God Discussion - March 23, 2011
Christian Dominionists Plan to Transform the World During "4/14 Window" by Focusing Prayers on Children
By God Discussion Reporter
A sect of Christian prayer warriors believe that there is a unique window to create a Christly kingdom on earth this coming April by focusing their efforts on children. According to the "4/14 Window Global Initiative" website, this "4-14 Window refers to the demographic group from age four to fourteen years old, which is the most open and receptive to every form of spiritual and developmental input."
Christian Domination of the Seven Mountains.
In its effort to raise up young followers of Christ, the 4/14 Window Global Initiative focuses on the "7 Mountains" ideology associated with what is loosely referred to as "Christian dominionism," a movement by New Apostolic Reformation, dominionist, reconstructionist and other forms of Christianity that believe that seven areas of world culture must be totally dominated and controlled by Christians so that Jesus Christ can return to earth and rule. While the ultimate focus is essentially the same, the exact verbiage of what constitutes the "7 Mountains" differs. The "7 Mountains" advocated by Shirley Dobson's National Day of Prayer Task Force are described as:
- Government,
- Military,
- Media,
- Business,
- Education,
- Church, and
- Family.
In a chilling video essay about the goals of Christian dominionists and their 7 Mountains agenda, journalist Bruce Wilson observed that Mary Glazier, who leads the Wasilla, Alaska prayer group that Sarah Palin joined, advocates "religious cleansing of entire lands" by believers in her movement. She preaches that people will be "displaced" and "toppled" from various institutions and that the Christians will take over. As to each individual's disposition, she claims their fate lies with God but that they will have an opportunity to "switch allegiances" and join the dominionists.
The 4/14 Window Global Initiative believes that today's cultural mountains are not providing children with godly values. In particular, it takes issue with the media complaining in its newsletter that:
Harry Potter is a major media icon that influences children and adolescents through references to sorcery, witchcraft, spiritualist invocations, and the lack of a Christ centered dimension of life.
In turning children to Christ, the 4/14 Window Global Initiative has an intense focus on organizational hierarchy in order to achieve global transformation, decreeing in its draft covenant that,
Each Christian organization shall include in its plans, programs and budget, provisions for capacity building of regional, national and local churches for the equipping and mobilization of children and their families in the 4/14 window for holistic transformation of their respective communities, nations and regions.
Luis Bush, founder of the 4/14 Window Global Initiative, believes that the focus on the young should be a priority, declaring,
It is a plea to open your heart and mind to the idea of reaching and raising up a new generation from within that vast group—a generation that can experience personal transformation and can be mobilized as agents for transformation throughout the world. Our vision and hope is to maximize their transformational impact while they are young, and to mobilize them for continuing impact for the rest of their lives.
Fasting and Intercessory Prayer.
Generals International, a dominionist group run by Cindy and Mike Jacobs, described in a March 22 email alert what their followers should do on the 4/14 Window:
The key demographic for missions in this century is the 4 to 14 Window in the view of a growing number of God’s people around the world because the four to fourteen year old's are known of their responsiveness to the gospel as compared to other ages and because of the formation of their character in during these years and the especially because of the highest priority given to them by Jesus when He walked on this earth.
This is the time to open the 4/14 Window. Participants came from almost 80 nations in September of last year called to catalyze and facilitate the rescuing, reaching, and raising up of a new generation from the 4/14 Window to transform their nations and beyond.
Join the growing global 4/14 Movement to mobilize focused, fervent, united intercessory prayer of God’s people in every region of the world on April 14th for the Raising up of a New Generation from the 4/14 Window to transform the world.
Steps to take:
1. Set the objective of the fast. There would be a two-fold purpose related to the 4/14ers in the church, city, nation, region and world: First, as The Esther Fast we are fasting for protection of the 4/14ers and deliverance from the Evil One (Esther 4:16). Second, we are praying for the Raising up of a New Generation from the 4/14 Window in the local church, city and nation to transform their nations, regions and the world.
2. Set aside the 14th of April for a day of fasting and prayer. If you need to go to work or serve use the open times to seek God on behalf of the 4/14ers of you church, town or city, country, region and world.
Generals also recommends a 3-day "Esther Fast," proclaiming that, "We are following the example of Esther to the challenge by her Uncle Mordecai to call a three-day fast as an essential part of the 4/14 Window Day to Change the World. The story concludes with a transformed world."
Prayer Focus.
The 4/14 Window Global Initiative prayer guide is a 64-page pdf document that describes objectives that all people having a humanitarian worldview can agree with — the elimination of poverty, abuse, neglect, war and violence for the sake of children. However, the prayer guide departs from humanitarian views when it takes issue with other faiths that are perceived to be evil. For instance, the guide states that:
Eastern religions have created a generation in Asia with a vastly different worldview that the traditional Christian one. With no ideas of Creator-God, Sin and Redemption, Asia’s children and youth represent a challenging mission field.
The prayer guide was issued before Japan's earthquake and tsunami. As to Japan, it stated:
They can’t shame their families by financial failure — suicide seems like an honorable way out — and the fatalism of eastern religion offers no hope. Japan’s next generation is in desperate need.
Prayer points:
Hope. Japan has one of the highest suicide rates of any industrialized nation.
Authentic priorities. Recent economic troubles have threatened Japan’s materialist mindset, and youth are pressured to succeed.
Absolute Truth. Most people in Japan claim to be Buddhists or Shintoists, or both. But in fact, their worldview is very secular.
True success. Failure is viewed as shameful to the family … Japan’s children need to know true success is found in relationship with Jesus Christ.
Innovative strategies. That’s what it will take to breach the barriers of social Shintoism and secularism.
Islam and Hinduism (and the belief in reincarnation) are also a focus of the faith-transforming prayers.
Secular values in American education are to be targeted by prayer:
Schools. Public schools have increasingly become platforms for a values-neutral message that impedes education and denigrates Christianity.
Truth … 65% of young people in the United States don’t know which religion is true. They desperately need the love of the Savior.
The prayer guide discusses "post-modernization and secularism:"
Around the world, the next generation has been secularized by globalization — a global youth culture emphasizes relativism, and even young people in rural areas and traditionally “Christian” areas don’t grasp ideas of absolute truth or the importance of a relationship with God.
The ultimate goal of the 4/14 Window Global Initiative is to create child activists:
Christian children who are grounded in a biblical worldview are, themselves, amazingly equipped to reach their own generation.
Prayer points:
Perception. Believers must recognize the power of children as agents of change.
Families. One believing child in a family can lead the entire family to Christ!
Indoctrinating Children.
More young people are turning away from religion. In America, 72% of the Millennials say that they are spiritual, but not religious. The exodus of young people from the churches has prompted groups such as Child Evangelism Fellowship to target children at public parks, apartment complex common grounds, and schools. This group, like many others, has a huge international outreach program that focuses on children.
While helping children who are the victims of war, poverty, sex trafficking and abuse is a goal of these Christian outreaches, not everyone appreciates the proselytizing and indoctrination that takes place. They believe that teaching science and practical, factual knowledge that will enable children to grow up to be self reliant is a more humane approach to children's education. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins views religious indoctrination of children, with its threats of eternal damnation in hell, as a form of child abuse.
Speaking at Oxford University in 1997, Dr. Nicholas Humphrey asked his Amnesty International audience, "What shall we tell the children?" He noted,
Should we be campaigning for the rights of human beings to be protected from verbal oppression and manipulation? Do we need "word laws", just as all civilised societies have gun laws, licensing who should be allowed to use them in what circumstances? Should there be Geneva protocols establishing what kinds of speech act count as crimes against humanity?
No. The answer, I'm sure, ought in general to be "No, don't even think of it." Freedom of speech is too precious a freedom to be meddled with. And however painful some of its consequences may sometimes be for some people, we should still as a matter of principle resist putting curbs on it. By all means we should try to make up for the harm that other people's words do, but not by censoring the words as such.
And, since I am so sure of this in general, and since I'd expect most of you to be so too, I shall probably shock you when I say it is the purpose of my lecture today to argue in one particular area just the opposite. To argue, in short, in favour of censorship, against freedom of expression, and to do so moreover in an area of life that has traditionally been regarded as sacrosanct.
I am talking about moral and religious education. And especially the education a child receives at home, where parents are allowed — even expected — to determine for their children what counts as truth and falsehood, right and wrong.
Children, I'll argue, have a human right not to have their minds crippled by exposure to other people's bad ideas — no matter who these other people are. Parents, correspondingly, have no god-given licence to enculturate their children in whatever ways they personally choose: no right to limit the horizons of their children's knowledge, to bring them up in an atmosphere of dogma and superstition, or to insist they follow the straight and narrow paths of their own faith.
In short, children have a right not to have their minds addled by nonsense. And we as a society have a duty to protect them from it. So we should no more allow parents to teach their children to believe, for example, in the literal truth of the Bible, or that the planets rule their lives, than we should allow parents to knock their children's teeth out or lock them in a dungeon.
That's the negative side of what I want to say. But there will be a positive side as well. If children have a right to be protected from false ideas, they have too a right to be succoured by the truth. And we as a society have a duty to provide it. Therefore we should feel as much obliged to pass on to our children the best scientific and philosophical understanding of the natural world — to teach, for example, the truths of evolution and cosmology, or the methods of rational analysis — as we already feel obliged to feed and shelter them.
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Posts
'Bible Answer Man' Hank Hanegraaff Defends Teen Mania Ministries
ReplyDeleteBy Jeff Schapiro | Christian Post Reporter
November 9, 2011
A widely respected Christian researcher and radio host is defending Teen Mania Ministries after an MSNBC documentary portrayed the group as a cult. Hank Hanegraaff, president of the Christian Research Institute and host of the radio program “Bible Answer Man,” has released his critique of the documentary, which aired on Sunday night. In the critique, he describes the documentary as “a case study in sophistry, sloppy journalism, and sensationalism.”
