posted March 02, 2007 11:46 PM              

By Chris Hedges, Truthdig. Posted February 8, 2007.

Dr. James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, told his students that when we were his age -- he was then close to 80 -- we would all be fighting the "Christian fascists."

The warning, given 25 years ago, came at the moment Pat Robertson and other radio and television evangelists began speaking about a new political religion that would direct its efforts toward taking control of all institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government. Its stated goal was to use the United States to create a global Christian empire. This call for fundamentalists and evangelicals to take political power was a radical and ominous mutation of traditional Christianity. It was hard, at the time, to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously, especially given the buffoonish quality of those who expounded it. But Adams warned us against the blindness caused by intellectual snobbery. The Nazis, he said, were not going to return with swastikas and brown shirts. Their ideological inheritors had found a mask for fascism in the pages of the Bible.

He was not a man to use the word fascist lightly. He had been in Germany in 1935 and 1936 and worked with the underground anti-Nazi church, known as the Confessing Church, led by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Adams was eventually detained and interrogated by the Gestapo, who suggested he might want to consider returning to the United States. It was a suggestion he followed. He left on a night train with framed portraits of Adolf Hitler placed over the contents of his suitcases to hide the rolls of home-movie film he had taken of the so-called German Christian Church, which was pro-Nazi, and the few individuals who defied the Nazis, including the theologians Karl Barth and Albert Schweitzer. The ruse worked when the border police lifted the tops of the suitcases, saw the portraits of the Führer and closed them up again. I watched hours of the grainy black-and-white films as he narrated in his apartment in Cambridge.

Adams understood that totalitarian movements are built out of deep personal and economic despair. He warned that the flight of manufacturing jobs, the impoverishment of the American working class, the physical obliteration of communities in the vast, soulless exurbs and decaying Rust Belt, were swiftly deforming our society. The current assault on the middle class, which now lives in a world in which anything that can be put on software can be outsourced, would have terrified him. The stories that many in this movement told me over the past two years as I worked on "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America" were stories of this failure -- personal, communal and often economic. This despair, Adams said, would empower dangerous dreamers -- those who today bombard the airwaves with an idealistic and religious utopianism that promises, through violent apocalyptic purification, to eradicate the old, sinful world that has failed many Americans.

These Christian utopians promise to replace this internal and external emptiness with a mythical world where time stops and all problems are solved. The mounting despair rippling across the United States, one I witnessed repeatedly as I traveled the country, remains unaddressed by the Democratic Party, which has abandoned the working class, like its Republican counterpart, for massive corporate funding.

The Christian right has lured tens of millions of Americans, who rightly feel abandoned and betrayed by the political system, from the reality-based world to one of magic -- to fantastic visions of angels and miracles, to a childlike belief that God has a plan for them and Jesus will guide and protect them. This mythological worldview, one that has no use for science or dispassionate, honest intellectual inquiry, one that promises that the loss of jobs and health insurance does not matter, as long as you are right with Jesus, offers a lying world of consistency that addresses the emotional yearnings of desperate followers at the expense of reality. It creates a world where facts become interchangeable with opinions, where lies become true -- the very essence of the totalitarian state. It includes a dark license to kill, to obliterate all those who do not conform to this vision, from Muslims in the Middle East to those at home who refuse to submit to the movement. And it conveniently empowers a rapacious oligarchy whose god is maximum profit at the expense of citizens.

We now live in a nation where the top 1 percent control more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined, where we have legalized torture and can lock up citizens without trial. Arthur Schlesinger, in "The Cycles of American History," wrote that "the great religious ages were notable for their indifference to human rights in the contemporary sense -- not only for their acquiescence in poverty, inequality and oppression, but for their enthusiastic justification of slavery, persecution, torture and genocide."

Adams saw in the Christian right, long before we did, disturbing similarities with the German Christian Church and the Nazi Party, similarities that he said would, in the event of prolonged social instability or a national crisis, see American fascists rise under the guise of religion to dismantle the open society. He despaired of U.S. liberals, who, he said, as in Nazi Germany, mouthed silly platitudes about dialogue and inclusiveness that made them ineffectual and impotent. Liberals, he said, did not understand the power and allure of evil or the cold reality of how the world worked. The current hand-wringing by Democrats, with many asking how they can reach out to a movement whose leaders brand them "demonic" and "satanic," would not have surprised Adams. Like Bonhoeffer, he did not believe that those who would fight effectively in coming times of turmoil, a fight that for him was an integral part of the biblical message, would come from the church or the liberal, secular elite.

His critique of the prominent research universities, along with the media, was no less withering. These institutions, self-absorbed, compromised by their close relationship with government and corporations, given enough of the pie to be complacent, were unwilling to deal with the fundamental moral questions and inequities of the age. They had no stomach for a battle that might cost them their prestige and comfort. He told me, I suspect half in jest, that if the Nazis took over America "60 percent of the Harvard faculty would begin their lectures with the Nazi salute." But this too was not an abstraction. He had watched academics at the University of Heidelberg, including the philosopher Martin Heidegger, raise their arms stiffly to students before class.

Two decades later, even in the face of the growing reach of the Christian right, his prediction seems apocalyptic. And yet the powerbrokers in the Christian right have moved from the fringes of society to the floor of the House of Representatives and the Senate. Forty-five senators and 186 members of the House before the last elections earned approval ratings of 80 to100 percent from the three most influential Christian right advocacy groups -- the Christian Coalition, Eagle Forum, and Family Resource Council. President Bush has handed hundreds of millions of dollars in federal aid to these groups and dismantled federal programs in science, reproductive rights and AIDS research to pay homage to the pseudo-science and quackery of the Christian right.

Bush will, I suspect, turn out to be no more than a weak transition figure, our version of Otto von Bismarck -- who also used "values" to energize his base at the end of the 19th century and launched "Kulturkampf," the word from which we get culture wars, against Catholics and Jews. Bismarck's attacks, which split Germany and made the discrediting of whole segments of the society an acceptable part of the civil discourse, paved the way for the Nazis' more virulent racism and repression.

The radical Christian right, calling for a "Christian state" -- where whole segments of American society, from gays and lesbians to liberals to immigrants to artists to intellectuals, will have no legitimacy and be reduced, at best, to second-class citizens -- awaits a crisis, an economic meltdown, another catastrophic terrorist strike or a series of environmental disasters. A period of instability will permit them to push through their radical agenda, one that will be sold to a frightened American public as a return to security and law and order, as well as moral purity and prosperity. This movement -- the most dangerous mass movement in American history -- will not be blunted until the growing social and economic inequities that blight this nation are addressed, until tens of millions of Americans, now locked in hermetic systems of indoctrination through Christian television and radio, as well as Christian schools, are reincorporated into American society and given a future, one with hope, adequate wages, job security and generous federal and state assistance.

The unchecked rape of America, which continues with the blessing of both political parties, heralds not only the empowerment of this American oligarchy but the eventual death of the democratic state and birth of American fascism.

posted March 04, 2007 12:45 AM            

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President Bush has handed hundreds of millions of dollars in federal aid to these groups and dismantled federal programs in science, reproductive rights and AIDS research to pay homage to the pseudo-science and quackery of the Christian right.

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The unchecked rape of America, which continues with the blessing of both political parties, heralds not only the empowerment of this American oligarchy but the eventual death of the democratic state and birth of American fascism.

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Here’s an excerpt from the excellent book “Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity” by Bruce Bawer, which I think reflects some of the same concerns in your article:

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"ARE YOU A CHRISTIAN?"

SPRING 1996, NEW YORK CITY. I'm standing on a moderately crowded subway car reading a paperback when I look up to see a man about my age--thirty-nine--who is standing a few feet away and staring at me with disconcerting intensity. For an instant we gaze speechlessly into each other's eyes. I expect him to say (as sometimes happens) that he's read one of my books and recognizes me from my dust jacket photo. Instead he asks me a question.

"Are you a Christian?"

The question takes me aback, though I know why he has asked it. I am reading Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, whose author, the Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong, is notorious for his denial of many orthodox Christian doctrines and for his work on behalf of an inclusive church. It occurs to me that my interlocutor, whose question marks him as a born-again Christian, has probably noticed the word Bible, which is in large type, and cannot make out the rest of the title.

"Yes," I reply.

"Are you born again?" His eyes meet mine in an unsettlingly intimate gaze.

I pause for a moment. We have entered difficult territory. Am I born again? Eight years ago, after a decade of feeling that one couldn't be both homosexual and Christian, and after a year or so of listening to sermons that had, for the first time, explained Christianity in a way that made sense to me, I was baptized at Saint Thomas Episcopal Church in New York.

Am I born again? I look into the man's eyes. "I think so."

"Do you accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior?"

Another pause. "Yes ..."

"Then you're born again!" he declares conclusively. "Next time someone asks, answer with confidence that you are!"

"Well," I reply, falling into a tone that sounds to me rather stiff and academic in comparison with his unrestrained ardor, "if I sounded hesitant, it's because I consider myself `born again,' but by some people's definition I'm not."

I don't explain that part of the problem for many people, himself probably included, would be that I'm gay. In the kinds of churches whose members are in the habit of describing themselves as born again, being gay is considered utterly incompatible with being Christian. Another part of the problem is that I'm an Episcopalian, a member of a church that fundamentalists and many conservative evangelicals don't consider a legitimate church at all because of what they see as its theological leniency. Nor do I add that the book I'm reading was written by someone who has helped to change the Episcopal Church in ways that would doubtless horrify my interlocutor.

"How long have you been a Christian?" the man asks, his eyes fixed on mine.

"Eight years," I tell him.

He seems delighted by my answer. Why? Because I've been a Christian that long? Or because I became one as an adult, which presumably suggests that, like him, I'm a "born-again Christian" who went through a "conversion experience," and am thus more serious and committed than many nominal Christians? Or because I remember how many years it's been--which suggests that my conversion continues to be an important event for me?

"I've been a Christian for nine years," he says. "I was going to commit suicide and then Jesus Christ saved me. I was filled with the power of the Holy Ghost."

I'm at a loss for words. What can I say in response to this testimony? After all, I'm an Episcopalian. Most of us don't talk that way, especially not to total strangers. "Good for you," I finally say.

When the man gets off the train a few moments later, we exchange a friendly good-bye. The doors close, and the train moves on. Yet the brief conversation haunts me for hours. I'm at once perturbed and impressed by the man's zealotry. Evangelical Christians, fundamentalist and otherwise, can walk up to strangers on the subway, tell them they're Christians, and testify about how they found Jesus. There's something wonderful about that. Mainline Protestants--members of such long-established, moderate-to-liberal denominations as the American Baptist Church, the Disciples of Christ, the Episcopal Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Presbyterian Church, the United Church of Christ, the United Methodist Church, and the Reformed Church of America--don't usually do that sort of thing. And we Episcopalians are probably the worst of all: Some of us are self-conscious about discussing God even in church. A century ago sex was seen as a private matter that simply shouldn't be discussed in public; today our secular society teaches us to view religion in the same way, and most of us unquestioningly oblige.

"Are you a Christian'" It's not as easy a question as it may sound. What is a Christian? How to decide who is or isn't one--and who does the deciding?

I probably wasn't more than seven or eight when I first noticed that the word could mean very different things, depending on who was using it. Many of my Protestant relatives in South Carolina routinely distinguished between "Christians"--meaning themselves--and "Catholics." In the middle-class neighborhood where I grew up in Queens, New York, many of my Catholic neighbors made it clear that they regarded themselves and their coreligionists as the only true Christians, and that in their minds everyone else--Protestants, Jews, whatever--blended into a non-Catholic, non-Christian sameness. Among fundamentalist (and many evangelical) Protestants today, such an exclusionary posture toward outsiders is not only alive and well but is a matter of essential doctrine. Fundamentalists, by definition, view only themselves and other fundamentalists as true Christians; conservative evangelicals generally view only themselves, other conservative evangelicals, and fundamentalists as true Christians.

When we speak of American Christians, of course, we may divide them into Protestants and Catholics. (Eastern Orthodox Christians account for only 1 percent or so of the total.) But today there is a more meaningful way of dividing American Christians into two categories. The mainstream media often refer to one of these categories as the Religious Right or the Christian Right and call people in this category conservative Christians; people who fall into the other category are frequently dubbed liberal Christians. The terms conservative Christian and liberal Christian can be useful, but I will try to avoid using them here because they suggest political rather than theological orientation. Generally speaking, to be sure, the political implications are accurate: Conservative Christians tend to be politically conservative, and liberal Christians tend to be politically liberal. But there are exceptions; and, in any event, it needs to be underscored that what distinguishes the members of these two groups of Christians is not politics but their essential understanding of the nature of God, the role of the church, and the meaning of human life. It is not an overstatement, indeed, to say that these two groups, despite the fact that they both claim the name of Christianity, have fundamentally divergent conceptions of the universe.

What, then, to call these two categories? Most Americans employ fundamentalist as a general label for conservative Christians--which is why I've used fundamentalism in this book's subtitle--but in its strict sense the term is too narrow for my purposes. Phrases like traditional Christian and modern Christian are, to an extent, legitimate, for conservative Christians tend to champion tradition and to reject much of the modern science and biblical scholarship that liberal Christians embrace; yet, as shall become clear, it is extremely misleading to suggest that the kind of theology to which conservative Christians subscribe is truly more traditional, in the deepest sense, than that of liberal Christians. Likewise, labels like biblical Christian and Bible-believing Christian, which many conservative Christians attach to themselves, wrongly suggest that there is something unbiblical about the faith of liberal Christians. We might speak of "exclusionists" and "inclusionists," because conservative Christians, unlike liberal Christians, tend to define the word Christian in such a way as to exclude others--including, in most cases, a large number of their fellow conservative Christians.

But it seems to me that the difference between conservative and liberal Christianity may be most succinctly summed up by the difference between two key scriptural concepts: law and love. Simply stated, conservative Christianity focuses primarily on law, doctrine, and authority; liberal Christianity focuses on love, spiritual experience, and what Baptists call the priesthood of the believer. If conservative Christians emphasize the Great Commission--the resurrected Christ's injunction, at the end of the Gospel according to Matthew, to "go to all nations and make them my disciples"--liberal Christians place more emphasis on the Great Commandment, which in Luke's Gospel reads as follows: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself."

