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Delegates at the United Church of Christ’s (UCC) 35th General Synod overwhelmingly passed an emergency resolution this week, condemning the ongoing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids as “domestic terrorism” and accusing President Donald Trump's administration of “weaponizing the Constitution.”

Religious News Service reported Tuesday that the resolution targets immigration enforcement operations “carried out by ICE agents working without uniforms, wearing masks or refusing to identify themselves,” condemning these tactics as threatening and abusive.

Titled “Responding to the federal government’s attack on immigrants, migrants, and refugees,” the resolution urges the church to divest from for-profit private detention firms, specifically naming CoreCivic, GEO Group, and Management and Training Corp.— while allowing congregations to go further if they choose, according to the report.

READ MORE:Devastating CNN poll shows just how much Trump has fallen — even among his biggest supporters

Presented as an emergency motion by the Rev. Clara Sims of First Congregational UCC in Albuquerque on behalf of the Southwest Conference, the move reflects the church’s urgent response to escalated immigration enforcement under the Trump administration.

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Meanwhile, First Congregational UCC has opened housing and provided food and aid to immigrants arriving from the border, actions its minister says stem from the denomination’s theological commitment to protect the vulnerable.

“Our faith has always called us into spaces of risk on behalf of the vulnerable,” said Sims, “especially when people are being made vulnerable by really corrupt systems of power.”

The Southwest Conference fast-tracked the resolution after national church leaders and regional partners voiced deep concerns about human rights violations in detention facilities, per the report.

READ MORE:Trump 'very irritated' with GOP senator whose reelection bid could decide Senate control

Last month, Bishop Alberto Rojas of the Diocese of San Bernardino, California, released a letter addressing recent reports that ICE agents had entered Catholic churches.

As head of the sixth-largest Catholic diocese in the U.S., Bishop Rojas strongly criticized the escalation of ICE operations.

In his communication to Catholics, he highlighted that “authorities are now seizing brothers and sisters indiscriminately, without respect for their right to due process and their dignity as children of God.”

He conveyed his solidarity with immigrants “who are bearing the trauma and injustice of these tactics,” and assured them that “we join you in carrying this very difficult cross.”

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During the inaugural prayer service, Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde urged President Donald Trump to “have mercy” on undocumented migrants and LGBTQ kids, and right-wing media responded by calling her a “fake bishop” with “deranged political beliefs,” saying her sermon was “heretical” and “satanic,” and claiming she was “forcing left-wing platitudes down everyone’s throat.”

Budde’s comments about mercy provoked Trump

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  • The bishop leading the inaugural prayer service at Washington National Cathedral made a plea to Trump to “have mercy” on behalf of LGBTQ kids and migrants.“In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now,”}: said Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, D.C. “There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican and independent families. Some who fear for their lives.” She added, “They may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors. They are faithful members of our churches and mosques, synagogues.” NBC News, [1/21/25]

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God’s Lobbyists: The Hidden Realm of Religious Influence

On the first day, according to the Book of Genesis, the Lord said, “Let there be light.”

But when it comes to the government lobbying efforts of most religious institutions, their activities are notably shrouded in darkness, even as representatives of numerous faiths routinely pressure federal lawmakers on issues ranging from health care to international relations, poverty to abortion rights.

This is largely by government design. In 1995, when Congress passed the Lobbying Disclosure Act in 1995, it provided for a few exceptions, including lobbying communications made by a “church, its integrated auxiliary or a convention or association of churches that is exempt from filing a federal income tax return,” as well as a “religious order.”

The only instances in which a church must disclose their lobbying is if spends a “substantial” amount of money on lobbying, if more than 20 percent of its lobbyist’s income is from direct lobbying on behalf of the church or if it hires an outside lobbying firm. Then, the hired firm is required to disclose that it has lobbied on behalf of a religious institution. The “substantial” test is a murky one, with little enforcement of it, and as is the 20 percent rule, unless attention is drawn to the organization.

People of faith are divided on whether this lobbying disclosure exception is appropriate.

CHURCH LOBBYING EFFORTS

Darrin Mitchell is a church lobbyist and president of the American Christian Lobbyists Association. While much of the world of undisclosed church lobbying remains hidden, Mitchell offered insight.

“Truthfully, most American citizens, Christians and non-Christians alike, do not follow up their vote by contacting their states elected officials in the U.S. Congress,” he wrote to *OpenSecrets Blog* in an email.

“The ACLA works to lobby and recruit individual pastors and/or local church members who are generally politically active,” he continued, “by encouraging them to retain the lobbying support services of the ACLA to help them individually lobby their elected officials in the U.S. Congress.”

“I currently do not directly represent churches or pastors as a Christian or church lobbyist,” he wrote. “Most of my work when I contact churches is to invite pastors and their congregations to attend ACLA Town Hall meetings or workshops that are held at a neutral location like a community center, town hall or hotel meeting room. If I speak in a church, I have to walk a tight rope as I cannot endorse candidates or parties in that forum.”

While Mitchell does not directly lobby members of Congress, he uses educational efforts to encourage others to do so. Beginning in late 2011, the ACLA aims to create a direct lobbying mechanism.

“We are currently in the developmental phase of this option as we are seeing how our clients respond to this new lobbying option and how many new clients sign up for
this program,” he wrote.

But what about when the church-goers he educates do lobby their members of Congress and do not disclose?

“Based on my experience as a Christian and church lobbyist I believe [lobbying disclosure exemptions are] unfair,” he wrote, noting that many other pastors would disagree with his position. “By allowing their members to know about their church lobbying activities I also believe that would energize politically active conservative Christians to take a more active part in contacting their states elected officials.”

Mitchell, pictured left, wrote that the relationship between churches and the federal government “should be
closer” and could be closer by overcoming levels of ignorance regarding lobbying.

“[M]any of the churches and pastors we contact are apolitical in nature due to their misunderstandings of the IRS rules pertaining to the contributions that their church could make for church lobbying activities,” he told OpenSecrets Blog.

Many Christian conservatives, he said, “do not know how to make their vote count beyond their vote between each two-year election cycle by directly lobbying their states elected officials in the U.S. Congress.”

Churches themselves are exempt from taxes, and they could lose their tax-exempt status if they engage in “substantial” levels of lobbying. There is no bright-line definition of what “substantial” lobbying actually means.

The IRS “considers a variety of factors, including the time devoted (by both compensated and volunteer workers) and the expenditures devoted by the organization to the activity, when determining whether the lobbying activity is substantial,” according to IRS Publication 1828, which is geared toward tax-exempt churches and religious organizations.

But, because churches are tax-exempt, they largely slide under the IRS radar. Usually, there is little accountability on these churches to lobby substantially; only a report for an individual or a chance audit will reveal to the IRS any substantial lobbying. A church’s major deterrence to “substantial” lobbying is the loss of their tax-exempt status.

With these rules, however murky, in place, some view the lack of sunlight in religious lobbying as rational.

Frank Guliuzza, professor of government and dean of academic affairs at Patrick Henry College, a Christian institution, told OpenSecrets Blog “the law treats those who wish to lobby motivated by their religious beliefs the same way it treats those who wish to lobby motivated by their feminist beliefs, their socialist believes, their support for Tea Party ideas and the like. They can raise money to speak out; they can contact elected officials; they can contact heads of regulatory agencies; they can submit amicus curiae briefs — all of the many forms of lobbying — without registering as professional lobbyists.

“However, if a church or religious organization sets up an outfit that will employ professional lobbyists, the lobbyists must register like other professionals,” he continued. “That distinction seems both reasonable and fair.”

UNKNOWN LOBBYISTS

Enter religious organizations that aren’t themselves churches.

One such group that knows how to lobby is theNational Association of Evangelicals. As an association of churches, it is also exempt from lobbying disclosure rules. An association publication, *For the Health of the Nation*, implicitly refers to lobbying.



“Evangelical Christians in America face a historic opportunity,” the preamble begins. “We make up fully one quarter of all voters in the most powerful nation in history. Never before has God given American evangelicals such an awesome opportunity to shape public policy.”

“The First Amendment’s Establishment Clause is directed only at government and

restrains its power,” it continues. “Thus, for example, the clause was never intended to shield individuals from exposure to the religious views of nongovernmental speakers. Exemptions from regulations or tax burdens do not violate the Establishment Clause, for government does not establish religion by leaving it alone.”

In other words, the National Association of Evangelicals believes that lobbying disclosure exemptions is not a violation of the First Amendment.

Spokesmen for the National Association of Evangelicals, as well as the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, did not respond to request by OpenSecrets Blog for interviews despite numerous attempts.

Mitchell, as a lobbyist, says that he “spend[s] the majority of my day conducting telephone, online or personal, face-to-face lobbying meetings.”

In addition to meetings, he teaches citizens how to lobby, conducts town hall meetings and responds to questions and requests.

His organization has inspired meetings with many members of Congress in a lobbying capacity from politically-interested Christians.

“It has always been a goal of the ACLA to get our clients to personally contact their states elected officials in person, by general mail and/or by telephone,” Mitchell told OpenSecrets Blog. “As a result of these efforts… I believe that we have been successful in contacting the majority of the members of the U.S. Congress over the past seven years.”

Because churches do not disclose with whom they meet, it is impossible to definitively tell if they have indeed met with lawmakers — though, as Mitchell says, they have.

Some congressional offices, such as the offices of Reps. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and Renee Ellmers (R-N.C.) declined to comment to OpenSecrets Blog.

Paul Flusche, the press secretary of Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.), said by email that “[r]ecognizing the right of people to meet with their elected officials in private, this office routinely does not disclose with whom the Congressman and his staff have met or what was discussed.”

Other congressional offices stressed the need to meet with constituents regardless of their exemption from lobbying disclosure.

“Rep. [Glenn] Thompson [R-N.C.] is on the Congressional Prayer Caucus, but it has no bearing as to whom he does or does not meet with,” press secretary Braden Parish told OpenSecrets Blog. “As a matter of office policy, Rep. Thompson does not discriminate as to whom he meets with, especially if they are from the Fifth District.”

Congressman J. Randy Forbes (R-Va.) is the founder and co-chairman of the Congressional Prayer Caucus.

Forbes “and members of his staff meet with countless constituents and numerous organizations both in Washington D.C. and in our district offices,” press secretary Joe Hack told OpenSecrets Blog in an email.

“Given the variety of these organizations, it would be logical to conclude that meetings have included individuals or groups recognized by the IRS as charitable organizations in addition to those that are required to file under the LDA; the meetings cover a range of topics, from faith issues to preserving our national defense,” Hack continued. “Meeting requests are not screened to determine an organization’s filing status, so we do not know which groups fall into which category.”

‘WE FEEL THE SUN NEEDS TO SHINE’

Some groups view church lobbying disclosure exemptions as unfair, unnecessary or even unconstitutional.

These exemptions “would shock Thomas Jefferson and James Madison,” Sean Faircloth, the executive director of the Secular Coalition of America, told OpenSecrets Blog.

“Any privileging of religion in law is of great concern to our organization, and I would hope it would be of great concern to any American,” Faircloth continued.

He condemned the special exemption granted to churches in lobbying disclosure.

“We should absolutely have disclosure,” he said. “There should be sunshine just like for any other organizations.”

Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, equated these special exemption rules with the notorious Jonestown Massacre and Pastor Jim Jones incident.

“He was not beholden to the government to report anything,” she toldOpenSecrets Blog. “This is the perfect cover.”

“The whole thing stinks,” she continued.

“It’s a problem. Why wouldn’t they do it?” she asked, referencing the act of disclosing.

Even among the religious, there is some degree of skepticism on the rules.

During the health care debate in 2009 and 2010, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops was a strong lobbying presence on Capitol Hill.

“It’s very important that legislators consider carefully whether they take the advice of these bishops,” David Nolan, communications director of Catholics for Choice told OpenSecrets Blog. “The bishops represent these matters in a very black and white manners.”

“We do think it would be helpful if everybody in a religious denomination could see what their leaders are up to,” Nolan continued. He argued that when lobbying, bishops claim to represent all 64 million Catholics, but in reality, they do not.

A poll conducted by the Catholic for Choice concluded that “Catholic voters believe the U.S. Catholic bishops are wrong on healthcare reform. Sixty-eight percent disapprove of U.S. bishops saying that all Catholics should oppose the entire healthcare reform plan if it includes coverage for abortion and 56 percent think the bishops should not take a position on healthcare reform legislation in Congress.”

Unrepresentative power remains the foundation for many opponents of the current disclosure exemption for churches.

“It’s like having a shadow government,” Gaylor said. “Somebody else holds the puppet strings.”

WHO ACTUALLY DISCLOSES?

Some churches do disclose their lobbying efforts, but only when hiring outside lobbyists. Other organizations that are religiously-oriented — but not churches — that disclose their lobbying efforts.

By far the largest religious organization that discloses its lobbying is the Friends Committee on National Legislation, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit founded by members of the Society of Friends, or Quaker church.

In 2010, it spent more than $1.8 million on federal lobbying efforts, an increase of $1.2 million from 2009, according to Center for Responsive Politics’ research. During 2008, the group posted a record high of more than $2 million.

“Quakers value integrity and truth-telling highly, so we willingly disclose our lobbying activities,” Jessica Halperin, FCNL’s communications program assistant, wrote to OpenSecrets Blog in an email.

“Churches should disclose their lobbying efforts in order to be accountable to their members and their communities, particularly if they are a 501(c)(3) organization and their lobbying is being subsidized by taxpayers,” she continued. “If churches are lobbying, they should follow the rules and disclose their lobbying activities. If they enter the public discourse, they should be subject to the public debate.”

The Friends Committee has lobbied on dozens of bills and involves itself in contentious legislation.

Among the issues it has lobbied in favor of during the past include prohibitions on increasing the number of American forces in Afghanistan. Indeed, the organization claims to be “the largest team of registered peace lobbyists in Washington, D.C.,” according to its website.

It has also lobbied on the health care reform bill, the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act, better known as the cap-and-trade bill and the Uniting American Families Act of 2009, which would prohibit an immigration judge from deporting an illegal immigrant parent of a child who is a U.S. citizen. During the legislative debate on climate change last year, it also lobbied on the “cap-and-trade” bill sponsored by Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), as OpenSecrets Blog previously reported.

The Church of Scientology and the First Church of Christ, Scientist, are the only organized denominations to disclose any of their lobbying in 2010, according to the Center’s research, likely because they hired outside lobbyists.

In 2010, the Church of Scientology spent $110,000, in part lobbying in favor of the National Criminal Justice Commission Act, which would create a blue-ribbon, bipartisan commission of experts tasked with reviewing the nation’s criminal justice system and offering recommendations for reform.

Since it began lobbying in 2003, the Church of Scientology has employed Greg Mitchell as its only lobbyist. Mitchell is a former chief of staff of ex-Rep. James Rogan (R-Calif.).

The First Church of Christ, Scientist, spent $40,000 on lobbying in 2010, down from a high of $150,000 in 2009. In 2008, the church did not report any lobbying expenditures.

In 2009, the church lobbied on the health care reform bill and the areas of “spiritual care.” In 2010, it lobbied only on issues of “spiritual care,” according to the Center’s research. Among its lobbyists is former Rep. David McIntosh (R-Ind.).

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints — notable for its involvement in contentious social issues such as Proposition 8 in California during the 2008 election cycle and ballot measures in other states regarding marriage issues — has only disclosed lobbying the federal government  once, according to the Center’s research.

In 2009, the LDS Church hired A. Elizabeth Jones, a former ambassador to Kazakhstan, to lobby for an increased religious status in Italy.

“The church has spent years negotiating the intesa, an Italian term that means ‘understanding,'” according to an article from *The National Law Journal*. “An intesa carries certain privileges, as well as granting the highest status given to religions in Italy. Each agreement must be individually negotiated.”

WHAT THE FUTURE HOLDS

Darrin Mitchell, the American Christian Lobbyists Association lobbyist, as well as some secular advocates agree that church lobbying disclosure is a goal for the future, though for very different reasons.

“Overall, accountability in this area would eventually lead to substantial political change on many of the issues that concern politically active conservative Christians in the United States,” Mitchell told OpenSecrets Blog.

“I believe that disclosure in this area would energize our base of financial support and could led to a future overturning of Roe v. Wade, the passage of a constitutional amendment protecting [the Defense of Marriage Act] and greater protections of Christian Free Speech issues,” he continued.

Likewise, Sean Faircloth of the Secular Coalition of America says he will continue to advocate for full disclosure of church lobbying to increase sunshine and to combat the “privilege of religion in law that offends the Constitution and intent of the Founders.”

Meanwhile, Frank Guliuzza, the professor at Patrick Henry College, seems to find the status quo reasonable.

“Those [religious institutions] that do not hire professionals, are no more keeping their efforts ‘secret’ than are any other groups that facilitate grassroots lobbying,” he said.

“If, however, religious people or religious groups were not permitted to engage in grassroots lobbying or otherwise participate as American citizens in political activism, then it is quite likely that the preventative legislation would be in violation of the establishment clause, the free exercise clause and probably the free speech clause of the First Amendment.”

RELATED TOPICS

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https://www.alternet.org/did-senior-air-force-general-use-his-power-spread-far-right-christian-nationalism

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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/why-are-poor-whites-more-depressed-and-pessimistic-poor-african-americans

AN alex anderson

Carol Graham appeared on Charles Ellison’s “Reality Check” program on WURD AM/FM (a liberal/progressive African-American talk radio station in Philadelphia) and discussed theemotional differences between poor blacks and poor whites. It was a fascinating conservation: according to Graham’s research, poor African-Americans in the United States are, on the whole, more optimistic than poor whites—who Graham described to Ellison as being much more likely to fall into despair. As worried as the African-American community is by the Trump Administration and its horrible policies, Graham finds poor whites to be in a much worse state emotionally and are decidedly more pessimistic.

WURD callers, mostly African-Americans living in Philadelphia, offered different views on Graham’s findings. Some asserted that formerly middle-class whites who fell into poverty during the Great Recession were ill-equipped, emotionally, to handle the types of economic struggles African-Americans have been facing all these years. But another explanation for Graham’s findings is that poor whites—whether they became the neo-poor during the Great Recession or were poor long before that—are much more likely to have been thoroughly indoctrinated into right-wing Republican ideology, especially in Republican-dominated areas of the U.S. And as a result, they feel a certain self-hatred and blame themselves for their economic misfortunes in a way that poor African-Americans don’t. Poor whites (especially the ones based in rural areas or small towns) and poor African-Americans often live in very different worlds—and everything from the media outlets they embrace to the churches they attend to the music they listen to is likely to affect whether they view the poor as morally deficient or as people who have been seriously screwed over.

