dominionism 2 bak

3/19

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see mastriano, wallnau

this is most wacko flavor?

merri ok

prolly somewhat neglected, see

ppp tag

see cabinet trump, drollinger

see cufi xian zion

ginni?!

see xian nat'lism

see theocracy

see nar new apostolic reform

this is general cat for extreme fundamentalist theocratic

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R4WW 10 26

Dominionist Chuck Pierce Declares ‘Year of the Sword’ and Claims New Spiritual Authority for SCOTUS Warrior Phillip Jauregui

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RWW 2026

The Dominionist Plan to Create Theocratic ‘Confessional Counties’ in Rural U.S. | People For

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AN 7 25

Vance Boelter, who allegedly shot Melissa Hortman, a Democratic Minnesota state representative, and her husband, Mark Hortman, on June 14, 2025, studied at Christ for the Nations Institute in Dallas. The group is a Bible school linked to the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR.

The NAR is a loosely organized but influential charismatic Christian movement that shares similarities with Pentecostalism, especially in its belief that God actively communicates with believers through the Holy Spirit. Unlike traditional Pentecostalism, however, the organization emphasizes modern-day apostles and prophets as authoritative leaders tasked with transforming society and ushering in God’s kingdom on Earth. Prayer, prophecy and worship are defined not only as acts of devotion but as strategic tools for advancing believers’ vision of government and society.

After the shooting, the Christ for the Nations Institute issued a statement “unequivocally” denouncing “any and all forms of violence and extremism.” It stated: “Our organization’s mission is to educate and equip students to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ through compassion, love, prayer, service, worship, and value for human life.”

But the shooting has drawn attention to the school and the larger Christian movement it belongs to. One of the most important aspects of NAR teachings today is what is called “the Seven Mountain Mandate.”

The Seven Mountain Mandate calls on Christians to gain influence, or “take dominion,” over seven key areas of culture: religion, family, education, government, media, business and the arts.

With over three decades of experience studying extremism, I offer a brief overview of the history and core beliefs of the Seven Mountains Mandate.

‘Dominion of Christians’

The Seven Mountains concept was originally proposed in 1975 by evangelical leader Bill Bright, the founder of Campus Crusade for Christ. Now known as “Cru,” the Campus Crusade for Christ was founded as a global ministry in 1951 to promote Christian evangelism, especially on college campuses.

United by a shared vision to influence society through Christian values, Bright partnered with Loren Cunningham, the founder of Youth With A Mission, a major international missionary training and outreach organization, in the 1970s.

The Seven Mountains Mandate was popularized by theologian Francis Schaeffer, who linked it to a larger critique of secularism and liberal culture. Over time, it evolved.

C. Peter Wagner, a former seminary professor who helped organize and name the New Apostolic Reformation, is often regarded as the theological architect of the group. He developed it into a call for dominion. In his 2008 book “Dominion! How Kingdom Action Can Change the World,” he urged Christians to take authoritative control of cultural institutions.

For Wagner, “dominion theology” – the idea that Christians should have control over all aspects of society – was a call to spiritual warfare, so that God’s kingdom would be “manifested here on earth as it is in heaven.”

Since 1996, Bill Johnson, a senior leader of Bethel Church, and Johnny Enlow, a self-described prophet and Seven Mountains advocate, among others, have taken the original idea of the Seven Mountains Mandate and reshaped it into a more aggressive, political and spiritually militant approach. Spiritual militancy reflects an aggressive, us-vs.-them mindset that blurs the line between faith and authoritarianism, promoting dominion over society in the name of spiritual warfare.

Their version doesn’t just aim to influence culture; it frames the effort as a spiritual battle to reclaim and reshape the nation according to their vision of God’s will.

Lance Wallnau, another Christian evangelical preacher, televangelist, speaker and author, has promoted dominion theology since the early 2000s. During the 2020 U.S. presidential election, Wallnau, along with several prominent NAR figures, described Donald Trump as anointed by God to reclaim the “mountain” of government from demonic control.

In their book “Invading Babylon: The 7 Mountains Mandate,” Wallnau and Johnson explicitly call for Christian leadership as the only antidote to perceived moral decay and spiritual darkness.

The beliefs

Sometimes referred to as Seven Mountains of Influence or Seven Mountains of Culture, the seven mountains are not neutral domains but seen as battlegrounds between divine truth and demonic deception.

Adherents believe that Christians are called to reclaim these areas through influence, leadership and even, if necessary, the use of force and to confront demonic political forces, as religion scholar Matthew Taylor demonstrates in his book “The Violent Take It By Force.”

Diverse perspectives and interpretations surround the rhetoric and actions associated with the New Apostolic Reformation. Some analysts have pointed out how the NAR is training its followers for an active confrontation. Other commentators have said that the rhetoric calling for physical violence is anti-biblical and should be denounced.

NAR-aligned leaders have framed electoral contests as struggles between “godly” candidates and those under the sway of “satanic” influence.

Similarly, NAR prophet Cindy Jacobs has repeatedly emphasized the need for “spiritual warfare” in schools to combat what she characterizes as “demonic ideologies” such as sex education, LGBTQ+ inclusion or discussions of systemic racism.

In the NAR worldview, cultural change is not merely political or social but considered a supernatural mission; opponents are not simply wrong but possibly under the sway of demonic influence. Elections become spiritual battles.

This belief system views pluralism as weakness, compromise as betrayal, and coexistence as capitulation. Frederick Clarkson, a senior research analyst at Political Research Associates, a progressive think tank based in Somerville, Massachusetts, defines the Seven Mountains Mandate as “the theocratic idea that Christians are called by God to exercise dominion over every aspect of society by taking control of political and cultural institutions.”

The call to “take back” the culture is not metaphorical but literal, and believers are encouraged to see themselves as soldiers in a holy war to dominate society. Some critics argue that NAR’s call to “take back” culture is about literal domination, but this interpretation is contested.

Many within the movement see the language of warfare as spiritually focused on prayer, evangelism and influencing hearts and minds. Still, the line between metaphor and mandate can blur, especially when rhetoric about “dominion” intersects with political and cultural action. That tension is part of an ongoing debate both within and outside the movement.

Networks that spread the beliefs

This belief system is no longer confined to the margins. It is spread widely through, podcasts, and political networks.

It’s hard to know exactly how many churches are part of the New Apostolic Reformation, but estimates suggest that about 3 million people in the U.S. attend churches that openly follow NAR leaders.

At the same time, the Seven Mountains Mandate doesn’t depend on centralized leadership or formal institutions. It spreads organically through social networks, social media – notably podcasts and livestreams – and revivalist meetings and workshops.

André Gagné, a theologian and author of “American Evangelicals for Trump: Dominion, Spiritual Warfare, and the End Times,” writes about the ways in which the mandate spreads by empowering local leaders and believers. Individuals are authorized – often through teachings on spiritual warfare, prophetic gifting, and apostolic leadership – to see themselves as agents of divine transformation in society, called to reclaim the “mountains,” such as government, media and education, for God’s kingdom.

This approach, Gagné explains, allows different communities to adapt the action mandate to. It encourages individuals to see themselves as spiritual warriors and leaders in their domains – whether in business, education, government, media or the arts.

Small groups or even individuals can start movements or initiatives without waiting for top-down directives. The only recognized authorities are the apostles and prophets running the church or church network the believers attend.

The framing of the Seven Mountains Mandate as a divinely inspired mission, combined with the movement’s emphasis on direct spiritual experiences and a specific interpretation of scripture, can create an environment where questioning the mandate is perceived as challenging God’s authority.

Slippery slope

These beliefs have increasingly fused with nationalist rhetoric and conspiracy theories.

A powerful example of NAR political rhetoric in action is the rise and influence of the “Appeal to Heaven” flags. For those in the New Apostolic Reformation, these flags symbolize the belief that when all earthly authority fails, people have the right to appeal directly to God’s authority to justify resistance.

This was evident during the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, when these flags were prominently displayed.

To be clear, its leaders are not calling for violence but rather for direct political engagement and protest. For some believers, however, the calls for “spiritual warfare” may become a slippery slope into justification for violence, as in the case of the alleged Minnesota shooter.

Understanding the Seven Mountains Mandate is essential for grasping the dynamics of contemporary efforts to align government and culture with a particular vision of Christian authority and influence.

Art Jipson, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Dayton

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Baptist News Global

https://baptistnews.com › article › du-mez-warns-of-alliance-of-theobros-techbros-and-oil-millionaires

Du Mez warns of alliance of TheoBros, TechBros and oil millionaires

TheoBros are a network of religious, political and economic elites who seek to impose a theocratic agenda on America, according to scholar Kristin Kobes Du Mez. She exposes their ties to Trump, tech billionaires, oil millionaires and Project 2025 in a Substack post and a film.

OCT

To understand the sinister forces working to influence the November election, pay close attention to the expanding alliance between religious, political and economic powers arrayed against American democracy, scholar Kristin Kobes Du Mez writes in a recent Substack post.

The expanding and strengthening coalition between Trump strategists, tech billionaires and Christian nationalists known as “TheoBros” is providing the ideological and financial muscle behind the right-wing’s authoritarian agenda, says Du Mez, professor of gender, religion and politics at Calvin University and author of the bestselling book Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.

Kristin Kobes Du Mez

“What we are witnessing right now is an ever-widening network — not just the TheoBros and Trump’s inner circle, but both of these networks now interlinked with the power of tech billionaires. That means we’ve got old-school oil money flowing together with 21st-century tech money, a nearly bottomless source of funds on hand to advance this agenda,” she warns in the Oct. 9 “Du Mez Connections” post titled “TheoBros, TechBros & Trump.”

“What do TechBros and TheoBros have in common with Trump and his inner circle? All think their respective causes will be better served by ending American democracy. They want a strongman at top — their strongman. To hell with democracy, and with the rest of us,” she writes.

The TheoBros have promoted a militant form of patriarchy within evangelical congregations and are working to seize political control to impose their version of God’s law and the rest of society, Du Mez explains.

That’s a trend covered in her new film, *, which uncovers the sexual and spiritual abuse of girls and women at the hands of conservative Christians and churches more concerned about personal power and political influence than justice and love.

The movement also is described in Kiera Butler’s recent Mother Jones article, “To Understand JD Vance, You Need to Meet the ‘TheoBros,’” which Du Mez presents as an essential read for understanding the religious motivations of the American theocracy movement.

Butler explains how and why these younger, more conservative and tech-savvy fundamentalist Christians have determined pluralistic democracy is diametrically opposed to faith.

“Many TheoBros, for example, don’t think women belong in the pulpit or the voting booth — and even want to repeal the 19th Amendment. For some, prison reform would involve replacing incarceration with public flogging. Unlike more mainstream Christian nationalists, like House Speaker Mike Johnson, who are obsessed with the U.S. Constitution, many TheoBros believe that the Constitution is dead and that we should be governed by the Ten Commandments.”

“Many TheoBros believe that the Constitution is dead and that we should be governed by the Ten Commandments.”

TheoBros consume the biographies of dictators, extol nations that execute gay people and warn against “the perils of multiculturalism,” Butler writes.

Their message has begun to overlap with that of Trump running mate JD Vance, who has increasingly embraced themes of hypermasculinity, misogyny, ethnonationalism and concerns about declining birthrates, she adds. “If you want to know some of the actors who red-pilled Vance, or at least those who flock to him, you need to meet the TheoBros.”

Du Mez also urges reading an article about the foreword Vance penned for Dawn’s Early Light, a new book by Project 2025 architect and Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts.

Project 2025 is the Christian nationalist blueprint for replacing the federal government with a Christian nationalist theocracy. Trump’s efforts to distance himself from the plan were undermined when he chose Vance as his running mate, Alex Shephard explains in his report in The New Republic.

“Vance has deep ties to the Heritage Foundation, and in particular to Kevin Roberts, who has been president of the right-wing think tank since 2021 and is the architect of Project 2025,” Shephard says. “Vance has praised Roberts for helping to turn the organization ‘into the de facto institutional home of Trumpism’ and has endorsed elements of Project 2025.”

In his foreword to Roberts’ book — originally titled Burning Down Washington to Save America and now delayed for publication until mid-November due to public backlash against Project 2025 — Vance claims it is time for conservatives to “load the muskets” to take back America.

Tim Dunn on the cover of Texas Monthly

Another article Du Mez suggests documents the effort of Texas billionaires Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks in forging the state into a theocracy with the intent of going national with their Christian nationalist campaign.

“Cycle after cycle, their relentless maneuvering has pushed the statehouse so far to the right that consultants like to joke that Karl Rove couldn’t win a local race these days,” Ava Kofman writes for ProPublica. “With its high concentration of movement leaders, conservative pastors and far-right megadonors, Texas has become the country’s foremost laboratory for Christian nationalist policy, and many of its experiments have been bankrolled by Dunn and Wilks.”

In addition to seeking to limit government, taxes and regulations, Dunn and Farris have spent millions to help re-elect Trump in order to replace representative democracy with Christian theocracy, the article warns.

Both men are pastors described as “thoroughgoing Dominionists” who want state and national laws and institutions to adhere to biblical teachings. Yet both also have denied being Christian nationalists, Kofman explains.

“Instead, like most Christian nationalists, the two men speak about protecting Judeo-Christian values and promoting a biblical worldview. These vague expressions often serve as a shorthand for the movement’s central mythology: that America, founded as a Christian nation, has lost touch with its religious heritage, which must now be reclaimed.”

Du Mez says it’s time Americans pay more attention to these interests and their collaborative efforts to defeat democracy: “In some ways it’s a relief to see the mainstream media start to pick up on these dynamics, but it may be too late. The repercussions are chilling.”

Related articles:

Sorry, Tim Dunn, you *are* a Christian nationalist | Opinion by Rodney Kennedy

Du Mez, Bass and Tisby warn: Project 2025 is a Christian nationalist blueprint

Project 2025 isn’t as scary as Kamala Harris, Heritage Foundation president says

Meet the Theobros, who want you to know they’re right about everything | Analysis by Rick Pidcock

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1 25

01/22/2025

by

Peter Montgomery

Donald Trump and his Christian nationalist supporters are demonstrating once again that much of the harshest anti-Christian rhetoric in our political life doesn’t come from secular leftists, it comes from right-wing Christian leaders and activists who bitterly trash the faith of Christians who don’t share their religious and political worldviews.

Their most recent target is Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde, who spoke at the National Prayer Service held at the Washington National Cathedral on Tuesday. Budde talked for about 15 minutes on the topic of unity, using her last few minutes to directly and respectfully address Trump and ask for mercy on behalf of gay, lesbian, and transgender people, immigrants, and refugees.

The same religious-right leaders and activists who have embraced or explained away Trump’s relentless lying, cruelty, corruption, and criminality, were outraged by Budde’s willingness to challenge him over the harmful impact his actions as president will have on many people.

Sean Feucht, a dominionist musician, political activist, and ardent Trump supporter, was contemptuous, referring to Bishop Budde as “the priestess” and saying, “They should let Christians preach next time.”

In a video posted from within the Cathedral, Feucht literally sneered at the interfaith service’s inclusion of “all these random religions and faiths,” concluding, “this was not a church service.” He continued:

We’re gonna go have a real church service with a bunch of folks that were in here. We’re gonna go lift up the name of Jesus because we are one nation under God, not all these other random religions. We don’t all worship the same God. And we definitely don’t worship the God of the LGTBQ mafia.

Feucht’s comments are a reminder that religious-right activists leaders are be quick to claim anti-Christian persecution when they are criticized for their harmful agendas or dishonest rhetoric, but they are themselves quick to attack other Christians. (Marjorie Taylor Greene recently provided another example, attacking the Catholic faith of Martin O’Malley because of his pro-choice position on abortion.)

“The Washington National Cathedral has become the Sanctuary of Satan,” ranted pundit Todd Starnes. He went on to denounce the Episcopal Church as “barely a religion.” He charged that “the blasphemous bishop at National Cathedral preached hate from her pagan pulpit.”

MAGA “prophet” Shave Vaughn declared Budde “a Bishop of Babylon.” Anti-LGBTQ activist John Amanchukwu denounced Budde as “a wolf in Bishop garments,” calling her “heretical” and “diabolical.” Dominionist Jim Garlow complained that it was “torture” to listen to Budde.

The kind of religious-right figures who constantly complain that conservative pastors aren’t preaching enough about politics complained that Bishop Budde would “lecture us about contemporary political positions,” in the words of Choral Ridge Ministries’ Rob Pacienza.

Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins denounced Budde’s comments as “rather pathetic,” tweeting that “The cause of America’s decline was not what was sitting in the pew but what was standing behind the pulpit.” Wallbuilders’ Tim Barton had the gall to complain about Budde “making a political speech from the pulpit” and griped about the service including people of other faiths.

Pastor and Trump apologist Robert Jeffress complained that Budde had “insulted rather than encouraged our great president.” Rep. Mike Collins of Georgia declared on X, “The person giving this sermon should be added to the deportation list.” Alex Jones denounced Budde as a “wokist cult leader.”

Trump himself demeaned Budde on his Truth social feed, calling her a “so-called Bishop.”

Meanwhile, Feucht also posted a celebratory video sharing his excitement that Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth has invited him to hold one of his Christians-only religious revivals in the Pentagon.

It’s worth noting that other Christians have praised and welcomed Budde’s remarks as an example of the kind of moral courage and leadership that is required in an era when Trump’s MAGA movement has been fully embraced by dominionists and white Christian nationalists. rww

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6 24 rww

johnny Enlow, a Seven Mountains dominionist and QAnon conspiracy theorist, declared this week that all three branches of the federal government have been so “corrupted” that the U.S. military will have to “step in.” Enlow called it a “long shot” that the November 5 election would take place “before the whole thing is interrupted by military presence.”

Enlow, who is associated with the dominionist New Apostolic Reformation movement, appeared Monday with Steve Shultz, who runs Elijah Streams, a streaming platform for modern-day “prophets.” As of noon Friday, the interview had been viewed more than 200,000 times.

After the 2020 election, Enlow said former President Donald Trump would be justified in imposing martial law and calling for revolution. This week, Enlow railed against Trump’s criminal convictions, making a big deal out of Trump’s frequent use of the term “election interference” to describe legal proceedings against him. According to Enlow, the convictions provide “absolute proof” of the corruption in the system, giving the “white hats” in the military full justification to step in. “There’s good reason why a lot of the people are like, ‘What in the world are you waiting for?’ with the proof that has already been made directly to the American people with all that’s taking place.”

In his conversation with Shultz, Enlow compared Trump to biblical figures God used to advance his will, including Cyrus, Moses, Joshua, and Jesus. “The Lord says, ‘I love Trump. He is my ally,’” Enlow claimed, insisting that Trump is a shepherd and “anointed” by God.

Other dominionists like Lance Wallnau have compared Trump to Cyrus, a Persian king who God used to free Jews from in exile in Babylon. On Monday, Enlow read multiple Bible verses about Cyrus, urging listeners to replace “Cyrus” with “Trump” as he and Shultz marveled at how “specific” the scriptures are in applying to Trump. “This is like Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump,” Enlow said, adding that Trump’s “assignment” comes with “higher consequences for global and kingdom matters.” Enlow said even many of Trump’s supporters fail to understand the “destiny” and “mantle of God” on him. “Trump’s assignment, if anything is 10 times larger than what Cyrus’s assignment was.”

Enlow brought in classic antisemitic and modern QAnon conspiracy theories to describe the forces that God has called on Trump to battle: “The Lord has chosen Trump as his ally,” he said. “He will use him to put an end to the empire of Babylon. And now where you see Empire of Babylon, think Federal Reserve, central banks, Rothschild dynasty.”

“So that is what’s being taken now,” Enlow said. “The Federal Reserve, even the religion of those who are what we would call the deep state, the Illuminati, those that are that are part of the cabal, this ruling corrupt pedophilic elite around the world, they really religiously connect completely with the same practices, even the same gods as Babylon, the same Babylon, that Cyrus had to deal with.”

Enlow is currently promoting a documentary called “Big God.” His latest book, “Kingdom Come: Understanding the Reign of God on Earth,” was published this week.

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Dominionist pastor Ché Ahn appeared at an event in Oklahoma last night that was organized by the Christian nationalist program “FlashPoint,” where he bragged that several members of his congregation are on the ballot for the November elections in California.

Ahn, a leader in the New Apostolic Reformation and head of Harvest International Ministries ​based in Pasadena, California, was active in the right-wing effort to keep former President Donald Trump in office after he lost the 2020 election, appearing at a rally on Jan. 5, 2021—one day before the Capitol insurrection—where he proclaimed that Trump would stay in power and that they would “rule and reign through President Trump and under the lordship of Jesus Christ.”

While Trump did not remain in office, Ahn is still intent on seeing his fellow right-wing Christians “rule and reign” over this nation.

“It is time for the church to rise,” Ahn told the FlashPoint audience. “We have the answers. We are the ones and we can’t just wait for the government—you are his ekklesia, you are his legislative body of the Kingdom of God and you need to be involved.”

“We’re encouraging people to run for office,” he continued. “For the first time in my network of churches … we have had seven people run in the March 5 primaries. They all ran because we gave them money to win and now they’re facing the election in November. They all won (their primaries). Not one lost.”

IFrame Content

The mission of the New Apostolic Reformation was explained in a recent Right Wing Watch review of André Gagné’s book, “American Evangelicals for Trump: Dominion, Spiritual Warfare, and the End Times”:

NAR’s political mission is “no less than the sociopolitical transformation of nations with the goal of bringing about the Kingdom of God on earth,” Gagné writes. Of course, their view of the Kingdom has no room for people who do not share their religious and political worldviews. “Spiritual warfare” must be waged constantly against God’s enemies—which in the U.S. context includes Trump’s opponents—who are under “demonic control.”

As Gagné notes, “This spiritual warfare theology creates conditions which lead to the demonization of peoples, cultures, and political communities.” And that contributes to a toxic political culture in which compromise and pluralism are seen as sinister rather than essential to healthy society and governing, and in which some “prophets” urge people to stockpile weapons and prepare for civil war:

*These Charismatic leaders showed unwavering support for Trump and for his policies an viewed any opposition to the former president as spiritual warfare. They stigmatized and delegitimized their critics, claiming their enemies to be under demonic influence. These enemies include political and religious leaders who do not share the same enthusiasm for Trump and his vision for the United States. Some Charismatics have even prophesized the coming of a second American civil war—encouraging Christians to defend themselves against all opposition to Trump and their plan for a Christian hegemony. Many of these Trump-supporting Charismatics view democratic pluralism with suspicion and often try to silence church leaders who disagree with them. Pluralism is simply—and literally—demonized.

Alabama Supreme Court chief justice spreads Christian nationalist rhetoric on QAnon conspiracy theorist's show

Chief Justice Tom Parker’s recent concurring opinion in a case granting rights to embryos drew criticism for invoking religious language

Special PROGRAMSABORTION RIGHTS & REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH (https://www.mediamatters.org/abortion-rights-and-reproductive-health)

WRITTEN BY PAYTON ARMSTRONG (https://www.mediamatters.org/author/payton-armstrong)

:{PUBLISHED 02/21/24

During a recent interview on the program of self-proclaimed “prophet” and QAnon conspiracy theorist Johnny Enlow, Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Tom Parker indicated that he is a proponent of the “Seven Mountain Mandate,” a theological approach that calls on Christians to impose fundamentalist values on all aspects of American life.

Enlow is a pro-Trump “prophet” (https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/02/18/how-christian-prophets-give-credence-to-trumps-election-fantasies-469598) and leading proponent (https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/enlow-government-media-should-function-on-earth-as-they-do-in-heaven/) of the “Seven Mountain Mandate (https://theoutline.com/post/8856/seven-mountain-mandate-trump-paula-white),” a “quasi-biblical blueprint for theocracy (https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/lance-wallnau-doug-mastriano-christian-dominion-1234602214/)” that asserts that Christians must impose fundamentalist values on American society by conquering the “seven mountains” of cultural influence in U.S. life: government, education, media, religion, family, business, and entertainment.

Enlow has also repeatedly pushed the QAnon conspiracy theory, sometimes even connecting (https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/johnny-enlow-marries-seven-mountains-dominionism-to-the-qanon-conspiracy-theory/) it to the Seven Mountain Mandate. Per Right Wing Watch, Enlow has claimed (https://x.com/RightWingWatch/status/1574775299270664192?s=20) that world leaders are “satanic” pedophiles who “steal blood” and “do sacrifices” and that (https://twitter.com/RightWingWatch/status/1664365715023880192) “there is presently no real democracy on the planet” because over 90 percent of world leaders are involved in pedophilia and are being blackmailed.

On February 16, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled (https://www.businessinsider.com/alabama-judge-rules-frozen-embryos-are-people-ivf-2024-2) that frozen embryos are people, with the same rights as living children, and that a person can be held liable for destroying them, imperiling in vitro fertilization treatment in the state. In a concurring opinion, Parker quoted the Bible, suggested (https://publicportal-api.alappeals.gov/courts/68f021c4-6a44-4735-9a76-5360b2e8af13/cms/case/343D203A-B13D-463A-8176-C46E3AE4F695/docketentrydocuments/E3D95592-3CBE-4384-AFA6-063D4595AA1D) that Alabama had adopted a “theologically based view of the sanctity of life,” and said that “human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God.”

In the interview on Enlow’s program — which was uploaded the same day as the ruling was issued — Parker claimed that “God created government” and said it’s “heartbreaking” that “we have let it go into the possession of others.” Parker then invoked the Seven Mountain Mandate, saying, “And that's why he is calling and equipping people to step back into these mountains right now.”

Parker suggested a familiarity with Enlow’s work, telling him, “As you've emphasized in the past, we've abandoned those Seven Mountains and they've been occupied by the opposite side.”

Video file

CitationFrom the February 16, 2024, edition of Restore Seven's Someone You Should Know

Parker discussed (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4016799) his “call” to what Enlow called the “mountain of government,” and later told (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4016802) Enlow that he appreciates what he’s done by “giving us the overview and the vision that allows us to really contemplate what God is calling each of us to for our role on those Seven Mountains.”

Enlow praised Parker, telling him he’s “in such a key place that we don't want to have any conversations that hurt you in any kind of way, but we appreciate who you are, who you are in the kingdom.”

Parker also claimed (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4016800) that God “is equipping me with something for the very specific situation that I’m facing,” and responded affirmatively when Enlow asked if “the holy spirit is there” when he’s “arbitrating a session” and performing his job as chief justice.

Parker’s ties to extreme right-wing Christian and “prophetic” media figures extends beyond the interview with Enlow.

Last year, Christian nationalist media figure Sean Feucht (https://www.mediamatters.org/turning-point-usa/right-wing-media-are-promoting-sean-feucht-christian-nationalist-singer-bringing#::text=Feucht%20tweeted%20that%20in%20Montgomery%2C%20Alabama%2C%20Tom%20Parker%2C%20chief%20justice%20of%20the%20state%E2%80%99s%20Supreme%20Court%2C%20attended%20his%20rally.%20Feucht%20said%20that%20Parker%20also%20invited%20him%20into%20the%20court%E2%80%99s%20chambers%20for%20a%20worship%20session%20and%20shared%20a%20picture%20of%20the%20pair.%20%5BTwitter/X%2C%203/19/23%5D) said Parker had invited him into the court’s chambers for a worship session. Parker also joined a prayer call in March 2023 with supposed prophets and apostles, and he prayed (https://www.claynash.org/uploads/1/3/0/7/130727692/mar_9_prayer_call.pdf) that “there will be a growing hunger in the judges of Alabama, and around the nation for more of God. And that they will be receptive to his moves toward restoration of the judges, so that they can play their forecast role in revival in this nation.”

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Kari Lake’s Campaign Chairman, Floyd Brown, Is A Seven Mountains Dominionist

Kyle Mantyla | February 9, 2024 rww

Seven Mountains Dominionism is a radical theology that advocates having right-wing Christians control all aspects of society. As Right Wing Watch has explained before, followers of Seven Mountains theology believe that they are to “do whatever is necessary” to take control of the seven main “mountains” that shape our culture—education, government, media, business, arts and entertainment, family, and religion—in order to implement the will of God throughout the nation and the world.

As evangelist Lance Wallnau, a leading proponent of Seven Mountains Dominionism, explained just this week, advocates of this theology believe that they have been uniquely granted “a kingly anointing” by God to serve as his “royal priesthood” on Earth and “occupy territory” atop each of the seven mountains in order to “bring Heaven down into the realm that we’re invading.”

During a recent appearance on the His Glory TV network, Christian nationalist Floyd Brown revealed himself to be a proponent of Seven Mountains theology who is intent on seeing conservative Christians “reclaim” these positions of power from Satan and “his spirits of darkness.”

“You’re talking about the Seven Mountains, which is the business mountain, the government mountain, the education mountain, all of these different mountains, the church mountain, the family mountain,” Brown said. “These mountains are very significant. Scripture talks, especially in the Old Testament, a lot about the high places and the gates. I believe that Satan sets up his gates in the high places with his spiritual forces, his principalities, his spirits of darkness, and as Christians, we’ve got to go and reclaim those mountaintops for Jesus.”

“I’m all in to claim them all,” Brown added.

IFrame Content

Brown’s embrace of Seven Mountains Dominionism is particularly relevant given that he is currently serving as chairman of MAGA cultist Kari Lake’s campaign for the U.S. Senate in Arizona.

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Clay Clark is a far-right conspiracy theorist who has been organizing “ReAwaken America” rallies where various election, COVID-19, and QAnon conspiracy theorists are brought together in churches to spread their disinformation all over the nation.

Clark’s events are a nonstop cavalcade of outlandish conspiracy theories and violent rhetoric mixed with aggressive Christian nationalism. For For example, during a recent event at one of former President Donald Trump’s properties in Florida, aself-proclaimed “prophet” named Amanda Grace warned about the dangers posed by technologically advanced “mermaids and water people.[patr takes twt vid mermaid hand to hand ; gt reawak vs gt reset; protect wealth fron inflation grift[]

speaking alongside Grace at this event were Eric and Lara Trump,and Clark recently bragged that through his ReAwaken America event, he has been able to connect Trump”s “inner circle” to prophets like Grace.

During an appearance on the Elijah Streams network last Wednesday, Clark reported that he has been successful in his effort to directly connect with Trump and has been working to ensure that Trump will be “surrounded by both prophets and pastors” if he is reelected to the White House.

“I had dinner with Devin [Nunes],”:{ Clark }:{. “He loves our country. He loves Jesus. He’s backstage at the ReAwaken America tour. … I want the prophets, the patriots, and the pastors all to be connected. So, Amanda Grace is backstage talking to Devin Nunes. }:Lara Trump—Eric’s wife—:{she openly describes the battle that we’re facing right now is a spiritual battle, which is a far cry from the secular right that doesn’t want to talk about God.”}:

Clark then noted that Trump had called into the event to promise disgraced his former disgraced national security adviser Michael Flynn a high-level position in his next administration. Flynn himself is a far-right conspiracy theorist who has developed close ties to Clark and has consistently been a speaker at Clark’s events.

Clark hailed Trump’s participation as further evidence that the former president is embracing the radical activists whom Clark has brought together for his ReAwaken America events.

“Trump’s inner circle is embracing the prophets,” Clark said. “It was great to see Eric Trump, find Amanda Grace, call her out by name, give her a hug, ‘How are you doing?,’ introduce her to his wife. That’s the kind of stuff that needs to be happening because if Trump is to return into the White House—and I believe he’s going to—we are going to need to make sure he is surrounded by both prophets and pastors that aren’t afraid to work together.[vid]

while it is deeply disturbing that the Trump family has embraced Clay and his cavalcade of extremists, Clay can’t take exclusive credit for introducing Trump to the world of right-wing dominionist “prophets,” “apostles,” and “spiritual warriors.” Right Wing Watch exhaustively documented the close mutual embrace of Trump and Christian nationalist prophets during his 2016 run for Congress and throughout his administration, where Trump spiritual adviser Paula White used her White House job as a platform for nurturing those relationships, denouncing Trump’s political opponents as demonic, and decreeing that God would intervene to keep Trump in office after his reelection defeat.

Tags: Amanda Grace Clay Clark Devin Nunes Donald Trump ReAwaken America

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https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/charlie-kirks-turning-point-usa-increasingly-leaning-right-wing-christian

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Kirk and his conservative student-oriented organization Turning Point USA have spent the last two years bolstering connections with faith leaders on the religious right and Christian nationalist influencers as part of a “mission” to “restore America’s biblical values.”

As part of this effort, TPUSA is pressuring pastors to push right-wing politics, deepening ties with extremist pastors and groups that push Christian nationalist talking points, and teaching kids Christian fundamentalist curriculums under the guise of more innocuous “patriotic” and “Christian education.”

Christian nationalism, which contends that the U.S. is a fundamentally Christian nation and should be governed by right-wing Christian beliefs, has been on the rise in Republican politics. According to a new survey from the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution,more than half of Republicans support Christian nationalism.

This undercurrent of right-wing religious fundamentalism has helped fuel a torrent of anti-LGBTQ legislation and anti-abortion laws in GOP-led state legislatures across the country. The 2022 midterm elections also saw increased fervor from the religious right on the campaign trail, such as in the candidacy of Pennsylvania Republican gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano, who experts warned had centered the dangerous Christian nationalist ideology at the heart of his campaign. (Kirk, however, praised Mastriano as "a fabulous person.”)

Turning Point USA, Kirk’s student-oriented youth group which he founded to increase right-wing political influence, has historically focused on college campuses, where its student chapters have a troubling history of racist incidents. Kirk also has espoused virulently anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and lamented supposed Christian persecution.

TPUSA Faith was launched in 2021, with a Turning Point spokesperson saying that “it was a no-brainer to recreate” the TPUSA model of activism for the faith community. Kirk has depicted the country as engaged in a “spiritual battle,”and this latest initiative seeks to win that supposed battle by restoring “America’s biblical values.” After Kirk partnered with extreme pastors and religious right leaders, some observers noted that TPUSA has increasingly grounded its mission in “the theology of Christian nationalism” and religious fundamentalism.

Kirk pushes Christian churches to spread bigotry by separating them into three groups: The cowardly, the courageous, and the complicit

Since co-founding TPUSA Faith with far-right pastor Rob McCoy, who reportedly played a key role in Kirk’s rejection of the principle of the separation between church and state, Kirk has traveled to churches across the country and attacked pastors he deems inadequately political.

At self-described “Christian extremist” Kenneth Copeland’s FlashPoint Live event in 2022, Kirk described what he sees as the three kinds of Christian churches: the “cowardly,” the “courageous,” and the “complicit.” He explained a simple litmus test for a “cowardly pastor” and church: “They didn't say a word after Roe vs. Wadewas overturned. … They should resign from the ministry or find some courage because we just overturned one of the worst demonic decisions in the history of our country.” Kirk elaborated that “We should try to bring the cowardly pastors into the courageous category. We should challenge them.”

During the event, Kirk described Copeland’s audience and church as “the good type of ministry” and “the courageous church that stands boldly and speaks with moral truth.” Kirk downplayed and mocked criticisms of Christian nationalism, telling the audience that critiques of this ideology “means you're starting to care and they're getting scared.” Kirk also suggested that the only true faith that will lead to salvation is Christianity, and he baselessly fearmongered that “young people are being preyed on by government school predators and groomers.”

Kirk described “complicit” churches as going “out of their way for the seal of approval of the world,” ridiculing churches that put the “gay flag outside of their church or the Black Lives Matter flag." Earlier in the speech, he questioned whether the U.S. is a “conquered country” due to the presenceof these flags.

Kirk's TPUSA Faith has partnered with groups associated with Christian nationalists

According to TPUSA’s 2021 Investor Prospectus, its TPUSA Faith initiative had a $6.4 million budget, making it one of the largest line items in the organization’s operating budget. TPUSA Faith's budget has seemingly funded a variety of events and programs, often in partnership with groups associated with Christian nationalists.

• TPUSA Faith recently announced a partnership with Christian nationalist pastor and musician Sean Feucht for a “revival” tour in 2023 and 2024 called “Kingdom to the Capitol.”The tour has the intention of “visiting every single state capitol in America.” Feucht, TPUSA's new partner, built a profile during the COVID-19 pandemic with his fierce opposition to public health measures that temporarily closed churches, holding events in defiance that “often fused Christian nationalism with conspiracy theories about coronavirus vaccines and globalism.” Feucht recently embraced Christian nationalism overtly, declaring that Christians must “be the ones writing the laws” and that “we want God to be in control of everything.”
• In 2021, Kirk launched TPUSA Faith’s “Saving America Tour” at megachurches around the country.At events, Kirk “melds the political with the spiritual” and frames political issues “as not just earthly policy differences, but part of the spiritual war between good and evil,” as described by The Arizona Republic. At one Saving America event in 2022, Kirk called on men in the audience to confront and physically prevent trans student athletes from competing in sports.
• TPUSA Faith also holds annual pastors summits with right-wing pastors and figures.David Barton, a Christian nationalist activist who has worked for decades to end the separation between church and state, is listed as a speaker at this May’s annual gathering. Last year’s summit featured Mat Staver, who runs the anti-LGBTQ extremist group Liberty Counsel; right-wing pastor Jack Hibbs; and Chad Connelly, the former RNC faith director who worked with Barton during the 2022 midterm elections to activate right-wing Christian voters by spreading debunked talking points about the Bible.
• Starting in 2021, TPUSA Faith partnered with Patriot Academy on courses to teach “biblical citizenship” and other programming denying the separation of church and state. Patriot Academy is an initiative of Barton’s anti-LGBTQ group Wallbuilders that seeks to “train citizens to understand and influence government policy with a Biblical worldview.” TPUSA and Patriot Academy collaborated on “biblical citizenship” courses and a workbook that denies the existence of the separation between church and state. The website also notes that the “biblical citizenship” is critical as “we fulfill the Great Commission and ‘make disciples of all nations.’”
• Through TPUSA Faith, Kirk holds monthly “Freedom Night in America” events at Dream City Church in Phoenix, Arizona, in an “effort to continue fighting America’s culture war … with the intent to call the faith community to action.”The watchdog Right Wing Watch has tracked and sometimes debunked Kirk when he has pushed popular Christian nationalist talking points at Freedom Night events, including claiming that the church is supposed to be the “counselor” to the government. Kirk recently held a Freedom Night event with TPUSA advisory council member and former Rep. Bob McEwen (R-OH), who is the current executive director of the Council for National Policy, a shadowy but influential right-wing networking group that serves as a political nerve center for the religious right. (Kirk is also reportedly a member of the Council for National Policy).
• To further expand its influence in recent years, TPUSA Faith​ launched Freedom Life Church, a network of TPUSA-aligned congregations.TPUSA Faith also reportedly hired a network of over 30 full-time “faith representatives” to launch faith groups across the country.

Kirk has praised extremist figures in the Christian nationalist movement and endorsed the “Seven Mountain Mandate” 

Kirk has closely associated with high-profile members of the Christian nationalist “dominionist” movement, which asserts that Christians have been called to exert God’s will on society. Lance Wallnau, a self-proclaimed “prophet” and “Christian nationalist” who has been dubbed the “father of American Dominionism,” popularized the “quasi-biblical blueprint for theocracy” that is at the heart of dominionism called the “Seven Mountain Mandate.”

The Seven Mountain Mandate demands that Christians impose fundamentalist values on American society by conquering the “seven mountains” of cultural influence in U.S. life: government, education, media, religion, family, business, and entertainment. Wallnau has an extensively documented history of extreme and violent rhetoric. Recently, he called Biden the “antichrist,” referred to LGBTQ people as the “trans taliban,” and warned that God may soon start killing those who are “persecuting” Trump.

In addition to endorsing the Seven Mountain Mandate himself in a 2020 speech, Kirk has interviewed Wallnau multiple times since 2020, including at TPUSA’s 2022 Young Women’s Leadership Summit. In an interview, Kirk on Wallnau, calling him “one of my all time favorite people.” Kirk has also repeatedly appeared alongside Wallnau in and at in-person events for Kenneth Copeland’s right-wing Christian network The Victory Channel, where Wallnau serves as a “regular” for its panel show FlashPoint.

Kirk has also aligned TPUSA with the right-wing cellphone company Patriot Mobile. The company is closely associated with the dominionist movement, explicitly defends Christian nationalism on its website, and has become a force in Texas school board politics against LGBTQ inclusion and curriculums that teach about diversity. Patriot Mobile has sponsored a TPUSA Faith event, Kirk’s podcast, and other TPUSA events; held special events with him; and sent a senior leader to speak at a TPUSA conference.

TPUSA’s increasing Christian fundamentalism has led to an increased focus on young kids

TPUSA announced last summer that it would open its first brick and mortar school, Turning Point Academy, in collaboration with Dream City Christian School in Arizona, a K-12 private school that claims the “current political and spiritual climate in the country is in turmoil.” Kirk has said that the “Christian, Classical, conservative, church-based” school is just "the first in a growing network of schools that will launch across the country in the coming years.”

As Media Matters previously reported, Turning Point Academy attempts to what right-wing figures have labeled as threats to kids, assuring parents that “CRT, postmodernism, ‘Wokeism,’ deconstructionism, queer theory, radical LGBT agendas, and anti-American ideas such as the 1619 project will have no place at our institution."

TPUSA’s expansion into K-12 education also aligns the organization with a long-term goal of the Christian nationalist movement: teaching kids Christian fundamentalist curriculums under the guise of simply “patriotic” and “Christian education.”

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dominionist author, speaker, and political operative Lance Wallnau is a right-wing anti-LBGTQ activist, conspiracy theorist, and unabashed Trump cultist who has repeatedly praised authoritarian leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. He is also a self-proclaimed Christian nationalist who has urged former President Donald Trump to organize public rallies across the nation and infuse them with right-wing Christianity in order to bring about a revival in the United States'

[vid]

the reason Wallnau has urged Trump to hold such rallies is that Wallnau is one of the leading advocates of Seven Mountains dominionism, a theology connected to right-wing political ideology that teaches that Christians are to “do whatever is necessary” to take control of the seven main “mountains” that shape our culture—education, government, media, business, arts and entertainment, family, and religion—in order to implement the will of God throughout the nation and the world.

As Wallnau explained earlier this year, if right-wing Christians can gain control of the seven mountains, they can control a nation.[vid]

on Monday night,Wallnau announced on his Facebook page that he will be joining Donald Trump Jr. in speaking later this week at a fundraiser for election-denier and Christian nationalism promoter Doug Mastriano, who is the Republican nominee for governor in Pennsylvania.

