish? Check. Un-Christian? Check. Elitist? Check, check and double-check. Mr. DelGiorno is all of these.

But how does he get away with it? And any theories on why his advertisers are irresponsible enough to still support him?