As much as right-wingers like to whine about the mainstream media having a liberal bias—which, for the most part, it doesn’t—the fact is that right-wing media is vast, from Fox News to white AM talk radio to Breitbart, Townhall, the Weekly Standard and countless other high-traffic wingnut websites. And theright-wing media has invested considerable time and energy in teaching that the poor are useless freeloaders living off the sweat, hard work and innovation of the rich (who Rush Limbaugh calls “the achievers”). Rural whites who have been bombarded with decades of poor-bashing from Fox News and white talk radio are bound to take that message to heart and view themselves as moral failures if they are not doing well financially.  The overall message at an African-American talk radio station like WURD is totally different from what one hears on Limbaugh’s show. From the local programming that dominates the station to the Rev. Al Sharpton’s syndicated program, “Keeping It Real,” Donald Trump’s presidency and the Republican Party are painted in a consistently negative light on WURD—and the poor are not painted as parasites or leeches by any means, but as people who have been screwed over by crony capitalism and a rigged game. While WURD callers often sound angry and frustrated over the political climate in the Trump era, the anger doesn’t sound like self-hatred or self-blame. Sharpton and Ellison will encourage education, self-improvement and job training, but in a way that uplifts rather demonizes or belittles the poor.

Christianity comes in wildly different forms in the U.S., where white fundamentalist megachurches often have a very different view of economics than African Methodist Episcopal (AME) denominations. The Christian Right, white megachurches and fundamentalist Pentecostals typically embrace the so-called “prosperity gospel,” which teaches that the rich are blessed with affluence because of their moral superiority and that the poor are poor because of their immoral, sinful ways. But in black AME churches, one often hears that it is a Christian’s duty to feed the poor and help the homeless—and one is more likely to hear Jesus Christ quoted as saying, “It is easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven.”

In AME churches, the burden of proof is usually on the rich rather than the poor. So, if an African-American in an AME congregation graduated from the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school or law school and has a six-figure income, that’s all well and good—but they’re still encouraged to roll up their sleeves and do some volunteer work in a homeless shelter because that’s their duty as a Christian. The prosperity gospel is viewed as wrong-headed and unchristian in many black AME congregations.

Liberal AME pastors view Jesus Christ as an advocate for the poor and the downtrodden. To right-wing white megachurches, Jesus hates the poor and spits in their faces.

Musicis another way in which poor whites and poor blacks can receive radically different messages. The fact that Kanye West said some favorable things about President Trump earlier this year was controversial in the hip-hop community, where Immortal Technique, Public Enemy, Ice-T, KRS-1, Paris, N.W.A, Ice Cube and countless other rappers have been known for their left-of-center views. But modern country-rock is full of right-wing activists who think former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin represents “the real America.” The Dixie Chicks became pariahs in the country music community after Natalie Maines criticized President George W. Bush and the Iraq War in 2003; Maines found out the hard way that being openly liberal can seriously damage one’s career in country music.

The message poor blacks are receiving is that poverty is the result of injustice and the failures of crony capitalism. The message many poor whites are receiving is that if you’re poor, you’re a loser and a parasite.  Of course, Jay-Z, Chance the Rapper and other hip-hop stars attract racially diverse audiences and have plenty of white fans. And as many liberals and progressives as there have been in hip-hop, conservative rappers are not nonexistent. But on the whole, the poor receive a lot more emotional support in hip-hop than they do in modern country music. And even though hip-hop has plenty of imagery of bling and Benzes while modern country music likes to portray itself as music of the common man, hip-hop—at the end of the day—tends to view the poor in a much more compassionate and favorable light.

With so many poor whites being demonized whether they’re turning on Fox News, going to a megachurch or hearing their favorite country-rock stars urging them to vote Republican and support President Trump’s agenda, it’s no wonder that so many of them have fallen into despair, hopelessness and self-hatred.

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http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-bc-us--reveal-recovery-centers-forced-labor-20171004-story.html

ref

Investigation: Drug court rehabs survive on forced labor

AMY JULIA HARRIS and SHOSHANA WALTER

Associated Press

Judges across the country are ordering defendants into recovery centers that are little more than work camps for private industry, an investigation by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting has found.

The programs promise freedom from addiction. Instead, they've turned thousands of men and women into indentured servants, exploiting a nationwide push to keep nonviolent offenders out of prison.

The rehabs send defendants to companies large and small: a Coca-Cola bottling plant in Oklahoma, a construction firm in Alabama, a nursing home in North Carolina. The rehabs get paid. The participants do not.

This article was provided to The Associated Press by the nonprofit news outlet Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting. To read — or publish — a full version of this investigation go to: https://revealnews.org/nopay .

Perhaps no rehab better exemplifies this allegiance to big business than Christian Alcoholics & Addicts in Recovery, also known as CAAIR , in the northeastern corner of Oklahoma.

It was started in 2007 by chicken company executives struggling to find workers. By forming a Christian rehab, they could supply processing plants with a cheap and captive labor force while helping men overcome their addictions.

Defendants work in grueling conditions at chicken plants owned by Simmons Foods Inc., a company with annual revenues of $1.4 billion. They work alongside paid employees, churning out chicken products and pet food for some of America's largest retailers and restaurants, including Walmart, KFC and PetSmart.

Reveal interviewed scores of former participants and employees, court officials and judges, and reviewed hundreds of pages of court filings and workers' compensation records.

Among the findings:

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http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/inmate-sues-prison-imposing-christian-propaganda

Shari Webber-Dunn, an inmate serving a murder charge in Kansas, said her First Amendment rights were violated by "Christian propaganda" imposed by the all-female prison.

The lawsuit alleged that the Topeka Correctional Facility in Kansas unconstitutionally embraces Christianity by displaying an eight-foot-tall wooden cross in its basement, publically posting prison-related prayers, soliciting book donations for a spiritual library and offering prayer request submission on a Christian bulletin board. Christian movies are also broadcasted on facility televisions and spiritual quotes are posted at the laundry room workplace, the lawsuit explained.

Webber-Dunn believed that the correctional center was "imposing strong Christian values on inmates" and creating "a coercive atmosphere where inmates are pressured to spend their time in a highly religious atmosphere and to participate in religious activities and prayers."

Inmates are prohibited from removing anything from the public bulletin boards, which Webber-Dunn said violates the establishment clause prohibiting government agencies from establishing a religion.

"There is no valid reason why Christian materials should be displayed there in a state-owned and operated correctional facility," the lawsuit said, referring to the prison laundry room, where inmates are required to drop off and pick up clothes three times a week.

Webber-Dunn wants the religious items removed and the eight-foot cross covered when it's not being used for Christian religious services. She is partnering with the American Humanist Association—a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing the separation of church and state. The group champions the constitutional rights of humanists and atheists. Webber-Dunn is registered with the prison as a practicing Thelemite, a system that encourages people to follow their true will and not interfere with the true will of another person.

...

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ref 404 http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0106-30.htm

https://web.archive.org/web/20060410075045/http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0106-30.htm

Published on Thursday, January 6, 2005 by Working For Change

Not Your Grandma's Religious Right

Don't be shocked or awed, but the Christian right isn't satisfied merely running the government

by Bill Berkowitz

"In your re-election, God has graciously granted America -- though she doesn't deserve it -- a reprieve from the agenda of paganism. You have been given a mandate... Don't equivocate. Put your agenda on the front burner and let it boil. You owe the liberals nothing. They despise you because they despise your Christ... Undoubtedly, you will have opportunity to appoint many conservative judges and exercise forceful leadership with the Congress in passing legislation that is defined by biblical norm regarding the family, sexuality, sanctity of life, religious freedom, freedom of speech, and limited government. You have four years -- a brief time only - - to leave an imprint for righteousness upon this nation that brings with it the blessings of Almighty God... If you have weaklings around you who do not share your biblical values, shed yourself of them."-- post-election letter to President Bush,Bob Jones III, president of Bob Jones University

The Rev. Jerry Falwell, Dr. James Dobson and Alabama's state representative Gerald Allen are on the warpath. The Rev. Falwell is promising to build his newly launched Moral Majority Coalition into an awesome electoral force to be reckoned with for decades to come. Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, is warning Democratic Senators that if they block President Bush's judicial nominees their political careers will be toast. And Allen wants to turn gay-positive literature, currently located at state supported institutions, to toast.

While you might have thought that President Bush's victory in November would initiate a fundamentalist time-out for hosannas and celebrations, they're keeping their joy in check. Instead of dancing in the streets, Christian right political warriors are donning full battle gear and scoping out new terrain.

The Art of Political War

During the 2000 campaign, conservative activist David Horowitz's political primer entitled "The Art of Political War: How Republicans Can Fight to Win" was distributed "compliments" of Tom DeLay, the party's majority whip, to every GOP member of the U.S. Congress, Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber pointed out in their book "Banana Republicans -- How the Right Wing Is Turning America Into a One-Party State" (Tarcher/Penguin 2004).

Horowitz's pamphlet was so highly thought of by the Heritage Foundation, Washington's premier right wing think tank, that it "sent another 2,300 copies to conservative activists around the country." Karl Rove, the mastermind behind Bush's campaigns, called Horowitz's pamphlet "a perfect pocket guide to winning on the political battlefield from an experienced warrior."

According to The Nation's Scott Sherman, Horowitz's work argued that "Politics is war conducted by other means. In political warfare you do not fight just to prevail in an argument, but to destroy the enemy's fighting ability... In political wars, the aggressor usually prevails."

Horowitz expands upon the pamphlet's theme in the book "The Art of Political War and Other Radical Pursuits (Spence Publishing Company, 2000): "Politics is a war of position. In war there are two sides: friends and enemies. Your task is to define yourself as the friend of as large a constituency as possible compatible with your principles, while defining your opponent as the enemy whenever you can. The act of defining combatants is analogous to the military concept of choosing the terrain of battle. Choose the terrain that makes the fight as easy for you as possible."

Since the election, numerous right wing campaigns, replete with the requisite fundraising pitch, have sprung up across the Internet. From the right's efforts to Stop Specter -- which, while not succeeding in denying the Senator the chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee, did force him to pledge his loyalty to the GOP's conservative leadership -- to the caterwauling about Christmas being under attack by the ACLU, to the campaign to ensure that Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" gets its share of Oscars, the right has donned permanent battle gear.

Operation Christian Vote

The Rev. Jerry Falwell recently announced the launching of a four-year voter registration project called Operation Christian Vote. Combining the resources of his newly founded Moral Majority Coalition and Liberty University's new Helms School of Government -- named after Jesse Helms, the retired five-term right wing Senator from North Carolina -- the Rev. Falwell said that intends to register 10 million new evangelical voters for the 2006 and 2008 general elections.

In a campaign announcement/fundraising pitch sent out via the Internet on December 13, the Rev. Falwell said that "students at Liberty will spend weekends and summers over the next four years working hand-in-hand with pastors and staff members of evangelical churches all over America, registering voters in the churches and neighborhoods along with educating parishioners on issues of concern to them.

"The Moral Majority Coalition will coordinate with pastors, and provide transport, food and other related expenses for all materials needed for this nationwide effort. The costs will be enormous, but the benefits will be long enduring for our nation.

"I believe that America was founded as a Christian nation, respective and tolerant of all religions, but we are indeed One Nation Under God. And it's time that the people of God exercised their right to vote and vote their Christian convictions."

Dobson's Threat

Dr. James Dobson, the founder of the Colorado Springs, Colorado-based Focus on the Family, and now head of Focus on the Family Action -- an arm of FotF established last year to allow public advocacy that would otherwise threaten FotF's tax-exempt status -- is threatening to bring the wrath of right wing Christians down upon any Democratic Senator that dares attempt to block President Bush's conservative appointments to the Supreme Court.

According to the New York Times, in a letter to more than one million of his supporters, Dr. Dobson promised "a battle of enormous proportions from sea to shining sea" if Bush fails to appoint "strict constructionist" jurists or if Democrats filibuster to block conservative nominees.

According to Dobson, vulnerable Democrats include Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Mark Dayton of Minnesota, Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, Kent Conrad of North Dakota, Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico and Bill Nelson of Florida, all of whom are up for re-election in 2006.

Goodbye to All That Gay Stuff

Gerald Allen is a Republican in the Alabama state legislature. In early December, Allen introduced a bill that would ban the use of state funds to purchase any books or other materials that "promote homosexuality." Allen's bill would prohibit taxpayer money from supporting "positive depictions of homosexuality as an alternative lifestyle."

The Guardian's Gary Taylor recently asked Allen what had motivated the bill: "Was one of his children exposed to something in school that he considered inappropriate? Did he see some flamingly gay book displayed prominently at the public library?"

Allen said that it wasn't any particular incident related to his family. "Traditional family values are under attack," Allen told Taylor. They've been under attack "for the last 40 years." The problem is with "Hollywood, the music industry." Allen said that we must "save society from moral destruction," and prevent the "re-engineering society's fabric in the minds of our children" by librarians and academics. Alabamians must be "protect[ed]."

Is Allen concerned that the legislation could mandate the state to ban some of Shakespeare's works from being staged and remove books by dozens of authors from local libraries, schools and state funded universities? According to Taylor, Allen "regards his gay book ban as a work in progress. His legislation is 'a single spoke in the wheel, it doesn't resolve all the issues.' This is just the beginning. 'To turn a big ship around it takes a lot of time,'" Allen said.

There's no shortage of right wing bile loosed on the land. Even Bill O'Reilly, the host of The O'Reilly Factor on the Fox News Channel, got caught up in the "attack on Christmas"nonsense. On his nationally syndicated radio program O'Reilly told a Jewish caller -- expressing his anger that Christmas is celebrated in public schools -- to "go to Israel."

The Rev. Falwell's Operation Christian Vote, Dr. Dobson's warning, and Alabama State Representative Allen's grotesque legislation are all signs of the religious right's vision for America. Will these and likeminded projects come to pass? Stay tuned.

© 2005 Working Assets Online

==

http://www.npr.org/2015/03/30/396365659/how-one-nation-didnt-become-under-god-until-the-50s-religious-revival

On how corporations hired ministers to spread "free enterprise"

The New Deal had passed a large number of measures that were regulating business in some ways for the first time, and it [had] empowered labor unions and given them a voice in the affairs of business. Corporate leaders resented both of these moves and so they launched a massive campaign of public relations designed to sell the values of free enterprise. The problem was that their naked appeals to the merits of capitalism were largely dismissed by the public.

The most famous of these organizations was called The American Liberty League and it was heavily financed by leaders at DuPont, General Motors and other corporations. The problem was that it seemed like very obvious corporate propaganda. As Jim Farley, the head of the Democratic Party at the time, said: "They ought to call it The American Cellophane League, because No. 1: It's a DuPont product, and No. 2: You can see right through it."

So when they realized that making this direct case for free enterprise was ineffective, they decided to find another way to do it. They decided to outsource the job. As they noted in their private correspondence, ministers were the most trusted men in America at the time, so who better to make the case to the American people than ministers?

On the message the ministers conveyed

They use these ministers to make the case that Christianity and capitalism were soul mates. This case had been made before, but in the context of the New Deal it takes on a sharp new political meaning. Essentially they argue that Christianity and capitalism are both systems in which individuals rise and fall according to their own merits. So in Christianity, if you're good you go to heaven, if you're bad you go to hell. In capitalism if you're good you make a profit and you succeed, if you're bad you fail.

On the Rev. James FifieldThe New Deal, they argue, violates this natural order. In fact, they argue that the New Deal and the regulatory state violate the Ten Commandments. It makes a false idol of the federal government and encourages Americans to worship it rather than the Almighty. It encourages Americans to covet what the wealthy have; it encourages them to steal from the wealthy in the forms of taxation; and, most importantly, it bears false witness against the wealthy by telling lies about them. So they argue that the New Deal is not a manifestation of God's will, but rather, a form of pagan stateism and is inherently sinful.

He takes over the pastorate at the First Congregational Church in Los Angeles, an elite church, literally ministering to millionaires in his pews. It's got some of the town's most wealthy citizens — the mayor attends service there, [Hollywood filmmaker] Cecil B. DeMille. He tells these millionaires what they want to hear, which is that their worldly success is a sign of heavenly blessing. He has a very loose approach to the Bible. He says that reading the Bible should be like eating fish: We take out the bones to enjoy the meat; all parts are not of equal value. Accordingly, he disregarded Christ's many injunctions about the dangers of wealth, and instead preached a philosophy that wedded capitalism to Christianity.

On Fifield's "spiritual mobilization"

"Spiritual mobilization" is his effort to recruit other ministers to the cause. So he is serving, in many ways, as a frontman for a number of corporate leaders. His main sponsors are Sun Oil President J. Howard Pew, Alfred Sloan of General Motors, the heads of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, they all heavily fund this organization. But what Fifield sets out to do is recruit other ministers to his cause. Within the span of just a decade's time, he has about 17,000 so-called minister representatives who belong to the organization who are literally preaching sermons on its Christian libertarian message to their congregations, who are competing in sermon contest[s] for cash prizes and they're doing all they can in their local communities to spread this message that the New Deal is essentially evil, it's a manifestation of creeping socialism that is rotting away the country from within. Instead they need to rally around business leaders and make common cause with them to defend what they call "the American way of life."

On Fifield's contribution to the alliance between business and Christian leaders

He helps refine the message considerably. He comes up with the phrase that reduces this Christian libertarian ideology down to a catchy slogan and that slogan is "Freedom Under God," as opposed to the slavery of the state. He popularizes this using the generous funding of his corporate backers ... through a weekly radio program that soon appears on over 800 stations nationwide, through monthly magazines that popularizes the writings of libertarian and conservative authors and most importantly, I think, through a massive Fourth of July ceremony in 1951, a ceremony organized by Cecil B. DeMille, featuring James Stewart as the master of ceremonies, and carried live coast-to-coast over national radio. In that ceremony, as in the magazine and the weekly radio show, he promotes this message that freedom under God is an essential value; that Americans need to cast off the slavery of the state and instead embrace a rugged individualism.

On "In God we trust" appearing on coins and stamps

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bigthink 2007

Rick Warren: I signed on to one of the papers talking about the Climate Change Initiative. And people assumed that that meant that I agreed with everything in that paper. I don’t happen to agree with everything in that paper. But I do believe that climate change is a spiritual issue. And you tell me which side you want to believe – whether you believe global warming is catastrophic or gradual; or whether it’s caused by humans or not caused by humans and it’s just a cycle. Tell me which side you want to believe and I’ll show you which scientific papers to read, because there are scientific papers actually written on both sides.

People need to be honest enough to admit that even scientists have differences. Well meaning and good scientists have differences on that, regardless of where that comes down. As a believer in Jesus Christ, as a follower of the Bible, I believe we have a stewardship to take care of the earth.

That is a spiritual issue that we need to take better care of the earth. And whether global warming is as big a deal or not, or we’re the cause of it or not, we just need to take better care of the planet.

bs

Rick Warren is an evangelical leader, best-selling author, and founding and senior pastor of Saddleback Church in Southern California. Along with his wife, Kay, Warren founded Saddleback in 1980 with just a single family to fill the pews. Today the church has a 120-acre campus, 22,000 weekly attendees, and has provided spiritual guidance and source material to over 400,000 ministers …

Recorded on: December 11, 2007

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ReBiblicans: https://crookedcrosses.wordpress.com/category/pacs/

Evangelical Christian leaders in Florida are making just that point, calling on Republican politicians in the state to take climate change seriously. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) recently went full-on climate denier, and Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) is a denier too.