Am I suggesting that conservative Christians are without love or that liberal Christians are lawless? No. I merely make this distinction: Conservative Christianity understands a Christian to be someone who subscribes to a specific set of theological propositions about God and the afterlife, and who professes to believe that by subscribing to those propositions, accepting Jesus Christ as savior, and (except in the case of the most extreme separatist fundamentalists) evangelizing, he or she evades God's wrath and wins salvation (for Roman Catholics, good works also count); liberal Christianity, meanwhile, tends to identify Christianity with the experience of God's abundant love and with the commandment to love God and one's neighbor. If, for conservative Christians, outreach generally means zealous proselytizing of the "unsaved," for liberal Christians it tends to mean social programs directed at those in need.

In these pages, accordingly, I'll refer to these two broad categories of Christianity as legalistic and nonlegalistic. Further, I'll use the terms Church of Law and Church of Love to describe the two different ecclesial ideals toward which the Christians in these respective categories strive--remembering always, of course, that every church and every human soul has within it a degree of legalism and a capacity for love.

This book will focus primarily on Protestant legalism and nonlegalism; some of the things I say will apply as well to the parallel split within Catholicism, while others do not. Though there are broad sympathies between legalistic Protestants and Catholics, and between nonlegalistic Protestants and Catholics, the strongly divergent doctrinal emphases of Protestantism and Catholicism make it difficult to generalize about "legalistic Christianity," say, as opposed to legalistic Protestantism or Catholicism.

Among the differences between legalistic and nonlegalistic Protestants are these:

· Legalistic Protestantism sees Jesus' death on the cross as a transaction by means of which Jesus paid for the sins of believers and won them eternal life; nonlegalistic Protestantism sees it as a powerful and mysterious symbol of God's infinite love for suffering mankind, and as the natural culmination of Jesus' ministry of love and selflessness.

· Legalistic Protestantism believes that Jesus' chief purpose was to carry out that act of atonement; nonlegalistic Protestantism believes Jesus' chief purpose was to teach that God loves all people as parents love their children and that all humankind is one.

· Legalistic Protestantism understands eternal life to mean a heavenly reward after death for the "true Christians"--the "Elect," the "saved"--who accept Jesus as their savior and subscribe to the correct doctrines; nonlegalistic Protestantism more often understands it to denote a unity with God that exists outside the dimension of time and that can also be experienced in this life.

· Legalistic Protestantism holds that God loves only the "saved' and that they alone are truly his children; nonlegalistic Protestantism holds that God loves all human beings and that all are his children.

· Legalistic Protestantism sees Satan as a real creature, a tempter and deceiver from whom true Christians are defended by their faith but by whom atheists, members of other religions, and "false Christians" are deceived, and whose instruments they can become; for nonlegalistic Protestantism Satan is a metaphor for the potential for evil that exists in each person, Christian or otherwise, and that must be recognized and resisted.

· Legalistic Protestantism believes that individuals should be wary of trusting their own minds and emotions, for these can be manipulated by Satan, and that questions and doubts are to be resisted as the work of the Devil; nonlegalistic Protestantism believes that the mind is a gift of God and that God wants us to think for ourselves, to follow our consciences, to ask questions, and to listen for his still, small voice.

· Legalistic Protestantism sees "truth" as something established in the Bible and known for sure by true Christians; nonlegalistic Protestantism sees truth as something known wholly only by God toward which the belief statements of religions can only attempt to point the way.

· Legalistic Protestantism reads the Bible literally and considers it the ultimate source of truth; nonlegalistic Protestantism insists that the Bible must be read critically, intelligently, and with an understanding of its historical and cultural contexts.

· Legalistic Protestantism encourages a suspicion of aesthetic values and a literalistic mentality that tends to thwart spiritual experience; nonlegalistic Protestantism encourages a recognition of mystery and beauty as attributes of the holy.

Some legalistic Protestants are fundamentalists, whose emphasis is on keeping themselves apart from the evil mainstream culture and thus pure; others might more accurately be described as conservative evangelicals, whose emphasis is on bringing the word of Jesus to the "unsaved," or as charismatics, who seek to model their worship on early Christians' miraculous experiences with healing, prophecy. and "speaking in tongues"; some may consider themselves to be all three at once. Members of all these groups believe in a wrathful God who rewards "true believers" with an eternity in heaven and condemns all others to an eternity in hell.

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posted March 04, 2007 12:46 AM            

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More legalistic Protestants belong to the Southern Baptist Convention (the nation's largest Protestant group) than to any other denomination; many others belong to such Pentecostal bodies as the Assemblies of God and the Church of God, which place special emphasis on charismatic manifestations; still others belong to congregations, Baptist or otherwise, that are independent (often fiercely so) of any established denomination and that, in both worship and doctrine, may strike a unique balance among fundamentalist, evangelical, and charismatic features. Many mainline church members are also legalists, though the percentage varies widely: The United Church of Christ contains far fewer legalists, for example, than does the United Methodist Church. As noted, so-called traditionalist Catholics, who in earlier generations would never have been grouped (either by themselves or by others) with Protestant fundamentalists, fall into the legalistic category; so do most Mormons, Seventh-day Adventists, and Jehovah's Witnesses. Though many in this category would not consider many others in it to be genuine Christians at all, they share a propensity for narrow theological views and reactionary social and cultural values, and consequently they tend to function as practical allies in the so-called culture war against "secular humanism."

Fundamentalist, evangelical, and charismatic Christianity cannot easily be discussed and understood without reference to the distinctive characteristics of American culture. Yes, these forms of legalistic Christianity claim adherents on every continent; but it is in America that they have taken root most firmly and borne the most fruit. They barely exist in Western Europe; their success elsewhere owes everything to American missionary work among the poor and undereducated. In their suspicion of the intellect and their categorical assertion that the Bible contains all truth, these kinds of Christianity reflect the American distrust of mind described by Richard Hofstadter in his book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, indeed, they can be understood as ways of avoiding the obligation to think--and, especially, to think for one-self. As William Ray puts it, "fundamentalism demands believers, not thinkers"; Ray's observation that "no evidence, no logic, no personal experience, nothing can change the fundamentalist's mind about `revealed truth' "applies equally to conservative evangelicals and charismatics "Questioning `revealed truth' in any way, even hypothetically," notes Ray, "challenges the ... belief system at its core.... The more successfully any `revealed truth' is challenged, the more vehemently the challenge must be rejected,"

Why did this kind of religion develop in America, of all places? Well, first of all, America is the place to which the Puritans came, and their fixation on stark antitheses (God and Satan, saints and sinners), their conviction that you're damned unless you believe exactly the right doctrine, and their tendency to equate immorality with sex all helped lay the foundations for today's legalistic Christianity. So did the pragmatism and materialism of the pioneers, whose respect for "honest work" and suspicion of professors, philosophers, and others who don't produce anything "real" spelled success for faiths that involved quantifiable sacrifice, little or no abstract reflection, and a concrete payoff in the form of a tangible heaven. Those pioneers' individualistic sentiments, moreover, made them distrust ecclesiastical elites and accept the right of every person to interpret the Bible according to his or her own lights; this emphasis on scripture was also fed by the notion of America as a new Eden, which, as the religious historian George M. Marsden has noted,"readily translated into Biblical primitivism," the idea that "the Bible alone should be one's guide." Yet given those pioneers' literal-mindedness and aversion to abstract interpretation, it was a short--and disastrous--step from the idea of the Bible as guide to a twisted insistence on biblical literalism.

Nonlegalistic Protestants figure far less often in the mainstream media than do legalists. Indeed, they sometimes seem virtually invisible. They worship a God of love, and they envision the church, at its best, as a Church of Love. They tend to belong to mainline Protestant churches or to relatively small bodies such as the Quakers and Unitarians. Some are Catholics: some are even Baptists or Seventh-day Adventists. If the public face of conservative Christians today is that of Pat Robertson and his Christian Coalition, liberal Christians as yet have no public face to speak of. Recently, liberal Christians have formed such national groups as the Interfaith Alliance and Call to Renewal, but so far they have failed to receive even a fraction of the media attention routinely accorded to the Christian Coalition. Few Americans even know they exist.

Nonlegalistic Christianity has its problems. Those who worship a God of love can sometimes appear to reduce the majesty and mystery of the divine to something pat and shallow. While legalists obsess over the presence of evil in the world, nonlegalists can seem naive, even blinkered, about it. How to explain the existence of evil, after all, if God is totally good? If God does love all his children unconditionally, then why do so many people live out their lives feeing worthless, lonely, and unloved? In a world full of heartless brutality, belief in a God of wrath is hardly inexplicable. Karen Armstrong, the distinguished author of A History of God and hardly a legalistic Christian, has written that we must "accept evil in the divine" in order to "accept the evil we encounter in our own hearts." This is certainly one solution to the age-old problem of evil, and it is consistent with much that we read about God in the Old Testament. But it is not the religion of Jesus.

In any event, the problem with legalistic Christianity is not simply that it affirms that God can be evil; it's that it imagines a manifestly evil God and calls that evil good. In effect, as we shall see, it worships evil. In America right now, millions of children are taught by their legalistic Christian parents and ministers to revere a God of wrath and to take a sanguine view of human suffering. They are taught to view their fellow Americans not as having been "created equal," as the Declaration of Independence would have it, but as being saved or unsaved, children of God or creatures of Satan; they are taught not to respect those most different from themselves but to regard them as the enemy, to resist their influence, and to seek to restrict their rights. This is not only morally offensive, its socially dangerous--and it represents, for obvious reasons, a very real menace to democratic civil society. America's founding fathers, as I shall show, respected religion because they saw it as strengthening people's best selves and checking their worst selves; too often, legalistic Christianity--which has deceitfully portrayed the founding fathers as its philosophical allies--does precisely the opposite.

Now, what do I mean by the title Stealing Jesus?

In recent years, legalistic Christians have organized into a political movement so successful that when many Americans today hear the word Christianity, they think only of the legalistic variety. The mainstream media, in covering the so-called culture wars, generally imply that there are only two sides to choose from: the God-of-wrath Christian Right and the godless secular Left. Many Americans scarcely realize that there is any third alternative. And many, unable to take the Christian Right seriously as a cultural force, view it as a holdover of traditional Christianity" that has inexplicably lingered into these "secular times" and will gradually fade away.

This notion is dangerously misguided. To be sure, the kind of legalistic Christianity that flourishes in America today does have a long historical background of which Americans need to be more aware--and which I will briefly trace in these pages. Legalism has, then, been a part of the Christian picture from the beginning. Yet today's legalistic Protestantism is very much (to borrow a favorite legalistic term) a "new creation." As new species evolve from old because they are specially equipped to endure a changed environment, so today's legalism--an animal unlike any that had ever existed before--emerged as an adaptation to modern secular democratic society. Far from being a vestige of traditional Christian faith, in short, it is a distinctively modern phenomenon--one that, while making tradition its rallying cry, has at the deepest level betrayed Christianity's most precious traditions. In fact it has, as we shall see, carried out a tripartite betrayal:

· Doctrine. It has replaced the traditional emphases of Christian belief with bizarre doctrinal strictures that have no legitimate basis in scripture, reason, or tradition.

· Authority. It has replaced the foundational Protestant trust in the individual's "soul competency" with a dictatorial system of clerical absolutism.

· Law. It has replaced Christ's gospel message of love, which drew on the noblest parts of the Hebrew Scriptures, with the harshest edicts from the Pentateuch. the epistles of Paul, and the Book of Revelation.

Born out of anger, modern legalistic Christianity has, over the long arc of the twentieth century, become steadily angrier in reaction to spreading secularism. During that period it has also spread like a cancer, winning adherents by the million and posing an increasingly serious threat to other faiths and to democratic freedoms. It has, in the process, warped Christianity into something ugly and hateful that has little or nothing to do with love and everything to do with suspicion, superstition, and sadism. And, quite often, it denies the name of Christianity to followers of Jesus who reject its barbaric theology. In essence, then, it has stolen Jesus--yoked his name and his church to ideas, beliefs, and attitudes that would have appalled him.

Yet to an extraordinary extent, the American media--which are widely denounced as liberal and which tend to be controlled and staffed by secularists and by nonlegalistic Christians--have allowed their own way of using the word Christian to be strongly influenced by legalistic Christian activists. This is especially true, unsurprisingly, of the conservative press. In 1996, the right-wing policy magazine American Enterprise published a special issue on religion in which the word Christian was routinely used to mean only legalists. One article referred to the increasing "involvement of Christians in school boards"; another gauged the "Christian influence" on the media and adverted to "Christian media" and `Christian periodicals.' Over and over, in short, the word Christian was used in a narrow way to include only legalistic Christians and to exclude pretty much everybody else. Certainly there aren't "more Christians" on school boards or on Capitol Hill than there used to be; there are simply more legalistic Christians in these places.

Such usage is probably to be expected in a periodical like American Enterprise, whose editors consider legalistic Christians their ideological allies. But it is rather more surprising in the case of the New York Times, which legalistic Christians almost universally despise for what they view as its liberal, anti-Christian slant. Given the fact that legalistic Christians tend to view the Times as their single greatest enemy in the media establishment, and given the Times's history of extremely careful usage, it was remarkable to find Times religion reporter Gustav Niebuhr, in a 1996 article, using the word Christian to mean a legalistic Protestant. Niebuhr refers to "Christian booksellers" whose `Christian bookstores `feature "Christian music videos" by "Christian musicians." That neither Niebuhr nor his editors considered it inappropriate to say "Christian" rather than, say, "conservative evangelical" indicates the extent of the Religious Right's success at getting even some of the most responsible and reflective elements of mainstream America to accept, however unconsciously, the notion that legalists are the only true Christians--or, at the very least, are in some way "more" Christian' or more urgently or authentically or fully Christian, than other Christians.

The increasing tendency to use the word Christian to mean only legalistic Protestants has given the word an unpleasant flavor for many Americans--Christians included. In a 1996 sermon, a friend of mine who is an Episcopal priest recalled that he cringed when, at a social event, he met a man "who rather quickly identified himself as a Christian." When the man said the word Christian, several other words immediately went through my friend's mind: "bigot, arrogant, mindless, intolerant, rigid, mean-spirited." Though the encounter proved pleasant, my friend was struck by his initial reaction to the man's seff-identification as a Christian, and by the fact that the word had come to stand for so many bad things that even a devout clergyman could find himself recoiling at the sound of it.