“I’m coming up from Dallas, Texas,” Wallnau. “I’m paying to go. I’m putting a couple thousand dollars into making this event happen, to help this great guy, Doug Mastriano, take a stand. He’s getting beat left and right. Why? Because he’s standing up for Christian values and is a strong conservative and a MAGA Republican.”

“Doug is doing what God called him to do,” Wallnau continued. “I believe the spirit of God is going to show up in a unique way. They’re attacking everyone who is a Christian in politics as a Christian nationalist. All the Christians are pearl-clutching and handwringing about Christian nationalism. All the nervous religious types are all warning me, ‘Lance, don’t use the term Christian nationalist.’ This just makes me so mad I feel like coming out as a Christian nationalist, because the devil controls—it’s like the rainbow. The rainbow used to be in the Bible a sign from God of his covenant that he’d never destroy [humanity again], but then the LGBTQ movement got a hold of it and now if you put a rainbow on something [people ask], ‘Are you LGBTQ?’ It’s like the devil grabs stuff and brands it. It makes me so mad. I’m not willing to let Christianity or nationalism or love of nation be destroyed by the left, who’s like a ubiquitous force; they’re like a virus."[vid]

mastriano already has deep connections to QAnon conspiracy theorists, self-proclaimed prophets, New Apostolic Reformation dominionists, the antisemitic founder of Gab, and a theocratic offshoot of the Unification Church that worships with AR-15s. We can now add Seven Mountains-promoting Christian nationalists to this list.

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• carter Walker @ Lancaster Online: ‘Flow from the pulpit:’ The LifeGate church members providing security to Doug Mastriano.
• John Fea @ Current: Doug Mastriano’s connection to the dominionist New Apostolic Reformation movement.

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/07/marjorie-taylor-greene-christian-nationalism/

https://www.alternet.org/2022/07/adam-kinzinger/

~ xian natl mtg am taliban

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see blazek for annotations

https://www.alternet.org/2022/07/inside-the-christian-nationalist-organizers/

six months before the 2020 election, Tomi Collins, a Christian right organizer from North Dakota, issued a demand on Twitter for the execution of political enemies in the federal government bureaucracy — citing an array of imagined offenses, including the QAnon hoax that progressive elites are harvesting children’s blood.

“#WeThe people demand incitements [sic] for #SpyGate #PizzaGate #UraniumOne #Adrenochrome,” shewrote. “#DeepState will be exposed and hung for treason. Even if we have to do it ourselves! #CoordinationMatters.”

Collins closed her digital call to arms with two more hashtags: #PatriotsMobilize and #1LoudVoice.

Collins serves as executive director of a little-known Christian right outfit called America Restored. Collins has described America Restored, which is organized as a private corporation, as a vehicle for providing strategic consulting and funding to grassroots organizers.

As early as January 2018, less than a year into the Trump administration, Collins was warning followers on Facebook Live about “voter machine fraud,” and foreign election interference, while specifically referencing Dominion Voting Systems. Her description of a plan “to cheat” in the upcoming 2018 midterm elections uncannily anticipated public claims by Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell that have prompted a defamation lawsuit against the two attorneys who litigated President Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

Collins’ role as a key, if overlooked, organizer in the sprawling network of operatives and influencers highlights the role of Christian nationalism in a movement that remains committed to overturning the 2020 election and vanquishing political opposition. Many of the tenets of a hyper-partisan version of Christianity — entwined with syncretic strains of the QAnon cult — were voiced by the far-right organizers who galvanized defiance of the 2020 election results, including some who attacked the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The mission statement for America Restored, prominently displayed on its website’s landing page, clearly describes the work of the organization led by Collins: “America Restored is ‘We The People’ building a powerful, action-driven infrastructure by organizing and mobilizing existing, effective patriot groups and freedom-loving Americans in all major areas of influence: Education, Family, Faith, Business, Government, Entertainment and Media.”

The mission statement ends with a pledge that inaccurately conflates the organization’s vision of a Christian theocracy with an originalist view of the country: “We The People willsee America restored to our founders’ original intent.”

America Restored’s mission statement explicitly references Seven Mountains dominionism, a far-right Christian ideology that emerged in the mid-1970s. It holds that Christians are called on by God to dominate all realms of civil society, including government.

Katherine Stewart, author of the 2020 book The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, described Seven Mountains dominionism in an email to Raw Story as “the conviction that Christians of a certain hyper-conservative variety are called by God to dominate the main peaks of modern civilization in the United States and, ultimately, the world.”

C. Peter Wagner, one of the ideology’s key proponents, preached that Christians’ responsibility for taking over “whatever molder of culture or subdivision God has placed them in” is a matter of “taking dominion back from Satan,” according to Stewart.

America Restored’s grafting of Seven Mountains dominionism ideology onto a claim of restoring the original republic represents a fundamental misreading of the founders’ intent, Stewart told Raw Story. Stewart cited appeals to reason and deistic or atheistic philosophy as underpinning the thinking of founders such as Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin. But even more important than what the founders thought, she said, is the question of what kind of government they established.

“Was it a government that derives its legitimacy from its appeal to Christian revelation, or from its endorsement by Christian ecclesiastical authorities?” Stewart wrote. “The answer to that is no. America’s founders established the world’s first large-scale modern secular republic.”

Four days after the 2020 election, Collins spoke at a “Stand With Trump Rally” at the North Dakota state capitol in Bismarck. Collins told the crowd she had been contacted by the Trump campaign’s legal team and had attended “meetings with intelligence folks.” Raw Story has not been able to verify these claims independently.

“It’s an amazing day when you get to stand and go from a conspiracy theorist to getting called up by the campaign and attorneys all over the country saying, ‘What about those voting machines? What’s going on in them?’” Collins said. “Hey, let’s go. We’ve got some lawsuits to do.”

Collins went on to describe a plan to “mobilize all 50 states” for rallies that would augment the lawsuits with continuous public pressure to overturn the election results.

“We worked in conjunction with Stop the Steal to get folks at capitols in every single state in the union so we the people could be heard,” Collins laterrecalled in an interview for a far-right podcast, referencing the coalition led by Ali Alexander.

Felisa Blazek, a New Hampshire-based event planner, described a markedly similar effort.

“I had started the 50-state rallies with — actually ahead of Ali,” Blaze an interviewer the following summer. “And Ali, having all of his width and breadth of followers — although he’s gone into hiding — God used him in that way, right? God used Cain and God used Abel. He sends out someone who has a much bigger presence on social media than myself. God’s calling for me was to be a base cheerleader, not a main player. So, we’re doing these 50-state rallies at all the capitols every Saturday after the steal of the November election.”

It is unclear whether Collins and Blazek worked together on the effort to mobilize Trump supporters for the rallies, and neither woman responded to repeated requests for interviews. But language used by the two women in interviews to promote their projects and on websites for their respective organizations — including the #1LoudVoice hashtag and Seven Mountains dominionism ideology — bear striking similarities.

The #1LoudVoice hashtag was used in Collins’ social media beginning in May 2020 and has also been prominently displayed on the America Restored website. Meanwhile, a tab on the website ThePatriotParty.rocks, which promotes events organized by Blazek, includes the heading “Our Mission: #1LoudVoice.” The mission statement includes a “call to action,” declaring it is “time to rise up in unity, go into the harvest and take our country back.” The statement continues: “We are assembling to organizing and mobilizing [sic] existing Patriots groups [sic] in all major areas of influence by a national digital communication platform and network influencing all seven (7) spheres of influence: Education, Family, Faith, Business, Government, Entertainment, Media.”

The page includes a link to a separate site listing “coalition members,” including Virginia Freedom Keepers and Latinos for Trump, two of the groups that hosted a MAGA Freedom Rally one block from the US Capitol on Jan. 6; and1st Amendment Praetorian, a security group associated with retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn that provided personal security details for speakers at several rallies and assisted attorney Sidney Powell with research on purported election fraud.

And although it is unclear what role, if any, Blazek had in organizing the Dec. 12, 2020 Jericho March that helped build momentum for Jan. 6, a photo gallery is displayed under the “Events” tab on the ThePatriotParty.rocks website, with images of Flynn, InfoWars host Alex Jones, and Oath Keepers founderStewart Rhodes.

Using Seven Mountains dominionism language in an interview to promote a two-day Patriot Party event at the Scottsdale Plaza Resort in Arizona two weeks before the 2020 election, Blazek avoided any mention of Christianity while highlighting defiance of mask mandates during the COVID pandemic.

“The seven spheres of influence to me and what I am trying to rally around are organizing people in education, family, faith, business, government, entertainment and media,” she said. “Underneath all of those are health and medical because health and medical touch each one of those. It doesn’t get its own sphere; it’s that magical bridge.”

Blazek had hoped to secure a special appearance by Flynn and his family, whom shedescribed as “the tip of the spear in our movement,” for the gathering, but had tosettle for his sister, Barbara Redgate. Other guests included Cowboys for Trump, led by Otero County, NM County Commissioner Couy Griffin.

Folded into the Patriot Party, the Q Con Live! gathering organized by Chris Jacobson commandeered a conference room at the Arizona resort.

Blazek described her radicalization during a joint appearance with Jacobson on a QAnon podcast in June 2020. She said the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon provided an initial jolt, but in early 2020 she said a friend prodded her to look into a conspiracy theory associated with the Sovereign Citizen movement that posits that the British crown holds the originals of American birth certificates. That led her to research the Federal Reserve, she said, prompting a weekslong quest to sources that predate Christ, until, Blazek said, she “worked my way back up to the heart of the issue, and landed with the corruption of the Deep State and how everything’s really been a lie.”

While promoting QAnon, Jacobson expressed a more conventional view of religious nationalism in response to a question about the role of religious leaders in the United States’ civic life.

“And we need to get back to being one nation under God, so that He will continue to bless us,” Jacobson said. “Our founding fathers all, whether they were Christian or not, they understood and said that if we don’t have a higher power — in other words, God — that this whole experiment, this United States of America, would fail.”

Blazek, in turn, affirmed a “spiritual, but not religious” outlook, and expressed a QAnon slogan as a central tenet of her faith.

“I really feel like our statement, ‘Where we go one, we go all,’ represents the true God,” she said. “The true and one God — our God.”

During the Q Con Live! conference, Alan Hostetter, an anti-lockdown activist from southern California,told attendees: “We are at war right now…. Nobody wants violence. We are conditioned from the time we are children to always think violence is a horrible, horrible thing, until we go back and reflect on the Revolutionary War. They picked up guns at some point, and said, ‘Enough!’”

Hostetter would later recall in a court filing that when he sat down after his speech, he noticed a man dressed in headgear and horns carrying a sign that read “Q sent me” enter the back of the conference room and stand in the back. It was Jacob Chansley, who would later gain infamy as the “QAnon Shaman” when he stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6. Hostetter faces charges of his own, including conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, due to his role in the events at the Capitol on Jan. 6. Griffin wasfound guilty of entering restricted grounds and sentenced to time served.

Griffin told Raw Story that he met Chansley “at the event in Scottsdale,” and that after their arrests the two men were housed in adjacent jail cells.

Reflecting on the awkward commingling of Christianity and QAnon, Griffin told an interviewer last fall: “I spent all my time witnessing to [Chansley] about Christ and about how he needs to put his faith in Jesus because he’s, in my opinion, and by scripture, he’s lost in that account.”

Griffin told Raw Story that he first met Blazek at the Patriot Party event in Scottsdale, and that since then he has come to know her “as a great patriot.”

“Felisa’s a good person; she’s an organizer,” Griffin said. “To make it look like she’s organizing a violent uprising — that’s what the American people are sick of. People are getting tired of the fake news.”

Many of Trump’s supporters involved in the effort to overturn the election — both before and after Nov. 3, 2020 — used language of “good” and “evil,” and even “war,” as a call to action.

“It’s not left and right, it’s not red and blue,”said David Sumrall, an organizer with the pro-Trump group Stop Hate during an interview with Redgate to promote her appearance at the October 2020 event in Scottsdale. “It’s good and evil…. It’s just real deal. And I’ve told people this a hundred times if I’ve said it once: Until we put the cross next to the flag again, this is a holy war we can’t win.”

A week before the election, Stop Hate posted a video of Daniel Goodwyn speaking at a rally in San Francisco on the group’s Instagram page.

“They’re Satanists and pedophiles,”said Goodwyn. “They’re disgusting. And we have God on our side. And Trump’s gonna win. The only thing standing in our way is the corruption, because they’re gonna try to steal the election via fraud.” Goodwyn, who shared a social media post promoting the Proud Boys and President Trump’s instruction to “stand back, stand by,” live-streamed his participation in the storming of the Capitol, and faces charges of violent entry and disorderly conduct, among other offenses.

A month after the election, white supremacist Nick Fuentes addressed Trump supporters at a “Stop the Steal” rally outside the Hyatt Regency hotel in Phoenix.

“This is not simply a political struggle, as I’m sure all of you know,” Fuentes said. “The real struggle is not between Republicans and Democrats. The real struggle is between good and evil. This is a spiritual war. It is a spiritual war between the devil and the children of Jesus Christ.” Video of Fuentes’ speech was amplified on social media by Goodwyn and Stop Hate.

Stewart, the author of the Power Worshipers, said extremism that rejects the idea that people can disagree without dehumanizing their opponents isn’t compatible with democracy.

“A large-scale political movement that believes that any deviation is illegitimate, and that political opponents are literally controlled by demons puts democracy in peril,” she said.

As Jan. 6, 2021 approached, #1LoudVoice became a mobilizing call for Trump supporters to pressure Congress to block the certification of Joe Biden as the next president.

Felisa Blazek hosted a conference call on Dec. 30, 2020. The guest, a social media strategist named Jason Sullivan who had worked with Trump confidant Roger Stone during the 2016 election,urged listeners to “descend on the Capitol.”

During the call, one of the listeners asked Sullivan what group he was with.

“I am not with a group,” Sullivan said. Blazek interjected and Sullivan amended his statement.

“Well, yes,” he said. “Thank you for correcting me. I just joined with #1LoudVoice. Yes, Felisa’s fantastic and I greatly admire her.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/05/pennsylvanias-gop-gubernatorial-nominee-is-a-christian-nationalist-who-associates-with-ar-15-fetishists-historian/

no lnx

in the swing state of Pennsylvania, Republicans have a nominated a gubernatorial candidate who is even to the right of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. State Sen. Doug Mastriano, who is competing with Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, is way beyond conservative — he’s extreme.

History professor Thomas Lecaque, who teaches at Grand View University in Des Moines, Iowa, lays out some reasons why Mastriano is so dangerous in an article published by the conservative website The Bulwark on May 31. The Republican who may be Pennsylvania’s next governor, Lecaque warns, is afar-right Christian nationalist and an “insurrectionist” who associates with AR-15 fetishists.

“Mastriano’s résumé hits all the main points of today’s bog-standard MAGA candidate template,” Lecaque explains. “He’s an insurrectionist who ginned up enthusiasm for the attempted coup as a featured speaker for Jericho March’s rally in December 2020 before participating — by his own admission — in the ‘Stop the Steal’ rally on January 6, 2021…. Mastriano also has an increasingly familiar religious profile.”

Lecaque continues,“He has described the Gulf War, in which he served in 1991, as a ‘holy’ war — a belief reflected in his bizarre 2002 graduate thesis, ‘Nebuchadnezzar’s Sphinx.’ He has attended events of theCharismatic Christian dominionist movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation. He shares anti-Muslim memes, hangs out with militia members to guard Confederate statues at Gettysburg, and constantly hits all the main themes of Christian nationalist discourse in his speeches and other activities.”

Moreover, Lecaque adds, Mastriano “associates with an extremist sect that places special emphasis on America’s most notorious gun.”

The “extremist sect” that Lecaque is referring to is the World Peace and Unification Sanctuary Church, a.k.a. Rod of Iron Ministries,founded by the Rev. Hyung Jin Moon — who is the youngest son of the late Unification Church founder Rev. Sun Myung Moon and also goes by Sean Moon. And the “notorious gun” is the semiautomatic AR-15, which was used in two mass shootings in May: one in Buffalo, New York on May 10, and the other in Uvalde, Texas on May 24.

“Rod of Iron continues the Unification Church’s tradition of apocalypticism, but adds to this framework beliefs derived a variety of sources that include, most importantly, the rhetoric, imagery, and ideology of both QAnon and Christian nationalism,” Lecaque observes. “The younger Moon wrote a constitution for the messianic kingdom he and his followers believe will replace the United States following its collapse…. Members of the church perform ceremonies wearing bullet crowns and carrying AR-15s.”

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Mastriano,Lecaque notes, has been “a speaker at Rod of Iron events.” According to Lecaque, Mastriano and Moon “are fellow travelers not only in promoting far-right Christian nationalist politics, but also, in being January 6th insurrectionists.”

“Moon reportedly stormed the Capitol with over 50 of his followers,” Lecaque writes. “But the most important connection between Mastriano and Moon is their shared belief in an apocalyptic religion that imagines the present moment as a battleground between good and evil at the advent of the End Times. Rev. Sean Moon derived his church’s unusual name from Revelation 2:27, ‘he shall rule them with a rod of iron.’ He takes the rod to be the AR-15.”

The Book of Revelation part is important. In far-right evangelical fundamentalism, the Book of Revelation in the New Testament is an obsession — and it fits in with their End Times theology.

“The Book of Revelation — also known as the Apocalypse of John — is the final book of the Bible and the place where Moon came to his beliefs about the cosmic significance of the AR-15,” Lecaque observes. “What he and other cultists should consider is that the apocalypse they desire might reveal a different deity than they expect.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/04/christian-nationalism/

k joyce salon

If the New York Times' "1619 Project" and Donald Trump's 1776 Commission mark two defining moments in American history, as well as opposite sides of an ideological chasm, a new book by sociologists Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry identifies a third defining moment. It's not a new proposed founding, but rather an"inflection point," the moment when the nation's history could have gone in another direction.

In "The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy," Gorski and Perry argue that in the years around 1690 — when Puritan colonists began envisioning their battles against Native Americans as an apocalyptic holy war to secure a new Promised Land, when Southern Christians began to formulate a theological justification for chattel slavery — a new national mythology was born. That mythology is the "deep story" of white Christian nationalism: the notion that America was founded as a Christian nation, blessed by God and imbued with divine purpose, but also under continual threat from un-American and ungodly forces, often in the form of immigrants or racial minorities.

The result was an ethnic nationalism sanctified by religion as it established a new "holy trinity" of "freedom, order and violence," meted out variously to in-groups and out.

When rioters driven by that vision broke into the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, they were just reenacting a story that has been told in this country for centuries. But it's a story that again threatens to "topple American democracy" unless, Gorski and Perry write, a new "united front" is formed to defend it.

Perry spoke with Salon this April.

You describe white Christian nationalism as the "San Andreas Fault" of American politics.

We see America torn apart by an authoritarian populism that was characteristic of Trump's movement, which distrusts any opinion not tied to the nationalist leader. There's a lot of distrust for experts, even medical experts when it came to COVID, in favor of somebody like Trump or organizations that put a conservative slant on all news related to politics, COVID, immigration, Muslims, all those things. So when we say white Christian nationalism is the San Andreas Fault, we mean it is a thread running through all of our current conflicts.

And the implication that we're waiting for the big one.

Exactly. We all observed the events that took place on Jan. 6 with horror and shock, but there's this puzzling juxtaposition of images from that day: violent chaos, suffused with Christian symbolism. There are "Jesus Saves" signs and Christian flags and a prayer in Jesus' name in the Senate chamber. Rather than see that event as fringe and those religious symbols as puzzling, we believe Jan. 6 should be thought of as an eruption of forces that have been building for a long, long time.

I appreciated the book's long historical view: You weren't just focusing on Jan. 6, but looking to the past to understand this idea of the "deep story" behind contemporary Christian nationalism.

From our perspective today, the white Christian nationalist deep story is that we as a country have our roots in white Anglo-Protestant culture, and that's what made us prosperous and successful. In the colonial era, we wouldn't have called it white Christian nationalism, but it would have tied together all the same elements: race, religion and nation. In the time of the Puritans, it could be called white Protestant Britishism: that the people to whom the land rightly belongs are white as opposed to Native American, Protestant as opposed to Catholic or any indigenous religious group, British as opposed to French or certainly the nations of Native Americans. White Christian nationalism in that form was just as exclusive, just as brutal, even apocalyptic in its thrust.

Manifestations of white Christian nationalism have ebbed and flowed throughout America's history, and usually they ebb and flow in response to threats against the ethno-cultural majority. Sometimes the enemies change. Early on it was Native Americans; later it was the French and Roman Catholics. At different times it was Asians and certainly Black Americans who were the out-group. Starting in the mid-20th century, it was socialists and all things associated with communism — which is racialized but also religious, because communists and socialists are thought to be godless. So all throughout American history, you see this tying together of race, religion and nation in the boundaries of who is and is not truly American. Who is not changes in response to the enemies. But the in-group is almost always the same. It's white, Christian and those who are either born in the U.S. or at least "belong" here as part of the dominant ethnic group.

The book includes a lot of original data research that's often absent from these conversations. What were some of your most surprising or compelling findings?

One thing we really wanted to contribute is to operationalize this thing called Christian nationalism and see how it plays in response to various issues. We collected all this national data over the last two years that allowed us to track national events — the election, COVID, George Floyd's and Ahmaud Arbery's murders, all these different factors. One of the most surprising findings is how differently Christian nationalism works for white and Black Americans, how stark the contrast is to the same questions. When African Americans hear the language of "Christian values" or "Christian nation," either it doesn't change their attitudes at all or they seem to think aspirationally about the country America should have been, but never was. When white Americans hear that language, they seem to think nostalgically about a time when the right people ruled and the right culture dominated.

I was also not only shocked but discouraged at how Christian nationalist ideology shaped responses when we asked who Americans went to for information about COVID. White Christian nationalism was powerfully associated with rejecting everybody's opinion about COVID-19 except for Donald Trump's.

I was also taken aback by how powerfully Christian nationalist ideology was associated with responses to the Capitol insurrection. White Christian nationalism powerfully predicted people blaming the violence on antifa or Black Lives Matter and placing none of the blame on Trump. We saw even a correlation between Christian nationalist ideology and supporting the rioters or being reluctant to say they should be prosecuted.

The association between Christian nationalist ideology and violence used for political purposes is one of the more sobering findings. We've collected more recent data since we finished the book, and there is a quite linear association between affirming Christian nationalist ideology and believing that things have gotten so far off track that true patriots may have to resort to physical violence. This is an ideology that doesn't just acknowledge violence as a possibility but in some ways actually affirms it as the way to get things done in our society.

White Christian nationalism supports the idea that the best way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun; it affirms the use of torture if it means national security; it affirms that police should be able to use any means necessary to maintain law and order. There seems to be this powerful connection between Christian nationalist ideology and support for violence to accomplish political goals, and often that means to control "problem populations."

You describe a "holy trinity" within white Christian nationalism of freedom, order and violence.

White Christian nationalism seems to be characterized by a libertarian mindset that's only applied to the inside group. The ideology powerfully predicted a belief that we need to protect the economy rather than the vulnerable during COVID and that socialism is anathema — actually, that socialists are the worst. White Christian nationalism predicts antipathy towards atheists and Muslims, but socialists are the real demonized group, because socialism represents everything that is leftist or "anti-American." It is not only an economic threat, but a cultural, ethnic and religious threat.

White Christian nationalism advocates for maximum freedom for our group. But there is also this connection between authoritarian violence and social order. Christian nationalism wants order in the form of hierarchies. Men on top. Whites on top. Christians on top. Heterosexuals on top. And any threats to that order are met with justified, righteous, good-guy violence. That is what we saw on Jan. 6: the justification of righteous violence in taking back our country from, in the words of the QAnon Shaman, "the tyrants, the communists and the globalists," and showing them "this is our nation, not theirs." So there is this kind of holy trinity: Freedom for us, order for everybody else. And when that order is violated, they get the violence.

You include a number of historical examples of how this played out, long before Jan. 6, at various times in American history, including in the post-Reconstruction era and through lynchings, which you describe as the "high mass" of white Christian nationalism. Why is violence such an important element?

A thread through our narrative is this metaphor of blood. White Christian Americans' place in the cosmos and in our country has always been interpreted through the idea of blood purity — that we are distinct and superior people. There is also the idea of bloody conquest: that America is out there and the land is ours and we are justified in using violence to take what God has given us. Then there is this idea of bloody apocalypse — that violence is an inevitable part of the story, that there is a cosmic struggle going on that will involve us going to war against evil forces who try to take away what God has given us.

One thing we try to underscore is that Americans gripped by the white Christian nationalist deep story see violence as inevitable. Christian nationalism doesn't seem to be too strongly associated with violence for its own sake. But violence in the service of our group and of control is what white Christian nationalism is about — not a celebration of it, but an endorsement of violence as a tool to maintain order and maximize our freedom and power.

Tell me about the idea behind "The Spirit of 1690" and where that fits into the narrative battle between "The 1619 Project" and Trump's 1776 Commission.

The 1776 project is one narrative of America's past: this whitewashed story where Anglo-Protestant values are the secret to our national prosperity, and yes, slavery was real, but it was an aberration. Obviously, "The 1619 Project" has a completely different narrative that sees slavery and white supremacy as a constant thread throughout our history, and that we as a nation were set on the trajectory of white supremacy because our roots are founded in it.

We take a slightly different approach from "The 1619 Project." We see contingency. We see opportunities throughout America's history where oppression could have been lifted. And yet we decided not to go in that direction but to continue to live according to this white Christian nationalist mythology. And of course, different from the 1776 project, we believe that white supremacy has been a constant thread throughout our nation's history, not one that had to be, but one we chose again and again and again.

Much of this mythology involves white Christian nationalism framing itself in a position of victimhood.

White evangelicals — the group most beholden to Christian nationalist ideology — have long been characterized by what sociologist Christian Smith called an idea of "embattlement." They constantly feel they are at war with a surrounding culture that aims to persecute or marginalize them. This is part of the Christian nationalist story, because when you believe your culture is inextricably linked to the state of the nation, and you believe it is not your story but America'sstory, when you start to see cultural change, you perceive that as an attack on your group.

It used to be that people like Jerry Falwell could look at pornography and say, "That is immoral" and use the language of "filth" or "degradation." America has shifted so profoundly that what Christians on the right now do is to evoke the language of religious freedom — to claim the defensive posture and say, "We are under attack for claiming our moral views." What is happening now is that language of rights or religious freedom is no longer a shield but a sword and a battering ram to slash at your cultural enemies and justify discriminating against certain populations, even in agencies that take money from the government.

It seems that language is also being used to cast voter suppression in defensive terms.

When we surveyed Americans in October 2020, we found that white Christian nationalism was the most powerful predictor that you already thought voter fraud was rampant, that we make it too easy to vote and that you would support hypothetical civics tests in order to vote or disenfranchising certain criminal offenders for life. This paints a picture of white Christian nationalism being fundamentally anti-democratic, that it supports limiting voting access to those who prove worthy — and the people who are worthy are the people like us. If there is a thread tying together today's white Christian nationalists with the founding fathers, it is that only white landowning Anglo-Protestants should be able to vote.

In subsequent surveys, we asked, "Is voting a right or a privilege?" Thankfully, the majority believe that voting is a right, which it is. But we found that white Americans who affirm Christian nationalist ideology are more likely to think voting is not a right, but a privilege. In other words, something we can take away.

The book discusses figures like Christian right revisionist historian David Barton. How has historical misinformation played a role in both getting us to this point as well as the conflicts we're seeing now around education?

One of the things we document is that Christian nationalist theology is powerfully associated not just with believing misinformation about COVID, QAnon or the Capitol insurrection, but about religion in American history. That you believe the Constitution references our obligations to God, which it does not. Or that the First Amendment says Congress can privilege Christianity, which it does not.

For years, we have known that evangelical Christians tend to do poorly on quizzes of scientific knowledge, not because they're ignorant per se, but because when they're asked questions about the Big Bang theory or evolution or even continental drift, they get those answers wrong because of ideology. Not because they don't know what the answer is, but because they intentionally say, "That isn't the way it went down." We find the same thing with Christian nationalism: It inclines Americans to affirm answers that paint Christianity as central to American history. Part of that is ideology, but another part is the misinformation put out by agencies like Barton's WallBuilders that contribute to the narrative that America has been evangelical throughout history.

We see the effort to try to control American history in Trump's 1776 Commission, which was led by executives at Hillsdale College, none of whom are professional historians. They threw together this document that is supposed to be a counter to "The 1619 Project," talking about American exceptionalism and slavery as an aberration, but all in all, America is great and here are the reasons why. That is an effort to control the narrative about who we are as a people.

We have always seen this and it's often tied to race. A great recent book, "The Bible Told Them So" by J. Russell Hawkins, argues that there was a segregation theology that motivated white evangelicals in the South. It wasn't just explicit racism, but this interpretation of the Bible that said segregation is good and God wants it that way. Over time, as it became clear they were losing, they developed separate institutions, and separate schools were among them. So in the late '70s, segregation theology started to morph into this "family values" conservatism that was ostensibly about protecting children.

So you have always seen this move on the Christian right to control education and raise fear about what children are being taught. How do you scare enough parents to be mobilized? By saying that nefarious elements are infiltrating the schools and they're going to infect your children. Within that, you have this push for homeschooling, for vouchers to defund public schools and support privatized education in which parents on the right can raise kids who are white, Christian conservatives, and you can maybe stave off the forces of secularization and diversity.

Toward the end of the book, you write about how other camps on the right, like Catholic integrationists and post-liberals, are also advancing ideologies complementary to white Christian nationalism. Can you talk about that coming together?

What we've seen in the political and religious realignment over the last few decades is the concern that the Christian right is no longer strong enough by themselves to win victories politically. That required them to relax the bounds of who is part of their team. So you see Christian conservatives on the right uniting groups that formerly did not like one another, like Catholics, evangelicals, Mormons and even "pro-Christian" secularists. Increasingly, we can't talk about a Christian right so much as a "pro-Christian right," because Christian identity isn't really necessary anymore. You can be a secular pro-Christian American and think "Christian" is an ethno-cultural category that supports traditional values. All of these identities are on the same team, since what you want is an institutionalization of white Christian ethno-culture and victories for the political right.

Over on the Democratic side, they have nothing close to that. This is why Republicans are a lot stronger as a group than many realize, because they're united around ideology and ethno-religious belief in a way that Democrats are constantly fractured.

Even though we see demographic decline among white Christians, the unity on the right belies the demographic numbers. We also know that Christian nationalist ideology ebbs and flows in response to threats: When you tell white Christians about their imminent demographic decline, they respond with greater Christian nationalism. If you are a savvy politician, you can stoke a Christian nationalist response that mobilizes people in your target audience to collective action.

You also talk about the need for a popular front that could counter white Christian nationalism. What would that look like and what would it require?

I think it will take everybody from never-Trump evangelicals all the way to the secular left. It's going to take concentrated effort to not only name this, but to make sure it can't be institutionalized any further in the name of religious liberty, and that political candidates can't continue to deploy the language of Christian threat without it being called out as dog-whistle language that just means white Christian ethno-culture. It's going to take organizations like the Baptist Joint Committee and Americans United for Separation of Church and State, who are already trying to do this, and coalitions of Americans from all kinds of backgrounds to say this is what we're against.

That is difficult. Evangelical Christians, say, are understandably reticent to sign a document alongside people they fundamentally disagree with. Abortion is always going to be a sticking point. But we are confronted with a situation where the stakes may be high enough.

I'll say it this way: COVID should have been the asteroid that united us, but it just polarized us further. But if an asteroid was headed towards Earth, I wouldn't ask the neighbor next to me who they voted for in the last election. We would recognize that the threat is great enough to just focus on defeating this thing. For many Americans, it's going to take a recognition that the threat is that great.

One of the reasons we wanted to write the book is to say: This is the asteroid. This is the thing that is coming for democracy. And we've got to unite to overcome that.

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/war-religion/

2 22 an nath

During my time as a boy attending an evangelical church and then later, when I attended an evangelical seminary, it was hard not to notice an underlying misogyny that seemed consistently present. As a man, I would be the head of the household. I was like Christ to my future wife. In fact, I once heard a sermon by prominent evangelical minister Tony Evans where he declared that wives must refer to their husbands as "Lord." In my church youth groups, we were separated by sex and the boys had bizarre discussions on the type of men we should become. There was a strong emphasis on being what they considered to be manly and tough, whereas young girls, of course, were encouraged to be nurturing, submissive and, most important, sexually pure.

When contemporary evangelical leaders push a message around Christian nationalism, I can promise you it always refers back to a time when the "traditional" roles of American households held fast. Making America "great again" is truly about bringing back a time when women were subject to their husbands' wills and whims, and the husbands were lords of the house.

Someone recently wrote to me, in response to one of my previous articles, wondering why so many evangelicals chose Donald Trump, a vulgar misogynist who shows no understanding of any element of the Christian faith, over other candidates who were much closer to the evangelical movement. The difficult answer is that most evangelical men long for the days when misogyny was cool, when women were under the thumb of their husbands and sexual harassment was almost universally accepted. Trump exemplified that approach — and a great many evangelicals loved him for it. Trump remains the favorite of the evangelicals not because any commitment to Christ or the Christian way of life — since he has none — but because of the widespread desire among evangelicals to take back control over their lives, and their wives. One of the major ways this has been expressed lately is through the ideology known as Christian nationalism.

As I understand it, Christian nationalism is an idea now widely accepted within the evangelical church that the U.S. is a Christian nation founded upon Christian principles — no matter what it may say in the Constitution. This commitment to the Christian faith, as a nation, is the reason God blessed the U.S. as the greatest nation that ever existed. God will only continue to bless this nation, however, as long as it remains a Christian nation. As America becomes more progressive and increasingly secular in terms of politics, culture and faith, then in this view God will remove his blessing and protection and great evils will befall our nation.

This remarkable theory has no connection to any of the teachings of Jesus Christ or his followers, and is completely irrelevant to the Christian faith. I will certainly admit that I have a heart for American idealism. I have officiated at numerous Veterans Day and Memorial Day services, and I have felt the love of country enormously, on those days and all the days in between. None of that, however, has anything to do with Christianity. God does not play favorites when it comes to nations, people or cultures. That entire idea is morally and theologically absurd.

In truth, Christian nationalism is based not in the Bible or the teachings of Jesus Christ, but on the idea of the traditional American family. As roles for women have changed, as divorce becomes more common, as same-sex marriage gains a firmer footing, and now with the movement for transgender rights and visibility becoming more public, the panic of the Christian nationalists becomes ever more desperate. This is where all that rage among evangelicals is coming from. Understand, most people are motivated politically based on how they perceive policy decisions affecting their day-to-day life. Nothing affects our lives more than what is happening to our families. When things fall apart at home, it can feel helpful — even if it's not healthy — to blame someone or something besides ourselves.For myself, I know that all my personal failures are mine alone. I can't blame MTV or Eminem or the LGBTQI population, the evangelical church, Trump, Biden, Obama, my mom, my dad or anyone else. The problem is in the mirror, as it is for everyone. Any effort to pass that blame along to others is quite human, and quite wrong.

My final point on Christian nationalism is around all the macho tough-guy stuff that seems to be on the lips of every right-wing leader. Being "tough" seems to be the only thing conservative commentators and evangelical leaders care about. Trump is supposedly the epitome of that and his little posse loves him for it. I won't pretend to understand it. After I graduated middle school, being tough just didn't seem that important. But for people like Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Jerry Falwell Jr. (before his fall) and of course Trump himself, it's important to keep pretending that they are a bunch of tough guys, even though they also claim to stand with Jesus Christ, a humble, meek and homeless teacher.

I'm no tough guy but I am happy to offer a challenge to any of these fake tough guys. Debate me anywhere, anytime. I am truly blue-collar, a member of the American working class. I am a Bible-believing minister and a flaming liberal. I believe that the Christian nationalist message comes from the devil himself. I am trying to save the name of the Christian faith and to stand up for American idealism. I oppose every part of the hypocritical, fake-populist agenda of the Christian nationalists and their enablers. I double-dog dare any of them, here and now, to stand up and take me on in public debate. Odds are they never will.

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rww

Early in 2021, Christian nationalist home-schooling advocate, author, and podcaster Heidi St. John launched a bid for U.S. Congress in Washington state’s 3rd Congressional District. Outraged by incumbent Republican Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler’s vote to impeach former President Donald Trump in the wake of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol, St. John decided to try and unseat her in the GOP primary by MAGA voters, denouncing public libraries as “evil organizations,” and pledging to “be a mom for America.”

Earlier this month, St. John appeared on the “Stand Up For The Truth” podcast, where she sounded Seven Mountains and Christian nationalist themes that have been central to her campaign, describing politics as “a spiritual battle” and vowing to “bring back the name of God into the political sphere.”

“[Politics is] in my blood,” St. John. “And I think it should be in the blood of every Christ follower. Politics determined policy, and it is policy that has murdered 63 million of our unborn in this country. It is policy that has gotten us into the mess that we are in as a nation, and we need wise people and godly people to ascend to positions of authority in the nation.”

“What we’ve observed over years and years and years is a church deciding to pull itself out of arguably one of the most important aspects of the culture, which is determining our laws and determining the policy that governs the people here,” she continued. “Christians belong in every sphere of influence. We have a command to be strong and courageous. [God] did not say, ‘Be strong and courageous except for in the political sphere, stay out of that one.’ No, we belong in every sphere of influence. We belong in medicine. We belong in entertainment. We belong in education. And we belong in politics.”

“[Christians] should be canvassing, they should be helping clean up the voter rolls, they should be running for positions of authority in every sphere of influence,” St. John added. “We bring back the name of Jesus, we bring back the name of God into the political sphere and we say out loud, ‘What is the biggest problem in our country? We have turned away from God.'”

“This is a spiritual battle,” St. John declared. “We know that we serve the Lord of Heaven’s armies. We serve the creator of the universe, the one who spoke the world into being. He can do anything. And I think he’s calling his people back out of hiding and out of the shadows and into the battle and onto the battlefield.”[pixvid: armour up xian soldiers it's game on!]

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an 1 22 corrob

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/scientists-establish-ink-between-religious-fundamentalism-and-brain-damage/

A study published in the journal Neuropsychologia has shown that religious fundamentalism is, in part, the result of a functional impairment in a brain region known as the prefrontal cortex. The findings suggest that damage to particular areas of the prefrontal cortex indirectly promotes religious fundamentalism by diminishing cognitive flexibility and openness—a psychology term that describes a personality trait which involves dimensions like curiosity, creativity, and open-mindedness.

Religious beliefs can be thought of as socially transmitted mental representations that consist of supernatural events and entities assumed to be real. Religious beliefs differ from empirical beliefs, which are based on how the world appears to be and are updated as new evidence accumulates or when new theories with better predictive power emerge. On the other hand, religious beliefs are not usually updated in response to new evidence or scientific explanations, and are therefore strongly associated with conservatism. They are fixed and rigid, which helps promote predictability and coherence to the rules of society among individuals within the group.

Religious fundamentalism refers to an ideology that emphasizes traditional religious texts and rituals and discourages progressive thinking about religion and social issues. Fundamentalist groups generally oppose anything that questions or challenges their beliefs or way of life. For this reason, they are often aggressive towards anyone who does not share their specific set of supernatural beliefs, and towards science, as these things are seen as existential threats to their entire worldview.

Since religious beliefs play a massive role in driving and influencing human behavior throughout the world, it is important to understand the phenomenon of religious fundamentalism from a psychological and neurological perspective.

To investigate the cognitive and neural systems involved in religious fundamentalism, a team of researchers—led by Jordan Grafman of Northwestern University—conducted a study that utilized data from Vietnam War veterans that had been gathered previously. The vets were specifically chosen because a large number of them had damage to brain areas suspected of playing a critical role in functions related to religious fundamentalism. CT scans were analyzed comparing 119 vets with brain trauma to 30 healthy vets with no damage, and a survey that assessed religious fundamentalism was administered. While the majority of participants were Christians of some kind, 32.5% did not specify a particular religion.

Based on previous research, the experimenters predicted that the prefrontal cortex would play a role in religious fundamentalism, since this region is known to be associated with something called ‘cognitive flexibility’. This term refers to the brain’s ability to easily switch from thinking about one concept to another, and to think about multiple things simultaneously. Cognitive flexibility allows organisms to update beliefs in light of new evidence, and this trait likely emerged because of the obvious survival advantage such a skill provides. It is a crucial mental characteristic for adapting to new environments because it allows individuals to make more accurate predictions about the world under new and changing conditions.

Brain imaging research has shown that a major neural region associated with cognitive flexibility is the prefrontal cortex—specifically two areas known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). Additionally, the vmPFC was of interest to the researchers because past studies have revealed its connection to fundamentalist-type beliefs. For example, one study showed individuals with vmPFC lesions rated radical political statements as more moderate than people with normal brains, while another showed a direct connection between vmPFC damage and religious fundamentalism. For these reasons, in the present study, researchers looked at patients with lesions in both the vmPFC and the dlPFC, and searched for correlations between damage in these areas and responses to religious fundamentalism questionnaires.

According to Dr. Grafman and his team, since religious fundamentalism involves a strict adherence to a rigid set of beliefs, cognitive flexibility and open-mindedness present a challenge for fundamentalists. As such, they predicted that participants with lesions to either the vmPFC or the dlPFC would score low on measures of cognitive flexibility and trait openness and high on measures of religious fundamentalism.

The results showed that, as expected, damage to the vmPFC and dlPFC was associated with religious fundamentalism. Further tests revealed that this increase in religious fundamentalism was caused by a reduction in cognitive flexibility and openness resulting from the prefrontal cortex impairment. Cognitive flexibility was assessed using a standard psychological card sorting test that involved categorizing cards with words and images according to rules. Openness was measured using a widely-used personality survey known as the NEO Personality Inventory. The data suggests that damage to the vmPFC indirectly promotes religious fundamentalism by suppressing both cognitive flexibility and openness.

These findings are important because they suggest that impaired functioning in the prefrontal cortex—whether from brain trauma, a psychological disorder, a drug or alcohol addiction, or simply a particular genetic profile—can make an individual susceptible to religious fundamentalism. And perhaps in other cases, extreme religious indoctrination harms the development or proper functioning of the prefrontal regions in a way that hinders cognitive flexibility and openness.

The authors emphasize that cognitive flexibility and openness aren’t the only things that make brains vulnerable to religious fundamentalism. In fact, their analyses showed that these factors only accounted for a fifth of the variation in fundamentalism scores. Uncovering those additional causes, which could be anything from genetic predispositions to social influences, is a future research project that the researchers believe will occupy investigators for many decades to come, given how complex and widespread religious fundamentalism is and will likely continue to be for some time.

