The Evangelical Pasztor

https://apnews.com/4296b5c0a5b2fe876b89f1c96ba7906c

This AP article ran in our local paper and since it mentioned Evangelicals it caught my eye. And then I was rather taken aback when I saw the Evangelical point man they chose to interview was none other than Laszlo Pasztor.

This is not Laszlo Pasztor the Hungarian fascist member of the Arrow Cross who spent his post-war years working with the Republican Party and the American Right organising ex-fascists to form an anti-Soviet bloc. This is not the Pasztor who after 1989 worked with Paul Weyrich of the Heritage Foundation under the auspices of the Free Congress Foundation and the National Endowment for Democracy to flood the former Warsaw Pact nations with money in order to form new pro-Western political parties and shift the region over into the American-NATO column.

No, that Pasztor died in 2015. This is Pasztor Jr. who apparently still lives in the Carlisle, Pennsylvania area. I've never met him but his name came up when I contacted Grace Baptist Church in Carlisle, one of the flagship congregations of the Reformed Baptist movement. I saw that Pasztor Sr.'s funeral was at the church and baffled, I made an inquiry. I was informed that the connection was through his son who attends there.

As I reported in a previous piece my guess is the congregation was never fully informed regarding Pasztor Sr.'s fascist past. Instead he was made into a heroic anti-communist crusader who laboured for the US during and after the Cold War. Indeed Pasztor's profile had risen to great heights. He was in good standing with Nixon, Reagan, and GHW Bush but during the latter's 1988 campaign he was exposed and had to step back from the limelight. He continued to work with Weyrich and was even invited to the GW Bush White House in 2006 – no doubt a kind of conciliatory gesture for his sleight some eighteen years previous. One wonders what Pasztor would have thought of Trump and the incorporation of figures like Stephen Miller and Sebastian Gorka into the inner circles of the White House.

Well, as the article reveals his son has continued the legacy at least in respect to a US military career and domestic politics. I'm sorry to see that the congregation formerly associated with names like Reisinger and Chantry has fallen so utterly under the spell of the Christo-American heresy here promoted by Pasztor.

Pasztor reveals his own ignorance of New Testament doctrine and ethics as his statements equate Trump's policies with Christianity.

The AP reporter was obviously ignorant of Pasztor's doctrine and family background. Given that he attends a Calvinistic Baptist congregation I highly doubt he's a Dispensationalist and thus the Trump administration's relocation of the US embassy to Jerusalem would not be that highly significant. That said, given the record of Pasztor's father and the Arrow Cross the article which suggests an association of Pasztor with the various enumerated Evangelical views including the Jerusalem embassy is not only ironic but disgusting.

The entire article is a testimony to Evangelical compromise. The only voice of wisdom is found with John Fea who teaches at Messiah University.

Pasztor is not his father and is not guilty of his father's crimes but neither is he repentant or reflective regarding the course of his father's life and his many evil associations. No doubt the son justifies them. As one whose own father left a very evil legacy I can say I've honestly dealt with what he did. My own father committed some of his criminal deeds in the name of Christ (as it were) but I do not justify what he did or seek to reconcile his actions with some kind of watered down understanding of doctrine or through some re-framing of the gospel. He did evil and was a very deceived man. I can say the same about Pasztor but apparently his son cannot as he clearly has not broken with the legacy he inherited and if anything has used his father's RNC connections to promote himself.

Fighting evil with evil embraces a consequentialist ethic which is incompatible with New Testament Christianity. This ethic which dominates the Christian Right perpetuates historical myth and ideological falsehood, and the tale of both the past and present will continue to be obscured and lied about until this changes.

See also:

https://proto-protestantism.blogspot.com/2017/10/ghosts-of-wwii-murderers-among-us-and.html