Evangelical Power within the GOP
By 2000, Evangelicals constituted the heart of the Republicans’ core constituency. Eighty-seven percent of Evangelicals voted in 2000, and 87% of them voted for George W. Bush. They believe that free enterprise is the only economic system consistent with the Bible and that the nation’s religious heritage and values are under attack and require the protection of federal and state governments. They were certain that there is only one Christian approach to most political questions and that liberals encounter grave problems in being truly Christian. Former Senator John Danforth lamented in April 2005, “ Republicans have transformed our party into the arm of Conservative Christians.” So great was their power that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist appeared on a televised fundamentalist rally to claim that Democrats were engaging in “an assault against people of faith” because they had held up the confirmations of a few conservative nominees to the federal courts. Dr. James Dobson, an organizer of the event, went further, denouncing the federal courts because they were “unaccountable” and “a despotic oligarchy,” presumably because they did not heed the advice of fundamentalist and evangelical clergy.
Former Republican National Committee Chairman John Moran complained in February 1997 that the party was “in jeopardy” because the Christian Coalition and other rightists were on the verge of taking over the national organization. By 2002, the Christian Right comprised 28% of the GOP coalition and constituted the vast majority of the basis of the New Right. In the early nineties, the New Right was powerful enough to challenge the leadership of Country Club Republicans. Eventually, it seized control of the party in some states, including Texas.. Many of these people deny the principle of separation of church and State, wish to regain the Panama Canal, and insist that the United States should leave the United Nations.
The Christian Coalition, one of the principle elements in the Christian Right, trained 16,000 volunteers in organizing and how to speak and operate within the Republican Party. Many of them became party operatives, state legislators, and local officials. In 2002, Professors Kimberly Conger of Ohio State and John Green of the University of Akron found that in both 1994 and 2002 the Christian conservatives were well integrated in eighteen state Republican organizations, particularly in the Midwest and South. By the 1990s, the Christian conservatives were proving to be particularly effective in tight House and Senate races.
Although there was some talk in the late 1990s that the Christian Right was in decline., the reverse was true. In the years 1997-1999, Christian Right organizations generally experienced rising revenues. Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcast Network took in $196 million and Dr. Dobson’s Focus on the Family garnered $121 million. In barely a quarter century these organizations had become stable, with predictable revenue streams and enormous political clout. Their voter guides and continual political mailings have been very effective. In addition, conservative groups within mainstream denominations were having considerable success in diverting these churches from pursuing social justice. By the turn of the century, the Presbyterians seemed likely to become an evangelical body. Methodists, who found it necessary to appease their conservative wing, took a step in that direction in 2000 by taking a tougher stand against ordaining practicing homosexuals.
Some on the Christian Right like Paul Weyrich have voiced the suspicion that the Republicans are using them, offering a few symbolic victories but little more. Though there is much evidence to support this view, few Evangelicals and fundamentalists are inclined to believe it. In October 2006, evangelical David Kuo published Tempting Faith, which argued that the George W. Bush administration was simply using the Christian Right. Kuo had been second in command of the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives. He claimed that though White House personnel would hug and praise evangelical leaders in public, they referred to them as “the nuts” in private. The religious leaders were also said to be “goofy” and “out of control.” In the 2004 election, the White House political shop used the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives to sponsor thinly disguised political meetings with religious leaders in twenty targeted states, and he believed that the numerous meetings in Ohio carried the state for Bush. Kuo noted that the Bush administration spent about $20 million less per year on assisting religious charities than the Clinton administration had.
Comprising more than a quarter of the Republican vote, the Christian Right became its most reliable element, its core constituency. Upper middle class and wealthy Republicans welcomed their assistance because conservative Christians made it possible to weaken regulatory legislation, hold down wages, reduce taxes for the rich and corporations, and slash welfare funding. However, the alliance was not a marriage crafted in heaven. The CEOs and suburban Republicans were uncomfortable with their allies’ positions on abortion, personal morality, education, and women’s rights. By the 1990s, Republicans were learning that in some places they faced political disaster if they promised the Religious Right too much. However, they needed the Christian Right as the core of their party and learned how to speak in culturally and theologically coded terms. It came to be understood, that the Christian Right was to receive little more than a few crumbs of symbolic victory.