A friend of mine who teaches theology at a Catholic university noted in a 1996 personal letter that at a recent meeting of his academic department, "one of my colleagues pointed out that the administration has found it unwise to use the word `Christian' in its official statements.... Why unwise? Because in the public perception `Christian' is hitched to `Coalition.'" Indeed, as the Reverend Canon John L. Peterson, the secretary-general of the Anglican Consultative Council, observed in his opening remarks at an international evangelism meeting in 1995, "in certain parts of the world the word Christian has become an embarrassment because it has been aligned with movements which are contrary to the Loving Christ that is at the heart of our message. I hold my head in shame to hear Jesus' name being affiliated with political movements that isolate, inhibit and breed hate and discontentment between human beings."

Why haven't nonlegalistic Christians made more of an effort to rescue the word Christian from the negative connotations it has acquired in the minds of many Americans? Partly, I think, because nonlegalistic Christians are used to thinking of religion as a private matter; they aren't in the habit of talking about what they believe, let alone organizing politically to do so. Partly because they feel cowed into silence by the aggressive, unapologetic manner in which legalists draw boundaries between "true Christians" (themselves) and false ones. And partly, perhaps, because they have a quite proper attitude of awe and humility about the fact that they are Christians--and an alertness to the danger of seeming smug, strident, and self-congratulatory in their profession of faith.

Yet one unfortunate result of this reticence is that the nonlegalistic Christian point of view has played an almost invisible role in the discussions of religion and "values" issues that have roiled our society in recent years. Instead, those discussions are almost invariably represented in the mainstream media as a clear-cut contest between "Christians" (that is, legalists), who supposedly uphold responsibility, values, and family, and liberal secular humanists, who support rights, tolerance, and separation of church and state. A major problem with this vision of the conflict is that neither side of it, as presented by the media, is speaking for Jesus Christ--for what he was and is really about. Indeed, it often seems that the media, secular liberals, and legalistic Christians alike take for granted that the most prominent legalistic spokespeople--men and women like Pat Robertson, Ralph Reed, Phyllis Schlafly, and James Dobson--do speak for Christianity. Even as many secular media figures privately smirk at legalistic Christians and tilt coverage in favor of secular humanism, they never publicly challenge the legalists' claim to speak on behalf of the Body of Christ--because the Body of Christ is, to them, not something of value.

The time has come for this challenge to be made. For to be a serious nonlegalistic Christian in America today is to recognize that the word Christian--and, more important, the real living Christ--are crying out to be unshackled from the prejudices and precepts to which legalistic Christians have bound them. To be a serious nonlegalistic Christian is to recognize that while legalists present themselves as "true Christians, the narrow doctrines they profess, the authoritarianism they practice, and the laws they uphold represent a damaging distortion and subversion of Jesus' message. And it is to recognize that in recent years, even as serious biblical scholars have answered with increasing clarity the question of who Jesus was and what he was about, legalists have radically redefined Jesus, condemning the principles he really stood for and instead identifying him with their own ugliest tendencies. Meanwhile, secular Americans have looked on blindly or indifferently, for the most part either not realizing or not caring what was going on. And most nonlegalistic Christians have held their tongues.

Yet to examine the nearly two thousand years of tension between the Church of Law and the Church of Love--a tension that has mounted at an increasing rate around the world, and in America above all, over the course of this century--is to feel that the present millennial moment in America is a moment of truth for Christianity, a moment when there is an urgent need for the Church of Law to be challenged. This challenge will almost certainly have to come from within the mainline Protestant churches, and it will have to be issued by Christians whose unfamiliarity with the present conflict's historical background I hope to remedy here. I will seek to do this by showing how discontinuous much of today's Christianity is with the teachings of Jesus; by describing how extreme such Christianity has become in twentieth-century America; by demonstrating how fully it has succeeded in usurping the name of Christianity; by explaining why these developments endanger the stability, democracy, and pluralism not only of the United States but also of the world in which it is now the sole superpower; and by emphasizing how necessary it is--for the health of Christianity, of America, and of the world (which legalistic Protestants are at present aggressively evangelizing)--to reverse these developments now.

---

posted March 04, 2007 08:36 AM            

That's a very interesting article.

Simply put, my opinion agrees with the saying, "Fundies are Fundies, no matter the Faith". I don't feel pulled to either extreme. I agree the media shoulders some, though certainly not all, of the responsibility for the rift between both Christian extremes, forgetting that most people fall somewhere in the middle.

From my personal experiences, I've had trouble dealing with the "Christian Right" on more than one occassion.

An example. Had one of my husband's co-workers' husbands over for dinner one night. He's a nice guy and we generally get along very well. He thought it wrong that I was a vegetarian because it's in the Bible and mentioned it at every opportunity. Didn't bother me because alot of people have issues with my vegetarianism. I don't speak about it much and certainly don't preach it. I guess it just gets under some people's skins that I don't feel like I have to defend it.
Anyway, I didn't get offended or angry and just kind of suggested that meat's not my thing and that I have no problem with what anyone else eats.
Apparantly, that was the wrong thing to say because after dinner he decided to broach the subject of religion. What did I believe? Erm, I was raised Catholic but have branched out since then. Do I follow the Bible as it was laid down. Uh, probably not exactly. Have I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior? Uh-oh.

In the end, he very patiently explained to me that I'm going to hell unless I accept Jesus ... and that means just believing in him wholeheartedly and trusting that no matter what happens, he will save me, in this life or the afterlife. Being a good person and doing good deeds for others plays no role in salvation because you can't buy your way into heaven.

I didn't argue. He's still a nice guy to me. Have nothing against him. But now I know that even my choice of food can cause me to be lectured to by those on the "Christian Right".

Now don't get me wrong, I don't care what they believe. I don't care what/who they worship or what laws they follow. I just don't like someone trying (and thankfull failing) to make me feel inferior because I disagree with them. And, in my experience, that kind of thing doesn't happen just with Christian extremists but with all religious extremists. If only it could at least remain an attack on the verbal level instead of leading to so much physical violence.

I do feel that extremes of what the author terms as the Church of Law are dangerous when taken too far. I also feel that the Church of Love can be equally dangerous when taken too far, as well, just in different ways. The main difference, imo, is that while the Church of Love may make their impact just the same through their deeds, they generally do it without browbeating people into agreeing with them.

Middle ground, guys. Laws and Love. But I think it's a long way yet for any form of organized Christianity that balances those scales to be widely accepted and practiced simply because it has branched out so far and so many people, left or right or middle, believe that their Truth is better than everyone elses.

posted March 06, 2007 02:42 AM              

Thanks for posting this. I find it very interesting but have not finished reading it. When I do I will get back with some thoughts. I love reading things like this and want that book!

I like what you had to say too, Eleanore. I have a brother in law like that guy you talked about. Though thank God he has tamed down a bit the past few years. I also run into those people all the time.

posted March 06, 2007 09:28 AM              

whatever happened to love?

posted March 06, 2007 12:11 PM              

EGO,

is the root of all Evil. ...

and ego means power and greed...
and it will use anything to justify
itSelf... .

posted March 06, 2007 12:28 PM            

quote:

---

i really don't get -- at all -- how those professing to be 'christian' can use hate and malice for justifying their position.

---

posted March 07, 2007 01:19 AM              

The Christian Right is made up of fundalmentalists from all Christian denominations, not just Evangeliticals. I just wanted to state that since I do not want to single out any one denomination and also, this does not apply to all Christianity just a minority.

Yes, Lotus, I agree that Ego, and along with it power and control and greed is the culprit behind all the worlds evils.

posted March 07, 2007 08:04 AM              

I just think that Man, created religion, after the fall, after turning his back on God, and the Universal Laws...

So, what was created, first, would have been the pristine writings, the ones closest to the truth...

perhaps 100,000 years have gone by
maybe 10,000?

that's a long time for the writings to be altered and changed
by the EGO. ...

God is within, and it was not from being raised catholic, that I came to know GOD...
it was through reading Linda's Star Signs, and Gooberz...

everything just started to fall into place..
and an understanding formed...

posted March 07, 2007 12:50 PM            

If you were not, you would have understood the people you like to quote are not engaged in spreading the "Gospel of Jesus Christ".

They are engaged in a different teaching. The people you like to quote, including Jim Wallis are attempting to spread secular humanism as the "Gospel".

That's not surprising because they're all linked up through the National Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches.

In the case of the National Council of Churches, they were forced to change their name when they were linked to the Soviet Union as a communist front group and the Communist Party USA.

They changed their name from the Federal Council of Churches to the National Council of Churches in the early 1950's because lots of heat was being applied to their sorry as$es from Congress and publicity associated with their activities. They did not change their focus or their mission..which is the destruction of Christianity in America.

The Fascists you like to screech about are all leftists. Like Hitler. Like Mussolini. Like the leftists you always highlight here.

Fascists are not to be found in the religious community of Christians. Those you and your friends like to screech about because...they actually read the Bible and believe what it says about the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

The Times, "Fascists," and the Religious Right
By Don Feder
GrasstopsUSA.com | January 22, 2007

Breezing through the bookstore at Reagan National Airport the other day, I came across a new volume with the intriguing yet subtle title, American Fascists – The Christian Right and The War on America by former New York Times' correspondent Chris Hedges. But, as the saying goes, tell us what you really think.

No hyperbole here. In the introduction, Hedges makes it clear that he actually is comparing evangelical opponents of abortion and gay marriage to the monsters who burned books, ran death camps and plunged humanity into a world war that left 63 million dead.

Except it’s Hedges who wants to ban books and gag his opponents – but we’ll get to that shortly.

The author begins with a quote from one of his distinguished professors at the Harvard Divinity School (where Christianity disappeared decades ago): "'The Nazis,' he said, 'were not going to return with swastikas and brown shirts. Their ideological inheritors in America have found a mask for fascism in patriotism and the pages of the Bible.'" Apparently, everything Hedges learned in the intervening years confirmed that grotesque prophecy.

Hedges’ screed is the latest in a long, long, line of hysterical tracts denouncing what the secular left calls the Religious Right. The past year alone has seen such saliva-specked exposes of alleged Christian extremism as:

"Religion Gone Bad: Hidden Dangers of the Christian Right" by Mel White;
"Why The Christian Right Is Wrong" by Robin Meyers;
"The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from The Religious Right" by Michael Lerner;
"Theocons: Secular America Under Siege" by Damon Linker;
"American Theocracy" by Kevin Phillips;
"The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right’s Plan for The Rest of Us" by James Rudin;
"Piety and Politics: The Right Wing Assault on Religious Freedom" by the Reverend Barry Lynn; and
"Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism" by Michelle Goldberg.
The objective of all of this Chicken Little squawking is to convince us that the Constitution is falling -- that conservative Christians intend to abolish the Bill of Rights, outlaw sin and replace democracy with a theocratic state that will make Calvin’s Geneva look like Hugh Hefner’s bachelor party.

Such sentiments are endlessly repeated as an article of faith by politicians, journalists and entertainers.

Colorado Senator Ken Salazar has called Dr. James Dobson and Focus on the Family "the Anti-Christ of the world" (for demanding that he vote to end the filibuster of Bush judicial nominees). Senator Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, labeled Christian broadcasters "sort of our homegrown Taliban."

Howard Dean asks rhetorically, "Are we going to live in a theocracy where the highest powers tell us what to do?" No, we’ll live in a Dean-ocracy where radical feminists, global-warming whack-jobs and the Brokeback Mountain Brigade tell us what to do.

In a profile piece in The New Yorker, Al Gore compared the faith of George W. Bush to Saudi Whabbism. In its May 2005 issue, Harpers Magazine ran a cover story titled "The Christian Right’s War on America." (The left demonstrates its commitment to the environment by recycling smears.)

And, last fall, seminal political thinker Rosie O’Donnell instructed viewers of ABC’s "The View," that "Radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam in a country like America where we have separation of church and state.

Speaking of fascists, when it comes to Christian conservatives, the Left takes a page out of the playbook of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, who confessed, "If you tell a big lie enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it."

Hedges does more than lie. In the name of fighting fascism, he wants to institute censorship and punish political incorrectness with prison sentences. Irony is always lost on the Left.

I’m tickled pink (no pun intended) when the Left starts casually throwing around charges of fascism. Look in their closets, and you’ll find jackboots shined and ready to wear.

Need proof?

Ask yourself: Over what institution does the left exert the greatest control (even more than over Hollywood and the news media)? Answer: Academia. Now, what institution most closely resembles a police state in its posture toward dissent? Same answer.

At American colleges and universities, Christian student groups are being told to renounce their principles or lose official status.

Conservative newspapers are burned. Conservative speakers are shouted down or assaulted with impunity. Students who vigorously challenge leftist dogma are suspended or expelled. Professors are denied tenure for failure to parrot the party line.

If you’d like a preview of an American fascist state, look at higher education. If Hitlerism ever comes to America, it won’t be marching with crosses and Bibles, but mouthing the platitudes of multiculturalism (cultural Marxism), while goose-stepping to the beat of Sgt. Pelosi’s PC Band.

In documenting the perils of incipient totalitarianism in the Bible Belt, Hedges describes his hair-raising adventures at a "Love Won Out" conference (for those born-again who left the gay lifestyle), a Creationism Museum in Petersburg, KY, (FYI, the Nazis were evolutionists) and one of Dr. D. James Kennedy’s "Evangelism Explosion," seminars where conferees were taught how to bring people to "the Christian Right’s version of Christ." Christians evangelizing? Fancy that.

The goal, Hedges breathlessly discloses, is "not simply conversion but also eventual recruitment into a political movement to create a Christian nation," where the Bill of Rights would be repealed and the Constitution replaced by Jerry Falwell’s latest sermon.

To prove this absurdity, Hedges quotes evangelist Kennedy: "As vice regents of God, we are to exercise godly dominion and influence over our neighborhoods, our schools, our government" and "our entertainment media, our news media, our scientific endeavors…."

How successful the Religious Right has been in exercising "godly dominion" over the news media and Hollywood may be seen by picking up the New York Times, tuning in to CNN or NPR or experiencing the torrent of sex and violence (not to mention the ubiquitous attacks on Christianity) in movies shown every evening on cable television.