By investigating the cognitive and neural underpinnings of religious fundamentalism, we can better understand how the phenomenon is represented in the connectivity of the brain, which could allow us to someday inoculate against rigid or radical belief systems through various kinds of mental and cognitive exercises.

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omg npi

https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/extremist-christians/

paul r salon

progressive policies and positions are supposed to be rooted in reality and hard evidence. But that's not always the case when it comes to the culture wars that have such an enormous impact on our politics — especially not since the unexpected evangelical embrace of Donald Trump in 2016, culminating in the "pro-life" death cult of anti-vaccine, COVID-denying religious leaders. If this development perplexed many on the left, it was less surprising to a small group of researchers who have been studying the hardcore anti-democratic theology known as dominionism that lies behind the contemporary Christian right, and its far-reaching influence over the last several decades.

One leading figure within that small group, Rachel Tabachnick, was featured in a recent webinar hosted by the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (archived on YouTube/maxresdefault.jpg)), as part of its Religion and Repro Learning Series program, overseen by the Rev. Dr. Cari Jackson. Tabachnick's writing on dominionism can be found at Talk2Action and Political Research Associates, and she's been interviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air.

Her presentation sheds important light on at least three things: First of all, the vigilante element of the Texas anti-abortion law SB 8. Second, the larger pattern of disrupting or undermining governance, including the "constitutional sheriffs" movement, the installation of overtly partisan election officials and the red-state revolt against national COVID public health policies. While Donald Trump has exploited that pattern ruthlessly, he did not create it. And third, the seemingly baffling fact that an anti-democratic minority feels entitled to accuse its opponents — including democratically elected officials — of "tyranny."

Some dominionist ideas — such as the biblical penalty of death by stoning — are so extreme they can easily be dismissed as fringe, others have been foundational to the modern religious right, and still more have become increasingly influential in recent years. Those latter two categories are what we need to understand most, say both Tabachnick and Jackson.

"One of the things that struck me, as a relative newcomer," said Jackson, a former Congregationalist minister, "was that there was not sufficient understanding about the theological frames used by many individuals who are opposed to abortion." She continued, "I'm a strategist in a lot of ways, and one important strategy, I believe, must be to understand what the teachings and the theological frames are" on the other side. Which links directly to the question of what progressive activists need to do differently in this changed environment.

This failure to understand the nature of dominionism has hampered activists, not just in the realm of reproductive justice, but across an entire spectrum of political issues, both cultural and economic. Jackson discussed her own background, raised within a conservative Christian worldview.

"I was taught a very individualistic approach," she said, "taught that we shouldn't pay taxes, because doing so enabled people who were not working, and enables people whose lifestyle we don't agree with." There's nothing new about such views, but dominionism provides believers with an even stronger foundation for them.

Jackson describes her current understanding of religious faith as highly intersectional: "We believe that to understand the attacks on abortion also invites us — or even requires us — to look at attacks on voting, to look at attacks on immigrants, attacks on prison reform, attacks on equal pay and on and on," she said. "It's all of the same cloth: They are all attacks on humans flourishing. That's my language. The God of my understanding wants all of us to flourish in who we are."

the language of dominionism is strikingly different, to put it mildly. In her webinar, Tabachnick played a clip of one of the movement's leading figures, C. Peter Wagner, providing a definition:

Dominion has to do with control. Dominion has to do with rulership. Dominion has to do with authority and subduing. And it relates to society — in other words what is talked about, what the values are in heaven [that] need to be made manifest here on earth. Dominion means being the head and not the tail. Dominion means ruling as kings. It says in Revelation chapter 1:6 that "he has made us kings and priests," and check the rest of that verse, it says "for dominion." So we are kings for dominion.

Later she provided a definition from Frederick Clarkson, author of the 1997 book, "Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy":

Dominionism is the theocratic idea that regardless of theological view, means, or timetable, Christians are called by God to exercise dominion over every aspect of society by taking control of political and cultural institutions.

Wagner, who died in 2016, is known as the founding father of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), one of the two main branches of dominionism, which grew out of the Pentecostal and charismatic traditions within evangelical Christianity. Dominionists in the other branch, known as "Christian reconstructionism," come out of conservative Calvinism, with a focus on bringing government and society under biblical law. They tend to be more circumspect, often obfuscating their true intentions and avoiding the word "theocracy" in favor of "theonomy," for example. But not Wagner, as can be seen in the title of his 2011 book, "Dominion!: Your Role in Bringing Heaven to Earth." The NAR talks constantly about taking dominion over the "seven mountains" of society: education, religion, family, business, government, arts and the media.

But it's the other branch, the Christian reconstructionists, who have excelled at strategic organizing and providing blueprints across different right-wing constituencies for almost 50 years. They are the ones Tabachnick focused most of her presentation on, specifically two key figures: Rousas John Rushdoony, the movement's master theologian, and his son-in-law Gary North, a prolific strategist, propagandist and networker who was once a staffer for Rep. Ron Paul, the libertarian hero.[ayn radical indiv ~ jesus charity]

Christian reconstructionism, Tabachnick explained, is "about bringing government in all areas of life under biblical law, a continuation of the Mosaic law in the Old Testament, with some exceptions." This dispensation would include, "according to Gary North, public execution of women who have abortions and those who advise them to have an abortion."

In a recent private presentation, Frederick Clarkson asked a rhetorical question: "People have long said that there should be Christian government, but if you had one, what would it look like? What would it do? Rushdoony was the first to create a systematic theology of what Christian governance should be like, based on the Ten Commandments, and all of the judicial applications he could find in the Old Testament — including about 35 capital offenses."

But the "Handmaid's Tale"-style extremism of dominionists' ultimate vision shouldn't really be our focus, Tabachnick told Salon. "Nobody cares about the theocratic, draconian future envisioned by reconstructionists because they don't believe it will happen," she said.

What's happening right now, however, is that this ideology has had tremendous impact on more immediate politics. "Christian reconstructionism is the merger of a distinct brand of Calvinism with Austrian School economics," Tabachnick said. "In other words, it's an interpretation of the Bible grounded in property rights." The results have been far-reaching:

For more than 40 years, its prolific writers have provided the foundations and strategic blueprints for the attacks on liberation theology and the social gospel, as well as many other streams of Christianity which do not share the Reconstructionists' belief in unfettered capitalism as ordained by God and its fierce anti-statism.

The larger religious right's attack on public education, the social safety net and most government functions are largely grounded in the writings, strategies and tactics formulated by reconstructionist writers. Reconstructionism is not the only (and certainly not the first) source of interposition and nullification in this country. However, much of what is currently being taught today about using interposition to undermine the legitimacy of government is sourced in reconstructionism.

This idea of "interposition" comes through what's known as the doctrine of the "lesser magistrate," which we'll return to below. But its significance — especially in the post-2020 Republican Party — has only recently become apparent. Reconstructionism's initial appeal was more immediately, as Tabachnick explained in the seminar:

What Rushdoony provided is a package that included attacking what these fundamentalists hated and feared most in society, often expressed in terms of "This is communist. This is socialist." But Rushdoony provided a way to sacralize these ideas, and at the same time not just tear down the old order, but provide a blueprint for the new order.

Everyone didn't have to agree on the blueprint, she said: "Rushdoony's ideas went out in bits and pieces. The Christian right leaders took what they wanted and discarded what they didn't."

"Christian reconstructionism, as articulated by Rushdoony, provided a standard by which everyone else had to measure themselves," Clarkson told Salon. "Not everyone on the Christian right agreed with Rushdoony and his fellow Reconstructionist thinkers on, for example, the contemporary application of capital crimes listed in the Old Testament. And followers were often at pains to distinguish themselves."

Clarkson cites the case of conservative Presbyterian theologian Francis Schaeffer, who disagreed with Rushdoony on the applicability of biblical law, but became a driving force behind the anti-abortion activist movement Operation Rescue. That "militant Schaefferism," Clarkson said, "led activists to think: What's next, beyond political protest and stopping abortion? This is where the conversation has been in the Christian right for decades."

The doctrine of the "lesser magistrate," mentioned above, first emerged into public discourse out of Operation Rescue. But it did so as part of a larger, more complicated story.

There's a long history of right-wing opposition to federal authority, particularly grounded in the 19th-century defense of slavery and continuing in the defense of Jim Crow segregation. In his famous "I Have a Dream" speech, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke specifically of the governor of Alabama "having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification."

As detailed by Randall Balmer in "Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right," the religious right wasn't initially fueled by opposition to the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, but by opposition to a lesser-known decision in 1971, Green v. Connally, which threatened the tax-exempt status of racially discriminatory institutions,most famously the evangelical stronghold Bob Jones University.

Anti-abortion activists have long sought not just to bury that past but to stand it on its head, somehow equating Roe v. Wade with the notorious Dred Scott decision of 1857 and claiming the moral heritage of abolitionism.

"Throughout these movements there is also an attempt to turn the tables on the claims of racism," Tabachnick said in her webinar. "This is one of the roles that anti-abortion activism as abolition plays. Also, there's a promotion of narratives that provide a different history and legal justifications for interposition, nullification and even secession. One of the things that Christian reconstructionism has added to this dialogue is the concept of the lower magistrate."

As Tabachnick explains it, the "lesser magistrate" is a heroic figure who "resists the tyranny of a higher authority" — defining "tyranny" in biblical terms, potentially including any number of popular or common-sense laws or policies. This notion first gained salience in the anti-abortion context in the 1980s and '90s, as Tabachnick went on to explain.

"Many violent anti-abortionists have justified their actions in reconstructionist teachings," she said. "One of these was Paul Hill, who studied under one of the major reconstructionist leaders and corresponded with others." Hill went on to murder Dr. John Britton, a physician who performed abortions, as well as Britton's personal bodyguard, in 1994. Hill was executed in 2003, but the reconstructionist movement sought to cast him out well before that.

"Gary North responded, after the murders had taken place, in a book called 'Lone Gunners for Jesus,'" Tabachnick said. His message to Hill was, "You're going to burn in hell, you've been excommunicated. This was because Paul Hill stepped outside the bounds of the guidelines set by the movement."

To explain this, she quoted a passage from another book by North that offered qualified support for Operation Rescue: "We need a statement that under no circumstances will Operation Rescue or any of its official representatives call for armed resistance to civil authority without public support from a lesser magistrate."

"On the basis of their belief of what the law or the word of God is, they are allowed — on the advice, on the interposition, of a lesser magistrate — to commit acts of violence," Tabachnick continued. North was seeking to control or curb anti-abortion terrorism, but without rejecting it in principle. Murdering abortion providers — or even murdering women seeking abortions — could be morally justified, with the blessing of a lesser magistrate.

This is relevant to SB 8 in Texas in at least two ways. That bill bans abortions after six weeks and is enforced not by state officials, but by deputizing private individuals to sue anyone who performs the procedure or "aids and abets" it. First of all, giving private individuals these vigilante-style rights seems a lot like making them into "lesser magistrates," however narrowly constrained.

Second, the Supreme Court's refusal to stay the law — which clearly violates the Constitution and existing precedent, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor argued in her dissent — can be seen as an example of the doctrine in action. In more normal circumstances, the court would have stayed the law pending consideration on the merits, even if a majority of justices intended to overturn precedent. That's how common law has worked for centuries.

But biblical law isn't common law, especially as reconstructionists understand it. Under the doctrine of the "lesser magistrate," Roe is not precedent but an instance of tyranny — and the justices have aduty to Godto resist it. Of course, not even Amy Coney Barrett or Clarence Thomas has said anything like that, but it's entirely consistent with their behavior — as well as with their silence, since openly making such an argument would clarify just how radicalized they have become.But adherents of the doctrine of the lesser magistrate must surely appreciate the drift in direction.

Nor is the doctrine limited to abortion cases, as already noted. Matthew Trewhella is a pastor who was a prominent leader of violence-prone wing of the anti-abortion movement in 1990s, and author of the 2013 book, "The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates," which greatly heightened its visibility.

"Trewhella is now all over radio and the internet," Tabachnick said in her webinar, "claiming to meet with state legislators and attorney generals at the moment, with the cause of fighting the 'tyranny of mask mandates' and vaccination for COVID. So you can see how this is a concept that is not just limited to abortion. It is a concept that can be used in resistance of government authority all over the country in all different kinds of ways — FEMA, EPA, Bureau of Land Management and so forth."

Trewhella isn't breaking new ground here. Clarkson's 1997 book "Eternal Hostility" describes him making similar arguments in a speech to an anti-tax group in Wisconsin. He was just one figure among many spreading the seeds of reconstructionist resistance to federal authority among militia members, "freemen" and anti-abortion activists at the time.

"This movement believes that rights come from God and not from any government," Tabachnick told Salon. "Therefore, any 'rights' that conflict with their interpretation of God's law are not actually rights. They are 'humanist' or a product of man's laws and not God's laws. This theme of 'human rights' versus inalienable rights from God has been at the center of the Christian Reconstructionist movement since its beginnings."

She pointed to "What's Wrong With Human Rights," an excerpt from a book of the same name by the Rev. T. Robert Ingram published in "The Theology of Christian Resistance," a collection edited by North. Ingram sweeps aside the Bill of Rights as "a statement of sovereign powers of states withheld from the federal authority of the Union," and turns instead to the Virginia Declaration of Rights, authored by George Mason in 1776.

The first section of the Virginia Declaration, beginning "That all Men are by Nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent Rights," is dismissed by Ingram for omitting any mention of God, as an "error of unbelief which falsifies all the rest that is said about human life." The second, beginning "That all power is vested in, and consequently derived from the People; that Magistrates are their Trustees and Servants, and at all Times amenable to them," he dismisses as well: "The meaning could not be more clear, nor more opposite Biblical thought. The ruling proposition of Scripture and Christian doctrine is that 'power belongeth unto God.'" In short, there are no human rights.

The connection to the doctrine of the lesser magistrate is clear: Power comes from God, not the people. Whatever the people want is irrelevant. Whatever laws they may pass are irrelevant, too, if they go against God. "Tyranny" is whatever the Christian reconstructionist decides he doesn't like.

Elsewhere, Ingram denigrates freedom of speech and the press:

Freedom of speech and freedom of press are, in fact, applied seriously only to giving government protection to instigators of riot and rebellion, as well as those who would undermine human order by more subtle attacks on morals and customs.

As for the right to dissent, he calls it "not a lawful claim to own or to do something, which is the true right," but "a turning upside down of right and wrong, calling good evil and evil good." Similarly, there is no scriptural right to "resist authority," only that granted by the false doctrine of "human rights."

Ingram's interpretation of the Civil War is that "Yankee radicals inflamed the Northern peoples to mount the Civil War in the name of a 'human right' to be free ... if they did not destroy the whole Southern Order, they did at least dismantle its vast and efficient plantation economy." The civil rights movement, unsurprisingly, is understood as a defiance of "Tradition, law, and custom, which preserved public peace and order in the bi-racial state of the union, both North and South," and became "the target of the right to resist in the 60's, the supposed human rights justifying the violent means."

Tabachnick didn't dig into this text in her webinar, but it serves to illustrate her central principle: "This attack on the very concept of 'human rights' can be found throughout today's religious right."

Jackson told Salon that the most important part of Tabachnick's presentation came "when she talked about humanism and the humanistic frame, from the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Those who are within the dominionist camp see that as contrary to God. I read those same documents and I say, this is pointing us toward the direction that God wants for us. They look at it and see that as counter to God, because humanism from their perspective is something very contrary to God."

If we take such arguments seriously, then we understand why for dominionists there is nothing wrong with breaking any law at all, so long as "God wills it" and you have the blessing of a so-called lesser magistrate. This is the reconstructionist argument supporting a whole range of chaotic right-wing activity today, including baseless claims that the 2020 election was a fraud. After all, the fundamental reconstructionist argument is that all such democratic government is illegitimate.

"The goal of reconstructionism is to tear down the existing order and reconstruct a new society based on biblical law," Tabachnick said. "Even if we assume that this vision of a theocratic America will never come to fruition, it's important to recognize the movement's impact on the ideas, strategies and tactics of the larger religious right and its role in sacralizing the actions of other anti-statist fellow travelers.

"As I wrote almost a decade ago, the theocratic libertarianism of Christian reconstructionism has been surprisingly seductive to Tea Partiers and young libertarians — many of whom may not realize what is supposed to happen after the government is stripped of its regulatory powers."

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/white-christianity/

cdv

since at least the 1980s, the conservative movement has increasingly been governed by faith, which can be described as a belief in things that cannot be proved by empirical means. In practice, this means that the Republican Party and the larger right-wing movement's policies and ideology across a range of issues — the economy, the environment, science, health care, democracy and the rule of law — have little if any basis in fact.

In the Age of Trump, movement conservatism has metastasized or devolved into its purest form: American fascism, a form of religious politics taken to its most illogical extreme. Facts, truth and even the conception of reality itself are being replaced with lies, fictions, and fantasies that serve the American fascist movement and its leader.

As public opinion polls and other research have repeatedly shown, white right-wing Christians, especially Protestant evangelicals, have pledged their loyalty to Donald Trump and his movement. Many view him as a literal prophet or savior: His evident immorality has been rationalized as somehow necessary to his prophetic role.

Violence is a key feature of the new American fascism, as dramatically illustrated on Jan. 6 but also at many other moments. Trumpists and other Republican fascists, many or most of whom identify as Christian, have widely embraced political violence, including outright terrorism, as a necessary measure to "protect" their "traditional way of life" against "radical socialist Democrats, Black and brown people, Muslims, LGBTQ people and pretty much all Americans who still believe in the constitutional separation of church and state and the rule of law.

Together, these forces exist in a state of collective narcissism and shared malignant reality. In that relationship, white right-wing Christianity is a nexus or type of glue.

To discuss this profoundly disturbing phenomenon, I recently spoke with Anthea Butler, professor of religious studies and Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She has been a guest on MSNBC, CNN, PBS and the BBC, and her essays have been featured in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Guardian, the Religion News Service and MSNBC. Butler's new book is "White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America".

In this conversation, she discusses the phenomenon of "white Christianity" and its role in the Age of Trump and America's current crisis of democracy. She also explores the specific role this phenomenon played in the events of Jan. 6 and the ascendant fascist movement, and its crucial role in legitimating and normalizing the society-wide moral crisis catalyzed and empowered by the Age of Trump.

Toward the end of this conversation, Butler warns that too many white people have erroneously convinced themselves that racial privilege will protect them from escalating right-wing Christian terrorism and related political violence.

This conversation has been edited, as usual, for clarity and length.

Imagine that American democracy is a patient in the hospital. If you were a type of religious figure — a priest, an imam, a rabbi or the like — what counsel would you be offer that patient in this dire moment?

I will answer that question in the context of the Catholic tradition. In that faith tradition there is something called "extreme unction." This is when you are on your deathbed, and they come to you to give you a prayer. Before the changes of Vatican II, the priest also carried a little kit, which had what would be used for communion and other needs. If I were diagnosing democracy right now in America, it is in a state of extreme unction. American democracy is in its last moments and it is going to need a miracle to get up from that deathbed. I would whisper in that patient's ear right now that you had better decide to fight back or you are dead in the next 15 minutes. Your 15 minutes are about up.

What would penance look like?

Continuing with the Catholic tradition. Most of the time the penitence, in the old Catholic tradition, would involve beating oneself. Self-flagellation. There would be bloodletting. You would not want someone else to make the bloodletting happen for you.

In the case of American democracy, especially with the Democratic Party, they are holding on to some old, tired notion that they are still in power and that the things that they have counted on before will work for them in this moment of crisis. The Democrats are counting on Black folks standing in line for 20 hours to vote. They are counting on Black people to ignore the fact that the Democrats have not done much for them. The Democrats are counting on the good Black Christians to come and save them, once again, from themselves.

There are all these political leaders and others who claim to be Christians and say that America is supposedly a "Christian nation." But there is little talk of the many forms of evil both summoned and empowered by the Age of Trump. How is this being reconciled?

There are two primary reasons, as I see it. Half the time they do not believe that there is in fact a devil. Moreover, many of these Christians are the devils at work in this society. Two, if you don't believe in the devil, then you don't have to deal with anything that is evil.

Instead, you use language such as "people are misguided" or "they have the wrong idea" or "they didn't really mean to lie like that." Evangelicals of the 1950s, and even the '60s and early '70s, would have looked at Donald Trump and said that he was the Antichrist. Now evangelicals worship him. To be clear, I am not offering a position on whether not I believe that Trump is the Antichrist or whether he should be worshipped. I'm just telling you what is happening.

Donald Trump, his regime and the Republican fascist movement are objectively evil. How do white Christians explain away such behavior?

Because they're in a bubble. Their pastor is reinforcing these messages. The people they live around are reinforcing these messages. They listen to Fox News. Their other information sources reinforce the same message.

Let's be frank: I don't care how many times they carry a Bible. Half of them are not reading it anyway. One may think that these people are evangelical Christians and therefore they know scripture. Yes, some of them do. These evangelicals may know it very well. But even though these evangelicals say, "I'm living by scripture," the reality is that they are living by the scriptures that are written by their politicians and their pastors.

The Jan. 6 coup attempt and attack on the Capitol was an act of white right-wing Christian terrorism against multiracial democracy. Given the Christian iconography and behavior seen on Jan. 6 — that huge cross, the prayers, the horns, and other examples — why do mainstream news media and others refuse to state such obvious facts?

It's intentional. They cannot come to grips with the fact that the Christianity of America is just like any other fundamentalist religion that gets weaponized in order to hold on to power. Therefore, they have to continue to tell themselves that everything that happened on Jan. 6 was an aberration and not something religious in nature. Those people are not "Christians" like us.

But the reality is that those people are you. And not only are those people you, they sat with you in the pews. They prayed with you. And if they had succeeded on Jan. 6, you would be right there on their side. And you would say that God must have blessed them to be able to overthrow the United States government.

Can you explain more about the horns and specific prayers that were used on Jan. 6?

They had horns, what are known as the ram's horn or the shofar, which appeared in the Old Testament. Those horns were blown before the walls of Jericho came down. It was like a battle. Those horns were used in rituals in ancient Judaism. That horn is also used in Jewish rituals today to mark certain kinds of events, whether that's Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur. The blowing of the horn means that we are going into battle — in this context, that God is going with us into the Capitol.

The kinds of prayers we saw on Jan. 6 at the Capitol are called "imprecatory prayers." There are the kinds of prayers used when you want your enemy to die. On Jan. 6 they believed that they were on a mission from God to go into the Capitol and get Nancy Pelosi, Mike Pence and other people they saw as enemies.

And that huge Christian cross?

They used that cross to be like the crusaders during the European Middle Ages.

Tate Reeves, the Republican governor of Mississippi, recently said that Christians are not afraid of the coronavirus because they believe in "eternal life." How did you process his assertion? The country is in the midst of a deadly plague, and right-wing leaders are summoning God and their faith to encourage people not to take proper health precautions.

Those words are a claim that "we" are not afraid of death because we Christians. It is a claim of certainty on going to heaven. It will all be fine, because if you die from the coronavirus then you are going to see Jesus. Well, what if Jesus is not there? What if there's no Jesus? What if you just drop straight down into the pit of hell?

I'm not saying that's what's going to happen, but the way in which the governor of Mississippi spoke about the pandemic was as though if you die, then it is all going to be all right. What kind of sense does that make?

As a matter of public policy, Christian nationalists, dominionists and other Christian fascists are trying to impose their End Times eschatological fantasies onto secular America in opposition to the Constitution and the separation of church and state. These are fantasies of death and destruction. These white right-wing Christians literally seem to be seeking out death.

They do in fact appear to be seeking out death. They have this huge desire to live the way they want to live without restraint. At some point it is death for you, but it is not death for them.

One of the dimensions here that many people do not understand is that when the pandemic started and many of these red-state and other right-wing leaders were telling people not to wear masks, they were kind of hoping that the "right people" would die. We know who the "right people" are.

Now, people in red states are dying and those Republican and other right-wing leaders can't get out of the spiral of telling people not to get vaccinated. They were hoping that all the people of color were going to die. But now in the red states, it's a lot of white folks dying. A lot of white children are going to die, and they still are doubling down on the same thing. It hasn't changed.

What is "White Christianity"?

White Christians tend to do very different things than Black Christians or Asian American Christians or Latino Christians in this country. You can be a Black Christian and believe in white evangelicalism. You can be Black and a Christian and be bought out and sold out to white evangelicalism or white Christianity because you accept the premises of what these white preachers are telling you, especially about how you're supposed to love America for example.

There are Black Christians, and others, who are not being discerning about what is Christianity, as opposed to what is better described as White American Christianity.

For some Christians, the question becomes, "Well, I'm a red-letter Christian," which basically refers to how the words of Jesus are red in the Bible. "I believe what Jesus says." My intervention there is: If that's the case, great. That means you have to be for the poor and all that comes with that.

White Christianity is a Christianity that is based on the following: Jesus is white. Jesus privileges white culture and white supremacy, and the political aspirations of whiteness over and against everything else. White Christianity assumes that everybody should be subsumed under whiteness in terms of culture and society.

White Christianity assumes that it does not have to look at poverty. We see this in the form of the so-called prosperity gospel, and that any blessing you get from God is because God favors you. If anybody else is out of favor, let's say some poor kid in Northwest Philadelphia who doesn't have enough to eat, well, that's just too bad because they're not blessed of God.

When suffering happens, it's blamed on anybody else but God.

As part of the right-wing culture war narrative there is a martial language that includes Christianity. There is talk of "Christian struggle" and "Christian war." What are the connections between such militant language and actual right-wing violence?

That language has a long history in this country. There's war imagery all through Biblical scripture. There are war songs that people sing in churches. This idea about battling for the Lord, whether we're talking about the Crusades or the Civil War or fighting communism and everything else, is embedded in our history. That language of war and fighting is being used to incite people now.

Most people in America do not want such violence to happen. The problem is that if you've got enough people who want such an outcome, who can make it hell for everybody else, and there are people in power who want to use the public to create decay and destruction, such violent language is going to be used to that end. Donald Trump knows how to push every one of these buttons.

How do you explain the role of white Christianity in the right-wing disruptions and threats of violence at local school board meetings about "critical race theory," vaccinations and other topics?

It is as though nobody remembers the 1950s, when white people were standing outside yelling and screaming and cussing Black children who were actually integrating these schools. These were Christians who were in churches, who were out there yelling and spitting and screaming. Women especially. Evangelicalism and harsh rhetoric have always been part and parcel of this.

We need to quit talking about evangelicalism as though it is some type of coddling religion and understand it for what it has been and what it is doing.

The language of "religious freedom" is central to the power of white Christianity in America. Other religions are rarely able to make such claims and have them accepted as normal or reasonable by the public, or especially by the Supreme Court and political leaders. In practice, the "freedom" of white Christianity is something unique in America. Muslims, for example, are rarely if ever afforded such protections and special rights.

The rhetoric of freedom is being used to elevate "freedom" for white Christians and to suppress freedom for everyone else. In order to remain on top, the freedom of everybody else is being suppressed. These types of white Christians want you to do what they want you to do. In turn, you will be controlled by them. Limiting women's reproductive freedoms is a way to keep everybody in check.

What is the role of white privilege in explaining why so many white Americans are able to deny the serious dangers embodied by white Christian fascist violence?

White privilege convinces many white people that they will not personally have to deal with the violence. They believe that, unlike other people, they will just be able to melt away into the background when the violence happens and nobody is going to shoot people who look like them.

White privilege has convinced them that nobody's going to take their home away from them. Nobody's going to kill their kids. Nobody's going to march them out as an example and shoot them. White privilege has convinced them that they can take some type of loyalty oath or pledge and they will be safe.

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September 13, 2021 

Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado Saturday at a conference held by the Truth & Liberty Coalition, a religious-right political organization founded by right-wing pastor Andrew Wommack.

Addressing a crowd of conservative Christian activists gathered in the auditorium at Wommack’s Charis Bible College, Boebert called on the audience to put faith into action by calling on God to remove ungodly leaders in Washington, D.C., and replace them with “righteous men and women of God” who realize that the government should be taking orders from the church.

“When we see Biden address the nation and the world and show more contempt and aggravation and aggression towards unvaccinated Americans than he does terrorists, we have a problem,” Boebert. “And that’s why I have articles of impeachment to impeach Joe Biden, Kamala Harris.”

“We cannot take another 18 months, we cannot take another three years of this poor, failed leadership,” she continued. “We are sons and daughters of revolutionaries. They went to battle for a lot less. They took a stand for a lot less. And it’s time we get involved. I need you involved in every local level. I need you speaking up. I need the world to hear your voice. You know the word of God, and you know that there is power in your words, that the world was framed by words. You have the Lord God Almighty on your side. I need you to use your voice and speak.”

“What if Jesus showed up today and said, ‘From this point forward, everything you say you will have it’?” Boebert asked rhetorically. “He said it! That’s exactly what he said to us. So, what are we saying? Are we going to sit and agree with the enemy? Are we going to agree with what the enemy is doing? Are we going to sit back and complain and murmur? Or are we going to speak life into this nation? Are we going to speak victory? Are we going to declare that God removes these unrighteous politicians, these corrupt, crooked politician, and installs righteous men and women of God?”

“You have the God kind of faith, and that faith speaks,” she added. “That faith speaks to mountains, those impossible, immovable situations, and I think there’s some mountains they need to hear your voice. … It’s time the church speaks up. The church has relinquished too much authority to government. We should not be taking orders from the government; the government needs to be looking at the church and saying, ‘How do we do this effectively?'”

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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/dominionism-and-christian-nationalism-returned-to-national-mall-at-let-us-worship-rallies/

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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/religious-right-pre-election-push-calls-democrats-demonic-warns-against-muslims-secularists/

religious-right groups are making a last-minute push to turn out conservative evangelical voters for Donald Trump by sharing a Virginia pastor’s sermon that denounces theDemocratic Party as evil and demonic and warns evangelical Christians that if they don’t get more involved in politics, they will allow Muslims and secular humanists to shape the country.

In the sermon video, Pastor Gary Hamrick of Cornerstone Chapel in Leesburg, Virginia, calls the election a “spiritual war” and says politicians who are “advancing a godless agenda” are “pawns of darkness.” Hamrick was one of the religious-right leaders who attended President Donald Trump’s speech at the White House in August accepting the Republican nomination for president.

Hamrick’s sermon is being promoted by White House aide Paula White’s Once Voice Prayer Movement, a political outreach project of the Trump White House in the guise of an online prayer group. One Voice Prayer Movement promotes dominionist leaders and Christian nationalist rhetoric, and White, herself, has a habit of portraying Trump’s political opponents as demonic.

Unlike most OVPM “prayer alerts”—in effect press releases promoting Trump and his administration—the promotion of Hamrick’s sermon didn’t bother to couch it as a “prayer request” or “prayer need” by the White House. The video was simply sent with a note praising its “boldness and clarity” and urging people to share it.

Closely aligned with One Voice Prayer Movement is Intercessors for America, a group of pro-Trump “prayer warriors” whose leader Dave Kubal helps run OVPM. IFA, whose monthly prayer calls regularly feature right-wing politicians, is also actively promoting Hamrick’s sermon with a five-day “sharing campaign” that began Saturday. IFA is sending its intercessors daily emails encouraging them to share selected clips from Hamrick’s sermon along with a link to copy of the full sermon published on IFA’s YouTube channel.

Hamrick’s sermon began with a dramatic build-up to those sitting in the pews as he delivered it. He said that some people might become so angry that they would leave the church. And he claimed that local law enforcement and state troopers were “stationed throughout the congregation” to enforce Virginia law against disrupting a religious service.

He told congregants that he is not angry with them personally, adding:

But I am angry with the spiritual forces of evil that have hijacked the hearts and minds of people in an effort to try to capture the soul of America. And I’m angry with demonic principalities, and by extension demonic principles that have influenced millennials, Gen Xers, and Gen Zers with godless philosophies and the doctrines of men. I am angry with politicians who are either knowingly or unknowingly pawns of darkness, instead of agents of light, who are advancing a godless agenda that is destructive to our country. And thus, I cannot be silent, I will not be silent and neither should you. America needs to wake up, and it starts with the church of Jesus Christ.

We need to wake up, Christian. We, we need to wake up, Christian. This is a battle. This is a war. This is not a game. It’s a spiritual battle that we are facing for the heart and soul of America and for the heart and soul of the next generation.

Hamrick grounded his sermon in the biblical book of Jeremiah, a prophet who warned of God’s wrath on nations that reject his law. He said the U.S. is at a crossroads, adding that if the body of Christ would get its collective act together and honor God “in this election cycle,” then perhaps God will have mercy on the country.

Hamrick rejected the “pushback” against what he calls his Election Day sermons from people who think pastors should keep politics out of the pulpit. Channeling religious-right pseudo-historian David Barton, Hamrick offered a presentation on pastors “leading the charge” in the Revolutionary War and at other moments in history. And he had a question for his congregants:

Okay, so let me ask you a question. Don’t you think that Rep. Ilhan Omar integrates her faith and politics? Don’t you think that Rashida Tlaib integrates her faith and politics? You better believe it. In fact, for those of you who are not aware, Joe Biden has already publicly declared that he will be adding Muslims to his administration. Listen to him yourself.

Hamrick showed a video that included Joe Biden speaking to Muslims and clips from a civic participation campaign encouraging American Muslims to vote. Hamrick claimed he was not sharing the video to disparage Muslim Americans, who also have freedom to worship in the U.S. But, he added:

Well, what I am saying is that if as Christians, somehow you believe the lie that faith and politics don’t mix, that pastors should stay out of that—it’s just too divisive—then by your apathy and your reluctance, you are actually helping to advance the doctrine and dogma of other world religions and of secular humanism, to influence this nation, rather than the values and virtues of Christianity. That’s what’s happening. Wake up! They’re not asleep. They’re not asleep. Why are Christians asleep today when it comes to this? Now, the fact is that only in recent times, have pastors kowtowed to political correctness, and remained silent or indifferent about faith and politics.

Hamrick read from a prayer guide distributed by Intercessors for America that contrasts positions in the Republican and Democratic Party platforms. He highlighted the Democratic Party’s—and the Biden-Harris ticket’s—support for LGBTQ equality. He said the Democratic platform’s call for “shared prosperity” is “political speak” for socialism. He praised Trump as the “most pro-life” and “most pro-Israeli” president the U.S. has ever had. He played a short video clip from a Trump speech in which Trump said “you still need help from the boss”—meaning God—and joked that he’s not the most famous person in the world because Jesus Christ is.

Hamrick told the Democrats in his congregation that theirs is no longer the party of FDR, JFK, or even Bill Clinton.

Listen to me, I’m going to speak truth to you. If you are a lifelong Democrat, your party has left you. Your party has left you. That ship has sailed. It’s true. I used to believe that the two-party system in America was much like a husband and a wife in a marriage, just differences. Just, you know, different people with different approaches and different perspectives but who shared a common goal and vision in life. And so, therefore, you could learn from each other’s different perspective, and you would balance each other out. I don’t believe that anymore. I believe that there is a liberal progressive agenda influenced by spiritual forces of evil, that if allowed to progress will be the demise of America. I believe it with all my heart. And while people are sitting around, foolishly talking about how they don’t like Trump’s tweets and his unfiltered style and his checkered past, meanwhile, the enemy is roaming around like a roaring lion looking for a nation to devour.

I know Trump is not going to win Miss Congeniality. Get over it! It’s not about personality. It’s about guardians of what is true and what is right in our day. That’s what we need to be concerned about.

Donald Trump is not our savior. Joe Biden is not our savior. Jesus Christ is our savior, and because he is my Savior, as for me in my house, I cannot, I will not vote for a candidate whose party platform advocates the murder of unborn babies, embraces same-sex marriage, encourages transgender behavior, and ignores God and his word in our culture.

I cannot. I will not. Cannot. Will not. Amen.

Listen, if you in good conscience cannot vote for Donald Trump, then don’t. But I don’t know how in good conscience a Christian can vote for an agenda that is evil.

Hamrick called a church that is “silent about the moral issues of our day “complicit in the evil,” like Christians in Nazi Germany that did not resist the regime’s persecution of Jews.

Hamrick’s sermon was posted on YouTube Oct. 18. As of Monday morning Oct. 26, it had nearly 140,000 views; a copy of the video posted by Intercessors for America had another 25,000 views.

Tags: Dave Kubal Gary Hamrick Paula White Intercessors for America One Voice Prayer Movement

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/trumps-nomination-of-amy-coney-barrett-another-step-toward-christian-fascism

originally appeared at Scheerpost. Used by permission.

The Christian right is content to have the focus on Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett revolve around her opposition to abortion and membership in People of Praise, a far-right Catholic cult that practices "speaking in tongues." What it does not want examined is her abject subservience to corporate power, her hostility to workers, civil liberties, unions and environmental regulations. And since the Democratic Party is beholden to the same donor class as the Republican Party, and since the media long ago substituted the culture wars for politics, the most ominous threat Barrett's appointment to the court represents is going unmentioned.

All fascist and totalitarian movements paper over their squalid belief systems with the veneer of morality. They mouth pieties about restoring law and order, right and wrong, the sanctity of life, civic and family virtues, patriotism and tradition to mask their dismantling of the open society and silencing and persecution of those who oppose them. This is the real game being played by Christian fascists, who since the early 1970s have been building institutions with tens of millions in corporate donations to take power.

Donald Trump, who has no ideology, has allowed the Christian right to fill his ideological void. He is the useful idiot. And the Christian right, awash in money from corporations that know their real political intent, will mobilize in this election to use any tool, no matter how devious, from right-wing armed militias to the invalidation of ballots, to block Joe Biden and Democratic candidates from assuming office. The road to despotism is always paved with righteousness. This was as true for Soviet communism as it was for German fascism. And it is true in the United States.

Capitalism, driven by the twin obsessions of maximizing profit and reducing the cost of production by slashing workers' rights and wages, is antithetical to the Christian Gospel, as well as the Enlightenment ethic defined by Immanuel Kant. But capitalism, in the hands of the Christian fascists, has become sacralized in the form of the Prosperity Gospel, the belief that Jesus came to minister to our material needs, blessing believers with wealth and power. The Prosperity Gospel delights the corporations that have carried out the slow-motion corporate coup. 

This is why large corporations such as Tyson Foods, which places Christian right chaplains in its plants, Purdue, Walmart, and Sam's Warehouse, along with many other corporations, pour money into the movement and its institutions such as Liberty University and Patrick Henry Law School. This is why corporations have given millions to groups such as the Judicial Crisis Network and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to campaign for Barrett's appointment to the court. Barrett has ruled consistently in favor of corporations to cheat gig workers out of overtime, greenlight fossil fuel extraction and pollution and strip consumers of protection from corporate fraud. The watchdog group Accountable.US found that as a circuit court judge, Barrett "faced at least 55 cases in which citizens took on corporate entities in front of her court and 76% of the time she sided with the corporations."

Her version of Catholicism is at odds with most of the positions championed by Pope Francis and traditional Catholic teaching on women's rights, voting rights, immigrants' rights, health care and environmental protections. The pope calls on the downtrodden to change the world economic order and denounces what he terms a "new colonialism" imposed by "the anonymous influence of mammon: corporations, loan agencies, certain 'free trade' treaties, and the imposition of measures of 'austerity' which always tighten the belt of workers and the poor." He speaks of the "sacred rights" of labor, lodging and land. He says the unfettered pursuit of money is "the dung of the devil" and castigates industrial nations for exploiting the raw materials and labor of the developing world.

Pope Francis has repeatedly warned that time is running out to save the planet from perhaps irreversible harm to the ecosystem. "Let us not be afraid to say it: We want change, real change, structural change," the pope has stated, decrying a system that "has imposed the mentality of profit at any price, with no concern for social exclusion or the destruction of nature."

"This system is by now intolerable: Farm workers find it intolerable; laborers find it intolerable; communities find it intolerable; peoples find it intolerable. The earth itself — our sister, Mother Earth, as Saint Francis would say — also finds it intolerable," he said.

Barrett's religiosity, like that of other Christian fascists, is in the service of almost everything the pope condemns.

These corporations don't give a damn about abortion, gun rights or the sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman. But like the German industrialists who backed the Nazi Party, they know that the Christian right will give an ideological veneer to ruthless corporate tyranny. These corporations view the Christian fascists the same way the German industrialists viewed the Nazis, as buffoons. They are aware that the Christian fascists will trash what is left of our anemic democracy and the natural ecosystem. But they also know they will make huge profits in the process and the rights of workers and citizens will be ruthlessly suppressed.

If you are poor, if you lack proper medical care, if you are paid substandard wages, if you are trapped in the lower class, if you are a victim of police violence, this is because, according to this ideology, you are not a good Christian and not blessed by God. In this belief system you deserve what you get. There is nothing wrong, these homegrown fascists preach, with the structures or systems of power. It is the mantra of self-help that made gurus like Oprah and Tony Robbins rich dressed up as the voice of God.

The Christian fascists, allied with organization such as the Federalist Society, have appointed two Supreme Court justices — Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh — as well as nearly 200 other judges with lifetime appointments to lower federal courts during the Trump administration. They claim to be strict "originalists." Originalists argue that the meaning of the constitutional text is fixed and immune to interpretation. Originalists denounce jurists who argue that constitutional law should respond to changing circumstances and values. The Originalists already have five Federalist Society Supreme Court justices. Barrett would be the sixth. (Two of them, Clarence Thomas and the late Antonin Scalia, were supported in the nomination process by Joe Biden.)

The legal calculus for the Christian right no longer revolves around the concept of universal human rights but around the tenets of "Bible-believing Christians" who supposedly authored the Constitution. Huge segments of the population are stripped of moral worth and legal protection. This process is incremental and often unseen. As the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels understood: "The best propaganda is that which, as it were, works invisibly, penetrates the whole of life without the public having any knowledge of the propagandistic initiative."

Victor Klemperer, who was dismissed from his post as a professor of Romance languages at the University of Dresden in 1935 because of his Jewish ancestry, astutely noted how at first the Nazis "changed the values, the frequency of words, [and] made them into common property, words that had previously been used by individuals or tiny troupes. They confiscated words for the party, saturated words and phrases and sentence forms with their poison. They made language serve their terrible system.They conquered words and made them into their strongest advertising tools [Werebemittle], at once the most public and most secret." And, Klemperer noted, as the redefinition of old concepts took place the public was oblivious.