Even Ronald Reagan, whose own outlook on sexual matters was probably libertarian, gave the Right little more than lip service on abortion. When the Religious Right held its annual anti-abortion rally on the Mall, Reagan would only address the crowd via a hock-up from the oval office; an annual rite which became an “open joke” among Washington insiders. George W. Bush was to occasionally repeat this ploy with similar success. In the election of 2000, it was apparent that Jerry Falwell and other leaders of the Christian Right accepted the new reality. He and Robertson endorsed George W. Bush, who did not meet all the criteria for an ideal Christian Right candidate. However, the Christian conservatives seemed perfectly happy with a few symbolic victories from time to time. The CEOs and upper middle class Republicans did not have to face the prospect of having to choose between economic benefits and enacting distasteful cultural policies.
The rhetoric of the cultural wars inflamed the Religious Right and cultural conservatives, but it also affected others who feared big government and who were generally suspicious of the intentions of Democrats. Their fear of liberalism and out-of- control big government often bred an indistinguishable anger. It would lead many of them to see politics it looked as combat and blood sport, the goal of which was not simply victories for particular policies, but to destroy the opposition. Conservative anger and paranoia about liberals were constantly fanned and reinforced on talk radio and some cable outlets and by pundits such as Ann Coulter. Over time a group bias was developed that defined opponents as profoundly immoral, and it lent itself to a moral inversion in which people saw themselves as righteous and their opponents as so evil that they should not share the same rights. The danger connected with this moral inversion was that people would lose their capacity for empathy and their moral inhibitions when dealing with others fade away.
The anger that fueled conservative politics energized voters and party workers, but it did not contribute to rational discourse. During his administration, President Bill Clinton became the focus of intense hatred. Later, some liberals admitted to a hatred of George W. Bush, and conservative columnists promptly identified the Bush haters as a “core threat to democracy.” After decades in the development of this collective psychopathology, it became very easy for many who shared this group bias to justify in 2004 the torture of Iraqi prisoners. It is doubtful that they had come to see liberals as people with fewer human rights, but in 2002 many found it easy to believe that Democratic opponents of George W. Bush were allied with terrorists.
Sherman has written African American Baseball: A brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum
Showing posts with label Christian Right. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Christian Right. Show all posts
Thursday, February 28, 2008
The Council for National Policy
A number of the conservative foundations were religious and could potentially influence hundreds of thousands of voters or more. For example, the Council for National Policy was created by Christian conservatives in 1981 and financed by T. Cullen Davis, Nelson Bunker Hunt, and others. Its first president was the very influential Rev. Dr. Tim LaHaye, who later wrote the “Left Behind” books about end times , which begin with momentous events in the Middle East. It is not clear how much influence the run-away best sellers had upon the administration of George W. Bush, but the Bush White House carefully consulted it on many matters, particularly foreign policy, and sent top-level speakers to it. The CNP temporarily had its tax exemption lifted in the 1990s because it is a secret organization and its activities could be seen as being politically partisan. Its companion organization is Concerned Women for America, led by Rev. La Beverley, a Religious Right leader.
A similar operation was the Institute on Religion and Democracy, founded in 1981, is an important organization in this Neo Conservative effort to combat U.S. Christian assistance for social justice programs in Latin America. Its goal was to prevent to prevent mainline Protestant churches from funding leftist movements south of the border. It strongly supported counterinsurgency and opposed President Jimmy Carter's efforts to promote human rights in the region. The IRD tried to project a moderate image and distance itself from the New Right. Nevertheless, some of its board members like Paul Sabury had New Right connections-- in his case, Freedom House. The Adolph Coors Trust and Richard Mellon Scaife fund it. According to Reverend Dr. Andrew Weaver, a research psychologist, IRD is behind “a systematic effort to undermine mainline churches that still have democratic, transparent processes.” By weakening the commitment of these churches on peace and justice issues, the IRD will eventually weaken the National Council of Churches as a religious conscience voice. IRD and similar groups have backed efforts to promote conservative take-overs in denominations by embroiling them in debates over wedge issues.