Kennedy and his colleagues are saying that Christians have a right and a duty to bring their values into the political arena. Shocking!

The original lie of the Left is that America was a nation founded on a secular worldview – one nation under who-knows-what, with liberty and justice for all. The monumental task of historical revisionism started 60 years ago and continues to this day.

To maintain this fiction, the elite relies on intimidation and ignorance of history – one reason American history is no longer taught in our schools.

Alexis de Tocqueville didn’t write for the New York Times. But this early 18th century theorist identified the source of America’s greatness, when he wrote: "In the United States the sovereign authority is religious…there is no country in the world where the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America, and there can be no greater proof of its utility and of its conformity to human nature than that its influence is powerfully felt over the most enlightened nation on earth."

Fast-forward 200 or so years.

In his December 22nd address to the Roman Curia, Pope Benedict XVI (in explaining Church’s opposition to same-sex "marriage") declared: "If we tell ourselves that the Church ought not to interfere in such matters, we cannot but answer: Are we not concerned with the human being?" In other words, when human life is at stake (as it is with abortion) or the very foundation of society (the family) is threatened, for humanity’s sake, the Church must speak out.

Does that make the pope one of Hedges verse-spouting Brown Shirts?

Christian political involvement is more than a moral imperative; it’s also a matter of survival. Since the French Revolution, the Left has rarely disguised its intention to ultimately abolish religion.

Hedges is chillingly clear when he writes that the Christian Right (read: normative Christianity) "should no longer be tolerated" because it "would destroy the tolerance that makes an open society possible."

Hedges echoes New Left philosopher Herbert Marcuse.

Before he emigrated to America in the 1930s, Marcuse was part of the Frankfurt School – Marxists who sought to advance the revolution by capturing the culture.

Surveying the general failure of communist revolutions in the wake of the First World War, Marcuse and his colleagues identified religion and faith-based morality (to which they believed the working class was wedded) as the chief obstacles to achieving a workers' paradise.

In his Sixties book Repressive Tolerance, Marcuse describes "toleration" with a twist in the "progressive and humane society" he envisioned. Freedom of expression and assembly would be abolished for all organizations and movements which promote "chauvinism (and) discrimination based on race and religion." To this, today’s Left would add gender and what it terms sexuality.

Hedges and Marcuse are intellectual twins separated by a few decades.

The father of political correctness, Marcuse declared: "Certain things cannot be said; certain ideas cannot be expressed; certain policies cannot be proposed, certain behavior cannot be permitted without making tolerance an instrument for the continuation of servitude."

As Jon Wiener, a historian at the University of California at Irvine, notes in his Los Angeles Times review of "American Fascists" (January 7, 2007): "Thus he (Hedges) rejects the 1st Amendment protections for freedom of speech and religion, and court rulings that permit prosecution for speech only if there is an imminent threat to particular individuals. Hedges advocates passage of federal hate-crimes legislation prohibiting intolerance, but he doesn’t really explain how it would work."

Oh, we can guess, can’t we? -- restricting religious radio stations to broadcasting Gospel music, taking "Focus on The Family," "The 700 Club," and "The Coral Ridge Hour" off the air, padlocking the doors of the D.C. headquarters of Family Research Council, Concerned Women for America, and the National Association of Evangelicals, closing religious day schools and Bible camps, and tearing pages from Leviticus out of Bibles. And that’s for starters.

Then comes Kristallnacht for Christians, re-education sessions and finally the concentration camps. And not just for politically active evangelical Christians, but also traditional Catholics, members of various Orthodox churches, Orthodox Jews, and Mormons.

The next book Christopher Hedges writes about fascism should be autobiographical.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=26549

posted March 08, 2007 07:32 AM            

But don't you think some "far right" Christian groups are even a little scary? It's not so much what they believe as it is how they put it or may want to put it into practice. I mean, I don't really care if someone thinks they're more favored by God and thus superior to me. Neither do I care that they think I'm going to hell. I'd just rather they themselves not try to send me or anyone else to hell before our time. Even the ones that just wake me up at the crack of dawn on the weekends to try and save my soul have gone too far, imo. I don't appreciate solicitation from any one ... not door to door salesmen, not political parties and certainly not religious groups of any denomination.

It seems that some religious groups within organized religions, including but not limited to some right wing Christians, are very intolerant of others that they see as too different or sinful. I think that attitude can lead to dangerous situations if taken too far.

In the "end of days" it appears a lot of people are doomed to atrocities and that many of us will be found lacking in the eyes of God. I can deal with that. But I don't think anyone should have to deal with people believing themselves to be God's own chosen army and doing horrible things in his name against people who are innocent, aside from the fact that they're not the "right" kinds of Christians or not Christians at all (or any other religions).

Right, far right and right wing don't seem like the best terms, as they're so political. Extremist would be better but it's become so loaded a word. I hope you understand that I'm not trying to trash anyone's religious beliefs.

posted March 09, 2007 02:03 AM              

Any religion when it mixes with government is lethal and dangerous. History has taught us this with the Crusades, the Inquistion, and all forms of theocratical governments. When combined, governments corrupt religion and religion corrupts governments.

The issue in this country today with the rise of the religious right ( sorry that is not my term but what they are called by the media and what they call themselves ) and their involvement and influence in government matters is dangerous as these people are trying to change Supreme Court rulings that existed in order to insure the separation of church and state and they are trying to rewrite the Constitution for their own agendas. That is a threat to democracy in America. It would be establishing a Theocratical form of government.

In light of what is happening in the U.S. today the book, " A Handmaids Tale," by Margaret Atwood has proven itself to be a very prophetical book.

I am a Christian but I never want to see in the U.S. a theocratical government because, as our founding fathers knew full well from their own experience in Europe, that leads to persecution of those other religions which do not believe along the same lines as the State Church. Thus it would destroy the freedom of religion we have always enjoyed in the U.S.

I don't like labels and for that reason I don't like labeling any religion left or right ( political groups either) but that seems to be something we just can't seem to break away from due to the media's insistance on labeling.

Like you, Eleanore, I will not argue religious beliefs along the lines of who is right and who is wrong, who knows truth and who doesn't. I don't tell others what they should believe and I would like that they grant me the same courtesy.

posted March 09, 2007 11:56 AM            

You started a lying campaign against Bush long ago and I called you on it. It's been the better part of 2 years and you've yet to post one lie Bush told in which you allege Bush lied the US into war.

I've asked you at least 10 times and probably more like 20 to state the particular lie Bush told, in his own "words/direct quotes" along with when and where he did so.

So far, silence on the subject from you on that score but rather an expansion of allegations none of which are factual.

Now, you're claiming so called "right wing Christians" are attempting to subvert the Constitution, attempting to establish a Christian theocracy in the United States and you've gone so far as to call them Fascists.

You claim concern that Christians are participating in the political process and point to that as one of your "proofs".

Your concern is bullsh*t and that bullsh*t is wide and deep.

You make unfocused allegations about right wing Christians attempting the takeover of the Government but you fail to mention a single individual...which is standard fare for leftist propagandists...nor a single church or a single Christian denomination which advocates a Christian theocracy for the United States instead of the Constitutional Republic which the US Constitution established.

After failing to back up your former lying allegations, I'm going to give you a chance to name names, name Christian denominations and name specific churches involved in what you allege...a Christian theocracy for America.

In the meantime Mirandee, I'm going to allege it's the so called christian left. So called because they distort the message of Christianity in their practices and teachings.

Now Mirandee, here's one of your favorites. I know Jim Wallis is one of your favorite leftists because you've posted some of his stuff..and I do mean stuff...as opposed to rational, truthful teachings about the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

You...if you are to be believed at all...you must be simply horrified that radical leftists so called Christian activists are and have been involved in the forefront of political activism.

This is from the home page of the Sojourner:
God's Politics a Blog by Jim Wallis and Friends
http://www.beliefnet.com/blogs/godspolitics/

Readers here should go there to see just how deeply involved the so called religious left is in the political process as activists; activities Mirandee says is:

quote:

---

Any religion when it mixes with government is lethal and dangerous. History has taught us this with the Crusades, the Inquistion, and all forms of theocratical governments. When combined, governments corrupt religion and religion corrupts governments....Mirandee

---

And yet, here is Mirandee, an advocate of leftist religious teachings..which is not to be confused in any way with Christianity...and she's harping on what she calls the Christian Right.

Since Mirandee has brought this up here, there will be a series of articles posted here from time to time about the activities, associations and political leanings of leftist religious organizations and individuals.

posted March 09, 2007 12:05 PM            

*Activist preacher and editor of the leftwing Christian magazine Sojourners

*Democratic Party operative who claims that God is "neither a Republican nor a Democrat"

*Apologist for communist atrocities in Cambodia and Vietnam

*Dedicated foe of capitalism

*Contends that Biblical scripture calls for large central government to aid the poor

A self-described activist preacher, Jim Wallis was born into an evangelical family in Detroit, Michigan. He has stated that his religious views initially drove him toward the civil rights movement of the 1960s. As Wallis relates the story, his opposition to segregation spurred him to break with his own community church and seek out a relationship with black churches of inner-city Detroit. "I would just go downtown," he says, "and just begin walking the streets and you know the drug dealers and the hookers and the pimps and the street kids, figuring out what this white kid is doing walking around, and I went to black churches and there I found a kind of Christian faith I had never heard before." Wallis would subsequently join the raging ranks of the anti-Vietnam War movement; his participation in the protests and demonstrations of that movement nearly resulted in his expulsion from the Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Illinois, a conservative Christian seminary where he was then enrolled.

While at the seminary, Wallis founded an anti-capitalism magazine called the Post-American. The then-small publication sang the praises of wealth redistribution and government-managed economies, ideals which he said were essential ingredients in the quest for "social justice." To match its seething disdain for the free market, the Post-American, in keeping with Wallis' antiwar convictions, also railed against American foreign policy. Wallis has carried his reflexively anti-American mindset on to the present day.

In the mid-1970s, Wallis and his Post-American colleagues moved their base of operation from Chicago to Washington, D.C., where they redesigned the magazine. In 1971, playing on the concept of Christian followers at odds with the larger Christian establishment - an accurate enough description of Wallis and his flock of fellow leftists - Wallis christened his new magazine Sojourners. In the thirty years that Wallis has served as its editor, Sojourners has never wavered from its radical roots. Seeking out religious cover for its unambiguously leftwing politics, the magazine, which today has a combined print and electronic readership of over 100,000, has consistently positioned itself in opposition to U.S. foreign policies, both foreign and domestic. Sojourners takes the position that the U.S. war against Iraq is immoral and unjustified, and that the ultimate solution to America's domestic problems is bigger and more intrusive government.

A number of the editorial positions taken by Sojourners over the years have come back to haunt Wallis. For example, in parallel with his magazine's stridently antiwar position during the Seventies, Wallis championed the cause of communism. Forgiving its brutal standard-bearers in Vietnam and Cambodia the most abominable of atrocities, Wallis was unsparing in his execration of American military efforts. For all his rhetoric about the alleged need for greater levels of "social justice" in the U.S., Wallis maintained a willful silence on the subject of the murderous rampages of Cambodia's Khmer Rouge. Sojourners, for its part, issued no editorials commiserating with the plight of massacred Cambodians. Very much to the contrary, several editorials attempted to exculpate the Khmer Rouge of the charges of genocide, instead shifting blame squarely onto the United States.

Nor was this the most blatant instance of Wallis' repeated willingness to support pro-communist ideals. As Ronald Nash, a professor at the Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, Florida, noted in his 1996 book on the religious left, Why the Left Is Not Right, Wallis, in the grip of his antiwar fevers, was not above vilifying the victims for the crimes of their Communist oppressors. Following the 1979 refugee crisis in Vietnam, to cite but one instance, Wallis lashed out at the desperate masses fleeing North Vietnam's communist forces by boat. These refugees, as Wallis saw it, had been "inoculated" by capitalist influences during the war and were absconding "to support their consumer habit in other lands." Wallis then admonished critics against pointing to the boatpeople to "discredit" the righteousness of Vietnam's newly victorious Communist regime. By no means blackening his credentials as a religious leader, Wallis' presence in the radical antiwar left endeared him to the mainstream news media: In 1979, Time magazine hailed Wallis one of the "50 Faces for America's Future." That same year, the journal Mission Tracks published an interview with Wallis, in which the activist evangelical confessed his hope that "more Christians will come to view the world through Marxist eyes."

Wallis' faith in Marxism would propel him to the front line of the Left's unifying campaign of the 1980s: support for Communist dictatorships in Central America. Catalyzed by the U.S. military's overthrow of a Marxist dictatorship in Grenada in 1983, leftwing activists mounted a grassroots effort to spare other Communist tyrants in the region from being similarly dispatched. To this end, Wallis embarked on an editorial crusade in Sojourners to undercut public support for a confrontational U.S. foreign policy toward Central America. Depicting as greatly overblown the threat posed by the spread of Communism in that region (as well as the threat posed by the Soviet Union), Wallis contended that the principal menace to international security and stability came from the Reagan administration's defense buildup.

Such was the argument put forth in a January 1983 Sojourners article titled "Crossroads for the Freeze," wherein Wallis wrote that "[t]he Reagan Administration remains the chief obstacle to the first step in stopping the arms race." One year earlier, Wallis had written in a similar vein in Sojourners: "It is sometimes difficult to remember how the Russians became our enemy." He also chastised the United States for its refusal to accede to the demands of the pro-Communist Left by giving the Soviet Union the benefit of the doubt during political negotiations: "At each step in the Cold War," Wallis wrote, "the U.S. was presented with a choice between very different but equally plausible interpretations of Soviet intentions, each of which would have led to very different responses. At every turn, U.S. policy-makers have chosen to assume the very worst about their Soviet counterparts." Wallis published bitter denunciations of the American government's sponsorship of anti-Communist Contra rebels against Nicaragua's Sandinista dictatorship.