Rev. Mich Hescox, president of the Evangelical Environmental Network, has started a petition drive calling on Scott to make climate change and "creation care" priorities. Here's an excerpt:

THIS STORY CONTINUES

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homophobe legal arm:http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2014/05/01/3429448/alliance-defending-freedom/

yaf top Conservative College list includes Christendom College, College of the Ozarks, Colorado Christian University, Franciscan University, Grove City College, Harding University, Hillsdale College,The King's College, Liberty University, Patrick Henry College, Regent University, Saint Vincent College,Thomas Aquinas College, Thomas More College, and Wisconsin Lutheran College.  

AlterNet [1] / By CJ Werleman [2]

How Rev. Billy Graham Taught the Republican Party to Sacrifice the Poor on the Altar of Big-Business

December 17, 2013 |

Since turning 95 last month, Reverend Billy Graham’s health has deteriorated, and judging by his family’s call for prayers, his life is nearing its end. Many things will be written about Graham's life by both disciples and his detractors, but if you want to know where the base of today’s Republican Party—the Christian Right—gets its mojo, look no further than this Southern Baptist preacher.

The genetic makeup of the GOP is one chromosome away from Graham’s DNA. Today’s Republican Party is a neo-Confederate pro-corporation movement, thanks to the supposed life-long Democrat (when he wasn’t endorsing Mitt Romney)—the Reverend Billy Graham. A close friend of Richard Nixon's, it was Graham who helped the disgraced president articulate the “Southern Strategy,” which won Nixon the White House in 1968.

Steven P. Miller, author of Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South,writes that it was Graham’s public relationship with Southern Baptist ministers, and quips like, “Prejudice is not just a sectional problem” and “Criticism of the South is one of the most popular indoor sports of some Northerners these days,” that made him an much-loved figure among his fellow Southerners. Miller also says that Graham’s evangelical understanding of the sins of racism allowed many white Southerners to declare themselves absolved from past guilt.

Millennials can be forgiven for mistakenly thinking the Christian Right has been the main strain of the GOP since ad infinitum. It hasn’t. The Christian Right is still a relatively new dynamic on the American political landscape. Prior to the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976, no serious presidential candidate ever claimed to have been “born again,” and the emphasis of faith for a politician seeking high office was as rare then as a candidate declaring his atheism is today.

But something weird happened on the way to the forum. Religious fundamentalists banded together to oppose Jimmy Carter’s 1980 reelection campaign (Carter was a Southern Baptist), and in turn, put their support behind Ronald Reagan, who was a divorced Hollywood actor. This strange coalition on the right became a movement better known as the Moral Majority, and Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell were the tip of the sword.

The Moral Majority surprised nearly everyone by helping sweep Reagan into the White House. The Sarasota Journal wrote as much on Feb 9, 1981: “The merging of the political right with the religious right has taken the country by surprise.”

Until then, not even your most casual political observer believed that conservative Christians could or would play a pivotal role in shaping the outcome of elections. Screenplay writer Norman Lear said at the time, “The Moral Majority is neither the moral point of view, nor the majority.”

With help from the likes of Pat Robertson and a coalition of anti-gay, anti-Muslim, anti-feminist, and anti-ACLU networks, the Moral Majority became the Christian Right. While Graham publicly distanced himself from the Moral Majority, this was done purely for political optics. The media’s gullibility in falling for the “genteel, bipartisan, apolitical preacher” narrative gave Graham’s voice even more political clout.

Graham was a skillful orator, and he adeptly infused the teachings of Ayn Rand with those of Jesus Christ. In the Bible, Jesus says, “The meek shall inherit the earth,” and urges his followers, “To sell what you have and give to the poor.” But Graham, with the biggest Christian following in America during the '80s, helped turn the biblical Jesus into a supply side economist who wants us to be anti-government, anti-regulation, anti-healthcare, and anti-assistance for the poor Christians.

Where Bible Jesus feeds the masses with two loaves of bread, Ayn Randian Jesus says, “Bugger off, this bread is mine, you lazy moochers.” While Graham removed Southern Christians’ guilt over segregation, Ayn Rand removed the Christian Right’s guilt for being selfish and uncaring about anyone except themselves. Bruce E. Levine, author of *Get Up, Stand Up: Uniting Populists, Energizing the Defeated, and Battling the Corporate Elite* [3], wrote on AlterNet, “Not only did Rand make it 'moral' for the wealthy not to pay their fair share of taxes, she 'liberated' millions of other Americans from caring about the suffering of others, even the suffering of their own children.”

With the explosion of cable television, Graham turned his church into a mega money-making empire for himself. The self-proclaimed political non-partisan also turned his massive flock into a loyal legion of storm troopers for the Republican Party. Today, Graham’s son, Franklin, is the CEO of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. He has continued his father’s legacy of being a shill and supporter of far-right pro-corporate causes while pulling down a $600,000 salary.

On the eve of the 2012 election, the younger Graham bragged that it was his father’s appearance with George W. Bush at a rally in Florida which won the Texas governor the presidency in 2000.

In endorsing Mitt Romney, Billy Graham said, "I believe it is vitally important that we cast our ballots for candidates who base their decisions on biblical principles and support the nation of Israel. I urge you to vote for those who protect the sanctity of life and support the biblical definition of marriage between a man and a woman. Vote for biblical values this November 6, and pray with me that America will remain one nation under God."

Today, evangelism is synonymous with sacrificing the poor on the altar of big-business’ interests, and in becoming the most reliable and agitated voting bloc of the Republican Party since the election of Reagan, we can rightfully accuse the Christian Right in ushering in three decades of failed trickle down economics. The price we've paid for this approach is that America is now one of the most wealth-disparate of the developed countries. It’s the political descendants of Graham who shut down the government with their radical Jesus said replace every government-funded service with a for-profit corporation ideology.

Graham’s coalition of hate also put social issues front and square in the GOP primary process, and no one was more hateful than Graham. White House tapes recorded him openly telling President Nixon he believed that the Jews had a “stranglehold on the American media” and that “this Jewish stranglehold has got to be broken or the country’s going down the drain.”

The National Archive tapes reveal the nation’s best-known preacher in agreement with a stream of bigoted Nixon comments about Jews and their perceived influence on American life. “If you get elected a second time, then we might be able to do something. There also the ones putting out the pornographic stuff,” said Graham. To which Nixon replied, “the Jews are an irreligious, atheistic, immoral bunch of bastards.”

Repeatedly, Graham’s judgment was found wanting, yet politicians on both sides seek his and/or his family’s approval and photo-ops, which shows how far the Christian Right has pulled this country to the right since 1980.

Graham blames today’s economic doldrums on God punishing the nation for its growing secularization and what he perceives to be an increase in immorality. “I don’t see our country turning to God…Maybe he will have to bring this country down economically before we turn our hearts back to God. We need to repent.”

Come the 2016 campaign season, when the likes of Rand Paul, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, and Rick Santorum talk about how “Christianity is under attack” and how the “takers” are destroying America, it will be Billy Graham’s shadow you have to blame for that.

See more stories tagged with:

Billy Graham [4]

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/how-rev-billy-graham-taught-republican-party-it-could-sacrifice-poor-altar-big

Links:

[1] http://alternet.org

[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/cj-werleman

[3] http://www.amazon.com/Get-Stand-Populists-Energizing-Corporate/dp/1603582983

[4] http://www.alternet.org/tags/billy-graham

[5] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

rt nation: IRS under carter threatened to take status of schools made after 1953.  Prots down but evang up (1980 almost all top 2 doz were) Dallas megachurch had sauna, bowling, skating 84 FM radio station (aud xian radio 10 mil 1970 to 61m 1980; 700 club and old time gospel 15mil each. Falwell etc at 1st not pol, but increased b/c of moral decay.

Sheri: Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise

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Home > Do End-Time Believers Care About Climate Change?

Religion Dispatches [1] / By Robin Globus Veldman [2]

http://www.alternet.org/print/belief/do-end-time-believers-care-about-climate-change

Do End-Time Believers Care About Climate Change?

July 12, 2013 |

End time belief has an almost salacious appeal in America—and not just to the four out of ten Americans who believe that Jesus Christ will return to Earth by 2050. At least since the Millerites were laughed off the national stage in 1844, watching prophecy fail has become something of a national pastime. The attitudes of the two groups—heavenly-minded believer and smirking spectator—are well captured in a pair of bumper stickers: “In case of Rapture, this car will be unmanned” and “In case of Rapture, can I have your car?”

But some in the spectator camp hold that America’s remarkably durable “rapture culture” is no laughing matter; that it might, in fact, be a menace to society. At issue is end time believers’ perceived lack of investment in the earth’s future. That is, if they believe Jesus is coming back, do they have any incentive to preserve and protect the environment for future generations?

Many who are concerned about the environment—including prominent figures like Al Gore, E.O. Wilson, and Bill Moyers—argue that for such believers the answer is no.

Although mistrust of end time believers’ earthly intentions has smoldered for decades, a new study about “End Times Theology” has added fuel to the fire. According to the study’s authors, political scientists David Barker and David Bearce, when it comes to climate change, “a belief in the Second Coming reduces the probability of strongly agreeing that the government should take action by more than 12 percent.”

The reason, according to Barker and Bearce, is that while “non-end-times believers have little reason to doubt humankind’s infinite persistence, all else being equal, end-times believers ‘know’ that life on Earth has a preordained expiration date, no matter what—and that all Christians will be raptured before the going gets too tough.”

With 76% of Republicans identifying as end times believers in their sample, they argue that end time belief may be a key factor stymieing climate change legislation.

But as someone who spent 14 months doing interviews and focus groups with conservative Christians on their views about climate change and the end times, I see major problems with their approach.

The study’s main flaw is that it measures attitudes toward climate change using a double-barreled question—one that’s actually comprised of more than a single question. Barker and Bearce asked respondents to state the degree to which they agreed with the following:

Global warming is a problem that requires immediate government action, in order to prevent environmental devastation and catastrophic loss of life for future generations.

The statement actually contains four parts, each of which could elicit a different level of agreement: global warming is a problem; the government should be the institution to address it; action needs to be immediate; and the reasons for acting are to prevent environmental devastation and catastrophic loss of life.

The authors did acknowledge one shortcoming of the statement; namely, that it does not allow them to distinguish between those who are skeptical that global warming is happening, and those who believe it’s happening but do not feel anything should be done about it. Since the latter claim is the one these researchers sought to prove, they controlled for “media distrust,” which they argued would be correlated with climate skepticism.

There are, however, at least two other reasons some conservative Christians would disagree with the statement besides their belief in End Times. First, having seen the government “take” prayer out of schools, and “force” the teaching of evolution, the Christians with whom I spoke had an especially negative view of government in general.

As Kelly (a pseudonym, as are all the names that follow) explained in a conversation about the merits of scientific research on climate change,

“I believe the government knows that whoever controls the mind of our children controls the next generation. And so there’s reason behind everything that’s put out there… I think they try to cause us to fear. And when you fear you want to have someone to trust in.”

After which her husband chimed in, “And that would be the government.”

As Linda (from another church) put it more succinctly, “Government needs to stay out of it. They screw everything up.”

Second, and probably even more importantly, participants in every one of the nine focus groups I conducted had the impression that scientists were saying climate change would precipitate an apocalyptic end to the world, an idea they rejected on the grounds that the Bible—not scientists—foretells how the world will end.

Of course, most scientists are not claiming that climate change will end life on Earth, but the study’s use of the word “catastrophic” would likely bring to mind the apocalyptic framing that many if not most of the respondents reject (Wylie Carr and colleagues also noted resistance to the apocalyptic framing in their qualitative study of conservative Christians’ views of climate change).

To be sure, conservative Christians are hardly alone in reacting negatively to apocalyptic framings of climate change. Matthew Feinberg and Robb Willer found that dire messages reduced belief in global warming and made people less likely to say they would take action to address the problem. Based on what I heard in the focus groups, however, I surmise that conservative Christians are more bothered by apocalyptic rhetoric than the average citizen. When I consider the comments many of them made about how the Christian worldview was being marginalized, it is apparent that these Christians might see a secular disaster narrative as yet another attempt by secular society to “take God out of the equation” (a refrain I heard frequently).

Thus some Christians may have disagreed with Barker and Bearce’s statement because of the word “catastrophic” in this context, rather than because their belief in the end times rendered them indifferent to such a prospect.

In my own research I did find some evidence of apathy about climate change that seemed to be related to end time belief. This only seemed to be the case among those who were truly passionate about the end times, however. In a small-town Pentecostal church I visited, for example, during a Sunday service the pastor painted a vivid picture of a world descending into chaos, listing a coming “holy war” with Iran, Christians being persecuted around the world, the inability to pray in school (“These days you get in trouble if you say ‘bless you’ when someone sneezes at school!”), and the way society increasingly “exalted the homosexual lifestyle” as signs that the end times were near.

“The Bible says this will happen in the Last Days, before the Rapture. We should expect suffering if the Lord tarries. Jesus Christ is coming back!” he concluded exultantly.

Not surprisingly, when I conducted a focus group at this church, the end times seemed to be on everyone’s minds. When we talked about caring for the environment, for example, Craig cautioned that it was important to draw the line between protecting the creation and worshipping it, while Julie agreed, adding that, “like with the polar bears and stuff, of course I don’t want them to die, but you also have to realize this is just a part of the world coming to an end like it’s supposed to. And there’s nothing really that they can do.”

After Sarah chimed in “Yeah, we can’t stop it,” Julie continued, arguing, “That’s why we need to be educated in the Bible, so we know what signs to look for. Because you’re just wasting all that money on research when it’s, sadly, not going to help.”

Such views contrasted with those I heard from people who believed that Jesus would return to Earth but did not actually think they were living in the last days. There, I almost invariably heard statements expressing ethical responsibilities vis-à-vis the environment. For example, Jessa pointed out that

“we constantly talk about the end times and as Christians we look forward to that but the Bible didn’t tell us to be stupid. When the Bible says if you have faith as the grain of a mustard seed you can move mountains, it didn’t literally mean for us to go and start trying to pick up a mountain… [W]henever He tells us that we’re going to see these signs of the end times, He doesn’t tell us to stop living because the world’s coming to an end. He wants us to live for Him every day, and living for Him means taking care of the world, and seeing that the environment is changing, and that we have an effect on that.”

In many cases such comments may have reflected ideals more than practices, as I did not see much evidence of dedication to environmental stewardship beyond recycling. But the majority of my respondents rejected the logic that end time belief justified inaction of any kind, pointing out that they still held bank accounts, sent their kids to college, and otherwise planned for the future.

This belies Barker and Bearce’s claim that any Christian who agreed to the question “do you believe in the Second Coming of Jesus Christ—that is, that Jesus will return to Earth someday?” would have been likely to discount the future. From what I saw in the field, people who did not live in the shadow of the Last Days recognized the folly of giving up on this world when it was uncertain when the next one would come.

This highlights another problem with Barker and Bearce’s study: it only included two belief-related variables: the one about the second coming of Christ, and another that assessed whether respondents believed the Bible “should be taken literally, word for word.” Consequently, the study did not assess how much of the indifference to taking action on climate change might derive from a host of other beliefs.

Perhaps most important to consider is whether suspicion of scientists and scientific research may be spilling over from the creation-evolution debate (as Katharine Wilkinson found in her qualitative study of the evangelical ‘climate care’ movement). But other beliefs could easily be relevant as well. Many scholars of evangelical environmentalism, for example, have noted evangelicals’ concerns that caring for the environment could lead to paganism.

I also frequently heard Christians say that their focus should be salvation and saving souls rather than pursuing a broader social agenda. Others argued that it was arrogant to believe humans could control the climate, since “God is in control.” It seems likely that Christians’ attitudes toward climate change would be influenced by beliefs such as these, yet none of them were included in Barker and Bearce’s study.

In short, my own research and that of others leads me to surmise that had Barker and Bearce adopted a more fine-grained approach, they would likely have found that end time beliefs contributed only modestly to Americans’ disinterest in addressing climate change.

Tempting as it may be to blame end time believers for the frustrating lack of action on climate change, if we want to determine whether and to what extent the religious beliefs of Christians shape their views and concerns about the issue, and understand the impact of such perceptions on daily and political life, then we will need more nuanced empirical research into these issues than has, as yet, been produced.

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http://religions.pewforum.org/maps

scholarly? http://libguides.sacredheart.edu/american_christianity

Geography

The name "Bible Belt" has been applied historically to the South and parts of the Midwest, but is more commonly identified with the South. In a 1961 study, Wilbur Zelinsky delineated the region as the area in which denominations are the predominant religious affiliation. The region thus defined included most of the Southern United States, including most of Texas and Oklahoma in the southwest, and in the states south of the Ohio River, and extending east to include central West Virginia and Virginia south of Northern Virginia; however, many Northern Kentuckians are Catholic, due to their German and Irish heritage. In addition, the Bible Belt covers parts of Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. A 1978 study by Charles Heatwole identified the Bible Belt as the region dominated by 24 fundamentalist Protestant denominations, corresponding to essentially the same area mapped by Zielinski.[4]

Tweedie (1978)[5] defines the Bible Belt in terms of numerical concentration of the audience for religious television. He finds two belts: one more eastern that stretches from central Florida through Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, North and South Carolina, and into Virginia; and another that is more western, moving from central Texas through the Great Plains to the Dakotas, and concentrated in Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Missouri, Kansas, and Mississippi.

Buckle

Several locations are occasionally referred to as "the Buckle of the Bible Belt":

Virginia Beach, Virginia, while not usually considered a buckle of the Bible Belt, is considered by many to be, along with Lynchburg, the eastern border. This is the headquarters of Pat Robertson and CBN as well as the location of Regent University.

Political and cultural context

The term Bible Belt is used informally by journalists and by its detractors, who suggest that religious conservatives allow their religion to influence politics, science, and education. There has been research that links evangelical Protestantism with social conservatism.[11] In 1950, President Harry Truman told Catholic leaders he wanted to send an ambassador to the Vatican. Truman said the leading Democrats in Congress approved, but they warned him, "it would defeat Democratic Senators and Congressmen in the Bible Belt."[12]

In presidential elections, the Bible Belt states of Alabama, Mississippi, Kansas, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas have voted for the Republican candidate in all elections since 1980. Other Bible Belt states have voted for the Republican presidential candidate in the majority of elections since 1980, but have gone to the Democratic candidate either once or twice since then.

A separate nation entitled the "The Bible Belt" is also mentioned in Robert Ferrigno's Assassin novels and comprises roughly the same area [13]

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."

