Wednesday, December 12, 2007

McChurch - Now Comes the Huckabee/Messiah Ticket

Huckabee: Jesus is His Co-Pilot

By:
Stan Moody

Besides the fact that there is something uncomfortably wild about Mike Huckabee’s eyes, there is that troubling 1992 statement encouraging quarantine of all AIDS victims – seven years after the medical opinion that AIDS could not be caught through incidental contact. To a public that is tiring (one hopes) of swashbuckling presidents with southern accents, up pops his 1998 sermon to Southern Baptist preachers in Salt Lake City (Arkansas-Democratic Gazette, June 8, 1998, Linda S. Caillouet).

“The reason that we have so much government is because we have so much broken humanity.” True enough, I say, albeit that all humanity is broken to one degree or another. “And the reason we have so much broken humanity is that sin reigns in the hearts and lives of human beings instead of the Savior.” Is that to say that if sin reigned in the heart of the Savior all would be mended? I take advantage of poor syntax, of course. Irresistible!

“Government knows it does not have the answer, but it's arrogant and acts as though it does." Arrogance is, I suspect, in the eye of the beholder. Read on! “Church does have the answer but will cowardly deny that it does and wonder when the world will be changed." That benign stance has been altered dramatically since the Christian Right officially merged with the Republican Party.

These days, the church not only has the answer, it has proclaimed that answer from the pulpits and from the airwaves in violation of its tax-exempt privilege. It has come of age and no longer wonders when the world will be changed. The world will be changed when certain freedoms of choice and certain alternative lifestyles are made unlawful and the nation is thereby declared sinless. There are more pearls of wisdom from the Governor.

“I fear we (the church) will turn and hit the snooze button one more time and lose this great republic of ours.” In other words, the preservation of this “great republic of ours” is dependent, not on the divine initiative of a Sovereign God but on the political mobilization of the Christian public. We must not let incidentals such as Christian doctrine stand in the way of progress.

Has the current legion of theocrats restored this “great republic of ours?”


“I'm often asked why taxes are so high and government is so big. It's because the faith we have in local churches has become so small. If we'd been doing what we should have -- giving a dime from every dollar to help the widows, the orphans and the poor -- we now wouldn't be giving nearly 50 cents of every dollar to a government that's doing ... what we should have been doing all along."

Excuse me, Governor, but what is this “faith we have in local churches?” I thought you were advocating for faith in Jesus Christ? Or is that the Freudian slippage of syntax again? You mention the “local church.” In fact, the local church is an institution of questionable merit these days, overwhelmed as it is by a recalcitrant and unrepentant megachurch spawned in large part by your very denomination whose long history has boasted racism, sexism and apartheid.

It gets worse.

"I didn't get into politics because I thought government had a better answer. I got into politics because I knew government didn't have the real answers – that the real answers lie in accepting Jesus Christ into our lives." Let me get this straight. You leave the pastorate where you are urging people to accept Jesus Christ into their lives as the answer to all human woe and go into politics because government does not have real answers to human woe. While I can’t argue with the reasoning, the logic of it all somehow escapes me.

Is the answer to human woe to legislate belief in Jesus Christ so that we can reduce the size of government? Duh! "There's not one thing we can do in those marbled halls and domed capitols that can equal what's done when Jesus touches the life of a sinner." You left the business of touching the life of a sinner for what?

Is there any thinking person left out there who still wonders about that wild look in Huckabee’s eyes?

All this from a guy who recently stated that “Jesus is too smart to run for President.” How about Vice President? The Huckabee/Messiah ticket!

When are we going to hear from the adults?





Thursday, December 6, 2007

McChurch and Strange Bedfellows

The FundamentaList

This week in the religious right: Barnstorming Iowa for Huckabee, Romney's JFK Speech, scare tactics on the Fairness Doctrine and school anti-bullying legislation, and an explanation of the $23,000 commode.