After visiting Nicaragua in 1983, in the company of the pro-Sandinista group Witness for Peace, Wallis and then-Sojourners associate editor Joyce Hollyday co-authored several articles in which they whitewashed the brutality of the Sandinista government while condemning the United States for waging an "undeclared war" against "the people of Nicaragua." One representative issue of Sojourners from the time condemned the "suffering created by U.S. policy against Nicaragua," and urged the "U.S. government to re-examine and change its policy toward Nicaragua, and establish a relationship of trust and friendship between the people of Nicaragua and the people of the United States." In keeping with his enthusiasm for Nicaragua's Communist regime, Wallis also criticized conservative evangelical leaders such as Pat Robertson for siding with the rebel opposition. "To allow political ideology to overshadow human needs and fundamental issues of life and death is to go seriously astray," Wallis self-righteously remarked in one such attack.

Under the sway of leftist evangelical movements like liberation theology, Wallis invited the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) - the public relations arm of the El Salvadoran terrorist group the FMLN - to take part in a number of initiatives with Sojourners. (That alliance did not prevent Wallis from attacking Christian supporters of the Contras as terrorist sympathizers. Insisted Wallis: "Christian support for terrorism, whether it be from the Right or the Left, is simply wrong.") Among these initiatives was the so-called "Pledge Of Resistance (POR)." In effect, the POR was a blueprint for mobilized protests and various acts of civil disobedience - to be carried out by leftist activists and their counterparts in the religious community - in the event that the United States launched an invasion of Nicaragua. Details of how this was to be accomplished were supplied by Wallis himself in an August 1984 article for Sojourners called "A Pledge of Resistance: A Contingency Plan in the Event of a U.S. Invasion of Nicaragua." In the article, Wallis sounded a number of leftist talking points, calling for opposition to U.S. funding of the Contras, and for a repeal of the embargo against Nicaraguan goods. He also spelled out POR's ultimate bjective:

"We hope either to prevent a direct U.S. invasion of Nicaragua or to make such military action so politically costly it will have to be halted. By announcing a credible and coordinated plan of massive public resistance, we hope to forestall an expanded war against Nicaragua. If the U.S. military undertakes direct action against Nicaragua, we will undertake non-violent direct action against it on the largest scale possible. In so doing we hope to bring the issue before the American people, pressure Congress to act, and demand an immediate end to the invasion and the withdrawal of U.S. forces in Nicaragua."

Wallis later expanded the POR to include opposition to any U.S. military action anywhere in Central America. It was not until 1999 that Wallis would admit to second thoughts about his unquestioning support for the Sandinista regime. In the course of an editorial decrying both the U.S. bombing campaign against Iraq and its sanctions against Saddam Hussein's government in Baghdad, Wallis conceded: "The Sandinistas were responsible for serious mistakes and violations of human rights, which led to their downfall no less than U.S. aggression did." Wallis drew the following lesson from this history: "It's a mistake only to criticize U.S. policy and refuse to criticize those on the other side of U.S. power."

But while he has recanted some of his pro-Soviet, Cold War-era politics, Wallis remains fiercely opposed to capitalism and the free market system. In many interviews, he has stressed his belief that capitalism has proven to be an unmitigated failure. "Our systems have failed the poor and they have failed the earth," Wallis has said. "They have failed the creation." And while Wallis today concedes that Communism was not all he that and his Sojourners colleagues claimed it to be, he remains adamant in his insistence that capitalism is no improvement. According to Wallis, "both macrosystems, capitalism and Communism, have failed, not just one, not Communism only, but also capitalism."

To replace these two systems, Wallis has called for the U.S. government to craft its policies in accordance with leftwing views on poverty and the environment. "There aren't new systems," Wallis says, "There are rather new ways that we will test and evaluate and hold systems, macrosystems or microsystems, accountable. For example, how well they serve the poor and the outcast is a primary religious test of any, of any of our projects and systems. How they are in harmony with the earth and the whole of the creation is a second. And thirdly, how they enable the participation of people in the decision-making, in the process. Those three criteria for me are absolutely essential."

It is to promote these policies that Wallis founded Call to Renewal in 1995. A congregation of leftwing religious groups, Call to Renewal's members include Evangelicals, mainline Protestants, Catholics, leftist black churches like the Progressive National Baptist Convention, and other local and national organizations inclined toward religious faith and left-leaning politics. Wallis serves as the group's convener. As diverse as Call to Renewal is, its members are united in one purpose, one long-championed by Wallis: to advocate, in religious terms, for a leftwing economic agenda. Thus, although Call to Renewal arrogates for itself a nonpartisan status (the group's mission statement includes a pitch for universal healthcare and states, "We do not promote any particular ideological method or partisan agenda"), its policy preferences suggest that it is firmly in the leftwing camp.

One 2003 Call to Renewal "analysis" of President Bush's proposal to stimulate economic growth by cutting taxes is illustrative of the group's predilection for tax increases and stepped-up government spending as the preferred solution to domestic problems. After asserting that cutting income taxes amounts to a government-sanctioned punishment of low-wage earners and the poor, Call to Renewal invoked its interpretation of scripture to chastise the President for rejecting the idea that "justice" can be best achieved by a powerful central government. According to Call to Renewal, "The President's plan violates the Biblical notions of justice and looking out for our neighbors, specifically poor people. It also illustrates a neglect to use power to promote justice. This is a form of idolatry about which the Christian scriptures repeatedly warn. While great strides have been made in this proposal to help 'the haves,' little has been done to help, as Jesus said, 'the least of these.'"

More than a mere religious leader, Wallis is also an adroit political operative. To promulgate his political agenda, he relies not only on the message of the Bible but also on the gospel of veteran Washington politicians: the language of bipartisanship. It is this note of bipartisanship that Wallis has long sought to strike in order to propel his vision of "social justice" into the political mainstream. The title of his most recent book, God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It, published in January 2005, is a case in point. Wallis, a registered Democrat, claims in the book that he disavows partisan politics. And this was not first time that Wallis has sought to portray himself as a neutral religious figure whose overriding allegiance is to God: Wallis made an analogous point in his 1995 book, The Soul of Politics: Beyond "Religious Right" and "Secular Left."

His supposed neutrality is a tactic he has routinely applied to sell his brand of politics. For example, during a 2000 appearance on Jim Lehrer's news program, Wallis entirely dismissed the significance of such categories as left and right. "And the politics of left and right, which we're hearing from you again tonight, are just dysfunctional," said Wallis. "They don't work on the ground. We want what's right and what works, whether it be canceling the corrupt debt of Third World countries, that shouldn't have been incurred in the first place, or changing our own neighborhoods. So I don't care about left and right, I care about finding answers." Similarly, in a November 28, 2004 appearance on Meet the Press, Wallis attempted to shirk political classification by stating that God has no political affiliation. "God is not a Republican or a Democrat," he said. "That should be obvious. The values question is critical. The question is how narrowly or how broadly we define values." More recently, at a January 2005 speaking engagement in Michigan, Wallis informed his audience: "God is not partisan. He's not a Republican or a Democrat. When either party tries to polarize God or co-opt religious committees to further political agendas, it makes a terrible mistake."

A review of Wallis' record suggests that such talk amounts to little more than empty rhetoric. His incessant genuflection to the ideals of bipartisanship notwithstanding, Wallis has long used religion to justify his leftwing political agenda. Nowhere was this hypocritical tendency more in evidence than during the run-up to the 2004 Presidential election. As a longtime antiwar activist, Wallis was particularly pointed in his condemnation of the U.S.-led war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Asked in a January 2003 interview with the Harvard Political Review about the then-looming war, Wallis stated that because the United States had previously supported undemocratic regimes, it had no right to preemptively oppose them in Iraq. "Saddam Hussein is an evil man," Wallis said, "but so are many rulers around the world. Other human rights violators just as bad have been on the U.S. government's payroll. I watched my government supporting and funding and keeping people like this in power for years: Somoza, Marcos, Pinochet, the Guatemalan dictators. We have a history here that isn't very admirable." Wallis further warned that by warring against Saddam Hussein, President Bush would decisively alienate the American religious community. "If President Bush goes to war with Iraq, he will do so without the support of the majority of church leaders of this country," Wallis opined. "The church leaders that he upholds and praises and wants to support are not supporting him in this war." In the same interview, Wallis revealed that he had met with the President in order to impress upon him his belief (one contradicted by considerable empirical evidence) that the underlying cause of terrorism was poverty. "I told him that until we focus that energy into overcoming poverty, both globally and domestically, we're going to lose the war on poverty and the war on terrorism," Wallis recounted.

No sooner had the war begun than Wallis pronounced it lost a cause. Writing in the May-June 2003 issue of Sojourners, Wallis insisted that the conflict's root causes were America's allegedly unjust support for Israel and the evils of globalization. "Unresolved injustice—such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, feudal Arab regimes protected by oil, and globalization policies that systematically give advantage to wealthy nations over poor countries and people—remains a root cause of violence and will not be overcome by the imposition of American military superiority," Wallis wrote. Belying his own oft-invoked commitment to keeping religion free of political partisanship, Wallis further alleged that Christianity instructs its adherents to oppose the war. "Dissent in a time of war is not only Christian, it is also patriotic," said Wallis. "A long and honorable record of opposition to war in church tradition and American history puts dissent in the mainstream of Christian life and American citizenship. Rather than acquiesce to the war, prayerful and thoughtful dissent is more important than ever."

Motivated by his antiwar views, Wallis applied his prominence in the religious community toward the task of undermining the perceived justness of the American cause in Iraq. Toward this end, Wallis brought together a number of noted leftwing religious and academic figures, including Princeton University professor Cornel West, to sign an antiwar petition. Among the positions endorsed by the petition was moral relativism, and a concomitant rejection of notions of good and evil. "The distinction between good and evil does not run between one nation and another, or one group and another," stated the petition. "It runs straight through every human heart." After complaining (incorrectly) that all opponents of U.S. foreign policy had been condemned by the government as "evil," the signatories, in a less-than-subtle allusion to the President, charged him with heresy: "We reject the false teaching that those who are not for the United States politically are against it, or that those who fundamentally question American policies must be with the 'evil-doers.' Such crude distinctions, especially when used by Christians, are expressions of the Manichaean heresy, in which the world is divided into forces of absolute good and absolute evil." (Wallis made a parallel plea for moral relativism in God's Politics, writing: "To believe that your own nation is 'the greatest force for good in history' . . . and that those who oppose us are 'evil' is, indeed, a dangerous religion for the world.") The petition signatories expressed their disapproval of a U.S. foreign policy which, they alleged, dispensed with ethical boundaries to attack civilians and deploy weapons of mass destruction: "We reject the false teaching that a war on terrorism takes precedence over ethical and legal norms. Some things ought never be done - torture, the deliberate bombing of civilians, the use of indiscriminate weapons of mass destruction - regardless of the consequences."

Always with the disclaimer that neither major political party can claim to authoritatively represent the values of religious faith, Wallis passionately contends that Republican policies are immoral and godless. In a July 2004 op-ed for the Boston Globe, he mounted the argument that because of American foreign and domestic policies, "[a] misrepresentation of Christianity has taken place." By Wallis' reading, "Many people around the world now think Christian faith stands for political commitments that are almost the opposite of its true meaning. How did the faith of Jesus come to be known as pro-rich, pro-war, and pro-American?" Wallis declined to explain how being against the wealthy, against a war of liberation, and against the United States was more in line with Biblical teaching. He did, however, dissociate himself from his previous rejection of the existence of absolute evil, expressed starkly in the aforementioned petition. Intent on lambasting the Bush administration, Wallis now decided to call evil by its name: multinational corporations. Wrote Wallis, "It is because religion takes the problem of evil so seriously that it must always be suspicious of too much concentrated power - politically and economically - either in totalitarian regimes or in huge multinational corporations that now have more wealth and power than many governments."

Just a month before the 2004 Presidential election, Wallis embraced a rabid partisanship that in form and content was indistinguishable from the venomous harangues delivered daily by the more animated Democratic Party loyalists. In an October 2004 anti-Bush diatribe for Sojourners called "The Religious Right Era is Over," Wallis (after making his obligatory point that "God is not a Republican, nor a Democrat") proceeded to make the case that religious believers should be deeply uncomfortable about voting for President Bush. Implying that the President was a liar, Wallis stated, "Truth-telling is also a religious issue that should be applied to a candidate's rationales for war, tax cuts, or any other policy, as is humility in avoiding the language of 'righteous empire' which too easily confuses the roles of God, church, and nation." Wallis further held that if Christian voters considered the war from a theological perspective, they would find it—and, by extension, the President who chose to wage it—unjust. As Wallis explained in the same article, "War, of course, is also a deeply theological matter. The near-unanimous opinion of religious leaders worldwide that the Iraq war failed to fit 'just war' criteria should be an electoral issue for Christian voters, especially as the warnings from religious leaders have proven prophetically and tragically accurate."

This eagerness to enlist religion in the cause of bashing the Bush administration made Wallis a much sought-after interviewee in the days preceding the election. With an eye toward aiding the Democratic Party, Wallis told reporters that "progressive" evangelicals and "moderate Catholics," which Wallis conjectured comprised 20 percent of the electorate, would prove a decisive force in turning the election's outcome in the Democrats' favor. After the election, Wallis revealed (to the surprise of no one) that he himself had cast a vote for the Democratic candidate, John Kerry.

That the election failed to bear out Wallis' projections did not diminish the fortunes of the preacher-activist. To the contrary, owing to the popular post-election consensus among Democratic Party members that their defeat could be attributed to their party's disconnect from religious voters, Wallis became an overnight celebrity within Democratic ranks. Wasting no time, Democratic strategists and politicians turned to him as the man who could sell the Democratic Party to the coveted religious demographic. In January 2005, at the beginning of the Congressional session, Senate Democrats invited Wallis to address them in a private discussion. Meanwhile, some fifteen Democratic members of the House made Wallis the guest of honor at a breakfast confab whose subject, according to The New York Times, was devising ways to instill support for the Democratic Party into the hearts of the religious faithful. James Manley, a spokesman for the Senate Minority Leader, Democrat Harry Reid of Nevada, acknowledged that Wallis was actively working with the Democratic political leadership to lure religious voters into the party's fold. "He can help us communicate with the rising number of evangelicals in the country, which is right now a Republican constituency, but which Wallis argues could easily become part of the Democratic constituency as well," Manley told the Times.