Sherman has written African American Baseball: A brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum
A similar operation was the Institute on Religion and Democracy, founded in 1981, is an important organization in this Neo Conservative effort to combat U.S. Christian assistance for social justice programs in Latin America. Its goal was to prevent to prevent mainline Protestant churches from funding leftist movements south of the border. It strongly supported counterinsurgency and opposed President Jimmy Carter's efforts to promote human rights in the region. The IRD tried to project a moderate image and distance itself from the New Right. Nevertheless, some of its board members like Paul Sabury had New Right connections-- in his case, Freedom House. The Adolph Coors Trust and Richard Mellon Scaife fund it. According to Reverend Dr. Andrew Weaver, a research psychologist, IRD is behind “a systematic effort to undermine mainline churches that still have democratic, transparent processes.” By weakening the commitment of these churches on peace and justice issues, the IRD will eventually weaken the National Council of Churches as a religious conscience voice. IRD and similar groups have backed efforts to promote conservative take-overs in denominations by embroiling them in debates over wedge issues.
Sherman has written African American Baseball: A brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum
Leaders of the Christian Right
Some major conservative Protestant preachers such as Jimmy Swaggart, Rex Humbard, and Oral Roberts did not focus on politics, and a few conservative Evangelicals took positions that could be considered liberal. Two of the most prominent spokesmen of the Christian Right were Jerry Falwell and Marion Pat Robertson. Falwell headed the Moral Majority, which was founded in the 1970s and lasted until 1989. Thereafter, the Christian Coalition became the most significant vehicle of the Religious Right. In 1994, it distributed over 30,000,000 voters’ guides. It demonstrated great skill in operating phone banks and driving people to the polls. Under Dr. Ralph Reed, its staff director, it skillfully used polling data and moved beyond moral questions to promote the economic policies of the Republican Party. In 2004, Reed was chairman of the Bush reelection campaign in the South. In 2001 and 2002, his consulting firm received $4.2 million for lobbying against and creating Christian opposition to expansion of gambling casinos in the South; more than half came from Indian casino clients anxious to prevent competition
Pat Robertson was leader of the Christian Coalition, an organization with 1,200,000 committed, hard-right members. Reverend Dr. Robertson also hosts from Virginia Beach his highly influential “700 Club” on the Christian Broadcast Network, which he controls. He also operates “Operation Blessing” to help Africans, especially refugees. However, he was caught using its airplanes to ship equipment to his diamond mines in Africa. He has investments from China to the Congo, and had a partnership with one of Africa’s most unsavory tyrants.
In 1979, Robertson denounced “the humanistic/atheistic/hedonistic influence of the American government” which was controlled by the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. The television spellbinder not only influenced hundreds of thousands of voters, but he managed to collect $164,000,000 in contributions in 1997. As a result of running for the Republican presidential nomination in 1988, he acquired a mailing list of over 3,000,000 angry and very conservative people, a list that became his most powerful asset, which he used to build the Christian Coalition into a major political force. The good reverend used it for at least one business venture. He encountered problems with the IRS and the FEC when he loaned out the list for Oliver North’s unsuccessful run for the Senate. Greg Palast, a careful investigator, said Robertson gave his mailing list to the George H.W. Bush campaign in 1992. Judy Liebert, the former chief financial officer of the Christian Coalition, insisted that Ralph Reed destroyed documents subpoened by the government. Some of them proved that the Coalition had printed Republican campaign literature.
