Fundagelical Watch

Rest in Peace

2008-03-09T15:22:00.000-07:00

Bob passed away in his sleep the morning of March 1st. He was the love of my life and I mourn the days we no longer have and the work left undone. Although this blog was his, looking fundagelicalism square in the eye and standing up to it is something we have done jointly. I will continue to do so in some format.

Bob, I love you!

For, though you die, La Resistance lives on,

Laura

John Hagee Endorses McCain and William Donohue is Outraged

2008-02-29T06:47:00.001-08:00

Don't you just love it when bigots collide? On Wednesday, Pastor John Hagee of San Antonio's huge Cornerstone Church (and a daily staple on the Trinity Broadcasting Network) endorsed John McCain, and William Donohue, President of the Catholic League, is beside himself. Hagee has a long history of anti-Catholic remarks, like calling the Catholic Church "The Great Whore," an "apostate church," and "The anti-Christ."

Problem is, Donohue himself has a history of anti-Semitism. I'll never forget watching him on MSNBC in December, 2004, complaining that Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" wasn't going to get any Oscar recognition because "Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular....Hollywood likes anal sex."

Wow, can these two ever be reconciled? Yes, as a matter of fact, I think they can. Hagee has had a penchant over the years for injecting references to The Illuminati/Jewish Bankers Conspiracy into his sermons. I've seen him do it. In fact, the very first item I ever posted on this blog back on September 9, 2005, was shortly after watching Hagee on TBN explaining how the Seder is really a Christian ritual (although the Jews apparently don't know it) celebrating the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. (Pastor Hagee has always denied any charges of anti-Semitism because he is such a big supporter of Israel.)

I do really think these two should get together and resolve their differences. They seem to have a lot in common and could become good friends.

Did IRS Target Obama's Church Because of Peace Petition and Arrest of UCC President outside White House?

2008-02-28T05:20:00.001-08:00

You have to ask the question. Last October, UCC President Rev. John Thomas attempted to deliver an anti-war petition with 60,000 signatures to President Bush. He and a colleague were denied access, and, when they refused to leave, they were arrested for remaining in a "no protest" zone. Earlier this week the IRS notified the national UCC that they had begun an investigation into the church's tax exempt status because the UCC General Synod invited Senator Barack Obama, a UCC member, to speak at its convention in Hartford, Connecticut last June. Every precaution was taken at the General Synod Convention to obey the law. Attending pastors were told not to wear anything other than celebratory clothing and buttons that pertained to the 50th anniversary of the UCC. One Obama supporter managed to get into the upper lobby, far away from the hall, and was promptly ushered out. Delegates were told that Obama was there only to speak on how his faith inspired him in his work.

Is this investigation just a coincidence? Ask Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame.

IRS Investigates United Church of Christ for Obama Speech

2008-02-27T10:39:00.001-08:00

The Bush Internal Revenue Service has opened an investigation into the tax exempt status of the United Church of Christ for hosting a speech by Senator Barack Obama at its General Synod in Hartford, Connecticut last June. The story has already hit major news outlets, including The Washington Post, The Miami Herald, ABC News, and MSNBC.

This is yet another outrageous abuse of power by a government agency under the Bush/Cheney administration. As a press release issued today by Americans United for the Separation of Church and State makes clear, there is no merit to this investigation because there was no endorsement of the senator's presidential candidacy. Obama is simply a high ranking public official who happens to be a member of a UCC congregation in Chicago.

The IRS under the current admiinistration seems to be highly selective in which complaints about church involvement in politics it chooses to investigate. Even though I've searched and searched, I can find no evidence, for example, that the IRS has actually pursued an investigation into Columbus' World Harvest Church Pastor Rod Parsley's questionable activities during the 2004 Ohio election campaign. This despite a complaint filed over two years ago by 31 Ohio clergy. I posted a story on Parsley's reaction to the complaint on March 8, 2006. It doesn't seem as funny now as it did then.

I say that because, in the interest of full disclosure, my wife and I are also members of a UCC congregation, and, while our church has certainly never endorsed a candidate, we do, well within the law, take positions on public issues based on scriptural principles.

Meanwhile, Pastor Parsley is still at it. I invite you to see and hear him in all his glorious sophistry right here.

Meet Howard Ahmanson, Jr., the Money behind the Fundagelical Movement

2008-02-27T05:07:00.000-08:00

Just as you often hear on PBS, "Major funding for this program is provided by....," if you look at a plethora of extremist Christian Right organizations, you'll find that major funding was provided by Howard Ahmanson, Jr., the reclusive heir to the Home Savings and Loan fortune (now Washington Mutual). Those organizations include the Discovery Institute, the subject of Monday's post, the Institute for Religion and Democracy, a Washington think tank devoted to creating schisms within mainline churches and eventually rooting out the liberal apostates, the movement to limit gay rights and especially to prohibit gay marriage, and the Chalcedon Foundation, the intellectual home of the late Rousas John (R.J.) Rushdoony (1916-2001), founder of the Christian Reconstruction movement and for years Ahmanson's spiritual adviser.

The most complete summary of Ahmanson's activities, at least up to 2004, is an article on Salon.com by Max Blumenthal, for my money the most aggressive and thorough journalist covering the Christian Right.

Christian Reconstruction, a tiny but very influential movement at the fringe of Calvinism, is based on Rushdoony's 1973 c. 800-page tome, Institutes of Biblical Law (the title a play on John Calvin's Institutes of Christian Religion). His basic argument is that we should scrap the Constitution and put the country under Levitical law and from there conquer the world for Jesus so that He can return. In theological terms, this notion of having to Christianize the world and starting the thousand-year reign of Christ over the earth before the Second Coming is called Postmillennialism, as opposed to Premillennialism, where Christ returns at any moment now and, after 7 years of Tribulation, wins the Battle of Armageddon and puts everything right. I won't get into the arguments among Premillennialists about whether the Rapture of the True Church happens before, during, or after the Tribulation. This stuff can drive you crazy.

Most American fundagelicals claim to be Premillennialists, but their rhetoric often reveals that in many ways they are really Reconstructionist Postmillennialists. Every time you hear televangelists talk about "dominion" or winning souls for Jesus around the world so that Our Lord can come back, they betray the Reconstructionist point of view. Many observers of the Christian Right call this tendency "Dominionism," a watered down version of Rushdoony's Christian Reconstruction. I have to say that I have my doubts about how diluted Dominionism really is compared to Reconstructionism. It seems to me that Dominionist rhetoric is simply a tactic to make the real thing more palatable to Americans.

Gary North, Rushdoony's son-in-law, still runs an operation in Tyler, Texas called the Institute for Christian Economics, which, not surprisingly, puts out tracts arguing that scripture dictates a purely free market economy. It has attracted the support of a lot of fundagelicals who call themselves "libertarians." For how grateful real libertarians are to be endorsed by North's supporters, take a look at a 1998 article on reasononline. As the last paragraph demonstrates, there ain't much liberty in North's "Christian Libertarian" vision:

We must use the doctrine of religious liberty to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, no neutral civil government. Then they will get busy in constituting a Bible-based social, political and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God.

Can we say Regent University? Can we say Bush Justice Department?

Discovery Institute "Discovers" Inconsistent Use of Establishment Clause

2008-02-25T05:00:00.001-08:00

Yesterday morning I was up early savoring my first cup of coffee and looking forward to Sunday School and church when I turned on C-SPAN-2's BookTV and saw an event hosted by the Discovery Institute in Seattle. The Discovery Institute, as you may know, is dedicated to getting intelligent design into public school biology classrooms as an alternative to the "theory" of evolution. The speaker was Dr. John West, a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute, who was discussing his new book, Darwin Day in America.

I immediately googled Dr. West and found that he has impeccable scientific credentials to be discussing Darwinism. He holds a Ph.D. in Government from The Claremont Graduate School and has taught history and politics at various colleges and universities. I thought, good gosh, I have almost identical credentials, a Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago with a doctorate orals field in political sociology, and I have taught history and politics at various colleges and universities. Maybe I should come out of retirement, move to Seattle, and get a job writing books about Darwinism and discussing them on the Tv. Anyway, I was intrigued, so I watched Dr. West's presentation.

At first I was outraged at what he was telling me--things the "mainstream media" never report. Apparently our tax dollars are going to support liberal religion in schools but not conservative religion. That's just not right. Whether it's Southern Baptist theology or Unitarian-Universalist theology, it has no place in the public classroom. Either way, that's a clear violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

Then I began to calm down as I heard him recite his evidence. It seems there's an organization called The National Center for Science Education (NCSE) headed up by some woman named Eugenie Scott, a physical anthropologist who happens to be president of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists (the very name is suspect). Worse, Dr. Scott and the NCSE website, said Dr. West, are promoting the idea that religion and evolution are compatible, even going so far as to encourage science teachers to bring liberal clergy into the classroom and send students out into the community to interview liberal clergy who have no problem with evolution.

To top it all off, the National Center for Science Education receives money from the National Science Foundation. Our tax dollars are going to promote liberal religion in the public classroom. As Dr. West put it, "The ACLU would immediately be on the scene" if a teacher brought in a Southern Baptist preacher as a guest speaker. I spent about 2 hours on the NCSE website yesterday, and yes, they do receive NSF funding, but I saw no indication that they were encouraging science teachers to bring in liberal clergy or send students out to interview liberal clergy. Maybe it's there, but I missed it. I did see a list of churches that seem to think evolution and Christianity are compatible, including my own denomination. Maybe that by itself is a violation of the Establishment Clause. I don't know.

I do know (again from Dr. West) that Eugenie Scott is a Humanist, who a few years ago signed something called the Humanist Manifesto III along with such other unsavory characters as Stephen Jay Gould, Katha Pollitt (columnist for The Nation), Michael Shermer (Editor of Skeptic Magazine), Oliver Stone, and Kurt Vonnegut. It was also signed by 22 Nobel Laureates, including Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA.

Then Dr. West lambasted Judge John E. Jones III (a George W. Bush appointee) who ruled in 2005 that the Dover, Pennsylvania School District couldn't include intelligent design in its high school biology classes. Judge Jones' ruling, argued Dr. West, was logically inconsistent because it wouldn't allow conservative religionists to introduce intelligent design because that would violate the Establishment Clause, but he would allow the introduction of liberal religious views that supported evolution.

Now I read Judge Jones' entire decision in Kitzmiller, et al. v. Dover Area School District, et al. the day he issued it in December, 2005, and I read it again yesterday--all 139 pages in pdf format. Nowhere in those 139 pages does Judge Jones say anything about allowing liberal religion into the public classroom. Why should he have? It was never at issue in the trial. (You can google the case, download it and read the full decision, if you like.)

Well, then Dr. West's talk ended and BookTV moved on to something else. I was still looking forward to church because two weeks ago we celebrated Evolution Sunday by asking the Holy Spirit to work within us, praying as Jesus taught us to pray, singing "O Mighty God" (our version of the English Calivinist "How Great Thou Art") and marveling at how God actually did it.

From Rural Kansas to Holocaust Denial

2008-02-22T04:40:00.001-08:00

Sometimes when you delve into the background of an obscure local story, you find all sorts of international implications. Take the case of little St. Mary's Academy located in St. Mary's, Kansas (pop. 2198), about 25 miles northwest of Topeka.

On February 13, Sports Illustrated posted an article about how St. Mary's Academy had refused to let a woman referee a boy's basketball game. To their eternal credit, the man who had been scheduled to officiate the game with her and the guy they tried to get as a substitute refused to cooperate and left the gym. Said the latter gentleman, Fred Shockey, a 12-year veteran of the United States Army, "I have been led by some of the finest women this nation has to offer, and there was no way I was going to go along with that."

As it turns out, St. Mary's Academy is owned and operated by the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX), an organization founded by French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre (1905-1991), who was excommunicated in 1988 by Pope John Paul II (hardly a flaming liberal) for consecrating four priests as bishops without Vatican approval. The SSPX is the world's largest Traditionalist Catholic Society.

