"Gnosticism is the force behind Islam and Communism!"

(I allow myself the occasional non-political post on weekends. Is this piece political or otherwise? You decide!)

There's nothing quite so amusing as a right-wing ideologue pretending to be an intellectual. It's a cute sight -- sort of like dressing a chimp in a business suit and calling him "Mr. President."

A few months ago, one Luke Sheahan, of something called The Family Security Foundation, wrote a piece called "The Gnostic Nature of Our Enemies" for a right-wing scare site. Arguing against those who point out (correctly, in my opinion) the similarities between Islamic fundamentalism and Christian fundamentalism, Sheahan writes:

Communism and Islam are both Gnostic ideologies and immanentacist in their respective eschatological beliefs; a stark difference from Christianity, the religion most influential in the West.

What nonsense.

Communism has nothing to do with Islam, and neither has anything to do with Gnosticism. Anytime someone attempts to lump together disparate enemies -- "All the Xs are really Ys" -- you know you are dealing with a fanatic or a fearmonger.

Sheahan tries to prove his point by quoting a philosopher named Eric Voegelin who, writing in the 1960s (before the discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts) lazily used "Gnosticism" as a catch-all term for any political ideas he did not like. I admire Voegelin's lifelong opposition to racism and tyranny; I do not admire him for constructing a definition of "Gnosticism" unrecognizable to anyone who has done some reading in that field.

(I encourage readers to take a look at what Stephen Hoeller has to say about Voegelin in the book Gnosticism. Hoeller -- a refugee from Hungary, and a lifelong opponent of Communism -- laughs Voegelin out of court.)

According to Voegelin/Sheahan:

With this fifth point we come to the Gnostic trait in the narrower sense -- the belief that a change in the order of being lies in the realm of human action, that this salvational act is possible through man’s own effort.

Again: What nonsense. Sheahan here plays to the fear-fantasies of his paranoid Christian audience, a group which specializes in force-fitting round pegs into square holes. Gnostics have held widely divergent beliefs over the years, but one basic view unites them: They think the material world is rotten. That's the actual term they use: Rotten. They have never sought to change the existing "order of being," and they certainly have not tried to bring about political revolution. They have always sought to be left alone.

Voegelin tried to convince his audience that the Gnostics hoped to "Immanentize the Eschaton" -- to create utopia, in plainer language. But this is unhistorical balderdash. No passage in any Gnostic scripture known to me comes close to stating or even implying this goal.

It is the fundamentalist Christians who talk the utopia talk. Look up any Dominionist website, and you'll see what I mean. The neocons are also in the utopia biz. Check out the interviews with Michael Ledeen in Adam Curtis' documentaries, and you'll see what I mean.

(Of course, the utopias that these people seek do not match my idea of the ideal.)

If America's Christians do not believe in human action, then why do fundamentalist sites contain information on voter registration? How do we explain the career of a guy like Ralph Reed? Why have the fundies allied themselves to a political party? Why are we at war?

Conflating Islam with Gnosticism is a particularly loopy undertaking, since Muslims have usually viewed Gnostics with suspicion. Although the Koran (I am told) asks for the Sabaens to be treated with respect, the modern day heirs of that Gnostic sect -- the Mandaeans -- have never had a particularly easy time of it, living in their small enclave in Iraq near the Iranian border. I've read that many of them have left the region, for understandable reasons.

If you want to know about the interplay between religion and totalitarianism, read up on the Cathars, a gentle Gnostic faith brutally suppressed by "mainstream" Christians in the 13th century. You judge a tree by its fruit, as a noted Jewish after-dinner speaker once pointed out; compare the bloodthirsty Crusaders to their Catharist victims. The Gandalf-like "heretics" wanted quiet lives of service and contemplation, while their persecutors wanted power. Which ones were tied to the stakes, and which ones lit the flames?

Although the Cathars wanted nothing to do with politics -- although they had hoped, in a sense, to escape history itself -- they did believe in spreading medical knowledge and literacy to the common folk. If that constitutes an attempt to "immanentize the eschaton," then count me as an immanentization fan.

Sheahan demonstrates one of the most deceptive practices of fundamentalist Christians: They construct false, fanciful versions of their enemies, thereby keeping their readers frightened of bogeymen. Remember when guys like Sheahan warned us about the dreaded "secular humanist" conspiracy? Remember when they played records backward to hear Satan jabbering? Now we have the Gnostic Muslim Commies.

Oooh! Scary!