Religious Right Watch

Alt-right Christians Embrace the Racist Roots of the Religious Right

Sarah Posner's New Republic article, "Amazing Disgrace" (March 20, 2017) asks the question: "How did Donald Trump—a thrice-married, biblically illiterate sexual predator—hijack the religious right?"

As data about voting patterns and survey results mount, it's increasingly clear that millions of self-identified, rank-and-file conservative Christians are at home with ideas or attitudes of the racist and nationalist right-wing—the so-called alt-right.

The term alt-right derives from "alternative right." But intentionally or not it also echos the German alt, old, and could in fact be described as a kind of "Old Right"—nativist, backward-looking, homophobic, and seeking racial and cultural homogenization including through non-democratic means if necessary.

Posner's article presents stark confirmation that the religious right-wing in its support of Donald Trump is letting its slip show: that the movement's foundation garment, close to the skin as it were, is racism.

Posner notes that the religious right was:

galvanized in the 1970s and early ’80s, when the IRS revoked the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University and other conservative Christian schools that refused to admit nonwhites. It was the government’s actions against segregated schools, not the legalization of abortion, that “enraged the Christian community,” Moral Majority co-founder Paul Weyrich has acknowledged.

By openly embracing the racism of the alt-right, Trump effectively played to the religious right’s own roots in white supremacy.

Posner notes that "white evangelicals were the key to Trump’s victory—they provided the numbers that the alt-right lacks."

In fact, these alt-right Christians—millions among America's conservative evangelical, conservative Pentecostal, and fundamentalist Christians—reflect this grim reality more so than some of their religious leaders.

Posner:

According to Brad Griffin, a white supremacist activist in Alabama, “the average evangelical, not-too-religious Southerner who’s sort of a populist” was drawn to Trump primarily “because they like the attitude.”
.....
Before the election, Griffin worried that white evangelicals would find his “Southern nationalist” views problematic. But.... “All these pastors and whatnot went in there and said Trump’s a racist, a bigot, and a fascist and all this, and their followers didn’t listen to them.”

Those ignored evangelical leaders are mindful of the large percentage of younger American who reject in particular the divisiveness, homophobia, and Republican Party partisanship that has marked conservative Christianity in America for more than 40 years.

Concerned about generational decline, and perhaps more mindful through pastoral experience and formal theological training, they are more critical of Trump, including his demagogic and authoritarian proclivities not to mention the xenophobic and often crypto-racist rhetoric and policies.

Even conservative evangelical Reverend Rob Schenck, a leader of the religious right especially visible in the 1990s, is concerned.

Posner:

Schenck fears that “Trump and his gang” have exposed an evangelical culture “that doesn’t know itself.” Sitting in his Capitol Hill townhouse, Schenck picks up his copy of Ethics, by the anti-Nazi theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer, he says, argued that because Jesus was a “man for others,” Christians are called “not to hold the other in contempt, or to be afraid of the other, or contemptuous of the other.” Yet when Schenck visited evangelical churches during the Obama years, he lost count of how many times he was asked, quite earnestly: “Is the president the Antichrist?”

Read the article in full at: https://newrepublic.com/article/140961/amazing-disgrace-donald-trump-hijacked-religious-right

Letter from Seven Evangelical Christian Leaders to President Trump

The letter can be downloaded as a PDF here, as referenced in the Politico.com article, "Christian groups oppose Trump's preference for Christian refugees."

January 29, 2017

Dear President Trump and Vice President Pence,

As evangelical Christians, we are guided by the Bible to be particularly concerned for the plight of refugees, individuals who have been forced to flee their countries because of the threat of persecution. Evangelical churches and ministries have long played a key role in welcoming, resettling, and assisting in the integration of refugees from various parts of the world. As such, we are troubled by the recent executive order temporarily halting refugee resettlement and dramatically reducing the number of refugees who could be considered for resettlement to the U.S.

The Bible teaches us that each person—including each refugee, regardless of their country of origin, religious background, or any other qualifier—is made in the Image of God, with inherent dignity and potential. Their lives matter to God, and they matter to us. While the U.S. has in recent years received only a fraction of 1 percent of the world’s refugees annually, we believe the refugee resettlement program provides a lifeline to these uniquely vulnerable individuals and a vital opportunity for our churches to live out the biblical commands to love our neighbors, to make disciples of all nations, and to practice hospitality.

