Bobby Jindal Warns America: Our God Wins!

bobby jindal

This is what Bobby Jindal took from his prayer rally full of extremists, and it is really quite funny, and such a silly thing to even be discussing: Jindal, who used to believe in a bunch of gods as a Hindu, has decided as a Christian that his motto is, “Our God wins!” as in the Old Testament singular God you shall not have any gods before.

We need a spiritual revival to fix what ails our country. It is like God has given us the book of life. He doesn’t let us see the pages for today and tomorrow. He doesn’t promise us everything will go the way you want, but he does let you see the last page of the book of life — and on the last page, our God wins.

This is what he told folks at his prayer rally, and this, as Dean Obeidallah writes at The Daily Beast, is a sort of “my God can beat up your God” deal. I guess it’s supposed to impress us. Or perhaps scare us. Meh.

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Look, I’m a Heathen. A surly old son of Odin. I have Thor, friend of man in my corner (that part Marvel Comics gets right). I don’t have to worry about Galilean carpenters or the sons of Midianite gods. As we Heathens like to say in response to nonsense like this (only partially tongue-in-cheek), “My god carries a hammer. Your god was nailed to a cross. Any questions?”

Even my Heathen ancestors portrayed Jesus as a guy afraid to come out and fight Thor when challenged. Icelandic Skald Steinunn Refsdóttir (yes, a woman) composed a little ditty in honor of Christian missionary Thangrand, which I will get to in a moment. Let me explain why this is important first.

Thangbrand was sent by the Christian King of Norway to force the island’s Heathens to avail themselves of the opportunity of conversion before it was forced on them, traditional religionists were justifiably nervous. This was a warning of the old “convert or die” gambit the Religious Right is still so fond of (in theological accord with ISIL). Jindal’s new buddy Bryan Fischer, who works for the folks who put on his prayer rally the other day, likes to make this point.

Anyway, this Thangbrand was no “gentle Jesus meek and mild” sorta guy. In truth, the historical record reveals the Medieval church to be quite militant – you know, crusades and all). Snorri Sturluson (in King Olaf Trygvason’s Saga, part II, section 80) refers to him as “a passionate, ungovernable man, and a great manslayer; but he was a good scholar and a clever man.”

Except for being able to murder their enemies and the “good scholar” part, Thangbrand could have been any number of modern Religious Right figures. You also have to keep in mind that Norsemen were generally flexible and pragmatic in their thinking, even after they had been introduced to the White Christ, as Heathens called him.

For example, Helgi the Lean was nominally a Christian but only nominally, since he prayed to Thor for protection while at sea, believing like many Heathens that Thor was best with sea travel. That Jesus would walk on water meant nothing to Helgi. He trusted the evidence of his own eyes, and Thor was better. The Sea of Galilee was not, after all, the North Sea, which had to be crossed to get from Norway to Britain and beyond.

So you have to picture this: an autonomous Pagan female taking on the inflexible White male establishment of the Church. A man not ready to tolerate Thor or men like Helgi under any circumstances. Understand also that this same Thangbrand, like another German missionary who had preceded him to Iceland, Thorvald the Far-Traveled, had already murdered two other Heathen skalds who insulted him once he got to Iceland (though they were hardly the first Heathen men he had killed according to Njals Saga), one of whom had called the missionary the ‘effeminate enemy of gods.’

While killing men who insult you was legal under Heathen law, it was hardly what Jesus told these men to do, and Thorvald, rather than be martyred in turn, simply fled Iceland.

Steinunn was unafraid. The daughter of chieftains, she lashed out at the invader. Her words (recorded in Njals Saga) resonate today:

“Have you heard,” she taunted, “how Thor challenged Christ to single combat, and how he did not dare to fight with Thor?”

Thangbrand was having none of this. Like Jindal’s, his God was the only real God and would win in the end:

“I have heard tell,” said Thangbrand, “that Thor was nothing but dust and ashes, if God had not willed that he should live.”

Undaunted, Steinunn told Thangbrand that it was Thor who had caused his recent shipwreck:

Þórr drew Þivinnill’s animal,
Þangbrandr’s long ship, from land,
shook the prow’s horse and hit it,
and hurled it against the sand.

On sea the ski of Atall’s land
will not swim henceforth,
for a harsh tempest sent by him
has hewn it into splinters.

Before the bell’s keeper (bonds
destroyed the beach’s falcon)
the slayer of giantess-son
broke the ox of seagull’s place.

Christ was not watching, when
the wave-raven drank at the prows.
Small guard I think God held
—if any—over Gylfi’s reindeer

Those not familiar with kennings will benefit from understanding what is being said here. Siân Grønlie explains in his translation of the Kristni Saga:

The kennings are as follows: ‘Þivinnill’s animal’ (ship: Þivinnill is the name of a sea-king), ‘prow’s horse’ (ship), ‘ski of Atall’s land’ (ship: Atall is a sea-king and his land is the sea), ‘bell’s keeper’ (priest, fiangbrandr), ‘beach’s falcon’ (ship), ‘slayer of giantess-son’ (Þórr), ‘ox of seagull’s place (ship: the sea-gull’s place is the sea), ‘wave-raven’ (ship), ‘Gylfi’s reindeer’ (ship: Gylfi is a sea-king). These verses have been generally admired for their metrical perfection, elegant kennings and mocking inversion of the motif of the successful sea-voyage in skaldic praise-poetry.

It may not sound like much to our English ears, but Steinunn had just eviscerated Thangbrand and his God with the precision of a Ginsu knife. Grønlie goes on to tell us,

Steinunn’s verses on Þangbrandr’s shipwreck are particularly accomplished: she makes Þórr the active, dominating force—drawing, shaking, hitting, hurling, hewing into splinters—while ‘the bell’s keeper’, Þangbrandr, watches helpless, and God and Christ fail to intervene (pp. 43-4). The contrast between her assertion that Christ ‘was not watching’ and the emphasis in the prose narrative on how God miraculously protects his messengers is striking. Finally, the níð verses provide an insight into possible contemporary perspectives on Christianity: the perceived ‘effeminacy’ of the missionaries, the misunderstanding of baptism in the verse about Friðrekr ‘bearing children’ (the apostle Paul describes himself as ‘in the pains of childbirth’ in Galatians iv), the description of Þangbrandr as a ‘spineless wolf of God’, whom the warrior-poet, the ‘wielder of steel’, must drive from the land (p. 38 and note 27, p. 42 and note 51).

Thangbrand walked away from that rebuke. Steinunn probably breathed a sigh of relief that she had survived it. We don’t know what her eventual fate was, but it could not have been happy. If she converted, she condemned herself to be less than she was. If she declined to convert, she faced the fate of Thorvald’s and Thangrand’s other opponents. There was no place in conservative Christendom then, as there is no place now, for uppity women who reject Jindal’s God and speak back to men.

The meaning of this parable is that it is not God we need to fear, but God’s followers. Jindal’s God is no more going to beat me up than my God will him – or his. The Thangbrands of this world, zealous bullies, are all too frequent an occurrence throughout religious history, and we have no lack of them today.

It is the men like Thangbrand, who, stirred up by men like the AFA’s Bryan Fischer and converts like Bobby Jindal, do the killing in their God’s name. And Sarah Palin’s use of targets is hardly necessary. These people already know who to kill: Everyone and anyone who isn’t one of them.



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