MSNBC's documentary “Mind Over Mania” is disturbing at first glance. Young people are shown at a Teen Mania Ministries event crawling through mud, eating worms and pushing themselves to their physical and emotional limits. The experts featured in the film suggest the ministry operates like a cult and uses mind control tactics on young people. TMM, however, says the film's claims against the ministry are “outrageous” and inaccurate.
In support of Teen Mania, Hanegraaff first addresses the film's allegations that the ministry brainwashes interns who enroll at its Honor Academy. The film features mind control recovery experts Doug and Wendy Duncan, who use Robert Jay Lifton's Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of Brainwashing in China to try to show TMM as a cult. The problem, Hanegraaff says, is their evidence falls short of their accusations, and “many of the arguments proffered against TMM could just as easily be used to establish historic Christianity as a thought reform cult.” He says the model the Duncans used to attempt to prove their point has been “utterly discredited.”
Kelly Schwalbert, a former Honor Academy attendee, wrote in a blog post that she never experienced abuse or mind-control tactics as an intern. “I would not classify myself, while at Teen Mania, as under mind-control,” she wrote. “I was not brainwashed. I knew enough about God and myself to read the Bible and follow the Bible. The leadership I was under did not make me 'conform' to anything.”
Schwalbert later showed sympathy for those who had bad experiences with TMM, but emphasized that “it is not a cult.” Later, Hanegraaff's critique moves on to accuse MSNBC of showing images of interns “gagging” on worms in order to stir up an emotional response, but he says NBC's “Fear Factor” show was popular at the time the video footage was taken. He also said TMM no longer does that particular activity during its camp.
“Mind Over Mania” also never acknowledges that ESOAL (Emotionally Stretching Opportunity of A Lifetime) campers knew how challenging the event would be going into it, and they could have stopped participating at any time. The ESOAL camp has been changed drastically since the shooting of those video clips, Teen Mania founder Ron Luce told The Christian Post, and its name has also been changed to PEARL, an acronym for Physical, Emotional, And Relational Learning.
Kimberly Warne, another blogger who says she spent two years at the Honor Academy, is critical of both TMM's ministry and financial practices. “Over the last couple decades, Ron has grown this organization into a multimillion dollar machine by convincing thousands of young people to pay to work,” wrote Warne. “Sometimes he succeeds in molding these youth into his cookie cutter version of modern Christianity ... Sometimes he breaks them down into depression, faithlessness, and a lost sense of self.” ...
...
MSNBC denies claims that the film inaccurately portrays the ministry and says it has spoken with TMM's founder and president, Luce, about the disagreement.
read the full article at:
http://www.christianpost.com/news/bible-answer-man-hank-hanegraaff-defends-teen-mania-ministries-61230/
MSNBC Responds to Accusations Over Teen Mania Documentary
ReplyDeleteBy Jeff Schapiro | Christian Post Reporter
November 09, 2011
After the president and founder of Teen Mania Ministries sharply criticized MSNBC for airing its "Mind Over Mania" documentary on Sunday, the network issued a response saying his accusations against the network are false, and they have told him so.
TMM president Ron Luce says “Mind Over Mania” casts his ministry in a “very inaccurate and negative light” by not fully explaining video and audio clips of TMM events and by trying to make the ministry out to be a cult.
He is also accusing filmmakers of lying in order to gain access to TMM's Honor Academy interns and ministry leaders for interviews. He says TMM was told by filmmakers his ministry would be just one component of a series on religion in America, but the “mockumentary” didn't at all turn out as he initially thought it would.
In an email to The Christian Post on Tuesday, however, MSNBC disputed his claims, saying, “MSNBC strongly disagrees with Mr. Luce's characterization that what was broadcast in Mind Over Mania was inaccurate. MSNBC did not approach Mr. Luce and his group under false pretenses and we have shared those thoughts with Mr. Luce.”
The Garden Valley, Texas-based TMM is a globally-recognized youth ministry and is the umbrella organization over well-known youth events like Acquire The Fire. The ministry's mission is “to provoke a young generation to passionately pursue Jesus Christ and to take his life-giving message to the ends of the earth.” But Luce says “Mind Over Mania” makes it seem like a cult that uses mind control tactics to manipulate young people.
The documentary features former interns from Teen Mania Ministries who say the group did them more harm than good and may even be a cult.
In response, Teen Mania stated that it “welcomes any question of our motives and our methods in communicating the gospel of Jesus Christ and are dedicated to using feedback to create a better experience for the young people we serve, but MSNBC’s Mind Over Mania segment ultimately takes issue with the fact that many of the Biblical tenets celebrated in Christianity are at odds with our current culture.”
Since the documentary aired Sunday night, individuals have taken to Twitter to express their opinions about TMM and its Honor Academy.
“Happy with the #mindovermania documentary,” Twitter user Shannon Kish posted on her account. “Though they only touched the surface of Teen Mania and its problems.”
Another post by Cassie Hendon said, “Watching an 'expose' on Teen Mania on msnbc. Sorry, not buying that TM is a cult.”
One blogger, who is identified only as “A Friend of Teen Mania” and claims to be an Honor Academy alumni, is trying to rally support for TMM by compiling the testimonies of current and former Honor Academy interns who say the ministry positively impacted their lives.
Though TMM, like any organization, has its faults, the blog's author says, the ministry's leaders have always been willing to discuss any concerns and as such are much more supportive than the documentary portrays them to be.
“I have seen firsthand the efforts made to correct any injustice and I have experienced nothing less than humility from the executive leadership when any alumnus has brought a situation to light,” the blogger wrote. “I, being an alumnus of the Honor Academy and a lifelong partner of the organization can say wholeheartedly that I endorse the motives and character of the staff and executive leadership team.”
http://www.christianpost.com/news/msnbc-responds-to-accusations-over-teen-mania-documentary-61181/
The Religious Right's Plot To Take Control Of Our Public Schools
ReplyDeleteBy Rachel Tabachnick, AlterNet March 6, 2012
The Good News Club: The Stealth Assault on America’s Children by Katherine Stewart uncovers a right-wing conspiracy to infiltrate and destroy the nation’s public school system, using recent Supreme Court decisions as a lever. It’s a must-read for anyone who’s seen public school kids, perhaps their own, targeted for proselytizing by peers, teachers and adult volunteers. And for those who haven’t, it’s a wake-up call.
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas once wrote, “Religion is certainly a source of positive values, and we need as many positive values in the school as we can get.” It sounds benign. But what if the particular brand of religion is coercive, and in conflict with the teachings and values of the family of the students being targeted? It doesn’t matter. Because under the law as it stands now, evangelical churches have the right to gather, teach and proselytize in your neighborhood school.
Spiritual Warfare in Your Neighborhood
How did it come to this? If you haven’t personally observed today’s aggressive “spiritual warfare,” it may be difficult to imagine that young children are being taught that their school is a battlefield and they are the warriors who must save their classmates from themselves. With a remarkable amount of grace and restraint, Stewart describes the havoc in communities around the nation as initiatives to evangelize public school students have increased. The effect is always the same: the polarization that results when the Good News Club shows up inevitably disrupts the ability of parents and teachers to work cooperatively as a school community. And the resulting dissension and loss of trust in the schools, says Stewart, is exactly the result the right wing has in mind.
The religious right's big break was a 2001 Supreme Court case, The Good News Club v. Milford Central School, which unleashed a new wave of school evangelization. This decision essentially told schools they could not say no to church groups that wanted to use their facilities for after-school gatherings. Stewart describes “the new legal juggernaut of the Christian Right” —an army of legal advocacy groups, including the Alliance Defense Fund, the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), Liberty Counsel, and others — that raise hundred of millions of dollars each year for the common goal of injecting stealth evangelism into public schools. They’ve spent the last 10 years figuring out how to use this decision as a wedge to maximize church control over school curricula, personnel and even the physical campus.
The spear point of this effort is the Child Evangelism Fellowship (CEF), which was founded in 1937. For decades, CEF has run Good News Clubs — after-school Bible classes taught by church-trained mothers and pastors’ wives in suburban homes around the country. But the Supreme Court decision made it legal to bring these classes right into the schools; and the volunteers who teach them typically also volunteer as classroom aides, which gives them a mantle of school authority. To a primary-aged child, it looks as though this indoctrination is simply a part of the school curriculum.
Stewart cites CEF figures that claim to have set up Good News Clubs “in 3,410 schools -- up 728 percent since the 2001 Supreme Court decision.” The clubs are sponsored by local churches, which are encouraged to “Adopt a Public School” by CEF and others. And they are aiming to take the program to every public elementary school in the country over the next decade or so.
The court case is still celebrated on the CEF Web site with the words, “God has opened the doors of public schools to the Gospel! CEF is ready and eager to help churches enter the schools, fully equipped to share the Gospel and teach the Bible to school children and extend the biblical influence to families.”
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ReplyDeleteStewart explains how CEF has used this access to teach children to conduct “student-initiated” ideological warfare in school. Public schools are forced to distribute the club’s media and announcements to all students, and to allow tables with media at all kinds of school events. These tables are typically laden with balloons and sweets in order to draw kids in. The coercion extends from the playground to the classroom, so there’s nowhere non-evangelical kids can go to avoid classmates who are insisting — with support from adult aides — that they’re doomed to hell unless they join the club. According to Stewart, it’s hard to overstate the sense of confusion experienced by young Catholic, Mormon, mainstream Protestant, Jewish, and non-theist children when adult authority figures in their school promote a particular sectarian belief, often while actively denigrating and contradicting the worldview they’re being taught at home.