Wallis' influence could be discerned immediately. Mirroring many of the themes Wallis has stressed in Sojourners, Senator Edward Kennedy, who had spoken frequently with Wallis over the years, delivered a speech calling on the Democrats to "speak more directly to the issues of deep conscience." For all intents and purposes a Democratic activist, Wallis has committed the months following the 2004 election to the cause of cheerleading for the Democratic Party. Appearing at Harvard University (where he had been a visiting Fellow in the fall of 2002, teaching a class called "Faith, Politics, and Society") Wallis used the occasion of a November 2004 speech to a conference of black journalists to link his leftwing religious views to the Democratic Party line.

Appropriating a line of attack often used by Democratic detractors to condemn the Bush administration, Wallis averred that the Republican Party not only subscribed to the wrong politics—it believed in the wrong religion as well. "There is a theology and politics of fear we must counter with the politics of hope," Wallis said.

In January 2005, Wallis, though still contending that God was neither a Republican nor a Democrat, once more reverted to moral relativism. His aim, as per usual, was to denounce the Bush administration. Asked, just prior to the President's inauguration, to give his opinion about Mr. Bush's personal religious views, Wallis instinctively fired a broadside against the Bush administration's foreign policy. "To say they are evil and we are good is bad theology and leads to bad foreign policy," Wallis told the St. Louis Post Dispatch.

posted March 09, 2007 01:46 PM            

The National Council Of Churches

"The beginning of true liberty is Jesus Christ. And therefore the first and last target of all subversion is biblical faith. Hence it is that the Church has been the first target of infiltration and subversion; and is the most subverted institution in the United States today.

— Dr. R. J. Rushdoony"

David Emerson Gumaer spent two years within the youth apparatus of the Communist Party as an undercover operative for Chicago Police Intelligence. In December of 1967 he accepted the invitation of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee to testify in executive session regarding his knowledge of the activities and personnel of the W.E.B. DuBois Clubs and the Students for a Democratic Society. Mr. Gumaer is currently a Contributing Editor to The Review Of The News (an outstanding new national newsweekly) and has lectured widely.

Claiming to speak with authority for some 42 million American Christians, the National Council of the Churches of Christ (N.C.C.) includes thirty-three denominations representing most of the major Protestant and Orthodox Churches in the United States. In addition, more than a score of denominations not actually members of the N.C.C. have participated actively in its radical programs.

Headquartered at 475 Riverside Drive in New York City, the National Council functions through dozens of interlocking departments, grouped under four major divisions, overseeing the N.C.C.'s international operations. The program is of such magnitude that in 1968, alone, the National Council of Churches expended over $19 million on a worldwide network of Leftist projects. In that year, however, the N.C.C. collected $24,819,000 from gullible American Christians and tax-exempt Leftist foundations.

During the meeting of this group's General Assembly at San Diego in February of 1968, a presentation titled "NCC Ministries and the Communist World" revealed that in 1967 over $1,584,000 had been given to the Communist Government of Poland through an N.C.C. on-going ministry called Church World Service. Although the aid was received in the name of the Polish Ecumenical Council, it was administered by the Communists for their own purposes. During the period from 1952 until 1967, over $40 million worth of food, clothing, and other material was give by the N.C.C.'s Church World Service to the Communist Government of Yugoslavia. Even stranger was an admission in this N.C.C. report that the National Council was operating a "refugee program" which picked up the tab for relocating Brazilian Communists in Mexico.

To top it off, in 1968 the same U.S. Government which prohibits prayer in our schools donated $5 million to the National Council of Churches through something called "(Ocean Freight Refunds." In fact, in its 1960 triennial report, the N.C.C. lists "Ocean Freight Refunds" from the federal government totaling more than $23 million for the period 1957 to 1960.

The recipient of this federal largesse is the same National Council of Churches whose 1968 General Assembly at San Diego demanded that America:

"Stop the bombing of North Vietnam as a prelude to seeking a negotiated peace"; "Avoid provocative military actions against Communist China in the knowledge that it has a legitimate interest in Asia"; "Press for the admission of the Peking government to the United Nations"; "Create conditions for cooperation between the United States and the Communist countries of Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and Cuba"; "Recognize the government of Cuba and acknowledge the existence of the East German Republic"; and, "Remove restrictions on imports from Communist countries and on cultural exchanges between the U.S. and the Soviet Union."

Other resolutions called for "increased support for poverty-rights action groups by Church Women United," and provided for financial backing of the subversive National Urban Coalition. The N.C.C. even directed its member churches "to provide funds for local black groups to strategize for the summer and to support inclusion of black power and black nationalist organizations in local task groups.... "In other words, the resolutions of the National Council exactly followed the current Communist Line.

The N.C.C. has consistently propagandized for every conceivable Leftist program, from federally forced integration to complete disarmament of the United States. From its office in Washington, D.C., the National Council's spokesmen regularly appear before Committees of Congress to lobby for the causes of the Far Left, though the National Council has never registered under the Lobbying Act of 1946. And, despite its having been repeatedly exposed as a fraud the N.C.C. has somehow continued to maintain not only its reputation for legitimacy, but its tax-exempt status as well. It is very well shielded indeed, and rooted in a conspiracy against Christianity in America which goes back more than eighty years.

A full decade before the turn of the century, the seeds of the Marxist "social gospel" were already being planted within our major seminaries and divinity schools by returning American theologians who had studied in England and Germany. There they had become infected with the virus of a Conspiracy which had already changed much of the spiritual and moral structure of Europe. After awhile, of course, America produced her own clergical conspirators. One of these was a man named Walter Rauschenbusch.

In 1885, Raushenbusch was graduated from the prestigious Rochester Theological Seminary, thoroughly indoctrinated in the Socialist tenets of "Ilumanism" — a philosophy calling itself a religion but substituting faith in man for faith in God. As the atheist Karl Marx noted: "Ilumanism is really nothing else but Marxism." Rauschenbusch was both a Ilumanist and a Marxist. Thus, in 1892 he and a group of Comrades organized "The Brotherhood of the Kingdom" to promote their radical beliefs along Fabian lines. Walter Ranschenbusch declared: "If ever Socialism is to succeed, it cannot succeed in an irreligious country. It must start in the churches."

And start in the churches it did.

In New York, the Reverend F.D. Huntington — another Marxist — was busy founding the American branch of the Christian Socialist Movement. It was to be a religious arm of the infamous Fabian Socialist Society which had been created some years earlier in London at the direction of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw, and a host of other prominent Marxists of the time. Indeed, the Webbs made a trip to the United States in 1898 to review the success of Fabian infiltration of religion. By the turn of the century, Marxist plans for the capture of our churches were proceeding apace.

In February of 1900 the first effort to create a National Federation of Churches resulted in a nationwide committee of twenty-five leading churchmen, many of whom were devoted Fabians. One of those young organizers was an English protégé of Walter Rauschenbusch named Harry F. Ward. Years later, in sworn testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, it would be revealed that Ward was not only a secret Communist, but "the Red Dean of the Communist Party in the religious field."

By February 1901, delegates from local church federations met at Philadelphia and formed the National Federation of Churches, forerunner of a larger, more powerful Fabian organization whose projects on behalf of the Communist apparatus would radically alter the course of American history. The next year at Chicago, during the national convention of the Socialist Party, a number of prominent N.F.C. clergymen participated actively.

There followed a Committee on Correspondence, made up of the more radical ministers and laymen of the day, which toured the nation's seminaries and church offices propagandizing for yet another Red project, an Inter-Church Conference on Federation. Deliberations at that important Conference, held in New York on November 15, 1905, would have a profound influence on the minds and actions of thousands of religious leaders for many years to come. It was at that historic gathering that the first formal proposal was made calling for the formation of the Federal Council of Churches, now the National Council of Churches.

In 1907 the Far Left created a supporting Front called the Methodist Federation for Social Service, a "religious" organization found by the House Committee on Un-American Activities to have been a key apparatus of the Communist Conspiracy since its very inception.1 In fact, when it was finally exposed years later, it was cited as "Among the more Conspicuous fronts for Communist activity . . . "And, as you might expect, one of the founding Methodist ministers was Harry F. Ward, the brilliant protégé of Walter Rauscbenbusch. For the next thirty-five years this Communist Front was directed by Comrade Ward, and staffed by numerous functionaries of the Communist Party.

By this time the groundwork had been laid and Dr. Rauschenbusch paid a return visit to Sidney and Beatrice Webb in England, fully committing himself to Fabian designs for subversion of the Christian church in America. The following year, on December 2, 1908, Waller Rauschenbusch and Harry Ward set up a nine-day conference at Philadelphia during which the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America (F.C.C.) was officially formed by representatives of twenty-nine Protestant and Eastern Orthodox denominations. The F.C.C. then chose as its constitution the same plan of federation that had earlier been adopted by the Socialists attending the 1905 Inter-Church Conference on Federation. They also adopted "The Social Creed of the Churches" written by English Communist Harry F. Ward, who had earlier submitted his Plan to Nikolai Lenin for approval.

By 1914 the Federal Council of Churches had become one of the major outlets in America for Marxist propaganda. On February tenth of that year a group of conspirators met in the home of millionaire industrialist Andrew Carnegie and laid plans for something called the Church Peace Union. In Pioneers For Peach Through Religion, Charles S. Macfarland (at the time General Secretary of the F.C.C.) reveals that this group included only those religious leaders who were in some way connected with the Federal Council of Churches. This newly formed organization was the brainchild of top conspirator Andrew Carnegie, who used it to capture for the Insiders the controlling clique of the Federal Council by subsidizing the Church Peace Union to the tune of $2 million.

Shortly after the meeting with Carnegie, two international church conferences were promoted by the F.C.C.'s Church Peace Union — one for Roman Catholics, to be held at Liegé, Belgium, and the other for Protestants at Constance, Germany. Both were scheduled to convene on August 1, 1914. Which, by an odd "coincidence," was the very day that war was declared between Germany and Russia.

Several months later, at Cambridge in England, the Fabian Socialists set up an International Fellowship of Reconciliation to protest the War while propagandizing for Socialism. This was followed a year later on November 11, 1915, by the formation of an American Branch of F.O.R., organized by such stalwarts of the Federal Council of Churches as Harry F. Ward and Walter Rauschenbush. They were aided in this project by leading Socialists Norman Thomas, Oswald Garrison Viliard, and Jane Addams (at whose home in Chicago the Webbs stayed during their visit to America). In April 1917, one month after the Czar had been forced to surrender control of his government to Socialist Alexander Kerensky, The United States was finally maneuvered into World War I, thus ending 141 years of neutrality. That fall, a relative handful of bolsheviks led by Nikolai Lenin captured the Government of Russia, thereby establishing a base for the Marxists' continuing world revolution.

By 1918, as its interlock with the Fellowship of Reconciliation became more pronounced, the Federal Council of Churches stepped up its agitation against the War and became the major propagandist in America for the Bolshevik Revolution. That year, too, with the passing of Walter Rauschenbush, the mantle of the Marxist movement within the church passed to Comrade Harry Ward, who had by then begun teaching the Red dialectic at Union Theological Seminary, where he was to remain for twenty-five years.

In early 1919 the Russian Communists issued a call for the founding of the Communist International, resulting that September first in the formation of the American Communist Party from the Left wing of the Socialist Party. Among the hundreds of delegates at the founding convention in Chicago were Comrades John Keracher and Dennis Batt, representing the Michigan State organization of the Socialist Party. They insisted "that the Communist Party should in its program adopt a plan calling for an all-out campaign against religion as its main and immediate objective." Years later a charter member of the Party revealed:

The policy in those days was framed in such a way that the members of the Communist Party could infiltrate church organizations for the purpose of conducting their propaganda among them, for enlisting their support for Soviet Russia, and for the various campaigns in which the Communists were interested.

In the early Twenties the Communist Party made considerable gains in its program to infiltrate the churches. This effort was led by such prominent "American" clergymen as Harry F. Ward, Jerome Davis, William B. Spofford, and Albert Rhys Williams. As former top Communist Benjamin Gitlow told the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1953: "This group wielded tremendous influence in the religious field and did Trojan Horse work in advancing the Communist conspiracy in religion."

The most important Communist in the field of religion, said Gitlow, was Robert W. Dunn — who "served as the Communist Party's liaison between its political committee and secretariat and the clergymen operating under instructions of the Party." Comrade Dunn, an official with the American Civil Liberties Union, carried his orders to Harry Ward and the others, who in turn issued directives of their own. Comrades Ward, Spofford, Davis, and Williams were all leaders of the F.C.C. and all were members of the Communist Party. Williams even worked in the Soviet Union as an assistant in the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs.

In 1922 the American Communist Party, and all Communist Parties throughout the world, adopted the "United Front" strategy ordered by Nikolai Lenin and the Communist International. This enabled the Reds greatly to expand their infiltration of religion. As Ben Gitlow testified: "The number of clergymen who followed the Communist Party line grew by leaps and bounds."

In 1924 (and again in 1929) Federal Council chieftain Harry Ward traveled to Moscow to discuss with Stalin the use of the churches in furthering the goals of the International Communist Conspiracy. In early 1925, Ward was sent to China where he lectured widely among Christian clergymen. His lectures in China were discussed at length at the Comintern, and it was agreed that "the missions and church institutions in China could be used . . . to cover up Communist espionage activities. . . . "That was also the case in this country, where the Federal Council already had a budget of $350,000 and an office in Washington from which it promoted Communist interests.

In 1927 the F.C.C.'s lobbying for Communist causes became so flagrant that Congressman Arthur M. Free introduced a resolution in the House of Representatives describing the Federal Council as "a communist organization aimed at the establishment of a state-church .... "In that same year, a report issued by the Military Intelligence Association branded the F.C.C. as subversive. Another denunciation appeared in the Naval Institute Proceedings of 1928, which established that the Federal Council had been meddling in defense matters and was "probably the most powerful propaganda organization in the country."

Testifying before the Senate Lobbying Investigating Committee, Congressman George Tinkham revealed that he had received propaganda from the F.C.C. on fifteen different political issues. Tinkham later revealed that Insider John D. Rockefeller Jr. had from 1926 to 1929 contributed over $137,000 to the Federal Council of Churches — a sum equal to about ten percent of its total annual income from all sources.