These Christian fascists understand the deep sickness that infects American society. They know how to exploit the moral and physical decay, as well as the despair it causes, to lure its followers towards their brand of tyranny. They are not wrong when they lambast the cruelty, corruption, emptiness and hypocrisy of the ruling elites, especially the liberal elites. They are not wrong when they mock cultural relativism, the idea that good and evil, right and wrong, truth and untruth, do not exist. It is part of the sad irony that the Christian right effectively exploits this cultural relativism to seize power. The failure of the liberal Christian church to denounce the Christian right as heretics, in the name of tolerance and cultural relativism, has given the Christian fascists religious legitimacy. At the same time, the Christian right seeks to delegitimize the liberal church as apostates. History has shown that it is unwise to tolerate the intolerant.

The Christian fascists, like all fascist movements, seek to create their own truth. It discredits verifiable fact, science, law and rationality. It promises a new, glorious world of moral renewal and prosperity. It promises a creator who will carry out miracles for believers and for America. It calls on followers to abandon the world of cause and effect and replace it with a world of magic. The reality-based world, as in all totalitarian movements, is snuffed out.

The Trump administration has implanted Christian fascists in senior positions of government, including Mike Pence to the vice presidency, Mike Pompeo to secretary of state, Betsy DeVos to secretary of education, Ben Carson to secretary of housing and urban development, William Barr to attorney general, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court and televangelist Paula White to Trump's Faith and Opportunities Initiative. Trump gave the Christian right veto and appointment power over key positions in government, especially in the federal courts. Almost all the judges he has appointed were selected by the Federalist Society and the Christian right. Many of the extremists among his judicial appointees have been rated as unqualified by the American Bar Association, the country's largest nonpartisan coalition of lawyers.

Trump has embraced the Islamophobia of the Christian right to ban Muslim immigrants and roll back civil rights legislation. He has made war on reproductive rights by restricting abortion and defunding Planned Parenthood. He has degraded LGBTQ rights. He has allocated federal money to Christian charter schools. He has ripped down the firewall between church and state by revoking the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits churches, which are tax-exempt, from endorsing political candidates. His Christian right appointees, including Pence, DeVos and Pompeo, regularly use biblical strictures to justify an array of policy decisions including environmental deregulation, war, tax cuts and the replacement of public schools with charter schools, an action that permits the transfer of federal education funds to private "Christian" schools.

The Christian fascists are not finished. Brick by brick they are building a Christian fascist state. Barrett fills one more hole in the wall. They will do this with or without Trump.

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OMG INTERLOCK STORY DOVETAIL

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/mike-pence-is-a-reminder-that-destructive-leaders-are-symptoms-of-an-anti-democratic-status-quo/

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If President Trump dies from the coronavirus that has killed more than 200,000 Americans largely due to his deliberate negligence, the man replacing him will be no less dangerous. While Mike Pence has eluded tough media scrutiny -- in part because he exhibits such a low-key style in contrast to Trump -- the pair has been a good fit for an administration that exemplifies the partnership of religious fundamentalism and corporate power.

The vice president, a former Indiana talk-show host who went on to become a six-term congressman and then governor, has described himself as "a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican, in that order." But he remains at cross-purposes with the biblical admonition (Matthew 6:24) that "you cannot serve both God and money." Whether Pence has truly served God is a subjective matter, but his massive service to money—big money—is incontrovertible.

Pence ranks high as a Christian soldier marching in lockstep with Trump on all major policy issues, a process that routinely puts business interests ahead of human lives. Whatever his personal piety might be, the results of Pence's fidelity to right-wing agendas have further consolidated a de facto coalition of those seeking ever-lower taxes on wealth and corporations; denial of LGBTQ rights; a ban on abortion and severe restrictions on other reproductive rights; voter suppression and barriers to voting by people of color; obstruction of healthcare for low-income people; and on and on.

Pence embodies the political alliance of very conservative evangelical forces with anti-regulatory forces of corporatism. In the arenas of elections and governance, that coalition is the present-day Republican Party, dedicated to imposing the edicts of religious dogma, rolling back democratic reforms and serving the rich at the expense of everyone else.

"As vice president, Mike Pence is doing everything in his power to control people's bodies," the Planned Parenthood Action Fund declares. Meanwhile, those who are inclined toward racism or outright believers in white supremacy are bolstered. And Wall Street has never had a better friend in Washington.

Pence's most consequential role during 44 months as vice president has been as chair of the White House Coronavirus Task Force. Since late February, he has functioned—in effect—as Trump's willing executioner, standing by and blowing smoke while Trump obfuscated and lied as the death toll kept mounting.

"The truth is that we've made great progress over the past four months," Pence proclaimed in a mid-June statement, "and it's a testament to the leadership of President Trump." Pence charged that "the media has taken to sounding the alarm bells over a 'second wave' of coronavirus infections"—but "such panic is overblown."

To underscore his full devotion to Lord Trump's downplaying of the virus, the vice president concluded with a blame-the-messenger flourish: "The truth is, whatever the media says, our whole-of-America approach has been a success. We've slowed the spread, we've cared for the most vulnerable, we've saved lives, and we've created a solid foundation for whatever challenges we may face in the future. That's a cause for celebration, not the media's fear mongering."

Pence's June 16 statement made its way into the Wall Street Journal as a prominent op-ed piece whistling past Covid graveyards. "It was so clearly wrong back then and has turned out to be so clearly wrong since that I hope there's some part of him that's embarrassed," Ashish Jha, the head of the Harvard Global Health Institute, said in late summer. "I had already been seeing data for a good week that things were really heading in the wrong direction." The Washington Post editorial board immediately responded with a denunciation under the headline "Mike Pence Is a Case Study in Irresponsibility."

No one with any discernment would associate Trump with religiosity because he held up a Bible at a photo op. But the other half of the ticket is a very different matter. Days after the November 2016 election, Jeremy Scahill wrote that Trump is "a Trojan horse for a cabal of vicious zealots who have long craved an extremist Christian theocracy, and Pence is one of its most prized warriors."

Scahill quoted an author of books on far-right fundamentalism, Jeff Sharlet, who said that "when they speak of business, they're speaking not of something separate from God, but they're speaking of what, in Mike Pence's circles, would be called biblical capitalism, the idea that this economic system is God-ordained."

What does all this mean for progressives? The case of Mike Pence should be an ongoing urgent reminder that—as toxic and truly evil as Donald Trump is—the current president is a product and poisonous symptom of an inherently unjust and anti-democratic status quo.

Instead of focusing our rage on the persona of one destructive leader, we should remember that corporate domination provides an endless supply of destructive leaders.While they come and go, the system of corporate power remains—and we must replace that system with genuine democracy.

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http://www.politicalresearch.org/research/christian-right

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http://www.politicalresearch.org/2020/07/01/crumbling-cornerstone-christian-right

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/libertarian-journalist-explains-the-links-between-qanon-and-fundamentalist-christianity/

this week in Oregon, Republican primary voters picked a major extremist to run against incumbent Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley in the general election: Jo Rae Perkins, who is an avowed believer in the QAnon conspiracy theory.Perkins won by almost 20%, which was certainly decisive — and given how much of a blue state Oregon is, pundits are predicting that Merkley will enjoy a landslide victory over Perkins in November.

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Despite the fact that this choice is likely to be a huge electoral blunder, we can’t totally disregard the QAnon believers. Those who embrace the QAnon cult are quite serious about it — as serious as evangelical Christian fundamentalists are about their faith, according to libertarian journalist Bonnie Kristian.

The QAnon theory claims that Donald Trump became president in order to combat a worldwide sex trafficking ring that includes Hillary Clinton and other prominent Democrats — and a mysterious figure named Q is giving them information and updates about their cause. During her victory speech, Perkins specifically mentioned Q and told supporters, “I stand with President Trump, I stand with Q and the team. Thank you, Anons. Thank you patriots.” And she referenced the QAnon slogan, “Where we go one, we go all.”

Kristian, in an op-ed for The Week, explains that while QAnon devotees are far from mainstream, they have a fundamentalist-like devotion to their cause. And she notes that QAnon’s “narrative centers on a cabal of powerful figures in government, business, academia and media who make time for child sex trafficking and satanic sacrifice in their busy schedule of world domination.” Q, she adds, is “the movement’s anonymous digital prophet.”

Although QAnon isn’t known for being a religious movement per se, The Atlantic’s Adrienne LaFrance has reported on QAnon-minded churches being developed. And Kristian predicts that QAnon will grow as a religious sect.

“The church of QAnon may be a portent of things to come,” Kristian writes. “Traditional religiosity is declining in America, but humanity will not cease to be religious. It will merely diversify its sources of increasingly customized religiosity. From lapsed evangelicals, as many QAnon adherents seem to be, to religiously unaffiliated ‘nones,’ people crave the community, meaning and purpose church provides — even if they abandon or reject its teachings.”

Kristian notes the similarities between QAnon’s views and the views of end-time Christian fundamentalists, who have an obsession with the apocalypse.

“QAnon builds on apocalyptic thinking common in parts of evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity in America,” Kristian explains. “Q drops frequently include Bible passages, and the style of study of scripture and Q texts employed — the careful search for hidden prophetic meaning and correspondence to history and current events — is very much a creature of the religious right.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/the-church-of-qanon-will-conspiracy-theories-form-the-basis-of-a-new-religious-movement/

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Followers of the QAnon movement believe in wild and dangerous conspiracy theories about U.S. President Donald Trump. Now a faction within the movement has been interpreting the Bible through QAnon conspiracies.

I have been studying the growth of the QAnon movement as part of my research into how extremist religious and political organizations create propaganda and recruit new members to ideological causes.

On Feb. 23, I logged onto Zoom to observe the first public service of what is essentially a QAnon church operating out of the Omega Kingdom Ministry (OKM). I’ve spent 12 weeks attending this two-hour Sunday morning service.

What I’ve witnessed is an existing model of neo-charismatic home churches — the neo-charismatic movement is an offshoot of evangelical Protestant Christianity and is made up of thousands of independent organizations — where QAnon conspiracy theories are reinterpreted through the Bible. In turn, QAnon conspiracy theories serve as a lens to interpret the Bible itself.

[Read more:

QAnon conspiracy theories about the coronavirus pandemic are a public health threat]

Trump vs. the ‘deep state’

The QAnon movement began in 2017 after someone known only as Q posted a series of conspiracy theories about Trump on the internet forum 4chan. QAnon followers believe global elites are seeking to bring down Trump, whom they see as the world’s only hope to defeat the “deep state.”

OKM is part of a network of independent congregations (or ekklesia) called Home Congregations Worldwide (HCW). The organization’s spiritual adviser is Mark Taylor, a self-proclaimed “Trump Prophet” and QAnon influencer with a large social media following on Twitter and YouTube.

The website of Omega Kingdom Ministries mixes QAnon theories and biblical references.

The resource page of the HCW website only links to QAnon propaganda — including the documentary Fall Cabal by Dutch conspiracy theorist Janet Ossebaard, which is used to formally indoctrinate e-congregants into QAnon. This 10-part YouTube series was the core material for the weekly Bible study during QAnon church sessions I observed.

The Sunday service is led by Russ Wagner, leader of the Indiana-based OKM, and Kevin Bushey, a retired colonel running for election to the Maine House of Representatives.

Bible and QAnon narratives

The service begins with an opening prayer from Wagner that he says will protect the Zoom room from Satan. This is followed by an hour-long Bible study where Wagner might explain the Fall Cabal video that attendees had just watched or offer his observations on socio-political events from the previous week.

Everything is explained though the lens of the Bible and QAnon narratives. Bushey then does 45 minutes of decoding items that have appeared recently on the app called QMap that is used to share conspiracy theories. The last 15 minutes are dedicated to communion and prayer.

At a service held on April 26, Wagner and Bushey spoke about a QAnon theory, called Project Looking Glass, that the U.S. military has secretly developed a form of time-travel technology. Wagner suggested to e-congregants that time travel can be explained by certain passages in the Bible.

On May 3, the theme of the QAnon portion of the service was about COVID-19. Bushey spoke about a popular QAnon theory that the pandemic was planned. (There is no evidence of this.) And when an anti-vax conspiracy theory documentary called “Plandemic” went viral , the video was shared on the HCW websites as a way for e-congregants to consume the latest in a series of false theories about the coronavirus.

Leveraging authority

What is clear is that Wagner and Bushey are leveraging religious beliefs and their “authority” as a pastor and ex-military officer to indoctrinate attendees into the QAnon church. Their objective is to train congregants to form their own home congregations in the future and grow the movement.

[Followers of the QAnon movement regularly show their support for Donald Trump at his political rallies, including this one held in Pennsylvania in 2018.

(Shutterstock)]

OKM’s ministry is rooted in Taylor’s prophecies. Wagner regularly mentions that if it wasn’t for Taylor, he would have never started this ministry.

On its website, OKM references the Seven Mountains of Societal Influence. Seven Mountains utilizes the language of Dominionism — a theology that believes countries, including the United States, should be governed by Christian biblical law. Its goal is to attain sociopolitical and economic transformation through the gospel of Jesus in what it calls the seven mountains or spheres of society: religion, family, education, government, media, entertainment and business. This blends QAnon’s apocalyptic desire to destroy society “controlled” by the deep state with the need for the Kingdom of God on Earth.

Wagner and Bushey have taught their congregation to stop listening to any media —even Fox News — because they’re are all “Luciferian.” What they provide instead is a road map to QAnon radicalization comprised of QAnon YouTube channels for the congregation’s daily media diet, the Qmap website that lists new QAnon conspiracy theories and Twitter influencers.

‘Deep state church’

They further insist that as Trump continues to “drain the swamp” in Washington, it’s “our” responsibility to drain the deep state church swamp. They believe the same deep state that controls the world has also infiltrated traditional churches. As Wagner stated in his April 12 service: “I am here to focus on the deep state church. This goes beyond our church and involves our culture and our politics. Kevin is here to talk about QAnon and the military operation to save the world.”

Like any church, they also run outreach ministries. OKM is currently raising funds for something called Reclamation Ranch, which Wagner describes as a safe place for children rescued after being held underground by the deep state. Children at risk is an ongoing theme in many QAnon conspiracy theories, including the famous fake “Pizzagate” theory.

As of May, OKM moved from Zoom to YouTube to accommodate the growth in attendees. At last count, approximately 300 accounts participated in the recent services.

While that’s not a lot of followers, we should be concerned about these latest developments. OKM provides formalized religious indoctrination into QAnon, a conspiracy movement that is both a public health threat by spreading false information about the coronavirus pandemic and a national security concern.The Conversation

Marc-André Argentino, PhD candidate Individualized Program, 2020-2021 Public Scholar, Concordia University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/william-barr-promotes-christian-tyranny-in-latest-speech/

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William Barr promotes Christian tyranny in latest speech

Written by Chrissy Stroop / Religion Dispatches February 29, 2020

I’ve said it before, and if you’re reading this, you’ve very likely heard the same thing darkly muttered among liberals and progressives if you haven’t said it yourself: I never thought anything could possibly make me miss Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. And yet, with his willingness to throw away our norms, checks, and balances, to politicize the Justice Department, to sacrifice the rule of law itself on the altar of Trump—current Attorney General William Barr has done it. As authoritarian as he was, invoking Romans 13 to defend the Trump administration’s indefensibly inhumane policy of caging children separated from their asylum-seeking parents, Sessions had at least enough genuine concern for the rule of law to recuse himself from the Mueller investigation, against the tweeter-in-chief’s explicit wishes.

In other ways, however, Sessions and Barr are clearly cut from the same cloth. Sessions, a Methodist, has asserted that without belief in God it is impossible to believe in truth, suggesting that non-believers are unfit to serve in government. In recent months, Barr, a Catholic, has expounded the same views much more forcefully and at much greater length, including in a speech he delivered Wednesday at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention in Nashville. NRB is an international evangelical organization whose board members include John Fuller of far-right powerhouse Focus on the Family and Tim Wildmon of the American Family Association, a Southern Poverty Law Center designated anti-LGBT hate group.

Featuring predictable dog whistles about “federalism” (i.e., “states’ rights”) and “the corporate—or ‘mainstream’—press,” Barr’s speech to NRB was divided into sections focusing on “religion, the decentralization of government power, and the free press,” all of which, Barr claims, have “have eroded in recent decades.” But today I’ll focus largely on Barr’s view of religion and its ideal place in society and the public sphere.

Barr’s exposition weaves together a variety of reactionary tropes, many of which have roots in the nineteenth century. (While it would be impossible to tease them apart and trace their relationships and genealogies in a short commentary, for those interested in an academic unpacking of Barr’s rhetoric, “The Russian Origins of the So-Called Post-Secular Moment: Some Preliminary Observations,” which I wrote for State, Religion and Church, will provide a helpful overview.)

The attorney general’s speech was likewise full of so many tensions, contradictions, and weak arguments that it resembles the “Gish gallop” style of debate, making it difficult to believe that they were all offered in good faith. In typical Christian nationalist form, Barr quoted American Founding Father John Adams: “We have no government armed with the power which is capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.”

Asked to comment, Freedom From Religion Foundation’s Andrew Seidel, author of The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism is Un-American, maintained, “Barr is misreading Adams.” To substantiate the point, he observed, “Adams, like the other founders, thought religion and morality were two separate entities; Barr thinks they are one and the same. The founders thought religion could be a substitute for morality. We now know that they were wrong on this point.”

What Seidel means here, as he details in his book, is that as Enlightenment elites, the Founding Fathers believed that they were educated and cultivated enough to be moral without religion, but that the masses were too uncultivated to do the same. The masses would therefore require religion. Seidel maintains that the founders were wrong on this point, and we can admit as much while still admiring their positive achievements.

Seidel adds, “If the founders believed that religion was important to ensure moral behavior for the masses but not for themselves, that means that the founders were moral without religion. It also means they founded the American government on their own morality, not religion,” concluding that “Barr is inadvertently refuting his entire argument by trying to co-opt Adams.”

Seidel’s work can also help us see that Barr is twisting Tocqueville in his attempt to marshal the nineteenth-century French observer of American democracy in support of his view that moral behavior is impossible without religion. A claim, by the way, that is entirely fact-free.

And Seidel is certainly correct that Sessions and Barr go much further than the Founding Fathers in claiming, as Barr did in his NRB speech, that moral values “must flow from a transcendent Supreme Being.” Despite Barr’s whiggish praise of “the Anglo-American political system” and his espoused disdain for Enlightenment thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau, his views on the necessity of an external, transcendent source of morals in order for humans to achieve virtue is much more prominent in Continental European thought than in the English-speaking world.

But Barr is a smooth gaslighter, and he represents his argument for theocratic authoritarianism as a defense of “liberal democracy.” Barr’s European (and sometimes American) antecedents were often more honest, admitting that they viewed liberal democracy, due to its supposed godlessness and concomitant lack of truth, as a failure that would have to be replaced with either “totalitarianism” (the “ersatz religions” of fascism or Communism) or “a religious society.”

Indeed, Barr’s claim that “the right way to transform the world is for each of us to focus on morally transforming ourselves” is almost a direct quote from the early twentieth-century anti-Communist Nikolai (Nicholas) Berdyaev, who might well have influenced the attorney general, if not directly, then through Berdyaev’s profound influence on late Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whom he cites. While Solzhenitsyn’s bravery in exposing the brutal Soviet GULAG system of prison camps should never be forgotten, Solzhenitsyn was no fan of the West.

In 1978, he gave a famous speech lambasting the West’s supposed decline in terms that would surely be congenial to Sessions and Barr. And later Solzhenitsyn, who had been expelled from the USSR, voted with his feet, accepting Russian citizenship from Vladimir Putin’s government and returning to his homeland, pleased with the way that Christian nationalist authoritarianism had replaced Communism as the Russian state’s guiding ideology. The closeness of Putinist Russians and American right-wingers that has come to light in recent years should not surprise us. But we should be very clear that what both parties want is neither democracy nor pluralism, however much Barr may claim to support both.

Barr claims he supports separation of church and state, but the claim is clearly disingenuous: “While most everyone agrees that we must have separation of Church and State, this does not require that we drive religion from the public square and affirmatively use government power to promote a culture of disbelief.” The tell here is that the attorney general conflates the idea of a religiously neutral public square with “using government power to promote a culture of disbelief.” The notion that there’s no religious neutrality, and that therefore,if public institutions are not promoting religion, they are promoting secular humanist ideology by default, is a hallmark of dominionist Christian thinking. His NRB audience would have no trouble getting the message.

Like authoritarians, narcissists, and abusers of all kinds, Christian extremists seek to paint themselves as victims, and Barr’s speech is a prime example of this powerful rhetorical tactic. In it, the attorney general blames supposedly nefarious secularists for the contentious state of American politics when, in fact, data shows us that precisely the opposite is true—America’s polarization has been driven by our radicalized, mostly Christian, Right.

Trump’s toady of an attorney general may wax poetic about his fear of the potential tyranny of a secular majority, but he is transparently trying to promote Christian tyranny, only in the guise of “liberal democracy.” It doesn’t take much digging beneath the surface to see that Barr’s authoritarian approach to religion derives from a very dark view of human nature. Authentic supporters of democracy, by contrast, understand that despite our human limitations—which are quite real but not nearly so severe as those posited by the toxic doctrine of “original sin”—it’s possible to build a society around a shared social contract grounded in the simple recognition of our shared human condition, and on that basis to foster functional institutions and a healthy respect for pluralism.

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blank 7/18 see barton

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Kirk Endorses Sean Feucht, Congressional Candidate Backed by Christian Nationalists and Dominionists

READ MORE

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/authoritarian-paranoid-and-patriarchal-the-dark-roots-of-christian-nationalism-gave-us-trump/

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‘Authoritarian, paranoid, and patriarchal’: The dark roots of Christian nationalism gave us Trump

President Donald J. Trump joins members of his Cabinet in a prayer led by Secretary of Energy Rick Perry during a Cabinet Meeting Tuesday, Nov. 19, 2019, in the Cabinet Room of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian)

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly February 17, 2020

Katherine Stewart is the writer who first introduced me to the term “Christian nationalists” almost a year ago. I had previously referred to the group that has shown unwavering support for Trump as “white evangelicals.” But that is a bit of a misnomer, primarily because, as we saw with the article in Christianity Today calling for the president’s removal from office, there are pockets of white evangelicals who aren’t part of the movement. There are also members of other religious groups that espouse the same beliefs. For example, Catholic leaders like Attorney General William Barr and Federalist Society President Leonard Leo are major players in the Christian nationalist movement.

Bringing some clarity to the make-up of the Christian nationalist movement is just one of the myths Stewart busts in her upcoming book titled: The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, set to be released on March 3rd. Equally important for us to understand is that this movement isn’t simply about culture wars.

It is not a social or cultural movement. It is a political movement, and its ultimate goal is power. It does not seek to add another voice to America’s pluralistic democracy but to replace our foundational democratic principles and institutions with a state grounded on a particular version of Christianity answering to what some adherents call a “biblical worldview” that also happens to serve the interests of its plutocratic funders and allied political leaders…This is not a “culture war.” It is a political war over the future of democracy.

When it comes to that “biblical worldview,” we often hear about the fact that Christian nationalists oppose abortion and LGBT rights. But as Stewart explains, the movement is actually based on the idea that “the Bible is very clear about the right answers to the political issues American voters face in the twenty-first century.” For example, they also believe that the Bible:

opposes public assistance to the poor as a matter of principle—unless the money passes through church coffers;

opposes environmentalism and, as a matter of theology, denies the science that human contributions to greenhouse gases causes global warning;

opposes gun regulation;

supports strong national borders;

favors the privatization of schools;

favors a gender hierarchy in both the home and church, with women being submissive to men;

favors the use of corporal punishment when discipling children;

favors government deregulation of business and minimal workers rights; and

favors capitalism and property rights.

To illustrate the Christian nationalist commitment to that biblical worldview, Stewart examined the writings and teachings of Ralph Drollinger, the founder of Capitol Ministries, who leads a weekly Bible study in the White House for cabinet secretaries and other officials. However, those views are also incorporated into churches by groups like the Family Research Council, which promotes “Cultural Impact Teams” and arms them with manuals that outline a biblical worldview.

Perhaps that helps explain why a host of uber-wealthy elites have signed on to the Christian nationalist movement and provide funding for the vast network of everything from non-profits to legal advocacy groups that promote their cause.

For me personally, the major myth about Christian nationalists that Stewart busted was to provide some history of where this movement came from. In this case, I have to disagree with my colleague Martin Longman. Trump hasn’t corrupted his Christian supporters, he is the apex of decades of work that led up to his election. Here are just a few of the men who laid the groundwork for where we are today.

Robert Lewis Dabney

Dabney was a Presbyterian minister and theologian who was born in 1820. He was an anti-abolitionist, who argued that opposing slavery was “tantamount to rejecting Christianity.” After the Civil War, Dabney, who referred to democracy as “mobocracy,” took up the cause of his “oppressed white brethren of Virginia and neighboring states to the south.”

Their oppression consisted in, among other things, having to pay taxes to support a “pretended education to the brats of black paupers.” These unjustly persecuted white people, as Dabney saw it, were also forced to contend with “the atheistic and infidel theories of physical science.”

As Stewart notes, “Christian nationalism came of age in the American slave republic” due to the proslavery theology of men like Dabney, who fused religion with a racialized form of nationalism.

Rousas Rushdoony

The importance of Dabeny can be seen from the fact that Rushdoony, whose writings provided the core of today’s Christian nationalism, considered him a role model.

The views of the theologian who lies at the center of so much influence are not hard to state simply and clearly: Rushdoony advocated a return to “biblical” law in America. The Bible, says Rushdoony, commands Christians to exercise absolute dominion over the earth and all of its inhabitants. Women are destined by God to be subordinate to men; men are destined to be ruled by a spiritual aristocracy of right-thinking, orthodox Christian clerics; and the federal government is an agent of evil. Public education, in Rushdoony’s reading of the Bible, is a threat to civilization, for it “basically trains women to be men,” and represents “primitivism,” “chaos,” and “a vast integration into the void.”

Two of the themes that are critical for today’s Christian nationalists emerged from Dabney and Rushdoony: (1) the fight against government (ie, public) schools, and (2) the disdain for democracy in favor of a hierarchy of authoritarianism. As Stewart wrote: “the new generation of leaders promoted a theological vision that emphasized the divine origins of the existing order, which invariably involved domination and subordination.”

Paul Weyrich

Weyrich wasn’t a particularly religious man. Instead, he was a Goldwater Republican who was passionate about “anticommunism, economic libertarianism, and a distrust of the civil rights movement.” It was Weyrich’s genius to meld those commitments with Christian nationalists in order to form a new radical right.

Initially, Weyrich joined with leaders like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Bob Jones to rally around the cause of fighting against federal attempts to desegregate their schools. In that effort, we can see the groundwork that was laid by Dabney and Rushdoony.

But they had a problem. As Weyrich understood, building a new movement around the burning issue of defending the tax advantages of racist schools wasn’t going to be a viable strategy on the national stage. “Stop the tax on segregation” just wasn’t going to inspire the kind of broad-based conservative counterrevolution that Weyrich envisions. They needed an issue with a more acceptable appeal.

That is when, several years after the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v Wade was actually embraced by most conservative Christians, they decided to focus on the issue of abortion. The rest, as they say, is history.

One of the most important moments of the so-called “Reagan revolution” was the fact that he launched his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi with a dog-whistle shout-out to states rights. But equally important was the speech the not-so-religious presidential candidate gave at the Reunion Arena in Dallas, Texas  to a crowd of 15,000 pastors and religious activists.

I know that you can’t endorse me,” he declared, but “I want you to know that I endorse you and what you are doing.” The pastors went wild. Reagan went on to air his personal doubts about the theory of evolution. Then he offered a homespun hypothetical: if he were to be trapped on an island with only one book, he said, he would take the Bible. “All of the complex questions facing us at home and abroad,” he said, “have their answer in that single book.”

With his speech in Mississippi, Reagan secured the support of southern white racists. But it was his speech in Dallas that married Christian nationalists to his candidacy and forged the bond with the Republican Party that lasts to this day. Weyrich’s vision came to fruition.

David Barton

In today’s political arena, the number of Christian nationalist influencers is too great to capture. But Stewart suggests that Barton is the “where’s Waldo” of the movement—showing up everywhere.

Barton got a bachelor’s degree in Christian education from Oral Roberts University and, until his early 30s, was a math teacher and principal at a Christian high school. Then he became convinced that the whole idea of the founder’s commitment to a wall of separation between church and state was a myth. Here is how Stewart describes Barton’s historiography.

American was once a single nation with a single God. It goes on to describe a fall and a cause for grievance as the righteous lose their hold, thanks to the actions of secular liberals. The story of the past thus leads inexorably to a political prescription for the future, which for the most part involves retaking the court system and the rest of government and turning it over to Bible believers.

Those are some of the historical highlights that led Stewart to this conclusion.

America’s conservative movement, having morphed into a religious nationalist movement, is on a collision course with the American constitutional system. Though conservatives have long claimed to be the true champions of the Constitution — remember all that chatter during previous Republican administrations about “originalism” and “judicial restraint” — the movement that now controls the Republican Party is committed to a suite of ideas that are fundamentally incompatible with the Constitution and the Republic that the founders created under its auspices.

Mr. Trump’s presidency was not the cause of this anti-democratic movement in American politics. It was the consequence. He is the chosen instrument, not of God, but of today’s Christian nationalists, their political allies and funders, and the movement’s legal apparatus.

To outsiders, the question often arises about why this religious movement would remain loyal to such an amoral president. But that fails to take into account the fact that Christian nationalism is “authoritarian, paranoid, and patriarchal to its core…In Mr. Trump, they have found a man who does not merely serve their cause, but also satisfies their craving for a certain kind of political leadership.”

Reading Stewart’s book is certainly enlightening, but it can also be depressing. She ends, however, on a note that harkens back to Barack Obama’s most important speech: the one he gave at the 50th anniversary of the Selma march where he talked about what it means to be an American. Stewart emphasized the same theme.

If we want to guard against demagogues and theocrats who wish to “redeem” America, we don’t need a new theory of American democracy. We just need to recover and restore the vision of a nation dedicated to the proposition that all men and women are created equal.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/heres-how-trumps-state-of-the-union-address-was-a-white-christian-nationalist-dog-whistle/

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Here’s how Trump’s State of the Union address was a white Christian nationalist dog whistle

Written by Andrew L. Seidel / Religion Dispatches February 8, 2020

Amid the ripping paper and misbegotten medals, Trump’s State of the Union address promised nationalism with a distinctly Christian bent.

Trump wants to steal $5 billion from public schools (which he decried as “failing government schools”) to give to private, i.e., Christian, schools. Trump wants to roll back reproductive rights and ban abortion. But more than anything, Trump wants to weaponize religious freedom. If he is successful there, it will be a win for his war against abortion and public schools too. He said:

My administration is also defending religious liberty, and that includes the constitutional right to pray in public schools. In America, we don’t punish prayer. We don’t tear down crosses. We don’t ban symbols of faith. We don’t muzzle preachers and pastors. In America, we celebrate faith, we cherish religion, we lift our voices in prayer, and we raise our sights to the Glory of God.

The Constitution already protects students’ right to pray in public schools. What Trump actually wants is to use the machinery of the state to impose religion on students.

The allusion to tearing down crosses is a nod to the Supreme Court’s recent decision to allow the 40-ft tall Bladensburg cross to remain on government land and be maintained at government expense. Justice Alito’s opinion was full of irreconcilable contradictions and it bought in to the idea that curing First Amendment violations would show “hostility toward religion.” Until last summer, that was a claim that the Supreme Court had repeatedly rejected going all the way back to its very first state-church decision.

The placement of this passage, with its Christian nationalist dog whistles, belies its true meaning. It came immediately after he touted the Federalist Society’s “pipeline” set up to get conservative lawyers—many patently unqualified—lifetime appointments as federal judges:

“Working with Mitch McConnell — thank you, Mitch — and his colleagues in the Senate, we have recommended 180 new judges to uphold our Constitution as written. This includes Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.”

Those aren’t Trump judges, they’re McConnell/Federalist judges. And they’re the ones who will make Trump’s religious freedom subtext a legal reality.

It’s also worth noting that immediately following this nod to Christian nationalism Trump claimed to be “defending national security and combating radical Islamic terrorism.”

And, in fact, the speech may have been edited to drop an even more blatant call to Christian Nationalism. Politico’s transcript includes the following line (emphases mine):

In reaffirming our heritage as a free nation, we must remember that America has always been a Christian nation.

Time magazine’s transcript, meanwhile, reflects what the president actually said:

In reaffirming our heritage as a free Nation, we must remember that America has always been a frontier nation.

It’s entirely possible that the speech wasn’t deliberately edited; that Trump, who’s famous for ad-libbing, simply misread or decided to deviate from the speech as written, but it’s meaningful that the speech appears to have been toned down.

Even so, the message is out in the open: These judges will make Christian nationalism the law. They will redefine the Constitution so that it creates two classes of people: conservative Christians and everyone else. That is and has been the goal of Christian nationalism—to codify Christian privilege and elevate Christians to a special, favored class. All others will be second-class citizens. As Chrissy Stroop noted in her Religion Dispatches piece on the SOTU, these ideas have been mainstreamed due to the influence of the radical Christian Reconstructionist movement.

Right now, Christian nationalists are raging against the dying of their privilege. Trump’s State of the Union encapsulated this rage. And, as America nears the tipping point at which conservative Christianity’s power and privilege are reduced to equality for all, the Christian nationalist myths will be spouted more often and more loudly. But the end is near for this movement. That is the true state of our union.

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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/kanye-west-joins-dominionist-pro-trump-prophets-for-stadium-prayer-rally/

Rapper Kanye West announced that he and his Sunday Service choir will take part in Awaken 2020, a prayer rally featuring dominionists Lou Engle, Ché Ahn, Cindy Jacobs and other evangelists that will be held Saturday, Jan. 18 at Sun Devil Stadium in Tempe, Arizona. According to one report, West’s announcement sparked such a flood of people registering for free tickets that the event website crashed.

Some religious conservatives believe that West’s highly publicized conversion and his traveling “Sunday Service” will help spark the Great Awakening, a revival that religious-right leaders have been trying to set in motion for years. To them, the Great Awakening is not just about saving souls, but about changing politics and shifting the direction of the nation.

“It’s time for you to be part of the Jesus awakening that is shifting HISTORY,” a website promoting the event reads. “Open the door and enter into a new era, a new decade, of revival that is bringing a movement of signs and wonders, healing of the sick, and preaching of the gospel.”

Like West, many of the rally speakers are ardent supporters of President Donald Trump. Guillermo Maldonado, whose church recently hosted the president at a campaign kickoff for Evangelicals for Trump, has said that God raised up Trump as part of his End Times plans for America.

Awaken 2020 organizer David Herzog also talks about prophecies for the second coming; he believes God is going to trust this generation to bring great signs and wonders and miracles to America because “the harvest is so ripe, it’s so close, and he’s in a hurry to do this.”

Ché Ahn, head of Harvest International Ministry and a leader of the New Apostolic Reformation, says that “true revival includes the reformation of society.” He has promoted political events organized by Christian nationalist David Lane in an effort to “transform” California. He publicly canceled his subscription to Christianity Today after the magazine editorialized in favor of Trump’s impeachment and removal from office. Ahn is a promoter of Seven Mountains dominionism, which teaches that Satan has had control of many of the “mountains” of influence in society—like government, media, entertainment—and that the right kind of Christians need to take control over them. Ahn has talked about the importance of Christians being in charge of the mountain of government so that “we can make decrees and declarations and we can influence that whole mountain.” Ahn, an ardent opponent of LGBTQ equality, co-founded The Call, which organized a series of large-scale political prayer rallies, with Lou Engle.

The Call co-founder, dominionist Lou Engle, has been promoting Awaken 2020, which he said in a promotional video will “open up the dawning of a new day” that could “change history.” Engle teaches that “the church’s vocation is to rule history with God.” He has used his prayer events to call for an end to abortion in America, to mobilize resistance to LGBTQ equality, and to ask God to “remove” pro-choice Supreme Court justices so that President Donald Trump can replace them with justices who will eliminate a right to abortion. In a video promoting Awaken 2020, Engle recalled prophesying at a 1997 event in Sun Devil Stadium that the stadium would be filled, a prophesy that he said was the beginning of The Call. In his own video promoting Awakening 2020, Ahn went back even further and described a 1995 event at which he said two young people prophesied the arrival of “stadium Christianity.”

“Prophet” Cindy Jacobs teaches that there is an imperative to “disciple nations.” On the eve of the 2018 midterms elections, she declared, “We’re going to put people in office that are going to believe that government needs to be upon his shoulders,” adding, “The government of God must be established.” Like Engle, Jacobs is a member of the council of POTUS Shield, a network created on the night of Trump’s election victory to support his presidency. Both she and Engle were part of a spiritual warfare event held at Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., in February 2018, at which she told her fellow warriors, “We are God’s enforcers in the Earth for His will to be done.”She, too, is a strong opponent of legal abortion and legal equality for LGBTQ people. Last year, Jacobs warned that the proposed Equality Act, which would expand federal civil rights laws to include protections against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation of gender identity, becomes law, “Christians will rise up” and “we would even come to a place of civil war.” In 2017, Jacobs told a gathering that God wants Christians to become so wealthy it will make Jews jealous, sparking a “great harvest” of Jewish conversions. In 2018, she said, “There’s a reason God brought so many Asians to California. The Lord told us that it was like a hidden weapon, the Asians were like a hidden weapon that God wanted to use to turn the elections.” Jacobs has teamed up with White House aide Paula White for the One Voice Prayer Movement, which launched in November with a prayer call on which White prayed against demonic efforts to undermine Trump.

Awaken 2020 is one of many large-scale tent-and-stadium prayer events being organized by religious-right leaders this year in hopes of sparking evangelical activism and a spiritual revival that will lead to reformation of the church and transformation of society.

Tags: Che AhnCindy JacobsDavid HerzogGuillermo MaldonadoKanye WestLou EngleAwakening 2020DominionismElection 2020New Apostolic ReformationSeven MountainsAwakening 2020Harvest International MinistryThe Call

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flurry of expose --> theocracy node

explains under the rader? [an rosenberg salon]

...Frederick Clarkson, senior research analyst at the progressive think tankPolitical Research Associates.

“Reporters and editors are often in a tricky spot.” Clarkson said. “Sometimes they lack the knowledge and vocabulary in this dynamic field. This can be particularly challenging when political figures or their prominent supporters are profoundly motivated by their religious views.”

He cited the example of the 2012 Republican primary, the early stages of which featured two candidates, Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, “who were unambiguously influenced by overtly theocratic ideas and figures from well-established theocratic camps called Christian Reconstructionism and the Pentecostal, ‘dominionist’ movement called the New Apostolic Reformation.”

Leading figure in NAR, for example, staged a prayer rally of 30,000 people in Houston to launch Perry’s campaign. “Journalists who had written accurately, about all this became the targets of a smear campaign,” Clarkson said. “They were (falsely) said to be tarring evangelicals in the broader sense,” and “media coverage of dominionism collapsed.”

Clarkson continued: “This turning a blind eye to the theocratic politics animating much of public life remains more the rule more than the exception. Even though evangelical historian John Fea described Ted Cruz as a Dominionist in an essay for the Washington Post, reporters did not much follow his lead.”

Such willful blindness is difficult to square with any coherent notion of objectivity, and has contributed significantly to the ongoing state of bewilderment that Trump retains such high levels of support from white evangelicals.  The coverage of all American politics directly suffers from this blindness.

This study may help empower the media profession to be less easily intimidated going forward. There is a great deal that needs repair and renewal in American democracy, and journalism has a vital role to play in that process. By recognizing its own strengths, as revealed in this study, and building on them to address its weaknesses, the press can once again perform its democratic duty, and help the American public to navigate dark times.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/scientists-establish-ink-between-religious-fundamentalism-and-brain-damage/

no lnx

Scientists establish link between religious fundamentalism and brain damage

Written by Bobby Azarian / Raw Story December 30, 2019

A study published in the journal Neuropsychologia has shown that religious fundamentalism is, in part, the result of a functional impairment in a brain region known as the prefrontal cortex. The findings suggest that damage to particular areas of the prefrontal cortex indirectly promotes religious fundamentalism by diminishing cognitive flexibility and openness—a psychology term that describes a personality trait which involves dimensions like curiosity, creativity, and open-mindedness.

Religious beliefs can be thought of as socially transmitted mental representations that consist of supernatural events and entities assumed to be real. Religious beliefs differ from empirical beliefs, which are based on how the world appears to be and are updated as new evidence accumulates or when new theories with better predictive power emerge. On the other hand, religious beliefs are not usually updated in response to new evidence or scientific explanations, and are therefore strongly associated with conservatism. They are fixed and rigid, which helps promote predictability and coherence to the rules of society among individuals within the group.

Religious fundamentalism refers to an ideology that emphasizes traditional religious texts and rituals and discourages progressive thinking about religion and social issues. Fundamentalist groups generally oppose anything that questions or challenges their beliefs or way of life. For this reason, they are often aggressive towards anyone who does not share their specific set of supernatural beliefs, and towards science, as these things are seen as existential threats to their entire worldview.

Since religious beliefs play a massive role in driving and influencing human behavior throughout the world, it is important to understand the phenomenon of religious fundamentalism from a psychological and neurological perspective.

To investigate the cognitive and neural systems involved in religious fundamentalism, a team of researchers—led by Jordan Grafman of Northwestern University—conducted a study that utilized data from Vietnam War veterans that had been gathered previously. The vets were specifically chosen because a large number of them had damage to brain areas suspected of playing a critical role in functions related to religious fundamentalism. CT scans were analyzed comparing 119 vets with brain trauma to 30 healthy vets with no damage, and a survey that assessed religious fundamentalism was administered. While the majority of participants were Christians of some kind, 32.5% did not specify a particular religion.

Based on previous research, the experimenters predicted that the prefrontal cortex would play a role in religious fundamentalism, since this region is known to be associated with something called ‘cognitive flexibility’. This term refers to the brain’s ability to easily switch from thinking about one concept to another, and to think about multiple things simultaneously. Cognitive flexibility allows organisms to update beliefs in light of new evidence, and this trait likely emerged because of the obvious survival advantage such a skill provides. It is a crucial mental characteristic for adapting to new environments because it allows individuals to make more accurate predictions about the world under new and changing conditions.

Brain imaging research has shown that a major neural region associated with cognitive flexibility is the prefrontal cortex—specifically two areas known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). Additionally, the vmPFC was of interest to the researchers because past studies have revealed its connection to fundamentalist-type beliefs. For example, one study showed individuals with vmPFC lesions rated radical political statements as more moderate than people with normal brains, while another showed a direct connection between vmPFC damage and religious fundamentalism. For these reasons, in the present study, researchers looked at patients with lesions in both the vmPFC and the dlPFC, and searched for correlations between damage in these areas and responses to religious fundamentalism questionnaires.