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1. Evangelicals Campaign for Huckabee in Iowa Former Baptist minister Mike Huckabee might be the king of the folksy one-liner, but charm alone doesn't explain the recent explosion of conservative Christian support for him in Iowa. According to the Washington Post, Huckabee has gotten more than a little boost from another king, the master of a coveted e-mail list of 71 million Christian voters. Randy Brinson, formerly of the Alabama Christian Coalition and now head of Redeem the Vote, has, according to the Post, provided 414,000 contacts for Huckabee in Iowa alone, a full quarter of all expected caucus-goers. Redeem the Vote is a Christian organization devoted to registering young people to vote; it has been hailed as the second coming of the Christian right -- this time in a less divisive package. Huckabee's alliance with Brinson goes back to 2004, when he agreed to serve as the chair of the organization's advisory committee. Brinson has been lauded as a new voice for politically active Christians -- he had critical words about "Dobson and those guys" in the Post piece -- a conservative who seems to hew to the Huckabee line that he "isn't mad about it." Brinson is one of the evangelical co-authors of Third Way's "Come Let Us Reason Together" position paper, aimed at forging consensus between evangelicals and progressives on issues like gay marriage and abortion. But that doesn't make Brinson -- or Huckabee -- a raging liberal by any stretch of the imagination. As Jeff Sharlet has pointed out, the fact that the Democratic Party has also enlisted Brinson's help proves that they are moving to the right to attract the "faith" vote -- not that Brinson has moved left. Sharlet wrote that "the 'new evangelicals' [Brinson] told me, are as anti-queer as ever, but they'll agree not to talk about it so long as 'the gay stuff's not in your face.' Don't-ask, don't-tell is the new moderation." Brinson is partnering with Vision America's Rick Scarborough to barnstorm across Iowa for ten days, staring tomorrow. Scarborough (who has personally endorsed Huckabee) has made a career out of serving up some of the most divisive rhetoric from the Christian right (see, e.g., his book entitled Liberalism Kills Kids, his convening of a War on Christians conference with all the usual bugaboos like the ACLU, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, and those terrible prosecutors persecuting the godly Tom DeLay). They'll be teaming up with the Iowa Family Policy Institute and the Iowa Christian Alliance, "registering thousands of voters and mobilizing tens of thousands to vote their values during the Iowa caucuses in January." It's hard to see how that will help any candidate but Huckabee, unless, of course, it just helps Giuliani. Also this week, Huckabee spoke at the secretiveIowa Renewal Project, along with heavy hitters Newt Gingrich, American Family Association president Don Wildmon (who has endorsed Huckabee), and "Christian nation" proponent David Barton. The event bore the same name as Gingrich's most recent book, Rediscovering God in America. Huckabee has maintained the secrecy of his appearances at Renewal Project events, which appear to be similar to the Texas Restoration Project, launched by Scarborough associate Laurence Wright (also a speaker at the Iowa event), which helped build evangelical support for Rick Perry in his gubernatorial race in 2006.

2. Romney to Give Speech on Faith Although his supporters deny that the Huckabee "surge" triggered his decision, Romney has announced he is going to give a speech on the history of faith in America -- particularly our tolerance of different faiths -- and how his own Mormon faith would inform his presidency. It's being billed as Romney's "JFK speech," but, ah, well, you know what the punchline is. Perhaps Romney's deer-in-the-headlights answer to last week's CNN/YouTube debate question about biblical literalism was a greater impetus than Huckabee's rise in the polls. Romney looked like he was about to be waterboarded --– his eyes widened, and he stammered through what he hoped would be the answer sought by his interrogators. He didn't have to compete for the votes of biblical literalists with Giuliani, who termed parts of the bible "allegorical;" it was the Baptist minister he was measuring himself against. But even Huckabee didn't really answer the question. The questioner, quite explicitly, held up the binding of his bible to display that he was asking about the literacy of the King James Version -- the authority for the most conservative of biblical literalists.