The 4/14 Window
CEF is just one of an array of organizations targeting children in an international evangelizing effort called the “4/14 Window," aimed at children from four to 14 years old. Stewart’s book points out that this infiltration is a well-orchestrated effort conducted by a “small number of influential actors.” With a few exceptions, noted by the author, the organizations involved teach a literal interpretation of the Bible, and “see their efforts in the schools as a part of a plan to bring the nation’s children back to its founding religion and thereby lay the basis for a Christian control of all the important parts of government and society.”
The push to infiltrate social institutions is promoted by a theology called Dominionism, which originated in Christian Reconstructionism and the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), but is now spreading rapidly across the right wing of the evangelical world. The NAR has simplified the theology into a campaign to gain Christian control over the "seven mountains" of American culture: family, business, media, education, religion, goverment, and the arts. The Good News Club is a leading initiative to achieve domination on the education front.
As a researcher and writer working to defend religious pluralism and secular democracy, I often stress the difference between those with conservative religious beliefs and those who are determined to force those beliefs on the state and everyone else. Stewart also makes the clear distinction between Christian conservatives, the Christian Right, and Christian Nationalists. “All conservatives who are also Christians are not members of the Christian Right,” she writes. “And many supporters of the Christian Right are not Christian Nationalist. However, to a degree that many social conservatives fail to appreciate, it is the Christian Nationalists who are driving the agenda in the public schools.” The people Stewart repeatedly encountered in her research often fell into the latter group, which is the most extreme and dangerous faction of the religious right.
“To take over the world, focus on the youth”
Stewart attended trainings and conferences to learn more about how these activities are being coordinated. She describes a CEF conference keynoted by attorney Matthew Staver, the founder of Liberty Counsel and one of the leading forces defending church access to public schools and other publicly funded venues in the name of “religious freedom.” Staver makes it clear that he’s on a war footing. Stewart quotes his keynote address: “If you want to ultimately take over the world, how are you going to do it when you have limited time and limited resources?...The best way to do it, and anyone who studies warfare [knows] you focus on the most strategic part of the human chain link...You focus on youth.”
“Knock down all the doors, all of the barriers, to all of the 65,000-plus elementary schools in the country and take the gospel to this open mission field now! Not later, Now!”
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ReplyDeleteThe battle to evangelize other people’s children is justified by a dualist worldview that sees every aspect of life as part of a cosmic battle between the forces of Jesus and Satan. Staver describes young children as the “strategic link,” in winning the war. Throughout the book, Stewart highlights the single-minded focus of those leading these ministries to children, and their unwavering belief that what they are doing is holy — despite the deep and lasting damage it will do to the children, families, schools, and communities they target. If the upshot of this infiltration is that the community turns its back on the school, that’s considered a bonus.
After all, many CEF teachers and supporters don’t send their kids to public schools anyway. They prefer to send their own kids to Christian academies, or homeschool them — even while they’re devoting many hours each week to infiltrating and undermining their local public schools.
Targeting the Upper Grades
While much of the book is dedicated to Stewart’s extensive tracking of CEF’s work in elementary schools, she also describes other tactics being used to reach middle and high school students as well. These include efforts to alter curriculum in public schools to reflect a Christian Nationalist worldivew, as seen in the recent battles over social studies guidelines in Texas schools. Other avenues include abstinence-only, substance abuse and anti-drunk driving educational programs.
One of the movement's big cash cows is “character” or “moral” education programs, which can include church-written curriculum delivered by church-trained instructors, motivational assembly speakers with a Christianized message, or Christian rock bands -- which the schools pay a hefty sum for. These programs are a commonly used foothold into high schools, one that’s become so common it has been given a nickname: pizza evangelism.
When the School House Becomes a Church
And it’s not enough just to co-opt the social atmosphere and the curriculum. The new Supreme Court rulings have forced schools to hand over their buildings to churches as well. Thousands of churches across the country now take over public school facilities on weekends, usually without paying anything more than a custodial fee to the district for the use of their multi-million dollar campuses. This allows these churches to start new congregations in communities where they wouldn’t otherwise be viable or affordable. Liberal, urban schools are hardly exempt: Stewart describes school-based churches in Seattle and Santa Barbara, and estimates that one-fifth of all New York City schools now harbor churches as well — almost all of them conservative and evangelical.
This trend has some unanticipated consequences that might not occur to the casual observer. The “ex-gay” Exodus International Church set up shop in one of Manhattan’s “most liberal and gay-friendly neighborhoods.“ Another church plant installed a complete communications network — including a satellite dish on the roof — in open defiance of the principal, who had repeatedly denied them permission to do this. And there’s no legal way the principal can throw them out for this.
From Cult Leaders to Theocrats
The church planted across the street from Stewart’s house in Manhattan — the school her daughter attends — was a part of the Every Nation network, formerly called Morning Star. Every Nation is a New Apostolic network of ministries founded by former leaders of Maranatha Campus Ministries, an international ministry disbanded after years of bad press about its authoritarian and cult-like practices. Maranatha's founder, Bob Weiner, later became one of the elite “apostles” in C. Peter Wagner’s International Coalition of Apostles.
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ReplyDeleteWagner was a key player in well-orchestrated efforts to evangelize as much of the world as possible prior to the year 2000. Many current sophisticated initiatives and coordinated efforts to access specific populations around the world are a continuation of that global effort, part of which survived as a movement dubbed by Wagner as the “New Apostolic Reformation.” (Sarah Palin is perhaps the movement’s most famous protege.)
NAR’s mission is to break down denominational divides and unite all of the world’s evangelical churches under the dictatorial authority of their chosen “apostles” and “prophets.” The goal is to take full Christian “dominion” over society in order to bring about Jesus’ return. Although NAR is only a part of the American Christian Dominionist scene, it provides a large and important window into the dualistic and aggressive nature of today’s Christian Nationalism.
A glimpse of NAR’s approach to the indoctrination of children could be seen in the 2006 documentary Jesus Camp, nominated for an Academy Award. The movie was widely criticized by evangelical leaders for using scare tactics and focusing on a “fringe” children’s camp. However, the featured leaders in the film, Becky Fischer and Lou Engle, are both part of the same apostolic network (Harvest International Ministries of Che Ahn), and Engle has since become one of the most powerful and politically well-connected leaders in today’s Religious Right. So it’s not an overstatement to say that the people who brought you Jesus Camp are now trying to take over your neighborhood school.
In regards to NAR, there is one minor correction to the book that should be noted. Every Nation is indeed a New Apostolic network, but another church mentioned later in the book as part of NAR is not. Life Challenge Church in Odessa is a United Pentecostal Church and belongs to a Pentecostal denomination. I point this out because Stewart mentions that the women of the church favored long skirts and had very long hair. Typically, NAR leaders do not dress in a particularly conservative manner, and in fact defy common stereotypes of the Religious Right. They usually preach in casual attire, including worn blue jeans, and youth leaders are often heavily tattooed and pierced.
But that quibble aside, Stewart has written a powerful and compelling book that should be read by anyone who doubts the current threat to separation of church and state. She leaves no doubt that the religious right is on a long-term crusade to undermine secular public education — and the cruel irony is that those ideologically opposed to public education are using the very openness and democratic nature of these public facilities to advance their own agendas.
Stewart writes: “Back home, I glance out the window at the bright red door across the street. Henceforth, I realize, I will have to accept that on Sundays my daughter’s public school, the furniture that the PTA contributions helped buy, and my daughter’s smiling photograph will be turned over to a group that is dedicated at its core to destroying public education in America. I remind myself that the school will be ours again on Monday. But the truth is, I don’t really believe in that door anymore.”
Rachel Tabachnick is an independent researcher who writes and speaks about the political and societal impact of the Religious Right. She can be reached at Protectpluralism[at]gmail.com.
http://www.alternet.org/story/154435/the_religious_right%27s_plot_to_take_control_of_our_public_schools
The New Legal Theory That Enables Homophobic Evangelizing in Public Schools
ReplyDeleteBy Katherine Stewart, The Guardian March 29, 2012
Last month, 8,000 public high school students in Montgomery County, Maryland, went home with fliers informing them that no one is “born gay” and offering therapy if they experienced “unwanted same-sex attraction.”
The group behind the flier, Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays (PFOX), isn’t the kind one expects to find represented in student backpacks. Peter Sprigg, a board member of PFOX who doubles as a senior fellow at the Family Research Council, recently told Chris Matthews that he believes “gay behavior” should be “criminalized.” PFOX president Greg Quinlan told another talk show host that gays and lesbians practice “sexual cannibalism.”
A number of Montgomery County parents, understandably concerned about the unusual flier, filed a letter of complaint with the school district. “Everything in this flier makes it sound like the goal is to be ex-gay,” said Ms. Yount-Merrell, mother of a high-schooler. “It reiterates a societal view that there’s something wrong with you … if you aren’t heterosexual. And teenagers have a hard enough time.”
In response to student questions, Superintendent Joshua Starr agreed that the flyer was “reprehensible and deplorable.” But he then pointed out, correctly, that he had no choice in the matter. A 2006 decision by the fourth circuit court of appeals made it clear that if the district allowed any outside groups to distribute fliers through the school, it could not exclude groups like PFOX.
The situation in Maryland may strike many readers as an anomalous event. One would think that it involves fringe characters, is unlikely to be repeated, and can be easily fixed with a new policy.
But none of that is true. In fact, similar events are taking place with increasing frequency nationwide, and they represent the wave of the future in America’s public schools. Indeed, at this very moment, the New York state assembly is deliberating a bill – already passed by the senate – that will allow New York’s public schools to double as a taxpayer-subsidized marketing channel for extremist groups of every variety.
How did this happen to our schools?
