04 February 2018

Hoekstra: An ambassador for the Empire, not the Kingdom

Former Congressman turned Ambassador Pete Hoekstra has been quite popular among the Christian Right. His name is often cited and since he long represented Dutch Reformed country in Michigan, his name was and is pretty well known.


After a rough senate campaign in 2012, allegations of racism and finally defeat, he spent a few years bouncing around law firms and think-tanks working as a lobbyist. Finally in 2018 he received a reward-promotion by being appointed US ambassador to the Netherlands but his past has come back to bite him.
Hoekstra is hardly alone in some of his shady associations. Congressmen as opposed to senators are usually able to get away with this on a larger scale. Hoekstra got involved with people like David Horowitz, a rather sad figure who has spent his life bouncing between extremes and yet still fails to grasp basic and fundamental issues. An ex-Marxist (and yet clearly not a very astute one) Horowitz has flipped to the hard right and now aggressively pursues a Nationalist-Capitalist agenda. He's made quite a splash and yet from my standpoint he's something of a fraud. His interviews are exasperating exercises in misinformation, hyperbole and outright lies. His books are little better but because he's an ear-tickler he's quite popular among some circles of the Christian Right. There are many others like him, frauds who perpetuate myths about Israel, Islam, the global elite, academia etc...
Hoekstra got caught up in this and perpetuated some of the lies emanating from Horowitz, Robert Spencer and others. These people promote myths that parts of America are under Sharia law and in the case of Hoekstra he pushed lies about Holland having 'no-go' areas and fictitious stories about people being murdered and politicians being burned alive.
Upon his arrival in the Netherlands, he was called out, humiliated and rightly so. He deserves it. He should repent and step down and then go back to Michigan and repent in front of his church.
But that won't happen.
I guess the thing that's most striking to me is this...
Do they somehow think that they are furthering the Kingdom of God in promoting misinformation? Do they have some kind of end-justifies-the-means ethic when it comes to the Gospel? You can lie, exaggerate, misrepresent, sensationalise and/or whatever else if it's for the right cause?
Perhaps because Hoekstra is a child of Southwest Michigan, the American heartland of Kuyperian-Dominionist Dutch Reformed Theology we can find an answer. He has from the beginning been taught a false view of what the Kingdom is and what the Christian life and calling is all about. He's been led astray and the rotten seed has produced a rotten fruit. He's hardly alone in this but once again here's a man that has sought and exercised power and done these things openly, wedding himself and his agenda to the Person of Christ....
And yet has been exposed as a fraud, a cheat and a liar, someone who has not only abused the power given to him but has used it to harm others and mislead not only the lost public, but those within the Christian Church.
He has given the enemies of the Lord occasion to blaspheme. That alone should make him recoil in horror.
But it doesn't. He's defiant and demonstrates that his tree is barren and void of fruit. His apologies strike me as largely insincere and superficial.

He has confused power and the American Empire with the Kingdom of God and thus as long as he is in the good graces of the Washingtonian Beast, it is well with his soul.

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