Our faith also compels us to be concerned with the well-being of families. Most of the refugees admitted to the U.S. in recent years are family reunification cases, coming to join a relative already in the country. A temporary moratorium will unnecessarily delay families whose cases already have been screened and approved from being reunited.

We fully affirm the important role of the U.S. government in vetting and screening those considered for resettlement to our country; indeed, it is a God-ordained responsibility of government. However, the U.S. refugee resettlement program’s screening process is already extremely thorough—more intensive, in fact, than the vetting that is required of any other category of visitor or immigrant to our nation—and it has a remarkably strong record. While we are always open to improvements to our government’s screening process, we believe that our nation can continue to be both compassionate and secure.

We would ask that you reconsider these decisions, allowing for resettlement of refugees to resume immediately so that our churches and ministries can continue to live out our faith in this way.

We are praying for you and for all of those in positions of civil authority, that God would continue to grant you wisdom and guidance.

Respectfully,

Chad Hayward
CEO, Accord Network

Shirley V. Hoogstra
President, Council for Christian Colleges and Universities

Hyepin Im
President & CEO, Korean Churches for Community Development

Leith Anderson
President, National Association of Evangelicals

Rev. Dr. Samuel Rodriguez
President, National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference

Rev. Dr. Jo Anne Lyon
Ambassador, The Wesleyan Church

Scott Arbeiter
President, World Relief Richard Stearns President World Vision US

“When Exemption is the Rule: The Religious Freedom Strategy of the Christian Right," by Frederick Clarkson

From Paul Rosenberg's piece in Salon:

“When Exemption is the Rule: The Religious Freedom Strategy of the Christian Right,” published by Political Research Associates on Jan. 12, was written by Frederick Clarkson, PRA’s Senior Fellow for Religious Liberty, author of “Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy” and co-founder of the blog Talk to Action. The title highlights a key aspect of the religious right’s long-term strategy, taking the time-honored principle of religious exemption, intended to protect the individual right of conscience, and expanding it recklessly to apply to whole institutions, even for-profit businesses—as seen in the Supreme Court’s 2014 Hobby Lobby decision, in a process designed to fragment the common public sphere and carve out vast segments of American life where civil rights, labor law and other core protections simply do not apply.

U.S. Episcopal Church from full participation in the Anglican Communion.

With the news this week that

Anglican leaders meeting in Canterbury have temporarily suspended the U.S. Episcopal Church from full participation in the Anglican Communion. The move comes at the behest of conservative bishops — mostly from Africa — who are unhappy with the American church's stance on same-sex marriage and gay clergy.

it should be remembered that US fundamentalists for years now have made insidious and malevolent political and cultural interventions, machinations, and consultations in African nations in order to fan the flames of homophobia, even to the point of helping shape and promote death penalty laws.

American fundamentalists loathe The Episcopal Church, and this division in the Anglican Communion is one of many consequences they hoped to see result from wretched handiwork in Africa.

See: How anti-gay Christians evangelize hate abroad. From that op-ed by Kapya Kaoma:

In nations such as Uganda, Russia, Nigeria and Belize, an insidious homophobia engineered in America is taking root. I have seen this hate being spread with my own eyes.

In March 2009, while in Kampala, Uganda, researching reports of U.S. right-wing evangelical involvement in attacks on LGBTQ equality and reproductive justice, I was invited to a three-day conference on homosexuality hosted by the Family Life Network, which is based in New York. The keynote speaker was Scott Lively from Springfield, Mass., who introduced himself as a leading expert on the "international homosexual agenda." I filmed Lively over the course of two days as he instructed religious and political leaders about how gays were coming to Uganda from the West to "recruit children into homosexuality."

Creationists Targeting Teachers | NCSE

Appalling. Science denialism, including as it relates to evolution, deserves a place alongside of phrenology, and Creationist literature has all of the scientific validity of Der Ewige Jude.

In front of me [at the National Education Association (NEA) meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, in 2013] were hundreds of books, DVDs, and handouts spouting creationist myths and targeting evolution as falsehoods being distributed to teachers. It nearly paralyzed me to watch as teachers, attracted by the glow of free, new materials, took stacks to distribute back home. I saw thirty years of NCSE’s good work slowly wash away as each teacher took a book or DVD. What was worse was the knowledge that many, if not all of them, thought they were receiving good and legitimate science. The teachers were being fooled.