Appropriately enough, it goes back to a lesson we all used to learn in school – but that many people seem to have forgotten. America’s founders understood very well that the freedom of religion and the separation of church and state are two sides of the same coin. Only by keeping government out of the religion business can we ensure that religion may go about its business freely. They also understood that, as a consequence, freedom of religion is different from freedom of speech. Indeed, they guaranteed those two freedoms in two separate and distinct clauses of the first amendment.
Over the past 20 years, legal advocacy groups of the religious right – a collection of entities that now command budgets totaling over $100m per year – have been pushing a new legal theory, one that has taken hold of some parts of the popular imagination and that has even been enshrined in recent judicial rulings. The essence of the theory is that religion isn’t religion, after all; it’s really just speech from a religious viewpoint. Borrowing from the rhetoric of the civil rights movements, the advocates of the new theory cry “discrimination” in the face of every attempt to treat religion as something different from any other kind of speech.
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ReplyDeleteOne implication of this novel theory is firmly embedded in the US supreme court’s 2001 6-3 decision in Milford Central School v The Good News Club. Justice Thomas stated in his majority opinion that to exclude a group from school because it is religious in nature is to discriminate against its religious viewpoint, and therefore to violate its free speech rights. No one challenges the exclusion of partisan political groups using the same thinking – we all recognize that partisan political groups are partisan in nature. But because religion alone is a “viewpoint”, opines Thomas, it is apparently different.
The other important implication is that the establishment clause of the first amendment – the part that is supposed to keep the government out of the religion business – has been diminished, especially in school-related cases.
Until 2006, the Montgomery school district, like almost all school districts in the nation, had a degree of discretion in the materials it sent home with kids. Few people had previously questioned the school’s authority to set aside religious and partisan political material, for example. All of that changed when a group called the Child Evangelism Fellowship came to town. The Child Evangelism Fellowship is the sponsoring organization for Good News Clubs, which offer a program of sectarian indoctrination in over 3,400 public elementary schools nationwide.
Backed by the legal advocacy groups of the religious right, the Child Evangelism Fellowship sued the school district and won the right to have its fliers distributed by the schools. The district’s policy on fliers, the majority of the fourth circuit court ruled, was not “viewpoint neutral.”
The Child Evangelism Fellowship, in partnership with the religious advocacy groups, has litigated similar cases in numerous states, and is, at this moment, suing a school district in Arizona on the question of fliers. These efforts are all done in the name of “religious freedom,” and their advocates proudly announce their determination to fight “discrimination.” But, in fact, they undermine religious freedom and promote discrimination.
The fundamental problem with the claim that religion is just another form of speech is that it just isn’t true. Religion is special; and notwithstanding the new legal theory, our legal and constitutional system rightfully continues to recognize it as such. Thanks to the free exercise clause, religious groups are allowed to hire and fire people and select their members without regard to the laws that constrain other employers and groups. They receive significant tax benefits.
More to the point, religious groups are permitted to preach the kinds of doctrines – that homosexuality is an abomination, for example – for which non-religious groups would be excluded from schools and other government institutions. The cumulative effect of the court decisions based on the new legal theory is to force schools and other institutions to provide state-subsidized platforms for the dissemination of religious beliefs.
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ReplyDeleteSo, which religious groups may be expected to take advantage of this opportunity?
Much can be learned from the experience over the past ten years in New York City, after the courts forced schools to become houses of worship on Sundays. Although the new churches represent a variety of faiths, the vast majority are conservative evangelical Christian; a substantial number of these are part of national church-planting movements that happen to preach that same-sex relationships are an abomination.
The Child Evangelism Fellowship is represented at their national conventions by movement leaders who rail against the “homosexual agenda” and promote creationism. One keynote speaker has condemned interfaith marriage, which he referred to as “interracial marriage.” The leaders of the Alliance Defense Fund and the Liberty Counsel – the legal juggernauts that have made the new legal theory possible – have produced books whose titles say it all: The Homosexual Agenda: Exposing the Principal Threat to Religious Freedom Today, and Same-Sex Marriage: Putting Every Household at Risk.
They are perfectly entitled to their religion, of course. They are also, by virtue of recent court decisions, now entitled to promote this religion through America’s public schools.
The lesson we may learn from our experiences over the past decade is that the founding fathers were right, all along, in acknowledging that religion is more than simply a form of speech. They knew what some of our law-makers and policy-makers may have failed to grasp: when government gets mixed up in the religion business, no outcome is pretty.
Katherine Stewart is the author of "The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children" (PublicAffairs). Visit her Web site or follow her on Twitter @kathsstewart.
http://www.alternet.org/story/154755/the_new_legal_theory_that_enables_homophobic_evangelizing_in_public_schools
Iowa high school assembly stirs protest
ReplyDeleteWaterloo Courier March 9, 2012
DUNKERTON, Iowa — Administrators, teachers and students did not get what they expected Thursday during an extended school program. Everyone anticipated the message from Junkyard Prophet, a traveling band based in Minnesota, to be about bullying and making good choices. Instead, junior and senior high students at Dunkerton High School and faculty members said they were assaulted by the group's extreme opinions on homosexuality and images of aborted fetuses.
"They told my daughter, the girls, that they were going to have mud on their wedding dresses if they weren't virgins," said Jennifer Littlefield, a parent upset with the band's performance. Her daughter, Alivia Littlefield, 16, is a junior, and called Littlefield after the event.
"I couldn't even understand her, she was crying so hard," Littlefield said. Littlefield also did not appreciate what she described as gay bashing. "They told these kids that anyone who was gay was going to die at the age of 42," she said. "It just blows me away that no one stopped this."
The assembly began with music, which some students apparently liked well enough. Overall, Superintendent Jim Stanton said, the group offered "a very strong anti-violence, anti-drug, anti-alcohol" message. The band's lyrics offer evidence of some of their religious beliefs, though, like this passage from "Junkyard Rock."
"People be freakin' when we speakin' cuz we burnin it up, The life you livin', when you sinnin' cuz we tearin it up, With the word that hot, From the School of Hard Knocks gonna break the rocks, We ain't stoppin', the convictions poppin' Junkyard in the house and the Holy Ghost droppin'."
"The kids were rocking out," Stanton said. He noted Junkyard Prophet performed at the school years ago prior to his tenure. According to Stanton, staff members at the school at that time and officials from other districts had positive impressions of the group. However, Stanton said, the group apparently changed and misrepresented its total message going into Thursday's appearance.
After performing, the group separated boys, girls and teachers in the building. During the breakout session, the young men learned the group's thoughts on the U.S. Constitution and what one Prophet referred to as its "10 commandments." The leader also showed images of musicians who died because of drug overdoses, including Elvis Presley. Members of the group blasted other performers, like Toby Keith, for their improper influence.
The girls, meanwhile, were told to save themselves for their husbands and assume a submissive role in the household. According to witnesses, the leader in that effort also forced the young ladies to chant a manta of sorts about remaining pure.
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ReplyDeleteThose who walked out or attempted to confront the speakers were shouted down or ridiculed as disrespectful, according to students. Heidi Manahl, Littlefield's sister, also had a student at the assembly. She, too, was appalled by Junkyard Prophet's message and tactics.
"I've never had so many young women come up to me crying because of what was said to them. They were bullied by these people and forced to sit there and told to be quiet," Manahl said.
Stanton spoke to the student body again at day's end, emphasizing the positive aspects of the group's message. But he also told students the presenters shared "an opinion about intolerance that's not in line with the beliefs of the Dunkerton Community Schools." "We promote tolerance for one another," Stanton said. "We will continue to celebrate diversity in our student body."
Littlefield said she appreciates that the administration has accepted responsibility for the assembly, which clearly went awry. "But the damage has been done. You let these people stay in the school for three hours," she added. Manahl is concerned about what comes next. She hopes administrators and teachers reach out to "students who don't fit in." "There are students in that school who are homosexual and they need to be protected," she said.
Littlefield isn't sure where officials go from here. But she is certain some repair work is in order. "Something definitely has to be done to make the situation better," she said. The district is trying to recover the fee paid to Junkyard Prophet, Stanton said. According to other sources, the band typically receives $1,500 per performance.
http://lacrossetribune.com/news/local/state-and-regional/iowa-high-school-assembly-stirs-protest/article_d754d1b2-6a25-11e1-b4e1-001871e3ce6c.html
Junkyard Prophet Profits Mightily
ReplyDeleteby: Freedom From Religion Foundation April 3, 2012
In the wake of publicity and complaints, Superintendent Jim Stanton of Dunkerton [Iowa] Community Schools has received a verbal lashing from parents at a school board meeting March 13 about an assembly for junior high and high school students presented by the Christian ministry group You Can Run But You Cannot Hide and its musical group Junkyard Prophet.
Stanton apologized and agreed to make changes to the assembly procedures for the school in Dunkertown, a town of about 800 people. The assembly the week before included images of aborted fetuses and derisive comments about gay people.
FFRF received a copy of the assembly contract in response to a request for records from the school. The contract required the school to pay $2,000 to You Can Run But You Cannot Hide.
The contract says of the ministry, “We have an agenda for truth and not [sic] agenda for opinion.” It says, “We fully warrant our productions to be factual; connective with the students, encouraging to produce an atmosphere of thought and responsibility for the student and the world they live in.”
The group posted two video clips of portions of the assembly. One is here. The other is here.
The contract specifies that boys, girls, and teachers would be separated for a second portion of the program. The contract says, “The boys will be doing a huge exploration of music, dealing with different artists, what they stand for and don’t stand for, their lyrics and more.”
The contract says, “The girls will deal with issues such as the beauty of being a bride, purity, your heart, knowing whom you follow and more.” KCRG reported that the girls' program included a statement that girls would have “mud on their wedding dresses” if they weren’t virgins and that they should assume a submissive role in the household.
