I don’t hate Pastor John Hagee, nor do I fear him – but many other people seem to and I wonder if their attitude is justified.
You Tube has removed eighty videos featuring Pastor John Hagee from its site at the request of lawyers representing the Pastor, but the real story is in the response to his request. Sam Stein suggests on the Huffington Post, that it’s a form of “revenge” and questioned why there was “no notification” about this action.
I question who he thinks deserved “notification” and against whom he thinks the revenge is directed? The very use of the terms is meant to suggest something nefarious about this admittedly controversial religious leader. So is Stein breaking news or using a news event to editorialize without having the courage to admit his negative feeling about Pastor Hagee? Being controversial and being evil is not the same thing, no matter how prevalent that slippage is in contemporary discourse about politics and religion.
But that’s nothing compared to the response by documentary film maker, and sharp critic of Hagee, Max Blumenthal: “Obviously Hagee’s minions orchestrated this move to suppress bad publicity ahead of their July summit.” Minions? Isn’t that how we describe the devil’s groupies? Does Blumenthal really believe that John Hagee is the devil? And if not, why use that language? Also, that kind of talk is every bit as apocalyptic as the language used by the pastor himself – the same language which scares so many people.
There is much to criticize about John Hagee’s beliefs or the beliefs of any religious group that believes its way, is the only way and that everything else is second best, at best. But lots of religious people, communities, and systems would fail that test, including many Jews and understandings of Judaism.

Perhaps not with the same prevalence, but that may just be a factor of our not having had enough political power over the last two thousand years to develop that kind of theology. It is amazing how relative powerlessness makes a people gentle and accepting, isn’t it?
Also, I admit to having a special place in my heart for Pastor Hagee and his followers. When I was riding buses in Israel with my family some years back, years when Israeli buses were blowing up on a regular basis, it was Hagee and his followers who shared those rides with us. And as troubled as I may be by some of his theology and genuinely disagree with some of his politics, those shared rides shouldn’t count for nothing should they?
When Hagee-critics become Hagee-haters, they end up sounding like their worst projections of the pastor himself – obsessed with one or two ideas and unable to maintain a balanced picture in which one can affirm that with which one agrees, discuss that which one doesn’t, and refrain from throwing gasoline on the burning political and religious issues of the day. There already overly inflamed, don’t you think?
Apologies for torturing the metaphor and looking forward to posting about Hagee, Hitler, and the Holocaust, next week….it’s both more and less of an issue than we think.