According to Dr. Grafman and his team, since religious fundamentalism involves a strict adherence to a rigid set of beliefs, cognitive flexibility and open-mindedness present a challenge for fundamentalists. As such, they predicted that participants with lesions to either the vmPFC or the dlPFC would score low on measures of cognitive flexibility and trait openness and high on measures of religious fundamentalism.

The results showed that, as expected, damage to the vmPFC and dlPFC was associated with religious fundamentalism. Further tests revealed that this increase in religious fundamentalism was caused by a reduction in cognitive flexibility and openness resulting from the prefrontal cortex impairment. Cognitive flexibility was assessed using a standard psychological card sorting test that involved categorizing cards with words and images according to rules. Openness was measured using a widely-used personality survey known as the NEO Personality Inventory. The data suggests that damage to the vmPFC indirectly promotes religious fundamentalism by suppressing both cognitive flexibility and openness.

These findings are important because they suggest that impaired functioning in the prefrontal cortex—whether from brain trauma, a psychological disorder, a drug or alcohol addiction, or simply a particular genetic profile—can make an individual susceptible to religious fundamentalism. And perhaps in other cases, extreme religious indoctrination harms the development or proper functioning of the prefrontal regions in a way that hinders cognitive flexibility and openness.

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posner 1219 see reed f&f

Unprecedented Power

Whether Trump’s evangelical boosters actually believe he is anointed by God or that the evidence really does exonerate him, they have one powerful motive for their unflagging support: Trump has given evangelicals unprecedented power. With him in the White House, Christian right ideologues have virtual carte blanche to run his administration, as he has handed them control over personnel and policy at a level they could have only dreamed of, even under admired presidents like George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan. Trump has handed them conservative judicial nominees, from the Supreme Court down to federal trial courts, and also has installed longtime evangelical allies at key Cabinet posts, including Mike Pompeo at the State Department, Bill Barr at the Department of Justice, Ben Carson at Housing and Urban Development, and Betsy DeVos at Education. Ralph Reed has told his followers, “There are more Christians serving” in the Trump administration “than all previous presidents combined.”

At the Faith & Freedom conference in June, Mercedes Schlapp, who at the time served in the White House but later moved over to the Trump reelection campaign, described her office as “the West Wing Chapel.” Derek Kan, a political appointee at the Office of Management and Budget, recounted how the books of Leviticus, Joshua and Genesis shape his views on regulation and taxes.

Health and Human Services has been ground zero for Trump administration efforts to scale back reproductive and LGBTQ rights, and eroding church-state separation and framing it as “religious freedom” for Christians. HHS Secretary Alex Azar then delivered a speech enumerating “many of the ways that under President Trump HHS has protected life, conscience and faith.” The department, he said, has “never fought more fiercely to protect life at all stages, from conception until natural death. That is thanks above all to the work, the leadership and the courage of President Trump, the most pro-life president in American history.” At the Values Voter Summit, two officials from HHS — Shannon Royce, the head of the department’s Office of Faith and Opportunity Initiatives, and Roger Severino, the head of the Office of Civil Rights, which in 2018 launched a Conscience and Religious Freedom Division — were given front-row seats and a shoutout from Tony Perkins.

In turn, evangelical organizations provide top Trump deputies a platform to tout their Christian credentials to the base ? and shield them from the glare of mounting scandals. The same day that Yovanovitch testified in her closed-door deposition, Pompeo delivered a speech, “Being a Christian Leader,” to the American Association of Christian Counselors, which is led by Tim Clinton, another top evangelical ally to Trump. (Clinton did not respond to a request for comment.) A week and a half later, Pompeo touted religious freedom initiatives carried out by the State Department to a Heritage Foundation President’s Club Meeting in Washington, D.C., joking that the gathering had provided him “shelter from the storm.”

Reelecting A ‘Christian’ President

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/why-christian-nationalism-is-an-existential-threat-to-democracy/

no lnx

Why Christian nationalism is an existential threat to democracy

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly November 26, 2019

It probably shouldn’t surprise us that, after hearing from witnesses who testified consistently that the president attempted to bribe a foreign head of state in order to get dirt on a political opponent, the needle hasn’t moved on those who oppose impeachment. We’ve been here before. On several occasions, hopes have been raised that this is the moment Trump’s enablers will finally abandon him. But it has never happened.

Given that the president’s base of support comes primarily from white evangelicals, it is important to understand Christian nationalism in order to explain their loyalty. One of the court evangelicals, Franklin Graham, recently gave us a window into that world.

During his November 21 interview with Graham, Metaxas, a Salem Radio Network talk-show host, asked the son of the late evangelist Billy Graham, “What do you think of what is happening now? I mean, it’s a very bizarre situation to be living in a country where some people seem to exist to undermine the president of the United States. It’s just a bizarre time for most Americans.”

Franklin Graham, president and CEO of the Billy Graham Evangelical Association, responded, “Well, I believe it’s almost a demonic power that is trying—”

At which point Metaxas interjected, “I would disagree. It’s not almost demonic. You know and I know, at the heart, it’s a spiritual battle.”

Graham agreed…

As Peter Wehner summarized, the message is that, in this “spiritual battle,” we all have to chose sides.

For Graham and Metaxas, it appears that agreeing with them equates to agreeing with God—and disagreeing with them, at least when it comes to Donald Trump, means doing the work of the evil one.

For these Christian nationalists, it’s not enough to say, “God is on our side.” If you don’t agree with them, you are engaged with a demonic power. There is no authoritarian tool more controlling than the one that wields the power to define the playing field like that. It is a pronouncement that leaves no room for debate or nuance. You’re either all in or all out. Anyone who buys into what they’re saying has no choice but to defend Trump. To do otherwise is a pathway to eternal doom with the devil.

To further the argument that God is on Trump’s side, Rick Perry recently opined about how the president is the “chosen one.”

Courtney Hagle

@CourtneyHagle

Fox & Friends preview an interview with Rick Perry, where he says that Trump is "the chosen one" and "sent by God to do great things"

C STREET:]

Pete Hegseth: "God has used imperfect people forever," but what Trump "has withstood is unlike what really any other mortal could understand"

Embedded video

Apparently, Perry also said that Obama was chosen by God. It’s funny how we never heard that when Obama was actually president. But what Perry was articulating is a theological argument for the omnipotence of God, who has unlimited power to control everything. Leaving that one aside for the moment, it is worth examining the rhetoric Perry used.

“I actually gave the president a little one-pager on those Old Testament kings about a month ago, and I shared it with him,” he continued. “I said, ‘Mr. President, I know there are people that say you said you were the chosen one, and I said, ‘You were.’”

“I said, ‘If you’re a believing Christian, you understand God’s plan for the people who rule and judge over us on this planet in our government,’” he added.

He was comparing Trump to kings in the Old Testament and referred to God’s plan for those who rule over us. That goes to the heart of something Katherine Stewart wrote about Christian nationalists.

The great thing about kings like Cyrus, as far as today’s Christian nationalists are concerned, is that they don’t have to follow rules. They are the law. This makes them ideal leaders in paranoid times…

I have attended dozens of Christian nationalist conferences and events over the past two years. And while I have heard plenty of comments casting doubt on the more questionable aspects of Mr. Trump’s character, the gist of the proceedings almost always comes down to the belief that he is a miracle sent straight from heaven to bring the nation back to the Lord. I have also learned that resistance to Mr. Trump is tantamount to resistance to God.

This isn’t the religious right we thought we knew. The Christian nationalist movement today is authoritarian, paranoid and patriarchal at its core. They aren’t fighting a culture war. They’re making a direct attack on democracy itself.

As you can see, Graham wasn’t the first one to claim that “resistance to Trump is tantamount to resistance to God.” Stewart has been hearing that one for a few years.

We have to grapple with the fact that Christian nationalists are launching a “direct attack on democracy itself.” That is because real democracy poses a threat to the kind of authoritarianism they embrace. The roots of that were explained by William Barr during his speech to the law school at Notre Dame. He began by articulating his own view of human nature.

Men are subject to powerful passions and appetites, and, if unrestrained, are capable of ruthlessly riding roughshod over their neighbors and the community at large.

No society can exist without some means for restraining individual rapacity.

Barr goes on to suggest that, when the founders talked about self government, they didn’t mean what we think they did.

In the words of Madison, “We have staked our future on the ability of each of us to govern ourselves…”

This is really what was meant by “self-government.” It did not mean primarily the mechanics by which we select a representative legislative body. It referred to the capacity of each individual to restrain and govern themselves.

But if individual rapacity is the problem, what is the source of those restraints?

[T]o control willful human beings, with an infinite capacity to rationalize, those moral values must rest on authority independent of men’s will – they must flow from a transcendent Supreme Being.

In short, in the Framers’ view, free government was only suitable and sustainable for a religious people – a people who recognized that there was a transcendent moral order antecedent to both the state and man-made law and who had the discipline to control themselves according to those enduring principles.

When you combine that with the belief among Christian nationalists that the only true religion is Christianity, you have the antithesis of democratic pluralism. Instead, you have authoritarian theocracy. That loops us back to Franklin Graham and the rest of the court evangelicals, who take it upon themselves to define who is on God’s side and who is doing the work of the devil.

Years ago, Sara Robinson captured what it takes to leave that kind of authoritarian mindset.

We must never, ever underestimate what it costs these people to let go of the beliefs that have sustained them…Externally, it always means the loss of your community; and often the loss of jobs, homes, marriages, and blood relatives as well. Internally, it requires sifting through every assumption you’ve ever made about how the world works, and your place within it; and demands that you finally take the very emotional and intellectual risks that the entire edifice was designed to protect you from. You have to learn, maybe for the first time, to face down fear and live with ambiguity.

While the loss of community can be traumatic, the prospect of “sifting through every assumption you’ve ever made about how the world works” is overwhelming. As she points out, the entire edifice is designed to protect you from fear and the threat of ambiguity. For most people, scaling that one is too much to ask.

I’m not going to suggest that it is impossible for Trump’s supporters to change their minds. But when we watch them reject one rational case after another, it is important to understand the depths of what binds them, as well as the threat that poses to our democracy.

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Trump’s base is a cult’: Rick Perry slammed after saying Donald Trump is ‘the Chosen One’ during Fox News interview

11/27 perry: trump sent by god, imperfect vessel, 1 pg cheat sheet of old test heroes; pompeo or someone //? line from The Family doc netflix?!

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https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2019/08/23/convention-states-fires-up-base-for-push-to-rewrite-u-s-constitution

david a cmd

Convention of States Action (COS) kicked off its first “Leadership Summit” in Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia today. COS, a project of Mark Meckler and Eric O’Keefe’s Citizens for Self-Governance, claims that “hundreds” of activists, state directors, and coordinators from all 50 states will attend to get inspired and learn strategies for passing COS resolutions in the states calling for a constitutional convention to rewrite the U.S. Constitution.

Fifteen states have passed the group’s applications so far, with 17 more states considering the resolution this year, according to COS. Wisconsin recently introduced a COS resolution, which would bump the number up to 18.

A constitutional convention has never been held since the Constitution was adopted, and COS will need 34 states to file applications in order for it to occur. If that happens, COS plans to move an array of sweeping amendments to redefine key parts of the Constitution and radically weaken the federal government.

COS has ties to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the National Rifle Association, the right-wing militia group Three Percenters, and the Christian nationalist group WallBuilders.

More than 200 civil rights and public interest groups, including the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), signed a letter last year denouncing such constitutional convention calls as “a threat to every American’s constitutional rights and civil liberties.”

Right-Wing Extremists to Speak

Fox News anchor Pete Hegseth, from Trump’s beloved Fox & Friends, addressed the crowd this morning, telling them that the Left hates the Constitution, the founding fathers understood that the word of “Jesus Christ our savior” is the guiding force for our country, and that there “is no other freedom-loving bastion in the world that values the individual with God-endowed rights.”

And, referencing the Three Percenters likely in attendance, Hegseth said, “it has always been the one percent or two percent or three percent of people that get it, that are willing to buck the comfiness of their moment and the established norms that everyone is comfortable with, willing to be defiant, willing to stand — be accused of being radical about things that are not radical at all.”

Recently, Hegseth has made some radical comments himself, saying that Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (MI-D) has a “Hamas agenda,” implying that she works with a U.S. designated terrorist organization.

Hegseth has also publicly defended Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’s brother Erik Prince’s Blackwater contractors, who were convicted of murdering Iraqi citizens, and has called climate change a “religion” that Democrats use to “control” people.

David Barton warmed up the crowd with a history lecture on the Constitution’s basis in fixed moral standards based on natural law and scripture, and drew applause with his claim that the federal government has “emasculated the states.”

A Christian nationalist with strong anti-LGBT views. Barton once said,

“There’s a passage that I love in Romans 1. … [I]t talks about homosexuality and it says that they will receive in their bodies the penalties of their behavior. … The Bible [is] right every time … and that’s why AIDS has been something they haven’t discovered a cure for or a vaccine for. … And that goes to what God says, ‘Hey you’re going to bear in your body the consequences of this homosexual behavior.'”

Barton founded the group WallBuilders, which has worked with Focus on the Family and the Family Policy Alliance to influence judicial elections and selection rules in states across the country, the Center for Media and Democracy detailed.

WallBuilders also works with the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation to push out Christian-Right model legislation in the mold of ALEC to state lawmakers under the name Project Blitz.

Also in line to speak at the Summit is one of the NRA’s top attorneys, Charles Cooper. Cooper will speak on, “The Real Threat to Gun Rights.” In an email to COS activists, Cooper is quoted as saying:

“The real threat to our constitutional rights today is posed not by an Article V Convention of States, but by an out-of-control federal government, exercising powers that it does not have and abusing powers that it does.”

COS materials in recent years have argued that a constitutional convention could be used to rewrite the Second Amendment in order to make it Supreme-Court-proof.

Others on the agenda to speak include founding board member Eric O’Keefe, former professor Rob Natelson, former U.S. Senator and COS Senior Advisor Tom Coburn, and the right-wing author of Liberty Amendments Mark Levin.

But the stars of the summit are likely to be the actors COS will have play the founding fathers Patrick Henry, James Madison, and George Washington.

Stay tuned to ExposedbyCMD.org for more on the right-wing’s effort to rewrite the Constitution.

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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/here-are-5-craziest-christian-fundamentalist-sects-cults-or-movements-feel-0

5  of the Craziest Christian Fundamentalist Sects, Cults or Movements That Feel Empowered in the Trump Era

Extremist groups are coming out of the woodwork.

By Alex Henderson / AlterNet July 19, 2018, 8:30 AM GMT

Evangelist Frank Amedia, leader of POTUS Shield

Photo Credit: The Jim Bakker Show

President Donald Trump—despite his alleged sexual activity with porn star Stormy Daniels, two divorces, lack of Biblical knowledge and a reputation for having a very foul mouth at times—has, ironically, become an icon of the Christian Right in the United States. His predecessor at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Barack Obama, actually has a long history of going to church and clearly possesses a greater knowledge of the Bible. Regardless, the Christian Right considers Obama an enemy and Trump a staunch ally—and with Trump in office, extremist groups are coming out of the woodwork more and more.

Here are some of the craziest far-right sects, organizations or Christian fundamentalist movements that are feeling empowered in the Trump era.

1. POTUS Shield

Led by television evangelist Frank Amedia, POTUS Shield is a new organization of far-right Christian fundamentalists that describes itself as “warriors, worshippers and watchmen”—and the one they are watching out for, through prayer, is Trump (POTUS stands for “President of the United States). Amedia insists that before Trump’s inauguration, God paid him a visit in the middle of the night and asked him to help form a protective shield of prayer around Trump—who the group believes was sent by God to promote a Christian fundamentalist takeover of government. Others active in POTUS Shield include Jerry Boykin, executive vice president of the Family Research Council, and Lou Engle (known for his large anti-abortion, anti-gay and pro-Republican prayer rallies).

2. People of Praise

After Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement from the U.S. Supreme Court, one of the people on Trump’s “short list” of possible nominees for a replacement was Amy Coney Barrett—a 46-year-old federal appellate judge who, the New York Times reported in 2017, was involved in a group called People of Praise (Brett Kavanaugh, not Barrett, eventually received Trump’s nomination). And given People of Praise’s beliefs, Barrett shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the High Court.

People of Praise is a predominantly Catholic group, although it has some non-Catholic members and incorporates Pentecostal practices (speaking in tongues, for example). Considered a cult within mainstream Catholicism, People of Praise require members to swear an oath of loyalty to the group and teach that while women can have some leadership positions, they must ultimately submit to male authority. In the past, People of Praise used the terms “handmaid” and “handmaiden” to describe women—which is downright chilling if one is familiar with Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” or the 1990 film and 2017/2018 television that were based on the book.

3. Quiverfull

The Christian Right’s hatred of reproductive freedom goes way beyond its opposition to abortion; some fundamentalists are equally opposed to all forms of contraception. And this anti-contraception ideology is exemplified by the looney Quiverfull movement. Quiverfull is a not a sect or denomination per se, but a movement within fundamentalist Protestant Christianity—and those who embrace it could be anything from Pentecostal to Calvinist. Quiverfull ideology asserts that it is a sin for Christian couples to do anything that might prevent a pregnancy; therefore, birth control pills and IUDs for women or condoms and vasectomies for men are considered tools of the Devil. And according to Quiverfull, Christian wives must have as many babies as possible while remaining totally submissive to their husbands. Other Quiverfull rules: wives cannot have their own bank accounts or e-mail addresses without their husbands’ permission, and they must always be sexually available to their husbands whether they’re in the mood for sex or not.

4. Project Blitz

Project Blitz is not a Christian fundamentalist church or sect, but rather, a coalition of Christian fundamentalist activists with a political agenda: to make sure that state legislatures are flooded with as many theocratic bills as possible. Working with Republicans who are sympathetic to their dominionist views—anti gay, anti-abortion, anti-contraception—Project Blitz believes that it is important for bills to be introduced regardless of how far they get. The more bills that are introduced, Project Blitz believes, the more likely they are to achieve some home runs eventually.

5. WallBuilders

In Texas, David Barton has been very active in both Republican politics and far-right fundamentalist Christianity. In addition to being a former vice chairman of the Texas Republican Party and serving as director of Keep the Promise PAC—a political action committee that supported Sen. Ted Cruz’ presidential campaign in 2016—Barton founded WallBuilders, which has taught through books and videos that the separation of church and state is not constitutional and that the government should be run according to strict Biblical law. And Barton has been active in the Providence Foundation, another group with dominionist views.

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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/trump-cabinet-bible-study-leader-sets-up-ministry-for-nicaraguan-strongman-sanctioned-by-u-s

Ralph Drollinger, whose ministry runs Bible studies for members of President Donald Trump’s cabinet and the U.S. Congress that are meant to “disciple” public officials to his particular “very conservative” interpretation of Christianity, traveled to Nicaragua this month at the invitation of President Daniel Ortega to discuss setting up similar Bible studies for Nicaraguan officials.

Drollinger spoke at a massive public gathering celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Sandinista revolution. Drollinger’s visit, and his for Ortega and his wife and Vice President Rosario Murillo, are striking in light of the intense criticism of the Ortega-Murillo regime by the U.S. government, which as recently as April expanded sanctions against individuals and institutions associated with the government–not to mention the disconnect between Ortega and Drollinger’s political backgrounds.

In an announcement of the most recent sanctions–against a bank and the son of the president and vice president—the U.S. undersecretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence said, “President Ortega, Vice President Murillo, and members of their inner circle continue to engage in blatant corruption, violence, and violations of basic human rights.” The government has also been criticized by international human rights advocates.

The latest U.S. sanctions came about one year after Nicaraguan officials and their allies killed hundreds of people and jailed or drove into exile thousands more in a violent crackdown on political protesters. Ortega, who has faced “persistent accusations” of election fraud, has consolidated his power, changed the constitution to eliminate term limits, and blocked opposition candidates from running for office. In August 2018, the Washington Post reported that “police and masked gunmen working with them have hunted down opposition leaders and protesters by the hundreds” and that many “have been killed, arrested, or disappeared.” In September, the BBC reported that the government had ordered the U.N. Commission on Human Rights to leave the country after it criticized the government’s use of excessive force against protesters and torture of detainees.

This April, the newspaper El País reported that repression under Ortega “has worsened during this year.” It cited a move by police to prevent regime opponents “from mobilizing in the streets of Managua.”

:{But there was no mention of any of that unpleasantness in Drollinger’s }:{ at the July 19 celebration. He began his remarks by bringing greetings from the U.S. }::{House of Representatives Bible study, the Senate Bible study, and “the U.S. White House cabinet member Bible study.”}:

Drollinger pronounced himself “blessed” and “honored” by the invitation to come to Nicaragua for the celebration and to talk about creating Bible studies for government officials. “In the United States of America, we have found amongst our political leaders, that it is essential they have a Bible teacher in their midst,” Drollinger said. He reiterated that point, saying “we have found in our nation, that it’s an important aspect of our government to have a Bible teacher in the midst of our political leaders.”

“Mrs. Vice President has said you are a Christian nation,” he told the crowd. “In America, we view ourselves as a Christian nation. But what is a Christian nation? A Christian nation is a Christian nation to the degree that the people in the nation reflect the attributes of God.”

Drollinger went on to say that it falls to the institution of the church to reflect the mercy, grace, love, patience and kindness of God, adding that other attributes include justice and righteousness, which God has “asked the state to manifest.”

We are personally to manifest the attributes of God’s justice and righteousness in our personal and our national life. And so to the degree that we reflect the love of Christ, to the degree that we reflect the mercy of Christ, to the degree that we reflect the grace of Christ, to the degree that we reflect the patience of Christ, to the degree that we reflect the justice of Christ, to the degree that our nation and our personal lives reflect the righteousness of Christ, is the degree to which we are or are not a Christian nation.

Let’s pause for a moment to remind ourselves what Drollinger and his Capitol Ministries teach about what God wants from public officials. Drollinger believes he has been called by God with a very specific purpose—to convert and “disciple” public officials at every level of government to his biblical worldview. Drollinger teaches public officials that the Bible endorses or mandates right-wing policy positions on economics, immigration, environmental regulation, abortion, LGBTQ equality, and the death penalty. Drollinger teaches that the government’s job is to “quell evil” and that governments and public officials “must send a constant message that sin will be punished.” He also teaches that the Bible promotes distinct gender roles, and he will not allow women to be Bible study leaders.

Drollinger’s teachings are reflected in his handbook for Christian public officials: Oaks in Office: Biblical Essays for Political Leaders. Capitol Ministries says that the Spanish-language edition is soon to be released and “will be used in the discipleship of the nation’s leaders.” Another Drollinger book, “Rebuilding America: The Biblical Blueprint,” has also been translated into Spanish and Portuguese with a new title, “Rebuilding a Nation.”

What might motivate Ortega and Murillo to invite Drollinger to Nicaragua and give him a speaking platform at a major national celebration? It’s a way to publicly wrap themselves in the mantle of Christianity, and perhaps poke a finger in the eye of the U.S. Treasury and State Departments by going over officials’ heads, so to speak, to an American who brags of his access at the highest levels of the U.S. government, including the White House.

This wouldn’t be the first time that Ortega and his wife have used religion for political purposes. A 2018 Washington Post article entitled “From Rebel to Strongman,” noted that when Ortega returned to office in 2006 a decade and a half after he was ousted by voters, he had “amped up his talk of peace and Christian values.”  The BBC quoted Ortega saying in 2006, “Jesus Christ is my hero now.” According to Capitol Ministries, Ortega’s invitation said, “We know if the people that God has trusted with the destiny of a nation are born again, our legislators will legislate according to the Bible.”

By one estimate, Nicaragua is about one-half Catholic and one-third evangelical. While Ortega’s opposition to abortion has undoubtedly pleased church leaders from both groups, the government became increasingly hostile to the Catholic Church during the past year over some church leaders’ criticism of his abuses of power.

Foreign Policy reported last August, “In recent weeks, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega and forces loyal to him have targeted clergy, profaning and destroying Catholic churches, even killing those who seek refuge within them.” Foreign Policy noted that Vice President Mike Pence had slammed the Nicaraguan government for “virtually waging war on the Catholic Church and those calling for democracy and national dialogue.”

It’s worth noting that Drollinger has seemingly little tolerance for those whose take on Christianity or biblical interpretation differs from his own. He has called the Catholic Church “the world’s largest false religion.”

Given the hostility between the Nicaraguan government and the Catholic Church, the public embrace of Drollinger could be seen as a way for Ortega and Murillo to portray their government as publicly aligned with Christianity in spite of their feud with Catholic leaders.

Indeed, in April, shortly after presidential son Laureano Ortega Murillo was hit with sanctions by the U.S. government, he took part in an evangelical gathering where Managua Mayor Reyna Rueda was given the microphone to thank God for “the peace that reigns in our country.”

The appearance generated some side-eye reporting on the leaders’ newfound enthusiasms. “Until recently, it was normal to see the Ortega Murillo family attending mass,” noted La Presna. “But since the dictatorship declared the Catholic Church as an enemy, they have moved closer to certain evangelical leaders, whose position during the crisis that Nicaragua is going through has been silence.”

La Prensa quoted Eliseo Nunez, a former deputy and member of the Broad Front for Democracy (FAD) portraying the ruling family as unprincipled and willing to do anything to maintain their hold on power. He accused Ortega of “taking advantage of the opportunism of a few pastors” in order to falsely portray all evangelicals as his supporters. There were also some Catholic leaders present at the July 19 celebration, La Presna reported, including a priest who asked Drollinger to intercede with the U.S. government to lift its sanctions.

Capitol Ministries’ own reporting about Drollinger’s public appearance in Nicaragua, which includes a link to the video of his “sermon,” states, “Drollinger explained that in the Bible, God doesn’t talk about ‘Christian nations,’ that only individuals can become Christians by being forgiven for sin through the atoning work of Jesus Christ.” But that’s not accurate, according to the video of Drollinger’s remarks at the political rally. At no point does he “explain” that “God doesn’t talk about ‘Christian nations’”—nor does he talk on that video about “individuals becoming forgiven for sin through the atoning work of Jesus Christ.” [See update below for Capitol Ministries’ explanation.]

“A ‘Christian nation’ per se, doesn’t exist,” continues the Capitol Ministries blog post, “Nations can only be so-called ‘Christian’ to the extent that their laws and people are guided by Christian principles, two of which are righteousness and justice, Drollinger said.

Drollinger did not tell the crowd in Managua that a “Christian nation” doesn’t exist. As noted above, he did say that what makes a nation a Christian nation is that its people and leaders reflect what he calls the attributes of God. He prayed that the people, government officials and country of Nicaragua would reflect the attributes of God, and added, “May God cement these ideas as to what is a Christian nation.”

This apparent misrepresentation* of his public remarks, at least those captured on the video shared by Capitol Ministries itself, may reflect the group’s sensitivity to how researchers and reporters have characterized Drollinger’s positions on church-state separation—he says he supports institutional separation, but not influential separation—and on Christian nationalism, which he has denounced.

Drollinger’s public remarks were translated into Spanish by Oscar Zamora, Capitol Ministries’ Peru-based director for Latin America. Zamora reported that he recently met with Nicaraguan congressional leaders and with General Inspector Jaime Vanegas “who asked me to give a word to almost 200 police officers who were waiting for me at an auditorium next door.” He also said he had met with Managua Mayor Rueda.

After the trip, Capitol Ministries announced that Bible studies for Nicaragua’s cabinet and National Assembly deputies will be led by Arsenio Herrera, who reportedly pastors the largest evangelical church in Managua. Herrera, described as the “spiritual son” of the late American missionary David Spencer, has his own ambitious plans to have a church in every city in the country to go along with his TV ministries. “We are a national church,” he said in 2015. A few years ago he told the Daystar network that he is “believing for the transformation of the nation.” Daystar described him as “working to establish the Kingdom of God in Nicaragua.”

Capitol Ministries says it “has planted ministries in 24 foreign federal capitals and has an objective of establishing 200 ministries in 200 foreign nations in the years to come.” It says that since Zamora’s appointment as Latin America director, “ministries have been birthed in Honduras, Uruguay, Ecuador, Mexico, and Costa Rica.” And it has asked its supporters to pray “for upcoming launches in the federal capitals of Brasilia, Brazil on August 29, and Panama City, Panama on October 22.”

*Update: After this blog post was published, Capitol Ministries contacted Right Wing Watch to let us know that its story about Drollinger’s Nicaragua trip has been edited to clarify that the comments attributed to him that do not appear in the video were meant to be described as things he said later to “explain” the “intent” of his talk in Nicaragua. With this clarification, the CM post no longer appears to report inaccurately what he told the crowd; readers can judge for themselves how closely his actual remarks, which described what makes a nation a Christian nation, matched what Capitol Ministries says was his intent.

===

==

new

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/the-terrifying-possibility-of-what-a-christian-nationalist-america-could-look-like/

The terrifying possibility of what a Christian nationalist America could look like

Chauncey DeVega / Salon July 23, 2019

The most compelling speculative fiction takes something about the world as it exists and alters it in such a way that the familiar is made into something provocative. This disruption of the familiar lies at the heart of the best speculative fiction.

America at present is already a surreal nightmare. A mentally unwell ignorant violent racist sexist greedy and cruel reality TV show host is president. He leads a political cult. Christian Nationalists and Christian Dominionists want to transform the United States into a “biblically correct” societyin violation of the United States Constitution and its guiding principle that church and the state should be separate.

And Donald Trump, a proud and resplendent sinner, is viewed by right-wing Christians as god’s prophet and their savior. And the so-called resistance and other people of conscience are still struggling to create a cohesive and coordinated movement to oppose American fascism as birthed by Donald Trump’s adminstration.

Michael Pence — Trump’s vice president — is a Christian Fascist who does his movement’s bidding as he and the Republican Party work to overturn women’s reproductive rights and freedoms as part of an overall assault on human rights and human dignity in America and around the world. Pence and the Christian Right’s obsessions with supposedly “protecting the unborn” and “living the principles of Jesus Christ” (their distorted version of him) does not extend to having any empathy or sympathy for the brown and black babies, children, and adults being held in Trump’s concentration camps and otherwise terrorized by Trump’s regime.

The corporation increasingly has power which rivals if not surpasses the nation-state. New technologies are radically altering the labor market and how people make sense of and perform their own identities. For example: the algorithm distributes resources and shapes individual’s desires, wants and life chances — all the while it remains invisible to most people. The American people are amusing themselves to death in a society where there are very high levels of loneliness but they are also “hyper-connected” to one another online. In total, the American people are under constant surveillance by corporations and the state. But most Americans do this willingly through **participatory totalitarianism.

Director and screenwriter Darcy Van Poelgeest’s powerful new graphic novel series “Little Bird’ (from publisher Image Comics) is some version of this present-day America and its malignant reality projected forward into the future.

"lil  Bird” (with art by Ian Bertram and colors by Matt Hollingsworth) tells the story of a Christian nationalist America led by the religious zealot “Bishop” who rules from the “New Vatican” in a decades-long war of conquest against Canada.

Poelgeest’s story is one of family, human dignity and resistance against oppressive power as shown through the coming of age story of the titular character and hero Little Bird, a 12-year-old girl and member of the First Nations who is trying to inspire the Canadian Resistance to fight on in its freedom struggle against the conquering American forces.

In my recent conversation with Darcy Van Poelgeest, we discussed the origins of “Little Bird,” the ways that it is a meditation on resistance and human dignity, and what it is like to watch America lose its way from the hope of the Obama years to the terror and cruelty of Donald Trump.

Poelgeest also explains how even history’s great villains such as Donald Trump actually believe that they are doing the right thing. In this conversation, Poelgeest also shares how the humanity of “Little Bird” channels what he learned from his mother’s political activism and the bravery of his Dutch grandparents during World War 2

no lnx

Little Bird” #5, the final issue of the series, was released last week. “Little Bird” will be available in a collected edition at a future date.

This conversation has been edited for clarity.

“Little Bird” is such a confident story. There is no regret or second guessing in the story. Because of that “Little Bird” is also very efficient. There is not a lot of exposition. You and your co-creators present the world simply as it exists and on its own terms. That is a very bold choice. How did you decide to proceed that way?

I have a great amount of respect for the readers and I think that is where my confidence comes from. I write for them. I am creating stories the way that I would like stories to be told to me.

In many ways I suppose I am doing it for myself. I feel like some writers do not have that much faith in their readers. I don’t understand this. At several of the signings for “Little Bird” that I have done people come up to me and we chat. They understand the story. I love that. They are getting the details and the subtext. I would rather rather risk the reader being challenged than just flipping through the pages and not having to think.

Where did that respect come from? This commitment to the truth of the story?

Long before you are a storyteller you are a story receiver. It always irritated me when I watched a movie or read a book — or any other type of entertainment for that matter — and I feel like it is being spoon-fed to me. It is not a nice feeling. Moreover, that means the story is not as engaging because by being challenged by a story we become part of it. We become invested in such a way that we are part of the story. We are made part of the process of telling that story. When everything is given to us by a story, even if it’s done in an exciting way, there is still that barrier.

Of course “Little Bird” reflects the angst — as well as hope — of this present moment of political and social tumult across the West and really in many ways around the world. When did you decide to write “Little Bird”?

In my first documentary project I interviewed indigenous youth who were incarcerated. I found myself in this jail for several days talking to young indigenous youth who had gotten in trouble with the law in some pretty bad ways. This was really an awakening to me regarding many of the challenges that the First Nations indigenous community in Canada are facing, specifically in British Columbia. This project gave me a very different perspective on their experiences and struggles. In the same project I also interviewed indigenous elders about the legacy of the residential school system here, the lasting impacts of that, most specifically on children being separated from their families.

As I continued to develop a relationship with the First Nations communities this became very important to me. More people need to understand these struggles and triumphs.

In “Little Bird” I do this by focusing on a young indigenous girl in a science fiction setting. And then of course while I was writing “Little Bird” Barack Obama was still president. I found his whole presidency very inspiring. But if you live long enough one gets to see the pendulum swings backward. So then I started wondering what happens after Barack Obama and that hopeful moment. When the pendulum swings back, how far does it go now?

You are a Canadian. What does the United States in this moment look like from afar?

It does not look good. “Little Bird” is quite far-fetched — but it looks a little less so far-fetched every day with Donald Trump being president. This is all very scary.

There is a hard truth that many people do not want to look at: We are all flawed, and in general, people are working from an honest place. That is a tough fact to accept for most. As much as I dislike Donald Trump, I do not believe that he wakes up in the morning and says to himself, “how can I make the world worse?” Donald Trump actually believes that what he is doing is good. Now how do we define “good”? What he is doing is mostly good for him and he obviously does not possess much empathy, but I think Trump thinks he is also doing good things for other people as well.

The character Bishop is a Christian Nationalist who leads this future United States in a holy war against Canada. There is a speech in “Little Bird” which sounds like it could have been delivered by Michael Pence or any other Christian Fascist. Despite being the aggressor, the American Empire in “Little Bird” also believes that it is a victim.

It does not matter how awful things are — there is someone doing these horrible things who actually believes they are doing the right thing. How do you change that person? How do you work towards changing such a person’s outlook on the world? That is very difficult, especially when it comes to religion. Those values, even if they are bad and dangerous, are so deeply embedded that most people are not even conscious of them. In “Little Bird” there are many discussions of the power of choices. But what are these choices that can really be made?

For Bishop’s speech I just put myself in that character’s head. This is easy to do when you accept the fact that these are truths for the character. That is really how they see the world. The character Bishop really does believe that he is doing the right thing. That he and his people are oppressed. There have been casualties on both sides. It’s very easy to convince people, even if they are the conquerors, that they are somehow oppressed if their cousin got murdered by someone in the resistance. 30 years into a war Bishop is able to speak from that place. There are people in that crowd who have been touched by the resistance.

How did you create the world of “Little Bird”? Is there a detailed story bible?

There is a logic to the world. Yes, I have a giant book. I asked myself, what does the world look like 2,000 years from now, where there are people called “mods” who are genetically modified both as a form of self-expression but also as a way of being more efficient at their job? The labor market is so competitive that you literally have to start changing your body to get a leg up on the next person. And this all starts to spiral out of control.

Bishop is speaking from a place where he can say that science has run away from us. He can say “Look what we’ve become in the name of progress!” And what makes Bishop so interesting to me is that there is some truth in what he is saying. Quite often in history with the benefit of hindsight we can see how dictators will take a small truth and manipulate and twist and turn it into something monstrous.

Your family is full of truth-tellers and resistance fighters. How does that inform your work?

It is just part of who I am. I do not think of myself as a political person. But then when I examine my own history I think about so many of the things that my grandparents did working with Green Peace, Amnesty International and for indigenous First Nations rights. My mother stood in front of bulldozers to protect an old growth forest that was going to be cut down in British Columbia. At the time I didn’t think much of about what she did and why. But then later in life I thought back about what she had done  and my respect for her just grew immensely.

What motivates your art?

It’s nothing I’ve ever stopped to think about. I am a very sensitive person. I was also a very sensitive child. One of my earliest obsessions was Jane Goodall. When I  was really young I wrote her a letter saying, “I’m going to study chimpanzees”. Even at that young age I just saw us, our humanity in them, and it was just a surreal awakening. I got caught up in this idea of “I need to help them”. They don’t have a voice. And I actually wrote Jane Goodall a letter when I was about 10 or so years old. She wrote me back on rice paper from a hut in Africa. That letter is hanging on my wall right now in a frame. It is a  source of inspiration.

I was also inspired by stories on my father’s side of the family because my grandmother and grandfather fought in the Dutch resistance where they smuggled American soldiers to safety, risking their lives to do so. We’re not often put in the situation to do things that brave, but I’m just inspired by people who step up and rise to the occasion.

===

ref

https://yyy.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jan/11/trump-administration-evangelical-influence-support

no lnx

The terrifying possibility of what a Christian nationalist America could look like

Vice President Mike Pence delivers remarks at the Christians United for Israel Washington Summit in Washington, D.C. Monday, July 8, 2019. (Official White House Photo by D. Myles Cullen)

Written by Chauncey DeVega / Salon July 23, 2019

The most compelling speculative fiction takes something about the world as it exists and alters it in such a way that the familiar is made into something provocative. This disruption of the familiar lies at the heart of the best speculative fiction.

America at present is already a surreal nightmare. A mentally unwell ignorant violent racist sexist greedy and cruel reality TV show host is president. He leads a political cult. Christian Nationalists and Christian Dominionists want to transform the United States into a “biblically correct” society in violation of the United States Constitution and its guiding principle that church and the state should be separate. And Donald Trump, a proud and resplendent sinner, is viewed by right-wing Christians as god’s prophet and their savior. And the so-called resistance and other people of conscience are still struggling to create a cohesive and coordinated movement to oppose American fascism as birthed by Donald Trump’s adminstration.

Michael Pence — Trump’s vice president — is a Christian Fascist who does his movement’s bidding as he and the Republican Party work to overturn women’s reproductive rights and freedoms as part of an overall assault on human rights and human dignity in America and around the world. Pence and the Christian Right’s obsessions with supposedly “protecting the unborn” and “living the principles of Jesus Christ” (their distorted version of him) does not extend to having any empathy or sympathy for the brown and black babies, children, and adults being held in Trump’s concentration camps and otherwise terrorized by Trump’s regime.

The corporation increasingly has power which rivals if not surpasses the nation-state. New technologies are radically altering the labor market and how people make sense of and perform their own identities. For example: the algorithm distributes resources and shapes individual’s desires, wants and life chances — all the while it remains invisible to most people. The American people are amusing themselves to death in a society where there are very high levels of loneliness but they are also “hyper-connected” to one another online. In total, the American people are under constant surveillance by corporations and the state. But most Americans do this willingly through participatory totalitarianism.

Director and screenwriter Darcy Van Poelgeest’s powerful new graphic novel series “Little Bird’ (from publisher Image Comics) is some version of this present-day America and its malignant reality projected forward into the future.

“Little Bird” (with art by Ian Bertram and colors by Matt Hollingsworth) tells the story of a Christian nationalist America led by the religious zealot “Bishop” who rules from the “New Vatican” in a decades-long war of conquest against Canada.

Poelgeest’s story is one of family, human dignity and resistance against oppressive power as shown through the coming of age story of the titular character and hero Little Bird, a 12-year-old girl and member of the First Nations who is trying to inspire the Canadian Resistance to fight on in its freedom struggle against the conquering American forces.

In my recent conversation with Darcy Van Poelgeest, we discussed the origins of “Little Bird,” the ways that it is a meditation on resistance and human dignity, and what it is like to watch America lose its way from the hope of the Obama years to the terror and cruelty of Donald Trump.

Poelgeest also explains how even history’s great villains such as Donald Trump actually believe that they are doing the right thing. In this conversation, Poelgeest also shares how the humanity of “Little Bird” channels what he learned from his mother’s political activism and the bravery of his Dutch grandparents during World War 2.

no lnx gul

“Brought to Jesus’: the evangelical grip on the Trump administration

The influence of evangelical Christianity is likely to become an important question as Trump finds himself dependent on them for political survival

Julian Borger in Washington

Fri 11 Jan 2019 07.00 GMT Last modified on Fri 18 Jan 2019 21.51 GMT

In setting out the Trump administration’s Middle East policy, one of the first things Mike Pompeo made clear to his audience in Cairo is that he had come to the region as “as an evangelical Christian”.

In his speech at the American University in Cairo, Pompeo said that in his state department office: “I keep a Bible open on my desk to remind me of God and his word, and the truth.”

The secretary of state’s primary message in Cairo was that the US was ready once more to embrace conservative Middle Eastern regimes, no matter how repressive, if they made common cause against Iran.

His second message was religious. In his visit to Egypt, he came across as much as a preacher as a diplomat. He talked about “America’s innate goodness” and marveled at a newly built cathedral as “a stunning testament to the Lord’s hand”.

['Toxic Christianity': the evangelicals creating champions for Trump

Read more]

The desire to erase Barack Obama’s legacy, Donald Trump’s instinctive embrace of autocrats, and the private interests of the Trump Organisation have all been analysed as driving forces behind the administration’s foreign policy.

The gravitational pull of white evangelicals has been less visible. But it could have far-reaching policy consequences. Vice President Mike Pence and Pompeo both cite evangelical theology as a powerful motivating force.

Just as he did in Cairo, Pompeo called on the congregation of a Kansan megachurch three years ago to join a fight of good against evil.