The boys were reportedly given the group’s theocratic view of the Constitution during a portion of their program.
“This school assembly is shocking," said FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. "The anti-gay and religious propaganda was offensive to students, teachers and parents. The school is entitled to a full refund, and You Can Run But You Cannot Hide cannot be allowed into any public school again."
FFRF previously warned other schools to take notice. see:
http://www.secularnewsdaily.com/2012/04/03/junkyard-prophet-profits-mightily-5
Secret recordings reveal anti-abortion group spreading falsehoods in schools
ReplyDeleteby: British Humanist Association April 3, 2012
Recordings of talks given by the anti-abortion group, the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) have revealed that the group seriously misinforms parents, pupils and staff about the effects of abortion, and the nature of Sex and Relationships Education (SRE). SPUC school speakers have falsely linked abortion to breast cancer and ‘post-abortion trauma’ (which is not a recognised medical condition). The British Humanist Association (BHA) and Education For Choice (EFC) have called on schools to stop inviting speakers in from organisations whose literature and presentations are riddled with misinformation, and on the government to take immediate steps to prevent such groups having access to children in schools.
Members of local humanist groups attended talks given to parents in Milton Keynes, Wakefield and Bournemouth, and more recently, members of Feminist Action Cambridge (FAC) were able to attend a talk given to secondary pupils in a school. The meetings in Milton Keynes and Cambridge were recorded.
SPUC’s talk to pupils focuses on the supposed harms of abortion. EFC has previously obtained SPUC’s 2008 PowerPoint presentation, which included graphic images of aborted foetuses and misinformation relating to pregnancy, contraception and abortion. The presentation FAC saw last month has been updated, although some of the fictions exposed then are still being repeated now, four years later. Claims presented include:
• The morning after pill ‘can cause an early abortion’ and may be damaging to women’s health and future fertility – but legally and medically, emergency hormonal contraception does not end an established pregnancy and is therefore not the same as abortion. There are no serious or long-term health problems associated with taking emergency contraception.
• Abortion increases a woman’s chances of developing breast cancer – but Cancer Research UK explain that ‘pregnancies that end in an abortion do not increase a woman’s chances of developing breast cancer later in life’.
• Abortion can lead to ‘suicidal tendencies’ ‘depression’ ‘drug and alcohol abuse’ – all symptoms of ‘post abortion trauma’ – ‘Post Abortion Trauma’ is an invented condition and is not recognised by the medical profession. The Academy of Medical Royal Colleges’ report, ‘Induced Abortion and Mental Health’ explains that ‘The rates of mental health problems for women with an unwanted pregnancy were the same whether they had an abortion or gave birth’.
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ReplyDeleteYoung people witnessing such presentations are subjected not only to misinformation but a stigmatising and at times distressing portrayal of a safe, legal medical procedure which a third of women in the UK will experience.
Paradoxically, SPUC’s own ‘Safe at School’ campaign opposes what it calls the ‘explicit nature of sex education in schools’, addressing parents across the country about the perceived harms of SRE. SPUC courted controversy last year when it held an event for parents in Tower Hamlets jointly with a number of other groups, including SREIslamic, under its ‘Safe at School’ banner. The meetings attended by local humanists focussed on generating fear amongst parents about the contents of their child’s SRE teaching, and informing them how to withdraw their children from SRE. Parents were also told that the government is considering introducing compulsory sex education (which it is not), and that they should write to their MP in opposition to this.
BHA Chief Executive Andrew Copson said: ‘It is deeply disturbing that anti-choice groups are so easily able to enter schools and present these damaging fictions, and that they are fear-mongering with parents, again through the spreading of stories which are untrue. Parents and teachers should be aware of the falsehood of the claims made by SPUC, and the government should be more pro-active in preventing groups that persistently make false claims of this nature from having access to vulnerable children, especially in schools.’
EFC’s Laura Hurley said: ‘Exposing pupils to presentations that misinform them and cause them distress goes against all good educational practice and is an abdication of schools’ pastoral duty of care. It is time that schools took responsibility for providing good quality, evidence-based education about abortion themselves and stopped their reliance on a range of outside agencies whose educational provision does not meet the basic standards which would be required in delivery of any other subject.’
For related articles see:
http://www.secularnewsdaily.com/2012/04/03/secret-recordings-reveal-anti-abortion-group-spreading-falsehoods-in-schools/
Christian fundamentalist Good News Club promotes genocide of nonbelievers in public schools
ReplyDeleteby Mike Daniels, Secular News Daily May 31, 2012
As if fighting tooth and nail for the right to teach creation myths as scientific fact weren’t bad enough, evangelical Christians are now promoting the genocide of nonbelievers as their god’s will. And teaching it to elementary school kids. Christian jihad, anyone?
The so-called “Good News Club” is a ministry of Child Evangelism Fellowship. They aren’t shy about their position of promoting evangelical Christianity. From CEF’s own website:
Each week the teacher presents an exciting Bible lesson using colorful materials from CEF Press®. This action-packed time also includes songs, Scripture memory, a missions story and review games or other activities focused on the lesson’s theme. As with all CEF ministries, the purpose of Good News Club is to evangelize boys and girls with the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ and establish (disciple) them in the Word of God and in a local church for Christian living.
These “clubs” meet in public schools all over the country–possibly even yours. In Salem, Oregon, the state capital, they meet in public schools in the Salem-Keizer school district. This particular district also graciously hosts the New Life Community Church, an aggressively evangelical organization, at its Bush Elementary School. What does the Good News Club teach? One of the stories is that of Saul and the Amalekites, and it comes early–the second week of the curriculum.
It’s not a pretty story, and it is often used by people who don’t intend to do pretty things. In the book of 1 Samuel (15:3), God said to Saul: "Now go, attack the Amalekites, and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys." Saul dutifully exterminated the women, the children, the babies and all of the men – but then he spared the king. He also saved some of the tastier looking calves and lambs. God was furious with him for his failure to finish the job. The story of the Amalekites has been used to justify genocide throughout the ages. According to Pennsylvania State University Professor Philip Jenkins, a contributing editor for the American Conservative, the Puritans used this passage when they wanted to get rid of the Native American tribes. Catholics used it against Protestants, Protestants against Catholics. "In Rwanda in 1994, Hutu preachers invoked King Saul’s memory to justify the total slaughter of their Tutsi neighbors," writes Jenkins in his 2011 book, Laying Down the Sword: Why We Can’t Ignore the Bible’s Violent Verses. This fall, more than 100,000 American public school children, ranging in age from four to 12, are scheduled to receive instruction in the lessons of Saul and the Amalekites in the comfort of their own public school classrooms. The instruction, which features in the second week of a weekly "Bible study" course, will come from the Good News Club, an after-school program sponsored by a group called the Child Evangelism Fellowship (CEF). The aim of the CEF is to convert young children to a fundamentalist form of the Christian faith and recruit their peers to the club.
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ReplyDelete‘Come now,’ you say, ‘They’re just teaching a Bible story. Nothing wrong with that. It’s not like they’re teaching Numbers 31, the slaughter of the Midianites for the same reason, where God told Moses to let the men “keep as wives” (that is, rape) all the virgin girls. This is a horrible story, sure, but they’re not teaching children that God wants all nonbelievers slaughtered!’ Sure about that, are you?
In the most recent version of the curriculum, however, the group is quite eager to drive the message home to its elementary school students. The first thing the curriculum makes clear is that if God gives instructions to kill a group of people, you must kill every last one: "You are to go and completely destroy the Amalekites (AM-uh-leck-ites) – people, animals, every living thing. Nothing shall be left." “That was pretty clear, wasn’t it?” the manual tells the teachers to say to the kids. Even more important, the Good News Club wants the children to know, the Amalakites were targeted for destruction on account of their religion, or lack of it. The instruction manual reads: "The Amalekites had heard about Israel’s true and living God many years before, but they refused to believe in him. The Amalekites refused to believe in God and God had promised punishment.
What lesson is this teaching children? Two things, actually. First, complete and unquestioning obedience to authority is a virtue. Specifically, obedience to their god who, of course, can only be “heard” through religious leaders who, naturally, would only say things their god told them . . . so they must be obeyed. Second, that anyone who doesn’t believe in their god is worthy of death, and that’s what their god wants. Lots of killing. I seem to recall all manner of outcry from folks about a religion that says exactly this. Which one was it? I can’t quite put my finger on it . . .
Muhammad said, “If anyone changes his religion, kill him,” and the death penalty for apostasy is still part of Islamic law. Those who choose to leave Islam have to live with a death sentence over the heads for the rest of their lives — even if they live in the U.S. But Muslim “civil rights” organizations whine about “Islamophobia” and never say a word about the human rights of apostates from Islam. -Robert Spencer, Jihad Watch.org
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ReplyDeleteIf I may paraphrase Robert Spencer, plenty of folks are calling out the atrocities of Islam; why aren’t those same people shrieking about Christianity’s pro-genocide bent? And slaughter of those they don’t like is becoming increasingly popular a message among the Christian right. A couple of weeks ago, North Carolina Baptist pastor Charles Worley told his congregation that all gays and lesbians should be rounded up and kept behind an electrified fence until they die out . . . yes, he advocated for concentration camps. His congregation was not horrified. In fact, they were supportive. Just days later, another Baptist pastor shared his thoughts on the idea. Curtis Knapp of New Hope Baptist in Seneca, Kansas, instead promoted government execution of all homosexuals:
They should be put to death … Oh, so you’re saying we should go out and start killing them, no?’ — I’m saying the government should. They won’t, but they should. You say, ‘Oh, I can’t believe you, you’re horrible. You’re a backwards neanderthal of a person’. Is that what you’re calling scripture? Is God a neanderthal, backwards in his morality? Is it His word or not? If it’s His word, he commanded it. It’s His idea, not mine. And I’m not ashamed of it. He continued: He said put them to death. Shall the church drag them in? No, I’m not say that. The church has not been given the power of the sort; the government has. But the government ought to [kill them]. You got a better idea? A better idea than God?