Lefebvre became famous for opposing Vatican II. OK, fair enough. That's a theological dispute within the Catholic Church. It's his political views which are truly disturbing. He supported collaboration with the Nazi Vichy regime in France during World War II and publicly praised Spanish dictators Francisco Franco of Spain and Chile's Augusto Pinochet. He also endorsed French right-wing extremist Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the neo-fascist Front National.

The Traditionalist Catholic Society is the movement to which actor Mel Gibson and his father, Hutton Gibson, belong. Hutton is an outspoken Holocaust denier. If you can control your gag reflex, check out some selected quotes from the senior Gibson on the Adelaide Institute website under the United States bold heading.

What was it the Kansas Populist orator Mary Lease said? "You farmers need to raise less corn and more hell?" Maybe St. Mary's Academy needs to raise less hell and more corn.

Barna Group Reports Distaste for Fundagelicals among Young Non-Christians and Christians Alike

2008-02-21T04:39:00.001-08:00

The Barna Group, a sort of Gallup organization for the Christian Right, published a study last fall that reported disillusionment about fundagelical churches among 16-29 year olds, both non-Christian and Christian. Only 16% of non-Christians have a favorable impression of Christianity in general and only 3% have a favorable impressions of evangelicals. Young non-Christians saw Christianity as judgmental (87%), hypocritical (85%), and too involved in politics (75%).

Even more striking were the opinions of churchgoers in the same age group. To quote the Barna study, "Half of young churchgoers said they perceive Christianity to be judgmental, hypocritical, and too political." Young Christians also tend to see evangelicals as expressing "excessive contempt and unloving attitudes toward gays and lesbians."

This feeds into a growing trend among observers of the Christian Right to see a liberalizing movement developing among fundagelicals. See, for example, David Kirkpatrick's influential piece in the New York Times Magazine last October.

I'm skeptical.

First, fundagelical groups have in the past used Barna Group studies to re-double their efforts to proselytize and to sell expensive materials. James Dobson made a mint off of an earlier Barna finding that only 9% of born again Christians had a "biblical world view." I commented on this two years ago, suggesting that the finding ought to prompt sane, honest people to rethink their whole enterprise.

Second, near as I can tell, all the "new" evangelicals have done is add some trendy issues like AIDS, poverty and the environment to their poltical agenda, and it remains unclear what they actually intend to do about them. When I hear that megachurch pastors like Rick Warren of Saddleback Community Church in California and Bill Hybels of Willow Creek Church in Illinois are openly welcoming gay people into their congregations as gay people and not as candidates for re-programming, when I hear them supporting a new war on poverty, when I hear them call for stricter regulations and severe penalties for polluting industries, when I hear them advocate something other than abstinence only education and support distributing condoms to people in Africa who are at high risk for contracting the HIV virus, then I'll rethink my position.

Until then, I'll just wait and see.

Perry Stone: U.S. Will Collapse like Rome, Sodom and Gomorrah Because We Have Judges

2008-02-20T04:46:00.001-08:00

Since my heart attack last fall, there are certain TV programs my wife and my cardiologist won't let me watch. All but one are on the Trinity Broadcasting Network and Fox News Channel. The one exception is "Tucker" on MSNBC, unless there's a guest host, which is happening more and more frequently. I think it has something to do with ratings.

Yesterday, however, while my wife was at work, I sneaked a peek at "God's News behind the News" on TBN. Joe Van Koevering hosts it out of St. Petersburg, Florida, and his guest yesterday was prophecy expert Perry Stone, who was hawking his new book, America's Unusual Prophecies Being Fulfilled: Discerning the Future Destiny of America.
You can view the entire program here under the heading "Airdate 02-19-08: America's Prophetic Future--Part 2."

Perry began with a long list of parallels between Rome and America, among them:

1. Rome began as a republic and so did we.
2. Then both Rome and America became a nation among nations.
3. Then both became empires.
4. Both then became the most powerful nation on earth.
5. Both occupied the Middle East.
6. Both Roman and American currencies became universal around the world.
7. Both became the leading voices in the world to whom everyone looked to make decisions.
8. Both had strong leaders.
9. Both had a Capitol Hill.
10. Both had a Senate.
11. Both had a flag.
12. Both peoples pledged allegiance to the flag.
13. Both built sports stadiums.
14. Both enjoyed watches races, whether chariots or NASCAR.
15. Both became obsessed with luxuries
16. Both allowed homosexuality.
17. Both allowed abortions.
18. As their empire grew, the Romans overtaxed the rich, and there are those who want us to do that.
19. Rome invented the welfare state, and now the United States has one, too.
20. Rome went into decline when it tried to control three areas of the world, and the United States now is in Afghanistan and Iraq and may soon invade Iran.

Well, that's enough. You get the idea. We're headed toward Rome's fate unless we turn back to Jesus.

After the commercial break, Stone segued into comparing the United States to Sodom and Gomorrah. He claimed to have seen a full copy of the Old Testament Book of Jasher, which was thought lost and is only mentioned a couple of times in the Bible. Apparently the problem with Sodom and Gomorrah was that they had judges who allowed homosexuality in the streets, "like some cities in America." When God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot fled to the city of Zohar, where they had neither judges nor homosexuality.

Case closed.

Then James Robison's program came on TBN. He was interviewing Bill O'Reilly about his book Culture Warrior. That was a double whammy, a comination of TBN and Fox News, so at that point I had enough sense to turn off the television.

Robertson Amused by His Producer's Cocaine Use

2008-02-19T04:43:00.001-08:00

Grinning ear to ear and snickering the whole time, Pat Robertson, on yesterday's 700 Club, described how his producer uses a form of cocaine to build up his muscle strength. If you think this is too bizarre even for Robertson, watch the video here.

I have to say that I've known a few coke heads in my time, and to me they all seemed weak, emaciated, paranoid and unable to put in a full day's work--hardly latter day Samsons capable of tearing a lion apart with their bare hands (Judges 14:6). But, then again, maybe I wasn't calculating in the Jesus factor. Maybe God reserves a special providence for those who do cocaine in the name of Jesus.

But wait a minute. Samson was born into the tribe of Dan (Judges 13), from which, according to many on the Christian Right, the Antichrist will come. We do know from the late Jerry Falwell that the Antichrist is definitely a Jew and is alive and walking the earth today.

Stay tuned.

Dobson Endorses Huckabee--Too Late

2008-02-18T05:22:00.001-08:00

Christian Right Grand Pooh Bah James Dobson of Focus in the Family waited until two days after Super Tuesday to endorse Southern Baptist preacher Mike Huckabee. By then it was too late to make any difference.

Why wait until it didn't matter? One explanation is that the other "family values" candidate, Mitt Romney, had "suspended" his campaign earlier in the day, leaving only Huckabee to represent the fundagelical wing of the Republican Party. My personal take is that Dobson has always been the purest of purists. I remember back in the summer of 2000 when George W. Bush was the inevitable GOP nominee and was floating several names as possible VP candidates, one of which was Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania, who had something of a pro-choice record. Dobson sent out mailers and went on the radio to say that he would refuse to support W if he selected Ridge or any other candidate with less than absolutely pro-life credentials. As it turned out, of course, Dick (shoot-em-up) Cheney led the search for a vice-president, and selected himself so that he could be our shadow president.

Dobson probably also sees Huckabee as less than pure. Unfortunately the former governor of Arkansas seems to have a soft spot in his heart for poor people, children of undocumented immigrants and the average working stiff. That in itself would be enough to give Dobson pause. Maybe Dobson thought the best way to punish Huckabee for his transgressions would be to wait until the very moment when his endorsement meant nothing.

Huckabee Equates Gay Marriage with Beastiality but Endorses Flag Pole Anal Sex

2008-01-18T06:45:00.005-08:00

Yesterday in South Carolina presidential candidate Mike Huckabee joined fellow fundagelicals former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum and Focus on the Family's James Dobson in expressing his concern that gay marriage will inevitably lead to sex with animals. Many journalists covering the current campaign (and Huckabee himself) keep saying that Huckabee is a new kind of evangelical, interested in a wider variety of issues. Maybe he is. Santorum was concerned only with dogs, and Dobson seemed to care especially about donkeys. Huckabee, however, seems determined to protect all of the animals.

Moreover, Huckabee expanded the definition of acceptable sex by endorsing sticking a flag pole up one's butt. I guess the fundagelical movement really is becoming more inclusive.

Huckabee Reveals His Dominionist Agenda

2008-01-15T05:32:00.004-08:00

It there were any doubts before, Mike Huckabee has now dispelled them. He is a Dominionist through and through. Last night in Warren, Michigan, he made it as clear as he possibly could. He advocates amending the United States Constitution to conform to his version of biblical standards. Now, they may not be my version of biblical standards, and they may not be your version of biblical standards, but, by all that is Holy, Mike Huckabee wants to reshape the Constitution to fit his interpretation of the Bible. He wants to subsume the Constitution and the government of our country under the repressive version of fundagelical Christianity.

Behind the affable, witty, charming facade is a Christian Fascist. You can say fascist is too strong a word, it's incendiary, and we shouldn't invoke images of Hitler and Mussolini in American political discourse. Well, fascism won't come to America with storm troopers in brown or black shirts. It will come in the form of fundagelicals attacking the foundations of constitutional government while waving the Bible in one hand and the American flag in the other. Check out Umberto Ecco's criteria for fascism and see if you don't see the parallels.

Three things scare me about what Huckabee said last night:

1. He said it on the eve of a Republican primary election in the state hit hardest by the economic dislocations of the last two decades.

2. He's as likable and charismatic a guy as you'll ever meet or see on television.

3. He's saying what millions of people are already thinking and want to hear someone with a chance at real political power to say out loud.

The polls are predicting that Huckabee will finish a distant third in Michigan, around 15%. Let's see if the fundagelicals surprise us again with their electoral power as they did in Iowa. Next up are two states where Huckabee should do well. The polls, which can be wrong, of course, as they were in New Hampshire (though not about Huckabee), right now show that the Dominionst former governor from Arkansas is well-positioned in both South Carolina and Florida.

Long Tradition of Freedom of Conscience in New Hampshire

2008-01-08T06:42:00.001-08:00

On the day that New Hampshire holds its presidential primary, and the fundagelical candidate is struggling to finish a distant third, while for the first time leading the national Gallup poll, it might be appropriate to honor New Hampshire's historic tradition of religious freedom. When the New Hampshire convention became the ninth to ratify our Constitution, they passed a resolution recommending the following amendment: "Congress shall make no laws touching (my emphasis) Religion or to infringe on the rights of Conscience." (Leonard Levy, Origins of the Bill of Rights, Yale University Press, 1999, p.82).

If the First Amendment had begun that way instead of "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," the Christian Right would today have no wiggle room to distort the original intent (allegedly so dear to right-wingers) into sophistry like: "The First Amendment only prohibits an official state church," or "The First Amendment protects religion from the state but not the state from religion."

New Hamshpire a Different Venue for Huckabee

2008-01-07T15:41:00.001-08:00

Mike Huckabee is experiencing a very different milieu in New Hampshire than the one in which he was able to carve out a decisive victory in Iowa last week. Not only are there fewer fundagelicals in New Hampshire, but they tend to be of a different sort than those who worship (and oragnize and vote) out of the megachuches of the mid-west, west and south. Their congregations are smaller, and, while certainly more conservative than mainline churches, most are unconnected to the national Christian Right organizations like Focus on the Family.

A recent Pew Research Center/AP poll shows that evangelicals are 38% of Iowa Republican voters, 53% of South Carolina's and only only 18% of New Hampshire's republican electorate. So, right now you hear Huckabee talking about 2nd amendment rights, low taxes and small government--issues dear to the hearts of New Hampshire Republicans.

A strong third place finish would be impressive for Huckabee. I would say anything over 15% would look good as he heads to South Carolina, but I wouldn't expect more than that. New England is just not fertile ground for fundagelicalism.