“We will continue to fight these battles,” the then congressman said at the Summit church in Wichita. “It is a never-ending struggle … until the rapture. Be part of it. Be in the fight.”

For Pompeo’s audience, the rapture invoked an apocalyptical Christian vision of the future, a final battle between good and evil, and the second coming of Jesus Christ, when the faithful will ascend to heaven and the rest will go to hell.

For many US evangelical Christians, one of the key preconditions for such a moment is the gathering of the world’s Jews in a greater Israel between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. It is a belief, known as premillenial dispensationalism or Christian Zionism – and it has very real potential consequences for US foreign policy.

It directly colours views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and indirectly, attitudes towards Iran, broader Middle East geopolitics and the primacy of protecting Christian minorities. In his Cairo visit, Pompeo heaped praise on Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, for building the new cathedral, but made no reference to the 60,000 political prisoners the regime is thought to be holding, or its routine use of torture.

Pompeo is an evangelical Presbyterian, who says he was “brought to Jesus” by other cadets at the West Point military academy in the 1980s.

“He knows best how his faith interacts with his political beliefs and the duties he undertakes as secretary of state,” said Stan van den Berg, senior pastor of Pompeo’s church in Wichita in an email. “Suffice to say, he is a faithful man, he has integrity, he has a compassionate heart, a humble disposition and a mind for wisdom.”

As Donald Trump finds himself ever more dependent on them for his political survival, the influence of Pence, Pompeo and the ultra-conservative white Evangelicals who stand behind them is likely to grow.

“Many of them relish the second coming because for them it means eternal life in heaven,” Andrew Chesnut, professor of religious studies at Virginia Commonwealth University said. “There is a palpable danger that people in high position who subscribe to these beliefs will be readier to take us into a conflict that brings on Armageddon.”

Chesnut argues that Christian Zionism has become the “majority theology” among white US Evangelicals, who represent about a quarter of the adult population. In a 2015 poll, 73% of evangelical Christians said events in Israel are prophesied in the Book of Revelation. Respondents were not asked specifically whether their believed developments in Israel would actually bring forth the apocalypse.

The relationship between evangelicals and the president himself is complicated.

Trump himself embodies the very opposite of a pious Christian ideal. Trump is not churchgoer. He is profane, twice divorced, who has boasted of sexually assaulting women. But white evangelicals have embraced him.

Eighty per cent of white evangelicals voted for him in 2016, and his popularity among them is remains in the 70s. While other white voters have flaked away in the first two years of his presidency, white evangelicals have become his last solid bastion.

Some leading evangelicals see Trump as a latterday King Cyrus, the sixth-century BC Persian emperor who liberated the Jews from Babylonian captivity.

The comparison is made explicitly in The Trump Prophecy, a religious film screened in 1,200 cinemas around the country in October, depicting a retired firefighter who claims to have heard God’s voice, saying: “I’ve chosen this man, Donald Trump, for such a time as this.”

Lance Wallnau, a self-proclaimed prophet who features in the film, has called Trump “God’s Chaos Candidate” and a “modern Cyrus”.

“Cyrus is the model for a nonbeliever appointed by God as a vessel for the purposes of the faithful,” said Katherine Stewart, who writes extensively about the Christian right.

She added that they welcome his readiness to break democratic norms to combat perceived threats to their values and way of life.

“The Christian nationalist movement is characterized by feelings of persecution and, to some degree, paranoia – a clear example is the idea that there is somehow a ‘war on Christmas’,” Stewart said. “People in those positions will often go for authoritarian leaders who will do whatever is necessary to fight for their cause.”

Trump was raised as a Presbyterian, but leaned increasingly towards evangelical preachers as he began contemplating a run for the presidency.

Trump’s choice of Pence as a running mate was a gesture of his commitment, and four of the six preachers at his inauguration were evangelicals, including White and Franklin Graham, the eldest son of the preacher Billy Graham, who defended Trump through his many sex scandals, pointing out: “We are all sinners.”

Having lost control of the House of Representatives in November, and under ever closer scrutiny for his campaign’s links to the Kremlin, Trump’s instinct has been to cleave ever closer to his most loyal supporters.

Almost alone among major demographic groups, white evangelicals are overwhelmingly in favour of Trump’s border wall, which some preachers equate with fortifications in the Bible.

Evangelical links have also helped shape US alliances in the Trump presidency. As secretary of state, Pompeo has been instrumental in forging link with other evangelical leaders in the hemisphere, includingGuatemala’s Jimmy Morales and the new Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro. Both have undertaken to follow the US lead in moving their embassies in Israel to Jerusalem.

Trump’s order to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv – over the objections of his foreign policy and national security team – is a striking example of evangelical clout.

[Sheldon Adelson: the casino mogul driving Trump's Middle East policy

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The move was also pushed by Las Vegas billionaire and Republican mega-donor, Sheldon Adelson, but the orchestration of the embassy opening ceremony last May, reflected the audience Trump was trying hardest to appease.

The two pastors given the prime speaking slots were both ardent Christian Zionists: Robert Jeffress, a Dallas pastor on record as saying Jews, like Muslims and Mormons, are bound for hell; and John Hagee, a televangelist and founder of Christians United for Israel (Cufi), who once said that Hitler and the Holocaust were part of God’s plan to get Jews back to Israel, to pave the way for the Rapture.

For many evangelicals, the move cemented Trump’s status as the new Cyrus, who oversaw the Jews return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple.

The tightening of the evangelical grip on the administration has also been reflected in a growing hostility to the UN, often portrayed as a sinister and godless organisation.

Since the US ambassador, Nikki Haley, announced her departure in October and Pompeo took more direct control, the US mission has become increasingly combative, blocking references to gender and reproductive health in UN documents.

Some theologians also see an increasingly evangelical tinge to the administration’s broader Middle East policies, in particular its fierce embrace of Binyamin Netanyahu’s government, the lack of balancing sympathy for the Palestinians – and the insistent demonisation of the Iranian government.

[US will expel every last Iranian boot from Syria, says Mike Pompeo

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Evangelicals, Chesnut said, “now see the United States locked into a holy war against the forces of evil who they see as embodied by Iran”.

In a speech at the end of a regional tour on Thursday, Pompeo reprised the theme, describing Iran as a “cancerous influence”.

This zeal for a defining struggle has thus far found common cause with more secular hawks such as the national security adviser, John Bolton, and Trump’s own drive to eliminate the legacy of Barack Obama, whose signature foreign policy achievement was the 2015 nuclear deal with Tehran, which Trump abrogated last May.

In conversations with European leaders such as Emmanuel Macron and Theresa May, Trump has reportedly insisted he has no intention of going to war with Iran. His desire to extricate US troops from Syria marks a break with hawks, religious and secular, who want to contain Iranian influence there.

But the logic of his policy of ever-increasing pressure, coupled with unstinting support for Israel and Saudi Arabia, makes confrontation with Iran ever more likely.

One of the most momentous foreign policy questions of 2019 is whether Trump can veer away from the collision course he has helped set in motion – perhaps conjuring up a last minute deal, as he did with North Korea – or instead welcome conflict as a distraction from his domestic woes, and sell it to the faithful as a crusade.

==

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/christian-nationalists-have-a-plan/

Christian nationalists have a plan

written by Paul Rosenberg / Salon July 7, 2019

There is a difference between exercising religious beliefs and imposing them on others. Our Constitution fiercely protects the former and expressly prohibits the latter.

— Rep. Joseph Kennedy III

It’s easy for significant stories to get lost in the sound and fury of Donald Trump’s frontal assault on American democracy, epitomized by his militarized co-opting of Washington’s Fourth of July celebration. As my interview with Angie Maxwell, co-author of “The Long Southern Strategy,” shows, Trump’s presidency was decades in the making, with racism, sexism. and fundamentalism all playing crucial roles. The forces that brought him to power are ultimately far more consequential than he is.

That’s why a cluster of recent developments involving questions of religious privilege deserve far more attention from the public and the media than they have received. These events reflect both the advancement of a theocratic, “dominionist” worldviewthat elevates the state-sanctified religious liberty of some at the obvious expense of others — and a rising tide of liberal, secular resistance.

On July 2, federal prosecutors announced they would retry humanitarian aid volunteer Scott Warren on two charges related to aiding migrants along the U.S.-Mexico border. Warren, whom Amnesty International has previously said “would be a prisoner of conscience” if convicted, was “detained for his volunteer activities motivated by humanitarian principles and his religious beliefs.”

Warren regards himself as a devout Christian, driven to follow the words of Jesus in the gospel of Matthew: “For I was hungry and you fed me, thirsty and you gave me to drink, an alien and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, sick and you ministered to me.” Warren’s religious freedom clearly plays no role in the Trump administration’s thinking. It’s the negative space that throws everything else into sharp relief.

The very next day,religious freedom was suddenly center stage again, as the VA announced new policies “to protect religious liberty” by trampling on the rights of religious minorities, in particular allowing religious displays in public lobbies, an issue I’ve written about before which is the subject of a recently-filed lawsuit by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. MRFF president Mikey Weinstein denounced the policy move as “both tragic and predictable in this hyper-dangerous era.”

To add another layer of confusion, the VA justified itself, in part, by referencing a recent Supreme Court decision on the Bladensburg Peace Cross, a century-old monument whose destruction would be “quite different from erecting or adopting new ones,” according to Justice Samuel Alito’s decision. New displays, of course, are precisely what the VA is addressing. Details, details.

Throughout such disputes, there’s a profound asymmetry: conservatives retell a few simple mythic just-so storiesabout an ideal cherished past moment, and how we’ve lost our way. America’s purported founding as a “Christian nation” is the most striking example of this, but far from the only one. Progressives counter with a bewildering multitude of contradictory facts, ultimately amounting to a complex story of protracted struggles stretching far beyond the limits of the simplistic narratives conservatives tell.

This happened again at the June 25 congressional hearing on the “Do No Harm” Act to remedy abuses of the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act, abuses that have ramped up significantly under the Trump administration. It happened earlier this year in Minnesota, with threatened drastic cuts to the State Historical Society budget, as reported by Frederick Clarkson at Religion Dispatches the same day as the “Do No Harm” hearing.  And it’s happening again with the VA’s decision.

Clarkson’s reporting was his latest on Project Blitz — a Christian right stealth state legislative campaign first exposed by him early last year, and reported here at Salon. As I wrote then, its guiding vision is heavily influenced by pseudo-historian David Barton, who “has been discredited by every American historian I know,” according to evangelical historian John Fea. (See Fea’s latest on Barton here.) The myth of America’s founding as a Christian nation, and our supposed need to restore what’s been lost, are its guiding lights, with three proposed tiers of legislation.

First comes “Legislation Regarding Our Country’s Religious Heritage.” Second come “Resolutions and Proclamations Recognizing the Importance of Religious History and Freedom.” And the third and final chapter is, “Religious Liberty Protection Legislation.” That last has “two main underlying intentions,” according to Clarkson. “First to denigrate the LGBTQ community, and second to defend and advance the right to discriminate…. As the late theocratic theologian R.J. Rushdoony said, ‘Only the right have rights.'”

The “Do No Harm Act” hearing focused directly on the underlying intentions of the third tier, although at the federal level. (A recent USA Today joint investigation highlighted the state-level side.) We focus on it first because it reveals early signs of the bitter fruit Project Blitz holds in store for America. But Clarkson’s latest reporting shines a sharp light on how vigorously and deceptively — and even unconstitutionally — the first two tiers are being advanced at state level, in pursuit of the long campaign to remake American culture in a theocratic mold.

This “slippery slope of religious exemptions has gotten us into explicit religious discrimination in adoption and foster care,” Clarkson told me, pointing to two key areas highlighted in the congressional hearing. “Part of this is Project Blitz, part of it is Trump administration policy.”

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But the idea that these “religious freedom” exemptions are “being used to justify discrimination” is, Clarkson says, far too limited. “This is about profound religious supremacism and religious bigotry that undergirds long-term theocratic political agendas.” The discrimination is vitally important, of course. But unless we respond much more vigorously, far worse could lie ahead.

The “Do No Harm” hearing took place before the House Committee on Education and Labor, whose Chair, Rep. Robert Scott, D-Va., is the bill’s coauthor, along with Rep. Joseph Kennedy III, D-Mass. (quoted above). Republicans began their issue-clouding efforts by questioning why the hearing was before them, a point that Scott made perfectly clear from the outset, noting that it was 78 years to the day since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 8802, banning employment discrimination by private defense-related contractors. Religiously-justified discrimination by government contractors was the overwhelming focus of the testimony and questioning that followed — at least on the Democratic side. Scott then turned to religion.

“Religion has played a vital role in our nation’s history. It has furthered social justice causes, such as the abolitionist movement, civil rights movement and movement to end child labor,” Scott said, “However, some have used religion as a pawn to justify slavery, Jim Crow, the slaughter of our native populations, and other horrific acts.” In fact, he noted that the landmark case striking down bans on interracial marriage, Loving v. Virginia, had reversed a lower court that had upheld the ban, explicitly relying on the circuit court judge’s religious views.

The Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 “was meant to be a shield to protect,” Kennedy said in his statement. “However, over the years, RFRA has morphed from a shield of protection to a sword of infringement, allowing employers to undermine basic workplace protections, organizations to stonewall child labor investigations, and health providers to deny needed care for victims of sexual abuse.”

Rachel Laser, president of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, made a similar point in her testimony. “The Trump administration is ignoring the intent and constitutional limitations on RFRA,” she said. Rather, it is weaponizing the law “to undermine civil rights protections, deny people access to health care and government services, and even deny children loving homes.”

...

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new

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/ginni-thomas-teams-up-with-james-okeefe-in-dark-money-operation-to-protect-trump/

Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and a right-wing political activist, has launched a new set of organizations meant to “protect President Trump” and attack Democrats and left-leaning organizations, according to an article published by The Intercept this week.

The well-connected Thomas, a former Heritage Foundation staffer, presented her plans to build a “robust infrastructure” to a meeting of the secretive Council for National Policy last month. The CNP is a strategy-development-and-sharing network that includes leaders across the U.S. religious and political Right, including people like neo-Confederate Christian Reconstrucionist Michael Peroutka. CNP members pushed Trump to sign an executive order on religious liberty.

Thomas is planning to build a “robust infrastructure” of affiliated organizations. Among her partners in the new project are longtime right-wing operative Richard Viguerie; undercover videographer and political tricksterJames O’Keefe; Republican campaign lawyer Cleta Mitchell; and Bill Meierling, chief marketing officer for the American Legislative Exchange Council, a matchmaker for corporate lobbyists and conservative legislators willing to do their bidding.

A slide from Thomas’s presentation at Council for National Policy notes, “Long Term teams taking shape will focus on Education, Media, Entertainment/Arts, Faith, Corporate/Economic, Government, Science, and more”—nearly identical to the list of spheres of cultural influence targeted by Religious Right proponents of Seven Mountain:{s Dominionism.}:

The Intercept also reported that Thomas had spoken at another CNP event last October, at which she declared, “The hard left is in control of the Democrat Party … And they’re controlling the media and corporations and Hollywood and education.”

This January, Thomas organized a White House meeting where she was joined by anti-Muslim activist Frank Gaffney and others where, among other things, they complained that White House aides were blocking right-wing Trump supporters from getting administration jobs.

Thomas and many of her partners were among conservative activists who mobilized a year ago to try to replace then-House Speaker Paul Ryan with right-wing favorite Rep. Jim Jordan.

Thomas presented United in Purpose “Impact” awards to O’Keefe, Gaffney, and Sean Hannity in 2017. In 2016, TPM reported that Thomas “wanted to ‘target’ the ‘most questionable’ precincts in Virginia with an anti-voter fraud campaign.”

Thomas also interviewed right-wing radio host Jesse Lee Peterson for the Daily Caller in 2016. The two talked about what Thomas called “race hustlers” who she said are “in the business of keeping blacks angry” and about Black Lives Matter, which Peterson called “evil,” “wicked,” and “worse than the KKK.” Last year, Thomas reportedly hired a former Turning Point USA staffer who had resigned after The New Yorker published screenshots of text messages that included a text that said “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE.”

Tags: Bill MeierlingCleta MitchellGinni ThomasJames O'KeefeRichard ViguerieElection 2020Seven MountainsALECAmerican Legislative Exchange CouncilCouncil for National Policy

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uk tablid

End of the World fears: First red heifer 'born in Israel in 2,000 years fulfils prophecy'

THE BIRTH of a red heifer in Israel, said to be the first in 2,000 years and a “viable candidate” to fulfil Biblical prophecy, has sparked fears the End of the World is near.

By NICOLE STINSON

PUBLISHED: 00:14, Wed, Sep 12, 2018 | UPDATED: 07:51, Wed, Sep 12, 2018

Israel: Temple Institute welcomes newborn red heifer

vid?

A red heifer born in Israel late last month is being closely examined by The Temple Institute, a religious organisation based in Jerusalem, after it has been claimed the animal could fulfil a prophecy in the Jewish and Christian holy books.

Numbers, chapter 19 in the Christian Bible details how God told Moses and the Israelites to bring a “a red heifer without defect or blemish” which was to burned as part of a cleansing ceremony.

It is said the sacrifice of a red heifer is essential for the construction of a third temple in Jerusalem, which some theologians have claimed could bring about the return of the messiah and Judgement Day.

Very few candidates for the red heifer have been found and most have been disqualified due to blemishes or pregnancies, which is why the The Temple Institute has become so interested in this latest birth.

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So far it is understood the heifer is pure red without any blemishes, however this could change as the animal grows.

The Temple Institute was setup in 1987 with its main focus being the rebuilding of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem.

On its website the organisation claims “the tenth red heifer will be prepared by the messiah”.

They also claim “there has been no red heifer for the past 2,000 years” adding: “If there are now red heifers – is ours the era that will need them?”

End of the world red heifer

End of the World fears: Some theologians believe the red heifer will trigger the second coming (Image: THE TEMPLE INSTITUTE/ YOUTUBE • GETTY)

Pastor explains Bible's requirements for 'sacred' red heifer

Play Video

Sharing a video of the red heifer on YouTube, The Institute said: “One week after its birth the heifer underwent an extensive examination by rabbinical experts, who determined that the heifer is currently a viable candidate for the Biblical red heifer (para aduma) described in Numbers, chapter 19.”

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The animal will then be examined again in three months time to see if it has developed any blemishes which would disqualify it.

The Institute said: “It will be examined again in three months time to determine whether it continues to possess the necessary qualifications for the red heifer, a necessary prerequisite for the renewal of the Divine service in the Holy Temple.

“The rabbinical experts who conducted the examination stress that the heifer, while currently bearing the required qualifications could, at any time in the future, become disqualified through natural causes, and therefore the heifer will be periodically reexamined.”

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https://grist.org/article/scherer-christian/

2005

kind of secular apocalyptic sensibility pervades much contemporary writing about our current world. Many books about environmental dangers, whether it be the ozone layer, or global warming or pollution of the air or water, or population explosion, are cast in an apocalyptic mold.

– Historian Paul Boyer

When he opened the sixth seal, I looked, and behold, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth, the full moon became like blood, and the stars of the sky fell to the earth as the fig tree sheds its winter fruit when shaken by a gale; the sky vanished like a scroll that is rolled up, and every mountain and island was removed from its place …

– Revelation 6:12-14

Abortion. Same-sex marriage. Stem-cell research.

U.S. legislators backed by the Christian right vote against these issues with near-perfect consistency. That probably doesn’t surprise you, but this might: Those same legislators are equally united and unswerving in their opposition to environmental protection.

See the numbers laid out in graph form, for the Senate and the House:

Senate ratings chart

House ratings chart

See how individual senators and representatives score:

Senate Excel spreadsheet

House Excel spreadsheet

Forty-five senators and 186 representatives in 2003 earned 80- to 100-percent approval ratings from the nation’s three most influential Christian right advocacy groups — the Christian Coalition, Eagle Forum, and Family Resource Council. Many of those same lawmakers also got flunking grades — less than 10 percent, on average — from the League of Conservation Voters last year.

These statistics are puzzling at first. Opposing abortion and stem-cell research is consistent with the religious right’s belief that life begins at the moment of conception. Opposing gay marriage is consistent with its claim that homosexual activity is proscribed by the Bible. Both beliefs are a familiar staple of today’s political discourse. But a scripture-based justification for anti-environmentalism?*

Many Christian fundamentalists feel that concern for the future of our planet is irrelevant, because it has no future. They believe we are living in the End Time, when the son of God will return, the righteous will enter heaven, and sinners will be condemned to eternal hellfire. They may also believe, along with millions of other Christian fundamentalists, that environmental destruction is not only to be disregarded but actually welcomed — even hastened — as a sign of the coming Apocalypse.

And those politicians are just the powerful tip of the iceberg. A 2002 Time/CNN poll found that 59 percent of Americans believe that the prophecies found in the Book of Revelation are going to come true. Nearly one-quarter think the Bible predicted the 9/11 attacks.We are not talking about a handful of fringe lawmakers who hold or are beholden to these beliefs. The 231 legislators (all but five of them Republicans) who received an average 80 percent approval rating or higher from the leading religious-right organizations make up more than 40 percent of the U.S. Congress. (The only Democrat to score 100 percent with the Christian Coalition was Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia, who earlier this year quoted from the Book of Amos on the Senate floor: “The days will come, sayeth the Lord God, that I will send a famine in the land. Not a famine of bread or of thirst for water, but of hearing the word of the Lord!”) These politicians include some of the most powerful figures in the U.S. government, as well as key environmental decision makers: Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), Senate Majority Whip Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Senate Republican Conference Chair Rick Santorum (R-Penn.), Senate Republican Policy Chair Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), House Majority Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, and quite possibly President Bush. (Earlier this month, a cover story by Ron Suskind in The New York Times Magazine described how Bush’s faith-based governance has led to, among other things, a disastrous “crusade” in the Middle East and has laid the groundwork for “a battle between modernists and fundamentalists, pragmatists and true believers, reason and religion.”)

Like it or not, faith in the Apocalypse is a powerful driving force in modern American politics. In the 2000 election, the Christian right cast at least 15 million votes, or about 30 percent of those that propelled Bush into the presidency. And there’s no doubt that arch-conservative Christians will be just as crucial in the coming election: GOP political strategist Karl Rove hopes to mobilize 20 million fundamentalist voters to help sweep Bush back into office on Nov. 2 and to maintain a Republican majority in Congress, says Joan Bokaer, director of Theocracy Watch, a project of the Center for Religion, Ethics, and Social Policy at Cornell University.

Because of its power as a voting bloc, the Christian right has the ear, if not the souls, of much of the nation’s leadership. Some of those leaders are End-Time believers themselves. Others are not. Either way, their votes are heavily swayed by an electoral base that accepts the Bible as literal truth and eagerly awaits the looming Apocalypse. And that, in turn, is sobering news for those who hope for the protection of the earth, not its destruction.

Once Upon End Time

Ever since the dawn of Christianity, groups of believers have searched the scriptures for signs of the End Time and the Second Coming. Today, most of the roughly 50 million right-wing fundamentalist Christians in the United States believe in some form of End-Time theology.

Those 50 million believers make up only a subset of the estimated 100 million born-again evangelicals in the United States, who are by no means uniformly right-wing anti-environmentalists. In fact, the political stances of evangelicals on the environment and other issues range widely; the Evangelical Environmental Network, for example, has melded its biblical interpretation with good environmental science to justify and promote stewardship of the earth. But the political and cultural impact of the extreme Christian right is difficult to overestimate.

It is also difficult to understand without grasping the complex belief systems underlying and driving it. While there are many divergent End-Time theologies and sects, the most politically influential are the dispensationalists and reconstructionists.

Tune in to any of America’s 2,000 Christian radio stations or 250 Christian TV stations and you’re likely to get a heady dose of dispensationalism, an End-Time doctrine invented in the 19th century by the Irish-Anglo theologian John Nelson Darby. Dispensationalists espouse a “literal” interpretation of the Bible that offers a detailed chronology of the impending end of the world. (Many mainstream theologians dispute that literality, arguing that Darby misinterprets and distorts biblical passages.) Believers link that chronology to current events — four hurricanes hitting Florida, gay marriages in San Francisco, the 9/11 attacks — as proof that the world is spinning out of control and that we are what dispensationalistwriter Hal Lindsey calls “the terminal generation.” The social and environmental crises of our times, dispensationalists say, are portents of the Rapture, when born-again Christians, living and dead, will be taken up into heaven.

“All over the earth, graves will explode as the occupants soar into the heavens,” preaches dispensationalist pastor John Hagee, of the Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas. On the heels of that Rapture, nonbelievers left behind on earth will endure seven years of unspeakable suffering called the Great Tribulation, which will culminate in the rise of the Antichrist and the final battle of Armageddon between God and Satan. Upon winning that battle, Christ will send all unbelievers into the pits of hellfire, re-green the planet, and reign on earth in peace with His followers for a millennium.

Dispensationalists haven’t cornered the market on End-Time interpretation. The reconstructionists (also known as dominionists), a smaller but politically influential sect, put the onus for the Lord’s return not in the hands of biblical prophesy but in political activism. They believe that Christ will only make his Second Coming when the world has prepared a place for Him, and that the first step in readying His arrival is to Christianize America.

“Christian politics has as its primary intent the conquest of the land — of men, families, institutions, bureaucracies, courts, and governments for the Kingdom of Christ,” writes reconstructionist George Grant. Christian dominion will be achieved by ending the separation of church and state, replacing U.S. democracy with a theocracy ruled by Old Testament law, and cutting all government social programs, instead turning that work over to Christian churches. Reconstructionists also would abolish government regulatory agencies, such as the U.S. EPA, because they are a distraction from their goal of Christianizing America, and subsequently, the rest of the world. “World conquest. That’s what Christ has commissioned us to accomplish,” says Grant. “We must win the world with the power of the Gospel. And we must never settle for anything less.” Only when that conquest is complete can the Lord return.

Don’t Worry, Be Happy

People under the spell of such potent prophecies cannot be expected to worry about the environment. Why care about the earth when the droughts, floods, and pestilence brought by ecological collapse are signs of the Apocalypse foretold in the Bible? Why care about global climate change when you and yours will be rescued in the Rapture? And why care about converting from oil to solar when the same God who performed the miracle of the loaves and fishes can whip up a few billion barrels of light crude with a Word?

Many End-Timers believe that until Jesus’ return, the Lord will provide. In America’s Providential History, a popular reconstructionist high-school history textbook, authors Mark Beliles and Stephen McDowell tell us that: “The secular or socialist has a limited resource mentality and views the world as a pie … that needs to be cut up so everyone can get a piece.” However, “the Christian knows that the potential in God is unlimited and that there is no shortage of resources in God’s Earth. The resources are waiting to be tapped.” In another passage, the writers explain: “While many secularists view the world as overpopulated, Christians know that God has made the earth sufficiently large with plenty of resources to accommodate all of the people.”

Natural-resource depletion and overpopulation, then, are not concerns for End-Timers — and nor are other ecological catastrophes, which are viewed by dispensationalists as presaging the Great Tribulation. Support for this view comes from an 11-word passage in Matthew 24:7: “[T]here shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places.” Other End-Timers see suggestions of ecological meltdown in Revelation’s four horsemen of the Apocalypse — War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death — and they cite a verse mentioning costly wheat, barley, and oil as foretelling food and fossil-fuel shortages. During the End Time, the four horsemen shall be “given power over a fourth of the earth to kill by sword, famine and plague, and by the wild beasts of the earth.” Some End-Timers note that Revelation 8:8-11 predicts a fiery mountain falling into the sea and causing great destruction, followed by a blazing star plummeting from the sky. This star is called “Wormwood,” which dispensationalists say translates loosely in Ukrainian as “Chernobyl.”

A plethora of End-Time preachers, tracts, films, and websites hawk environmental cataclysm as Good News — a harbinger of the imminent Second Coming. Hal Lindsey’s 1970 End-Time “non-fiction” work, The Late Great Planet Earth, is the classic of the genre; the movie version pummels viewers with stock footage of nuclear blasts, polluting smokestacks, raging floods, and killer bees. Likewise, dispensationalist author Tim LaHaye’s “Left Behind” novels — at one point selling 1.5 million copies per month — weave ecological disaster into an action-adventure account of prophesy.

At RaptureReady.com, the “Rapture Index” tracks all the latest news in relation to biblical prophecy. Among its leading environmental indicators of Apocalypse are oil supply and price, famine, drought, plagues, wild weather, floods, and climate. RaptureReady webmaster Todd Strandberg writes to explain why climate change made the list: “I used to think there was no real need for Christians to monitor the changes related to greenhouse gases. If it was going to take a couple hundred years for things to get serious, I assumed the nearness of the End Times would overshadow this problem. With the speed of climate change now seen as moving much faster, global warming could very well be a major factor in the plagues of the tribulation.”

Another prophecy index points to acts of nature (drought in Ethiopia, famine in South Africa, floods in Russia, fires in Arizona, heat waves in India, and the breakup of the Antarctic ice shelf) as proof of the approaching doomsday, noting that “When these things begin to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nigh” (Luke 21:28).

According to a chart on the End-Time website ApocalypseSoon.org, we are at “the beginning of sorrows” (Matthew 24:3-8) marking the Great Tribulation. The site links to a BBC News article on infectious diseases and a chronicle of extreme weather events on Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ross Gelbspan’s climate-change website as evidence of those unfolding sorrows. However, it adds a stern disclaimer regarding these external links: “We do not, by any means, approve or recommend some of the sites that this page links to. They were chosen simply because they document literally what the Word of God prophesies for the End Days.”

If I Had a Hammer

To understand how the Christian right worldview is shaping and even fueling congressional anti-environmentalism, consider two influential born-again lawmakers: House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) and Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chair James Inhofe (R-Okla.).

DeLay, who has considerable control over the agenda in the House, has called for “march[ing] forward with a Biblical worldview” in U.S. politics, reports Peter Perlin The Washington Post Magazine. DeLay wants to convert America into a “God centered” nation whose government promotes prayer, worship, and the teaching of Christian values.

Inhofe, the Senate’s most outspoken environmental critic, is also unwavering in his wish to remake America as a Christian state. Speaking at the Christian Coalition’s Road to Victory rally just before the GOP sweep of the 2002 midterm elections, he promised the faithful, “When we win this revolution in November, you’ll be doing the Lord’s work, and He will richly bless you for it!”

Neither DeLay nor Inhofe include environmental protection in “the Lord’s work.” Both have ranted against the EPA, calling it “the Gestapo.” DeLay has fought to gut the Clean Air and Endangered Species acts. Last year, Inhofe invited a stacked-deck of fossil fuel-funded climate-change skeptics to testify at a Senate hearing that climaxed with him calling global warming “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.”

DeLay has said bluntly that he intends to smite the “socialist” worldview of “secular humanists,” whom, he argues, control the U.S. political system, media, public schools, and universities. He called the 2000 presidential election an apocalyptic “battle for souls,” a fight to the death against the forces of liberalism, feminism, and environmentalism that are corrupting America. The utopian dreams of such movements are doomed, argues the majority leader, because they do not stem from God.

“DeLay is motivated more than anything by power,” says Jan Reid, coauthor with Lou Dubose of The Hammer, a just-published biography of DeLay. “But he also believes in the power of the coming Millennium [of Jesus Christ], and it helps shape his vision on government and the world.” This may explain why DeLay’s Capitol office furnishings include a marble replica of the Ten Commandments and a wall poster that reads: “This Could Be The Day” — meaning Judgment Day.

DeLay is also a self-declared member of the Christian Zionists, an End-Time faction numbering 20 million Americans. Christian Zionists believe that the 1948 creation of the state of Israel marked the first event in what author Hal Lindsey calls the “countdown to Armageddon” and they are committed to making that doomsday clock tick faster, speeding Christ’s return.

In 2002, DeLay visited pastor John Hagee’s Cornerstone Church. Hagee preached a fiery message as simple as it was horrifying: “The war between America and Iraq is the gateway to the Apocalypse!” he said, urging his followers to support the war, perhaps in order to bring about the Second Coming. After Hagee finished, DeLay rose to second the motion. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “what has been spoken here tonight is the truth from God.”

With those words — broadcast to 225 Christian TV and radio stations — DeLay placed himself squarely inside the End-Time camp, a faction willing to force the Apocalypse upon the rest of the world. In part, DeLay may embrace Hagee and others like him in a calculated attempt to win fundamentalist votes — but he was also raised a Southern Baptist, steeped in a literal interpretation of the Bible and End-Time dogma. Biographer Dubose says that the majority leader probably doesn’t grasp the complexities of dispensationalist and reconstructionist theology, but “I am convinced that he believes [in] it.” For DeLay, Dubose told me, “If John Hagee says it, then it is true.”

Onward Christian Senators

James Inhofe might be an environmentalist’s worst nightmare. The Oklahoma senator makes major policy decisions based on heavy corporate and theological influences, flawed science, and probably an apocalyptic worldview — and he chairs the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

That committee’s links to corporate funders are both easier to trace and more infamous than its ties to religious fundamentalism, and it’s true that the influence of money can scarcely be overstated. From 1999 to 2004, Inhofe received more than $588,000 from the fossil-fuel industry, electric utilities, mining, and other natural-resource interests, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Eight of the nine other Republican members of Inhofe’s committee received an average of $408,000 per senator from the energy and natural resource sector over the same period. By contrast, the eight committee Democrats and one Independent came away with an average of just $132,000 per senator from that same sector since 1999.

But the influence of theology, although less discussed, is no less significant. Inhofe, like DeLay, is a Christian Zionist. While the senator has not overtly expressed his religious views in his environmental committee, he has when speaking on other issues. In a Senate foreign-policy speech, Inhofe argued that the U.S. should ally itself unconditionally with Israel “because God said so.” Quoting the Bible as the divine Word of God, Inhofe cited Genesis 13:14-17 — “for all the land which you see, to you will I give it, and to your seed forever” — as justification for permanent Israeli occupation of the West Bank and for escalating aggression against the Palestinians.

Inhofe also openly supports dispensationalist Pat Robertson, who touts every tornado, hurricane, plague, and suicide bombing as a sure sign of God’s return; who accused both Jimmy Carter and George Bush Sr. of being followers of Lucifer; and who makes no secret of the efforts of his Christian Coalition to control the Republican Party, according to Theocracy Watch.

A good fundamentalist, Inhofe scored a perfect 100 percent rating in 2003 from all three major Christian-right advocacy groups, while earning a 5 percent from the League of Conservation Voters (and a string of zeroes from 1997 to 2002). Likewise, eight of the nine other Republicans on the Environment and Public Works Committee earned an average 94 percent approval rating in 2003 from the Christian right, while scoring a dismal 4 percent average environmental approval rating. The one exception proves the rule: Moderate Lincoln Chafee (R.-R.I.) last year earned a 79 percent LCV rating and just 41 percent from the religious right.

As committee chair, Inhofe has subtly chosen scripture over science. The origins of his 2003 Senate speech attacking the science behind global climate change, for example, reveal his two masters: the speech is traceable to fossil fuel industry think tanks and petrochemical dollars — but also to the pseudo-science of Christian right websites. In that two-hour diatribe, Inhofe dismissed global warming by comparing it to a 1970s scientific scare that suggested the planet was cooling — a hypothesis, he fails to note, held by only a minority of climatologists at the time. Inhofe’s apparent source on global cooling was the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, a Christian-right and free-market economics think tank. In an editorial on that site called “Global Warming or Globaloney? The Forgotten Case for Global Cooling,” we hear echoes of Inhofe’s position. The article calls climate change “a shrewdly planned campaign to inflict a lot of socialistic restriction on our cherished freedoms. Environmentalism, in short, is the last refuge of socialism.” Inhofe’s views can be heard in the words of dispensationalist Jerry Falwell as well, who said on CNN, “It was global cooling 30 years ago … and it’s global warming now. … The fact is there is no global warming.”

Inhofe’s views are also closely tied to the Interfaith Council for Environmental Stewardship, a radical-right Christian organization founded by radio evangelist James Dobson, dispensationalist Rev. D. James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Ministries, Jerry Falwell, and Robert Sirico, a Catholic priest who has been editing Vatican texts to align the Catholic Church’s historical teachings with his free-market philosophy, according to E Magazine.

The ICES environmental view is shaped by the Book of Genesis: “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the seas, the birds of the air, and all the living things that move on this earth.” The group says this passage proves that “man” is superior to nature and gives the go-ahead to unchecked population growth and unrestrained resource use. Such beliefs fly in the face of ecology, which shows humankind to be an equal and interdependent participant in the natural web.

Inhofe’s staff defends his backward scientific positions, no matter how at odds they are with mainstream scientists. “How do you define ‘mainstream’?” asked a miffed staffer. “Scientists who accept the so-called consensus about global warming? Galileo was not mainstream.” But Inhofe is no Galileo. In fact, his use of lawsuits to try to suppress the peer-reviewed science of the National Assessment on Climate Change — which predicts major extinctions and threats to coastal regions — arguably puts him on the side of Galileo’s oppressors, the perpetrators of the Christian Inquisition, writes Chris Mooney in The American Prospect.

“I trust God with my legislative goals and the issues that are important to my constituents,” Inhofe has told Pentecostal Evangel magazine. “I don’t believe there is a single issue we deal with in government that hasn’t been dealt with in the Scriptures.” But Inhofe stayed silent in that interview as to which passages he applies to the environment, and he remained so when I asked him if End-Time beliefs influence his leadership of the most powerful environmental committee in the country.

And the Cow Jumped Over the Moon

So weird have the attempts to hasten the End Time become that a group of ultra-Christian Texas ranchers recently helped fundamentalist Israeli Jews breed a pure red heifer, a genetically rare beast that must be sacrificed to fulfill an apocalyptic prophecy found in the biblical Book of Numbers. (The beast will be ready for sacrifice by 2005, according to *The National Review.)*

It can be difficult for environmentalists, many of whom cut their teeth on peer-reviewed science, to fathom how anyone could believe that a rust-colored calf could bring about the end of the world, or how anyone could make a coherent End-Time story (let alone national policy) out of the poetic symbolism of the Book of Revelation. But there are millions of such people in America today — including 231 U.S. legislators who either believe dispensationalist or reconstructionist doctrine or, for political expediency, are happy to align themselves with those who do.

That’s troubling, because the beliefs in question are antithetical to environmentalism. For starters, any environmental science that contradicts the End-Timer’s interpretation of Holy Writ is automatically suspect. This explains the disregard for environmental science so prevalent among Christian fundamentalist lawmakers: the denial of global warming, of the damaged ozone layer, and of the poisoning caused by industrial arsenic and mercury.

More important, End-Time beliefs make such problems inconsequential. Faith in Christ’s impending return causes End-Timers to be interested only in short-term political-theological outcomes, not long-term solutions. Unfortunately, nearly every environmental issue, from the conservation of endangered species to the curbing of climate change, requires belief in and commitment to an enduring earth. And yet, no amount of scientific evidence will likely shake fundamentalists of their End-Time faith or bring them over to the cause of saving the environment.

“It’s like half this country wants to guide our ship of state by compass — a compass, something that works by science and rationality, and empirical wisdom,” quipped comedian Bill Maher on Larry King Live. “And half this country wants to kill a chicken and read the entrails like they used to do in the old Roman Empire.”

Those who doubt the dangers of such faith-based guidance need only recall the 9/11 hijackers, who devoutly believed that 72 black-eyed virgins awaited them as their reward in paradise.

In the past, it was not deemed politically correct to ask probing questions about a lawmaker’s intimate religious beliefs. But when those beliefs play a crucial role in shaping public policy, it becomes necessary for the people to know and understand them. It sounds startling, but the great unasked questions that need to be posed to the 231 U.S. legislators backed by the Christian right, and to President Bush himself, are not the kind of softballs about faith lobbed at the candidates during the recent presidential debates. They are, instead, tough, specific inquiries about the details of that faith: Do you believe we are in the End Time? Are the governmental policies you support based on your faith in the imminent Second Coming of Christ? It’s not an exaggeration to say that the fate of our planet depends on our asking these questions, and on our ability to reshape environmental strategy in light of the answers.

Many years ago, a friend of mine introduced me to his “religious grandparents,” who, whenever they were asked about the future, proclaimed, “Armageddon’s comin’!” And they believed it. Christ was due back any day, so they never bothered to paint or shingle their house. What was the point? Over the years, I drove by their place and watched the protective layers of paint peel, the bare clapboards weather, the sills and roof rot. Eventually, the house fell into ruin and had to be torn down, leaving my friend’s grandparents destitute.

In a way, their prediction had proven right. But this humble apocalypse, a house divided against itself, was no work of God, but of man. This is a parable for the 231 Christian right-backed legislators of the 108th Congress. Their constituency’s cherished beliefs may lead to the most dangerous and destructive self-fulfilling prophecy of all time.

*[Correction, 04 Feb 2005: The asterisked section of the article, above, originally read:

But a scripture-based justification for anti-environmentalism — when was the last time you heard a conservative politician talk about that?

Odds are it was in 1981, when President Reagan’s first secretary of the interior, James Watt, told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. “God gave us these things to use. After the last tree is felled, Christ will come back,” Watt said in public testimony that helped get him fired.

Today’s Christian fundamentalist politicians are more politically savvy than Reagan’s interior secretary was; you’re unlikely to catch them overtly attributing public-policy decisions to private religious views. But their words and actions suggest that many share Watt’s beliefs. Like him, many Christian fundamentalists feel that concern for the future of our planet is irrelevant, because it has no future.

In fact, Watt did not make such a statement to Congress. The quotation is attributed to Watt in the book Setting the Captives Free by Austin Miles, but Miles does not write that it was made before Congress. Grist regrets this reporting error and is aggressively looking into the accuracy of this quotation.]

[Update, 11 Feb 2005: Grist has been unable to substantiate that Watt made this statement. We would like to extend our sincere apologies to Watt and to our readers for this error.]