Meanwhile, in a more typical stance of the Christian Right, Truth in Action Ministries is blaming all of America’s ills on the IRS and homosexuality, and demanding that homosexuality be made illegal. Faux historian David Barton, who shaped Texan’s social studies textbooks with his warped “christian nation” nonsense, is in agreement. This is what the Christian Right wants: The removal of anyone who doesn’t obey their leaders. And they’re after your children. Are they in your child’s school?
Katherine Stewart has written a book about the Good News Club, The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children. She also has a website which features stories about the Religious Right in America.
To see the links embedded in this article go to:
http://www.secularnewsdaily.com/2012/05/christian-fundamentalist-good-news-club-promotes-genocide-of-nonbelievers-in-public-schools/
Charges filed against pastor in mock terrorism raid at Lower Swatara church
ReplyDeleteThe Patriot News, Pennsylvania July 27, 2012
Dauphin County prosecutors today charged a church and its pastor after a mock "terrorism raid" in March.
The fake raid occurred at Glad Tidings Assembly of God Church in Lower Swatara Township when four men -- one carrying an unloaded but real gun -- rushed into a room full of youth-group participants, put pillowcases over their heads and forced them into a van. The children didn't know the raid was fake. One was injured.
The district attorney's office filed charges of false imprisonment, a felony, and simple assault against the church and youth pastor Andrew D. Jordan, 28.
Lower Swatara Police Chief Richard Wiley said he didn't understand the rationale of the church leaders and that he's never witnessed a case like this.
District Attorney Edward M. Marsico Jr. that while the intentions of the church were not necessarily harmful, “they in essence terrorized several children.”
John Lanza, the pastor of the church, said after the incident that the raid is used as a learning experience to show what some missionaries deal with because of their faith.
The mother of a 14-year-old girl who was taken during the incident called police.
After bursting in on the youth group, the raiders prodded the hooded kids into a church van and drove across the parking lot to the pastor’s house. They led the teens through the garage, past the pastor’s motorcycle with crucifixes painted on its gas tank to an interrogation room in a dark corner of the musty basement.
A single-bulb painter’s light was suspended from the ceiling. It illuminated a lone chair. The men questioned each teen for 30 seconds in the room, raising their voices to invoke fear, before releasing them, Lanza said in March.
Lanza and Jordan are still listed as lead and youth pastors, respectively, on the church's website.
http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index.ssf/2012/07/charges_filed_against_pastor_i.html#incart_river_default
see previous news reports at:
http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index.ssf/2012/03/lower_swatara_township_churchs.html
http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index.ssf/2012/03/lower_swatara_township_teen_al.html
The Littlest Missionaries: A New Christian Plot to Invade Public Schools
ReplyDeleteExploiting a legal loophole, evangelicals are using children to spread their message in schools.
by By Katherine Stewart | AlterNet October 1, 2012
When he was 15, Jim ran drugs for a cult group. When I first heard his story, I was shocked – not just that the group was running drugs, but that they had directed one of their youngest recruits to do the dirty work for them. Then I learned why it made sense in a technical sort of way: the cult leaders reasoned that the older members, if caught, would face serious sentences and lifetime records, whereas the kids could get away with an unpleasant but not life-altering juvenile detention. It was a matter of using kids to do what the grown-ups didn't want to risk doing themselves.
In a tactical sense, religious fundamentalists in America appear to have taken a page from the same book. The constitution and the law prohibits adults from, say, establishing ministries within public schools [3] aimed at proselytizing to the children [4] during school hours. But a growing number of religious activists have come to realize that it's technically legal if they get the kids to do their work for them. OK, so religious proselytizing is not the same thing as running drugs – but manipulating kids to exploit legal loopholes isn't pretty wherever it happens.
This tactic has been tested and deployed in a great number of situations already in schools across the country. Right now, a large group of fundamentalist organizations and church denominations is making a big bet that they will be able to pull it off on a national scale, starting in 2013.
If you go to the Every Student Every School [5] website, you'll see that their dozens of promotional videos are first-rate. The music is great, the cameras are professionally handled, the sound bites are short and snappy. Their message is very clear.
As ESES's name implies, their idea is to proselytize every student in every public school in America through an aggressive "Adopt-a-School" campaign. And the way to do it is to have the kids do what grownups are not allowed to do – establish full-fledged missionary operations inside the schools. A clever map [6] allows viewers to click on their state and type in their area code, revealing every school in the district and determine whether it has been "adopted" by churches or other religious organizations. Kids from those entities are instructed to conduct daily prayer groups during the school day, distribute religious literature and are given numerous other ideas for practicing or promoting their religion [7] at school.
"We must help our teenagers get serious about sharing their faith with those God has place in their lives," an article on the ESES website advises. According to ESES's Campus Prayer Guide [8], evangelical Christian students are in a "strategic position" to proselytize "unchurched" peers, and advises these students to "consider every school a PRAYER ZONE."
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ReplyDeleteWho is behind ESES and its sponsoring group, Campus Alliance [9]? It is backed by nearly 60 large-scale fundamentalist initiatives and church denominations, including the Fellowship for Christian Athletes, Young Life, Youth with a Mission, Campus Crusade for Christ (CRU) and the Life Book Movement, a project of the Gideons International.
ESES is the fulfillment of a strategy that has been unfolding for the past few decades. It started with student groups rightfully claiming certain free speech rights in public schools. After all, kids can and should be allowed to talk about their religion with their friends at school. It led to a legal distinction [10] by Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor that seems more simple on the surface than it is in practice – the distinction between private speech by students and speech that is linked to school authorities or the authority of the school.
This distinction was perhaps too simplistic. After all, when students give class presentations, they don't have a right to express just any views on any subject they choose. Schools routinely restrict student speech – directing kids to speak politely, or speak in turn, for instance – when it makes sense for educational purposes, and even sometimes when it doesn't. This distinction ultimately led to what some fundamentalist activists took to calling a "God-given loophole [11]".
September 26th, for instance, marked the 22nd annual "See You at the Pole [12]" prayer event, in which children nationwide gathered around the flagpole at their schools and prayed in as ostentatious a manner as possible. The event is purportedly "student-led". But at the SYAP I attended, local pastors directed kids in their youth groups to join, told them what to do, loaned them sound amplification equipment, participated in the event and hosted an after-party at a local mega-church, which was staffed with adults wearing t-shirts with the SYAP logo.
These initiatives are "student-led" in the same sense that a pee-wee soccer league is student-led. Yes, it's the kids kicking the ball, but you have to be pretty detached from reality to imagine that there would be kids on that playing field in the first place without the grown-ups organizing and funding their activities, and cheering them from the sidelines.
Bible distribution programs are pursuing the same tactic. For years, adult missionaries with the Gideons International sought to distribute [13] Bibles in public schools – with limited success, as adults are not allowed to hand out religious literature on public school grounds. But give a stash of evangelical tracts to a kid, and the kid is allowed to do it for them. In the past three years since its inception, the Life Book movement [14], a "peer evangelism" project of the Gideons International, claims to have distributed over 3.4m evangelical tracts, written with teens in mind, to kids on school campuses nationwide.
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ReplyDeleteIn many instances, such activities like this will appear as a nuisance at the margin, one of those violations of the spirit of the constitution, if not the letter, that would seem to be more about symbolism and principle than anything else. But in this case, it would be naïve to imagine that that is the end game. The goal of such initiatives, quite clearly, is to normalize the idea that public schools should be venues for religious activity. Once you've got churches entangling themselves in the schools, it is very hard to remove them.
New York City's department of education found this out the hard way. After being forced by the courts to allow churches rent-free [15] access to space within public schools, a new constituency was created: namely, churchgoers and church leaders accustomed to having state-subsidized houses of worship. Even though the second circuit court of appeals recognized that there was a serious constitutional concern here, the department of education has run into heavy political resistance [16], which they are still battling today.
Defenders of such religious initiatives call their efforts a fight for "religious freedom." But largely what they seek are special privileges for their religion alone. The normalization of the integration of church and school comes from very particular strands of the Christian faith; not every Christian denomination, or every religion, is involved in this kind of activity. Mainline Christian denominations, to give just one example, are largely excluded. The work of ESES and its friends creates precisely those ills against which the constitutional principle of the "separation of church and state" was intended to defend.
Such mixing of church and school is sure to cause conflict and division – especially among parents who are not represented by the school-churches. It will burden public school officials who already have enough to deal with in terms of instruction and management, and are frankly not equipped to handle sectarian conflicts in school communities. But the groups involved in these efforts won't be deterred by that division. In fact, many of them welcome it. Many fundamentalists simply do not accept public schools as legitimate enterprises in the first place. They see public education as secular education, and therefore intrinsically hostile to their religion.
At their core, they do not accept that we live in a diverse society with a secular form of government. If their activities degrade support for the public schools or even destroy them, they will not be sorry to see them go.
http://www.alternet.org/education/littlest-missionaries-new-christian-plot-invade-public-schools
Christians Evangelizing Military Youth on the Taxpayer's Dime
ReplyDeleteBy Mikey Weinstein, AlterNet | Op-Ed 25 February 25, 2013
Quentin Tarantino deals in tawdry fiction writ large, bloody, and outrageous, as is the case with his latest Best Picture Oscar-nominated exploitation epic, "Django Unchained." Even he would be cowed by the pathetic tale of woe that follows.