Huckabee First in Iowa in 2008, Robertson SECOND in 1988

2008-01-05T11:18:00.002-08:00

I probably missed it a time or two, but I've been watching the three cable news channels a lot the last two days. I have yet to hear a talking head on any network get it right. Pat Robertson finished SECOND in the 1988 Iowa Republican caucuses, not first. He finished with 25% behind Dole (37%) and ahead of Bush I (19%). There are certainly newsworthy parallels to draw between Robertson and Huckabee, but for heaven's sake, people, you're supposed to be professionals. Look it up and get it right.

Qoute of the Day

2008-01-05T06:15:00.001-08:00

"In my experience, religious zeal and politics don't mix. Look at Belfast, Beirut and Bosnia if you want proof."

From Warren Rudman, Combat: Twelve Years in the U.S. Senate (1996). Rudman was a very conservative Republican senator from New Hampshire until his 1992 retirement after two terms.

The Prospect of Politics as Religion

2008-01-04T11:50:00.000-08:00

Last night, in all the excitement of Iowa caucus results, I said that the possibility of a Huckabee-Obama match-up in the fall would be like an amusement park thrill ride. Today I'm not so sure. In fact, the prospect has forced me back into stewing over an issue I have spent 20 years never resolving.

What is the proper relationship between religion and politics?

Now, I am still skeptical that Huckabee can win the Republican nomination. The Republican establishment fears and detests his encroachment on their hegemony, and he's got to survive Super Tuesday on February 5 when 20 states hold their Republican primaries, including California, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey and New York. A tall order for someone who right now has little money and almost no organization other than church-related volunteers.

But what if it happens? Huckabee's nominated and so is Obama. Huckabee really is a preacher, and Obama often sounds like one. In fact, Obama has made a point of lecturing Democrats that they need to bring religious faith into their politics, and he has no qualms about talking about his own beliefs. See, for example his keynote address to a Sojourners conference in June, 2006. A Southern Baptist preacher battling it out with a scripture-quoting United Church of Christ liberal may be the kind of thing you want plenty of popcorn and Milk Duds for, but it also raises some of my worst fears and deepest conflicts.

Allow me to indulge in an little personal history here. Nearly 20 years ago, at a very desperate time in my life, I was seeking spiritual guidance and joined the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. What attracted me initially to Lutheranism was Luther's theology of grace, but I also quickly came to cherish his Two Kingdoms doctrine, namely, that the proper role of the church was to preach the Gospel and administer the sacraments, and every other sphere of human life was secular and the province of the state.

Eighteen years ago I began teaching history and politics at a Missouri Synod college and remained on the faculty there until 2005 when I retired, let's say, by mutual agreement. I conscientiously taught Luther's Two Kingdoms in my History of Political Theory class, although I felt it necessary to point out that Luther himself violated his own doctrine on a number of occasions, most famously with his 1525 pamphlet calling for the extermination of the rebellious German peasants, and when he not very judiciously advised Philip of Hesse to go ahead and commit bigamy for political reasons.

My problem with all of this was that almost all my colleagues and students took their right-wing politics seriously, so seriously, in fact, that over the sixteen years I was there they increasingly included the most extreme brand of Christian Right ideology into their doctrine and more and more de-emphasized Luther's Two Kingdoms. By the end, being a political liberal was a deal-breaker almost as serious (maybe as serious) as denying the Trinity. The theologians on the faculty quit teaching the Two Kingdoms in doctrine classes. I will never forget the last time I taught History of Political Theory in 2004, and when we got to Luther, a very smart class just didn't seem to get it. They were all juniors and seniors who had already taken the required Lutheran doctrine courses, but when I asked them how many had even heard of the Two Kingdoms doctrine before my assigned reading, only one guy raised his hand--and he wasn't a Lutheran. It took me a few months, but I realized that I didn't belong there any more.

To be honest, strictly separating politics and religion as a matter of doctrine provided me with a convenient cover for a lot of years. To this day, I can't fully separate out my core belief from convenience. Nevertheless, I still today get very nervous when the two are combined, whether on the right or the left.

Let me acknowledge something from the start. Mixing religion and politics on an individual level is inevitable. We all form our political opinions and vote according to our values, and often those values are religious. We wouldn't want to prevent that even if we could. I've voted my religious convictions many times, although there may have been perfectly good secular reasons as well.

That is, however, very different from conducting, in the public arena, political debates and making policy decisions based on religious convictions. It's very dangerous territory, and here are a few reasons why.

1. "God/Jesus/Allah says" is usually a conversation stopper, not a conversation starter. To quote a bumper sticker popular in fundagelical church parking lots, "God said it. That settles it."

2. Strange things happen when policy debates turn into theological debates. Do we really want discussions of U.S. policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict revolving around which politician has the correct interpretation of the Bible? I have a sneaking suspicion that this has already gone on in the current Bush administration's mostly hands-off approach.

3. If policy debates become theological debates, then there's a very real way that the theocrats have already won. That's what they want--for all policy considerations to hinge on right religion. It they can make all issues about theological correctness, then they're always fighting on their home turf.

4. At least for now, there are a lot more right-wing evangelicals than liberal evangelicals. There are some hints that is beginning to change, and Obama may be able to tap into the evangelical vote, but I'll wager that at best only one-third of evangelicals will ever vote liberal in the next generation.

5. Our public discourse is already nasty enough, in some large part because of fundagelical input, but it can get a lot nastier if we play the fundagelical game and make our political debates about what God wants. For a hint of what could befall our polity, take a look at what happened in the little community of Dover, Pennsylvania during the controversy over teaching intelligent design in biology classes. It's described well in Edward Hume's book Monkey Girl.

6. Do we really want to choose our political leaders based on who seems to be more with Jesus? I hope not. I don't think that someone who thinks he/she knows the current state of God's mind should be running anything, let alone the country. We've had seven years of that.

There are, after all, perfectly effective and legitimate secular frameworks within which to make wise political choices. I personally prefer the late John Rawls' approach in his A Theory of Justice (1971) in which he develops the concept of justice as fairness (and further develops it in his 1993 Political Liberalism).

Engaged in a debate with a fundagelical right-winger, I'd much rather say "that's not fair, and here's why" than say "that's not what Jesus was about" or "I think you're misinterpreting what Jesus meant." Here's the problem. Much of my passion for Rawls' entirely secular political philosophy is derived from what Jesus said.

It's Obama!

2008-01-03T18:27:00.000-08:00

MSNBC and CNN just projected Obama the winner in Iowa. It's far too early to project who will face whom in November, but just imagine a black United Church of Christ urban liberal versus a Southern Baptist preacher from rural Arkansas. That's a thrill ride no amusement park could possibly create.

MSNBC Declares Huckabee the Winner

2008-01-03T18:12:00.000-08:00

MSNBC has now joined CNN in projecting Huckabee the winner in Iowa, and both are reporting that 60% of those Republicans who showed up to caucus were evangelicals. At this time, it looks like the Arkansas preacher will win by a wider margin that any poll predicted. New Hampshire will be very different, but nationwide this, I think, demonstrates the organizational power of the fundagelical churches.

My big question now is how long will Great Pooh Bah James Dobson remain on the fence.

Not Paranoid

2008-01-03T18:00:00.000-08:00

OK, I'm not paranoid. Five minutes ago CNN projected that Huckabee will win the Iowa caucuses. Them Iowa pastors and their faithful followers came through.

Was Huckabee Confused about Appearing on Leno?

2008-01-03T09:29:00.002-08:00

Yesterday Mike Huckabee flew from Iowa to Los Angeles to appear on Jay Leno's first new show since the writers' strike began. Before getting on the plane he told reporters that he supported the writers' strike but that since Leno had settled with the union, he wouldn't have to cross a picket line. In fact, of course, most of the country knows it was Letterman, not Leno, who has reached an agreement. When informed of that by a reporter, Huckabee told him he was wrong, then said "Oh" and promptly changed the subject.

There are two ways to read this. It was either yet another gaffe revealing that neither Huckabee nor political genius Ed Rollins know what is going on in the world, or, perhaps, it was a deliberate strategic move to attract Republican support, because neither country clubbers nor fundagelicals are big union fans.

My problem with the whole incident is that either Huckabee and his campaign manager didn't know what they were doing, or Huckabee was lying when he said he thought he wouldn't have to cross a picket line.

I did, however, see the show last night, and Huckabee was his usual charming and witty self. His performance certainly could boost his popularity in Iowa and beyond. That makes me inclined to adopt the second explanation. But who knows?

How Paranoid Am I, Really?

2008-01-03T08:25:00.004-08:00

One of the things I'll learn tonight is where I am on the paranoid scale with my Huckabee obsession. I readily admit that after sixteen years as somewhat of a rebellious outsider within the fundagelical community, I tend to score fairly high. If Huckabee even just squeaks out a win, then he's still viable and at least some of my paranoia is justified. If Romney beats him decisively, then I'll have to re-evaluate.

By the way, I received a very perceptive comment in response to yesterday's Huckabee rant. The gentleman's point was that there is a way Huckabee is better than most of the rest of the Republican field because he is not beholden to the other two wings of the Republican Party, the corporatists and the neocons. There's a reason he has little money and, therefore, almost no professional organization. His only chance is fundagelical zeal.

In fact, the Republican establishment is foaming at the mouth over Huckabee's rise to prominence. Witness what George Will, Robert Novak and The Club for Growth have said about him. They're scared that the fundagelicals might be getting tired of being the reliable Republican foot soldiers on election day and then getting little of what they want while the corporate types and neocons prosper. That was Chris Hedges' point in the piece I recommended yesterday.

If you haven't read Hedges' American Fascists (Free Press, 2006), it's well worth your time. What frightens Hedges (and me) is that the classic formula for fascism is corporatism, a militaristic foreign policy, combined with a mass movement organized around deep discontents amidst a time of economic crisis.

What the reader's comment got me to wondering was, if Huckabee is successful, will he turn out to be a genuine populist or will he form the fatal alliances with the corporate interests and the military-industrial complex in order to win and govern. By fatal, like Hedges, I mean fatal to American democracy.

Of course, by 8 p.m. tonight, this may all be academic, i.e., irrelevant.

Finally, a Decision in Iowa

2008-01-03T07:16:00.001-08:00

At 6:30 p.m. central time tonight, Iowa voters will begin caucusing. It's incredibly close on both sides. I saw Tim Russert on "NBC Nightly News" last evening say that he had talked off-the-record yesterday with the top people behind the scenes in all the major campaigns and asked them who was going to win. Every single response was "We don't have a clue." They, of course, know what their own internal polls say and know what we know from the published polls, which, put together, leave us saying as well, "We don't have a clue."

Historically the most accurate Iowa polling has come from the Des Moines Register. Their latest numbers show Huckabee leading Romney 32% to 26% and Obama leading Clinton 32% to 25% with Edwards at 24% (margin of error +/- 3.5%).

The MSNBC/McClatchy poll shows the races much closer. They have Romney at 27% and Huckabee at 23% among Republican caucusers and among Democrats Edwards at 24%, Clinton at 23% and Obama at 22% (5%+/- margin of error).

Yesterday's Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby poll also provides no basis for a prediction. Huckabee leads Romney 28% to 26%, and Clinton and Obama are tied at 28% with Edwards close behind at 26% (3.3% +/- margin of error).

Fortunately, living on the west coast, I won't have to stay up as late as most of the political junkies around the country to learn the results.

I'm Not the Only One Who's Scared

2008-01-02T16:26:00.001-08:00

By the way, Chris Hedges is scared, too. I recommend you read why.

What to Think about Huckabee?

2008-01-02T10:30:00.000-08:00

I don't know what to think about Mike Huckabee and his meteoric rise in the polls over the last several weeks. Thirty-six hours before we'll probably know the Iowa caucus results, I don't know whether to be frightened, amused or perplexed. I've been following the MSNBC wall-to-wall coverage of Iowa today, and they seem to have chosen to be perplexed.

