Jack Van Impe

We all have the same voting power at election time. That does not mean we all have the same responsibility for democratic decision making. Civic responsibility corresponds to one’s understanding of the issues, compared with the understanding of others. The better I understand, or think I understand, and the less I think others understand, the more compelled I am to act.

This is why, in City, Save Thyself! I call for self selection of initiators who will work to end the monopoly that nations hold on issues of peace and war.

Jack Van Impe’s television show the other night illustrated what I mean. The Reverend Van Impe is a dangerous fellow. He reminds me how many are beyond hope of persuasion that we might achieve a world of enforced law. He leads thousands of followers toward a glorious, ordained end time when Christ will lift them to perpetual glory while everyone else burns in hell. The influence of Van Impe and other extremist religionists has to be compensated for by citizens with a sense of humankind’s mutual responsibility for what happens to us.

Van Impe inveighs against weapons in space, but welcomes the holocaust that such weapons will bring, on the grounds that a space war is foretold in the Book of Revelations. He spits out a denunciation of efforts of the five year non-proliferation conference because it cannot, and apparently he thinks, should not, succeed, presumably because it would thwart God’s will.

Van Impe denounces efforts to pressure Israel to treat with Palestinians, on grounds that Israel is a democracy. When his eagerly awaited end time occurs, though, not being Christian, Israelis presumably await fiery destruction along with Muslims and atheists. He displays mockingly a color cartoon of Obama drawn like a Stepinfetchit clown, one of many blatant political comments, made absent any discernible frame of reference to issues about what is good for the country, and in clear violation of his religious 501(c)(3) tax exemption.

Followers of this demagogue cannot be expected to apply rational judgment to public decision making. Van Impe’s ministry of irresponsibility is so transparently self-contradictory, irrational, and destructive of civic discourse, that his followers have to be assumed incapable of rational political thought, due to emotional predisposition, lack of education, or whatever. If the rest of us fail to compensate for their disregard for what the nuclear arms race is likely to bring, Van Impe’s predictions will come true, except that his followers will burn right along with Muslims.