In its in-house documents and in Robertson’s speeches, there is much harsh language about minorities and women. Coalition staffers said this was necessary to keep the contributions coming. A dismissed employee claimed that Ralph Reed, head of the coalition, destroyed subpoenaed documents. Robertson’s great following prevented the federal government from taking decisive action, but he did close the Christian Coalition and reestablished it with a slightly different name, the Christian Coalition of America. In 2000, he helped his friend George W. Bush win in Republican primaries in Virginia and South Carolina by portraying John McCain as ungodly. In 2003, he joined in the far right’s attack on the career elements in the State Department, stating, “If I could just get a nuclear device inside Foggy Bottom, I think that’s the answer.” Robertson and Falwell were mainly concerned with, abortion, sexual morality, anti-gun control, opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, and opposition to gay rights. They advocated school prayer, opposed sex education and backed teaching creationism or at least “teaching the controversy,” which means discussing both evolution and creationism in the science class. They demand that textbooks print disclaimers to the effect creationism was at least as good an explanation for human origins as human evolution. To accomplish their ends, they began running school board candidates in the eighties and quickly entered state politics. By 2003, Mississippi, Alabama, and Oklahoma had laws requiring this.
Soldiers of the Christian Right were also interested in enlisting Christ in the Cold War, and Falwell assured his followers that “Jesus was not a pacifist. He was not a sissy.” The Religious Right operated telephone banks and was very effective at get-out-the vote operations. At election time, Falwell’s allies passed out voter guides on Sundays. By the nineties, they sponsored attack-advertising campaigns in some states where they were particularly interested in electing Republican senators. Reverend Tim LaHaye also entered the political arena in the late seventies. He was initially motivated by a desire to battle President Jimmy Carter’s plans to strip Christian schools of tax exemptions if they practiced racial discrimination. Soon, his concerns broadened to include the full agenda of the Christian Right.
Another powerful Christian evangelical spokesman was Dr. James Dobson, who built his following addressing family values. “Focus on the Family,” Dobson’s radio broadcast reached 7.5 million listeners per week in 2002. Gary Bauer, a conservative Christian politician, ran unsuccessfully for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000. Although his showing was not impressive, he built up a network of 100,000 activists who petition politicians when he gives the signal. These leaders realize that anger is the energy source that gives their movement life and vitality, and they have proven to be very effective at playing upon anger and transforming it into conservative Republican political activism.
Dr. Dobson’s messages are carried on Salem Communication’s network, which owns 103 stations and has more than 1,900 affiliates. Christian radio stations are growing at a rapid rate, and it is estimated that 100 million people listen to them. Except perhaps in the case of the campaign to recall Gray Davis, the stations have avoided obvious political involvement, but their messages are nonetheless unmistakable. Recently Dobson has been assisting a young evangelist who promises to be a very effective successor to Robertson and Falwell, Rod Parsley of Columbus, Ohio, a pastor of a 12,000 mega church in the Columbus suburbs. Though white, his worship and preaching style has attracted many African-Americans. He is credited with doubling the number of African American Republican votes in 2004, when he cris-crossed the state with Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, denouncing gay marriage. As a preacher he combines cultural wars issues with the prosperity gospel. Services are like pep rallies, the atmosphere is sweaty and emotion filled. Parsley holds that compliant, tithing Christians will be assisted by God in realizing their material dreams.
In his preaching, he stops just a shade short of endorsing a party or candidate but the message is unmistakably. He favors legislation that would permit clergy to discuss parties and candidates in church. Borrowing from his friend former Senator Zel Miller, he calls himself a “Christocrat.” Through Reformation Ohio, he seeks a million converts and 400,000 new voters. For him religion and politics are reverse sides of the same coin, and he explicitly endorses the entire Republican economic agenda, even questioning the value of Social Security and Medicare. Since the November 2004 election he has appeared with many prominent Republican leaders, explaining to party operatives how best to exploit culture wars issues and appeal to much greater numbers of blacks. When George W. Bush nominated John Roberts to the Supreme Court, Parsley shared a conference call with him to introduce the candidate to ministers across the nation. Though a Bible College dropout, Parsley is considered by hundreds of ministers to be anointed by God to lead conservatives in the next phase of the culture war. Parsley took over a major mega church in Colorado Springs in late 2006 after its pastor admitted homosexual practices.