From the onset of Operation Enduring Freedom in October 2001, U.S. military servicemembers and their families have borne the tragic brunt of prolonged operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Herculean task at hand, spanning the full spectrum of human endurance, from coping with multiple deployments to the hopelessly bleak, inhospitable frontlines of the War on Terror hasn't fallen on war fighters alone. Indeed, the oozing sores of perpetual anxiety, debilitating depression, and other extreme disorders have proven themselves across military and civilian communities to be communicable diseases, affecting servicemembers and their dependents alike. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder has become a household word across the nation, as active-duty servicemembers, for the first time in a generation, are more likely to fall on their own swords and take their own lives than face death in a war zone. This national tragedy continues to play out despite the phasing out of the U.S. role in Iraq and a sharp drop in troop levels in Afghanistan.
Some of the most acute psychological torment has fallen heaviest on servicemembers' children. Speaking as a veteran "military brat" from a family with a long and proud multigenerational tradition of service in our nation's armed forces, I can surely empathize with these youth in terms of the trials that they face.
Enter Tarantinoesque fiction - except it's real.
It came as a sickening jolt of shock when we at the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) learned that a group of savagely opportunistic fundamentalist Christian vultures known as "Club Beyond" are using taxpayer dollars - let me emphasize that point one more time: TAXPAYER DOLLARS - and Department of Defense property to aggressively prey on these youth, as well as advertising their activities via the official Army.mil website. Club Beyond's mission, in their own words, is to "'celebrate life with military kids, introducing them to the life giver, Jesus Christ, and helping them to become more like him,' while offering youth a chance build meaningful relationships." [italics added]. All of the foregoing would be just fine and dandy if only the United States military was not subject to the United States Constitution - but it is. Thus, the just-mentioned "sickening jolt."
In other words, Club Beyond's nefariously unconstitutional modus operandi is the outright, incontestable proselytization and religious indoctrination of vulnerable youth perceived to be "unchurched." Club Beyond is a sectarian enterprise with global reach. It's a subsidiary of a raging fundamentalist Christian parachurch organization called "Military Community Youth Ministries" (MCYM). MCYM offers, get this, "well chaperoned" weekly 90 minute club meetings, retreats, and Bible Study courses facilitated by "staff and volunteers [that] love young people and are available to journey with them through the hard challenges of adolescence, providing positive role models and exhibiting Christ-like behavior." Uh huh. Want some more?
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Ok. Well, one of the ways that Club Beyond shows its "love" for these captive audiences is by hosting so-called "Purity Conferences," events where the widely debunked abstinence-only movement is, ahem, propagated. In fact, this year's Valentine's Day was the occasion for one such "Virginity Ball," an event called "Can't Lose." At this "ball," rather than receiving a realistic sexual education, youth enmeshed in a cannonade of hormonal tides of teenage passion are schooled solely in the ways of puritanical self-denial. The "virginity movement" has long been exposed as a transparent, fundamentalist Christian campaign that perniciously undermines reproductive health and cloaks old-school misogyny of the very worst kind in mawkish rhetoric regarding "preserving yourself for your future husband." Yep.
ReplyDeleteThat'll work for sure.
In 2012's annual "Wastebook" published by the office of Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) - in case you didn't notice, a Republican - the glut of wasteful "non-defense" spending by the Pentagon earned it the notorious and ignominious title of the "Department of Everything." As our brilliant MRFF Senior Research Director Ms. Chris Rodda uncovered, a not-insignificant portion of these shamefully gluttonous expenditures skirt not only the realm of usefulness in the field of national defense but are utterly devoid of lawful constitutionality as well. A virtual king's ransom has been set aside by the Department of Defense (DoD) for the wretchedly theocratic purpose of "saving souls," with a major portion of this sum going directly towards MCYM. Since 2000, this child-targeting, taxpayer funded, proselytizing monstrosity has received a little known largesse of literally hundreds of lucrative DoD contracts for the explicitly-stated purpose of evangelizing ever-vulnerable military youth. In 2011 alone it received nearly $2 million, and in 2012 this sum increased to nearly $2.5 million! It goes without saying that this treasure of treachery represents a staggering violation of the First Amendment's No Establishment Clause, which clearly prohibits the intertwining of church and state.
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As our excellent researcher Ms. Rodda also noted, the cold, calculated, clever, cult-like tactics of these fundamentalist Christian parachurch madrassas include luring teens to pizza parties and movie nights, infiltrating the public schools surrounding military bases, and quite literally stalking minors by following their school buses from their on-post school bus stops to their off-post public schools. Wait...did I really say stalking minors by following their school buses? Indeed I did. It would be one thing if these sectarian religious predators carried out this style of proselytizing on their own time and own dime, as is the case with The Gideons International, who leave Bibles in the dressers of seedy motels. What MRFF takes grave exception to is the hideous fact that the DoD contract descriptions THEMSELVES actually command the utilization of these buzzard-like, textbook, ambulance-chasing tactics, totally negating the Constitution's "No Religious Test" mandate (see Clause 3, Article VI). Noting that the military base "Religious Education Director" and other related positions are the exclusive domain of Christians, contracts include the requirement to "ensure [that] all programs and activities are inclusive of all Christian traditions." Further, the DoD contract descriptions urge these state-sanctioned, uber-fundamentalist Christian proselytizing vultures to "use a variety of communications medium that shall appeal to a diverse group of youth, such as music, skits, games, humor, and a clear, concise, relevant presentation of the Gospel." What? No candy, bubblegum, kittens, puppies, and popcorn?
ReplyDeleteThese stinking travesties, odiously repulsive in their own right, represent merely the tip of the tip of a proverbial iceberg threatening not only the bedrock Constitutional protections of our military personnel and their families, but our comprehensive national security as well. The campaign to indoctrinate our military youth, at taxpayer expense, with the apocalyptic dogmas of fundamentalist Christianity goes hand-in-hand with other acts meant to advance a scurrilous Dominionist agenda - such as the Pentagon's recently-discovered blocking of LGBT websites. Under the false guise of "freedom of religion," Constitutional tramps have been given carte blanche to ride roughshod over the foundational religious rights of servicemembers and their families, most importantly their right to go unmolested by hectoring, seething, salivating proselytizers of Christian "Talibanism." The eventual goal of these parachurch Mafioso entities isn't simply to comfort military youth by assisting them in some sectarian conception of what constitutes a "walk with God." Quite on the contrary, the obsession is to raise a "Crusader force" championing weaponized Christianity - to be more specific, a twisted version steeped and marinated in poisonous, parochial religious exclusivity, supremacy, exceptionalism, and belligerent fundamentalist backwardness. To underestimate the enormity of the colossal danger posed by this fifth column to America's core Constitutional values, not to mention our strategic national security interests, would be a fatal mistake of literally Jovian proportion.
It must be stopped. It must be stopped now. Perhaps the next DoD Secretary is listening?
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/14773-django-unchained-christians-evangelizing-military-youth-on-the-taxpayers-dime
Sophia Investigates The Good News Club
ReplyDeleteby Scott Burdick· YouTube February 7, 2013
http://youtu.be/aISnyA6k5Io
Do you think children should be told they are evil and deserve to die? This is what the Good News Club teaches -- in Public Elementary Schools, no less.
In 2001, a conservative Supreme Court overthrew a New York public school's policy of excluding adult-led religious proselytizing groups like The Good News Club from operating in its schools, turning the Establishment Clause on its head. Since then the Good News Clubs have been on a tear, and now can be found in well over 3000 public elementary schools across America.
The Clubs, which are sponsored by an organization called the Child Evangelism Fellowship, are designed to indoctrinate very young children in a very specific and deeply fundamentalist version of the Christian faith -- one that endorses Biblical "inerrancy" and creationism, and emphasizes obedience at all costs. By operating in public schools, the Clubs deceive small children into thinking that their school supports this particular form of the Christian religion. Kids who attend the Clubs have said that the religion of the Good News Club "must be true, because they teach it in school, and they don't teach things in school that aren't true."
The introduction of such proselytizing Clubs sows division in formerly harmonious school communities, weakening support for public education as a whole. Good News Clubs are coming to a school near you. Catch the documentary first.
Please visit Katherine Stewart's website for more information on her book, "The Good News Club"
http://www.thegoodnewsclub.com
Or these websites with lots of information on what you can do to combat these clubs in general, or if they come to your school. http://www.goodnewsclubs.info http://goodnewsclubs.info/civilremedies.htm
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Here's the Permission form Bob signed (I've omitted Sophia's last name). Bob is now claiming that he only signed permission for Sophia to use the footage for a school project, which is clearly not true. I'll be happy to provide a copy of the form Bob and all the other people interviewed for the film signed if YouTube requests them, seeing as Bob has now filed with YouTube to have the film removed.
ReplyDeleteI give Sophia ***** and her team permission to record and use my interviews as well as footage of the Good News Spectacular for the purposes of creating a video documentary, or for any other projects she may give permission for in the future.
I understand that at my request, I will be provided with a DVD copy of Sophia ******'s final documentary project that I may use in it's completed form free of charge.
I understand that the recordings of my interview, footage from the Good News Spectacular, and the transcripts (if transcribed) will be maintained and made available indefinitely by the filmmaker for such research, production (e.g., radio, television, film festivals, World Wide Web, exhibitions, related advertisements), and educational purposes as the filmmaker/photographer shall determine.
I hereby grant, and transfer to the filmmaker/photographer, all rights, title, and interest in the interview and video documentary, including without limitation the literary rights and the copyright. I hereby release filmmaker/photographer, his/her legal representatives and assigns, from all claims and liability relating to said documentary and photographs.
I attest that I have voluntarily agreed to be interviewed and that this document contains the entire and complete agreement concerning the use and preservation of my interview.