During 1932 the Federal Council suffered a series of setbacks. Congressional Committee Report Number 2290 formally branded the F.C.C. as subversive. And the Sunday School Times of August 13, 1932, exposed an obscene F.C.C. sex manual entitled Young People's Relationships, described as "a crowning achievement of the Federal Council controlling group along the line of preparing the way for atheistic Communism." Also, Major Amos A. Fries produced documentation before a Hearing of the House Immigration Committee in January 1932, proving that "There has been an interlocking board of directorates all the way from the Federal Council of Churches to the most extreme Communists."

During this hectic period for the F.C.C., Harry Ward was graduating one of his more interesting proteges from Union Theological Seminary in New York — an eager young Marxist who promptly began working for the A.C.L.U. Ward's pupil was Arnold Johnson, now Public Relations Director for the Communist Party, U.S.A. The following year Comrade Johnson served as Field Secretary for the Communists National Religion and Labor Foundation, created in 1932 by Communist Sidney Hillman. Acting in the same capacity as Johnson in that effort was Willard E. Uphaus, a Federal Council official who has since affiliated himself with ten other officially cited Communist projects. Other F.C.C. officials listed on the letterhead of the Reds' National Religion and Labor Foundation include such members of its Executive Committee as Communists Jerome Davis, A.J. Muste, and Charles C. Webber.

By 1935 Communist infiltration of religion in the Untied States was in full swing, presaging orders of the Seventh World Conference of the Comintern at Moscow to maintain such subversion. On September 10, 1935, a Report on the F.C.C. from the Office of Naval Intelligence was read into the Congressional Record, establishing that the Federal Council was one of several organizations which "give aid and comfort to the Communist movement and Party." Its leadership, the Intelligence Report revealed, "consists of a small radical group which dictates its policy," and "it is always extremely active in any matter against national defense." In fact the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral William H. Standley, formally accused the F.C.C. of collaborating with the Communists.

How far the Federal Council of Churches was prepared to go in pushing the Communist Line was revealed in a special report issued by the Commission to Study the Bases of a Just and Durable Peace, at the 1942 convention of the F.C.C. It called for:

Ultimately, "a world government of delegated powers." Complete abandonment of U.S. isolationism. Strong immediate limitations on national sovereignty. International control of all armies and navies. A universal system of money.... Worldwide freedom of immigration. Progressive elimination of all tariff and quota restrictions on world trade .... A "democratically controlled" international bank ....

Chairman of the Commission which issued these proposals was John Foster Dulles, an Insider who was a leader of the Federal Council of Churches.

The F.C.C. conference concluded:

Many duties now performed by local and national governments "can now be effectively carried out only by international authority." Individual nations . . . must give up their armed forces "except for preservation of domestic order" and allow the world to be policed by an international army and navy . . . .

Three years later, in 1945, the Federal Council of Churches was one of only forty-two non-governmental organizations invited to send delegates to the international conference at San Francisco which founded the United Nations. Presiding over the U.N. conclave was Communist agent Alger Hiss, who like Dulles had earlier served as Chairman of an important committee of the Federal Council of Churches. The Federal Council even boasted that it had first conceived the idea of the United Nations, and noted that one of its prominent officials, John Foster Dulles, had been responsible for incorporating the Federal Council's "Six Pillars of Peace" into the U.N. Charter.

Nonetheless, the F.C.C. had taken quite a beating from Conservatives during the Forties. It was time for a change of image if it was to survive. On November 29, 1950, the Federal Council held a convention at Cleveland where it absorbed four additional agencies (the Church World Service, the Interseminary Committee, the Protestant Film Commission, and the Protestant Radio Commission), and formally changed its name to the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Leaders of the old Marxist organization became leaders in the new one. In fact, the F.C.C.'s Bulletin that December explained: "All the work of the Federal Council will continue under new auspices....other divisions of the National Council and the general administration of the Council will also draw upon the resources in both personnel and finances."

In checking the quick-change artistry of the Federal Council of Churches, Dr. J.B. Mathews, who compiled the voluminous Appendix IX of the Dies Committee on Un-American Activities, found:

In the formal constitution of the National Council of Churches in Cleveland, one representative from each of the participating denominations signed the official book which became the Document of Record. Eleven of these 29 signers of the official book have public records of affiliation with pro-Communist enterprises....

There were 358 clergymen who were voting delegates to the constituting convention.... Of these clergymen, 123 (or 34 per cent) have had affiliations with Communist projects and enterprises. That represents a high degree of Communist penetration.2

The overlap between the old Council and the new was almost complete. It included Edwin T. Dahlberg who had been Chairman of the Department of Evangelism in the F.C.C. and later became President of the "new" National Council of Churches. The public record shows that Dahlberg has affiliated himself with at least twenty-seven officially cited Communist projects. Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam, who had been President of the F.C.C. in 1948, became a member of the powerful N.C.C. General Board. Oxnam has a record of affiliations with forty-one officially cited Communist Fronts and projects. Roswell P. Barnes, as Associate General Secretary of the F.C.C. in 1940, and editor of the F.C.C. Bulletin in later years, turned up as Executive Secretary of the N.C.C.'s Division of Christian Life and Work. Barnes has associated himself with nine officially cited Communist Fronts. And then there was Walter W. Van Kirk, who had held the identical title of Executive Director of both the F.C.C. and N.C.C. Department of International Justice and Goodwill. The list, as one might expect, could go on and on.

What is most interesting about control of the National Council of Churches is that its hierarchy consists of a General Assembly made up of 750 delegates who meet once every three years. From this group is chosen a General Board of 275 members who meet every four months. The rules provide that a quorum must be present to take any official action, and that a majority of those present must be in favor of said action for it to be official. The fantastic thing about this is that it only lakes 20 of the 275 to constitute a quorum — and a majority of that twenty is eleven. Therefore, the balance of power lies in the hands of just eleven men who can issue a declaration on any political subject and promulgate that declaration in the name of thirty-three denominations comprising over 42 million American Protestants. That, people, is just the way the Communists want it.

In 1951, opposition to the N.C.C. came from both the House Committee on Un-American Activities (see its investigation of the Communist Committee for Peaceful Alternatives to the Atlantic Pact), and from a newly formed Methodist organization based in Cincinnati, the anti-Communist "Circuit Riders."

The year 1952 began with the H.C.U.A. exposing the Communists' Methodist Federation for Social Action, which was found to be directly linked to both the F.C.C. and the successor N.C.C. The House Committee also heard testimony from former Communist leader Joseph Kornfeder, who said there were at that time somewhere in the neighborhood of 600 American clergymen who were members of the Communist Party. Kornfeder had trained at the Lenin School of Political Warfare in Moscow from 1927 to 1930, been a top aide of Josef Stalin, and spoke from experience.

When Dwight Eisenhower took office, Leftists in the National Council of Churches began to pop up in key posts in the Administration. There was John Foster Dulles, who became Secretary of State; Harold Stassen, who became Mutual Security Director (he had been Vice President of the N.C.C. and President of its International Council of Religious Education); and, Arthur S. Flemming, who became head of the manpower division of the Department of Defense and later Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare.3 President Eisenhower personally added prestige to the N.C.C. by speaking at its functions.

During 1953 the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and the House Committee on Un-American Activities took thousands of pages of testimony on Communist penetration of all phases of American life. In July of that year, H.C.U.A. heard testimony from such former leaders of the Communist Party as Manning Johnson, Benjamin Gitlow, and Joseph Kornfeder, detailing Communist infiltration and manipulation of our nation's churches. Supporting evidence was likewise given in sworn testimony by such experts as former Communists Paul Crouch, Karl Prussion, and Albert Vassart. The latter testified that "In 1936, Moscow sent out an order to have sure and carefully selected Communist youth enter the seminaries and become priests." After all, Stalin had himself been a seminarian.

1953 was also the year of the famous G. Bromley Oxnam Hearing before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, in which Oxnam admitted his participation in numerous Communist projects and implicated his N.C.C. Comrades. During that year the American Legion launched a drive to block the N.C.C. effort to bypass the McCarran Act in order to bring Communist clergymen to America from the Soviet Bloc. Meanwhile, the National Council was attacking the Bricker Amendment and the McCarren-Walter Internal Security Act of 1950.

The following year, while the National Council of Churches was pushing to abolish Bible reading in public schools, Walter Reuther presented a check to the N.C.C. for $200,000 — a grant from the C.I.O.'s Philip Murray Memorial Foundation. In the meantime, the Communist Daily Worker was devoting its space to reporting the National Council's attacks on Senator Joseph McCarthy and on all Congressional Committees investigating subversive activities.

In 1958 the National Council of Churches World Order Study Conference met at Cleveland, Ohio, from November eighteenth through the twenty-first. As the Communist Worker reported, the Cleveland delegates proposed:

Diplomatic recognition by the United States of Red China — and its admission to the United Nations; Co-existence with "the Communist nations"; Avoidance of "the posture of general hostility" to "the Communist nations"; Ratification of the genocide convention; Internationalism to supercede national patriotism; "Disarmament by multilateral agreement" for "universal disarmament"; "The creation of a permanent United Nations police force" and abolition of universal military training; "Abolition of the system of military conscription" and of the Selective Service System; Extension of trade and travel without restriction between the United States and Communist countries.

Of course, these N.C.C. proposals might just as well have come directly from Moscow. We are told, however, that they emanated from a "Message to the Churches," prepared by a committee of twenty-three N.C.C. laymen and clergy under the chairmanship of Dr. John C. Bennett, dean of the faculty at Union Theological Seminary. As one would assume, Bennett had already affiliated himself with at least twenty-seven officially cited Communist Fronts and projects.

What is most interesting about the Cleveland Conference is that, of the six hundred delegates, two-thirds were lay-men. The Circuit Riders note in Recognize Red China? that one-half of the registered clergymen at the conference, or 103, had public records of affiliation with Communist Fronts and causes.

The next major incident to jar the hierarchy of the National Council came on February 25, 1960, with the publication of Issues Presented By Air Reserve Center Training Manual, a Report of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. As the H.C.U.A. Report revealed, the Air Force had issued a training manual for its officers which dealt at some length with Communist penetration of religion. Officials of the National Council of Churches, learning of this, immediately contacted Secretary of the Air Force Dudley C. Sharp, demanding that this "offensive" manual be removed and the chapter pertaining to subversion of religion be rewritten to exclude any mention of Communist penetration. On the same day that the N.C.C. message was received, February 11, 1960, General Lloyd P. Hopwood, Director of Personnel Procurement and Training of the U.S. Air Force, ordered the manual withdrawn.

Some time thereafter, Secretary of Defense Thomas Gates told the Press: "in response to the letter of the National Council of Churches...I have assured this fine organization of my very genuine regrets regarding the statement that appeared in [the] Air Force Reserve Manual .... "

Citing the "offensive" passage on page fifty-three of the Air Reserve Center Training Manual, H.C.U.A. staff director Richard Arens quoted it as follows:

A while back Americans were shocked to find that Communists had infiltrated our churches....

The Communist Party, U.S.A., has instructed many of its members to join churches and church groups, to lake control whenever possible, and to influence the thoughts and actions of as many church-goers as they can .... The party tries to get leading church men to support Communist policies disguised as welfare work for minorities. Earl Browder, former head of the American Communist party,, once admitted: "By going among the religious masses, we are for the first time able to bring our anti-religious ideas to them."

Are there Communist Ministers? Sure.

The manual then named two such identified Communist ministers — the Reverend Eliot While, and the Reverend Claude C. Williams. It was Williams who once boasted: "Denominationally I am a Presbyterian, religiously a Unitarian, and politically I am a Communist. I am not preaching to make people good or anything of the sort, I'm in the church because I can reach people easier that way and get them organized for Communism."

Defending the H.C.U.A. position favoring the unaltered Air Force Reserve Manual, staff director Arens declared:

...in view of the Secretary's repudiation of the information conveyed respecting the National Council of Churches of Christ in America, the chairman issued a statement to the effect that the leadership of the [N.C.C.] had hundreds or at least over a hundred affiliations with Communist fronts and causes. Since then we have made careful, but yet incomplete checks, and it is a complete understatement. Thus far of the leadership of the National Council of Churches of Christ in America, we have found over 100 persons leadership capacity with either Communist-front records or records of service to Communists causes. The aggregate affiliations of the leadership, instead of being in the hundreds as the [H.C.U.A.] chairman. first indicated, is now, according to our latest count, into the thousands, and we have yet to complete our check....

Another matter raised by the Air Reserve Center Training Manual was the fact that on September 30, 1952, the National Council of Churches had published a "Revised Standard Version" of the Bible in which many beloved passages were altered, and adulterated phrases substituted to fit the social gospel of the N.C.C. Of the ninety translators named in a brochure issued by the N.C.C. at least thirty have been affiliated with ninety major Communist Fronts or projects.

Several months later, on April 20, 1960, Congressman Donald Jackson read into the Congressional Record (Pages 7842-7846) a shocking exposé of the pamphlet The Negro American A Reading List, published in 1957 by the Department of Racial and Cultural Relations of the National Council of Churches. This pamphlet was a bibliography of 260 books on "Negro history," many of which had been written by identified Communists. The Foreword to that reading list, by Alfred S. Kramer, slated: "We of the National Council . . . consider ... these books ... safe to recommend for children." Among the Communist authors recommended were: Victor Perlo, former head of a Soviet espionage ring operating within the U.S. government; Herbert Aptheker, chief theoretician for the Communist Party, U.S.A.; W.E.B. DuBois, an admitted Communist in whose honor the Party later named its youth affiliate; Shirley Graham, DuBois' Communist wife (who was in charge of all radio and television propaganda in Ghana when it was controlled by the Communists); and, Langston Hughes, whose blasphemous poem, "Goodbye Christ," scrapes the bottom in Communist sacrilege (Hughes had nine books on that reading list). A committee of ten clergy and laymen, headed by Dr. J. Oscar Lee (an N.C.C. Executive Director), had approved this N.C.C. reading list.

Obviously we will not be able to go into many more of the hundreds of subversive operations of the National Council of Churches because of limitations on our space. But, ever so briefly, let us touch on a few additional items of major importance.

On June 7, 1963, the N.C.C. created an Emergency Commission on Religion and Race headed by Dr. Martin Luther King, Walter Reuther, and Eugene Carson Blake. It was a Major coalition of Leftist forces run by Dr. Robert W. Spike, who after successfully leading the attack on the South during the N.C.C.'s Delta Project was murdered at Columbus, Ohio, in 1966 in circumstances which led police to believe that he had been a practicing pervert. Lewd pictures of homosexuals, names and addresses of known deviates, and addresses of homosexual hangouts in several cities were found in his possession.