Reverend Doug Coe is one of the nation’s most influential Christian leaders. He is little know and keeps a low profile. Yet he is the friend of presidents and counts many Washington figures as friends and followers, including Senator Hillary Clinton. He operates The Fellowship, which puts on the annual National Prayer Breakfast, and operates out of an estate on the Potomac called the The Cedars. He claims to be non-political, but his followers are mostly on the right. Mrs. Clinton sought comfort in its ranks during the Lewinsky scandal. She is a member of a Bible study group and an all female prayer cell. Some say that The Fellowship practices “cobelligerency” in welcoming non-conservatives. Evangelical theologian Francis Schaeffer used this term to describe alliances evangelicals found it necessary to develop with Roman Catholics. The Fellowship or Family does admit to waging “spiritual war” on behalf of Christ.
Sherman has written African American Baseball: A brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum
Pat Robertson was leader of the Christian Coalition, an organization with 1,200,000 committed, hard-right members. Reverend Dr. Robertson also hosts from Virginia Beach his highly influential “700 Club” on the Christian Broadcast Network, which he controls. He also operates “Operation Blessing” to help Africans, especially refugees. However, he was caught using its airplanes to ship equipment to his diamond mines in Africa. He has investments from China to the Congo, and had a partnership with one of Africa’s most unsavory tyrants.
In 1979, Robertson denounced “the humanistic/atheistic/hedonistic influence of the American government” which was controlled by the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. The television spellbinder not only influenced hundreds of thousands of voters, but he managed to collect $164,000,000 in contributions in 1997. As a result of running for the Republican presidential nomination in 1988, he acquired a mailing list of over 3,000,000 angry and very conservative people, a list that became his most powerful asset, which he used to build the Christian Coalition into a major political force. The good reverend used it for at least one business venture. He encountered problems with the IRS and the FEC when he loaned out the list for Oliver North’s unsuccessful run for the Senate. Greg Palast, a careful investigator, said Robertson gave his mailing list to the George H.W. Bush campaign in 1992. Judy Liebert, the former chief financial officer of the Christian Coalition, insisted that Ralph Reed destroyed documents subpoened by the government. Some of them proved that the Coalition had printed Republican campaign literature.
In its in-house documents and in Robertson’s speeches, there is much harsh language about minorities and women. Coalition staffers said this was necessary to keep the contributions coming. A dismissed employee claimed that Ralph Reed, head of the coalition, destroyed subpoenaed documents. Robertson’s great following prevented the federal government from taking decisive action, but he did close the Christian Coalition and reestablished it with a slightly different name, the Christian Coalition of America. In 2000, he helped his friend George W. Bush win in Republican primaries in Virginia and South Carolina by portraying John McCain as ungodly. In 2003, he joined in the far right’s attack on the career elements in the State Department, stating, “If I could just get a nuclear device inside Foggy Bottom, I think that’s the answer.” Robertson and Falwell were mainly concerned with, abortion, sexual morality, anti-gun control, opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, and opposition to gay rights. They advocated school prayer, opposed sex education and backed teaching creationism or at least “teaching the controversy,” which means discussing both evolution and creationism in the science class. They demand that textbooks print disclaimers to the effect creationism was at least as good an explanation for human origins as human evolution. To accomplish their ends, they began running school board candidates in the eighties and quickly entered state politics. By 2003, Mississippi, Alabama, and Oklahoma had laws requiring this.
Soldiers of the Christian Right were also interested in enlisting Christ in the Cold War, and Falwell assured his followers that “Jesus was not a pacifist. He was not a sissy.” The Religious Right operated telephone banks and was very effective at get-out-the vote operations. At election time, Falwell’s allies passed out voter guides on Sundays. By the nineties, they sponsored attack-advertising campaigns in some states where they were particularly interested in electing Republican senators. Reverend Tim LaHaye also entered the political arena in the late seventies. He was initially motivated by a desire to battle President Jimmy Carter’s plans to strip Christian schools of tax exemptions if they practiced racial discrimination. Soon, his concerns broadened to include the full agenda of the Christian Right.