There are some good reasons to be frightened if Huckabee wins tomorrow night and picks up steam. It probably won't give him much of a boost in New Hampshire next Tuesday, but then there's South Carolina, Florida and, well, the rest of the south. It's still difficult for me to believe that he can survive states like New York, California and New Jersey, but who knows. There are fundagelicals everywhere, and a lot of them seem to have found their very white knight in Huckabee.

You have to admit that he comes across with a lot of appeal. Even I caught myself being moved by his red sweater-white cross Christmas commercial. That was a fine piece of work. Even Bill Clinton said of him recently that he's the only Republican candidate who can give a speech and tell a joke. High praise indeed from the master himself. Well, maybe not, given the rest of the field.

Here are a few things that scare me about Huckabee. I caught him on "Meet the Press" Sunday, and Russert confronted him about saying in 1998 that "we" (meaning the fundagelicals) need to take America back for Christ. That's code for dominionism (the political expression of Reconstructionist Theology), i.e., we ought to get to rule over the rest of you, primarily by Old Testament law. Huckabee answered by saying that it was no big deal because, after all, he was talking to a group of Southern Baptists. That gave me small comfort, like excusing David Duke because, after all, he was addressing a Klan rally. In 1998, at the Southern Baptist convention, Huckabee was also one of 131 signatories to the proclamation that wives should submit to their husbands. As I recall, that was one of the big reasons Jimmy Carter resigned from the SBC.

Then there are the folks who have endorsed Huckabee, which include Jerry Falwell, Jr., in a move that might cause some tax exempt problems at Liberty University. But Falwell the Younger doesn't scare me half as much as the other endorsements. They constitute the fringe of the fringe:

Don Wildmon of the American Family Association

Rick Scarborough of Vision America

Tim and Beverly LaHaye

Kenneth Copeland (now under Senate investigation for some financial improprieties, an investigation led by Iowa Republican Senator Chuck Grassley)

Michael Farris, the founding father of the Christian home school movement

Janet Folger, a radio show host who has a book out claiming America will soon criminalize Christianity

and,
let's not forget Chuck Norris

By the way, when Huckabee spoke at Liberty University, someone asked him to explain his recent success, and he seemed to imply that God wanted him to be president. I remember another southern governor saying that about six years ago after being elected, and we all know how that turned out. Either W wasn't hearing clearly that day or God has a very sadistic sense of humor. I do think God has a great sense of humor, but certainly not a sadistic one.

Huckabee also has a lot of Iowa pastors who have met with each other and endorsed him, making clear, of course, that they speak only for themselves and not for their churches. But we should know (and I certainly do after sixteen years in a fundagelical church and church-related university) what that means back at the congregatation level. The word is passed, maybe legally, but certainly unmistakably--TURN OUT ON JANUARY 3 AND CAUCUS FOR HUCKABEE!

Then there are his gaffes, most of which would be funny if you don't consider the possibility he might actually get elected president. They're mostly in the area of foreign policy. He claimed after the Bhutto assassination that, next to Mexicans, Pakistanis are the largest group sneaking into the country across the southern border. (Not true, of course.) Thirty hours after the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran was released, saying that the Iranians had given up a nuclear weapons program in 2003, a reporter asked Huckabee about it and he said he hadn't heard of it. He seriously needs someone on his staff to make him read at least one newspaper every morning.

Huckabee then tried to compensate for his lack of foreign policy experience by saying that John Bolton was one of his advisers. When reached for comment, Bolton said he and Huckabee had exchanged a few e-mails but he wasn't working for any of the candidates.

To prevent further embarrasments, Huckabee has now hired a real pro to run his campaign--Ed Rollins. The last time Ed Rollins successfully managed a major campaign was when he helped George Nethercutt unseat Speaker of the House Tom Foley (D, Wash.) in 1994 and before that Christie Todd Whitman in New Jersey in 1993. Lately he mostly has shown up on Lou Dobbs' show, pontificates as if he knows the inside poop, collects his two grand (the going rate my sources tell me), and then goes home. That may not have been the best of hiring decisions.

As I say, some of this would be really hilarious, if it weren't also scary. We'll begin to see which it is tomorrow night.

Come to think of it, David Shuster was among several reporters on Chris Matthews' New Year's Eve "Hardball." At the end of the show Matthews pressed everyone to predict who would win it all. Shuster is one of the very best political reporters in the business. He's covered Huckabee since he was Lieutenant Governor of Arkansas. Most of Matthews' guests hedged the question. Shuster took it on. He said that in all his years of reporting on politics he's never seen a better politician than Mike Huckabee. He risked a prediction. Hillary will win the Democratic nomination and Huckabee will win the Republican nomination. Huckabee will win in November.

I'm scared.

Hello Again

2008-01-01T11:16:00.000-08:00

I'm back after a hiatus of several weeks of medical treatments and some recuperation during the holidays. I won't burden you with all the gory details, but they involved my heart, prostate and bladder all simultaneously and all interrelated. Basically it took them a long time to stop bleeding that was depriving my heart of so much oxygen that I came within a hair's breadth of another heart attack like the one I barely survived earlier this fall. I'm fine now, or as fine as you can be after two heart attacks (I'm still trailing Cheney by two), the diagnosis that the prostate cancer had come back was a false alarm, and they finally stopped the bladder bleeding that resulted from radiation treatment four years ago.

I'm now ready to re-enter the fray, and what a week to do so. A Southern Baptist preacher and a black United Church of Christ guy may win the Iowa caucuses Thursday night, and a Mormon in poised to win New Hampshire next Tuesday.

In the interest of full disclosure, I am an worshiping member of the United Church of Christ. That means that the fundagelicals of the world think that neither Obama, nor I, nor Romney, for that matter, is a Christian, but that's OK. They're entitled to their bigotry. They're just not entitled to use our government to enforce it.

Huckabee on "Hardball"

2007-11-20T14:38:00.000-08:00

Just saw Chris Matthews interview Mike Huckabee. Damn, he looked good. He came across really well--calm, reasonable, sane, refreshing, and honest. He acknowledged in response to a Matthews question that he was both a "fundamentalist" conservative and a "fundamentalist" religiously, then quickly added that religious conservatives needed to add "hunger, poverty, the environment as well as education and health care reform" to the conservative fundamentalist agenda. Huh? Is he saying he's a Rick Warren kind of fundamentalist?

Matthews did his trademark slurping number and compared Huckabee to Martin Luther as a reformer, a "'Here I stand' kind of guy." This against the backdrop of the breaking story that former White House press secretary Scott McClellan's book, which comes out next April, says that the president, his chief of staff, the vice-president, his chief of staff (now convicted but commuted), and Karl Rove were involved all along in the attempt to discredit Joe Wilson by outing his wife as a covert CIA agent and sent McClellan out to lie about it every day.

Huckabee really liked the Martin Luther comparison. I just hope he doesn't harbor the same views Luther held about uppity peasants and Jews.

Chuck Norris a Veteran of Fundagelical Endorsements

2007-11-20T08:48:00.000-08:00

Chuck Norris' endorsement of Mike Huckabee is not his first foray into fundagelical politics. He and his wife Gena are the prime spokespersons for an outfit called The National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools (NCBCPS). Take a look at two of their promotional spots on the NCBCPS website.

NCBCPS, like most things in the fundagelical universe, is not, of course, what it seems to be at first glance. The story for general public consumption is that it just wants students to learn about the Bible as literature, history and an essential part of our cultural heritage. It's really a stealth movement to put the most extreme brand of fundagelicalism into public school classrooms. The organization boasts enormous success, claiming, for example, that 423 school districts have adopted their curriculum in 37 states and that 95% off all school boards they have approached have voted to implement it. They currently say on their website that over 221,000 students have already taken the course.

People for the American Way has been tracking these folks for some time, however, and have noted that in their public pronouncements they have played very loosely with their numbers, avoiding publication of a full list of school districts using their program but claiming that number has grown from 45 to the current 423. So no one really knows how successful they are. People for the American Way notes other discrepancies and some of the fundagelical powerhouses who are really behind the movement, including D. James Kennedy (now deceased), Pat Robertson, Howard Phillips and David Barton (I'll get around to Barton in a later post).

The Texas Freedom Network (TFN) has done the best job of researching the NCBCPS agenda and has a detailed analysis of their curriculum (which is very difficult to come by) available on line. Glance only at the Executive Summary, if you wish, but I recommend at least scanning the full report (in pdf format). You should especially check out pp. 18-19 where they cite Dr. Carl Baugh (no scientific doctorate, just one in education and another in theology) and plug his Creation Evidence Museum in Glen Rose, Texas. Dr. Baugh has a weekly program on the Trinity Broadcasting Network and has the "evidence" that the earth is just 6,000 years old and that humans and dinosaurs co-existed.

A few years ago, The Daily Show sent Mo Rocca down to Glen Rose to interview Dr. Baugh at his Creation Evidence Museum. Dr. Baugh seemed delighted to be on the Tv and proudly showed off his "museum" which turned out to be housed (so help me) in a double-wide trailer. The interview used to be up on YouTube, but Viacom made them take it down, and not even a transcript is available anywhere, including the official Daily Show website. But take my word for it, that segment was a thousand hoots.

I assume Dr. Baugh is still operating out of his double-wide since his website currently states that "contributions toward our building of a permanent museum facility are greatly needed and appreciated."

Huckabee Trying to Dispel Nice Guy Image

2007-11-19T04:39:00.004-08:00

I'm having a lot of second thoughts about what I said recently about Mike Huckabee ("Meanness Counts," October 25 post). My take then was that Huckabee came across as just too nice a guy to attract much fundagelical support. I may have been right, but Huckabee is doing all he can to undo that image. It now looks as if he has a real chance in Iowa, and he's doing all he can to look as mean and tough as Guiliani. Now he has the personal endorsement of Don Wildmon, Homophobe-In-Chief at the American Family Association. His first Iowa TV ad, featured on his website, employs one of America's most famous tough guys, Chuck Norris.

Not only that, he's inching toward a campaign theme which basically says, "I'm the only ordained minister in the entire field of candidates, and that makes me best suited to fight a religious war (meaning the war against 'Islamo-Fascism,' including Iraq." I say inching in that direction because he first brought it up in an interview with the Associated Press in February of this year. At that time he said the war was about an "ill-interpreted theology," characterizing Muslim terrorism as a perversion of Islam. In October, on the respectable PBS program "Religion and Ethics Newsweekly," he again talked about our being in a "theological war," but also made it very clear that he had been real nice and welcoming to Muslim leaders while he was governor of Arkansas.

Then, lo and behold, after Pat Robertson endorsed Guiliani, he does an interview with David Brody of Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network, and says that we are in a theocratic war (emphasis mine) and that "I'm the only guy on that stage with a theology degree."

Now, what's Huckabee really saying here? "Theological" has become "theocratic," and his Baptist ordination renders him best qualified to fight a theocratic war.

That sounds an awful lot like "It takes one to know one."

Quote of the Day

2007-11-18T06:52:00.000-08:00

"A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion."--Aristotle

Wildmon Endorses Huckabee

2007-11-09T05:41:00.005-08:00

Well, I may have been wrong about Huckabee getting ignored by fundagelicals because he isn't mean enough. Don Wildmon of the American Family Association, one of the premiere homophobic operations out there, has now endorsed him. Wildmon is no rock star on the Christian Right like Robertson or Dobson, but he does own 200 radio stations and claims 3 million online supporters. He made it clear that he was speaking only for himself and not the AFA or any other group with which he's associated. For a sampling of the wit and wisdom of Wildmon and the AFA check out the Media Matters archives.

On the other hand, Paul Weyrich, one of the founders of the modern Religious Right, endorsed Romney. He dismissed Huckabee as someone who "Every time you turn around, he's taking the wrong stand on a different issue." Weyrich wasn't specific, and I have no idea what he's talking about.

Let's see how many more of the usual suspects support Huckabee. I suspect not many.

Puzzled over Robertson's Endorsement of Giuliani?