Working with Spike in that N.C.C. Delta Project (which included the Reds' march on Selma, Alabama, in 1965) were Bayard Rustin, a convicted sexual deviate and former organizer for the Young Communist League; Myles Horton, Marxist director of the notorious Highlander Folk School; and, the Delta Ministry's associate director, the Reverend Warren McKenna. The Reverend McKenna was photographed in 1957, sitting during a visit to Red China with Communist Premier Chou En-lai, and has been referred to by Herbert Philbrick (in a government document called Communist Passport Frauds) as "one of the leading collaborators of, and apologists for, the Soviet Union."

In March and April of 1964 the Communist Worker announced an N.C.C. coalition to create a March on Washington — a march officially designated as a project of the Communists Party.

Then there is the Sixth Triennial Conference of the National Council of Churches held at Detroit during the first week in December 1969. On December fifth the Communist Daily World carried an article by Communist William Allen reporting that:

By unanimous vote, the 790 delegates at the convention here of the National Council of Churches condemned the massacre of Vietnamese civilians by U.S. troops.

On that same page, immediately following Comrade Allen's account, appeared a shorter item reporting yet another N.C.C. resolution which recommended "that U.S. churches raise 'substantial' funds to support 60,000 American military deserters and draft resisters who have taken refuge in Canada."

The Daily World report also named Dr. Cynthia Wedel, "an outspoken advocate of women's rights," as having just been elected the first woman President of the National Council of Churches. The New York Times noted on December fifth that the new N.C.C. President now occupies the "highest symbolic post in American Protestantism." Devoting a quarter of a page to the background of Mrs. Wedel, it revealed that she maintains the position of Associate Director of the wildly Leftist Center for Voluntarism in the Institute for Applied Behavioral Science in Washington, "the pioneering body in sensitivity training formerly known as the National Training Laboratory." In addition, she is a leading member of the "Jeanette Rankin Brigade" — a subversive group made up largely of the wives and daughters of Communists and fellow travelers.

After receiving her doctorate in psychology from George Washington University in 1935, we are told, Mrs. Wedel "took charge of youth work for the Episcopal Church in New York." There she met and married the Reverend Theodore O. Wedel. The Times somehow failed to mention that the Reverend Theodore Wedel is listed in Appendix IX of the Dies Committee on Un-American Activities as having begun his career of support for Communist causes as early as 1940 by sponsoring a "Conference On Civil Rights" held under the auspices of a Communist Front called the Washington Committee for Democratic Action. His wife, Cynthia, was listed in the Communist Worker of July 14, 1957, as a signer of a Communist petition to President Eisenhower calling for a ban on H-bomb testing.

What plans have Mrs. Wedel and the leaders of the National Council for rendering further aid to the Communists? For one thing, they called on member churches at their Detroit conference to "organize the collection of funds in the churches over the Christmas season for distribution among the Committee of Responsibility, the American Friends Service Committee, Vietnam Christian, Service and Caritas, for emergency medical relief to civilian Vietnamese casualties....To participate in the continuation of the March Against Death in communities around the country...." In short, the N.C.C. called for the collection of money for subversive agencies which have given material aid to the Communist Vietcong, and for the promotion of the Communists' continuing "Vietnam Moratorium" project.

During the course of the N.C.C.'s week-long conference, some three thousand "church leaders" were treated to the stirring words of Marxist James Forman, militant leader of the Black Nationalist movement in America. Referring to his "Black Manifesto," Forman called for "a transfer of power," asserting the hoary Communist canard about the "right of self-determination" for blacks in America.

Commenting on Forman, syndicated columnist Tom Anderson has noted:

On May 2, 1969, Marxist-anarchist James Forman presented a list of demands, called a Black Manifesto, to the General Board of the National Council of Churches. This manifesto demands that United States churches pay 500 million dollars as "reparations" to Negroes for past "exploitation." The money would be paid to Forman's National Black Economic Development Conference to help finance a nationwide guerrilla war. The Manifesto clearly, expressed N.B.E.D.C.'s intention to overthrow the U.S. government by force and violence.

And, believe it or not, the General Board of the N.C.C., after voting in favor of Foreman's plan, declared that it desired "to record its deepest appreciation to Mr. James Forman for the presentation of, and explanation concerning, the Black Manifesto...."

So you see, there is little wonder that in its issue of July 15, 1968, Approach magazine (a publication of the National Council of Churches) devoted considerable space to an exclusive interview with Gus Hall, General Secretary of the Communist Party, U.S.A. During that unprecedented interview, Comrade Hall declared that Communism and the church share so many goals that "they ought to exist for one another." Hall, said the N.C.C. article, "cited current red goals for America as being 'almost identical' to those espoused by the liberal church....

'We can — we should — work together for the same things,'' he said." You see. Communist leader Gus Hall concluded: "We can live together in a Socialist nation."

If the National Council of Churches has its way, that's just the way it will be!

Footnotes:

1 The Methodist Federation for Social Service, which later changed its name to become the Methodist Federation for Social Action, admitted its cooperation with the Communists in its Bulletin number eight for 1932. It was subsequently cited as a Communist Front by the 1948 Report of the California Committee on Un-American Activities. On February 17, 1952, the House Committee on Un-American Activities Issued an 87-page document detailing the Red activities of the M.F.S.A. and its Communist personnel. Among those in this Front cited as active Communists posing as church leaders was one Winifred Chappell, a Soviet agent who was assigned by Harry Ward to do "youth work" for the Methodist Church. As Secretary of M.F.S.S. for ten years, she counseled young draftees to commit wholesale sabotage and treason against the United States. Writing in the Methodist weekly, Epworth Herald, Comrade Winifred advised youth to: "Accept the draft, take the drill, go into the camps and onto the battlefield, or into the munitions factories and transportation work — but sabotage war preparations and war. Be agitators for sabotage. . . ."

Another Communist in this outfit was the Reverend Jack McMichael, the first clergyman ever subpoenaed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. He was Executive Secretary for the M.F.S.A. Then there was Dr. Charles C. Webber, M.F.S.S. Co-Secretary, who told an audience at Rochester Divinity School: "Capitalism is un-Christian and unethical, and must give way, to Socialism and Communism, and the missionaries of the future must be social revolutionists." There was also Jerome Davis, identified twice under oath as a Communist, with a record of Communist activities that takes eight full pages. The current Executive Secretary of the Methodist Federation for Social Action is Communist Lee H. Ball of Chicago.

Communist Party founder Benjamin Gitlow revealed during testimony given in 1953 that the objective of M.F.S.A. "was to transform the Methodist Church and Christianity into an instrument for the achievement of Socialism." The Communists in this organization, said Gitlow, "posed as religious reformers fighting orthodoxy and reaction in religion."

2 Approximately one-third of those elected to the General Board of the National Council of Churches have had similar Communist records. while at least seven hundred officers, denominational representatives, and other N.C.C. officials also have Communist Front records.

posted March 10, 2007 12:23 AM              

quote:

---

As usual Mirandee, you make allegations you can't back up with facts.

---

More of the countless facts that I have posted at GU to back up my statements. Yet even in doing so once again here I know the myth will persist.

If the federal government gives money directly to a religious school or organization in a manner that clearly violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, can anyone sue to stop it? The answer should be obvious: any taxpayer should be able to sue to prevent his or her tax dollars from being used in a manner that is an unconstitutional establishment of religion.

Unfortunately, President Bush and the religious right disagree.

On Wednesday, February 28, the Supreme Court heard arguments in Hein v Freedom from Religion Foundation, a case that threatens to make the federal government completely immune from challenges when it spends money to support religion.

In a 1968 court case, Flast v Cohen, the Supreme Court recognized an exception to the usual rule that a person cannot sue as a taxpayer to stop the spending of money that violates the Constitution. In that case, the Court said that the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment was meant to be a limit on Congress's taxing and spending power and that therefore taxpayers do have standing to enforce its commands.

Hein v Freedom from Religion Foundation is a challenge to the Bush administration's unprecedented attempt to funnel money to religious entities providing social services. In his first days as President, George W. Bush created an Office of Faith Based and Community Initiatives for the purpose of giving money to religious institutions. The question is whether a taxpayer can bring a challenge to this as violating the Establishment Clause.

It is to be hoped that the Supreme Court will reaffirm Flast v Cohen and allow taxpayers to challenge this effort to support religion with federal tax dollars. But there is a real possibility that the Court could narrow or even overrule Flast.

If that happens, then there would be no way to sue to stop the federal government from giving any form of assistance to churches, synagogues, mosques, or other religious entities. The Establishment Clause could be ignored by the federal government and no one could stop it.

This possibility reaffirms the importance of our nations's commitment to the seperation of church and state and our fight against the relgious right's war on this American principle.

posted March 10, 2007 11:02 AM            

What is hysterical is that those who protest the loudest are the very people who claim to be christians...leftist christians, but they make the claim never the less.

These idiots don't understand the prohibition is against the Congress of the United States making "any" religion the official religion of the United States. That's what is prohibited and for the very reason that most of the early settlers in America came here to escape the religious persecution of the "Official Church of England".

When confronted with the fact Thomas Jefferson...when he was President...attended church services almost every Sunday which were held in the main chamber of the House of Representatives they go silent...because there's nothing they can say which would rescue their absurd argument.

Likewise, when confronted with the fact Jefferson permitted federal buildings to be used for church services and other church functions/meetings, they also have not one word to say about their "wall of separation between church and state".

Their main problem is the sawdust which inhabits the space between their ears. Like some others...here and elsewhere..they are definitions challenged and don't know what "establishment" means. These morons think they know more about the intent of the writers of the Constitution than they themselves knew.

These leftists..so called christians yammer on and on about helping people. They screech and howl about feeding the poor and healing the sick but they don't mean a word of it.

If they did, they would shut the hell up and let government pay Christian organizations and religious organizations of other religions provide social services to the poor. Organizations which provide not only superior service but do it much more cost effectively. These are real nonprofit organizations already reaching out to the needy...doing what leftist so called christians say is the message of christianity and leftists screech, howl and wet themselves over it.

But no, their real argument is over who is God. Having their heads up Karl Marx's ass, they believe government is god from which all good things flow so they want a bloated federal bureaucracy to provide those services..and rip off about 70% of the allocated funds just to fund the bureaucracy itself.

So Mirandee..and anyone else...you've failed once again to name one lie Bush told to lead America into war and you've failed to name one individual, name one Christian denomination or name one Christian church which advocates a Christian theocracy for the United States. There may well be someone, may be a church somewhere which calls themselves christians who advocates this. But you are either too lazy to do your homework before popping off or you couldn't find any. If such a church or individual, or individuals existed, Christians and their churches would denounce them. If you really knew anything about Christianity at all, you would know why they would be denounced. Here's a hint.

"My kingdom is not of this world..."

You utterly fail to back up the allegations you spew out on this forum.

Now Mirandee, just to give everyone here a view of where you're really coming from, I'm going to highlight the name of that US Supreme Court case you attempted to use to back up your position.

Hein v Freedom from Religion Foundation

That's right, it's not "Freedom of Religion the so called christian left is screeching and shrieking about. It's "freedom from religion".

How interesting a person who refers to herself as a christian would attempt to use a court case brought by a group of atheists to back up her allegations and is found championing their cause.

posted April 01, 2007 11:45 AM            

Not only that but attacking the very foundation on which the Christian religion rests.

The so called Christian left is busily engaged in attacking the foundations of Christianity itself while attempting to spread the heresy of "secular humanism" to replace the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Oh, but they're quick to declare themselves Christians.

Now, I don't care personally what anyone believes. However denouncing the basis tenets of Christianity while at the same time calling yourself a Christian is a lie that should not be permitted to pass unchallenged. Secular Humanism is the theology of Karl Marx. So if one is substituting that Marxist theology for Christianity then be proud of your Marxism, acknowledge it and stop trying to mask your words and actions behind a thin veneer of Christianity.

TESTING THE FAITH
'Gay' cleric: Christ did not die for sin
Calls Easter message 'repulsive,' 'insane' – makes 'God sound like a psychopath'
Posted: April 1, 2007
1:00 a.m. Eastern
WorldNetDaily.com

Church of England traditionalists, wearied by the battles over homosexuality in the church and the clergy, are about to take it on their spiritual chins once again when a leading "gay" cleric will tell listeners to BBC Radio 4 that Christianity's traditional teaching on Christ's crucifixion for the sins of mankind is "repulsive," "insane" and makes "God sound like a psychopath."

Rev. Jeffrey John (Courtesy of BBC)

Rev. Jeffrey John, who was forced to withdraw before assuming a position as bishop in 2003 after it was learned he was in a longterm homosexual relationship, is scheduled to appear on Wednesday and will criticize ministers who use their Easter messages to preach that Jesus was sent to earth to die as an atonement for sin, reported the London Telegraph.

Christian theology has taught the doctrine of "penal substitution" – that humans, alienated from God by their sins and unable to save themselves, could only be forgiven by God sending Christ as a substitute to suffer and die in their place.

"In other words, Jesus took the rap and we got forgiven as long as we said we believed in him," said John. "This is repulsive as well as nonsensical. It makes God sound like a psychopath. If a human behaved like this we'd say that they [sic] were a monster."

John, who currently serves as dean of St. Albans, raised a furor when he and Rev. Grant Holmes, a hospital chaplain, entered into a civil partnership last August.

Church of England clergy may enter into "gay" marriage if they assure their bishop they are to remain celibate.

In rejecting penal substitution, John will reportedly propose a different interpretation of Christ's death, suggesting Christ was crucified so he could "share in the worst of grief and suffering that life can throw at us."

Too many Christians fail to understand God is about "love and truth", not "wrath and punishment," Johns said.

Rev. Tom Wright, the bishop of Durham, blasted the BBC for giving John such an influential forum to make provocative claims on traditional beliefs, saying John's statements attacked the central message of the Christian gospel.

"He is denying the way in which we understand Christ's sacrifice. It is right to stress that he is a God of love but he is ignoring that this means he must also be angry at everything that distorts human life," Wright said.