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see ginni above

ref rww tag 7 mtns

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/topics/seven-mountains/

• JUNE 7, 2019 4:21 PM

Ginni Thomas Teams Up With James O’Keefe in Dark-Money Operation to ‘Protect’ Trump

• APRIL 26, 2019 3:59 PM

God Will Remove Americans Opposed to ‘Kingdom of God,’ Says ‘Prophetic Revivalist’

• MARCH 22, 2019 2:56 PM

Donald Trump is ‘The Perfect Shepherd’ for Scared Sheep, Says ‘Seven Mountains’ Advocate Lance Wallnau

• MARCH 11, 2019 5:33 PM

Eric Metaxas and Lance Wallnau Talk About Trump’s ‘Circumcision’ and How ‘Globalists’ Control the Media and the Banking System

• JANUARY 9, 2019 12:46 PM

Cindy and Mike Jacobs: Jair Bolsonaro is Making Brazil a ‘Sheep Nation’

• MARCH 8, 2018 1:49 PM

Rick Saccone, State Rep. With Christian Nationalist Ties, Vying For A Seat In Congress On Tuesday

• OCTOBER 26, 2017 12:20 PM

Dominionist Leader Ché Ahn: Time For ‘Davids’ To Arise And Rule

• OCTOBER 10, 2017 12:42 PM

Anti-Choice Leaders Join Dominionist Rally In DC, Pray For ‘Massive Shift’ On Supreme Court

• OCTOBER 6, 2017 10:52 AM

Tent City Sprouts on National Mall For ‘Holy Spirit Woodstock’ and Dominionist Rally

• SEPTEMBER 19, 2017 3:13 PM

The Christian Nationalists Betting On Roy Moore

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NEW

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https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2019/04/23/alecs-washington-state-chair-discussed-violence-surveillance-against-constituents/

Washington State Rep. Matt Shea (R-Spokane) has found himself back in the spotlight again, this time for messages sent and received through the Signal app discussing acts of violence against and surveillance of left-wing activists, as revealed by The Guardian.

Rep. Shea is the Washington state chair for the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and has served on its Civil Justice Task Force.

In the private chats with far-right talk show host Jack Robertson and activist Anthony Bosworth, “The men proposed to confront leftists — whom they repeatedly refer to as ‘communists’ and ‘Antifa’ — with a suite of tactics, including violence,” The Guardian reported.[lnx]

The messages were exchanged in the heated lead-up to the alt-Right’s propaganda about an impending “Antifa revolution” on November 4, 2017 — something that in reality amounted to a handful of anti-Trump rallies.

According to the chat history, Robertson suggested extreme violence against a Spokane resident, one of Shea’s constituents, “Fist full of hair, and face slam, to a Jersey barrier. Treat em like communist revolutionaries. Then shave her bald with a K-Bar USMC field knife.”

Shea did not argue against torturing his constituent and instead offered to help with the effort by conducting background checks on Indivisible members and a professor, also constituents: “OK. What BG checks need to be done. Give me the list. All I have several names that have come up…Any info out there?”

The men also discussed civil war and “using symbols from what they understood to be Russian anti-communist groups as a way of spreading paranoia among their adversaries,” The Guardian found.[lnx]

The Guardian report comes less than six months following the leak of Shea’s outline for holy war, entitled “Biblical Basis for War.”

As the Center for Media and Democracy reported, Shea’s manifesto advocated for the killing of all males if his radical agenda could not be achieved peacefully, the terms of which Shea laid out as a stop to all abortions, an end to same sex marriage, an end to idolatry, an end to communism, and replacing America’s current justice system with Biblical law.

Shea lost his position as Chair of the Republican Caucus after the holy war revelations, and many donors, including Avista, BNSF Railroad, and AT&T, cut ties with him.

ALEC, however, ignored calls for it to sever ties with Shea and, when he won reelection last November, renewed his post as its Washington state chair.

In addition to introducing bills this year to abolish abortion and deregulate firearms, Shea is sponsoring legislation to establish the new state of Liberty, formed by dividing the state of Washington east of the Cascade mountains. The goal of some white supremacist groups is to create a “white homeland” in the northwest states.

Shea will be the master of ceremonies at a John Birch Society (JBS) dinner in Idaho on April 26, where right-wing conspiracy theorist William F. Jasper will deliver an address entitled, “No Borders, No Nation.” JBS — whose cofounders include the Koch Brothers’ father, Fred, and the founder of the Bradley Foundation — is an extremist group that viewed the Civil Rights movement and the Equal Rights Amendment as communist plots.

Washington Lt. Governor Cyrus Habib has asked Republicans to “do the right thing and eject Matt Shea from their caucus. Obtaining background checks on people for the purpose of planning violence against them is a crime, and even offering to do so is clearly 100% unacceptable in the Legislature.”

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NEW 419

https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/the-power-of-lies-inside-the-christian-rights-plan-to-remodel-the-us/

On April 3, USA Today published an array of stories under the banner, “Copy, Paste, Legislate,” exploring the political impact of model bills on state-level legislation — more than 10,000 bills from 2010 to 2018 — based on a two-year joint investigation with the Arizona Republic and the Center for Public Integrity. The lead story headline said it all: “You elected them to write new laws. They’re letting corporations do it instead.”

OK, it wasn’t quite all. While corporate influence was the strongest, figures revealed that conservative groups weren’t far behind: There were 4,301 bills from industry and 4,012 from conservative groups, far more than the 1,602 from liberal groups or the 248 classified as “other.” The hidden origins of these bills often hides their true intent. The most notorious such group, the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, for instance combines business interests with movement conservatives.

But within the fold of “conservative groups” there’s a whole other story to be told about the organizing of extremist religious conservatives, whose political mobilization, as I’ve noted in the past, played a crucial role in electing Donald Trump. Indeed, just the day before “Copy, Past, Legislate” was published, the Texas Senate passed SB-17, a bill that would protect anti-LGBTQ discrimination by all licensed professionals who claim to act on a “sincerely held religious belief.”

“It’s time for Americans to wake up to the harsh reality that the religious right, fueled by their fear of loss of power from the changing demographics in our country and their support from the Trump administration, is emboldened and aggressively pursuing all means possible to maintain white Christian power in America,” Rachel Laser, the president of Americans United For Separation of Church and State, told Salon. “Project Blitz, for example, has already introduced over 50 bills in at least 23 states this year alone,” she added.

One spin-off story published in the Nashville Tennessean dealt specifically with an anti-LGTBQ adoption model bill. (Simultaneously, NBC reported such bills were “’snowballing’ in state legislatures.”) The Tennessee bill came from Project Blitz, which was described as “a legislative effort with the stated aim to ‘bring back God to America.’” But as Salon has reported in the past, Project Blitz is much more sinister than that.

Frederick Clarkson, senior research analyst at Political Research Associates, was the first to discover its three-tier playbook, produced by a coalition of right-wing activists he’d long been following, including Texas Republican activist and pseudo-historian David Barton, whose book, “Jefferson Lies,” which tried to remake Thomas Jefferson as an evangelical hero, was canceled by its publisher under withering criticism from conservative and evangelical scholars (followup here).

“The authors of the Project Blitz playbook are savvy purveyors of dominionism,” Clarkson told Salon at the time. “They are in it for the long haul and try not to say things that sound too alarming. ​But they live an immanent theocratic vision.” Not all their allies would go all the way with them, Clarkson told me, but the theocratic end they envision is chillingly akin to “The Handmaid’s Tale” — reason enough to warrant far more attention than they’ve gotten so far.

The first tier of Project Blitz aims at importing the Christian nationalist worldview into public schools and other aspects of the public sphere, the second tier aims at making government increasingly a partner in “Christianizing” America, and the third tier contains three types of proposed laws that “protect” religious beliefs and practices specifically intended to benefit bigotry.

“Although category three is divided in three parts, you could also see it as having two main underlying intentions,” Clarkson explained. “First to denigrate the LGBTQ community, and second to defend and advance the right to discriminate. This is one way that the agenda of theocratic dominionism is reframed as protecting the right of theocrats to discriminate against those deemed second-class, at best. As the late theocratic theologian R.J. Rushdoony said, ‘Only the right have rights.'”

The broader findings revealed in “Copy, Paste, Legislate” help to expand our understanding by highlighting three significant patterns shared in various ways with Project Blitz, which are used to advance their theocratic agenda, often hiding it in plain sight:

1) Misleading Language That Inverts Common Sense Project Blitz does this repeatedly with the most fundamental terms: “religious freedom,” “First Amendment,” and so on. In doing so, it mirrors what corporations and insurance companies did with “transparency” in the “Asbestos Transparency Act,” switching the roles of victims and perpetrators, casting themselves as “victims of litigation filed by people harmed by asbestos,” and requiring mesothelioma victims to seek money from an asbestos trust — a lengthy process many won’t live long enough to benefit from.  How’s that for “transparency”?

2) Goalpost Moving The entire Project Blitz concept is premised on moving the goalposts. It’s built into the very structure of its three-tiered playbook, as well as the logic of the supporting arguments. A similar strategy was involved in promoting vouchers in Arizona, beginning with a voucher for students with disabilities, then following up with bill after bill offering vouchers to more and more students, eventually all of them, with no guarantee protecting the first group of recipients from getting lost in the process.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/justice-neil-gorsuch-says-no-one-can-sue-to-stop-the-government-from-establishing-religion/

kos

Theocrat Gorsuch says no American can challenge a Christian religious display on government property.

One inherent danger of allowing a religious minority to install a puppet controlled by religious fanatics in the White House is the now unfolding threat of government officially establishing religion – the Christian religion. Any American’s confidence that the U.S. Constitution is a protection against government establishing religion is grossly misplaced and, that belief is about to be disabused by the current religious conservatives responsible for adjudicating the law of the land.

Because a nearly half-century-old Supreme Court ruling prevented the government from advancing religion, the wall of separation between church and state is almost certainly going to be eviscerated by the Christian conservatives on the current Supreme Court. The crusade to demolish the wall of separation is being advanced by one of the Heritage Foundation SCOTUS nominees confirmed shortly after Trump corrupted every aspect of  the government his tiny little hands touched. However, it is noteworthy that Neil Gorsuch’s theocratic crusade is wholly supported by Trump’s other SCOTUS appointee, religious serial liar and sexual abuser Brett Kavanaugh.

The reason the “Establishment Clause” is going to be found unconstitutional by the current Court’s Christian conservatives is crystal clear; they believe a 1970’s-era ruling prohibiting government establishment of religion adhered to the U.S. Constitution and is patently wrong. The prohibition on government establishing religion is appalling to evangelicals and the theocrats on the High Court are not going to tolerate it any longer.

The High Court recently heard two cases, American Legion v. American Humanist Association and Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission v. American Humanist Association, brought by Americans who errantly believed the Supreme Court would rule according to the U.S. Constitution like lower federal courts; but that prospect is highly unlikely. Those Americans failed to comprehend that there are few conservatives who actually fulfill their oath to uphold the nation’s founding document and law of the land; this is particularly true any time the Constitution is at odds with the theocracy-minded Christian **Dominionists. Christian Dominionists have lusted for the day the federal government will establish the Christian religion as the law of the land, and it is something Justice Neil Gorsuch contends cannot be challenged.

Based on comments by Trump’s more vocal and radical theocratic justice, it is all but certain that the Court will uphold the so-called “Peace Cross” as the initial step in a long sought-after demolition of the so-called wall of separation enshrined in the U.S. Constitution’s 1st Amendment. The case centers on a 40-foot tall Christian cross-shaped monument on government land in Maryland. The Christian cross, a well-known Christian symbol, was erected to honor fallen Christian soldiers from the First World War; as if no Buddhists, Jews, Hindus, or atheists sacrificed their lives for what they believed was a nation with a secular Constitution banning the government from establishing any religion.

Trump’s theocratic Justice Neil Gorsuch proffered a truly radical position regarding the unconstitutionality of the government establishing religion, as if he was a hired lawyer and spokesman for the theocratic Dominionist movement. Although not going so far as asserting the First Amendment’s “Establishment Clause is unconstitutional” like former Attorney General J. Beauregard Sessions, he may as well have.

Gorsuch did, in fact, claim that any plaintiffs who challenge government establishment and endorsement of one specific religion should be banned from suing the government to force it to uphold the Constitution’s Establishment Clause. According to Gorsuch, there is no situation that allows any American to have “legalstanding to challenge” a Christian religious display on government property; something that is in fact establishing religion. He claims that because “their only injury is that they take offense” at the religious display on taxpayer’s land, in his theocratic mind being offended is not enough to demand the government abide by the law of the land – any more than expecting Christian conservative justices to support, uphold, and decide cases based on the Constitution.

...

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also denied transcript?

State Department bars credentialed reporters from special conference call while allowing ‘faith-based media only’: report

David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement

The U.S. State Department is holding a special conference call but has barred reporters who regularly cover the State Dept. from the call and instead is allowing only “faith-based media

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http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/eric-metaxas-and-lance-wallnau-talk-about-trumps-circumcision-and-how-globalists-control-the-media-and-the-banking-system/

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It’s all about the apocalypse: The disturbing reason behind the right wing’s pro-Israel obsession

Cody Fenwick

===

rww

Right-wing political operative Newt Gingrich is warning that the 2018 election results are proof that “the Left is waging—and winning—a linguistic war.” In a commentary first published at Fox and distributed via email over the weekend by Gingrich Productions, Gingrich wrote that “the linguistic war of condemnation, hatred, and intimidation being waged every day by the Left” is just part of what he claims as the problem.

“The efforts to steal the governorships of Georgia and Florida and the Senate seat in Florida are only the tip of the iceberg of illegality and hostility that the Left now practices routinely.”

Gingrich’s amped-up rhetoric about the “illegality” and “hostility” of “the Left” is evidence of his own long expertise in waging linguistic warfare. As People For the American Way President Michael Keegan wrote back in 2011 when Gingrich decided to run for president, “Gingrich is an enthusiastic participant in the right wing’s divisive and destructive McCarthyism, portraying his political opponents as enemies of America’s very existence.”

Indeed, before Gingrich was forced out of his position of speaker of the House, before he had repositioned himself as an advocate for “Rediscovering God in America,” and long before his former mistress and current wife was serving as Trump’s ambassador to the Vatican, Gingrich was responsible for bringing an especially toxic approach to partisan politics.  More specifically, as RWW noted in 2012:

His entire political careerhas been based on destructive, vicious, negative attacks on his opponents. In the 1990s, his GOPAC produced “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control,”an infamous list of words that Gingrich said Republicans should use to smear and denigrate their opponents. Among the suggested words was “destructive,” along with “traitors,” “sick,” and “betray.”  Gingrich perfected the kind of hyper-partisan politics of destruction that are currently making it harder to run the country, and harder to attract decent people to run for office. Obviously, decency hasn’t been a barrier for Newt’s own ambitions.

Gingrich’s recent piece aggressively promotes far-right smears against activists who challenge racism and white nationalism. “The Left claims and occupies more and more linguistic ground with each new fight,” he wrote:

Defense of the Founding Fathers becomes defense of white, racist, slaveowners.

Defense of American identity becomes an act of white male domination. …

Wanting to obey the law in counting votes becomes an effort to suppress votes and disenfranchise poor people, minorities, and immigrants.

And then things get really Orwellian—or perhaps Trumpian—with Gingrich attributing to Democrats and “liberal media” exactly the kind of behavior that right-wing activists and media are engaged in:

Every day, we are watching Democrats break and stretch the law for the sole purpose of winning, while they attack Republicans for wanting an honest count of legal voters.

Democrats and their liberal media allies know that if they repeat something often enough it begins to be accepted as truth.

However, the Left’s interest in winning the language war is only the first step toward legitimizing real threats and mob behavior.

Once they win the language fight, they can claim moral superiority. Once they have gained moral dominance, they can do anything to their opponents because they will be presumed right, and their opponents will be presumed wrong.

Gingrich doesn’t spell out the solution, but seems to be teeing things up for conservatives to turn to him for the answer: “Developing the conservative solution to the left’s linguistic war is a major step toward winning elections in 2020 – and preserving our society.”

And who better to turn to than Gingrich, Inc., right? While Gingrich has spent much of the past decade allied with dominionists and Christian-nation activists to promote his “Rediscovering God in America” books and video brand—and turning to them to promote his failed 2012 presidential bid—he has also never given up his core competence as a political smear artist.For example, at the Heritage Foundation in December 2016, Gingrich said the right should stop using the term “news media” and replace it “the propaganda media.” Before he rose to the speakership in 1996, he made a name for himself for calling Democrats “pro-communist” in late-night soliloquies he delivered from the House floor to an empty chamber, as he leveraged the new C-SPAN cable channel.

President Trump, of course, has been an ardent deployer of the “language as a weapon of control” strategy. Gingrich has praised Trump, saying that the president has “brought out into the open how truly anti-American much of the left is and how much it stands for a set of values that all of us, if you looked at it carefully, would find horrifying.”

And Gingrich has joined Trump’s efforts to discredit both the investigation of his 2016 campaign and his Democratic opponents. “Democratic dishonesty is a lot greater threat to freedom than some unproven Russian conspiracy,” Gingrich said earlier this month, adding, for good measure, “Democrats will end up stealing a lot more votes than Putin ever dreamed of taking.”

During the 2016 campaign, against “those who would impose a totalitarian secularism on us.” That was a recycled version of comments he made in 2011 at John Hagee’s Cornerstone Church, where he memorably said he was “convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time [my grandchildren are] my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.”

Tags: Newt GingrichChurch-StateElection 2018Election 2020Republican Party

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granddaughter of Notorious Westboro Baptist Church Founder Describes Growing Up as a 'True Believer': Everyone Else Is the Enemy

By Libby Phelps, Salon

"My grandfather was Fred Phelps, who founded the notorious Westboro Baptist Church. This is what he taught us." READ MORE»

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Republican state representative in Washington, Matt Shea, is under fire for a four-page manifesto he distributed titled "Biblical Basis for War" that was posted online on Tuesday.

According to the Spokesman-Review, Shea took credit and defended himself against critics in a Facebook Live video, saying that it was just "a summary of a series of sermons on biblical war in the Old Testament" that his critics had taken out of context. He also said that America is a "Christian nation" — something that has been repeatedly debunked by reputable scholars and by the writings of the founding fathers — and that people offended by his views are part of a "Maoist insurgency" and a "counter state" of "Marxists" and "Islamists".

"Biblical Basis for War" is a theocratic call to arms. Among other things, the manifesto describes God as a "warrior," lays out the conscription of able-bodied men over 18 years of age into a "holy army," and instructs Christian warriors to be circumcised, take a holy vow, and refrain from scorched-earth tactics or killing "productive citizens" who will be their "base of support....

Perhaps the most chilling segment is the description of how to make peace with enemies. Any offer of peace, says the document, is "not a negotiation or compromise of righteousness" — the enemy must fully submit to "Biblical law," including "stop all abortions," "no same-sex marriage," "no idolatry or occultism," and "no communism."

If the enemy submits, according to the document, they "must pay share of work or taxes." If they do not submit, the holy army shall "kill all males."

The document contains similar rhetoric to the Marble Community Fellowship, a local sect in eastern Washington State that advocates an ideology of "Dominionism," or Christian theocratic rule. The group's leader, Barry Byrd, has condemned interracial marriage and called Jews "Anti-Christs." Shea has been a guest speaker at one of the group's Fourth of July events.

"The document Mr. Shea wrote is not a Sunday school project or an academic study," said Spokane County Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich, in an email to the Spokesman-Review. "It is a 'how to' manual consistent with the ideology and operating philosophy of the Christian Identity/Aryan Nations movement and the Redoubt movement of the 1990s." Knezovich added that he handed over the material to the FBI.

While Shea stands by his manifesto, the backlash in the local community has been swift. Some of his campaign donors are now expressing doubts about their support for him.

This is not the first time in recent months that a state lawmaker's extreme religious beliefs have come into question. In 2016, Kentucky elected state Rep. Dan Johnson, a self-styled " who ran a bizarre church complete with its own biker bar and "gun choir," and who shortly introduced a bill to outlaw miscarriages. Last December, Johnson committed suicide following accusations he molested a teenage girl.

Shea represents Washington House of Representatives District 4, which is centered in Spokane Valley on the border with Idaho. He won his last election by 29 points. This year, his Democratic opponent is local union leader Ted Cummings.

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// red calf prophesy?

https://www.alternet.org/ex-evangelist-slams-moron-christians-believing-trumps-jerusalem-embassy-will-hasten-jesus-second

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http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/christian-nationalists-dominionists-set-their-sights-on-california/

The American Renewal Project, led by Christian nationalist David Lane,is holding all-expenses-paid events for pastors and their wives “up and down the state” of California during the election season, and is currently inviting pastors to attend an event being held in San Diego on September 13 and 14 and one in Costa Mesa in Orange County on September 17 and 18.

Dominionist leader Che Ahn is among the Religious Right figures who have recorded videos urging California pastors to attend Lane’s events. From Che Ahn’s video, in which he says he is sending pastors in his network to both southern California events.

The Lord has given me a strategy to really turn California around. And so we’re trying to rally pastors who would then inform their congregation, to be a transforming agent in California, to make a difference, in this upcoming midterm election but all elections down the road.

Pastor Jack Hibbs of Calvary Chapel Chino Hills is also promoting the events. His video assures pastors that they and their wives can attend for free because the event is “purely brought to you by a host of people who care about California, believers, and they believe in the pastor in the pulpit.” More from Hibbs:

California’s politicians cannot save the state, but you and I can—from the tyrannythat is being legislated against our children and against our biblical freedoms right here in the state of California. The hour has fallen to us, pastors, to stand up, and to do what God has called us to do. And that is to be watchmen on the wall as pastors, blowing the trump of warning. But we’re not alone.

Lane, who declared in 2013 that “Christians must be retrained to war for the Soul of America,” has been organizing events since the mid-1990s to encourage conservative evangelical pastors to preach more about politics, to get their congregants more politically engaged, and to run for office. Lane’s “pastors and pews” events have functioned as matchmakers between right-wing politicians and tens of thousands of pastors; and his Issachar trainings have encouraged pastors to run for office themselves.

Lane preaches that the U.S. has a divine mission to glorify God and advance the Christian faith, and he has called the separation of church and state a “lie” and a “fabricated whopper” designed to stop “Christian America—the moral majority—from imposing moral government on pagan public schools, pagan higher learning and pagan media.” He has complained that there was “not a peep from the Christian Church” in response to the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, when the church “should have initiated riots, revolution, and repentance.”

Among the scheduled speakers for the California events are American Renewal Project regulars:

• Christian Broadcasting Network’s David Brody, who has a long track record of promoting Lane’s events;
• Right-wing author and video propagandist Dennis Prager;
• Rob McCoy, Lane’s pastor and a politician who Lane cites as inspiration for his efforts to get more conservative pastors to run for public office and mobilize congregants as volunteers;
• Ken Graves, a Calvary Chapel pastor from Maine who warns that “militant homofascism” wants to turn America into Sodom and that secular humanists are working with militant Islam to “destroy everything we have” and establish a “secular humanist caliphate”; and
• “Historian” Bill Federer, a conspiracy theorist who was warning a few years ago that the “atheist homosexual gay agenda movement” would move America “into an Islamic future” and that Muslim refugees and drug dealers were plotting to start riots so that President Obama could set up a “militarized dictatorship.”

Many of the same speakers took part in a David Lane-sponsored event that then-candidate Donald Trump attended in Orlando in August 2016.

In addition to Ahn and Hibbs, videos promoting the California Renewal Project have been cut by Graves and several other Religious Right leaders, including Christian-nation “historian” David Barton; pastor and anti-gay activist Jim Garlow, who led the effort to get churches involved in promoting the anti-marriage-equality Prop 8; pastor Jack Hibbs, who also Prop 8 and soughtunsuccessfully to push a referendum against SB 48, legislation regarding the inclusion of LGBT and disabled figures in history. A Spanish-language version features Pastor Netz Gomez.

Below are some excerpts from videos promoting the upcoming California Renewal Project events.

Jim Garlow:

We all know that politicians are not going to save America. Wall Street’s not going to save America. Even our military might will not save America. If America is to be saved, biblical values must be returned and embraced in the public square…The future of California is at stake, and you can make a difference.

David Barton:

If California is to be saved, and if its current direction reversed, biblical values must be re-embraced in the public square, and that’s where we as Christian leaders can play a key role.

Roy McCoy, pastor of Calvary Chapel Thousand Oaks and mayor pro tem of the city, makes a reference to Seven Mountains dominionism in his video:

We’ve made a difference in our own community because we’ve stepped into the public square. In this cultural mountain of influence, we want other pastors to understand we can make a difference in this state.

Ken Graves, Calvary Chapel in Central Maine, appears on several videos, which include these snippets:

My brothers, in the state of California, you’re aware that your state is in great crisis. That crisis is not a political problem, it’s a spiritual, moral problem. You know that. But it does have components that must be addressed by the clear preaching of the word of God. A new etiquette has developed that is not biblical, an etiquette that says something about separation of church and state. Dear brothers, there isn’t anything that the word of God has ever encouraged us to not speak about, or to. We have a commission from God and I encourage you to come and be refreshed at the California Renewal Project as a preacher of God’s word …

California Renewal Project has one focus, and that is to do something about biblical ignorance. Biblical illiteracy is the root of the problem. … Political problems are the fruit of total ignorance. It is ignorance and unbelief that causes people to do down the roads that they go. It’s what causes nations, states, to go in the direction that they go …

Lane’s American Renewal Project has been funded in part by Texas fracking billionaire Dan Wilks, whose Heavenly Father’s Foundation has funneled big contributions to Lane through the American Family Association. The Thirteen Foundation, funded by Dan’s brother Farris Wilks, has also made major contributions to the AFA as well as other Religious Right groups.

Tags: Bill FedererChe AhnDavid BartonDavid BrodyDavid LaneDennis PragerKen GravesRob McCoyChristian NationChurch-StateDominionismElection 2018American Renewal ProjectCalifornia Renewal Project

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https://www.alternet.org/did-senior-air-force-general-use-his-power-spread-far-right-christian-nationalism

rosenberg salon

On  July 18, Air Force Brig. Gen. John Teichert assumed command of the 412th Test Wing at Edwards Air Force Base. Less than one month later, on Aug. 12,the Military Religious Freedom Foundation filed a22-page complaintagainst him for violating military rules and regulations about religious proselytizing,based on the online record at Teichert's Christian ministry website, “PLUS” (“Prayer at Lunchtime for the United States”), which has been in operation for five years, well before his latest promotion. Within the week, the MRFF, a watchdog group founded in 2005, received word that the Department of Defense was beginning a formal investigation.

According to a press statement from MRFF founder and president Michael L. Weinstein, a former Air Force officer, on Teichert's website he has “denigrated LGBT individuals, slammed American society at large, and, of course, delivered election voting mandate directives" urging that only certain categories of Christians should be elected to public office.

Military officers enjoy the same freedom of religion as everyone else in America, so Teichert's religious faith is not an issue in itself. But military service entails special restrictions on how religion is expressed, particularly if that expression is deemed to undermine military effectiveness, a point that lies at the heart of the MRFF’s complaint.

For example, Air Force Instruction 1-1, Paragraph 2.15.4. states the following:

Airmen who provide commentary and opinions on internet blogs that they host or on others’ internet blogs, may not place comments on those blog sites, which reasonably can be anticipated, or are intended, to degrade morale, good order, and discipline of any members or units in the U.S. Armed Forces, are Service-discrediting, or would degrade the trust and confidence of the public in the United States Air Force.

The complaint was filed on behalf of 41 clients at Teichert’s new command (32 of whom identify as Christian), “many of whom are in mortal fear of retaliation should they be personally identified in this matter, something that MRFF suggests is an equally troublesome issue,” as its text explains. Elsewhere the MRFF complaint argues that Teichert's specific form of zealotry does not  “promote diversity, unit cohesion, good order and discipline, religious tolerance and esprit de corps," all considered core values of the 21st-century military.

“Our clients feel as though they been spiritually raped by this general, and he was their commander,” Weinstein told Salon, comparing these circumstances to the Tailhook Scandal, which made sexual harassment in the military a major national issue. This one, he argues, is far more hidden. Complainants didn't feel they could confront Teichert or even speak to him openly, Weinstein said, "because, again, the moment you do that you're done.”

Weinstein summarized the issue this way: “When you tell somebody — and you're a general in the Air Force [speaking] to a subordinate — that you lack integrity, character, honor, honorability, intelligence, courage, etc., because of your chosen religious faith or lack thereof, there is no difference between that and telling that someone they're stupid because of the color of their skin or because they were born without a penis.”

Teichert fervently believes that America was founded as a Christian nation, and has fallen away from its original exalted state. The cultural resonance of these views — although they represent fake history — helps give cover to activity to would otherwise cause outrage.

“Can you imagine what would happen if, instead of Brig. Gen. Ernest John Teichert, we had Brig. Gen. Mohammed Assan, and it turned out that he had Prayers at Lunchtime for the United States and it was completely Islamic?” Weinstein asked. “There would be blood in the streets.”

Prior to his current assignment, Teichert was wing commander at Andrews Air Force Base, home to Air Force One, the president’s plane. So Teichert alone is not the problem. “We want to know who else knows,” Weinstein said. Senior figures in the Defense Department and Air Force "knew what this guy was doing it, and are complicit, but did nothing.”

Weinstein's clients face a situation that is difficult for those outside the military to grasp, he explained. Weinstein himself is an Air Force Academy graduate — one of six in his family — who served for seven years as a military lawyer with the Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps. His family has served in every major U.S. combat engagement from World War I to the current "war on terror." MRFF, which Weinstein founded, represents more than 57,000 active duty military, reserve members, DOD civilian employees and veterans, 96 percent of whom identify as Christian. So he knows what he’s talking about.

“The military is unbelievably tribal, adversarial, communal and ritualistic,” Weinstein said. “Anyone who outranks you has unbelievable control over you. You can lose liberty, if you even slightly disrespect them. We’ve had, I think, 12 of our clients killed in action. It's been very difficult. We’ve had another dozen who’ve committed suicide.”

Teichert’s defenders (cited in this story from Air Force Times, for example), have tried to claim that he has simply engaged in private religious practice, which everyone agrees is a protected constitutional right. But the fact that 41 complainants have come forward strongly suggests otherwise.

The complaint calls for an investigation into whether Teichert’s conduct interferes with or violates the civil liberties or equal opportunities of service-members and civilians under his command, as well as whether it violates several key provisions of Air Force Instruction 1-1, including the following (in addition to Paragraph 2.15.4. cited above):

Paragraph 2.11: “Every Airman is free to practice the religion of their choice or subscribe to no religious belief at all. You should confidently practice your own beliefs while respecting others whose viewpoints differ from your own.” …

Paragraph 2.12: Leaders at all levels must balance constitutional protections for their own free exercise of religion, including individual expressions of religious beliefs, and the constitutional prohibition against governmental establishment of religion. They must ensure their words and actions cannot reasonably be construed to be officially endorsing or disproving of, or extending preferential treatment for any faith, belief, or absence of belief. …

Paragraph 2.15.5, Use of Social Media [Excerpt]: When you are expressing personal opinions on social media sites and can be identified as an Airman, you should make it clear that you are speaking for yourself and not on behalf of the Air Force. While service members may generally use their rank and service even when acting in their personal capacity, they should not do so in situations where the context may imply official sanction or endorsement of their personal opinions. [Emphasis added.]

In Weinstein's press statement, he argues that “Teichert has inextricably intertwined his USAF position of senior command" with his ministry and proselytizing on the PLUS website. Paragraph 2.12. is violated persistently, as there is no disclaimer making clear that these are Teichert’s personal views, as opposed to official ones. To the contrary, Teichert parades his rank frequently and repeatedly misrepresents American history to echo his views and provide them with ersatz legitimacy and a semblance of official sanction. As Weinstein observes, Teichert has also attacked America in a way that would be inconceivable from a hypothetical general who was Muslim.

In an early post, from April 2013, "Unrecognizable from the Original — Hebrews 13:8," Teichert fumes over the ways America has changed since its founding, which he assumes was well-nigh perfect, slavery and all, because it was supposedly so thoroughly Christian.

"It is clear that American Christians have steadily drifted away from the Lord, following in the footsteps of an aggressively liberalizing society,” Teichert writes. “How did we, both as a people and as a nation, arrive at such a position that is largely unrecognizable from where we began? The answer is a series of small compromises." What compromises is he talking about? The abolition of slavery? Voting rights for women? He doesn’t say.

That's just one of many such posts. In July of that year, Teichert expounded on the theme of “Omission,” writing: “Evil is triumphing in our nation because the good are doing nothing.” He cited a series of 12 earlier posts on how the “sins of omission are evident among us,” and criticized He America with a doggedness that would get anyone to the left of Genghis Khan accused of treason.

This is all justified, it would seem, by the mythology of America’s supposedly pure Christian origins, which supports a multitude of false or distorted historical narratives. This is a subject long studied by Frederick Clarkson, senior research analyst at Political Research Associates, a progressive think tank in Massachusetts.

“Teichert’s blog posts epitomizes a kind of historical revisionism that historian Frank Lambert calls creating a ‘usable past,’” Clarkson told Salon. “This is done by selecting tidbits from history and suggesting that they support contemporary conservative Christian political views and candidates, or more importantly an interpretation of the Constitution. This is how Christian nationalists create a history that they use to justify not only their favored politicians and issues du jour, but often the more profound vision of political dominion we call 'Dominionism.'”

In its starkest forms, the ideology known as Dominionism is clearly anti-democratic and un-American. Laws passed by overwhelming majorities are invalid if they conflict with “God’s law” — separating the races, for example, which was long perceived as a biblical mandate in the pre-civil rights South. So for obvious reasons most American Dominionists of the 21st century shield or shade their beliefs, sometimes even from themselves. But their underlying logic is broadly influential, Clarkson argues:

Once one has arrived at the notion that the United States was founded as a Christian nation, and that this means based on Christian or biblical principles (they are often used interchangeably), one holds a self-issued license to serve as spokesperson for God and the founding fathers. Political opinions take the character of revealed truths.

Teichert has a method in his blogging, in which he quotes a biblical passage, and sometimes a quote from a founding father or other notable person which leads him to say that "Christian citizens" must elect Christian candidates (of the right sort, of course) who are then to craft policies based on Christian principles because that is what God requires of his Christian nation.

Although this is profoundly misleading — and eerily reminiscent of the reasoning behind the al-Qaida or ISIS interpretation of Islamic doctrine —nothing would prevent Teichert from expressing these views as a private citizen. He is not. He is a senior military officer in command of thousands, with a duty to promote unity rather than division. The danger Teichert may pose in that command is rooted in a fundamental historical falsehood captured in an April 2016 blog post in which he claimed that "at the beginning of the Revolutionary War, between 98.4% and 99.8% of Americans were professing Christians," citing a book promoted by Glenn Beck, who has long been obsessed with "proving" that George Washington was an orthodox Christian. (Which would prove nothing if true, and has been meticulously refuted.)

Teichert's alleged statistic is both untrue on its own terms and profoundly deceptive, Clarkson argued by email:

That percentage is silly and not borne out by contemporary scholarship, which shows that only about 17% of the population in the colonies were church members at the time of the Revolution. But whatever the number or percentage, there were also a wide variety of Christians in the colonies, including Congregationalists, Lutherans, Catholics, Baptists, Dutch Reformed, Quakers, Mennonites and Presbyterians. So when one says Christian, it meant different things to different people. The same is true today.

To claim that the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation, one has to ignore such facts as that the founding of the United States set in motion the dismantling of 150 years of mini-colonial theocracies; that there was no mention of God or Christianity in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights; [and] that this was because the framers recognized that the glue that would hold a religiously diverse nation together would be religious equality in the eyes of the law.

In short, America’s strength as a nation — indeed, its very existence — depends on avoiding the kind of exclusionary religious conflict that Teichert is preoccupied with. Our nation's original motto says it all: E pluribus unum. In this same spirit, after quoting from George Washington’s own correspondence on the subject of military chaplains serving religiously diverse troops, the MRFF complain observes that the father of our nation was “worried about even the ‘smallest uneasiness’ over religion and objected to anything that would “compel men to a mode of worship that they didn’t profess.”

Many of the most troubling posts identified by MRFF’s clients identified had to do with Teichert’s divisive religious-warrior mindset. The general frequently writes as if he were at war with America itself, and certainly with anyone who does not share his own form of fundamentalist belief. Here are a few examples:

• In June 2014, he wrote, "We are engaged in a war between fundamentally opposed ideologies."
• In December, 2014, he wrote about "the enemies of Christ."
• In October 2015, he wrote, "God has entrusted us to subdue our own kingdom – 21st century America.”
• Also in October 2015, he wrote, “In 21st century America we may feel like we have landed in enemy controlled territory behind enemy lines.”
• In April 2016, he wrote that "the adversary has taken the first shots of the current battle."
• On July 28th of this year, he wrote, “Far too often, Christians move against other Christians who aren’t much different than themselves, sometimes with great violence and strife. … Each time this happens, it is a dark day for the cause of Christ when there are plenty of real enemies that should be the focus of our forces.” He closed by saying, "PLEASE PRAY FOR UNITY AMONG BIBLE-BELIEVING CHRISTIANS IN AMERICA IN ORDER TO PROPERLY OPPOSE OUR REAL ADVERSARY." [All-caps in the original.]

There’s an important if nearly invisible layer of cultural influence at work here which is likely to influence how this case is perceived, and even how it plays out in the military bureaucracy. This is known as “secularized evangelical discourse” [SED], meaning an ideological orientation derived from evangelical Christian roots but is then expressed in public “in religiously nonparticularistic terms,” as described in a recent paper for the journal Social Forces, "Christian America? Secularized Evangelical Discourse and the Boundaries of National Belonging,” by Jack Delehanty, Penny Edgell and Evan Stewart.

Even as evangelicals decline as a percentage of the electorate, the persistence of SED preserves a powerful influence over the culture, these scholars argue. In practice, this means that Teichert’s deeply divisive Christian proselytizing is instinctively defended by many people who do not share his most extreme beliefs and would no doubt be horrified by a website expressing similar views from an Islamic (or Hindu, or Jewish) viewpoint.

My initial thought was that one could view the set of influences at work in terms of concentric rings of influence: hardcore Dominionist beliefs at the bullseye of a target, surrounded first by Christian nationalism and then by secular evangelical discourse. That metaphor "seems a bit too straightforward to me," study co-author Delehanty told Salon.

"I think that dominionism can also exist separately from Christian nationalism, because it’s a theological position more than a political one," he said. Delehanty pointed to the notorious example of the fanatical extremists at Westboro Baptist Church, who would qualify as Dominionists in most respects, but "believe that the nation and all people in it are 'totally depraved' – so detested and loathed by God that there is literally no point in trying to organize a nation around gaining his favor."

Edgell, another co-author, agrees. “While the bullseye metaphor is very evocative, what is happening out there is more about overlap,” she said. “When do the nationalist and Dominionist strains line up in a way that one reinforces the other?”

Their paper focuses on four particularly important claims drawn from SED, and widely shared among Christians who may not otherwise hold extreme positions or even be especially devout:

1. that religious identity is important for good citizenship,
2. that religious belief is a criterion for strong political leadership,
3. that society’s rules should be based on divine will,
4. that public institutions should broadly accommodate religious belief and practice.

The paper found that SED enjoys majority support, extending well beyond the evangelical demographic, but with qualified power. Views generally break down into four groups — ardent opposition, moderate opposition, moderate support and ardent support. There is no “sensible center” equally opposed to “both extremes” in this regard, said co-author Stewart. “Even among the moderates, consensus about religion’s symbolic role is limited. People generally agree about how governments should accommodate religious belief and commitment, but the role of evangelical ideas in symbolic boundary-making remains a source of contention."

One further surprise is that “even strong supporters of SED hesitate to support explicitly Christian prayers in schools and government funding of religious charities," Stewart said. This suggests that "even the most culturally conservative Americans use religious ideas as a source of symbolic boundaries more than as a basis for law and policy."

Edgell made a related point: “The talk about symbolic boundaries can drown out debate on a substantive agenda, and substantive agenda items are hard to talk about on their own terms.” One example would be the way that the MRFF, Weinstein's foundation, has frequently been attacked as "atheistic" or "anti-Christian," although it's clients and members overwhelmingly identify as Christian.

This opens up a whole new range of questions about how religious culture war issues will be framed and reframed in the years ahead. But as far as those under Teichert’s command are concerned, it comes down to this:  Their lives are not symbolic playthings for one general's illegitimate exercise of power comes from treating them as such. While many of those who have raised complaints about the general's conduct are just as Christian he is (or arguably more so), that is essentially irrelevant. Those who profess other faiths or none at all wear the same uniform, serve the same flag and swear the same oath of allegiance to a nation whose constitution is utterly silent about God.

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DOMINIONISM RISING: A THEOCRATIC MOVEMENT HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT

Posted on August 18, 2016 by Frederick Clarkson

This article appears in the Summer 2016 edition of The Public Eye magazine. In June 2016, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) held a private meeting with conservative movement leaders to plot his political future. Attendees afterwards cast him in the role Read More

Posted in Articles, Eyes Right Blog | Tagged christian dominionism, Christian Right, dominionism, fred cla, frederick clarkson, Rousas J. Rushdoony, Ted Cruz

TRUMP, CRUZ, & DOMINIONISM: SOME CHRISTIAN RIGHT LEADERS FEAR A CRACK-UP

Posted on April 25, 2016 by Frederick Clarkson

The 2016 Republican presidential campaign has transformed American politics, likely forever. Everyone is making adjustments, but two recent illuminating episodes suggest that some Christian Right leaders are finding the changes to be unusually awkward and challenging. The Christian Right, as Read More

Posted in Eyes Right Blog | Tagged dominionism, dominionist, frederick clarkson, robert p george, Ted Cruz, trump

WHEN EXEMPTION IS THE RULE: THE RELIGIOUS FREEDOM STRATEGY OF THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT

Posted on January 12, 2016 by Frederick Clarkson

Table of Contents: -Acknowledgements -Preface -Executive Summary -Introduction -Building Infrastructure for the Long Game …..Mobilizing to Discriminate in Bob Jones -Building a political infrastructure for a counteroffensive -Manhattan Declaration: A Strategic Turning Point -Legal and Legislative Players and Trends Today Read More

Posted in Eyes Right Blog | Tagged fred clarkson, LGBTQ rights, manhattan declaration, religious freedom, religious liberty, Reproductive Justice

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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/here-are-5-craziest-christian-fundamentalist-sects-cults-or-movements-feel-0

5  of the Craziest Christian Fundamentalist Sects, Cults or Movements That Feel Empowered in the Trump Era

Extremist groups are coming out of the woodwork.

By Alex Henderson / AlterNet July 19, 2018, 8:30 AM GMT

Evangelist Frank Amedia, leader of POTUS Shield

Photo Credit: The Jim Bakker Show

President Donald Trump—despite his alleged sexual activity with porn star Stormy Daniels, two divorces, lack of Biblical knowledge and a reputation for having a very foul mouth at times—has, ironically, become an icon of the Christian Right in the United States. His predecessor at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Barack Obama, actually has a long history of going to church and clearly possesses a greater knowledge of the Bible. Regardless, the Christian Right considers Obama an enemy and Trump a staunch ally—and with Trump in office, extremist groups are coming out of the woodwork more and more.