Now, I could spend the rest of this post talking about the many reasons why this is a problem. I could talk about how creationist myths misrepresent the evidence for evolution and the nature of science. I could talk about how by distributing this material, the creationists are setting teachers up for painful and expensive lawsuits, as teaching creationism in public schools has been found to be unconstitutional. Or I could simply ask if it wouldn’t be better not to waste students’ time.

But I want to talk about what NCSE is doing about this.

Read the entire article at: ncse.com

Christian Right Leaders Escalate Anti-LGBTQ Threats | Political Research Associates

From Frederick Clarkson of Political Research Associates:

In recent years, we have repeatedly heard threats of civil disobedience from Christian Right Leaders – everyone from the signers of the historic, 2009 Manhattan Declaration (which included top Roman Catholic prelates and evangelical and organized Christian right leaders), to Rick Warren.  We have heard predictions of civil war, revolution, and martyrdom from the likes of Catholic thinker John McCloskey, theocratic evangelical intellectual Peter Leithart, and even Christian Right electoral activist David Lane. We have also heard calls for political assassinations and secessionist civil war from White Southern Christian Nationalists, Michael Hill, David Whitney, and Michael Peroutka.

Most recently, some 200 Christian Right figures signed a renewed pledge of resistance to the anticipated Supreme Court decision favoring marriage equality.  At a press conference, they called this “A Bonhoeffer Moment in America.” The reference is to the famous Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who resisted the Nazi regime and was hanged for his role in an unsuccessful plot to assassinate Adolph Hitler.  Bonhoeffer is increasingly invoked by Christian Right leaders as they compare the situation in the United States to Nazi Germany and cast him—as they choose to define him—as a role model for Christian Right resistance.

Read the article at: www.politicalresearch.org

For Christian Millennials, gay marriage debate produces new views on morality - Yahoo News

On Tuesday, March 17, 2015, Palisades Presbytery became the 86th of the 171 presbyteries of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) to approve redefining marriage in the Book of Order from the sacred union between “a man and a woman” to between “two people, traditionally a man and a woman.” It points to a deeper debate for Millennials about interpretations of biblical morality.  

From the Christian Science Monitor article, "For Christian Millennials, gay marriage debate produces new views on morality."

In general, American Protestantism has long been defined by its reliance on the Bible as its sole authority. And [David Gushee, an evangelical and professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University in Atlanta], still bases his ethical thinking on Scripture. But, he says, Protestantism has long changed its interpretations of the Bible as its experiences have begun to change.

Even Evangelicals as a whole, he points out, changed their interpretation of Scripture to accommodate expanded roles for women – upending selected verses that had been understood to mean women should be silent or keep their heads covered. The experience of slavery and the Holocaust also transformed the Bible’s ostensible teachings on race.

And today, new experiences, especially among the young, are transforming what Gushee sees as misinterpretations of what the Bible condemns in a handful of passages, written to address an ancient context.

“A big part of why that is the case is because more and more of us are coming to know gay and lesbian Christians, in their dignity and their suffering,” he says. “Many Millennials no longer find the older narratives of condemnation plausible: It doesn’t fit the facts, and it doesn’t fit the lives of people that we know.”

[Alex Patchin] McNeill, part of a younger generation of leaders in the PC(USA) and [executive director of More Light Presbyterians (MLP), an advocacy group in Minnetonka, Minn., that has worked to change the church’s definition of marriage], invokes the traditional “Protestant principle” proclaimed in the church’s Book of Order: “The church affirms Ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda secundum verbum Dei, that is, ‘The church reformed, always to be reformed according to the Word of God’ in the power of the Spirit.”

via news.yahoo.com

More here at the More Light Presbyterians website.

Photo: some leading clergy of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) at 219th General Assembly of the denomination, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2010.

Holy Bullies and Headless Monsters: NYT column provides excellent counterpoint to 'religious liberty' sham

The blog Holy Bullies and Headless Monsters notes:

The column in [January 11th's] New York Times by writer Frank Bruni -  Your God and My Dignity Religious Liberty, Bigotry and Gays - is a dignified, but still take-no-prisoners counterpoint on the anti-gay idea of religious liberty.

Read the post here.

The post's author, BlackTsunami, quotes Bruni's key observation:

. . .  Baking a cake, arranging roses, running an inn: These aren’t religious acts, certainly not if the establishments aren’t religious enclaves and are doing business with (and even dependent on) the general public.