3. Christian Right Scares Up Opposition to Fairness Doctrine To hear the Christian right noise machine tell it, the Fairness Doctrine is on the verge of being reinstated. It is, said American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ)'s Jay Sekulow last week, "the greatest threat to Christian broadcasting and conservative talk radio that we have ever seen." In reality, recent legislative efforts to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine, a requirement abolished during the Reagan administration that required broadcasters to give equal time to competing viewpoints, have repeatedly failed. But Christian right activists are up in arms nonetheless. Republican Mike Pence of Indiana has introduced "Broadcaster Freedom Act," which would prevent reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine by the Federal Communications Commission as part of any new rules on media consolidation. The House Republicans, however, would need some help from Democrats to get the 218 votes necessary for their discharge petition to get the bill out of committee and onto the House floor. The absence of such Democratic support, the Christian right insinuates, shows that Democrats hate Christians. Hey, is it election season? National Religious Broadcasters general counsel Craig Parshall called the Fairness Doctrine a "direct assault on Gospel programming around the world" on Sekulow's radio show, and Sekulow fretted about Islamists and Holocaust deniers being entitled to equal time with Christians should the doctrine be reinstated. The left "can't stand it," added Sekulow's son, Jordan, who also works for ACLJ, "that no one is listening to Air America." Sekulow chimed in, "they really do oppose the values and issues we stand for." To encourage support for Pence's bill, televangelist Rod Parsley tried to motivate his followers with this scary scenario: "It would shock you to tune in to our TV broadcast and instead find Senator Ted Kennedy promoting abortion rights. Yet this sort of programming could be required by law if the Federal Communications Commission should reinstate the so-called 'Fairness Doctrine.'"

4. Coalition of Conservative Groups Engage in Gender-Bender Scare Tactics In California, a new law aimed at harmonizing the state's hodge-podge of laws outlawing discrimination in public schools has come under attack by a number of conservative groups. The legislation, SB 777, is designed to prevent discrimination, harassment and bullying of LGBT students in public schools, and to protect kids on the basis gender identity as well as perceived gender identity and orientation. But conservatives have pulled out the old scare tactics, asking whether unsuspecting kids will have to endure gender-bending bathrooms with transgendered kids. Capitol Resource Institute, a conservative lobbying group, has launched "Save Our Kids," a referendum drive to stop the implementation of SB 777, and the Alliance Defense Fund and Advocates for Faith and Freedom have filed a lawsuit challenging the law's constitutionality on the grounds that the terms "gender" and "discriminatory bias" are vague. According to the ADF's press release, "State officials are jeopardizing women's privacy and the safety of women and children. Without any standards for determining someone's 'gender,' school officials have no way to prevent a man from using the girl's restroom or locker room, for example, and this should alarm students and parents." Equality California, a gay rights group that lobbied for the bill, said in response to the lawsuit: “It is ironic that organizations that claim to support families are working to overturn a law that will protect students and help keep them in school. Equality California will work to preserve this law and ensure that all California students are safe in school.”

5. Scandal Update Recently resigned Oral Roberts University president Richard Roberts told students that he didn't want to step down amid charges he misused university resources for his family's lavish lifestyle, but God insisted he do so. Joyce Meyer, one of the televangelists targeted in Sen. Charles Grassley's probe into use of tax-exempt resources to underwrite personal luxuries, has responded publicly in advance of the Dec. 6 deadline set by the Republican's investigation. But did she answer Grassley's questions? Meyer maintains that her ministry is in compliance with its tax-exempt status under the Internal Revenue Code and that all its financial undertakings are transparent to donors and the public. And about the hottest item Grassley was looking into, a $23,000 commode? Meyer insists that it was not a toilet but a "tall, elegant chest of drawers," and that she didn't actually spend that much on it. How much she did spend, however, she would not say; only that she spent over $260,000 on 68 pieces of furniture when she renovated her 150,000 square foot ministry headquarters. So that averages out to about $4,000 per piece of furniture – it isn’t any $23,000 toilet, but it’s hardly thrifty, either. Contact me at tapthefundamentalist at gmail dot com.



photoSarah Posner is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the Prospect, The Washington Spectator, AlterNet, and other publications. Her book, God's Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters will be published by PoliPoint Press next year.

