The Invention of an Anti-Christ

Submitted by Jon Stokes on September 28, 2007 - 8:35pm.

From Rick Perlstein: I'm excited to announce that through the rest of the year I'll be hosting several outstanding guest bloggers on The Big Con. You've already thrilled to several Digby masterpieces. Tonight, for your weekend reading, I'm proud to introduce my friend John Stokes, co-founder of the computing site Ars Technica, Ph.D. student in early Christian history, and practicing Pentecostal, whose love-hate relationship with the Southern Christian conservative milieu in which he was born and raised has produced some of the most penetrating analysis of our political moment that I know.

By Jon Stokes

I'm an XM radio fanatic, but when I'm our other car--the one with only an FM radio--I find myself listening to one of two stations: Chicago's NPR, or WBMI, the local radio affiliate of the national Moody Broadcasting Network. As a Pentecostal, I find that I often enjoy some of the programs on the MBN, which is the broadcasting arm of the conservative Christian Moody Bible Institute. Indeed, to use the common evangelical idiom, I wouldn't hesitate to say that I've been "ministered to" on occasion by this or that preacher, show host, or call-in guest.

But then there are the times when I turn on WBMI and I become sick to my stomach. This typically happens when one of the station's "news" programs comes on the air. And when the discussion turns to the Middle East, I listen with a mix of morbid curiosity and utter despair--morbid curiosity, like the kind that you have when you see a horrific car accident taking place, and utter despair, like when you realize that your family is in the back seat of one of the cars.