==

Right Wing Watch [1] / By Brian Tashman [2]

Pastors Blame Wildfires on Christian Women Who Wear Pantsuits and Hats

July 1, 2013 |

Last week on Generations Radio, Colorado pastors Kevin Swanson and Dave Buehner addressed the forest fires hitting their state. They wondered why God was punishing Colorado with the fires, and specifically targeting the heavily conservative city of Colorado Springs.

The two ultimately determined that the forest fires were linked to the state’s liberal abortion laws and the recent success of civil union legislation. Swanson added that a Denver Post photograph of State House Majority Leader Mark Ferrandino kissing his partner also played a role in inviting God’s wrath.

Buehner: Why Colorado Springs? Understand that Colorado itself is a state that has been begging for God’s judgment. How did we do that? Well, we were the first state to make abortion legal; you could murder your baby as long as it’s in your womb.

Swanson: 1967.

Buehner: Gov. Love, a Republican.

Swanson: Two ironies there, not just one, the man’s name was Gov. Love and he’s responsible for killing more babies than probably anybody in the history of this country because he’s the guy who started it.

Buehner: Our legislative session opened up this year and their very first order of business, their most pressing order of business—

Swanson: They could hardly wait, they could hardly wait.

Buehner: Like the very first day, was to pass a civil union bill, which is an uncivil bill.

…

Swanson: When you have a state where the House leadership is performing a homosexual act on the front page of the Denver Post two months ago? Does God read the Denver Post? Do you think He picks up a copy of the Denver Post? He gets it. God gets the Denver Post.

Buehner concluded that Coloradans should be glad God “hasn’t destroyed the whole state yet” as “an act of grace.” But why were the fires concentrated in Colorado Springs, Buehner asked, “Why not wipe out Boulder or Denver” where all the Democrats live? He answered his own question: “Judgment begins in the House of God.”

Later, Swanson elaborated on the point, saying that Christians have not done a good of a job resisting cultural trends pushed by television shows and fashion. He described a particularly disturbing plane ride he took back from Australia, in which he was forced to look at other people’s airplane TV sets. “I’ve never seen so many breasts in all of my life,” he reported. “Every form of aberrant sexuality and women’s breasts are shown in front of me almost nonstop for fourteen hours.”

After saying that he was a victim of “oppressive” breast exposure, he criticized young men for “doing the metrosexual thing with the skinny pants and the little fairy shoes” and not growing out their facial hair as God commands. But feminism is also to blame, he said, as too many Christian women have embraced feminist fashions like hats and pantsuits.

Buehner: Colorado is asking for judgment and God is delivering it in little pieces. He is very gracious that He hasn’t destroyed the whole state yet; I think that’s an act of grace. But then the question is: of all of Colorado, why Colorado Springs? I mean, Colorado Springs is the Christian mecca. Why not wipe out Boulder or Denver? I mean those people are in more radical rebellion.

Swanson: Oh yeah, they’re Democrats up there.

Buehner: And the answer is: judgment begins in the House of God.

…

Swanson: Coming back from Australia, I’m stuck in fourteen hours of these visual presentations, sitcoms and stuff, on seventeen screens in front of me and I’ve never seen so many breasts in all of my life. The immodesty going on in our society is far worse than it was back when Cheers, Family Ties and The Cosby Show was playing. I mean every form of aberrant sexuality and women’s breasts are shown in front of me almost nonstop for fourteen hours. It’s just such an oppressive, horrible, horrible world and so many of our young girls in our Christian churches are running down to Wal-Mart and buying the same clothes. These are the sorts of things that I’m bringing out in front of God’s people, I’m saying: how are we going to repent of the sexual sin that is paraded in front of us in the wider culture? Why do we have to submit to theses sexual sins again and again?

I brought up androgyny and how many young boys are running out and doing the metrosexual thing with the skinny pants and the little fairy shoes. They’re working on the gender blender for themselves and they don’t want to look like a man and God is just so upset, He hates it when man are not manly in their approach. 1 Corinthians 6 speaks about homosexuality and feminine behavior and feminine dress for men. God does not want men to be androgynous and feminine like in their approach; He gave them facial hair for a reason.

These are the sorts of things that I preached yesterday because I said, you could just say, ‘well all of the unisex, homosexual, metrosexual stuff that’s out in the world is so bad but we’re not going to repent of anything, we’re not going to look any different, we’re not going to bear any fruits of repentance in the way that we dress and the way that we interact.’ Then I brought out the whole thing on feminism and how feminism has corrupted our women today. I brought out this quote from Forbes magazine, July 27, 2012:

It’s hard to deny the key role that fashion has played in the women’s movement…Ms. Magazine points to New York City women garment workers in the early 20th century who wore hats to signify that they were earning their own money, and thus financially independent. Women in the 1980s adopted a male style of dress—ties, tailored skirt suits, shoulder pads—in order to gain a foothold in the male dominated world of business. And Carol Moseley Braun, the first African American woman elected to the U.S. Senate, wore a pantsuit on the Senate floor in 1993, ending the Senate’s ban on women wearing slacks there.

My question was: Do you resist feminist trends? Do you argue with it? Do you find ways to oppose it? Or do you just succumb to it and just kowtow to feminism? Dave, I’m afraid this stuff is all over the place in our nice little evangelical, reformed, conservative, fundamentalist churches.

Buehner: Kevin my main text this last Lord’s Day: God is a consuming fire.

See more stories tagged with:

sex [4],

christian [5],

hats [6]

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/christian-wildfires

Links:

[1] http://www.rightwingwatch.org

[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/brian-tashman

[3] http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/swanson-links-gay-kiss-and-women-wearing-hats-and-pants-colorado-forest-fires#sthash.GoFPW9Rh.dpuf

[4] http://www.alternet.org/tags/sex-0

[5] http://www.alternet.org/tags/christian-0

[6] http://www.alternet.org/tags/hats

[7] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

==

map http://www.floatingsheep.org/2010/03/mapping-christianity.html

How Big Oil Uses the Republican Party to Subvert American Democracy

Posted: 5/10/2013 9:04 am

In a surprise move, the eight Republican members of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee yesterday blocked a floor vote on President Obama's nominee, Gina McCarthy, as EPA Administrator. In doing so the Republican senators broke their earlier promisadditione to move McCarthy's nomination if she answered an unprecedented 1079 written questions, a quest she completed. Political observers assume the Republican roadblock is meant to derail or delay the implementation of a new EPA rule, promised by President Obama to finally regulate carbon pollution. The Republican ranking member, Senator David Vitter of Louisiana, orchestrated the double cross. Vitter is an unabashed mouthpiece for the petroleum industry and record breaking receptacle for petrodollars having received $1.2 million in oil company largesse during his public service career. With cash gushers of oily money cascading down their open gullets, the Republican leadership's mercenary devotion to Big Oil shouldn't shock us. However, the boldness of the party's most recent assault on the public interest might cause us to ponder how GOP's honchos' knee jerk slavishness to petroleum interest has infected its rank and file. 

The perversity of the modern conservative mind is displayed in two studies published last week. Those studies illustrate the extent to which the right wing has become the ideological sock puppet of Big Oil and the GOP's army of right wing Christian fundamentalists oil industry foot soldiers. A peer reviewed National Academy of Sciences report shows that the label "energy efficient" on a product actually makes it less likely that self-identified conservatives will purchase that product. Why? Because morally twisted right wing orthodoxy has taken the "conserve" out of conservatism. Craven hatred of all things environmental has made the labels "clean," "green" or "efficient" pariah among GOP acolytes. Conversely, dirty energy is patriotic and even "blessed."

[

End-Times Theology, the Shadow of the Future, and Public Resistance to Addressing Global Climate Change Political Research Quarterly 1065912912442243, first published on May 1, 2012

Big Oil's Orwellian skill at employing the rhetoric of patriotism and emblazoning its enterprises with stars and stripes, has stitched the notion that conservation is synonymous with "anti-American" into the fabric of GOP talking points. In 2006, President George W. Bush's press secretary Ari Fleischer answered a press query about whether President Bush believed in fuel efficiency standards for automobiles saying, "That's a big 'No.'" The President believes that it's an American way of life, and that it should be the goal of policy makers to protect the American way of life. The American way of life is a blessed one. And we have a bounty of resources in this country... Conservation alone is not the answer."

After a decade of this brand of oily claptrap from the industry's political toadies and its talking heads on Fox News and hate radio, many conservative Americans now embrace the farcical presumption that buying and burning gas is a patriotic act. In 2008, as the oil industry raked in record profits by raking Americans with record prices at the pump, the party of the petro plutocrats proudly adopted Big Oil's rallying cry as its mantra "Drill, Baby, Drill."

By the way, Fleischer's use of the term "blessed" to describe unconscionable profligacy and immoral waste reflect another GOP orthodoxy -- the notion that God wants us to burn oil. A second study published this week by University of Pittsburgh Professor David Barker and Professor David Bearce of the University of Colorado found that a fundamentalist Christian belief in biblical End Times is a significant motivating factor behind Republican voter resistance to curbing climate change. According to Bearce and Barker, 76 percent of self-identified Republicans say they believe in the End Times. "Since the world is going to end at a predestined time anyhow," their logic goes, "it would be heretical to curb our destructive appetites under the delusion that we can do anything about pushing back God's ordained date."

Anointing rapacious behavior with religious gloss is an old strategy for both right wing conservatives and the extraction industry. When a House Oversight Committee summoned Ronald Reagan's first Secretary of Interior, James Watt, to explain his caper to sell off American's public lands, waters and mineral rights to oil, mining and timber companies at what the General Accounting Office called "fire sale prices," Watt, a former mining and oil company lawyer, retorted, "I don't know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns." Embracing his party line, along with its hook and sinker, Watt explained that environmentalism was a plot to "weaken America" and dismissed environmentalists as a "left wing cult which seeks to bring down the kind of government I believe in."

Watt was an early proponent of Dominion Theology, the authoritarian Christian heresy that cites cherry-picked phrases from the book of Genesis to advocate man's duty to subdue nature. His carbon industry alliances and Apocalyptical Christianity inspired Secretary Watt to set about dismantling his department and distributing its assets to his pals. His disciple and former employee, Gale Norton, another energy industry lawyer and lobbyists, would continue the chicanery when she succeeded Watt as Interior Secretary during George W. Bush's administration. As Shakespeare observed, "The devil can quote Scripture to serve his own purposes."

In reality, there is nothing patriotic, moral or religious about Big Oil. A storied history of perfidy and greed has distinguished these companies among the most treasonous and piratical of all American business enterprises. Halliburton's decision to relocate to the Cayman Islands after fattening itself on $9 billion worth of inherently crooked no-bid, cost-plus contracts during the Iraq War is only one of many examples of their shaky loyalty to our country. Before it vaulted onto the bandwagon of patriotism, Texaco flew not "Old Glory" but the "Jolly Roger" over its Houston headquarters, proudly adopting the pirate flag as the emblem of a pirate industry.

The threats from global climate change and ocean acidification are only the tip of a melting iceberg. Not satiated with simply destroying the planet, the oil industry's relentless greed has eroded American's economic independence, imperiled our national security, and ruined our global economic leadership and moral authority.

America's national security is rooted in a strong economy at home. As Republican oilman T. Boone Pickens has acknowledged, our deadly addiction to oil is the principal drag on American capitalism. Our nation is borrowing a billion dollars a day to purchase a billion dollars of foreign oil, much of it from nations that don't share our values or that are outright hostile to our interests.

Our oil jones has us funding both sides of the war against terror! Big Oil has embroiled us in foreign wars supporting petty dictators who despise democracy and who are hated by their own people. The export of $700 billion dollars annually of American wealth has beggared our nation, which, a few short decades ago, owned half the wealth on Earth.

Add to these cataclysmic numbers, the $100 billion annual military cost of protecting oil infrastructure in the Persian Gulf, trillions spent on various oil wars over the past decade, billions more in economic injury from oil spills in Valdez, the Gulf of Mexico and in American rivers from the Hudson to the Kalamazoo to the Yellowstone, the massive damage done to the coast of Louisiana from local drilling companies which aggravated New Orleans' destruction by Katrina, not to mention the hundreds of billions annually in externalized health care costs from illnesses caused by the oil industry.

If the oil industry had to pay the true costs of bringing its product to market, gas prices would be upwards of $12 per gallon at the pump, according to economist Amory Lovins, and most Americans would be running to buy electric cars.

With low cost disruptive technologies like cheap, fast and efficient electric vehicles, and solar and wind technologies poised to displace Big Oil, the industry is using its hold on the Republican Party to permanently embed itself in our economy while subverting science, American democracy, free market capitalism and our sacred belief in an ethical God.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr/oil-industry-republicans-congress_b_3252170.html?view=print&comm_ref=false

gay marriage:

Smirking Chimp [1] / By Bill Berkowitz [2]

The Christian Right Is Panicking Because They Know They Are Losing

April 2, 2013  |   

Christians will be “forced underground.”

– Pastor Jim Garlow 

Legalizing gay marriage will spell "the death of capitalism."

– Matthew Hagee 

If the Supreme Court rules in favor of gay marriage it "will have lost its legitimacy in its entirety."

– Matt Barber & Mat Staver

Marching against same-sex marriage felt like being involved in the “Civil Rights Movement.”

– Brian Brown

Gays and lesbians “hate God’s law and therefore they do hate God.”

– Peter LaBarbera

If the above statements from members of the conservative evangelical Christian commentariat sound ludicrous yet chilling, outlandish yet eerily familiar, that is because over the years we have become quite familiar with their incessant anti-gay vitriol. However, the more interesting aspect of this collection of off-the-wall commentary by Pastor Jim Garlow, Matthew Hagee, Liberty Counsel’s Matt Barber and Mat Staver, who is also vice president of the Jerry Falwell-founded Liberty University, the National Organization for Marriage’s president Brian Brown, and Peter LaBarbera of Americans For Truth About Homosexuality, is their fear that the tide of public opinion has turned against them.

As People for the American Way’s Right Wing Watch reported, Garlow told Christian radio talk show host Janet Mefferd that gay people really don’t want to get married, but rather they are determined to “destroy marriage” and “force us to affirm an immoral behavior”: “If same-sex so-called marriage is established as the law of the land, many of the people who are listening to my voice right now, not maybe immediately but at some point in the future, if they are followers of Christ, will be forced underground. Their buildings will be taken away from them, many of their rights will be taken away from them.”

Matthew Hagee, the son of pastor John Hagee, he of the multi-million dollar San Antonio, Texas-based media ministry, warned on “Hagee’s Hotline” that, "The only relationship in natural law that can produce consumers is the relationship between a man and a woman. When you create a society that does not recognize this relationship as the foundation of its existence and you cease to produce what is required to sustain your economy, you will not survive."

On their "Faith and Freedom" radio show, Liberty Counsel’s Matt Barber and Mat Staver declared that any Supreme Court decision other than one that quashes marriage equality "will be the nail in the coffin of the credibility of the entire judicial system…”

The National Organization for Marriage’s Brian Brown, whose organization has been trying to drive a wedge between the African American community and the LGBTQ community for the past several years, also spoke to Mefferd and told her that while he “was not alive during the Civil Rights Movement [the March 26 anti-gay rally in Washington, D.C.] is what is must have felt like” to be involved with the Movement.

Brown added: “… people were just so ecstatic to stand up and they did it in a loving, respectful way but they weren’t going to be silenced. I couldn’t be more happy with what happened today, I think it’s a huge step forward for the pro-marriage movement and I don’t think it’s going to be lost on the Supreme Court justices that we were there and we were there in force.”

LaBarbera, who has been fanning the flames of anti-gay bigotry for years, told Mefferd that “If you want to understand the homosexual movement, .it’s a movement at war with nature, with God and with truth.”

The Religious Right group Government Is Not God PAC recently warned that if the Supreme Court strikes down Proposition 8 and DOMA then “religious freedom, freedom of speech and the First Amendment will die”: “If homosexuals win, the Bill of Rights dies and religious liberty/free speech will die with it,” GING PAC maintained. “We either fight this evil or see our children and grandchildren brainwashed and/or coerced into accepting homosexuality as the new normal in our society.”

This is by no means the last we will hear from these guys. They’ll be rocking and railing against the gay for many years to come. Regardless of what the Supreme Court decides, as time passes they and their conservative Christian comrades (and there are plenty of them to go around) will become more and more isolated. In some cases, martyrdom what there hoping for. After all, that formula has paid the bills for the past several decades and will likely keep the lights on at those ministries and organizations for years to come.

Meet The Oath Keepers

Submitted by Kyle Mantyla on Monday, 2/22/2010 10:32 am

Justine Sharrock has a long article on The Oath Keepers in the latest issue of Mother Jones that notes the organization's ties to Tea Party and 9/12 activists and, by extension, figures like Ralph Reed, groups like the Eagle Forum, and members of Congress:

Founded last April by Yale-educated lawyer and ex-Ron Paul aide Stewart Rhodes, the group has established itself as a hub in the sprawling anti-Obama movement that includes Tea Partiers, Birthers, and 912ers. Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs, and Pat Buchanan have all sung its praises, and in December, a grassroots summit it helped organize drew such prominent guests as representatives Phil Gingrey and Paul Broun, both Georgia Republicans.

There are scores of patriot groups, but what makes Oath Keepers unique is that its core membership consists of men and women in uniform, including soldiers, police, and veterans. At regular ceremonies in every state, members reaffirm their official oaths of service, pledging to protect the Constitution���but then they go a step further, vowing to disobey "unconstitutional" orders from what they view as an increasingly tyrannical government.

...

It was while volunteering for Ron Paul's doomed presidential bid that Rhodes decided to abandon electoral politics in favor of grassroots organizing. As an undergrad, he had been fascinated by the notion that if German soldiers and police had refused to follow orders, Hitler could have been stopped. Then, in early 2008, SWAT received a letter from a retired colonel declaring that "the Constitution and our Bill of Rights are gravely endangered" and that service members, veterans, and police "is where they will be saved, if they are to be saved at all!"

Rhodes responded with a breathless column starring a despotic president, "Hitlery" Clinton, in her "Chairman Mao signature pantsuit." Would readers, he asked, obey orders from this "dominatrix-in-chief" to hold militia members as enemy combatants, disarm citizens, and shoot all resisters? If "a police state comes to America, it will ultimately be by your hands," he warned. You had better "resolve to not let it happen on your watch." He set up an Oath Keepers blog, asking soldiers and veterans to post testimonials. Word spread. Military officers offered assistance. A Marine Corps veteran invited Rhodes to speak at a local Tea Party event. Paul campaigners provided strategic advice. And by the time Rhodes arrived in Lexington to speak at a rally staged by a pro-militia group, a movement was afoot.

...

Rhodes has become a darling of right-wing pundits. In a column last October, Pat Buchanan predicted that "Brother Rhodes is headed for cable stardom." Glenn Beck has cited the group as a "phenomenal" example of the "patriot revival movement," while Lou Dobbs declared that its platform "should give solace and comfort to the left in this country." Conspiracy-radio king Alex Jones even put an Oath Keepers segment, including footage of the Lexington speech, on his hit DVD Fall of the Republic. "I can't stress enough how much your organization is scaring the globalists," he told Rhodes on his show.