Another powerful Christian evangelical spokesman was Dr. James Dobson, who built his following addressing family values. “Focus on the Family,” Dobson’s radio broadcast reached 7.5 million listeners per week in 2002. Gary Bauer, a conservative Christian politician, ran unsuccessfully for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000. Although his showing was not impressive, he built up a network of 100,000 activists who petition politicians when he gives the signal. These leaders realize that anger is the energy source that gives their movement life and vitality, and they have proven to be very effective at playing upon anger and transforming it into conservative Republican political activism.
Dr. Dobson’s messages are carried on Salem Communication’s network, which owns 103 stations and has more than 1,900 affiliates. Christian radio stations are growing at a rapid rate, and it is estimated that 100 million people listen to them. Except perhaps in the case of the campaign to recall Gray Davis, the stations have avoided obvious political involvement, but their messages are nonetheless unmistakable. Recently Dobson has been assisting a young evangelist who promises to be a very effective successor to Robertson and Falwell, Rod Parsley of Columbus, Ohio, a pastor of a 12,000 mega church in the Columbus suburbs. Though white, his worship and preaching style has attracted many African-Americans. He is credited with doubling the number of African American Republican votes in 2004, when he cris-crossed the state with Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, denouncing gay marriage. As a preacher he combines cultural wars issues with the prosperity gospel. Services are like pep rallies, the atmosphere is sweaty and emotion filled. Parsley holds that compliant, tithing Christians will be assisted by God in realizing their material dreams.
In his preaching, he stops just a shade short of endorsing a party or candidate but the message is unmistakably. He favors legislation that would permit clergy to discuss parties and candidates in church. Borrowing from his friend former Senator Zel Miller, he calls himself a “Christocrat.” Through Reformation Ohio, he seeks a million converts and 400,000 new voters. For him religion and politics are reverse sides of the same coin, and he explicitly endorses the entire Republican economic agenda, even questioning the value of Social Security and Medicare. Since the November 2004 election he has appeared with many prominent Republican leaders, explaining to party operatives how best to exploit culture wars issues and appeal to much greater numbers of blacks. When George W. Bush nominated John Roberts to the Supreme Court, Parsley shared a conference call with him to introduce the candidate to ministers across the nation. Though a Bible College dropout, Parsley is considered by hundreds of ministers to be anointed by God to lead conservatives in the next phase of the culture war. Parsley took over a major mega church in Colorado Springs in late 2006 after its pastor admitted homosexual practices.
Reverend Doug Coe is one of the nation’s most influential Christian leaders. He is little know and keeps a low profile. Yet he is the friend of presidents and counts many Washington figures as friends and followers, including Senator Hillary Clinton. He operates The Fellowship, which puts on the annual National Prayer Breakfast, and operates out of an estate on the Potomac called the The Cedars. He claims to be non-political, but his followers are mostly on the right. Mrs. Clinton sought comfort in its ranks during the Lewinsky scandal. She is a member of a Bible study group and an all female prayer cell. Some say that The Fellowship practices “cobelligerency” in welcoming non-conservatives. Evangelical theologian Francis Schaeffer used this term to describe alliances evangelicals found it necessary to develop with Roman Catholics. The Fellowship or Family does admit to waging “spiritual war” on behalf of Christ.
Sherman has written African American Baseball: A brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Christian Reconstructionists
There are other evangelical Christians, also political conservatives, who do not accept this approach to End Times. They believe that Christians must gain control of government before Christ will return. These Christian Reconstructionists believe that they must rule and establish the Kingdom of God before Christ will come. They detest the First Amendment and want to rule using a literal interpretation of biblical law “Dominionists” or Reconstructionists want to restore Old Testament law, uphold capitalism, and abolish business regulations. They claim as many as 20,000, 000 followers, but this figures appears to be a great exaggeration. Nevertheless, they are growing rapidly, and they exert a great influence within the evangelical movement.