2007-11-08T10:19:00.000-08:00

For those of you scratching your heads over Pat Robertson's endorsement of Rudy Giuliani yesterday, I simply refer you to my Thursday, October 25 post below. Note especially the last three paragraphs. As I said, meanness counts.

More Skepticism about the Alleged Demise of the Religious Right

2007-11-01T11:05:00.000-07:00

Jeff Sharlet has written an excellent piece on the New York Times sounding the death knell for the Fundagelical Right. He focuses on other things than I did in Monday's post and reinforces our need to be skeptical of MSM conventional wisdom.

The Religious Right Isn't Going Away

2007-10-29T09:31:00.000-07:00

Sorry, Frank Rich and David Kirkpatrick, the Fundagelical Right, as I prefer to call it, is here to stay, maybe not in it's Bush era status, but probably in a far nastier form. You see, there's a history of what happens when politicized fundagelicals lose to liberals, moderates and sensible conservatives. They are not good losers. They get ugly, really ugly, show their true colors and continue to poison American political culture.

On the surface, there's a glaring contradiction between the books published last year by two journalists (Michelle Goldberg's Kingdom Coming and Chris Hedges' American Fascism) versus David Kirkpatrick's "The Evangelical Crackup" and Frank Rich's "Rudy, the Values Slayer," both published in Sunday's New York Times. Both Goldberg and Hedges see the specter of fascism in the Christian Right and warn that in a national crisis, we could be faced with a real totalitarian threat. Both cite Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism and Fritz Stern's The politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the German Ideology (both classic studies of fascism) in ways that send chills up your spine when you look at today's Fundagelical Right.

Kirkpatrick and Rich, on the other hand, see American evangelicals morphing into something far less threatening while the old guard Religious Right leaders like Robertson, Falwell, Dobson, Perkins and Kennedy are either dead, ready to retire, or no longer the great power brokers they once were. The hard-liners are now out of touch with their own constituency, which is disillusioned with the Iraq war and with the Bush presidency in general. Now evangelicals are flocking to more inclusive leaders like Rick Warren and Bill Hybels, who are still against abortion and anti-gay, but who also talk about the need to address other issues like poverty, AIDS and global warming. (Clearly the new "inclusiveness" refers to the number of policy areas it's OK to talk about and not who is OK since the homophobia continues unabated.)

I suspect Goldberg, Hedges, Kirkpatrick and Rich are all correct. The apparent contradiction is a superficial one. While the declining influence of the Fundagelical Right within the Republican Party may gladden hearts on both sides of the political spectrum, in the long run the danger is still going to be there.

Let's take a quick tour of twentieth-century fundagelical history.

Remember that embarassing 1925 Scopes Trial that supposedly sent fundagelicals back to their churches and out of politics until Jerry Falwell came along in 1979? Well, it's a myth. First of all, fundamentalist Protestants as fundamentalist Protestants had never been an organized pressure group in American politics. There was nothing to retreat from. They may have cheered William Jennings Bryan, and they may have been bitterly disappointed with the results of the Scopes Trial, but there was no organization to fall apart and no political party with a clear stand on evolution to desert.

What did happen after 1925 was that the most extremist elements of fundamentalism gained unprecedented influence among American Protestants.

The leader of this movement to the fringe was Gerald B. Winrod, a Wichita-based preacher, publisher and politician. Sometimes called the Protestant Father Coughlin , Winrod attracted hundreds of thousands if not millions of followers in the 1930's with his tent revivals, his radio programs and his monthly magazine The Defender, which had a circulation of over 110,000 by 1938.

I'm currently writing a book on Winrod's career, and his exploits are instructive about what happens when the Fundagelical Right loses in the arena of electoral politics.

You see, Winrod didn't slink away to save individual souls privately in a Wichita tabernacle after the Scopes Trial. Instead he founded the Christian Right in America. In 1925 he started an organization called Defenders of the Christian Faith, and the next year he began publishing The Defender. Already a star on the revival circuit from California to New England, Winrod quickly became active in politics nationwide. He lobbied for anti-evolution bills not just in Kansas but also in Minnesota, California and several other states. In all cases the legislation went down to defeat. He backed Herbert Hoover in 1928 because Al Smith was a Catholic, but then decided that Hoover was soft on prohibition, so he actively campaigned for Prohibition Party presidential candidate, Georgia congressman W.D. Upshaw, in 1932. Winrod actually believed that he had enough influence in fundamentalist circles in New York and Pennsylvania that he could help Upshaw win those states and throw the election into the House of Representatives, where, he thought, Upshaw had a real chance.

Needless to say, Winrod was bitterly disappointed with the 1932 election results, and what he did with that disappointment is what is instructive about the Fundagelical Right when it loses. Starting with the 1933 issue of The Defender, Winrod blamed everything political that did not go his way on an international Jewish conspiracy operating through the secret society of the Illuminati. He published and promoted The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and English writer Nesta Webster's books on the Jewish Illuminati conspiracy. Naturally, when Winrod finished a distant third in the 1938 Kansas Republican senatorial primary, he blamed the Jews, and he did the same when the United States entered World War II after Pearl Harbor.

What is remarkable is that throughout the 1930's, as Winrod became more and more obsessed with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, he became more and more popular as a speaker at churches and revival meetings all over the country. For a period of time, only Father Coughlin and Charles Fuller had larger national radio audiences. It is safe to say that in many ways Winrod was the most influential leader within American fundamentalism from 1933 until WWII. Twice a year he was the biggest draw at Aimee Semple McPherson's Angelus Temple in L.A.

Winrod's influence began to wane in July, 1942, when he was named the lead defendant in the only sedition trial conducted by the United States government during WWII. Since 1934 Winrod had been a staunch advocate of Hitler's policies and had been constantly in touch with key German Nazi leaders. The sedition trial took place in federal district court in Washington, dragged on for seven months (Winrod was one of 30 defendants) and ended abruptly in a mistrial when the presiding judge died suddenly in November, 1944, an event Winrod, of course, attributed to Divine Providence. The case was never retried.

After the sedition trial, Winrod became increasingly marginal within the broader fundagelical world, although he continued pushing his conspiratorial anti-Semitism right up to his death in November, 1957. He died of an untreated case of the flu that had developed into pneumonia because he refused to see an M.D. since he believed the American Medical Association was controlled by Jews who wanted to destroy him.

Interestingly enough, though, his most committed fundagelical followers did not desert him while he was dealing with the sedition charges. His ledger books from 1941 through early 1946 reveal steady and substantial growth in his publishing business. Between 1941 and 1946 advertising revenue remained constant and contributions more than doubled. Total revenue for those years rose 47%. The faithful apparently kept sending in their hard-earned money.

I wish that were the end of the story, but of course it's not. During the 1950's and 1960's the Reverends Billy James Hargis and Carl McIntire rallied politicized fundagelical movements around many of the same conspiratorial theories Winrod had made popular in that community. Starting in 1958, many were promoted by the John Birch Society. I remember seeing copies of The Protocols and pamphlets arguing (as had Winrod) that Franklin Roosevelt was Jewish for sale in a Birch Society American Opinion Bookstore as late as 1973.

And the story doesn't stop there. After failing in his bid to become the Republican nominee for president in 1988, Pat Robertson wrote a book in which he explains his defeat (and all the country's problems) by invoking the same Jewish Illuminati myth popularized a half century earlier by Winrod. There are passages in Robertson's The New World Order (1991) that are not very well disguised paraphrases of Winrod's writings, although Winrod is never actually cited. Robertson does, however, cite Nesta Webster and Eustace Mullins, both notorious anti-Semites. Gary Kah, an author popular among American fundagelicals and a frequent guest on Trinity Broadcasting shows, did cite Winrod's Adam Weishaupt: Human Devil in his 1991 En Route to Global Occupation. (Weishaupt founded the Illuminati in 1776).

So, here we are, back in our own times. If Dobson, Perkins, Robertson, et al. lose their political influence over the next four to eight years, what do you think they will do? Sing "Kumbaya" with Rick Warren? Probably not.

Meanness Counts

2007-10-25T08:51:00.000-07:00

It's difficult to assess what the Family Research Council's "Values Voters Summit" last weekend means for the Fundagelical Right in the 2008 presidential election. The speakers who paraded across the stage in front of approximately 2000 attendees were certainly a who's who of the Hard Right, fundagelical or not. All the Republican presidential candidates appeared. I watched most of it on C-SPAN, despite warnings from my wife and my cardiologist.

What disturbed me most was a certain militaristic sub-text, including the frequency with which speakers (many of whom had never had anything to do with the military) entered and left the stage to loud martial music. The scariest moment was when the Reverend Harry Jackson, Senior Pastor of Hope Christian Church in Bowie, Maryland proudly proclaimed that "We are the Navy Seals of the Christian movement!" My worst fear is that if this country ever suffers a crisis of stability, whether from a terrorist attack, an economic collapse, natural disaster, or whatever, that's exactly what these guys will be--commandos ready to take over. I trust Rev. Jackson was speaking metaphorically, but I hear far too many military metaphors in fundagelical rhetoric. (This is something, by the way, noted in both of the two best books I have yet read on the Fundagelical Right: Michelle Goldberg's Kingdom Coming and Chris Hedges' American Fascists. Goldberg and Hedges are on to what the fundagelicals are really up to--power, and power over us all.)

The straw poll conducted by the conference was even more unreliable than most straw polls, which is saying it was really, really unreliable. Huckabee was a 5 to 1 winner over second place Romney among attendees who actually voted on site. The problem was that you could also vote online, and that vote had been open since August, when the Family Research Council invited people to pay one dollar, join up and vote. FRC membership grew from 5,000 to 8,500 between August and October.

Romney won the online vote with 1,595 votes, thirty more than Huckabee. No one else was even close. Giuliani came in next to last and John McCain was dead last. Complicating things was that about 600 attendees voted online.

The straw poll (or polls) settled nothing. The Fundagelical Right remains as fragmented as ever over whom to support. I don't know how this will all shake out, but I'm going to make one prediction. The candidate who appears the meanest and most likely to win will, in the end, get the most fundagelical support. Despite all the odds against him, that just might be Giuliani, although Romney is making a real go of it with his doubling Gitmo bit.

But what about Mike Huckabee? He's the natural choice. He's a Baptist minister and is the most personable, likable and articulate of all the Republican candidates. And, he's with the Fundagelical Right on all their push-button issues, always has been. Why isn't there a big push for Huckabee?

I think the answer is that he's not mean enough (and may not be mean at all). There is even evidence that he did some compassionate things as governor of Arkansas. I lived and worked in the fundagelical community for sixteen years, and, believe me, meanness counts. You need to know how to smile sweetly, speak often of Jesus and be the meanest SOB on the block to get anywhere in that world. Just look at the hate that spews from the likes of Robertson, Dobson, Lou Sheldon, and Don Wildmon of the American Family Association.

Despite his showing in last weekend's straw poll, don't count Giuliani out as the choice of many fundagelicals. A mayor who fostered a police culture resulting in random shootings of innocent people and ramming a stick up a guy's butt--now there's a real leader. Mike Huckabee doesn't stand a chance.

Oral Roberts University Scandal

2007-10-24T11:35:00.000-07:00

It seems that some top officials at Oral Roberts University have some explaining to do. Last week university president Richard Roberts took a leave of absence after announcing in chapel that the Lord had told him to proclaim his innocence.

Allegations include:

1. Three professors (who have filed wrongful termination suits) were fired for reporting to the Board of Regents that university employees were being pressured to participate in political activities in violation of tax codes for non-profit organizations.

2. Outrageous sums of contributors' money have gone to renovating repeatedly (ll times in 14 years)the Roberts' home.

3. The Roberts have used the university jet for private trips.

and, most intriguing of all,

4. Richard's wife Lindsay is conducting an ongoing "relationship" of some sort with and underage boy. The two have spent the night at the university guest house at least 9 times and have been photographed late at night 29 times in Mrs. Robert's sports car. (I'm sure this is simply an innocent matter of spiritual guidance.)