...

On the conference's final day, National 912 Project chairman Patrick Jenkins stepped up to talk about the National Liberty Unity Summits his group was organizing in cooperation with Oath Keepers. They would provide a chance, he said, for patriots to forge a common agenda and a plan to carry it out. At the first summit, in December, attendees included representatives of groups from FairTax Nation to the Constitution Party to Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum. On hand were Ralph Reed Jr. (former director of Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition and recent founder of the Faith and Freedom Coalition), Larry Pratt (head of Gun Owners of America), and Tim Cox (founder of Get Out of Our House, an organization praised on Fox News for its goal of replacing business-as-usual incumbents with "ordinary folks"). Most notable were representatives Broun and Gingrey, who according to summit organizer Nighta Davis have expressed willingness to introduce legislation crafted by summit attendees. (So, Davis says, have Steve King [R-Iowa] and Michele Bachmann [R-Minn.]. None of the representatives agreed to comment for this story.)

As they say, read the whole thing.

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2010/10/16/206882/glenn-beck-cornwall-alliance-exxonmobil-climate-change/

Video: Glenn Beck brings ExxonMobil-linked religious front group to tell Christians not to believe in “man-caused" climate change

By Joe Romm on Oct 16, 2010 at 8:56 am

“How is it we’ve had ice ages — and yet there were no SUVs?”

In June, ThinkProgress published an exclusive investigation into the Cornwall Alliance “” a corporate front designed to deceive evangelicals into doubting the science underpinning climate change.�� Yesterday, Fox News hate-talker Glenn Beck brought on a representative from the group to tout Cornwall’s new DVD, “Resisting the Green Dragon,” which claims the climate change movement is a “false religion,” and a nefarious conspiracy to empower eugenicists and create a “global government.”   TP’s Lee Fang has the story.

The DVD, which Cornwall is distributing to evangelical churches around the country, seems to be designed perfectly for Beck’s world view, and unsurprisingly, the Cornwall guest and Beck exchanged bizarre conspiracy theories. Watch it:

The Cornwall Alliance appears to be a creation of a group called the James Partnership, a nonprofit run by Chris Rogers and Peter Stein, according to documents filed with the Virginia State Corporation Commission. Rogers, who heads a media and public relations firm called CDR Communications, collaborates with longtime oil front group operative David Rothbard, the founder and President of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) and Jacques Villarreal, a lower level staffer at CFACT, for his James Partnership group. In the past, Rogers’ firm has worked for the Bush administration and for the secretive conservative planning group, the Council for National Policy.

According to public records, the following entities are all registered to the same address, 9302-C Old Keene Mill Road Burke, VA 22015, an office park in suburban Virginia: 

In late 2005, evangelical leaders like Rick Warren joined a drive to back a major initiative to fight global warming, saying “millions of people could die in this century because of climate change, most of them our poorest global neighbors.��� To counter this historic shift in the evangelical community, a group called the “Interfaith Stewardship Alliance” (ISA) was launched to oppose action on carbon emissions and to deny the existence of climate change. One of the men guiding this group was Paul Driessen, a consultant for ExxonMobil, the mining industry, and for CFACT.

For “stream lining” reasons, ISA relaunched as the Cornwall Alliance in 2006. With the new name came a redesigned website,highly produced web videos, and an organized network of churches to distribute climate change denying propaganda to hundreds of pastors around the country. The branding for the Cornwall Alliance is derived from the “Cornwall Declaration,” a 1999 document pushing back against the creation-care movement in the evangelical community. The Declaration “stressed a free-market environmental stewardship and emphasized that individuals and private organizations should be trusted to care for their own property without government intervention.��� CFACT President Rothbard has been hailed as the “driving force” behind the Cornwall Declaration public relations effort.

CFACT is a gimmicky right-wing organization that does everything it can to try to discredit the science underpinning climate change. For instance, staffers from the group traveled to the Copenhagen conference on climate change to stage silly press conferences with Rush Limbaugh’s former producer and stunts aimed at mocking Greenpeace.

Church & State Magazine / By Simon Brown [1]

The 10 Most Dangerous Religious Right Organizations

October 2, 2012  |

The movement known as the Religious Right is the number-one threat to church-state separation in America. This collection of organizations is well funded and well organized; it uses its massive annual revenue and grassroots troops to undermine the wall of separation in communities nationwide.

Americans United staff members have carefully researched this movement, and here are the 10 Religious Right groups that pose the greatest challenges to church-state separation. Most of these organizations are tax-exempt under Section 501(c)(3) of the tax code, but the financial data includes some affiliated 501(c)(4) lobbying organizations operating alongside the main organizations. The figures come from official IRS filings or other reliable sources.

1. Jerry Falwell Ministries/ ­Liberty University/Liberty Counsel

Revenue: $522,784,095

Although Jerry Falwell, a Religious Right icon and founder of the Moral Majority, died in 2007, his empire is going strong thanks mostly to Liberty University, a Lynchburg, Va., school now run by his son, Jerry Falwell Jr. Following in his father’s footsteps, Falwell Jr. regularly meddles in partisan politics – from local contests to presidential races. This year, he invited Republican White House hopeful Mitt Romney to give Liberty’s commencement address, introducing him as “the next president of the United States.” A second Falwell son, Jonathan, is pastor of Thomas Road Baptist Church, a mega-church in Lynchburg. Liberty Counsel is a Religious Right legal outfit founded by Mat Staver that is now based at Liberty University, where it launches lawsuits undermining church-state separation and encourages pastors to get involved in partisan political activity.

  1. Pat Robertson Empire

Revenue: $434,971,231

Known for his years of involvement in far-right politics, TV preacher Pat Robertson has forged a vast Religious Right empire anchored by the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN). Robertson also runs Regent University and  a right-wing legal group, the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ). (Attorney Jay Sekulow heads ACLJ, as well as his own quasi-independent legal outfit, Christian Advocates Serving Evangelism.) CBN, which brings in the bulk of Robertson’s revenue, broadcasts far-right religious and political invective laced with attacks on church-state separation, a concept Robertson has called a “myth” and a “lie of the left.” His “700 Club” TV program is a powerful forum for the promotion of right-wing ideology and favored politicians. Robertson has been welcomed into the halls of government. The current governor of Virginia, Bob McDonnell, is a Regent U. graduate.

  1. Focus on the Family (includes its 501(c)(4) political affiliate CitizenLink)

Revenue: $104,463,950

Fundamentalist Christian James Dobson founded Focus on the Family to offer “biblical” solutions to family problems. Dobson, a child psychologist by training, soon branched out into the dissemination of hardcore right-wing politics with an international reach. Dobson has been a major player in the halls of power in Washington, D.C., and Focus-aligned “family policy councils” pressure lawmakers and influence legislation in 36 states. In fact, the Colorado-based organization frequently plays a key role in fighting gay rights and restricting abortion at the state level. Jim Daly is now president of Focus; Dobson left the organization in 2010 but remains active on the political scene.

  1. Alliance Defending Freedom (formerly Alliance Defense Fund)

Revenue: $35,145,644

The ADF may have changed its name, but it still promotes a familiar Religious Right agenda. The Arizona-based organization, which was founded by far-right TV and radio preachers, attacks church-state separation, blasts gay rights, assails reproductive freedom and seeks to saturate the public schools with its narrow version of fundamentalism. In recent years, the ADF, headed by Ed Meese acolyte Alan Sears, has worked aggressively to overturn a federal law that bars tax-exempt churches and other nonprofits from intervening in partisan elections. The group says church-state separation is not in the Constitution and calls the church-state wall “fictitious.”

  1. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops

Lobbying Expenditures: $26,662,111

The USCCB for years has lobbied in Washington, D.C., to make the hierarchy’s ultra-conservative stands on reproductive rights, marriage, school vouchers and other public policies the law for all to follow. This year, the USCCB escalated its efforts in the ���culture war” arena, forming the Ad Hoc Committee on Religious Liberty. Led by Baltimore Archbishop William E. Lori, the committee seeks to reduce Americans’ access to birth control, block efforts to expand marriage equality and ensure federal funding of church-affiliated social services, even if the services fail to meet government requirements. American Catholics often disagree with the hierarchy’s stance on social issues, but the bishops’ clout in Washington, D.C., and the state legisla­tures is undeniable.

  1. American Family Association

Revenue: $17,955,438

Founded by the Rev. Donald Wildmon, the Tupelo, Miss.-based AFA once focused on battling “indecent” television shows. When that failed, the group branched out to advocate for standard Religious Right issues such as opposing gay rights, promoting religion in public schools and banning abortion. In recent years, AFA staffer Bryan Fischer has become notorious for making inflammatory statements. Fischer has asserted that Adolf Hitler invented church-state separation and has proposed kidnapping children being raised by same-sex couples. The AFA, designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, frequently announces boycotts of companies that don’t give in to its demands. The organization says it operates nearly 200 radio stations nationwide.

7. Family Research Council

Revenue: $14,840,036(includes 501­(c)(4) affiliate FRC Action)

This group, an offshoot of Focus on the Family, is headed by GOP operative and ex-Louisiana legislator Tony Perkins. It is now the leading Religious Right organization in Washington. Every year, FRC Action sponsors a “Values Voter Summit” to promote far-right politicians and rally Religious Right forces nationwide. The 2012 edition hosted many top Republican politicians and drew about 2,000 attendees. The organization frequently assails public education, political progressives, reproductive justice and the church-state wall and seeks to form a far-right coalition with the Tea Party. FRC is also known to engage in harsh gay bashing and has been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

  1. Concerned Women for America

Revenue: $10,352,628(includes 501­(c)­(4) affiliate CWA Legislative Action Committee)

Founded to counter feminism, Con­cerned Women for America (CWA) claims to be “the nation’s largest public policy women’s organization.” Its mission is to “bring Biblical principles into all levels of public policy.” CWA was organized by Tim and Beverly LaHaye in 1979 to oppose the Equal Rights Amendment, and when that issue faded, it moved on to other Religious Right agenda items. The group attacks public schools for allegedly promoting “secular humanism” and supports the teaching of creationism in science classes. It also vehemently opposes abortion and gay rights.

9. Faith & Freedom Coalition

Revenue: $5,494,640

This 501(c)(4) advocacy group was founded by former Christian Coalition executive director Ralph Reed. He formed the organization after his run for lieutenant governor in Georgia was derailed because of his ties to disgraced casino lobbyist Jack Abramoff. In just three years of operation it already boasts more than 500,000 members and claims affiliates in 30 states. Reed is infamous for exaggerating his organizations’ clout, but his latest group is certainly making political waves. In 2012, it hosted forums for GOP presidential hopefuls in four states. Faith & Freedom Coalition claims to have budgeted $10 million in 2012 to lure conservative religious voters to the polls.

10. Council for National Policy

Revenue: $1,976,747

The Council for National Policy exists to do just one thing: organize meetings of right-wing operatives, Religious Right leaders and wealthy business interests at posh hotels around the country to share ideas, plot strategy and vet GOP presidential candidates. Membership is by invitation only, and the group seeks no media attention. Despite its small size and shadowy operations, the CNP – founded by Religious Right godfather Tim LaHaye – wields a great deal of influence, showing that even organizations with modest budgets can have a significant impact. U.S. Rep. Todd Akin (R-Mo.), after his now-infamous “legitimate rape��� comment, showed up at the next CNP meeting to ensure ongoing financial support as he runs for the U.S. Senate. Heritage Foundation Vice President Becky Norton Dunlop currently serves as CNP president, with Phyllis Schlafly and FRC’s Tony Perkins also taking leadership roles.

See more stories tagged with:

church [2],

religion [3],

church and state [4],

religious right [5]

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/belief/10-most-dangerous-religious-right-organizations

Links:

[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/simon-brown

[2] http://www.alternet.org/tags/church-0

[3] http://www.alternet.org/tags/religion-0

[4] http://www.alternet.org/tags/church-and-state

[5] http://www.alternet.org/tags/religious-right

[6] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

In '05 and '08, Todd Akin Entered American History Lies in the Congressional Record: The Congressional History Lie Project

"The Bible was foundational to development of our country. The English Puritans came to the New World to follow the Bible according to the convictions of their own consciences. Of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence, 24 had what today would be considered Bible college or seminary educations. Only a few years later, in 1782, Congress itself authorized the printing of the Bible." -- Congressional Representative Todd Akin of Missouri, Thursday December 6, 2005, statement to Congress during National Bible Week

While Representative Akin's statement on the Bible and the Puritans was accurate, his claim on the "Bible college" or "seminary" educations of 24 of the signers, which traced to claims advanced by David Barton, was not, and Akin's statement that "Congress itself authorized the printing of the Bible" was also false. Congress did nothing but certify the accuracy of a Bible edition printed by Thomas Aitken, and did so for secular reasons - to promote the struggling American book printing industry, under pressure because of a British blockade.

Akin also read the same statement in Congress on September 26, 2008, for the occasion of National Bible Week. But even more importantly, Rep. Akin was one of the original cosponsors, along with Rep. Randy Forbes, of the history lie-packed House Resolution 888, that Forbes introduced in Congress on December 18, 2007 (see subsection on H. Res. 888, and its history lies, towards the end of this article).

Since then, the style of history lies promoted in H. Res. 888, exemplified in the work of author David Barton, has been denounced even by conservative evangelical scholars as factually challenged and in 2012 conservative evangelical publisher Thomas Nelson withdrew from publicationBarton's bestselling book The Jefferson Lies because of numerous factual errors.

While the historical accounts of Christian nationalist author David Barton have at long last been widely recognized as inaccurate and misleading, neither mainstream media nor mainstream academia have acknowledged the extent to which Barton's brand of Christian nationalist pseudohistory has permeated national politics, manifested through the spectacle of national politicians declaiming, with fair frequency, Barton-esque American history lies on the floor of the U.S. Congress, and sponsoring Congressional resolutions packed with such history lies.

Why does any of this matter? Why should we care? Talk To Action cofounder Frederick Clarkson explains, in a trenchant essay, History is Powerful: Why the Christian Right Distorts History and Why it Matters: 

"The notion that America was founded as a Christian nation is a central animating element of the ideology of the Christian Right. It touches every aspect of life and culture in this, one of the most successful and powerful political movements in American history. The idea that America's supposed Christian identity has somehow been wrongly taken, and must somehow be restored, permeates the psychology and vision of the entire movement. No understanding of the Christian Right is remotely adequate without this foundational concept."

Several years ago, driving through New Jersey, I stopped by to visit Chris Rodda, author of Liars For Jesus: The Religious Right's Alternate Version of American History....

Chris Rodda, who has made debunking the religious right's history lies - concocted to emphasize America's Christian heritage and the piety of its founders - her specialty, told me that to the best of her recollection, her survey showed that 97% or 98% of American history lies entered into the Congressional Record came from Republicans.

Fascinated, I tried to talk Chris into the project of revisiting and verifying the research, enlisting backing from well-known historians, and releasing it with a great flourish, perhaps to launch a new nonprofit that would fight falsified American history.

Rodda thought it was a great idea, except that she was caught up in other projects. Well, I asked, couldn't the work be farmed out, parceled out to volunteers? No, she replied, that would be impossible because ferreting out all the lies required an intimate knowledge of the various classes of history lies in use, and their myriad permutations, that she alone possessed.

And so the years went by, but the idea stuck in my mind and this Fall, I started to poke around in the Congressional Record myself. I'm a novice to the world of falsified American history, it's true, but what I've found certainly corroborates Chris' Rodda's preliminary survey. So I've decided to cover my findings, sporadically - as time allows - in a running series.

So far, I have yet to find an instance, in the Congressional Record, of a Democrat in Congress or the Senate uttering any of the classic history lies coined by David Barton or any of his colleagues in the American history falsification business; all have come from Republicans. But that doesn't leave Democrats completely off the hook:

One of the most outrageous exercises in the Congressional promotion of American history lies came in December 2007, with the introduction, by Republican Representative Steve Forbes, of House Resolution 888 - a compendium of many of the most classic of David Barton's history lies. Five Congressional Democrats would eventually sign on as H. Res. 888 cosponsors, and they were joined by a whopping 88 Republicans who, by late 2008, had signed on as fellow cosponsors of Forbes' resolution.

House Resolution 888

In a multi-part series at the website I co-founded in 2005 with journalist Frederick Clarkson, Chris Rodda covered the numerous history lies packed into H. Res. 888, in a running series that commenced with the post, Think the "Christmas Resolution" was Bad? Check Out H. Res. 888 [7] in which Rodda wrote,

"On December 18, 2007, Congressman Randy Forbes (R-VA) introduced H. Res. 888, a resolution "Affirming the rich spiritual and religious history of our Nation's founding and subsequent history and expressing support for designation of the first week in May as 'American Religious History Week' for the appreciation of and education on America's history of religious faith." This resolution, which purports to promote "education on America's history of religious faith," is packed with the same American history lies found on the Christian nationalist websites, and in the books of pseudo-historians like David Barton."

Here's a list [8] of many of the "888" posts in the series.

One of the more interesting ones in the "888" series, at least from an immediate political perspective, was 35% of House Republicans Support Christian Nationalist History Revisionism [9], a post that referenced the fact that over 1/3 of House Republicans had signed on as cosponsors of Randy Forbes' H. Res. 888.

Rep. Forbes would later re-submit 888, almost verbatim, as House Resolution 397 [10], then after that as House Resolution 253 [11].

But since then, a number of prominent conservative evangelical scholars have strongly denounced [3] David Barton's pseudo-history. How many Republicans in Congress and the Senate, I wonder, would - if asked by media - defend their past endorsement of Barton-style American history lies? As Chris Rodda and I have often discussed, there are two horns to the dilemma - someone promoting such history lies is revealed to be either 1) also a liar or, 2) a history ignoramus: and, neither title is nice to wear during an election year.

note: Chris Rodda has a new [book series [12] debunking the many lies about Thomas Jefferson that have been put out by David Barton, who has tried to paint Jefferson as a pious Christian nationalist.]