Reconstructionists are the driving force behind the evangelical attacks on public schools and science. They have clearly taken over the Presbyterian Church in America, but not the moderate Presbyterian Church (USA). They have also made inroads in the Southern Baptist Convention. Republican parties in twenty states have adopted their “A Christian nation” platforms. They believe women should be subordinated to men, and in the best situation, not vote. Gary North, one of their leaders, calls for the stoning of nonbelievers and gays. Even some of his friends call him “Scary Gary.” Herb Titus, another leader, claims the First Amendment protects the right to criticize government but it does not guarantee freedom of speech. They also oppose separation of church and state and emphasize the importance of religious schools. Under leader Gary De Mar, head of America Vision and leader of the Restore America rally, they are growing in influence.
George W. Bush fashioned his compassionate conservatism on the work of one of their most prolific writers, Marvin Olasky. Of course, De Mar is their most prolific writer. Their goal is control of the USA and exclusion of non-believers from citizenship and the franchise. They envision thousands of executions a year, including those of witches and women who lie about their sexual pasts. Reconstructionists play an important role in the Council for National Policy, a group that coordinates the political activities of the Religious Right.
The Reconstructionists advocate a form of Dominionism. Christopher Hedges has suggested that the Christian Right, practically as a whole, is comprised of Dominionists. This suggests they reject the secular state, but it is more likely that those who go that far are far less numerous. However, he is right in saying that the mindset of the Christian right promotes outlooks that short-circuit reality-based thinking. Indeed, rational discussion with many of these people becomes very difficult, if not impossible. Millions whose economic condition is not good tend to think that God has a plan to resolve their problems. People in despair over their conditions and believing they have no real social identity achieve a kind of heroism by joining conservative religious movements. Their outlook, both political and religious, breeds intolerance and strips those who disagree of legitimacy as actors in a republic. Hedges claim that the New Right and Religious right pump “garbage” “day in and day out into people’s minds [which] poisons the civic discourse of the nation and is going to have an effect in a moment of instability.”
Sherman has written African American Baseball: A brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum
Reconstructionists are the driving force behind the evangelical attacks on public schools and science. They have clearly taken over the Presbyterian Church in America, but not the moderate Presbyterian Church (USA). They have also made inroads in the Southern Baptist Convention. Republican parties in twenty states have adopted their “A Christian nation” platforms. They believe women should be subordinated to men, and in the best situation, not vote. Gary North, one of their leaders, calls for the stoning of nonbelievers and gays. Even some of his friends call him “Scary Gary.” Herb Titus, another leader, claims the First Amendment protects the right to criticize government but it does not guarantee freedom of speech. They also oppose separation of church and state and emphasize the importance of religious schools. Under leader Gary De Mar, head of America Vision and leader of the Restore America rally, they are growing in influence.
George W. Bush fashioned his compassionate conservatism on the work of one of their most prolific writers, Marvin Olasky. Of course, De Mar is their most prolific writer. Their goal is control of the USA and exclusion of non-believers from citizenship and the franchise. They envision thousands of executions a year, including those of witches and women who lie about their sexual pasts. Reconstructionists play an important role in the Council for National Policy, a group that coordinates the political activities of the Religious Right.
The Reconstructionists advocate a form of Dominionism. Christopher Hedges has suggested that the Christian Right, practically as a whole, is comprised of Dominionists. This suggests they reject the secular state, but it is more likely that those who go that far are far less numerous. However, he is right in saying that the mindset of the Christian right promotes outlooks that short-circuit reality-based thinking. Indeed, rational discussion with many of these people becomes very difficult, if not impossible. Millions whose economic condition is not good tend to think that God has a plan to resolve their problems. People in despair over their conditions and believing they have no real social identity achieve a kind of heroism by joining conservative religious movements. Their outlook, both political and religious, breeds intolerance and strips those who disagree of legitimacy as actors in a republic. Hedges claim that the New Right and Religious right pump “garbage” “day in and day out into people’s minds [which] poisons the civic discourse of the nation and is going to have an effect in a moment of instability.”
Sherman has written African American Baseball: A brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)