Here are some of the craziest far-right sects, organizations or Christian fundamentalist movements that are feeling empowered in the Trump era.

1. POTUS Shield

Led by television evangelist Frank Amedia, POTUS Shield is a new organization of far-right Christian fundamentalists that describes itself as “warriors, worshippers and watchmen”—and the one they are watching out for, through prayer, is Trump (POTUS stands for “President of the United States). Amedia insists that before Trump’s inauguration, God paid him a visit in the middle of the night and asked him to help form a protective shield of prayer around Trump—who the group believes was sent by God to promote a Christian fundamentalist takeover of government. Others active in POTUS Shield include Jerry Boykin, executive vice president of the Family Research Council, and Lou Engle (known for his large anti-abortion, anti-gay and pro-Republican prayer rallies).

2. People of Praise

After Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement from the U.S. Supreme Court, one of the people on Trump’s “short list” of possible nominees for a replacement was Amy Coney Barrett—a 46-year-old federal appellate judge who, the New York Times reported in 2017, was involved in a group called People of Praise (Brett Kavanaugh, not Barrett, eventually received Trump’s nomination). And given People of Praise’s beliefs, Barrett shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the High Court.

People of Praise is a predominantly Catholic group, although it has some non-Catholic members and incorporates Pentecostal practices (speaking in tongues, for example). Considered a cult within mainstream Catholicism, People of Praise require members to swear an oath of loyalty to the group and teach that while women can have some leadership positions, they must ultimately submit to male authority. In the past, People of Praise used the terms “handmaid” and “handmaiden” to describe women—which is downright chilling if one is familiar with Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” or the 1990 film and 2017/2018 television that were based on the book.

3. Quiverfull

The Christian Right’s hatred of reproductive freedom goes way beyond its opposition to abortion; some fundamentalists are equally opposed to all forms of contraception. And this anti-contraception ideology is exemplified by the looney Quiverfull movement. Quiverfull is a not a sect or denomination per se, but a movement within fundamentalist Protestant Christianity—and those who embrace it could be anything from Pentecostal to Calvinist. Quiverfull ideology asserts that it is a sin for Christian couples to do anything that might prevent a pregnancy; therefore, birth control pills and IUDs for women or condoms and vasectomies for men are considered tools of the Devil. And according to Quiverfull, Christian wives must have as many babies as possible while remaining totally submissive to their husbands. Other Quiverfull rules: wives cannot have their own bank accounts or e-mail addresses without their husbands’ permission, and they must always be sexually available to their husbands whether they’re in the mood for sex or not.

4. Project Blitz

Project Blitz is not a Christian fundamentalist church or sect, but rather, a coalition of Christian fundamentalist activists with a political agenda: to make sure that state legislatures are flooded with as many theocratic bills as possible. Working with Republicans who are sympathetic to their dominionist views—anti gay, anti-abortion, anti-contraception—Project Blitz believes that it is important for bills to be introduced regardless of how far they get. The more bills that are introduced, Project Blitz believes, the more likely they are to achieve some home runs eventually.

5. WallBuilders

In Texas, David Barton has been very active in both Republican politics and far-right fundamentalist Christianity. In addition to being a former vice chairman of the Texas Republican Party and serving as director of Keep the Promise PAC—a political action committee that supported Sen. Ted Cruz’ presidential campaign in 2016—Barton founded WallBuilders, which has taught through books and videos that the separation of church and state is not constitutional and that the government should be run according to strict Biblical law. And Barton has been active in the Providence Foundation, another group with dominionist views.

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religious right’s professed insistence upon “family values” might appear at first blush to be at odds with the anything but saintly personal behavior of many of its leading proponents. Some of this may be due to the general inability of human beings to reflect on conflicting information: I have never ceased to be amazed at how facts manage to bounce off people’s consciousness like pebbles off armor plate. But there is another, uniquely religious aspect that also comes into play: the predilection of fundamentalist denominations to believe in practice, even if not entirely in theory, in the doctrine of “cheap grace,” a derisive term coined by the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. By that he meant the inclination of some religious adherents to believe that once they had been “saved,” not only would all past sins be wiped away, but future ones, too—so one could pretty much behave as before. Cheap grace is a divine get- out-of-jail-free card. Hence the tendency of the religious base of the Republican Party to cut some slack for the peccadilloes of candidates who claim to have been washed in the blood of the Lamb and reborn to a new and more Christian life. The religious right is willing to overlook a politician’s individual foibles, no matter how poor an example he or she may make, if they publicly identify with fundamentalist values. In 2011 the Family Research Council, the fundamentalist lobbying organization, gave Representative Joe Walsh of Illinois an award for “unwavering support of the family.” Representative Walsh’s ex-wife might beg to differ, as she claims he owes her over one hundred thousand dollars in unpaid child support, a charge he denies.

Of course, the proper rituals must be observed before an erring politician can obtain absolution. In November 2011, at a forum sponsored by religious conservatives in Iowa, all of the GOP presidential candidates struck the expected notes of contrition and humility as they laid bare their souls before the assembled congregation (the event was held in a church). Most of them, including Cain, who was then still riding high, choked up when discussing some bleak midnight of their lives (he chose not to address the fresh sexual harassment charges against him, which surely would have qualified as a trying personal experience preying on his mind). Even the old reprobate Gingrich misted up over some contrived misdeed intended to distract attention from his well-known adventures in serial matrimony.

All of these gloomy obsequies of repentance having been observed, Gingrichgave a stirring example of why he is hands-down the best extemporaneous demagogue in contemporary America. Having purged his soul of all guilty transgressions, he turned his attention to the far graver sins bedeviling the American nation.

If we look at history from the mid-1960s, we’ve gone from a request for toleration to an imposition of intolerance. We’ve gone from a request to understand others to a determination to close down those who hold traditional values. I think that we need to be very aggressive and very direct. The degree to which the left is prepared to impose intolerance and to drive out of existence traditional religion is a mortal threat to our civilization and deserves to be taken head-on and described as what it is, which is the use of government to repress the American people against their own values.

That is as good an example as any of cheap grace as practiced by seasoned statesmen like Gingrich—a bid for redemption turned on its head to provide a forum for one of the Republican Party’s favorite pastimes: taking opportunistic swipes at the dreaded liberal bogeyman. How quickly one forgets one’s own moral lapses when one can consider the manifold harms inflicted on our nation by godless leftists!

• – - – - – - – - -

Some liberal writers have opined that the socioeconomic gulf separating the business wing of the GOP and the religious right make it an unstable coalition that could crack. I am not so sure. There is no basic disagreement on which direction the two factions want to take the country, merely how far it should go. The plutocrats would drag us back to the Gilded Age; the theocrats to the Salem witch trials. If anything, the two groups are increasingly beginning to resemble each other. Many televangelists have espoused what has come to be known as the prosperity gospel—the health-and- wealth/name-it-and-claim-it gospel of economic entitlement. If you are wealthy, it is a sign of God’s favor. If not, too bad! This rationale may explain why some poor voters will defend the prerogatives of billionaires. In any case, at the beginning of the 2012 presidential cycle, those consummate plutocrats the Koch brothers pumped money into Bachmann’s campaign, so one should probably not make too much of a potential plutocrat-theocrat split.

Most of the religious enthusiasts I observed during my tenure on the Hill seemed to have little reluctance to mix God and Mammon. Rick Santorum did not blink at legislative schemes to pay off his campaign contributors: In 2005 he introduced a bill to forbid the National Weather Service from providing weather forecasts for free that commercial forecasters—like AccuWeather, a Pennsylvania- based company which had contributed to his campaign—wanted to charge for. Tom DeLay’s purported concern about the dignity and sanctity of human life, touchingly on display during the controversy over whether Terri Schiavo’s husband had the right to tell doctors to remove her feeding tube after seeing her comatose for fifteen years, could always be qualified by strategic infusions of campaign cash. DeLay’s quashing of bills to prohibit serious labor abuses demonstrates that even religious virtue can be flexible when there are campaign donations involved.

One might imagine that the religious right’s agenda would be incompatible with the concerns for privacy and individual autonomy by those who consider themselves to belong to the libertarian wing of the Republican Party—the “don’t tread on me,” “live free or die” crowd that Grover Norquist once called the “leave me alone” conservatives. Given their profound distaste for an oppressive and intrusive federal government, one would think they might have trepidations about a religious movement determined to impose statutory controls on private behavior that libertarians nominally hold to be nobody’s business, and particularly not the government’s business.

Some more libertarian-leaning Republicans have in fact pushed back against the religious right. Former House majority leader Dick Armey expressed his profound distaste for the tactics of the religious right in 2006—from the safety of the sidelines—by blasting its leadership in unequivocal terms:

[James] Dobson and his gang of thugs are real nasty bullies. I pray devoutly every day, but being a Christian is no excuse for being stupid. There’s a high demagoguery coefficient to issues like prayer in schools. Demagoguery doesn’t work unless it’s dumb, shallow as water on a plate. These issues are easy for the intellectually lazy and can appeal to a large demographic. These issues become bigger than life, largely because they’re easy. There ain’t no thinking.

Armey had previously been an economics professor at several cow colleges in Texas, and when he came to Congress in 1985, libertarian economics was his forte. I do not recall religious issues motivating his political ideology; instead, economics was what gripped him, particularly the flat tax, which he tirelessly promoted. I believe his departure from Congress was impelled not only by the fact that he was not on the inside track to become Speaker, but also because of his disillusionment with the culture wars, as his passionate denunciation of Dobson suggests. But later, Barack Obama’s election and the rise of the Tea Party induced a miraculous change of heart in Armey, as no doubt did the need to raise money for his lobbying organization, known as FreedomWorks. By 2009, Armey had become a significant voice of the Tea Party. As such, he attempted to declare a truce between fiscal and social conservatives, who would thenceforth bury their squabbles and concentrate on dethroning the Kenyan usurper in the Oval Office. That meant soft-pedaling social issues that might alarm fiscally conservative but socially moderate voters, particularly women, who lived in the wealthier suburbs.

In September 2010 Armey took one step further in his reconciliation with the people he had called thugs and bullies when he announced that a GOP majority in Congress would again take up the abortion fight, which was only right and proper for those who held such a sincere moral conviction. When the Republicans duly won the House two months later, they did precisely that. State legislatures across the country followed suit: Ohio, Texas, and Virginia enacted the most severe abortion restrictions in any legislative session in memory. Suddenly Armey didn’t seem to have any problem with social issues preempting his economic agenda.

The Tea Party, which initially described itself as wholly concerned with debt, deficit, and federal overreach, gradually unmasked itself as being almost as theocratic as the activists from the religious right that Armey had denounced only a few years before. If anything, they were even slightly more disposed than the rest of the Republican Party to inject religious issues into the political realm. According to an academic study of the Tea Party, “[T]hey seek ‘deeply religious’ elected officials, approve of religious leaders’ engaging in politics and want religion brought into political debates.” The Tea Party faithful are not so much libertarian as authoritarian, the furthest thing from a “live free or die” constitutionalist.

Within the GOP libertarianism is a throwaway doctrine that is rhetorically useful in certain situations but often interferes with their core, more authoritarian, beliefs. When the two precepts collide, the authoritarian reflex prevails. In 2009 it was politically useful for the GOP to present the Tea Party as independent-leaning libertarians, when in reality the group was overwhelmingly Republican, with a high quotient of GOP activists and adherents of views common among the religious right. According to a 2010 Gallup poll, eight in ten Tea Party members identify themselves as Republicans. Another study found that over half identified as members of the religious right and 55 percent of Tea Partiers agree that “America has always been and is currently a Christian nation”—6 points more than even the percentage of self-described Christian conservatives who would agree to that. This religious orientation should have been evident from the brouhaha that erupted in mid- 2009 over the charge that the Obama administration’s new healthcare reform plan would set up “death panels.” While there was plenty to criticize about the health-care bill, the completely bogus charge garnered disproportionate attention. Republican political consultants immediately recognized that they had found a classic emotional issue that would resonate with the same people on the religious right who had been stirred up over the Terri Schiavo case. The Tea Party, a supposedly independent group of fiscal conservatives outraged by Obama’s profligate spending plans, fell prey to the hysteria Republican Party operatives whipped up over end-of- life counseling. This self-unmasking of the Tea Party may help explain why, after three years in existence, public support for the organization has been dropping precipitously.

Ayn Rand, an occasional darling of the Tea Party, has become a cult figure within the GOP in recent years. It is easy enough to see how her tough-guy, every-man-for-himself posturing would be a natural fit with the Wall Street bankers and the right-wing politicians they fund—notwithstanding the bankers’ fondness for government bailouts. But Rand’s philosophy found most of its adherents in the libertarian wing of the party, a group that overlaps with, but is certainly not identical to, the “business conservatives” who fund the bulk of the GOP’s activities. There has always been a strong strain of rugged individualism in America, and the GOP has cleverly managed to co-opt that spirit to its advantage. The problem is that Rand proclaimed at every opportunity that she was a militant atheist who felt nothing but contempt for Christianity as a religion of weaklings possessing a slave mentality. So how do Republican candidates manage to bamboozle what is perhaps the largest single bloc in their voting base, the religious fundamentalists, about this? Certainly the ignorance of many fundamentalist values voters about the wider world and the life of the mind goes some distance toward explaining the paradox: GOP candidates who enthuse over Rand at the same time as they thump their Bibles never have to explain this stark contradiction because most of their audience is blissfully unaware of who Ayn Rand was and what she advocated. But voters can to some extent be forgiven their ignorance, because politicians have grown so skillful at misdirecting them about their intentions.

This camouflaging of intentions is as much a strategy of the religious right and its leaders—James Dobson, Tony Perkins, Pat Robertson, and the rest—as it is of the GOP’s more secular political leaders in Washington. After the debacle of the Schiavo case and the electoral loss in 2008, the religious right pulled back and regrouped. They knew that the full-bore, “theoconservative” agenda would not sell with a majority of voters. This strategy accounts for Robertson, founder of the Christian Coalition (who famously said that God sent a hurricane to New Orleans to punish the sodomites), stating the following in October 2011: “Those people in the Republican primary have got to lay off of this stuff. They’re forcing their leaders, the front-runners, into positions that will mean they lose the general election.” I doubt he thought the candidates held positions that were too extreme, merely that they should keep quiet about those positions until they had won the election. Max Blumenthal, author of Republican Gomorrah, argues that this is a “lying for Jesus” strategy that fundamentalists often adopt when dealing with the snares of a wicked and Godless world. Since Satan is the father of lies, one can be forgiven for fighting lies with lies.

Hence the policies pursued for at least two decades by the religious right on the federal, state, and local levels. It usually starts at the school board, after some contrived uproar over sex education or liberal indoctrination. The stealthily fundamentalist school board candidates pledge to clean up the mess and “get back to basics.” After a few years they capture a majority on the board, and suddenly “Catcher in the Rye” is heaved out of the curriculum and science teachers are under pressure to teach the (imaginary) controversy about evolutionary biology. This was the path to greater glory of Michele Bachmann: Her first run for public office, barely a dozen years ago, was for a seat on the school board in Stillwater, Minnesota. Up until then she had drawn a taxpayer-funded salary for five years working as an attorney for the Internal Revenue Service, not, of course, because she was one of those lazy, good-for-nothing government bureaucrats that Republican candidates routinely denounce. She was secretly studying the ways of the government beast so as to defeat it later on.

Bachmann, Rick Perry, and numerous other serving representatives and senators have all had ties to Christian Dominionism, a doctrine proclaiming that Christians are destined to dominate American politics and establish a new imperium resembling theocratic government. According to one profile of Perry, adherents of Dominionism “believe Christians—certain Christians—are destined to not just take ‘dominion’ over government, but stealthily climb to the commanding heights of what they term the ‘Seven Mountains’ of society, including the media and the arts and entertainment world.” Note the qualifier: “stealthily.”

At the same religious forum where the GOP candidates confessed their sins, Bachmann went so far as to suggest that organized religion should keep its traditional legal privilege of tax exemption while being permitted to endorse political candidates from the pulpit. The fact that government prohibits express political advocacy is in her imagination muzzling preachers rather than just being a quid pro quo for tax-exempt status equivalent to that imposed on any 501(c)3 or 501(c)4 nonprofit organization. But for Bachmann and others of like mind, this is persecution of a kind that fuels their sense of victimhood and righteous indignation.

Reprinted by arrangement with Viking, a member of the Penguin Group (USA) Inc., from “The Party is Over” by Mike Lofgren

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just beginning to dawn on folks how much Donald Trump’s presidency relies on religious support. All the scandals surrounding Trump have brought intense attention to the 81 percent support he received from evangelical Christians in the 2016 election. New research by Andrew Whitehead, meanwhile, explicates such support in the context of Christian nationalism, and historian John Fea has written an important new book, "Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump," to be published in June.

But the power of the presidency isn’t the only way Christian nationalism is advancing its agenda in America today. As Frederick Clarkson, senior research analyst at Political Research Associates, reported last week at Religion Dispatches, a coalition of Christian right groups — including the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation, Wallbuilders, the National Legal Foundation and others — have organized a major legislative initiative called “Project Blitz.” Its goal is to pass an outwardly diverse but internally cohesive package of Christian-right bills at the state level, whose cumulative impact would be immense.

The agenda underlying these bills is not merely about Christian nationalism, a term that describes an Old Testament-based worldview fusing Christian and American identities, and meant to sharpen the divide between those who belong to those groups and those who are excluded. It’s also ultimately "dominionist," meaning that it doubles down on the historically false notion of America as a “Christian nation” to insist that a a particular sectarian view of God should control every aspect of life, through all manner of human institutions. Christian nationalists are not in a position to impose their vision now, and to be fair, many involved in the movement would never go that far. But as explained by Julie Ingersoll in "Building God's Kingdom: Inside the World of Christian Reconstruction" (Salon interview here), dominionist ideas have had enormous influence on the religious right, even among those who overtly disavow them.

The authors of the Project Blitz playbook are savvy purveyors of dominionism,” Clarkson told Salon. “They are in it for the long haul and try not to say things that sound too alarming. ​But they live an immanent theocratic vision, and they sometimes cannot help themselves, such as when they describe the resolutions as seeking to ‘define public policies of the state in favor of biblical values concerning marriage and sexuality.’

“Among the ways they are seeking to implement 'biblical values,'" Clarkson continued, "is by seeking religious exemptions from civil rights laws and professional licensing standards.” The two-tiered society this would create reflects the essence of Christian nationalism, as Whitehead describes it.

Whitehead told Salon: “Our work shows that believing that the United States is a ‘Christian nation’ and desiring a close, symbiotic relationship between Christianity and civil society is significantly associated with a number of stances like opposition toward same-sex marriage, antipathy toward religious minorities and a tendency toward endorsing stricter racial boundaries in romantic and family relationships." So it makes sense, he continued, "that these groups who advocate for a formal recognition of the 'Christian nation' narrative are also seeking to formalize support for particular definitions of marriage, gender identity and family structure” — definitions that elevate some people and effectively subjugate others.

So far this year, supporters of this initiative, and their allies, have introduced 71 bills nationwide (or carried them over from last year) -- and those are only the ones tracked by Americans United for Separation of Church and State. (Some of the bills counted are similar in intent, but may not directly draw on the Project Blitz playbook.)

Most of those have innocuous or feel-good names like the National Motto Display Act (23 bills), the First Amendment Defense Act (10 bills), the Child Protection Act (four bills), the Bible Literacy Act (eight bills) and the Clergy Protection Act (six bills). The goal is to come across as wholesome, apple-pie Americans, while copying the strikingly successful approach of the pro-corporate American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

Nonetheless, Fea continued, Barton “is one of the most important people in American politics today.” How could that possibly be true? "If Andrew Whitehead and his colleagues are correct, evangelicals supported Trump because they believe America was founded as, and continues to be, a Christian nation," Fea said. "No one has promoted this narrative more effectively than David Barton.”The guiding vision behind Project Blitz is heavily influenced by pseudo-historian David Barton, a leading propagandist for the myth that America was founded as a “Christian nation.” John Fea, author of the aforementioned "Believe Me," told Salon: “David Barton has been discredited by every American historian I know, including evangelical historians who teach at the most conservative Christian colleges in the country, including Bob Jones University and Liberty University. He is a politician who uses the past for his own political agenda."

The war imagery conjured up by the name “Project Blitz” is no accident. This is religious war in the minds of those waging it, and they’ve got specific goals and strategies in mind. But it’s not easy for outsiders to see what’s going on here, as Clarkson explains in his story:

The bills are seemingly unrelated and range widely in content — from requiring public schools to display the national motto, “In God We Trust” (IGWT); to legalizing discrimination against LGBTQ people; to religious exemptions regarding women’s reproductive health. The model bills, the legislative strategy and the talking points reflect the theocratic vision that has animated many in the Christian Right for some time. In the context of Project Blitz’s 116-page playbook, however, they also reveal a highly sophisticated level of coordination and strategizing that echoes the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which infamously networks pro-business state legislators, drafts legislation, and shares legislative ideas and strategies.

The bills are organized into three tiers, “according to the degree of opposition they anticipate — 1 being the least,” Clarkson reports. “The general plan is to begin with the less controversial measures to get legislators comfortable with the subject matter; to seek small victories first.” The full meaning and significance of the earlier measures will not become readily apparent until later measures build on them and covert synergies are revealed.

“Category 3’s focus on religious liberty is especially relevant today," in the wake of the Supreme Court's historic Obergefell decision, said Daniel Bennett, author of "Defending Faith: The Politics of the Christian Conservative Legal Movement." With same-sex marriage a settled issue, right-wing Christian groups "will want to prioritize protection for religious liberty, defined in their specific way. The Christian legal movement is fighting these battles in the court, but these sorts of legislative proposals show how wide-ranging the broader movement’s strategy is.”The first tier, “Legislation Regarding Our Country's Religious Heritage,” aims at importing the Christian nationalist worldview (including Barton’s bogus history) into public schools and other aspects of the public sphere. It starts simply with a display of the motto “In God We Trust,” a Cold War replacement for “e pluribus unum” — out of many, one — which better reflects America’s pragmatic, pluralist foundations. The second tier, “Resolutions and Proclamations Recognizing the Importance of Religious History and Freedom,” aims at making government increasingly a partner in “Christianizing” America. The third tier, "Religious Liberty Protection Legislation," has three subcategories, one dealing with “public policy resolutions,” the other two with specifically targeted but sweepingly conceived “protections” for religious practices.

It’s a defensive fight now, but it’s also laying the groundwork for a possible future counter-offensive. “Although Category 3 is divided in three parts, you could also see it as having two main underlying intentions," said Clarkson. "First to denigrate the LGBTQ community, and second to defend and advance the right to discriminate. This is one way that the agenda of theocratic dominionism is reframed as protecting the right of theocrats to discriminate against those deemed second-class, at best. As the late theocratic theologian R.J. Rushdoony said, 'Only the right have rights.'"

Bills protecting the “right” to discriminate against the LGBTQ community are the most salient example of how Project Blitz aims to produce a radically altered “Handmaid’s Tale-style America. But even the most innocent-seeming proposal — introducing the motto “In God We Trust” into schools — has a divisive, discriminatory, damaging impact, sharply at odds with its presentation.

“To an ex-evangelical such as myself, Project Blitz is deeply concerning,” Christopher Stroop told Salon. Stroop is a scholar, writer and Twitter personality with a history and humanities Ph.D. from Stanford, who is currently senior research associate with the Postsecular Conflicts project. As he says, he spent many years in the evangelical world.

“When I was growing up in the 1980s," Stroop said, "two issues that were frequently lamented in my evangelical community were the legalization of abortion and the supposed banning of prayer in school — ‘supposed’ because the right-wing evangelicals I grew up with usually failed to note that the Supreme Court had only ended officially school-sponsored prayer, and had not outlawed private prayer in schools. Extreme exaggeration of the ostensible persecution we supposedly faced as Christians was prevalent in my childhood milieu.”

The attempt to reverse that imagined persecution can have real damaging effects, as Stroop notes. In examining the goal of requiring "In God We Trust" to be displayed in public schools, he said, "I cannot help but associate this goal with evangelical resentment over legal limitations on prayer in school, and to see it as an attempt to take a step toward the Christianization of public schools. On its own, posting the motto 'In God We Trust' in schools would already embolden Christian nationalists present in those schools, leading Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, liberal and atheist children to feel alienated and pressured to conform.”

paul r

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http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/dominionists-head-to-trumps-dc-hotel-to-bring-heavens-rule-to-america/

While thousands of conservative political activists gather just outside Washington, D.C., this week for the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), a gathering of spiritual warriors will pack the Trump International Hotel just blocks from the White House. The sold-out event—The Turnaround: An Appeal to Heaven National Gathering—has been organized by a group of dominionists who consider themselves to be modern-day apostles and prophets, including Dutch Sheets, Chuck Pierce, Cindy Jacobs and Lou Engle.

Event leaders are associated with the New Apostolic Reformation, which believes a triumphant, dominion-taking church will help bring about the return of Christ, and many are part of POTUS Shield, a network of self-described apostles and prophets who believe President Trump was anointed by God to help bring that all about.

Sheets, the event’s main promoter, believes the event will play a prophetic role in getting the church to “function as Christ’s Ekklesia, the representatives of His Kingdom government on earth; as such, we will expose the enemies of God, disrupt their plans, enforce Heaven’s rule, and reform America.” As he described it in 2015, “We must realize that we are God’s governing force on the earth, which have been given keys of authority from Him to legislate from the spiritual realm.”

“It seems the spiritual airwaves are filled with prophetic insight regarding this gathering,” Sheets wrote excitedly in an email sent over the weekend. He told a story about a dream that a “trusted prophet” had, which featured hundreds of angels with tuning forks in their hands transforming into an army of special forces.

Sheets is big on the concept of the Ekklesia, a Greek word that is traditionally interpreted in scripture as “the church.” But Sheets imbues the term with governmental authority:

One of the great shifts in process within the Body of Christ is regarding our role as Christ’s Ekklesia (Church). Most of you probably know that in Christ’s day, the Word did not mean a religious service, organization, or building; it was a legislative assembly. We are “representatives” of Christ’s Kingdom government on earth.

Certain streams of the Body of Christ have functioned well as His family and Bride. Few of us, however, have operated at a high level as His Ekklesia. Binding and loosing, opening and closing spiritual doors, releasing Heaven’s decrees to earth—these governmental functions have occurred only at fairly low levels.

This is about to change.

The turnaround for America is only part of God’s plan for this gathering. One prophecy concerning the upcoming Turnaround conference stated that the worldwide prayer movement will be launched into its next phase. Functioning as Christ’s Ekklesia IS that new phase! The Church is about to move into a completely new level of enforcing Kingdom rule and the will of God on earth.

Sheets considers it interesting that the meeting will take place physically between the FBI and the Department of Justice, “two of the agencies from which a few corrupt individuals have tried to destroy the president.”

We will operate in our Kingdom authority while there, breaking the back of this attempt to render President Trump ineffective. We will decree the exposing and failure of all attempts to sabotage his presidency. We will release favor over him, enabling him to accomplish everything for which God sent him to the White House—including the turning of the Supreme Court! President Trump will fulfill all of God’s purposes for him.

“I think it’s so prophetic that we’re doing this in the Trump hotel in Washington, D.C.,” Sheets told fellow prophet Steve Shultz in a January interview.  Sheets says that when organizers were looking for a place to hold their event in DC, some venues told them they weren’t welcome. They worried about approaching the Trump International because it is more expensive than anywhere else, he said. But after his team reached out, someone from the hotel called the next morning and said they knew all about the Appeal to Heaven, wanted it in the hotel, and lowered their prices to make it happen.

The event’s February 22 starting date also holds prophetic significance for Sheets and other organizers. Sheets calls the Bible verse Isaiah 22:22 “the key to governmental authority,” describing its power in 2014:

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http://www.alternet.org/belief/vatican-fires-shot-us-religious-right-calls-out-religious-liberty-industry-and-evangelical

An article being described as “explosive,” written by two allies of Pope Francis in a Vatican-reviewed publication, is taking on the “spurious alliance between politics and religious fundamentalism” in the United States.

Antonio Spadaro and Marcelo Figueroa call out the dominionist groups“composed mainly of whites from the deep American South” for their rejection of the “global ecological crisis” and their Armageddon-infused rhetoric, pointedly drawing parallels to Islamic fundamentalism.

They accuse these evangelical fundamentalists of seeking “influence in the political and parliamentary sphere and in the juridical and educational areas so that public norms can be subjected to religious morals.”

And, they name names:

This is the doctrine that feeds political organizations and networks such as the Council for National Policy and the thoughts of their exponents such as Steve Bannon, currently chief strategist at the White House and supporter of an apocalyptic geopolitics.

But it’s not just evangelical fundamentalists who desire “religious influence in the public sphere”:

Appealing to the values of fundamentalism, a strange form of surprising ecumenism is developing between Evangelical fundamentalists and Catholic Integralists. . . . Some who profess themselves to be Catholic express themselves in ways that until recently were unknown in their tradition and using tones much closer to Evangelicals. They are defined as value voters as far as attracting electoral mass support is concerned. . . . This meeting over shared objectives happens around such themes as abortion, same-sex marriage, religious education in schools and other matters generally considered moral or tied to values.

More than 15 years after the Catholic bishops helped get George W. Bush elected president and nearly eight after the signing of the Manhattan Declaration, the Vatican has discovered what had become the defining feature of the Christian Right in America: the conservative evangelical-Catholic convergence.

And while Spadaro and Figueroa are critical of the sublimation of gospel values to the goal of right-wing political domination, it’s worth noting that the two issues that drove this convergence in the first place—abortion and same-sex marriage—haven’t exactly been abandoned by Pope Francis.

As for the “glue” that holds this altogether—and formed the underpinning of the Manhattan Declaration coalition—Francis has been a proponent of the idea that the “religious liberty” of Catholics is under attackin western democracies such as the United States, even as Spadaro and Figueroa criticize its use for political ends:

The erosion of religious liberty is clearly a grave threat within a spreading secularism. But we must avoid its defense coming in the fundamentalist terms of a “religion in total freedom,” perceived as a direct virtual challenge to the secularity of the state.

While much of their criticism is justified, Spadaro and Figueroa are silent about the role that Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict played in the creation of the “evangelical Catholics” they complain about and about the role that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops played in driving conservative Catholics into the arms of the Republican Party, and, eventually, Trump.

Nonetheless, they correctly call-out the “shocking rhetoric” of the Church Militant and other pro-Trump organizations that are “openly in favor of a political ultraconservatism and uses Christian symbols to impose itself”

. . . it has created a close analogy between Donald Trump and Emperor Constantine, and between Hilary Clinton and Diocletian. The American elections in this perspective were seen as a “spiritual war” . . .  Church Militant asks if Trump’s victory can be attributed to the prayers of Americans. The response suggested is affirmative. The indirect missioning for President Trump is clear: he has to follow through on the consequences. This is a very direct message that then wants to condition the presidency by framing it as a divine election.  For conservatives, however, this is not political warfare cloaked as spiritual warfare, but a logical and necessary outcome of attacks on the traditional church. Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput The cooperation of Catholics and evangelicals was quite rare when I was a young priest. Their current mutual aid, the ecumenism that seems to worry La Civilta Cattolica, is a function of shared concerns and principles, not ambition for political power. . . . Dismissing today’s attacks on religious liberty as a “narrative of fear”—as the La Civiltà Cattolica author curiously describes it—might have made sense 25 years ago. Now it sounds willfully ignorant.  It also ignores the fact that America’s culture wars weren’t wanted, and weren’t started, by people faithful to constant Christian belief.

But Spadaro and Figueroa call this a false ecumenism, “an ecumenism of conflict that unites them in the nostalgic dream of a theocratic type of state” and that “wants walls and purifying deportations.” By contrast, they say, Francis’ ecumenism “moves under the urge of inclusion, peace, encounter and bridges.”

Regardless of whose brand of ecumenism you subscribe to, one thing is for sure. Francis, they say, “wants to break the organic link between culture, politics, institution and Church.” But this link underpins much of the conservative religious understanding in the United States today. And breaking it may take more than just words.

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“The movie never asks the seminal question as to why the people of Iraq are fighting back against us in the very first place,” said Mikey Weinstein, whom I reached by phone in New Mexico. Weinstein, who worked in the Reagan White House and is a former Air Force officer, is the head of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, which challenges the growing Christian fundamentalism within the U.S. military. “It made me physically ill with its twisted, totally one-sided distortions of wartime combat ethics and justice woven into the fabric of Chris Kyle’s personal and primal justification mantra of ‘God-Country-Family.’ It is nothing less than an odious homage, indeed a literal horrific hagiography to wholesale slaughter.”

Weinstein noted that the embrace of extreme right-wing Christian chauvinism, or Dominionism, which calls for the creation of a theocratic “Christian” America, is especially acute among elite units such as the SEALs and the Army Special Forces.

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http://www.publiceye.org/christian_right/dominionism.htm

Christian Right & Theocracy

When Michelle Goldberg wrote “A Christian Plot for Domination?” for the Daily Beast she chose her terms carefully. The subhead stated “Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry aren't just devout—both have deep ties to a fringe fundamentalist movement known as Dominionism, which says Christians should rule the world.” Within hours both critics and supporters of Goldberg’s thesis littered the Internet with posts that drew no distinctions among the Christian Right, Dominionism, and Christian Reconstructionism. There are important differences, and this essay seeks to explain them. PRA takes no position on the 2012 elections, but we do take a position supporting the accurate use of language.

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PRA's definition since 2005:

Dominionism: The theocratic idea that regardless of theological view or eschatological timetable, heterosexual Christian men are called by God to exercise dominion over secular society by taking control of political and cultural institutions. Competes in Christianity with the idea of Stewardship, which suggests custodial care rather than absolute power. Used here in the broader sense, some analysts use the word only to refer to forms and offshoots of Reconstructionism.

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Inside the Christian Right Dominionist Movement That's Undermining Democracy

Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin have all flirted with Christian Right Dominionism, but there's lots of misinformation about just what that means.

Dominionists want to impose a form of Christian nationalism on the United States, a concept that was dismissed as eroding freedom and democracy by the founders of our country. Dominionism has become a major influence on the right-wing populist Tea Parties as Christian Right activists have flooded into the movement at the grassroots.

At the same time, legitimate questions have been raised about whether or not potential Republican presidential nominees Rick Perry, Michelle Bachmann, or Sarah Palin have moved from a generic form of Christian Right Dominionism toward the more totalitarian form know as Dominion Theology.

Clueless journalists and crafty Christian Right pundits have mocked the idea that Dominionism as a religiously motivated political tendency even exists. Scholars, however, have been writing about Dominionism for over a decade, some using the term directly, and others describing the tendency in other ways. Many articles on Dominionism can be found on Talk to Action, especially by authors Rachel Tabachnick, Bruce Wilson, Frederick Clarkson. Several of the authors who pioneered the discussion of Dominionism have written for the Public Eye Magazine.

Dominionism is a broad political impulse within the Christian Right in the United States. It comes in a variety of forms that author Fred Clarkson and I call soft and hard. Fred and I probably coined the term "Dominionism" back in the 1990s, but in any case we certainly were the primary researchers who organized its use among journalists and scholars.

Clarkson noted three characteristics that bridge both the hard and the soft kind of Dominionism.

• Dominionists celebrate Christian nationalism, in that they believe the United States once was, and should again be, a Christian nation. In this way, they deny the Enlightenment roots of American democracy.
• Dominionists promote religious supremacy, insofar as they generally do not respect the equality of other religions, or even other versions of Christianity.
• Dominionists endorse theocratic visions, believing that the Ten Commandments, or "biblical law," should be the foundation of American law, and that the U.S. Constitution should be seen as a vehicle for implementing Biblical principles.

At the apex of hard Dominionism is the religious dogma of Dominion Theology, with two major branches: Christian Reconstructionism and Kingdom Now theology. It is the latter's influence on the theopolitical movement called the New Apostolic Reformation that has been linked in published reports to potential Republican presidential nominees Perry, Bachmann or Palin. All three of these right-wing political debutantes have flirted with Christian Right Dominionism, but how far they have danced toward the influence of hard-right Dominion Theology is in dispute. It would be nice if some "mainstream" journalists actually researched the question.

"While differing from Reconstructionism in many ways, Kingdom Now shares the belief that Christians have a mandate to take dominion over every area of life," explains religion scholar Bruce Barron. And it is just this tendency that has spread through evangelical Protestantism, resulting in the emergence of "various brands of `dominionist' thinkers in contemporary American evangelicalism," according to Barron.

The most militant Dominion Theologists would silence dissenters and execute adulterers, homosexuals and recalcitrant children. No...seriously. OK, they would only be executed for repeated offenses, explain some defenders of Christian Reconstructionism. Even most Christian Right activists view the more militant Dominion Theologists as having really creepy ideas.

Much of the controversy over the issue of Dominionism is caused by writers who use the term carelessly, often conflating the broad term Dominionism with the narrow term Dominion Theology. Some on the Left have implied that every conservative Christian evangelical is part of the Christian Right political movement; and that everyone in the Christian Right is an active Dominionist. This is false. Some critics even state that the Christian Right is neofascist. Few serious scholars of fascism agree with that assessment, although several admit that if triggered by a traumatic societal event, any contemporary right-wing populist movement could descend into neofascism.

Advocates of Dominion Theology go beyond the democracy eroding theocracy of Dominionism into a totalitarian form of religious power called a "theonomy," in which pluralistic democracy and religious tolerance are seen as a problem to be solved by godly men carrying out God's will. Karen Armstrong calls Christian Reconstructionism "totalitarian" because it leaves "no room for any other view or policy, no democratic tolerance for rival parties, no individual freedom." Matthew N. Lyons and I call Christian Reconstructionism a "new form of clerical fascist politics," in our book Right-Wing Populism in America, because we see it echoing the religiously based clerical fascist movements that existed during World War II in countries including Romania and Hungary.

According to Fred Clarkson:

Reconstructionists believe that there are three main areas of governance: family government, church government, and civil government. Under God's covenant, the nuclear family is the basic unit. The husband is the head of the family, and wife and children are "in submission" to him. In turn, the husband "submits" to Jesus and to God's laws as detailed in the Old Testament. The church has its own ecclesiastical structure and governance. Civil government exists to implement God's laws. All three institutions are under Biblical Law, the implementation of which is called "theonomy."

Christian Reconstructionists believe that as more Christians adopt Dominion Theology, they will eventually convert the majority of Americans. Then the country will realize that the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights are merely codicils to Old Testament biblical law. Because they believe this is God's will, they scoff at criticism that what they plan is a revolutionary overthrow of the existing system of government. Over the past 20 years the leading proponents of Reconstructionism have included founder Rousas John (R.J.) Rushdoony, Gary North, Greg Bahnsen, David Chilton, Gary DeMar, and Andrew Sandlin. Kingdom Now theology emerged from the Latter Rain Pentacostal movement and the concept of Spiritual Warfare against the literal demonic forces of Satan. It has been promoted by founder Earl Paulk as well as C. Peter Wagner, founder of the New Apostolic Reformation movement.

For many, President Obama and the Democratic Party are among these "demonic forces." This has real world consequences.

In 2006 former Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris told thousands of cheering Christian Right activists that beating the Democrats in the upcoming elections was a battle against "principalities and powers," which many in the audience would hear as a Biblical reference to the struggle with the demonic agents of Satan. Harris (who played "ballot bowling" in Florida to elect George W. Bush in 2000) told the audience at the annual Values Voter Summit in Washington DC that she had studied religion in Switzerland with the godfather of the Christian Right, theologian Francis A. Schaeffer. Her speech there, which I witnessed and wrote about, qualifies her as a Dominionist.

In 2004 Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, another Dominionist, oversaw the election apparatus giving his favored candidate George W. Bush a boost into the Oval Office.

Religion scholar Bruce Barron explains that "unlike the Christian Right, Reconstructionism is not simply or primarily a political movement; it is first and foremost an educational movement fearlessly proclaiming an ideology of total world transformation." According to sociologist Sara Diamond, Christian Reconstructionism spread the "concept that Christians are Biblically mandated to `occupy' all secular institutions" to the extent that it became "the central unifying ideology for the Christian Right."

William Martin is the author of the 1996 tome With God on Our Side, a companion volume to the PBS series of the same name (Martin and I were both advisers to the PBS series). Martin is a sociologist and professor of religion at Rice University, and he has been critical of the way some critics of the Christian Right have tossed around the terms "dominionism" and "theocracy." According to Martin:

It is difficult to assess the influence of Reconstructionist thought with any accuracy. Because it is so genuinely radical, most leaders of the Religious Right are careful to distance themselves from it. At the same time, it clearly holds some appeal for many of them. One undoubtedly spoke for others when he confessed, `Though we hide their books under the bed, we read them just the same.'

Martin reveals that "several key leaders have acknowledged an intellectual debt to the theonomists." The late Christian Right leaders Jerry Falwell and D. James Kennedy "endorsed Reconstructionist books" for example. Before he died in 2001, the founder of Christian Reconstuctionism, R. J. Rushdoony, appeared several times on Christian Right televangelist programs such as Pat Robertson's 700 Club and the program hosted by D. James Kennedy.

"Pat Robertson makes frequent use of dominion' language," says Martin. Robertson's book, The Secret Kingdom, "has often been cited for its theonomy elements; and pluralists were made uncomfortable when, during his presidential campaign, he said he would only bring Christians and Jews into the government,' as well as when he later wrote, `There will never be world peace until God's house and God's people are given their rightful place of leadership at the top of the world.' "

Martin also pointed out that Jay Grimstead, who led the Coalition on Revival, "brought Reconstructionists together with more mainstream evangelicals." According to Martin, Grimstead explained "`I don't call myself [a Reconstructionist]," but "A lot of us are coming to realize that the Bible is God's standard of morality...in all points of history...and for all societies, Christian and non-Christian alike....It so happens that Rushdoony, Bahnsen, and North understood that sooner."

Then Grimstead added, "there are a lot of us floating around in Christian leadership--James Kennedy is one of them--who don't go all the way with the theonomy thing, but who want to rebuild America based on the Bible."

So let's choose our language carefully, but let's recognize that terms such as Dominionism and Theocracy, when used cautiously and carefully, are appropriate when describing troubling tendencies in the Christian Right that are helping push the current political scene toward confrontation and intolerance.

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More background articles on the roots of Dominionism:

The Roots of Dominionism

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[editor's note:] Author Chip Berlet was co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Millennialism and Millennial Movements and a contributor to the Encyclopedia of Fundamentalism and the second edition of theEncyclopaedia Judaica. Originally posted on Alternet.org.

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