 

Their owners are routinely interacting with customers who behave in ways they deem sinful. They don’t get to single out one group of supposed sinners. If they’re allowed to, who’s to say they’ll stop at that group?

 

  . . .  I support the right of people to believe what they do and say what they wish — in their pews, homes and hearts. But outside of those places? You must put up with me, just as I put up with you.

 

Click the chart to enlarge it for better readability.

January 16: The Christian Right Does Not Want You To Know About This Day - updated

In some parts of America you may not feel like this is the case, but you're free to not have to be a Christian in America or an adherent of any religion. Please blog, write, tweet, post, and shout out about Religious Freedom Day, which (since 1992) is January 16 every year. Learn more about it from Frederick Clarkson and Elena Carlena. Of course,  blog, write, tweet, post, vlog, shout out, and everything else on January 16 itself about religious freedom in the United States. 

(One important aside: the domain name and website ReligiousFreedomDay.com is, alas, owned by a religious right-wing group.*)

Clarkson explains about the history of Religious Freedom Day:

In the heat of our political moment, we sometimes don’t see how our future connects deeply to our past. But the Christian Right does — and they do not like what they see.

The Christian Right has made religious freedom the ideological phalanx of its current campaigns in the culture wars. Religious freedom is now invoked as a way of seeking to derail access to reproductive health services as well as equality for LGBTQ people, most prominently regarding marriage equality.

But history provides little comfort for the theocratic visions of the Christian Right. And that is where our story begins.

For all of the shouting about religious liberty — from the landmark Hobby Lobby Supreme Court case, to the passage of the anti-gay Religious Freedom Restoration Act in Mississippi, and more — there is barely any mention, let alone any observance, of the official national Religious Freedom Day, enacted by Congress in 1992 and recognized every January 16 by an annual presidential proclamation.

The day commemorates the enactment of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom in 1786.

Read the rest of Frederick's excellent post at dailykos.com.

*This is to the point of several commentators. To quote Clarkson: "The Christian Right has made religious freedom the ideological phalanx of its current campaigns in the culture wars". So while it's true that the Christian Right doesn't want you to know about January 16, it might also be said that they don't want you to know about it unless they're the ones telling you about it.

Weighing 2016 bid, Bobby Jindal to meet with pastors in Iowa - Yahoo News

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal returns to Iowa on Tuesday to meet with local pastors and again look for support among Christian evangelicals for a possible White House campaign.

The stated reason for Jindal's trip is to talk about his headlining appearance later this month at a prayer rally that is expected to draw thousands of people to Baton Rouge, and to discuss ways to mount a similar event in Iowa.

"These are a group of Christian men and women very interested in spiritual revival, very interested in prayer," Jindal said in a Monday interview with The Associated Press.

But the private meetings with Christian religious leaders in Cedar Rapids and Des Moines also come as Jindal courts religious conservatives across the country ahead of the 2016 campaign.

Tuesday's trip to first-to-vote Iowa will be his fifth since June. In recent months, Jindal has also spoken to pastors in New Hampshire, at a gathering of faith leaders and conservative activists in Washington, and in Oklahoma at an event promoting a Bible museum planned by owners of Oklahoma City-based Hobby Lobby.

via news.yahoo.com

Christian right undermines marriage equality with religious supremacism – LGBTQ Nation

In his LGBTQ Nation op-ed, Frederick Clarkson looks at how Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council (FRC) thinks Christians who support marriage equality are not really Christians and that religious freedom is only for those who hold to what he calls "orthodox" views. Excerpt:

It...helps to clarify that when Christian Right leaders talk about religious liberty—they often really mean theocratic religious supremacism.

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, took to the airwaves after the filing of UCC’s suit to claim that the church is not really Christian, and that those who support gay rights don’t have the same rights as conservative Christians—because ‘true religious freedom’ only applies to ‘orthodox religious viewpoints.’”

Perkins’ blunt statements are a sobering reminder that theocratic factions of the U.S. Right have long sought to regain the religious and political hegemony they lost when the Constitution was ratified in the 18^th century

Read the op-ed in full at www.lgbtqnation.com

Censorship Challenge: Texas Pastor Seeks Restrictions On ‘Dangerous’ Library Books | Americans United

I think it’s pretty obvious what the Religious Right is up to here: They want to “protect” children from critical thinking, self-reflection and the type of curiosity about our world that an immersion into literature can give us.

via www.au.org

Rumblings of Theocratic Violence | Political Research Associates

Frederick Clarkson, senior fellow at Political Research Associates, examines a possible "ideological reorganization, or at least reconsideration, now taking place within the Christian Right" that calls for non-democratic means, possibly including martyrdom, to affect extremely conservative political change in the United States.