All this, and a lot more (see here for lots more salacious details) adds up to a heap of trouble for yet another Christian Right institution, so many of which seem to consider themselves above the mundane requirements of a fallen world (and of the God they claim to believe stands ready to redeem it).

R.I.P., D. James Kennedy

2007-10-23T07:26:00.000-07:00

D. James Kennedy, Senior Pastor at the 10,000- member Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church and founder of the Center for Reclaiming America for Christ, passed away at his home in Fort Lauderdale, Florida on September 5. He never recovered from a massive heart attack suffered in late December. I missed the news until this past weekend because I was in the hospital on September 5 recovering from my own heart attack.

Not as well-known as Robertson, Falwell and Dobson, Kennedy was nevertheless one of the most powerful leaders of the Christian Right. He devoted the majority of his sermons, televised weekly on the Trinity Broadcast Network, to attacking abortion, homosexuality, the separation of church and state, and evolution among other threats to a Christianized America. He was more openly influenced by the Reconstructionist vision than most prominent Christian Right leaders.

I often watched Kennedy on TBN and was most struck by his dishonesty. He was clearly a very smart guy, but, for example, he would distort American history and basic science in ways that were infuriating.

The Center for Reclaiming America for Christ closed down in April, but its remnants have now joined forces with the Family Research Council. It will be interesting to see what happens to Coral Ridge Ministries, including its weekly TV show (which is still on the air running old Kennedy sermons). Its fate may tell us something about how much Christian Right groups have real organizational viability and to what extent they are personality cults. Given the fascist tone to so much of the fundagelical movement and the centrality of cults of leadership in the fascist mind set, the answer is important.

Despite all that, my hope and prayer for the late Rev. Kennedy is that he now understands how little of God's grace his narrow brand of Calvinism ever allowed him to see.

Purity Balls

2007-10-21T18:16:00.000-07:00

From the Now That's Just Creepy file: 

In a chandelier-lit ballroom overlooking the Rocky Mountains one recent evening, some hundred couples feast on herb-roasted chicken and julienned vegetables. The men look dapper in tuxedos; their dates are resplendent in floor-length gowns, long white gloves and tiaras framing twirly, ornate updos. Seated at a table with four couples, I watch as the gray-haired man next to me reaches into his breast pocket, pulls out a small satin box and flips it open to check out a gold ring he's about to place on the finger of the woman sitting to his right. Her eyes well up with tears as she is overcome by emotion.

The man's date? His 25-year old daughter. Welcome to Colorado Springs' Seventh Annual Father-Daughter Purity Ball, held at the five-star Broadmoor Hotel. The event's purpose is, in part, to celebrate dad-daughter bonding, but the main agenda is for fathers to vow to protect the girls' chastity until they marry and for the daughters to promise to stay pure.

That's how Glamour magazine describes the lastest thing in the fad-prone fundagelical world. Never mind that, as the article points out, 88% of fundagelical abstinence pledgers end up having sex before marriage anyway, are more likely than non-pledgers to have oral and anal sex and are less likely to use condoms when they do.

Purity balls? They remind me of what Peggy Bundy's Wanker County cousin Effie said in Episode 606 of "Married with Children."

There's nothin' but sin in the city anyways. I say if you're gonna gyrate naked on tables for money, you should do it for the family.

Back to Work

2007-10-21T17:49:00.000-07:00

It's been eight months since I posted an entry on Fundagelical Watch. First, I was consumed with working on my book on Gerald B. Winrod (1900-1957), who founded the Chrstian Right in this country. It's a myth that fundagelicals withdrew from politics after the 1925 Scopes Trial, a myth perpetrated by a lazy media and an indifferent academia. Second, since July I have been struggling with the return of prostate cancer and then a heart attack seven weeks ago.

I'm still recovering, so I don't promise a new post every day, but I will be making frequent comments about the Christian Right, who continue to be a great source of humor as well as a serious threat to American democracy.

Ted Haggard Heterosexual Always and Forever

2007-02-12T08:52:00.000-08:00

The news media and the comedians (in the few instances where there's a difference) have misunderstood the announcement by Crystal Methodist Pastor Ted Haggard and his healers that after only three weeks of treatment he is now "completely heterosexual." They take it to mean that Haggard was cured in three weeks. He's not saying he was cured. He's saying that he never was gay. He was just was "acting out." He made a bad choice, because that's what homosexuality is--a bad choice.

In the fundagelical world, there are no gay people. There are only people who choose to behave satanically. That's all. So, all you need to do to go straight is figure out why you chose to act gay.

Is the same true of crystal meth? Do you choose to act hooked on crystal meth because there's no such thing as addiction to crystal meth? Funny how that crystal meth thing has fallen off the radar.

Barack Obama Not Really a Christian

2007-02-12T07:58:00.000-08:00

Well, it's started, and it was as predictable as the sun coming up tomorrow. Barack Obama, a member of the United Church of Christ, is not really a Christian, even though he thinks he is. Tucker Carlson made the announcement last week on his MSNBC show. It seems that Obama's African American UCC congregation in Chicago "contradicts the basic tenets of Christianity" because it teaches a "Black Value System." I guarantee such pronouncements will increase as Obama's presidential campaign moves forward. The last thing the Right wants is for Obama to siphon off a few fundagelical voters with his faux Christian message. We know Obama practices a counterfeit Christianity because the last thing Jesus would support is a black congregation serving the needs of a black community.

Actually the attacks started last fall when Rick Warren invited Obama to speak at his Global AIDS Summit. The fundagelical community was outraged. Obama couldn't be a Christian because he subscribed to the "Creed" of abortion. Among so many other confusions, fundagelicals are hopelessly confused about the distinction between a creed and a policy position. To them there is no distinction because what really counts is where you stand politically. ( I believe in The Bush Almighty, Decider of Heaven and Earth.)

Spacerapers

2006-09-01T08:29:00.000-07:00

Chuck Missler, featured in yesterday's post, is a superstar in the fundagelical world. No warrior for Christ is invited more frequently to speak at churches, conferences and on the Christian media. If you go to his website and scan the areas of his expertise, it's easy to see why. It's sexy stuff--literally.

Missler is probably best known for his biblical perspective on UFOs. You see, aliens are really demons piloting spaceships to earth for the purpose of mating with us in order to produce a hybrid race. I'm not kidding. Wasn't that a recurring theme throughout several seasons of the "X-Files?" Actually, if you do a little digging, it becomes clear that Missler's spacerapers theory makes sense. He has a history of quoting and recommending anti-Semitic/white supremacist sources such as the Liberty Lobby's Spotlight. Maybe I'm paranoid, but I get nervous when folks who traffic with white supremcists start spinning theories about how some people are the spawns of Satan.

If you want a quick lesson in how fundagelicals promote anti-Semitism without ever actually using the word "Jew," check out Missler's article on the evil geniuses behind the Federal Reserve system. He never actually says "International Jewish Bankers Conspiracy," but he manages to drop more Jewish surnames than the Manhattan phone directory.

Remember, Missler is a key leader within The Base. Does Karl Rove return his phone calls?

George W. Bush an Instrument in the Hand of God

2006-08-31T08:30:00.000-07:00

This is how Joe VanKoevering, host of Trinity Broadcasting's "God's News Behind the News," closed a session on Iraq earlier this year at the 2006 International Prophecy Conference.

Can I be so bold as to say, irrespective of the political opposition and the media opposition and those (we've already addressed it) who hate our president, can I be so bold to say that the political opposition he faces, which is primarily due to his decision to go into Iraq, that he was an instrument in the hand of God to do what he did. [applause] Whether you voted for him or not, whether you are part of his approval rating high or low right now is irrespective, even the decsions he is currently making, which all of us have difficulties with--his land for peace--I believe that that sole decision which will be the deciding determinating [sic] factor on his legacy in the future years, I am convinced that because he was a man, I believe a true Christian man, a man who's prayed every day, I see the Lord in him going to that nation. All of us are pained by what we see in our news and about the civil war that exists, but this is something that had to happen.

So I guess the bad news coming out of Iraq every day is all part of God's plan. If you listen to the whole session preceding Van Koevering's revelation, you see the irrefutable logic. All the speakers, who included Chuck Missler, Tim LaHaye and Perry Stone, predicted that ancient Babylon (about 55 miles south of contemporary Baghdad) would be rebuilt and emerge, to quote Missler, "as a major power center on the earth." That has to happen, you see, because the events described in Isaiah 13 & 14, Jeremiah 50 & 51 and Revelation 17 & 18 relating to Babylon being judged and destroyed have not yet happened. Babylon was never destroyed; it simply fell into ruin in the third century B.C.E. and has to rise again so God can judge and destroy it. (I guess crumbling into dust doesn't count as destruction.)

That will be a judgment richly deserved, because, according to Missler, the United Nations will move to the New Bablyon (too much crime and too few parking places in New York--seriously). Revived Bablyon will become "a new Switzerland" and serve as "the new headquarters of the Antichrist."

So, you see, President Bush had to lay waste to Iraq so that, in the process of rebuiding that devasted country, Iraqis could create the New Babylon. Never mind that Saddam Hussein had well-publicized plans to rebuild Babylon. Apparently he would never had gotten around to it, or he wouldn't have done it right. Maybe he would never have let the United Nations in, what with all those sanctions and stuff.

Jesus can't come back until Babylon is destroyed, so Babylon has to be rebuilt in order to be destroyed, and Babylon can't be rebuilt and then detroyed without George W. Bush's war in Iraq. Q.E.D.

Remember that when you vote on November 7.

Dobson, et al, Convince Only 9% of Their Own Followers

2006-08-30T08:44:00.000-07:00

Feeling especially masochistic the other day, I was browsing the Focus on the Family website and came across something called The Truth Project. It's a set of 7 DVD's containing 12 lessons teaching a "biblical worldview." Dr. Dobson (he of man-on-donkey marriage fame) is enthusiastic about The Truth Project, so I wanted to send in my money. Turns out, however, I couldn't--not without first paying $119 to attend a special training conference ($149 if I brought the wife along). Also, I would have to join some sort of support group organized around The Truth Project. Sounds like an awful lot of trouble just to buy 7 DVD's.

Being cynical as well as masochistic, I became suspicious that this was really all about political organization, but something else made me even more reluctant to pull out the credit card. To stress the urgency of signing up with The Truth Project, Dr. Dobson and the boys cite a 2003 study by the Barna Group which shows that only 9% of born again Christians have a biblical worldview (compared to 4% of the total population).

9%!!?? What the hell have these guys been doing with their contributors' hard-earned money all these years? You mean to tell me that Dobson and his cohorts have had captive audiences every Sunday morning and God knows when and where else for a whole generation, and the best they can do is sell 9% of their own people on a "biblical worldview?" Something's wrong here. I'd say it's time for some serious reappraisal.

I'm putting my wallet back in my pocket.