  • * *

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/speakeasy/brucewilson/05-and-08-todd-akin-entered-american-history-lies-congressional-record

Links:

[1] http://www.alternet.org/speakeasy/brucewilson

[2] http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2009/05/18/more-christian-nation-falsehoo/

[3] http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d110:HE00888:@@@P

[4] http://www.csmonitor.com/Books/chapter-and-verse/2012/0813/The-Jefferson-Lies-is-recalled-by-publisher-Thomas-Nelson

[5] http://www.publiceye.org/magazine/v21n2/history.html

[6] http://www.liarsforjesus.com

[7] http://www.talk2action.org/story/2008/1/4/24725/53989

[8] https://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=888&btnG=Google+Search&domains=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.talk2action.org%2F&sitesearch=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.talk2action.org%2F&diarylist_count=50

[9] http://www.talk2action.org/story/2008/2/26/204823/585

[10] http://www.talk2action.org/story/2009/7/23/95914/7729/

[11] http://www.talk2action.org/story/2011/5/6/114253/5797

[12] http://freethoughtblogs.com/rodda/2012/09/13/the-first-installment-of-my-barton-jefferson-debunking-is-now-available/

http://www.alternet.org/speakeasy/brucewilson/05-and-08-todd-akin-entered-american-history-lies-congressional-record?page=entire

=== 

gop platform:

2. Tony Perkins.Perkins heads the Family Research Council, whose Values Voter Summit is the Religious Right’s most important annual conference, where activists rub shoulders with Republican officials and candidates. Perkins _{bragged}_ [6] in an email to his supporters how much influence he and his friend David Barton (see below) had on the platform. Perkins was an active member of the platform committee, proposing language to oppose school-based health clinics that provide referrals for contraception or abortion, and arguing for the strongest possible anti-marriage equality language. Perkins also introduced an amendment to the platform calling on the District of Columbia government to loosen its gun laws, which Perkins says still do not comply with recent Supreme Court rulings.

The media tends to treat Perkins, a telegenic former state legislator, as a reasonable voice of the Religious Right, but his record and his group’s positions prove otherwise. Perkins has been aggressively _{exploiting}_ [7] the recent shooting at FRC headquarters to divert attention from the group’s extremism by claiming that the Southern Poverty Law Center was irresponsible in calling FRC a hate group. Unfortunately for Perkins, the group’s record of promoting hatred toward LGBT people is well-documented. Perkins has even complained that the press and President Obama were being too hard on Uganda’s infamous “kill the gays” bill, which he _{described}_ [7] as an attempt to “uphold moral conduct.” It’s worth remembering that Perkins ran a 1996 campaign for Louisiana Senate candidate Woody Jenkins that paid $82,600 to David Duke for the Klan leader’s mailing list; the campaign was _{fined}_ [8] by the FEC for trying to cover it up.

3. David Barton. Texas Republican activist and disgraced Christian-nation “historian” Barton has had a tough year, but Tampa has been good to him. He was perhaps the most vocal member of the platform committee, and was a featured speaker at Sunday’s pre-convention “prayer rally.” During the platform committee’s final deliberations, Barton couldn’t seem to hear his own voice often enough. He was the know-it-all nitpicker, piping up with various language changes, such as deleting a reference to the family as the “school of democracy” because families are not democracies. He thought it was too passive to call Obamacare an “erosion of” the Constitution and thought it should be changed to an “attack on” the founding document. He called for stronger anti-public education language and asserted that large school districts employ one administrator for every teacher. He backed anti-abortion language, tossing out the claim that 127 medical studies over five decades say that abortion hurts women.

Progressives have been documenting Barton’s lies for years, but more recently conservative evangelical scholars have also been _{hammering}_ [9] his claims about American history. The critical chorus got so loud that Christian publishing powerhouse Thomas Nelson pulled Barton’s most recent book – which, ironically, purports to correct “lies” about Thomas Jefferson – from the shelves. Of course, Barton has had plenty of practice at this sort of thing, from producing bogus [10] documentaries [10] designed to turn African Americans against the Democratic Party to pushing his religious and political ideology into Texas _{textbooks}_ [11]. Barton's right-wing friends like Glenn Beck have rallied around him. And nothing seems to tarnish Barton with the GOP allies for whom he has proven politically useful over the years.

US FF ~   http://www.alternet.org/print/belief/5-people-who-bravely-fought-christian-takeover-america

truther theologian; http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/156351

[wrecking crew suggests nra was early xian trophy]

WASHINGTON -- Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) said Friday that the shootings that took place in an Aurora, Colo. movie theater hours earlier were a result of "ongoing attacks on Judeo-Christian beliefs" and questioned why nobody else in the theater had a gun to take down the shooter.

During a radio interview on The Heritage Foundation's "Istook Live!" show, Gohmert was asked why he believes such senseless acts of violence take place. Gohmert responded by talking about the weakening of Christian values in the country.

"You know what really gets me, as a Christian, is to see the ongoing attacks on Judeo-Christian beliefs, and then some senseless crazy act of terror like this takes place," Gohmert said.

"Some of us happen to believe that when our founders talked about guarding our virtue and freedom, that that was important," he said. "Whether it's John Adams saying our Constitution was made only for moral and religious people ... Ben Franklin, only a virtuous people are capable of freedom, as nations become corrupt and vicious they have more need of masters ... We have been at war with the very pillars, the very foundation of this country."

Ernest Istook, the host of the show and a former Oklahoma congressman, jumped in to clarify that nobody knows the motivation of the alleged Aurora gunman. Gohmert said that may be true, but suggested the shootings were still "a terrorist act" that could have been avoided if the country placed a higher value on God.

hmn: http://www.exminister.org/Madsen-Christian-mafia-second.html  includes C street

Other important women members of the Fellowship are Interior Secretary Gale Norton, former Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and Eileen Bakke, the wife of former Advanced Energy Systems (AES) CEO Dennis Bakke.

Why we can’t have better flood insurance yet:Abortions 

http://grist.org/news/why-we-cant-have-better-flood-insurance-yet-abortions/

...

It was this article, looking at revisions to the nation’s flood insurance policy. The idea was so sensible, so cost-effective, that we assumed even in the Wacky World of Washington�� they stood a good shot of passage.

After all (we wrote, smiling) the legislation simply allowed the Federal Emergency Management Agency to update flood maps and insurance rates to consider the impacts of higher sea levels. Opposing such rational action made no sense at all, we noted, then joking that irrationality “has never once in America’s 223-year history of Congress been an obstruction to politicians introducing legislation.” Just a joke, Congress! We knew you’d come through!

We were so innocent back when we wrote that, yesterday.

From Politico.com:

The Senate’s flood insurance program looked like it was headed toward smooth passage — but now, there appears to be an abortion-related wrinkle.

Yes, abortion.

That’s at least according to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who said Tuesday that a Republican senator is insisting on a vote on an amendment defining “when life begins.” Reid didn’t name the senator, but it was Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) who had offered the amendment.

We just … we can’t …

So, the Senate can’t update flood insurance rates and projections — a move which would save the government a ton of money — because abortion?

Paul responded to reporters Tuesday: “I think the people who believe in protecting life would like to see a vote.”

sept 2011 overview 

http://www.talk2action.org/story/2011/9/13/221038/507

dominionism: 

http://www.talk2action.org/story/2011/9/4/8954/17253

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.

http://grist.org/article/scherer-christian/

Christian-right views are swaying politicians and threatening the environment

By Glenn Scherer

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.

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.”)

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.

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 dispensationalist writer 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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_right

Christian right is a term used in the United States to describe right-wing Christian political groups that are characterized by their strong support of socially conservative policies. Christian conservatives principally seek to apply the teachings of Christianity to politics and public policy by proclaiming the value of those teachings and/or by seeking to use those teachings to influence law and public policy.[1]

In the U.S., the Christian right is an informal coalition of numerous groups, chiefly evangelicals and Catholics.[2] The Christian right is strongest in the South, where it replaced the core of the Republican Party.[3] Besides conservative positions on domestic issues such as opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage,[4] in recent years, quite a lot of the Christian right is a strong supporter of Israel in foreign affairs.[5] There are similar, smaller Christian right movements in other countries, including Canada,[6] Australia,[7] and the Philippines.[8]

Contents [hide]��

The Home School Legal Defense Association was cofounded in 1983 by Michael Farris, who would later establish Patrick Henry College, and Michael Smith. This organization attempts to challenge laws that serve as obstacles to allowing parents to homeschool their children and to organize the disparate group of homeschooling families into a cohesive bloc. The number of homeschooling families has increased in the last twenty years, and around 80 percent of these families identify themselves as evangelicals.[43]

A number of universities and colleges have been founded due to the growing popularity of the Christian right. The main universities associated with the Christian Right are:

the response, rick perry rally:

The American Family Association

The American Family Association is the driving force behind The Response. Founded by the Rev. Don Wildmon in 1977, the organization is based is best known for its various boycott campaigns, promotion of art censorship, and political advocacy against women’s rights and LGBT equality. The organization also controls the vast American Family Radio and an online news service, in addition to sponsoring various conferences frequented by Republican leaders, including the Values Voter Summit and Rediscovering God in America. The AFA today is led by Tim Wildmon, Don’s son, and its chief spokesperson is Bryan Fischer, the Director of Issues Analysis for Government and Public Policy and host of its flagship radio show Focal Point.

Fischer routinely expresses support for some of the most bigoted and shocking ideas found in the Religious Right today. He has:

Other AFA leaders and activists are just as radical:

james robison, falwell RR era

RECONSTRUCTIONSTS

Most Americans have never heard of the Reconstructionists. But they have felt their impact through the Reconstructionists’ profound (if indirect) influence over the wider (and vast) evangelical community.

Take Michele Bachmann. She is a Reconstructionist schooled – literally – by some of that obscure movementâ€��s leading thinkers, including my father.

The evangelicals have shaped the politics of a secular culture that barely understood the religious right, let alone the forces within that movement that gave it its edge. The Americans inhabiting the wider (and more secular) culture just saw the results of Reconstructionism without understanding where those results had come from—for instance, how the hell George W. Bush got elected and then reelected or why Michele Bachmann was into home schooling long before she was into trying to become president in order to turn America into a homophobic theocracy.

Victimhood

If you feel victimized by modernity, then the Reconstructionists have the answer in their version of biblical interpretation. Reconstructionists want to replace the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights with their interpretation of the Bible.

The Reconstructionist worldview is ultra-Calvinist but, like all Calvinism has its origins in ancient Israel/Palestine, when vengeful and ignorant tribal lore was written down by frightened men (the nastier authors of the Bible) trying to defend their prerogatives to bully women, murder rival tribes, and steal land. (These justifications may have reflected later thinking: origin myths used as propaganda to justify political and military actions after the fact, such as the brutality the Hebrews said God made them inflict on others and/or their position as the Chosen People.)

In its modern American incarnation, which hardened into a 20th-century movement in the 1960s and became widespread in the 1970s, Reconstructionism was propagated by people like my father and others I knew and worked with closely when I, too, was both a Jesus Victim and a Jesus Predator claiming God’s special favor.

The Leaders

The leaders of the Reconstructionist movement included the late Rousas Rushdoony (Calvinist theologian, father of modern-era Christian Reconstructionism, patron saint to gold-hoarding haters of the Federal Reserve, haters of the US Government and creator of the modern evangelical home school movement), his son-in-law Gary North (an economist and publisher), and David Chilton (Calvinist pastor and author).

No, the Reconstructionists are not about to take over America, the world, or even most American evangelical institutions. Bachmann – for instance – will likely never be president. But their influence has not abated, however a la Tea Party.

The Reconstructionists have been like a drop of radicalizing flavoring added to a bottle of water: They’ve subtly changed the water’s flavor. And even though most evangelicals, let alone the general public, donâ€��t know the names of the leading Reconstructionist thinkers, the world we live in—where a radicalized, angry government-hating religious right has changed the face of American politics and spun off into movements such as the Tea Party��€”is a direct result of that “flavoring.”

Anyone who wants to understand American politics, not to mention North American religion, had better get acquainted with the Reconstructionists. For instance these folks just held America hostage in the debt crisis, an attempt to – literally â€�� destroy the government’s ability to function at all a manufactured “crisis” in which Bachmann was a leading proponent of scorched-earth, destroy the system “politics.”

Reconstructionism, also called Theonomism, seeks to reconstruct “our fallen society.” Its worldview is best represented by the publications of the Chalcedon Foundation (which has been classified as an antigay hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center).

Kill the Gays

According to the Chalcedon Foundation Web site, the mission of the movement is to apply “the whole Word of God” to all aspects of human life: “It is not only our duty as individuals, families and churches to be Christian, but it is also the duty of the state, the school, the arts and sciences, law, economics, and every other sphere to be under Christ the King. Nothing is exempt from His dominion. We must live by His Word, not our own.”...

From Puritans To Government Haters

The Puritans’ theology of government was formed in the context of an embrace of all Christians’ duty to demand the “public good.” This was exemplified by such unquestioned well-established concepts as the “king’s highway,” a common road system protected by the crown (government) and a common law that applied to all. One’s common duty to others was accepted as the essential message of Christian civilization. Public spaces were defended by government in the early New England settlements, just as they had been in England.

What’s so curious is that in this religion-inflicted country of ours, the same evangelicals, conservative Roman Catholics, and others like George and Bachmann who had been running around post-Roe insisting that America had a “Christian foundation” and demanding a “return to our heritage” and/or more recently trashing health care reform as “communist” ignored the fact that one great contribution of Christianity was a commitment to strong central government. For instance, this included church support for state-funded, or state-church-funded, charities, including hospitals, as early as the fourth century.

Government was seen as part of God’s plan for creating social justice and defending the common good. Christians were once culture-forming and culture-embracing people. Even the humanism preached by the supposedly “anti-Christian” Enlightenment thinkers of the 18th century was, in fact, a Deist/Christian “heresy,â€�� with a value system espousing human dignity borrowed wholesale from the Sermon on the Mount.

In the scorched-earth post-Roe era of the “health care reform debates” of 2009 and beyond, evangelicals seemed to believe that Jesus commanded that all hospitals (and everything else) should be run by corporations for profit, just because corporations weren’t the evil government. The right even decided that it was “normal” for the state to hand over its age-old public and patriotic duties to private companiesâ€��even for military operations (��€œcontractors”), prisons, health care, public transport, and all the rest.

The religious right/far right et al. favored private “facts,” too. They claimed that global warming wasn’t real. They asserted this because scientists (those same agents of Satan who insisted that evolution was real) were the ones who said human actions were changing the climate. Worse, the government said so, too!

“Global warming is a left-wing plot to take away our freedom!

“Amtrak must make a profit!”

Even the word “infrastructure” lost its respectability when government had a hand in maintaining roads, bridges and trains.

In denial of the West’s civic-minded, government-supporting heritage, evangelicals (and the rest of the right) wound up defending private oil companies but not God’s creation, private cars instead of public transport, private insurance conglomerates rather than government care of individuals. The price for the religious right’s wholesale idolatry of private everything was that Christ’s reputation was tied to a cynical political party “owned” by billionaires. It only remained for a far right Republican-appointed majority on the Supreme Court to rule in 2010 that unlimited corporate money could pour into political campaigns—anonymously—in a way that clearly favored corporate America and the superwealthy, who were now the only entities served by the Republican Party.

The evangelical rubes who are Bachmann's foot soldiers never realized that the logic of their “stand” against government had played into the hands of people who never cared about human lives beyond the fact that people could be sold products. By the 21st century, Ma and Pa No-name were still out in the rain holding an “Abortion is Murder!” sign in Peoria and/or standing in line all night in some godforsaken mall in Kansas City to buy a book by Sarah Palin and have it signed. But it was the denizens of the corner offices at Goldman Sachs, the News Corporation, Exxon, and Halliburton who were laughing.

Frank Schaeffer is the author of "Crazy for God: How I Grew Up As One Of The Elect, Helped Found The Religious Right, And Lived To Take All (Or Almost All) Of It Back."

http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/151960

The Wild Hypocrisy of America's Conservative Christians

By David Sirota, AlterNet
Posted on April 20, 2012, Printed on April 28, 2012
http://www.alternet.org/story/155080/the_wild_hypocrisy_of_america%27s_conservative_christians

Here's a newspaper headline that might induce a disbelieving double take: "Christians 'More Likely to Be Leftwing' And Have Liberal Views on Immigration and Equality." Sounds too hard to believe, right? Well, it's true -- only not here in America, but in the United Kingdom.

That headline, from London's Daily Mail, summed up the two-tiered conclusion of a new report from the British think tank Demos, which found that in England 1) "religious people are more active citizens (who) volunteer more, donate more to charity and are more likely to campaign on political issues" and 2) "religious people are more likely to be politically progressive (people who) put a greater value on equality than the non-religious, are more likely to be welcoming of immigrants as neighbours (and) more likely to put themselves on the left of the political spectrum."

These findings are important to America for two reasons.

First, they tell us that, contrary to evidence in the United States, the intersection of religion and politics doesn't have to be fraught with hypocrisy. Britain is a Christian-dominated country, and the Christian Bible is filled with liberal economic sentiment. It makes perfect sense, then, that the more devoutly loyal to that Bible one is, the more progressive one would be on economics.

That highlights the second reason this data is significant: the findings underscore an obvious contradiction in our own religious politics.

Here in the United States, those who self-identify as religious tend to be exactly the opposite of their British counterparts when it comes to politics. As the Pew Research Center recently discovered, "Most people who agree with the religious right also support the Tea Party" and its ultra-conservative economic agenda. Summing up the situation, scholar Gregory Paul wrote in the Washington Post that many religious Christians in America simply ignore the Word and "proudly proclaim that the creator of the universe favors free wheeling, deregulated union busting, minimal taxes, especially for wealthy investors, and plutocrat-boosting capitalism as the ideal earthly scheme for his human creations."

The good news is that this may be starting to change. In recent years, for instance, Pew has found that younger evangelicals are less devoutly committed to the Republican Party and its Tea Party-inspired agenda than older evangelicals. Additionally, surveys show a near majority of evangelicals agree with liberals that the tax system is unfair and that the wealthy aren't paying their fair share. Meanwhile, the organization Faith in Public LIfe has highlighted new academic research showing that even in America there is growing "correlation between increased Bible reading and support for progressive views, including abolishing the death penalty, seeking economic justice, and reducing material consumption."

Of course, many Americans who cite Christianity to justify their economic conservatism may not have actually read the Bible. In that sense, religion has become more of a superficial brand rather than a distinct catechism, and brands can be easily manipulated by self-serving partisans and demagogues. To know that is to read the Sermon on the Mount and then marvel at how anyone still justifies right-wing beliefs by invoking Jesus.

No doubt, only a few generations ago, such a conflation of religion and right-wing economics would never fly in America. Whether William Jennings Bryan's "Cross of Gold" crusade or the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.'s poor people's campaign, religion and political activism used to meet squarely on the left -- where they naturally should.

Thus, the findings from Britain, a country similar to the United States, evoke our own history and potential. They remind us that such a congruent convergence of theology and political ideology is not some far-fetched fantasy -- it is still possible right here at home.

David Sirota is the author of the best-selling books Hostile Takeover and The Uprising. He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado and blogs at http://openleft.com. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com or follow him on Twitter @davidsirota.

Putting the Far Right into Perspective 

Paul de Armond

Research director

Public Good Project

Political Behaviors

Rationalizations for Misbehavior

Cheating

The actor knows that the behavior is wrong and can feel guilt and remorse before being caught.

Disobedience

The actor proclaims a moral imperative for misconduct, but stops short of serious felonies or violent resistance to legal authority.

Crime

The actions are committed covertly, evidence is concealed or destroyed and legal authority may be violently resisted.

WarThe actor seeks to destroy all authority that thwarts attaining goals.