Tuesday, December 4, 2007

McChurch - Uneasy Over Congressional Inquiry

Questions Surround TV Preacher Inquiry

Among the many conservative Christians who feel misunderstood by the general public, the six televangelists under investigation by a Senate committee are an embarrassment.

The ministers' on-air faith healings and fundraising, backed by self-serving misinterpretations of Scripture, reinforce offensive stereotypes of greedy preachers and their unquestioning followers, critics say.

But traditional Christians aren't universally celebrating the inquiry. Some are wondering whether the investigation led by Republican Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa is the right way to end any wrongdoing, especially if the result is more government oversight of all ministries.

"We're not representing any of the parties involved, but when I see a senator charging into organizations, wielding this kind of budget ax and laying bare religious figures and expenditures, huge constitutional questions are being raised," said Garry McCaleb, senior counsel at the Alliance Defense Fund, a religious liberty legal group founded by James Dobson of Focus on the Family and other influential evangelicals.

Craig Parshall, senior vice president and general counsel for the National Religious Broadcasters, a trade association, said the questions that Grassley sent the six ministries about their finances were too broad. None of the televangelists is a member of the NRB.

"We don't have any inside information of the financial workings of the six ministries involved," Parshall said. "What we're concerned about is the future of Christian broadcasting and Christian ministries — nonprofit ones — if this inquiry is either broadened or ratcheted up and hearings are held and new legislation is considered."

Grassley, a member of the Senate Finance Committee, has asked the ministries to submit records by Friday on compensation, board oversight and perks — from oceanside homes and expensive furniture to flights on private jets. IRS rules for nonprofits prevent pastors and other insiders from excessive personal gain through their tax-exempt work. Even so, the groups are not legally required to disclose financial information to the Senate.

The ministries under review include Randy and Paula White of Without Walls International Church and Paula White Ministries of Tampa, Fla.; Benny Hinn of World Healing Center Church Inc. and Benny Hinn Ministries of Grapevine, Texas; David and Joyce Meyer of Joyce Meyer Ministries of Fenton, Mo.; Kenneth and Gloria Copeland of Kenneth Copeland Ministries of Newark, Texas; Bishop Eddie Long of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church and Bishop Eddie Long Ministries of Lithonia, Ga.; and Creflo and Taffi Dollar of World Changers Church International and Creflo Dollar Ministries of College Park, Ga.

All the ministries preach a form of Word of Faith theology, known as prosperity gospel, which effectively teaches that God wants believers to be rich. The ministries have said separately that they are committed to following the tax laws, but it is not known whether they will all comply with Grassley's request by the deadline.

"This has nothing to do with church doctrine," said Grassley, who has been investigating nonprofit compliance with the tax code for years. "This has everything to do the with tax exemption of an organization."

But Grassley irked some religious leaders when he quipped about the lifestyles of the preachers under investigation, saying Jesus road into Jerusalem on a donkey, not a Rolls Royce.

J. Brent Walker, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty in Washington, said he believes Grassley has "the best of motives," but his donkey comment gave the impression that the inquiry pits one religious view against another.

"They're supposed to enforce the law evenhandedly without regard at all to religious expression," Walker said. "There is a fear of government theologizing and government overreacting to isolated problems."

Conservative Christians have worked hard for years to avoid this exact type of inquiry. In the late 1970s, then-Sen. Mark Hatfield of Oregon told influential Christians that they should create a voluntary financial watchdog agency to keep the government largely out of their work.

The Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability was formed in 1979, requiring its members to fully disclose their finances to donors. None of the six televangelists belongs to the group, according to its president, Kenneth Behr.

Pentecostal leaders and defenders of Christian orthodoxy have also challenged the TV preachers about their lifestyles or beliefs.

Hank Hanegraaff, president of the Christian Research Institute, an evangelical apologetics group in Charlotte, N.C., has written and spoken extensively for more than a decade about what he considers the dangers of teachings by Hinn, Meyer, Dollar and others.

But even he says he has concerns about the impact of the Grassley investigation.

"I can assure you," said Walker, of the Baptist Joint Committee, "that people are watching this very closely."