One hardly knows what to do with this.

Former Representative Michele Bachmann appeared on Tony Perkins’s Washington Watch radio show last week. She made a rather inocuous statement that apparently is serving as some kind of dog whistle on the atheist and anti-Christian left sending them barking mad.

“We recognize the shortness of the hour,” she said in an interview with right-wing radio host Tony Perkins last week. “That’s why we as a remnant want to be faithful in these days and do what it is that the Holy Spirit is speaking to each one of us, to be faithful in the Kingdom and to help bring in as many as we can — even among the Jews — share Jesus Christ with everyone that we possibly can because, again, he’s coming soon.”

…

“This week really was about biblical prophecy in many ways,” she said. “And we’re seeing as events are speeding up, events are speeding up so quickly right now, and we see how relevant the Bible is, and we’re reading our newspaper, at the same time we’re learning about these biblical events, and it’s literally day by day by day, we’re seeing the fulfillment of scripture right in front of our eyes, even while we’re on the ground.”

Bachmann, who unsuccessfully ran for the GOP presidential nomination in 2012, frequently prophesies about biblical matters. Earlier this year, she warned that President Barack Obama’s foreign policy would bring about the rapture.

“We need to realize how close this clock is getting to the midnight hour,” she said in April. “We are literally watching, month by month, the speed move up to a level we’ve never seen before with these events.”

For anyone vaguely familiar with Christianity there isn’t much surprising here. I’m not Dispensationalist and I think The Rapture makes for an interesting plot device in dystopic novels, though not much more, but I understand how some Christians come to that view. Among many of the same denominations that believe in The Rapture you find something of an obsession with eschatology and looking for signs of End Times. Nothing wrong with that, it just isn’t my cup of tea. When we reach the end, I’m guessing someone will tell me, but until then I will live my life as best I can.

I do, however, believe in the The Great Commission. As a Roman Catholic, I join my co-religionists on Good Friday in praying for the conversion of the Jews:

Let us pray also for the Jews.

May our God and Lord enlighten their hearts, so that they may acknowledge Jesus Christ, savior of all men.

 

Almighty and everlasting God, who desires that all men be saved and come to the knowledge of truth, mercifully grant that, as the fullness of the Gentiles enters into Thy Church, all Israel may be saved. Through Christ Our Lord. Amen.

Why would this surprise anyone? Christianity is the fulfillment of promise Judaism. Why would we not want our brethren to enjoy the Salvation made possible by Christ’s death and resurrection?

But Bachmann’s interview is reported, in breathless tones, from Gawker to The Hill, as if she had just confessed to being a three-headed red-haired Eskimo gypsy.

What this kerfuffle shows is the extent to which Christianity has declined in the United States. In a mere half-century we have gone from the dominant force in the nation to a pilgrim church trying to survive in a sea of neo-pagans who are so unfamiliar with the basic tenets of Christianity that they report on them as though they were some kind of extraordinary event.

Erick has already posted on this subject, but I had sunk time into the writing this and decided to post anyway.