Spiritual Blame Game Redux

2006-08-29T08:39:00.000-07:00

On the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's destruction of New Orleans, it seems appropriate to revisit the award-winning Spiritual Blame Game. (This blog has won as many Peabody Awards as Bill O'Reilly.) While Bush administration officials cautioned against "playing the blame game," their minions on the Fundagelical Right were busy assigning blame to all sorts of undesirables. All the fundagelical heavyweights, including Pat Robertson, Franklin Graham and Pat Boone, offered their favorite reasons for why God chose to lay waste to a great American city. Although the comptetition was fierce, the winner was really no surprise to those of us who track the vigilant defenders of American morality. Gay people easily beat out witches, abortions, Jews and Democrats as the most likely reason for Katrina's devastation. You can read who voted for whom here and here. Below are the final results, and please note that these were faith-based scientific polls based on whatever the Lord led me to notice.

gays----7
witches----4
abortions----4
Israeli evacuation of Gaza settelements (read Jews)----4
Democrats----2
cloning----1
contraception----1
Mardi Gras----1
drugs & alcohol----1
orgies----1
murder----1
unspecified divisions within the church----1
gangs in L.A.----1
erasing God from public places----1
girls gone wild----1
depletion of the divine ozone layer----1

and my personal all-time favorite:

man-on-horse sex----1

Help for Mel Gibson's Bewildered Fans (and for Mel Gibson)

2006-08-28T08:15:00.000-07:00

No one seems to know where Mel Gibson's anti-Semitic tirade came from, least of all Mel Gibson. As James Hirsen of Newsmax put it on Tucker!, "It didn't just surprise everyone else, it didn't surprise just me. It surprised Mel Gibson." The fundagelicals' favorite Jewish movie critic, Michael Medved, couldn't explain it either. He just needs Mel to "tamp it down," and whatever "inner hatred" Mel is struggling with, Michael Moore "has done far more damage to the Jewish community" than Mel Gibson could ever imagine. Father Jonathan, Fox News' resident Catholic theologian, worked with Gibson on The Passion of the Christ for over a year, and he's sure Mel's not anti-Semitic. Otherwise, Father Jonathan wouldn't have worked with him. (And we know the Catholic Church has never been associated with anti-Semitism.) All Passion cheerleader Jennifer Geroux knew was that, somehow, "this is spiritual warfare." (Against whom? Mel? Booze? Anti-Semitism? Jews?) Pat Robertson seemed most bewildered. In search of an explanation, he even abandoned his usual contempt for secular psychology and speculated that little baby Mel might have unconsciously absorbed his holocaust-denying father's attitude toward Jews.

But the one thing Pat and all the others know is, Mel Gibson is not anti-Semitic. So where did Mel get the idea that Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world?

Maybe Mel got it from Robertson's 1991 book, The New World Order (Word Publishing, 1991). Pat reveals that "European Bankers" [wink, wink] were responsible for the French Revolution (p. 68), communism (p. 69), World War I (pp. 65-66), and World War II (p. 101). Robertson is somewhat amibiguous on the origins of the Civil War, or, as he calls it, the War of Northern Aggression (p. 50), but he is absolutely unambiguous about how the "European Bankers" [wink, wink] ordered the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1865. In other words, "European Bankers" [wink, wink] are responsible for all the major turmoil in the world over the last 200+ years.

It pains me to see so many good folks in such bewildered agony. I hope this helps.

Apologetics, Fundagelical Style

2006-05-29T10:54:00.000-07:00

Apparently Ralph Reed thought it was the Lord's work to trap women and children as wage slaves in the sex tourism industry and then introduce them to Jesus. What was that about a millstone?

Peein' on The Pooh

2006-03-11T06:27:00.000-08:00

I'm a pretty tolerant guy. Unlike most radio/TV pundits, it takes a lot to get me "outraged." I'm willing to overlook a lot, forgive and forget, live and let live.

Take, for example, the fundagelicals' favorite artist, Thomas Kinkade. He's made millions selling his inspirational paintings to the Christian market. Good for him.

So what if former business associates and investors are suing Kinkade for taking his company public, driving down the stock price and then buying it back for about 15% of what it was once worth. Business is business.

So what if he gets drunk, falls off bar stools and then screams "F you!' at people who try to help him up. Hard drink will do that to some folks.

So what if he goes up to a woman at an art show, palms her breasts and yells "Great tits!" Artists have a zest for life.

So what if he engages in "ritual territory marking" (his own words) by urinating in public. We make allowances for an artist's eccentricities.

But Thomas Kinkade went too far. According to the Los Angeles Times, a few years back Kinkade was Robert Schuller's guest on "Hour of Power" at the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California. The night before his appearance he and some friends did some heavy drinking on the town. On the way back to their rooms at the Disneyland Hotel, Kinkade stopped, announced, "This one's for you, Walt," and urinated on a figure of Winnie the Pooh.

Now, that's outrageous. Kinkade says he "grew up in the country," and that's what country folks do. Bull. I grew up on a farm, and, O.K., maybe once in a while, way over the hill on the back forty; otherwise, we went to the bathroom in the bathroom. I still do.

I don't care where you grew up. You don't pee on The Pooh. You just don't.

Revival? No, Just Legal Defense Fund

2006-03-08T11:28:00.000-08:00

The other day I was feeling a bit down. Nothing exciting was going on. The holidays were over. The Super Bowl was over. Cheney hadn't shot anyone for a couple of weeks. The late winter blues were setting in.

Then I channel-surfed to Trinity Broadcasting Network just in time to catch the biggest news since the Protestant Reformation. God was pouring out his Holy Spirit on a humble megachurch in suburban Columbus, Ohio.

Pastor Rod Parsley of World Harvest Church claims he's never seen anything like it in nearly 30 years of ministry. Since the first of the year, a powerful revival has been gathering steam at World Harvest's church, school and bible colege. According to Parsley, by the fourth day of classes in January

Students were prophesying in the hallways, laying hands on one another, laying hands on their teachers....One day in the elementary school alone, 142 children received instantaneous baptism in the Holy Spirit, with the evidence of speaking in other tongues. That revival swept through the high school and then on to World Harvest Bible College. Literally hundreds upon hundreds of our young people were apprehended by the manifested, tangible presence and power of God. Don't dare miss it. This is coming to your home.

A video clip from a recent Sunday service proved the point. Pastor Parsley screamed: "Shout! The Holy Ghost is real! The Holy Ghost is real! The Holy Ghost is real! And He's falling in this room! He's falling in this room! He's falling in this room! Signs! Wonders! Miracles! Healing! Deliverance! Victory! Joy! Shout!!!" Meanwhile a nubile young lady bounced back and forth behind the pastor.

I was excited. I wanted miracles, healing, victory and joy. (I didn't need one of those nubile young ladies since I'm already married to one, but I'm sure that will be a big draw in some quarters.) How could I get all these wonderful things? All I had to do was call, write or go online and send $40. That would "signify" my "covenant relationship with Pastor Parsley."

If only I had Pastor Parsley's prepaid debit Mastercard. But wait a minute. Why Columbus, Ohio? I've been to Columbus, Ohio.

Pastor Parsley explained. Apparently Pastor Tommy Bates of Independence, Kentucky had a vision.

He saw a beast rising up out of the sea. It was pushed back for a season, but then he saw that beast coming back with a woman riding on its back. Her name: Mystery Religion. And she is drunk--hear me--with the blood of the prophets and of the saints. [Blogger's Note--See Revelation 17: 3-6] Within days of those prophetic words being uttered in the midst of this revival, I was attacked viciously through the media by a group of religious leaders. Now, you probably heard about it on the news. It's made national headlines across the country. But as Pastor Bates prophesied, only the virgin Shulammite [Blogger's Note: See Song of Solomon 6: 13], the Church of Jesus Christ, the salt of the earth, can combat that rider. When the attacks came, the saints of God here at World Harvest Church had been fasting and interceding for nearly 40 days since the first of the year, and what the Enemy meant for evil, God has turned for good. He's using this unwarranted vicious attack to shine the spotlight on the church. 5-4-3-2-1, it's show time!

You can trust Pastor Parsley's discernment between warranted and unwarranted attacks, as you can trust him on all moral issues. He is, after all, the Founder and President of The Center for Moral Clarity.

Later in the telecast, Parsley aired a clip of Pastor Bates himself recounting his vision at the World Harvest Church revival.

There was a beast that came walkin' through America with a body like a leopard, paws like a bear, a mouth like a lion, seven heads with ten horns. [Blogger's Note: See Revelation 13: 1-2] God chose this place, your pastor, to push the beast back for a season. Now God is gonna choose this place. The reason why the intensity is so strong here is because this is a birthing center. I don't know what I'm sayin'. I'm only listen' to what I'm hearin'.

Pastor Tommy then spoke in an unknown tongue:

Kare verhay hora kandra kay shanda la hahaya, nenna honda hyundai.
[Rough translation: If you don't have the money, sell your Honda or Hyundai and send us the cash; my cut is 30%.]

As it turns out, 31 Ohio clergy are asking the IRS to investigate Parsley's tax exempt status given his political activities. Come to think of it, I have heard him brag on TBN that he got George W. Bush re-elected by turning out a big Republican vote in Ohio in 2004, and he's openly politicking for J. Kenneth Blackwell, Republican candidate for governor.

Oh, well. Back to the late winter blues.

Quote of the Week

2006-03-02T12:40:00.000-08:00

"Knowledge is not all it's cracked up to be."

Pastor Rod Parsley, World Harvest Church, Columbus, Ohio, today on TBN hawking his Harvest Prep Virtual Academy (Grades 3-12)

How to Play Winkin', Blinkin' and Nod

2005-10-13T11:49:00.000-07:00

Despite a lot of reporting and commentary about James (Man-on-Donkey) Dobson's radio show yesterday, the real story wasn't Dobson's message to the Senate Judicary Committee not to bother calling him; it was rather this closing exchange between Dobson and Sexual Grand Inquisitor Ken Starr.

Dobson [winkin']: Well, let me, uh, let me end with this question, uh, it's an obvious one now. But, uh, you obviously think that she would be a good justice on the Supreme Court, as we define it, and I think you know what that means.
Starr [blinkin']: Yes, I think she believes in the traditional vision which we need to restore, the vision of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and, uh, other great justices to have served who's not trying to impose his or her views and especially his or her views on issues that so divide American society and American culture.
Dobson [winkin']: And you are convinced she has a very personal faith in Jesus Christ?
Starr [noddin']: That I do. She is, uh, a very, very strong Christian, and that should be a source, I think, of great comfort and assurance to, uh, people in the household of faith around our country.
[emphasis Dobson's]

O.K., is there anyone who didn't get the message? Do you suppose Rove and Dobson were as disgustingly coy on the phone with each other?

The Spiritual Blame Game, Week 4

2005-10-05T15:37:00.000-07:00

I thought the Hurricane Katrina Spiritual Blame Game might be over--until last night. Franklin Graham found a way to keep it going. Joe Scarborough reported that Billy's boy said recently that New Orleans is "known for Mardi Gras, for Satan worship. It's known for sex perversion. It's known for every type of drugs and alcohol and the orgies and all of these things that go on down there in New Orleans." Franklin summed it all up by revealing that "there has been a black spiritual cloud over New Orleans for years."

One of Joe's guests, Jennifer Giroux, defended Graham by warning that "God will not be mocked" by such evils as abortion, contraception, homosexuality and cloning. I first encountered Jennifer on Christian radio about a year before Mel Gibson's "Passion of the Christ" was released. She was already defending it against the (anticipated) attacks of "secular Jews and humanists." Apparently Giroux's Women Influencing the Nation is still mostly plugging Mel's "Passion."

John King interviewed Franklin Graham on CNN yesterday about his remarks, and Graham's weaseling is worth a look.

So, the running totals in the Spiritual Blame Game are as follows:

gays-----7
witches-----4
abortions-----4
Israeli evacuation of Gaza settlements-----4
Democrats-----2
cloning----1
contraception----1
Mardi Gras----1
drugs & alcohol----1
orgies----1
murder----1
unspecified divisions within the church----1
gangs in L.A.----1
erasing God from public places----1
girls gone wild----1
depletion of the divine ozone layer----1

And returning as my personal favorite (I'm over the divine ozone layer depletion), and bringing up the rear, as it were,

man-on-horse-sex----1

Previous weeks' results are below in the 9/26, 9/19 and 9/12 posts.

Remember: This is a faith-based scientific poll based on whatever the Lord has led me to notice.

Waking Up with Dobson

2005-10-01T15:02:00.000-07:00

While I'm on the subject of Dobson, on that same 9/26/05 radio show he said the following with all of the passion he could muster:

John, wouldn't it be great to wake up one morning to find that hard core obscenity, the worst kind of pornography, wouldn't jump out at your kids when they turn on the computer?

Dear Lord, what does this man use for a homepage? AnnCoulter.com?