Right Wing Strategies

Leaderless Resistance is a terrorist strategy. The movement splits itself into two components: an aboveground leadership of propagandists and an underground network of terrorist action cells. Individual cells may be prosecuted, but Leaderless Resistance networks are virtually immune from law enforcement activities.

"Paper terrorism" is a resistance/terrorist strategy. The name is misleading, but widely used. Properly speaking, the activity is barratry, the fraudulent simulation of a legal process. Most barratry consists of harassing lawsuits, filing frivolous documents in support of tax resistance and phony liens against public officials. Widely tolerated by prosecutors and county clerks. No significant enforcement activity has occurred, though many states' Attorneys General have drafted numerous opinions on right-wing barratry for the last two decades.

Tax Resistance is another name for tax fraud. Fraud is the most common form of Christian Patriot criminal activity. Cheating on taxes is widespread, but right-wingers have raised it to an elaborate art form similar to drug money-laundering operations. Rarely prosecuted.

Common law is a protest/resistance/terrorist strategy. In the milder variant, it takes the form of frivolous pro se legal actions. In its most dangerous form, it consists of kangaroo "common law" courts which use militia cells to enforce their rulings.

Right Wing Groups and Movements

Neo-nazis and the Klan merged into a single movement in the early 1970's through the agency of Richard Butler and his Aryan Nations organization. Strongly influenced by "one-seed" Identity. Neo-nazi and Klan racism is very similar to the volk theories of Hitler's Nazis.

Identity, or more properly Christian Identity, is a Bible-based but non-Christian sect. Intensely racist, Identity believes that only Anglo-Saxons (Aryans) are true "Christians" and that all other people are subhuman mongrels.

Virulently anti-Semitic, Identity has split into two factions over the nature of Jewish peoples. The larger faction (one-seedline Identity) believes that Jews worship Satan. A smaller faction (two-seedline Identity) believes that Jews are the children of Cain, whose father was Satan not Adam. Two-seed Identity believers are far more violent and apt to view Adolph Hitler as a "Christian" prophet.

Militias are overt or covert right-wing paramilitary organizations. John Trochmann, the leading militia figure today, preaches the Leaderless Resistance strategy of "public meetings and private cells." Most of the so-called "militia movement" is the armed wing of the Christian Patriot movement.

Christian Patriots (or often just Patriots) are a broad movement on the far right which extends from the John Birch Society to the Freemen. On the left, it stops short of the National Rifle Association and on the right, it does not include neo-nazis. When the movement began in the early 1960s, it was dominated by Identity and a few right-wing Mormons.

Its historical predecessors include the Ku Klux Klan, Father Coughlin's Christian Action paramilitary organization, the Silver Shirts, and the Black Legion, all American fascist organizations. The name comes from two small Identity-led paramilitary organizations which flourished in the 1960s: the Christian Defense League and the Christian-Patriot Defense league. Other early Christian Patriot groups included the Posse Comitatus, the Minutemen, the California Rangers, the Arizona Patriots, the Committee of the States, New Nation USA (NNUSA), Committee to Restore the Constitution and Willis Carto's Populist Party.

Originally part of the alliance of racist groups who participated in the Aryan Nations conferences in the early 1970s, by the 1980's the early Christian Patriot movement began to split into two distinct factions: the revolutionary neo-nazi/Klan movement and the reactionary Christian Patriot movement. Previous to the split, both factions used the name Christian Patriot.

By the late 1980's, after the exposure of the Posse Comitatus following Gordon Kahl's murder of several law enforcement officers and his subsequent death in a shoot-out, and the exposure of Aryan Nations involvement in Robert Mathews' murder-robbery gang, The Order, the Christian Patriots began denouncing the Klan, neo-nazis and two-seed Identity as "costumed kooks" and "Hitler-worshipers." This was also reflected in the collapse of the Populist Party after Bo Gritz's 1992 presidential campaign, as the Christian Patriot and Klan/neo-nazi wings battled openly.

In the early 1990's, the Christian Patriot movement sought and found allies to its left -- but still well off-center -- in the militant wing of the Christian Right, particularly among violent anti-abortion activists and in the Wise Use Movement, a loose collection of anti-environmentalist organizations originally started by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon and Alan Gottlieb, a Washington State ultra-libertarian. The convergence of these groups, along with anti-gun control militants, led to the militia organizing drive of 1994.

Christian Patriot leadership continues to be dominated by "one-seed" Identity (notably John Trochmann and his Militia of Montana) and their affiliates such as Bo Gritz, Jack McLamb, Red Beckman and others. Christian Patriot racism is cultural, rather than bloodline, and sometimes described as nativism, "Afrikaaner" or "Old Settler" racism in contrast to the Nazi-style racism of the Klan. "Freemen" are mostly "two-seed" Identity and radical Mormon participants on the extreme right of the Christian Patriot movement.

According to most Christian Patriots, only white, "Christian," property-owning males can possess "first-class" citizenship. Christian Patriot anti-Semitism is mostly coded in language about the fictional "Illuminatti," "International bankers," and the New World Order. Most Christian Patriots will simultaneously deny the Holocaust and their anti-Semitism. By Patriot lights, only neo-nazis and Klan are anti-Semites and racists -- since Patriots aren't neo-nazis, they can't be anti-Semites or racists. Their theories about property ownership, federal jurisdiction, taxation, monetary systems, and the United Nations are equally baroque and self-contradictory.

Constitutionalists reject most conventional legal theory. Instead, they substitute a simplified notion a divinely inspired "organic" Constitution -- the original Constitution and the Bill of Rights -- combined with their interpretation of the Bible as the only "true law." Basically, most Constitutionalists don't want to pay taxes or recognize government authority.

Much of modern Constitutionalism comes from the writings and prophesies of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints (Mormons.) The origin of the Christian Patriot term "Freemen" and the key to Constitutionalism can be found in The Book of Mormon, Alma 51: 5-6.

The foundation to Constitutionalist theory is that any alteration to the divinely inspired "organic" Constitution is contrary to God's will. This makes most American jurisprudence and case law, the abolition of slavery, income tax and votes for women, to name just a few of the things that Constitutionalists object to, not only "unconstitutional," but downright blasphemous.

Wise Use is a right-wing business lobby. It creates and uses local "property rights" groups as political fronts. Originally started as a partnership between Rev. Sun Myung Moon and Washington ultra-libertarian Alan Gottlieb, Wise Use employs writer Ron Arnold and organizer Chuck Cushman as their main propagandists. In Washington State, the two main industry supporters of Wise Use are the Washington Contract Loggers Association and the Building Industry Association. At the local level, most Wise Use support comes from extractive resource industries and real estate developers. County secession groups were started by a handful of key Wise Use operators and recruited heavily among Christian Patriot groups. Likewise, most militias in Western Washington drew heavily on Wise Use support.

Christian Right is a loose alliance of politicized religious groups with a reactionary agenda. it is mostly separate and distinct from the Patriot movement. The main Christian Right issues are opposition to progressive social programs: public education, civil liberties, reproductive choice, and women's equality. Some extreme Christian Right groups are behaviorally indistinguishable from Christian Patriot groups. The difference is that the ideological roots of Christian Right protest, resistance and terrorist activities are based on economic and social determinisms, while the Christian Patriots draw mainly on biological (racial) determinism.

Those extreme Christian Right groups which overlap the Patriots share a set of beliefs with Identity that are called "Dominion theology" -- a program of religious supremacy which places religious authority above and beyond the law. Most of the leadership for Dominion theology comes from a sect known as Reconstructionists led by R.J. Rushdooney and Gary North. These groups practice common law, tax resistance, "paper terrorism," militia organizing and Leaderless Resistance. The best known examples of the Christian Right/Patriot convergence are Identity minister Pete Peter's 1992 conference in Estes Park to organize Leaderless Resistance militias and the April 1994 convention of the Wisconsin US. Taxpayers Party.

The national example of Christian Right/Patriot overlap is Larry Pratt, one of Pat Buchanan's national campaign managers. In western Washington State, Sen. Val Stevens is the leading example. She has participated in tax resistance, and draws significant support from Wise Users and Christian Patriots in Snohomish County. US. Rep. Jack Metcalf is a Christian Patriot who has garnered most of his support from the Christian Right.

Leading Washington State Christian Right groups include the Christian Coalition, Eagle Forum, and the Evergreen Freedom Foundation. The Washington Republican Party is dominated by Christian Right forces.

http://www.publicgood.org/reports/spectrum/

incubator; gun clubs  , ~ gw  crusader icons

http://njiat.com/global-warming.html

pray away drought and/or

SEE ALSO

http://www.alternet.org/belief/151911/the_biggest_religious_movement_you_never_heard_of%3A_nine_things_you_need_to_know_about_rick_perry%27s_prayer_event/

The Fringe Of The Fringe'

Other names on the list of coordinators and endorsers have raised eyebrows.

"I mean, when you talk about the religious right, this is the fringe of the fringe here," says Dan Quinn, communications director of the Texas Freedom Network, an Austin-based watchdog group that tracks the far right in Texas.

"This is clearly, when you look at it, religious extremism and naked partisan politics," Quinn says. "I think it's one of the most cynical displays of using faith as a political tool we've seen in a long time."

This is clearly, when you look at it, kind of a combination of religious extremism and naked partisan politics ... I think it's probably one of the most cynical displays of using faith as a political tool that we've seen in a long time.

The event is being paid for by the American Family Association, which describes itself as being "on the frontlines of America's culture war." The Southern Poverty Law Center characterizes the AFA as a hate group because of its fierce anti-gay agenda.

Other participants include:

—John Hagee, a San Antonio evangelist whose endorsement was rejected by John McCain in 2008 because of Hagee's anti-Catholic statements.

—Mike Bickle, a founder of the International House of Prayer in Kansas City, Mo., who's called Oprah Winfrey a "pastor of the harlot of Babylon."

—Alice Patterson, founder of Justice at the Gate, in San Antonio, has written that there is "a demonic structure behind the Democratic Party."

—And then there's John Benefiel, head of the Oklahoma-based Heartland Apostolic Prayer Network, who once said this about the Statue of Liberty: "You know where we got it from? French Freemasons. Listen, folks, that is an idol, a demonic idol right there in the middle of New York Harbor."...The gathering in Houston appears to some observers as an early attempt to line up the support of conservative evangelicals for Perry's expected presidential run. The event's executive committee includes religious/political activists David Lane and Jim Garlow, as well as Wayne Hamilton and David Barton, both former officials of the Texas Republican Party.

Gov Perry TX

Controversy surrounding Perry's Day of Prayer is growing quickly. The event is hosted and funded -- including the rental of Houston's huge stadium -- by the Tupelo, Mississippi-based American Family Association (AFA), which the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) labels as an anti-gay hate group. A June 11 editorial in the Houston Chronicle opposing Perry's Day of Prayer said "There could hardly be a more divisive, unforgiving group than the American Family Association," to host the event. The AFA makes no attempt to hide its disdain towards gays and other members of society it considers inferior. In 2010, Bryan Fischer, AFA's Director of Issue Analysis for Government and Public Policy, said, "Homosexuality gave us Adolph Hitler, and homosexuals in the military gave us the Brown Shirts, the Nazi war machine and six million dead Jews." Fischer has also openly attacked native Americans. In a February, 2011 blog post (pdf), Fischer wrote that native Americans are morally and culturally inferior because of their refusal to accept Christianity. He wrote, "In all the discussions about the European settlement of the New World, one feature has been conspicuously absent: the role that the superstition, savagery and sexual immorality of native Americans played in making them morally disqualified from sovereign control of American soil." Moreover, Fischer blamed high rates of poverty and alcoholism among native Americans on their refusal to accept Christianity, writing, " ...Many of the tribal reservations today remain mired in poverty and alcoholism because many native Americans continue to cling to the darkness of indigenous superstition instead of coming into the light of Christianity and assimilating into Christian culture."

AFA's president, Tim Wildmon, dismisses SPLC's labeling of AFA as a hate group, saying AFA's stand on homosexuality represents the beliefs of "a lot of people who have traditional values." He adds that the purpose of the Day of Prayer is to pray for an end to the "debasement of our culture." Translation: to pray for an end to America's increasing acceptance of homosexuality.

Gen Boykin was nominated by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for a third star and was named to a new position as Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence. Boykin reported to Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen A. Cambone.

Because of Boykin's anti-Islamic remarks made frequently and publicly, his appointment is seen by many as likely to increase the perception among Muslims that the U.S. is engaged in a War on Islam. Indeed, Boykin's blunt rhetoric seems to evoke this directly. In describing the faceoff in Somalia:

"There was a man in Mogadishu named Osman Atto," whom Boykin described as a top lieutenant of Mohammed Farah Aidid."When Boykin's Delta Force commandos went after Atto, they missed him by seconds, he said. "He went on CNN and he laughed at us, and he said, 'They'll never get me because Allah will protect me. Allah will protect me.'"Well, you know what?" Boykin continued. "I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol." Atto later was captured."Our "spiritual enemy," Boykin continued, "will only be defeated if we come against them in the name of Jesus."

William B. Arkin reports that "in his newly created position, Boykin is not just another Pentagon apparatchik or bureaucratic warrior. He has been charged with reinvigorating Rumsfeld's "High Value Target Plan" to track down Bin Laden, Hussein, Mullah Omar and other leaders in the terrorism world.

"But Gen. Boykin's appointment to a high position in the administration is a frightening blunder at a time when there is widespread acknowledgment that the position of the United States in the Islamic world has never been worse.

"A monthlong journalistic investigation of Boykin reveals a 30-year veteran whose classified resum�� reads like a history of special operations and counterterrorism. From the failed Iranian hostage rescue attempt in 1980 to invasions in Grenada and Panama, to the hunt for drug lord Pablo Escobar in Colombia, to Somalia and various locales in the Middle East, Boykin has been there. He also was an advisor to Atty. Gen. Janet Reno during Waco."

"He has described himself as a warrior in the kingdom of God and invited others to join with him in fighting for the United States through repentance, prayer and the exercise of faith in God.

"He has praised the leadership of President Bush, whom he extolled as 'a man who prays in the Oval Office.' ... 'George Bush was not elected by a majority of the voters in the United States,' Boykin told an Oregon congregation. 'He was appointed by God.'"

site docs http://www.publiceye.org/portal/top-domtheo-page.html

According to Michael Kazin, the dynamic of rightist subcultures feeding ideas into mainstream media is typical of right wing populist movements.17 A 1998 scholarly book edited by Linda Kintz & Julia Lesage, Culture, Media, and the Religious Right, contains several chapters that show how discussions in right wing alternative media help frame issues that are refined for later publication in the mainstream media.18

^...^

Christian Right media is extensive and reflects a large subculture in our society. For example, televangelist Jerry Falwell periodically sends material to "162,000 conservative pastors and churches through Pastors' Policy Briefings." In late 1998, he solicited funds to expand in order to "Alert, educate and rally America's 200,000 conservative pastors who collectively speak to 50-60 million persons each week." Moreover, Falwell is just one of many national Christian Right leaders seeking to mobilize evangelicals and fundamentalists to engage in conservative political action.27 In January 1999 Pat Roberson's "700 Club" TV program featured a special weeklong series of reports on "America's Moral Crisis." Evidence of "America's moral decline" included abortion, euthanasia, homosexuality, and "America's obsession with sex." Viewers with concerns about the moral crises were urged to call the National Counseling Center, part of the Christian Broadcasting Network Ministry. According to the 700 Club, the Center logged 5,000 calls per day.

Studies show members of some Christian Right activist groups, such as Focus on the Family and Concerned Women for America, share three related attributes; they are much more likely than the general population to:

·Depend on religious television, radio, magazines, and direct mail as important sources of information.

·Vote in primary and general elections.

·Believe that most political issues have "one correct Christian view," that shouldn't be compromised.28

This subculture was the core of the constituency pushing for Clinton's impeachment and removal. It is important not to dismiss the Christian Right as "religious political extremists" or a "lunatic fringe" because it trivializes their significant role in electoral politics and masks their drive to deny basic human rights for people they label as sinful.

http://www.publiceye.org/conspire/clinton/Clintonculwar8-02.html#P58_16897

http://www.grist.org/article/gate2/

2006 speical series

Great Warming is pro GW film for xians (shown in theaters 2006)

http://www.grist.org/article/scherer-christian/

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.

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.

...

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*.)

http://dir.salon.com/topics/christian_right/ news

Jeff Sharlet (fresh aire) The Family: the secrtet fund at heart of  Am Power

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/07/21/c_street

The Family likes to call itself a "Christian Mafia," but it began 74 years ago as an anti-New Deal coalition of businessmen convinced that organized labor was under the sway of Satan. The Great Depression, they believed, was a punishment from God for what they viewed as FDR's socialism. The Family's goal was the "consecration" of America to God, first through the repeal of New Deal reforms, then through the aggressive expansion of American power during the Cold War. They called this a "Worldwide Spiritual Offensive," but in Washington, it amounted to the nation's first fundamentalist lobby. Early participants included Southern Sens. Strom Thurmond, Herman Talmadge and Absalom Willis Robertson -- Pat Robertson's father. Membership lists stored in the Family's archive at the Billy Graham Center at evangelical Wheaton College in Illinois show active participation at any given time over the years by dozens of congressmen.

Today's roll call is just as impressive: Men under the Family's religio-political counsel include, in addition to Ensign, Coburn and Pickering, Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Jim DeMint and Lindsey Graham, both R-S.C.; James Inhofe, R-Okla., John Thune, R-S.D., and recent senators and high officials such as John Ashcroft, Ed Meese, Pete Domenici and Don Nickles. Over in the House there's Joe Pitts, R-Penn., Frank Wolf, R-Va., Zach Wamp, R-Tenn., Robert Aderholt, R-Ala., Ander Crenshaw, R-Fla., Todd Tiahrt, R-Kan., Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., Jo Ann Emerson, R-Mo., and John R. Carter, R-Texas. Historically, the Family has been strongly Republican, but it includes Democrats, too. There's Mike McIntyre of North Carolina, for instance, a vocal defender of putting the Ten Commandments in public places, and Sen. Mark Pryor, the pro-war Arkansas Democrat responsible for scuttling Obama's labor agenda. Sen. Pryor explained to me the meaning of bipartisanship he'd learned through the Family: "Jesus didn't come to take sides. He came to take over." And by Jesus, the Family means the Family

prayer breakfast tends to be defense ministers

In the process of introducing powerful men to Jesus, the Family has managed to effect a number of behind-the-scenes acts of diplomacy. In 1978 it secretly helped the Carter Administration organize a worldwide call to prayer with Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat, and more recently, in 2001, it brought together the warring leaders of Congo and Rwanda for a clandestine meeting, leading to the two sides' eventual peace accord last July. Such benign acts appear to be the exception to the rule. During the 1960s the Family forged relationships between the U.S. government and some of the most anti-Communist (and dictatorial) elements within Africa's postcolonial leadership. The Brazilian dictator General Costa e Silva, with Family support, was overseeing regular fellowship groups for Latin American leaders, while, in Indonesia, General Suharto (whose tally of several hundred thousand “Communists” killed marks him as one of the century's most murderous dictators) was presiding over a group of fifty Indonesian legislators. During the Reagan Administration the Family helped build friendships between the U.S. government and men such as Salvadoran general Carlos Eugenios Vides Casanova, convicted by a Florida jury of the torture of thousands, and Honduran general Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, himself an evangelical minister, who was linked to both the CIA and death squads before his own demise. “We work with power where we can,” the Family's leader, Doug Coe, says, “build new power where we can't.”

