by Berry Craig

MAYFIELD, Ky. – John McCain reminds me of Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte of France .

It’s not because they were both military guys. It’s their use of religion to further their ambitions.

Napoleon was a deist, maybe even an atheist. Most of his subjects were Catholics, so he wanted the church on his side.

"When a man is dying of hunger alongside another who stuffs himself, it is impossible to make him accede to the differences unless there is an authority which says to him God wishes it thus," the emperor said.

In 2000, McCain challenged George W. Bush for the GOP presidential nomination. The mostly white, Protestant fundamentalist and Republican-friendly Religious Right backed Bush.

McCain called two of its leaders, the Revs. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, “agents of intolerance.” McCain lost.

This time, he actively courted the GOP’s powerful Jesus-loves-me-but-he-can’t stand-you crowd. To seal the deal, he chose one of them as a running mate.

McCain hopes that conservative Christians will equate a vote for McCain-Palin with a vote for the Almighty. “You can’t be a Christian and a Democrat,” some Religious Rightists claim in Kentucky. Other GOP Christian soldiers probably say the same thing elsewhere in the Bible Belt, where Religious Right preachers act like GOP also means “God’s Own Party.”

Part of the Religious Right’s message is anti-union. Right-wing Republican politicians, even those who seldom darken church doorways, love it.

Okay, Sarah Palin’s husband is a Steelworker. But his union endorsed Barack Obama.

The Steelworkers are for the Obama-Biden ticket. “McCain-Palin is not a team that works for working families,” warned Steelworkers President Leo W. Gerard.

Gerard added that Palin’s record as governor of Alaska “is thin and divisive. And John McCain has a life-long record of being for the rich and powerful. No union card can hide that - not any more than Ronald Reagan's union card did."

So far, Palin has not criticized McCain’s deeply anti-union politics. He supports right to work and opposes to the Employee Free Choice Act, for instance. My guess is Palin the “barracuda” will stay toothless on union issues.

Meanwhile, the Christian Coalition is sticking to the God-put-you-where-He-wants-you line: "Christians have a responsibility to submit to the authority of their employers since they are designated as part of God's plan for the exercise of authority on the earth by man.”

God Himself is against unions, according to the Rev. Tim LaHaye, another GOP holy warrior and author of the apocalyptic Left Behind novels. "Unions are one of the organizations leading the world to wickedness," he said.

LaHaye lives in California. But some of his strongest supporters warm the pews of white fundamentalist churches in the South, where anti-unionism is an old tradition.

“…Under the essential Calvinism of outlook which had been fixed by slavery before the Civil War even in the non-Calvinist sects and riveted home by the conditions of Reconstruction, it was widely felt in all classes that strikes constituted a sort of defiance of the will of Heaven,” North Carolina journalist W.J. Cash wrote in The Mind of The South, published in 1941.

In the 1930s, Cash covered strikes by Tar Heel State textile workers. He said he often heard opponents of the strikers – including “very common whites” – warn “that God had called one man to be rich and master, another to be poor and servant, and that men did well to accept what had been given them, instead of trusting their own instinct and stirring up strife.”

That sermon topic is still popular in Bible Belt Dixie and even in border states like my native Kentucky. Kentucky isn’t a right to work state. But every ex-Confederate state is. (So is McCain’s Arizona.)

While the Religious Right is strongest in the South, it is a national movement whose methods remind journalist and author Chris Hedges of tactics Italian Fascists and German Nazis used to grab power before World War II.

Hedges, who wrote Christian Fascists: The Religious Right and the War on America, told a radio interviewer that the Religious Right has acculturated “the Christian religion with the worst aspects of American imperialism and American capitalism.”

No doubt, Hedges is a heathen to Religious Rightists. But he’s the son of a Presbyterian pastor. Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times reporter with a master’s degree in theology from Harvard to boot.

Hedges also said on the “Democracy Now!” program that Christian conservatives – who used to eschew politics as “worldly” – have allied themselves with the interests of large corporations and their Republican friends to the mutual benefit of both groups.

It doesn’t matter that profit, not piety, is the bottom line of big business. The Religious Right needs help in high government places if it is to turn American into a conservative, fundamentalist Protestant nation. The old corporate Republican right is grateful to the Religious Right for putting the Good Lord’s seal of approval on greed, polluting God’s green earth and union-busting.

“I mean, when you’re creating the corporate state, it’s very convenient to have an ideology that says, ‘Don’t worry. You don’t need health insurance, because if you have enough faith, Jesus will cure you,’” Hedges said. “‘It doesn’t matter if all of your jobs are outsourced and there are no labor unions, because, you know, God takes care of his own. And not only that, but God will make you materially wealthy.’”

LaHaye and more than a few other Religious Right preachers are well-heeled. They live in big houses in nice neighborhoods and drive expensive cars.

At the same time, many in their flocks are not rich, or even close to it. But these preachers – almost all of them conservative Republicans -- have that based covered: What's a short, miserable life on earth compared to eternal bliss in Heaven? To please their patron Napoleon, wealthy Catholic clergy posed the same sort of question to gull the Gallic poor.

Fundamentalist preachers sermonize that the hereafter – not the here-and-now – is what really counts. So what if you stock shelves at Wal Mart, flip burgers at McDonald’s or run a cash register at a 7-Eleven.

It doesn’t matter if you live a long way from Easy Street. All you need to think about is getting right with God (not the Jewish, Catholic or liberal Protestant version, of course). That accomplished, the humblest of souls can contentedly wait for the Kingdom Come and vote McCain-Palin on Nov. 4.

The con job is enough to make Napoleon proud, and even a little jealous. But the old scam doesn’t always fool working stiffs. In 1911, the famous labor balladeer and martyr Joe Hill wrote “The Preacher and the Slave.”

Sung to the music of “The Sweet Bye and Bye,” the song is timely as ever. The first part of it goes:

Long-haired preachers come out every night,
Try to tell you what's wrong and what's right;
But when asked how 'bout something to eat
They will answer with voices so sweet:

You will eat, bye and bye,
In that glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray, live on hay,
You'll get pie in the sky when you die….

Apple, cherry, whatever’s your favorite – just ask any preacher with one of those silver-colored Jesus fish and a McCain-Palin sticker on his new Lexus.