The Spiritual Blame Game, Week 3

2005-09-26T14:17:00.000-07:00

All of this week's hurricane blame game news came from evangelist Mario Murillo. On last Thursday night's "Praise the Lord" (TBN) Murillo assured us that "God hasn't left America, but we have depleted the divine ozone layer. That's what's going on. Things that never used to get through are getting through now." How are we poking holes in the "divine ozone layer?" Murillo cited abortion ("We do abortions in a way that would make Hitler blush."), gay marriage and gangs in Los Angeles--really. He also noted that "we've erased God" from public schools, buldings and courts.

With Mario's contributions, the running totals are as follows:

gays--------5
Israeli evacuation of Gaza settlements----4
witches-----3
abortions-----3
Democrats-----2
murder--------1
unspecified divisions within the church--1
gangs in L.A.----1
erasing God from public places---1
girls gone wild------1
man-on-horse sex-----1

And my new personal favorite, edging out man-on-horse sex by a nose, as it were:

depletion of the divine ozone layer---1

Reminder: This is a faith-based scientific poll based on whatever I happen to see.

Quote of the Week

2005-09-24T15:58:00.000-07:00

"Who knows what goes on in George Bush's mind."

Pat Robertson
700 Club
9/23/05

The Spiritual Blame Game, Week 2

2005-09-19T14:11:00.000-07:00

It's time for the weekly Spiritual Blame Game update. Pat Boone, Pat Robertson and Dwight Thompson all blamed Hurricane Katrina on American policy allowing/pressuring Israel to evacuate the Gaza settlements. So, the big news is that Israeli evacuation of the Gaza settlements is now tied for first with gays in the running total. When something is as bad as homosexuality, it's REALLY serious business.

The results, combining weeks 1 & 2, are as follows:

gays--------4
Israeli evacuation of Gaza settlements--------4
witches--------3
abortion clinics--------2
Democrats-----------2
murder----------1
unspecified division within the church--------1
girls gone wild---------1
man-on-horse sex--------1

Remember, this is a faith-based scientific poll (based on whatever I happen to see).

Editorial Decision

2005-09-18T19:48:00.000-07:00

I've decided to leave up my webmistress wife's last post. It's a refreshing break and explains what little sanity I have left after 16 years teaching at that same Christian college where she was a student.

test post to be deleted

2005-09-18T19:01:00.000-07:00

I am testing

block quotes to see if it will break the text the way I want. I don't want it to add breaks. Sweet Sassy Molassy 60 minutes has born again virgin teens. Most of the ones I knew when I was at a Christian college were humping more than the honest non virgins. Oh my holy sh*t. This is the webmaster, not Robert Kemp.

Now lets see what this will do.

Sekulow a Sucker?

2005-09-18T18:54:00.000-07:00

Pat Robertson worried aloud on The 700 Club Friday that, despite Jay Sekulow's gung ho campaign for Judge John Robert's confirmation as Chief Justice, Roberts might be another David Souter. He has reason to worry.

Sekulow, of course, heads up one of Robertson's favorite creations, the American Center for Law and Justice, or ACLJ (get it? ACLJ). Early on the White House enlisted Sekulow to convince the Christian Right to go all out for Roberts. And that Jay has done with all the fundagelical fervor he can muster. Last Friday night he hosted a two-hour primetime special on TBN plugging Roberts' confirmation. Practically glowing with self imprtance, he trotted several Republican senators and congressmen and two former attorneys general (Ashcroft and Meese) across the stage. All drove home the same message: This is a pivotal moment in American history, and John Roberts will move the Court dramatically to the Right.

I have to say, however, that I seem to remember Ronald Reagan using Jerry Falwell in much the same way when he nominated Sandra Day O'Connor. That didn't work out so well for the fundies.

One of the few pieces of solid information about Roberts to come out of the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings this past week is that Roberts is a great admirer of Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson (1941-1954). Jackson authored the majority (6-3) opinion in the 1943 case of West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, in which the Court ruled unconstitutional West Virginia's requirement that Jehovah's Witness children salute the flag, and thus violate their religion, or face expulsion from school. He wrote the following:

If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us.

Uh oh.

When he appointed Justice Jackson Chief Prosecutor for the United States at the Nuremberg Trials, Harry Truman knew what he was doing. I'm not sure Jay Sekulow does.

Pat Boone Scares Us All

2005-09-18T18:31:00.000-07:00

Pat Boone has a new career--foreign policy analyst. Last Thursday night, evangelist Dwight Thompson hosted a Trinity Broadcasting Network panel discussion on the meaning of Hurricane Katrina. Boone used the occasion to blame the storm on Bush foreign policy.

We need to heed God's promise to Abraham that "Those who bless you, Israel, will be blessed; those who curse you will be cursed." I didn't say that. If I could change that, I might. But God said it. And He hasn't changed His mind. We need to bless and stand with Israel. And as nine, almost ten thousand people were dispaced in the Gaza Strip, the next day Katrina hit Mississippi and Lousiana and 330,000 Americans were displaced. Now maybe there's no connection. Heh heh. Many people think there is a connection between our standing with Israel and how we do as a nation. 'Cause He said, "Those who bless Israel, your seed and your descendants, Abraham, I will bless. Those who curse you, look out." And He hasn't changed His mind. At least I haven't heard lately, if He has.

Thompson immediately chimed in.

The greatest thing the United States of America can do in its history now and forever will always be the big brother and the strong arm that protects the nation of Israel. The day we take our hand off of Israel to protect it is the day that you can count on it's not going to be a good day. You're right.

Boone, of course, is still trying to redeem himself with the fundagelicals, who are still suspicious of him for wearing leather pants, leather vest, fake tatoos and a studded dog collar to the 1997 American Music Awards to accept an award for his "Pat Boone in a Metal Mood--No More Mr. Nice Guy." He thought he was being funny. How can you run with these people for forty years and not know that they have less of a sense of humor than a Stalinist commissar?

Robertson: Bushies Late to Their Own Party

2005-09-13T14:19:00.000-07:00

After calling relief efforts in the wake of Hurricane Katrina a "party," Pat Robertson revealed today that the party had, in fact, been organized by the Bush administration. This morning on "The 700 Club," Robertson was clearly miffed by criticism of efforts to help the gulf states. "We had a terrible disaster," he acknowledged, "and this great country was a couple days late getting to the party. But believe you me we're there now with armies of compassion reaching out to people, and this will turn out to be one of America's finest hours."

A few moments later, after a segment on Israeli evacuation of Gaza settlements, Robertson linked Katrina to American policy toward Israel. "The United States is forcing them. I think we should take warning for what happened with Katrina. There are many people in this country who look at prophecy and who link directly natural disasters to America with actions of America against Israel. This pullout from Gaza was orchestrated and pushed by the [Bush] administration."

Regardless of whether this turns out to be one of America's finest hours, there are early indications that it might be one of Pat Robertson's finest hours. For those wondering why a great spiritual leader would call hurricane disaster relief a "party," please read Max Blumenthal's excellent article in The Nation. As it turns out, Robertson's own army of compassion, Operation Blessing, got a special invitation to the party.

For those of you keeping score in the Spiritual Blame Game, please note that the Bush administration now has one vote and is currently tied with girls gone wild and man-on-horse sex.

The Spiritual Blame Game

2005-09-12T14:23:00.000-07:00

The Fundagelical Right is already hard at work identifying the spiritual causes of Hurricane Katrina's destruction of New Orleans. I am conducting a faith-based scientific poll (whatever I happen to come across) and over the next few weeks will be providing a running total of the most likely suspects.

Here's the first installment:

On TBN's "Praise the Lord" Friday night, a panel discussion conducted by Pastor Richard Hogue of City Church, Oklahoma City, which included Tommy Tenney of GodChasers and "prophet" Kim Clement, blamed gays, witches and an unspecified division within the church. Clement claims to have prophesied New Orleans' fate several weeks ago.

Rick Scarborough of Vision America identified gay marriage, Israel's withdrawal from Gaza settlements, and the inability of the state of Washington to prosecute under current statutes people who have sex with horses.

With Texas Governor Rick Perry in attendance, The Reverend Dwight McKissic of Conrnerstone Baptist Church in Arlinglton told a Texas Restoration Project gathering that homosexuality (especially the annual New Orleans six-day "Southern Decadence" gay pride festival) and devil worship were to blame. He also noted that "girls go wild in New Oreans."

The Reverend Bill Shanks of New Covenant Fellowship of New Orleans identified abortion clinics (also fingered by Columbia, S.C. Christians for Life), Mardi Gras, the "Southern Decadence" gay pride parade and witches.

In the Los Angeles Times, Dennis Pager cited the New Orleans murder rate and political corruption.

Last week Pat Robertson said that, as the Senate Judiciary Committee begins its hearings, John Roberts "can maybe, you know, be thankful that a tragedy has brought him some good," because "the focus of America's going to be on these victims." Robertson didn't exactly say that God sent Katrina for that reason, but it's close enough and I'm including it anyway. Also, in fairness, Prager said that it would be "constructive" if the people of New Oreans interpreted the hurricane as punishment for murder and political corruption. But again, close enough. (I realize that Prager is Jewish, but I classify him as a fundagelical because he actually seems to think that he'd survive if these guys took over.)

To summarize,

Spiritual Blame Game Score as of 9/12/05
gays----4 (no surprise here)
witches----3
abortion clinics----2
Mardi Gras----1
murder----1
corruption (read Democrats)----1
unspecified division within the church----1
Senate Judiciary Committee (again, Democrats)----1
girls gone wild----1
man on horse sex----1
Israel----1

Two items of interest regarding the Texas Restoration Project event.
1. Some secular humanists have suggested that the TRP, which wants to register 300,000 new fundagelical voters in Texas, is a tool of Governor Perry's re-election campaign. I'm sure that's not the case.
2. Rev. Laurence White of Houston's Our Savior Lutheran Church (LCMS), TRP chairman, told reporters that Rev. McKissic's remarks did not reflect the TRP position. Those remarks probably do, however, reflect Pastor White's position. He is National Co-Chariman, along with Rick Scarborough, of Vision America. Either that or White and Scarborough need to get on the same page (other than Vision America's webpage).

Breaking News: Seder Really Christian Ritual

2005-09-09T12:44:00.000-07:00

Antisemitism has always been the Christian Right's dirty little secret. From the founding generation of Gerald B. Winrod and Gerald L.K. Smith, to Pat Robertson's obsession with the Jewish Illuminati (See his 1991 New World Order), to Herman Otten's holocaust denial in the Christian News, the Christian Right has always been profoundly antisemitic. Winrod and Smith were blatantly explicit , but now the Christian Right hides its antisemitism behind the camouflage of support for Israel. Occasionally, however, it pops up in the strangest ways.

Yesterday, on his daily television program airing on the Trinity Broadcasting Network, John Hagee of Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, instructed his congregation as follows:

"Let's talk about this meal. It's called the Seder, the Passover Meal. It began in the Book of Exodus and 6,000 years later is still being executed in every Jewish home that is observant of the law of Moses. Three pieces of unleavened bread were brought to the table. These three pieces are the symbol of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. The piece that was in the middle, representing the Son, was broken in half, and being broken was then taken and placed in a napkin. And the mother would place it in the napkin and then hide it somewhere in the home. And, after the meal, the child who found it was given a very, very special gift, something even better than they would get at Christmas. Now, this is filled with typology of Christ."

This is disturbing on so many levels, but I'll limit my comments to two things:

1. How could Passover have been celebrated 6,000 years ago in 4000 B.C.E., not only over 2500 years before Moses but about 2000 years before Abraham began the migration from Ur? I guess that's faith-based history, or faith-based math, or both.

2. I acknowledge that I was born and raised rural poor white trash Protestant, but I have been invited to a few seders and I missed that Father, Son and Holy Ghost/typology of Christ thing.

Hagee has a history of injecting Illuminati/Jewish bankers stuff into his sermons, but this is something different. You've heard of cultural genocide? This is it. You can't convert them, the political correctness nazis won't let you tell the truth about how they run the world, so you simply proclaim that their religion is really yours. You unilaterally annex them. Problem solved.