Mike Pompeo, the nominee slated to head the CIA, has a darkly dangerous way of thinking that is based on evangelical Christian notions, contends the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
"To worship our lord and celebrate our nation at the same place is not only our right, it is our duty," the Kansas congressman began a speech to a Wichita congregation in 2015. He bemoaned the supposed official campaign to "rip faith from our schools" and then went on to describe the threat of jihadi terrorism as he saw it: "This evil is all around us." Pompeo concluded by describing politics as "a never-ending struggle ... until the rapture."
Pompeo's speech is riddled with falsehoods. It is not "our duty" to "worship our lord." Quite to the contrary, the United States of America was founded as a secular country and remains one — a nation where every individual has the right to worship whomever he or she pleases or choose not to worship at all. This is the right that the Freedom From Religion Foundation was founded to protect and continues to diligently defend with all its might.
In the same speech, Pompeo also exposes a deep streak of distasteful Christian fundamentalism: "America had worshipped other gods and called it multiculturalism. We'd endorsed perversion and called it an alternative lifestyle."
The final portion of his speech, referring to the "never-ending struggle ... until the rapture," is the most troublesome. It shows a deeply flawed way of analyzing the world. Putting a person with such an outlook in control of our premier intelligence agency would be dangerous. "It's worth pausing to appreciate the fact that America's CIA will shortly be run by a man who appears to view American foreign policy as a vehicle for holy war," Michelle Goldberg of Slate aptly notes.
Pompeo's views have led him to align with fringe conspiracy theorists such as Frank Gaffney, who has become notorious for far-fetched beliefs about Muslim penetration of the Obama administration. These alliances make Pompeo unsuitable for such a powerful policy position.
Mike Pompeo is unfit to lead the country's intelligence agency. A person of his worldview should not be allowed to supervise the gathering of information upon which U.S. foreign policy will be based in the coming years.
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