Clarkson begins with an essay by long-time Republican Party operative David Lane calling for religious war in the United States.

“If the American experiment with freedom is to end after 237 years,” wrote Republican campaign strategist David Lane in an essay published on a popular conservative website in 2013, “let each of us commit to brawl all the way to the end.”

Lane's essay, “Wage War to Restore a Christian Nation,” was published on World Net Daily (WND) and then removed from it. A month later, in July 2013, Lane

told conservative Iowa radio talk show host Steve Deace...that “car bombs in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C. and Des Moines, Iowa” would be merciful punishment from God for legalized abortion and for “homosexuals praying at the Inauguration [of President Obama’s second term].”

Since those comments, Lane is a man on the move, not a piraha. As Clarkson explains, in October 2013, Lane told the Dallas Morning News about an event of the Iowa Renewal Project,

one of several state-level units of the American Renewal Project—which is, in turn, a political development and mobilization project of the Mississippi-based American Family Association. Its most prominent figures are founder Don Wildmon and the abrasive radio host Bryan Fischer. Lane [said] that the goal of the event, which featured Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus and U.S. Sens. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Ted Cruz (R-TX), was the same as the others: “the mobilization of pastors and pews to restore America to our Judeo-Christian heritage and re-establish a Christian culture.” Lane said: “We’ve been in 15 states now, largely under the radar, and we’ve had 10,000 pastors plus spouses that we’ve put up overnight and fed three meals. The purpose is to get the pastors—the shepherds in America—to engage the culture through better registration and get out the vote.”

Clarkson also looks at writings of "theologian Peter Leithart, 55, a Christian Reconstructionist (hardline theocrat)", a "new Reformed Protestantism, called Federal Vision, whose leading lights include Neo-Confederate authors Wilson and Steven Wilkins",

Father C. John McCloskey, who believes that regional American strongholds of conservative Christianity may be necessary in light of the culture of religious pluralism and the constitutional doctrine of separation of church and state,

and Pastor David Whitney, 56, who leads the small Cornerstone Evangelical Free Church in Pasadena, MD (near Washington, D.C.).

Clarkson notes:

Taken singly, the views of [these] Christian Right leaders...would not necessarily signal a trend. But taken together, the commonalities of their views take the edge off of their many differences and reveal distinct, overlapping factions of a dynamic movement towards the ideas of nullification and secession—and the possibility of violence and revolution.

These leaders are not without influence, they are not without connections within the Republican Party, and, as Clarkson shows, they are deadly serious.

The rumblings may be faint, seemingly distant, but they absolutely must not be ignored.

Articles on Clarkson's essay have on Salon.com (article by Paul Rosenberg) and Buzzflash (an article by Bill Berkowitz).

Ohio Board Of Education Member Calls On Religious Right To Take Over Education | Right Wing Watch

PFAW's Right Wing Watch looks at Mark Smith and his agenda for Ohio education.

Mark Smith, who was appointed to the board of education by Gov. John Kasich last year, is president of Ohio Christian University and president of the Ohio Faith and Freedom Coalition. He said at one board meeting that books like Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” are “quite divisive” and part of an “underlying socialist-communist agenda.”

Read the entire article and listen to the audio clips on www.rightwingwatch.org

Does a 'religious left' threaten Abbott? | Business Spectator

Here is a rare and interesting opportunity to read about progressive people of faith, the "religious left", outside of the U.S. Rob Burgess of the Austrialian Business Spectator looks briefly but effectively at the situation, its recent past, and the domestic issues that may bring together the "religious" and the "left". See also the piece by Barney Zwarts in the Brisbane Times.

One might expect, therefore, to see church leaders picking up the same themes and looking for ways to assist the left of politics to back their social justice vision.

Such a union was seen as pretty natural in Australia right up until the 1955 Labor Party/Democratic Labor Party split precipitated by B. A. Santamaria’s Catholic Social Studies Movement.

Since that time, however, gettting ‘religion’ and ‘left’ together has proven much more difficult. Many of the political issues raised during the liberationist movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s – sexual liberation, contraception, abortion, same-sex marriage and the like – helped drive a wedge between church groups and the political left.

via www.businessspectator.com.au