At the 1990 National Prayer Breakfast, George H.W. Bush praised Doug Coe for what he described as “quiet diplomacy, I wouldn't say secret diplomacy,” as an “ambassador of faith.” Coe has visited nearly every world capital, often with congressmen at his side, “making friends” and inviting them back to the Family's unofficial headquarters, a mansion (just down the road from Ivanwald) that the Family bought in 1978 with $1.5 million donated by, among others, Tom Phillips, then the C.E.O. of arms manufacturer Raytheon, and Ken Olsen, the founder and president of Digital Equipment Corporation. A waterfall has been carved into the mansion's broad lawn, from which a bronze bald eagle watches over the Potomac River. The mansion is white and pillared and surrounded by magnolias, and by red trees that do not so much tower above it as whisper.

...

Another Family project, Youth Corps distributes pleasant brochures featuring endorsements from political leaders—among them Tsutomu Hata, a former prime minister of Japan, former secretary of state James Baker, and Yoweri Museveni, president of Uganda—

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2003/03/0079525

Doug Coe(sp)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYnC8p5X1X4

Fundamental

Evangelical

Born-Again

http://www.unscientificamerica.com/

see also mooney war on sci eg intelligent design

http://www.waronscience.com/excerpt.php?p=3

Despite failed attempts to win scientific backing for ID, this new blossoming of antievolutionism has found dramatic support both on the religious Right and among its political allies. ID critic Barbara Forrest has noted that virtually all of the leading organizations on the Christian Right have embraced or at least shown sympathy for ID, including James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum, the Concerned Women for America, D. James Kennedy’s Coral Ridge Ministries, the American Family Association, and the Alliance Defense Fund (a Christian legal group).

In 2001, Santorum teamed up with ID supporters to slip “teach the controversy” language into the so-called No Child Left Behind Act. Singling out evolution in particular, Santorum’s amendment to the Senate version of the bill stated that “good science education should prepare students to distinguish the data or testable theories of science from philosophical or religious claims that are made in the name of science.” This may sound innocuous enough, but when you learn that the language comes in part from ID movement progenitor Phillip Johnson, who believes that “Darwinism is based on an a priori commitment to materialism, not on a philosophically neutral assessment of the evidence,��€ you see where Santorum is headed....

Update

This book first appeared just as the Dover, Pennsylvania, evolution trial—technically Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School Districtâ��”built toward a dramatic courtroom confrontation. The case pitted a truly radical school board, which had gone further than any other in the nation in pushing “intelligent design” (ID) on its students, against the American Civil Liberties Union, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and the Pennsylvania law firm Pepper Hamilton. Everyone called it a replay of the 1925 Scopes trial, but in fact it more closely paralleled 1982â€��s McLean v. Arkansas, a case that helped to determine whether ID’s predecessor, “creation science,” could be constitutionally taught in public school biology classes or whether it violated the First Amendment doctrine of separation of church and state.

The judge in McLean, William Overton, wrote a scathing opinion denouncing creation science as religion in disguise; and the judge in the Dover trial, John E. Jones III, more or less did the same with respect to ID. Perhaps the main difference was that Jones’s opinion was considerably longer. Released in December 2005 and 139 pages in length, it demonstrated just how rigorously the legal process can, at least sometimes, evaluate “scientific” disputes (a virtue unfortunately not possessed by some journalists who are called upon to cover science in its political context).

Jones’s opinion may well represent the death knell of “intelligent design,â€�� both as a viable political strategy and as an idea with pretensions to intellectual seriousness. The judge proclaimed that ID does not and cannot constitute science because of its appeal to supernatural explanations and because its advocates do not (with rare exceptions) participate in the scientific process by publishing in peer-reviewed journals. He probed the religious motivations of the “intelligent design” movement and dredged up the “Wedge Document,” which he described as “a program of Christian apologetics to promote ID.” With all of this, Jones was only getting warmed up.

...But leading Republicans in the United States, in positions of considerable power, do not apparently possess Judge Jones��€™s powers of discernment. Shortly before the Dover trial went to court, the teaching of “intelligent design” in public school science classes had won support from Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist as well as from President Bush. More recently, Republicans in the House of Representatives elected Congressman John Boehner of Ohio as their new majority leader. In 2002, before winning this role, Boehner coauthored a letter to the Ohio State Board of Education instructing it that students should learn about “differing scientific views on issues such as biological evolution.â�� If Boehner isn’t himself an “intelligent designâ�� creationist, he certainly sounds sympathetic to them.

http://web.archive.org/web/20030621162743/www.publiceye.org/research/directories/theo_top.html

pro-green?  http://www.grist.org/article/2010-04-27-jesus-climate-change-journey-of-evangelical-leader-rich-cizik/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_right

The Alienation of Southern Democrats

The alienation of Southern Democrats also contributed to the rise of the Right as a result of the dissolution over race, particularly after desegregation efforts following the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the Barry Goldwater campaign attracted members of the Southern elite into the Republican Party. The Right also grew as a reaction of the progressive culture of the 1960s and a fear of social disintegration.

[edit] Ability to organize

The contemporary Christian right became increasingly vocal and organized in reaction to a series of United States Supreme Court decisions (notably Bob Jones University v. Simon and Bob Jones University v. United States) and also engaged in battles over pornography, obscenity, abortion, state sanctioned prayer in public schools, textbook contents (concerning evolution vs. creationism), homosexuality, and sexual education. The movement strengthened its influence through grassroots activists, intellectual think tanks (such as American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation, Hoover Foundation, etc), and a wide range of media institutions and key media figures (i.e. National Review, Rupert Murdoch, and Rush Limbaugh).

[edit] Grassroots activism

Much of the Christian right's power within the American political system is attributed to their extraordinary turnout rate at the polls. The voters that coexist in the Christian Right are also highly motivated and driven to get out a viewpoint on issues they care about. As well as high voter turnout, they can be counted on to attend political events, knock on doors and distribute literature. Members of the Christian Right are willing to do the electoral work needed to see their candidate elected. Because of their high level of devotion, the Christian right does not need to monetarily compensate these people for their work, thus making them a valuable resource for the Christian right.^6^7^

[edit] Political leaders and institutions

Led by Robert Grant's Christian Voice, Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority, Ed McAteer's Religious Roundtable Council, James Dobson's Focus on the Family, and Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network, the new Religious Right combined conservative politics with evangelical and fundamentalist teachings.^8^ The birth of the New Christian right, however, is usually traced to a 1979 meeting where televangelist Jerry Falwell was urged to create a "Moral Majority" organization.^9^10^

^=^

http://www.grist.org/article/scherer-christian

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 Perl in 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*.)

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=10167

wacko?

The spawning of some Christian Right sects also creates an ideology to drive the shock troops willing to literally ‘die for Christ’ in places such as Iraq or Afghanistan, Iran or elsewhere that the Pentagon needs their services. That ideology has been used to build a fanatical activist base within the Republican Party which backs a right-wing domestic agenda and a military foreign policy that sees Islam or other suitable opponents of the US power elite as Satanism incarnate. How does Sarah Palin fit into this?

The CNP: manipulating religion to political ends

Many of the religious evangelical groups in America are coordinated top-down by a secretive organization called the Committee on National Policy. Former close Bush adviser, Rev. Ted Haggard, was a member of the Committee on National Policy until a sex and drugs scandal forced him out in late 2006.

Haggard was Pastor of the New Life Church in Colorado Springs described as the ‘evangelical Vatican,’ and was head of the National Association of Evangelicals. Ted Haggard was also a member of a highly significant and little-understood sect known as Joelâ��™s Army or the Manifest Sons of God, the same circles which spawned Sarah Palin.

Another noteworthy member of the CNP as was Grover Norquist, the man once described as the ‘Field Marshall of the Bush Plan.’

The CNP, created in the early 1980’s during the Reagan era, is the nexus for several odd and quite powerful organizations. It was described by ABC's Marc J. Ambinder as â€��the conservative version of the Council on Foreign Relations.’ CNP Members include names such as General John Singlaub, shipping magnate J. Peter Grace, Texas billionaire Nelson Bunker Hunt, Edwin J. Feulner Jr of the right-wing Heritage Foundation, Rev. Pat Robertson of the Christian Broadcasting Network, Jerry Falwell, Tim LaHaye and most of the prominent names in the Christian Right around Bush. It has included prominent politicians including Senator Trent Lott, Senator Don Nickles, former Attorney General Ed Meese, Col. Oliver North of Iran-Contra fame, and Right-wing philanthropist Else Prince, mother of Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater the controversial private security firm.1

CNP members have also included not only the Rev. Sun Myung Moon Unification Church, definitely a bizarre formation whose founder openly states that he is superior to Christ. The CNP as well reportedly includes the Church of Scientology.2

CNP member and GOP strategist, Gary Bauer, links both. Bauer’s Family Research Council was a signatory of the Scientology Pledge to remove psychology from California schools and replace it with L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics. Bauer was also a speaker at Sun Myung Moon's Family Federation for World Peace and Unification Conference in 1996.

Religious researchers Paul and Phillip Collins describe the CNP as follows: ‘The CNP appears to be a creation of factions of the power elite designed to mobilize well-meaning Christians to unwittingly support elite initiatives. The CNP could also be considered a project in religious engineering that empties Christianity of its metaphysical substance and re-conceptualizes many of its principles and concepts according to the socially and politically expedient designs of the elite. These contentions are supported by the fact that many CNP members are also members of other organizations and/or criminal enterprises that are tied directly to the power elite.’3

In order to shape public debate over the course of national military and foreign as well as domestic policy, the US establishment had to create mass-based organizations to manipulate public opinion in ways contrary to the self-interest of the majority of the American people. The Committee on National Policy was formed to be a central part of this mass manipulation.

The Committee on National Policy is a vital link between multi-billion dollar defense contractors, Washington lobbyists like the convicted felon and Republican fundraiser, Jack Abramoff, and the Christian Right. It’s at the heart of a new axis between right-wing military politics, support for the Pentagon war agenda globally and the neo-conservative political control of much of US foreign and defense policy.

The CNP has been at the center of Karl Rove’s carefully-constructed Bush political machine. Tom Delay and dozens of top Bush Administration Republicans are or had been members of the CNP. Few details about the organization are leaked to the public. As secretive as the Bilderberg Group if not more so, the CNP releases no press statements, meets in secret and never reveals names of its members willingly.

The elite circles behind the Bush Presidency have crafted an extremely powerful political machine using the forces and energies of the Christian Right and millions of American Christians unaware of the darker manipulations. Is Sarah Palin a part of such darker manipulations?

Sarah Palin and Dominionism

Sarah Palin it appears now, was chosen very carefully as she comes out of the very fundamentalist evangelical circles that the CNP uses to mobilize and shape America’s political agenda.

Palin reportedly drew early attention from state GOP leadership when, during her first mayoral campaign, she ran on an anti-abortion platform. Normally, political parties do not get involved in Alaskan municipal elections because they are nonpartisan. But once word of her evangelical views made its way to Juneau, the state capitol, state Republicans put money behind her campaign. According to researcher, Charley James, "Once in office, Palin set out to build a machine that chewed up anyone who got in her way. The good, Godly Christian turns out to be anything but."

The religious background of Sarah Palin is not unrelated to her bid to take the nation’s second highest office. She herself has been extremely vague about that background. Given the details, it becomes clearer perhaps why.

Sarah Palin has spent more than two and a half decades of her life as a member of an Alaska church which is part of a fanatical Christian-named cult project that is sweeping across America. Palin comes out of the most radical stream of US Born-Again Evangelism known as ‘Joel’s Army,’ an offshoot of what is called Dominionism and sometimes also called the Latter Rain cult or Manifest Sons of God. The movement deliberately attempts to remain below the radar screen.

A Dominionist soldier in McCain’s Army

Sarah Palin is a product of an extreme fringe of the American Evangelical movement known variously as the Third Wave Movement, also known as the New Apostolic Reformation, or as Joel's Army, a part of what is called Dominionism. Until 2002 according to their own website, Palin was a member of Wasilla Assembly of God with Senior Pastor Ed Kalnins. Online video clips of Palin speaking from the pulpit of this church are revealing. Curiously, between the time this article was begun on September 9th and the 11th, the video was removed without explanation:

(http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20712.htm.).

As one researcher familiar with the history of the Third Wave Movement or Dominionism describes, ‘The Third Wave is a revival of the theology of the Latter Rain tent revivals of the 1950s and 1960s led by William Branham and others. It is based on the idea that in the end times there will be an outpouring of supernatural powers on a group of Christians that will take authority over the existing church and the world. The believing Christians of the world will be reorganized under the Fivefold Ministry and the church restructured under the authority of Prophets and Apostles and others anointed by God. The young generation will form ‘Joel’s Army’ to rise up and battle evil and retake the earth for God."€™4

The excesses of this movement were declared a heresy in 1949 by the General Council of the Assemblies of God, and again condemned through Resolution 16 in 2000.

Big Lies, faith based charity 

$500K to robertson, used to fund diamonds in congo?! 188

Marvin Olasky  http://www.nndb.com/people/325/000058151/

Newly disclosed Bush-era White House visitor records suggest leading conservative Christian leaders may have had a significant voice in President Bush’s administration, and many seem to have had the ear of the president himself. The White House produced these records in response to CREW’s request for the visitor records of nine individuals beginning in January 1, 2001.

Only one record indicates a visit after October 4, 2006, the date of CREW’s request. The data is summarized below.

  • For the period April 2001 through June 2006, Focus on the Family Founder and Chairman Emeritus James Dobson visited the White House 24 times; 10 of those visits were to President Bush.
  • Andrea Lafferty, Executive Director of the Traditional Values Coalition, made an astonishing 50 visits to the White House starting on February 1, 2001, and continuing through March 16, 2008. Six of those visits were to President Bush.
  • Wendy Wright, President of Concerned Women for America, made 43 visits to the White House between May 2001 and August 2006. Four of those visits were to President Bush.
  • Gary Bauer, President of American Values, made 10 visits to the White House, starting with a January 6, 2003 visit to Vice President Cheney and ending with a July 20, 2006 visit to President Bush.
  • The late Jerry Falwell, of Jerry Falwell Ministries, made eight visits to the White House between May 2001 and September 2004. Three of those visits were to President Bush.
  • Tony Perkins, President of Family Research Council, visited the White House 14 times between February 2001 and June 2006, including two visits to President Bush.
  • Louis Sheldon, Chairman of the Traditional Values Coalition, made 19 visits to the White House between March 2001 and September 2006, including two visits to President Bush.
  • The late Paul Weyrich, the Founder of Free Congress foundation, made 17 visits to the White House between May 2001 and July 2005, including six visits to President Bush and one to Karl Rove.
  • Donald Wildmon, Founder of the American Family Association, made three visits to the White House between July 2001 and March 2003, including one visit to President Bush.

https://www.pfaw.org/rww-in-focus/the-tea-party-and-religious-right-movements-frenemies-with-benefits

Howard & Roberta Ahmanson: The Financiers

David Barton: The Lesson Planner

Doug Coe: The Stealth Persuader

Chuck Colson: Reborn and Rehabilitated

Luis Cortès: Bringing Latinos To the Table

James Dobson: The Culture Warrior

Stuart Epperson: A High-Fidelity Messenger

Michael Gerson : The President's Spiritual Scribe

Billy & Franklin Graham: Father and Son In the Spirit

Ted Haggard: Opening Up the Umbrella Group

Bill Hybels: Pioneering Mass Appeal

T.D. Jakes: The Pentecostal Media Mogul

Diane Knippers: A Think Tank With Firepower

Tim & Beverly LaHaye: The Christian Power Couple

Richard Land: God's Lobbyist

Brian McLaren: Paradigm Shifter

Joyce Meyer: A Feminine Side Of Evangelism

Richard John Neuhaus: Bushism Made Catholic

Mark Noll: The Intellectual Exemplar

J.I. Packer: Theological Traffic Cop

Rick Santorum: The Point Man On Capitol Hill

Jay Sekulow: The Almighty's Attorney-at-Law

Stephen Strang: Keeper of "The Faith"

Rick Warren: America's New People's Pastor

Ralph Winter: A Global Mission

http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101050207/index.html

Then there is the conservative media machine, which operated at full power to get George W. Bush re-elected in 2004. Conservatives and their allies were able to magnify their message through a network of right-leaning TV and radio channels, including Rupert Murdoch's Fox News Channel, which provided Bush and Co. with a 24/7 campaign infomercial - for free. Here was a news network with more viewers than CNN and MSNBC combined, constantly repeating, often verbatim, the messages out of the White house and the Bush campaign.

More help for Bush came from the far-less known religious broadcasters. "Under the radar screen, the Christian Church community has created a formidable electronic media infrastructure and now plays a major role influencing public opinion," says Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy. The religious media are producing and distributing "news," commentary and cultural guides, and their reach and influence are undeniable.

Religious Right

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The Religious Right is a term used to describe a general coalition of organized conservative political activist groups that use religious (usually Christian) premises and rhetoric. This coalition's political power increased substantially in the United States during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, and it remains a significant force in US politics today.

The term is more commonly used by outsiders than members of this group. It also is used to denote political conservatism, rather than religious or theological conservatism (Many in the Religious Right are also religiously conservative, but the latter does not imply the former.)

Use of common enemy rhetoric to rally support for their cause is common among groups in the religious right, where the common enemies in question include secularists, liberals, homosexuals, and in past years, godless Communists. Similarly some liberal groups use the religious right itself as a common enemy to rally support for their causes.

David Sinclair, editor of the website "The American Religious Right" has described the Religious Right as "Christian political extremists in the US [which] are only a small minority of the population, but [that] are well-organized and wield political power far beyond their numbers." [1] Sinclair also claims that they run the Republican Party, but in recent years it has not always been clear who has been controlling whom. One author of this article saw a voter's guide distributed by the Christian Coalition in the mid-1990s that had more items mentioning Republican party planks than items that mentioned explicitly Christian issues. There are also significant portions of the Republican Party that do not share the religious agenda of the religious right, and the party as a whole has often put its own political power over the agenda of the religious right. For instance, while the religious right is firmly pro-life, pro-choice Republican candidates have been known to get significant support from the national Republican party, arguably more than pro-life Democrat candidates have gotten from the national Democratic party.

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Categories: Religion | Politics (U.S.) | Right wing | George W. Bush | Civil liberties (U.S.) | Needs review