This week, the Greater Blogosphere is discussing the significance of the politics of the religious right as it relates to the National Association of Evangelicals, global warming -- and how Democrats should relate to all that; the double standard of the DOJ regarding treatment of people of faith in the workplace; what to make of the Democratic member of Congress who came out as a "non-theist" - and much more --- including: what a major Christian seminary president makes of the documentary film "Jesus Camp;" news of Christian nationalist "minutemen" marching on Lexington; and bloggers making movies and writing books!
The idea of Anglican guerrillas seems oxymoronic. But in fact, they not only see themselves in this way, but the longterm guerrilla war being waged by rightwing Anglican activists against the American Episcopal Church (the American branch of the world Anglical communion) may be headed for a watershed moment, according to a report in the San Francisco Chronicle:
Thursday in the African nation of Tanzania. Leaders of at least 20 of the church's 38 branches around the world have said they will refuse at a meeting there to share communion or "sit at the same table" with the American church's leader, Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, who supports the ordination of gay clergy and bishops.
The possibility that senior leaders of an historic protestant denomination might refuse to sit at the same table with the elected leader of the American church -- is a signal accomplishment of the Washington, DC-based Institute on Religion and Democracy; the agency bankrolled for a generation by Richard Mellon Scaife, (and other strategic funders of the modern conservative movement and the religious right) to foment division and schism in the mainline American protestant churches.
You wouldn't know it to read the mainstream media, (or to listen to those who wring their hands over the alleged efforts by as yet unnamed secularists to drive also unnamed people of faith from public life) that the rightist Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD), the inside the beltway, neoconservative agency has waged a war of attrition against the historic mainline protestant churches in the U.S. You wouldn't know about the ways the agency and its satellite groups have spent millions of dollars to destablize and even dismember these churches like they were a third world country whose government was disliked by the United States. You wouldn't know that the group has been bankrolled by the leading strategic funders of the conservative movement and the religious right such as Richard Mellon Scaife and Howard Ahmanson, and cheer-led by The Washington Times newspaper, which is owned, controlled and bankrolled by the Unification Church of Rev. Sun Myung Moon.
So when there is news about the IRD, the slant on the story can be most peculiar. Today was no exception.
The religious right you shall always have with you. At least for the rest of the lives of anyone reading this -- the latest of my more-or-less weekly round-ups of interesting and significant posts about the religious right, from the Greater Blogosphere.
There are those who run around predicting the imminent demise of the religious right, citing this or that reading of the tea leaves. For a quarter century, such people have been wrong, wrong, wrong (and not necessarily in that order.) So umm, don't listen to such people. They epitomize the culture of ignorance and politial expediency that has enabled the rise of the religious right for a generation. If people who profess to be concerned about the religious right, and any of the attendant issues, were more like Terrence (see on the flip) at The Republic of T, our country and by extension, the world, would be a better place.
Rev. Dr. Andrew Weaver has been researching and writing about the attacks on the mainline Protestant denominations for several years, including several pieces at Talk to Action. However, in a new article at Media Transparency -- Weaver breaks the story that the two-decade war of attrition and division against the mainline churches, led by the Washington, DC-based Institute on Religion and Democracy has been orechestrated by some of the leading neo-conservative Catholic intellectuals in the Unites States.
Sometimes you've got to do a lot of looking around to find the best the blogosphere has to report on the religious right and what to do about it. But fortunately, a little searching always yeilds some gems -- in addition to the great stuff from the usual suspects, who we can count on to come through for us just about every week.
This is yet another eclectic round-up of interesting and significant blog posts from the Greater Blogosphere on the religious right and what to do about it. This week's edition features posts from Orcinus, Jews on First!, and Political Spaghetti -- as well as many of the usual suspects.
Almost everyone has opinions about the religious right, its major characters, and the latest outrageous statements of Pat Robertson.
I think it is important that we listen to people who know what they are talking about.
People have been getting wise to the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD) -- that's the Washington, DC-based agency that has been waging a war of attrition, setting people against their pastors, their churches, denominational staff, and each other, for a generation. The aim has been to neutralize, divide and conquer the historic churches of mainline Protestantism -- apparently so that they could be displaced at the center of American political and cultural life by conservative forms of evangelical Protestantism and Catholicism. Unsurprisingly, people are writing and speaking out about all this -- and IRD doesn't like it. How can we tell? Well, the new president of IRD, Jim Tonkowich, who used to be the editor for Charles Colson's nationally syndicated radio commentary, BreakPoint, apparently got his old boss to denounce his critics, using the same shopworn smear tactics that have fueled its propadanda war for a generation.
The Washington Window, the newspaper of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington has joined a growing number of publications inside and outside mainline Christianity to publish exposes of the efforts of rightist agencies to destabilize the historic mainline Protestant churches in the U.S.
The two-part series by former Washington Post and New York Times reporter James Naughton examines, according to a press release, the network of conservative groups, "their donors and the strategy that has allowed them to destabilize the Episcopal Church.... The groups represent a small minority of church members, but relationships with wealthy American donors and powerful African bishops have made them key players in the fight for the future of the Anglican Communion "to warn deputies that they must repent of their liberal attitudes on homosexuality or face a possible schism."
For a quarter century, the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD), bankrolled by the founding funders and architects of the institutional right in Washington, DC, (such as the Heritage Foundation), has waged a war of attrition against the historic churches of mainstream Protestantism. This gang of social and foreign policy conservatives have planted bogus stories with the media, and deployed staff to foment dissent, and to organize conservative factions into dissident formations throughout the churches as if they were strategic targets in a global war. All this and much more.
The 1.3 million member United Church of Christ, one of the targeted churches, has over the past two years, been engaged in a warm-hearted outreach campaign called "God is Still Speaking," which includes a TV ad campaign seeks to reach people who have felt "rejected" for one reason or another by churches (as UCC research has found that many people do), and seeks to offer a message of what they call "extravagant welcome." The ads assert "God does not reject people. Neither do we."
The current ad campaign was unveiled at a national news conference on March 27th at UCC headquarters in Cleveland. Based on the UCC's news release, longtime IRD leader Mark Tooley published a piece in the The American Spectator online on April 6 that is highly critical of the ad -- and of the UCC.
The quarter century war of attrition that has been waged by elements of the religious and political right against the mainline Protestant churches in America, has gone largely unchronicled. To read the mainstream press, you would think that people were so upset about homosexuality that they want to divide their historic churches into little warring camps. But these conflagrations have been far from spontaneous -- and have always been about much, much more than homosexuality.
You can tell a great deal about an organization by it's leader. That person is, after all, the person who was hired to carry out the agenda of the board of directors. That person is normally the principal spokesperson; the person who gives the speech; the person whom the reporter asks for even when he sometimes has to settle for someone else. And whenever an organization goes through a transition after the departure of a longtime leader, who the next leader is often signals the organization's direction.
Thus, the announcement of the new president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a Washington, DC-based organization with a 20 year history of seeking to undermine mainline Christian churches deemed "too liberal" -- is a bellwether moment.
Once upon a time, the member denominations of the National Council of Churches maintained a vigorous social witness. That's what such mainline Protestants as the Presbyterians, United Church of Christ, the Methodists, and the Episcopals called their stands for social justice including such things as civil rights for African Americans, equality for women -- including ordination, and opposition to the excesses of American foreign policy from Vietnam to El Salvador. While there was some conservative opposition to these advances over the course of the 20th century, including some schisms, the direction of mainline protestantism was clear.
