Religious Right Watch

Project Blitz

Frederick Clarkson in Religious Dispatches has a new article out: "'Project Blitz' Seeks to do for Christian Nationalism What ALEC Does for Big Business". 

The article concerns a 116-page playbook for the Christian Right's state legislative strategy on religious liberty.

Launched initially in 2015, Project Blitz brings something new and dramatic to the Christian Right as it continues to mature as a political movement—especially in light of its electoral advances in state governments over the past decade. To that end, Project Blitz has also been organizing state legislative “Prayer Caucuses” since its inception. There are currently 29 such groups, modeled on the Congressional Prayer Caucus (which comprises about a hundred sitting U.S. Senators and Representatives.) They range from very small in terms of publicly named members, to remarkably large; Iowa boasts 65 members, plus the Governor and Lt. Governor.

Trump, Trump, he's their man. The Christian Right's unsurprising embrace of Donald Trump

Michelle Goldberg, in her column in The New York Times, "Of Course the Christian Right Supports Trump," writes:

Despite his louche personal life, Trump, the racist patriarch promising cultural revenge, doesn’t threaten the religious right’s traditional values. He embodies them.

This week, Tony Perkins, leader of the Family Research Council, told Politico that Trump gets a “mulligan,” or do-over, on his past moral transgressions, because he’s willing to stand up to the religious right’s enemies. Evangelicals, Perkins said, “were tired of being kicked around by Barack Obama and his leftists. And I think they are finally glad that there’s somebody on the playground that is willing to punch the bully.”

Perkins' argument and even language and tone are telling. The Christian Right is a political movement; political first and religious second. That doesn't mean that they are not ardent believers in the salvific work of Jesus Christ and its implication for all who have faith in Christ: eternal life in heaven. But it's noteworthy that after hundreds of hours of fellowship, sermons, worship, and Bible studies, the fruit of most conservative Christians' faith most publicly becomes not inspirational lovingkindness but right-wing political activity and even moral relativity when it suites them.

Goldberg notes that desegregation and not the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing regulated abortion was what triggered the rise of the Christian Right. 

In his 2014 biography of Jimmy Carter, the Dartmouth historian Randall Balmer quotes the conservative activist Paul Weyrich: “What caused the movement to surface was the federal government’s moves against Christian schools. This absolutely shattered the Christian community’s notions that Christians could isolate themselves inside their own institutions and teach what they please.”

In 2013, this blog highlighted the segregation-related origins of the Christian Right, also citing Balmer.

Consider the Christian Right in light of a key pattern seen in the Bible by New Testament scholar John Dominic Crossan. He writes:

the heartbeat of the Christian Bible is a recurrent cardiac cycle in which the asserted radicality of God’s nonviolent distributive justice is subverted by the normalcy of civilization’s violent retributive justice. And, of course, the most profound annulment is that both assertion and subversion are attributed to the same God or the same Christ.
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Throughout the biblical story, from Genesis to Revelation, every radical challenge from the biblical God is both asserted and then subverted by its receiving communities. (Crossan, John Dominic. How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian: Struggling with Divine Violence from Genesis Through Revelation.)

Thus we have the earlier, peaceful Jesus of the Gospels who enters Jerusalem on a humble donkey and the later, wrathful Jesus of Revelation, the last of the Bible's books to be written, who is violent and mighty. The Christian Right is perhaps surprisingly worldly insofar as they take the work of Christ to their heart and from that bear the fruit of machinations, the worldly game of right-wing and increasingly reactionary politics. They are more Imperial Rome than New Jerusalem, more the Machiavellian state than the Kingdom of Heaven. They keep their faith so long as it is not one that causes them political discomfiture. 

Former Methodist mega-church pastor and now progressive evangelical blogger and youth pastor John Pavlovitz recently reacted to an example of this sort of political conservative Christianity, the Christian Right's embrace of Donald Trump. On his blog Stuff That Needs to Be Said, Pavlovitz, addressing "White evangelicals," writes:

Your willingness to align yourself with cruelty is a costly marriage. Yes, you’ve gained a Supreme Court seat, a few months with the Presidency as a mouthpiece, and the cheap high of temporary power—but you’ve lost a whole lot more.

Image from The New York Times online: Jerry Falwell Jr., left, at a campaign event for Donald Trump in 2016. Credit Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

 

Religious Freedom — an interview with historian John Ragosta in Religious Dispatches

It's Religious Freedom Day 2018. On January 16, 1786, the Virginia General Assembly, in Fredericksburg, Virginia, enacted into state law the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which Thomas Jefferson had drafted in 1777.

Historian John Ragosta, author of Religious Freedom: Jefferson’s Legacy, America’s Creed, was interviewed for Religion Dispatches by Frederick Clarkson of Political Research Associates.

Ragosta remarked that "[Thomas] Jefferson was very clear that you can’t use religion or religious freedom to claim an exemption from an otherwise valid law."

He also noted:

Certainly most early Americans, including most of the Founders, were Christian–although some, like Jefferson, were not. (Jefferson rejected Jesus’ divinity, the resurrection, original sin, atonement, etc.; he is best described as a Unitarian.) But these same, very religious people decided that mixing church and state would corrupt both; separating them was best for both.

Ragosta calls for the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom to be posted in schools and read on or about Religious Freedom Day—which is January 16 every year—in churches, in schools, and at home to draw attention to the true value of religious freedom in America.

You can read the entire interview at Religion Dispatches.

Religious Freedom Day, Thomas Jefferson's way

Paul Rosenberg interviews Frederick Clarkson of Political Research Associates in the Salon piece, "Celebrate religious freedom — the way the Founding Fathers originally intended," subtitled: "Christian nationalists have tried to co-opt the idea, but what [Thomas] Jefferson meant was something revolutionary" 

Rosenberg notes: 

The U.S. Constitution was remarkable precisely because it didn’t claim to derive authority from God in the typical top-down manner, but instead, bottom-up, from the people, following the arguments used by John Locke to justify government, as well as his views on religious tolerance and the distinctions between secular and religious spheres of power. God is never mentioned in the Constitution, nor is any form of religion except in the negative: “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” 

Clarkson's advise regarding the persistent influence of the religious right in America:

The [political] system we have is competitive. Let’s not cede the playing field to the Christian right, which has invested so much in ideological development and the building of electoral capacity for several generations....

You can read the whole interview here, which considers the conservative theology of Dominionism that underpins much of the religious right's work, and introduces readers to how the religious right misrepresents religious freedom and the idea of the United States as having been founded as a Christian nation, as well as how the religious right organizes politically through Cultural Impact Teams, which are organized in churches and are based on training materials created by the Family Research Council (FRC), a conservative Christian right-wing organization.

(Credit: Getty/Wikimedia/Salon)

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.”
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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