Signed and dated by Bob -- he also wrote his address and phone # -- and I filmed him doing so. Here is a link to the actual release form with Bob's signature -- I just blacked out Sophia's last name and Bob's personal information.
http://scottburdick.com/Pages/Bob.htm
And here's a link that proves the claim that the GNC teaches children they deserve death -- from their own course books. http://goodnewsclubs.info/youdeservedeath.htm
5 Kids Bravely Fighting Christian Domination of Their Schools
ReplyDeleteImagine fighting a pitched church-state battle when you’re a teenager in high school.
By Rob Boston, Americans United for Separation of Church and State March 5, 2013
It can take a lot of guts to stand up for separation of church and state in America. People who file lawsuits to stop the display of religious symbols on public property or the use of sectarian prayers before government meetings often find themselves the targets of harassment, threats, and even violence.
Adults can usually withstand the pressure. But imagine fighting a pitched church-state battle when you’re a teenager in high school.
The high school years are a period when many young people just want to fit in with peers or keep a low profile. When separation of church and state is violated in a public school, students are the ones most affected. They’re the ones who have to stand up and make it right. It’s not always easy.
Here are five young people who made a difference.
1. Zack Kopplin: Zack Kopplin is a one-man war against the teaching of bad science in Louisiana. Zack was a high school student in Baton Rogue when he started to speak out against a measure legislators passed in 2008 to sneak creationist materials into schools through the backdoor.
Zack began lobbying for repeal of the so-called “Louisiana Science Act” (which is misnamed because it doesn’t actually promote science) and lined up 43 Nobel laureates to endorse a repeal of the law. He also worked with state Sen. Karen Carter Peterson (D-New Orleans) to introduce legislation repealing the law.
The repeal hasn’t passed yet, but Kopplin, who is 19 and now a student at Rice University in Houston, continues to work on the issue. He has led rallies calling for repeal and lobbies national science organizations, urging them to avoid holding conferences in Louisiana until the law is overturned. (The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology has already done so, shifting its conference from New Orleans to Salt Lake City.) He also captured national headlines by blowing the whistle on the teaching of creationism in private school in Louisiana that receive taxpayer funding through a voucher program.
In addition, Kopplin successfully lobbied the New Orleans City Council to support repeal of the law. In May, the council voted unanimously in favor of supporting repeal. A group of religious leaders called the Clergy Letter Project has also endorsed the call.
Along the way, Kopplin has become an effective spokesperson for the cause of sound science instruction in public schools. He has delivered speeches and appeared on national news programs to discuss the issue. In early March, he was interviewed by Bill Moyers on PBS.
2. Jessica Ahlquist: In 2011, high school junior Jessica Ahlquist protested the posting of a banner listing an official school prayer in the auditorium of Cranston High School West in Rhode Island.
The banner had been hanging there since 1963 – ironically, the same year the U.S. Supreme Court struck down official programs of prayer and Bible reading in public schools in a famous case called Abington Township v. Schempp.
Officials at the school refused to remove the banner, so Ahlquist contacted the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU sued on her behalf, and she won. In the ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Ronald R. Lagueux praised Ahlquist for having the courage to take on the case at the tender age of 16.
Unfortunately, many members of the community didn’t agree. Ahlquist was subjected to a torrent of abuse. A Twitter user said “this girl honestly needs to be punched in the face,” and an anonymous commenter posted Ahlquist’s home address on the Providence Journal's website. She received numerous death threats and was shadowed by police for a time at school.
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Ahlquist was even blasted by the 1970s rock star Meatloaf, who cited her as an example of why “the world’s gone to hell in a handbasket.”
ReplyDeleteRemarkably, Ahlquist was also attacked by a state politician. State Rep. Peter Polombo called her “an evil little thing,” a “clapping seal” and a “pawn star” on a talk radio show. Things got so out of hand that when the Freedom From Religion Foundation tried to send flowers to Ahlquist, it couldn’t find a local florist willing to deliver to her house.
The good news is that school officials decided not to appeal the ruling, and the banner was removed. Ahlquist is currently finishing up her senior year studying at home. This fall, when she goes to college, she’ll have fewer worries about money. An atheist blogger, Hemant Mehta, launched a scholarship fund for her. More than $44,000 was collected.
3. Krystal Myers: High school senior Krystal Myers knew something wasn’t right at Lenoir City High School in Tennessee. There was simply too much religion in the school.
Myers made note of a litany of abuses: sectarian prayers at graduation ceremonies, coercive prayer at football games, teachers wearing clothing with religious imagery, lunchtime visits by ministers, distribution of Christian material during the school day and prayers opening school board meetings.
As editor of her school newspaper, Panther Press, Myers believed she was in a position to highlight these abuses and bring about change. She penned a column explaining what it felt like to be an atheist in such an environment.
“I have realized that I feel that my rights as an atheist are severely limited when compared to other students who are Christians,” Myers wrote. “Why do Christians have special rights not allowed to nonbelievers?”
The column never made it into Panther Press. The school’s principal pulled it, asserting the piece might cause disruptions at the school. The Knoxville News-Sentinel had no such worries, however, and ran Myers’ article on Feb. 26, 2012.
Myers’ willingness to speak out sparked action from Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Attorneys at Americans United wrote to school officials and demanded that they stop the unconstitutional activities. The Lenoir City Board of Education subsequently announced that it would suspend prayer before meetings and would also end the practice of allowing public prayers before high school football games. (The other matters were referred to the school’s attorney.)
Some in the community lashed out against Myers. In an online forum for Lenoir City residents, a comment thread titled “Krystal Myers should be Excommunicated from the City and County” sprung up. One anonymous commenter asserted, “We need to rise up and Kick (sic) devil worshiping, drama loving, Krystal Myers out of town.”
Not long after that, hundreds of people gathered to pray on the Loudon County courthouse lawn, calling for school prayer. Some carried signs that read: “He stood for us. We stand for him,” and “It’s freedom of religion, not freedom from religion.”
Myers graduated and is now studying journalism at the University of Tennessee.
4. Corwyn Schulz: By the time he was a high school senior, Corwyn Schulz had had enough. Corwyn, who attended Medina Valley High School in Castroville, Texas, endured Christian invocations at school events, prayers led by coaches, religious posters on school walls and other school-sponsored forms of religion.
As Corwyn prepared to graduate, he decided to fight back. With legal firepower provided by Americans United for Separation of Church and State, Corwyn and his family filed a lawsuit to block school-sponsored prayer during the commencement ceremony.
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A flurry of legal activity resulted in an initial win for Corwyn, when a federal court blocked the prayer. An appeals court overturned that ruling, however. Corwyn and his family could sense strong hostility in the community and decided not to attend the commencement.
ReplyDeleteAlthough the Schulz family lost the skirmish over graduation prayer, they won the larger battle. The lawsuit continued, and after more than six months of litigation, school officials agreed to work on settling the case out of court.
Under the terms of the settlement, district officials, administrators, teachers, staff and other employees cannot initiate, solicit or direct prayers, nor can they join students in prayers, proselytize or invite others to engage in worship activities of this type.
In addition, the school district agreed to stop displaying crosses, religious images, religious quotations, Bibles or religious texts or other religious icons or artifacts on the walls, hallways and other common areas at the school. The district said it would no longer invite speakers who might proselytize during school events.
Finally, school officials altered the student handbook to add a section on students’ rights to religious freedom and offer special training on church-state separation to all district personnel who work with students.
There was an interesting postscript to the case: After the settlement was announced, Superintendent James Stansberry called the lawsuit a “witch hunt” and made untrue allegations about it. At the same time, Keith Riley, the band director, accused Corwyn of making “lies and false allegations.”
U.S. District Judge Fred Biery held that these comments were in violation of the settlement decree and ordered Stansberry and Riley to apologize to the Schulz family.
5. Mark Reyes: The small town of Poteet, Texas, had a tradition of including a lot of religion in its high school graduation ceremonies – often Christian. Students were expected to compose and deliver prayers during the event. In fact, they were told to submit their prayers in advance for review by the principal.
Mark Reyes, who was valedictorian in 2012, discovered that two of the students who were expected to deliver prayer weren’t comfortable doing so, and he decided to challenge the practice. There was no way Reyes could have done this anonymously – there were only about 100 kids in his graduating class.
Reyes began researching separation of church and state issues and contacted Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which wrote letters to school officials advising them that they could not compel students to write and deliver prayers. In response, the school officials told Reyes that if any students didn’t want to offer a prayer, the school would find someone else to do it. Americans United had to write to the school again and tell the officials that this only made things worse.
Local media reported that when word of Reyes’ protest became public, an uproar ensued. Reyes subsequently appeared on CNN and Fox News to explain his point of view. Despite the anger in the community, the graduation ceremony went off without coerced prayer. Reyes went on to Texas Tech University to study computer science.
These are just five examples. Lots of young people stand up against Christian fundamentalism intrusions into public schools and never make the national media. Activists who have been defending the separation of church and state for a long time sometimes wonder if a new generation will rise up to carry the torch. It seems there’s no need to worry. They are well on the way.
to read the links embedded in this article go to:
http://www.alternet.org/5-kids-bravely-fighting-christian-domination-their-schools
Good Lord: In China, Christian Fundamentalists Target Tibetans
ReplyDeleteBy Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore / XiningMarch 08, 2013
When Dawa said yes to a party held by American friends in the city of Xining, she expected music, drinks, and a chance to practice her English. But it soon transpired that there would be more to the evening’s activities.
“When we arrived one person said loudly: ‘Lord!’ and started to cry,” Dawa, an earnest Tibetan in her late 20s, recalls in a café in Xining, the capital of China’s Qinghai province. “Some people came and touched me and cried. We were so afraid. We thought, Why are they crying?”
For Dawa and her friend Tenzin (names have been changed to protect their identities), both Tibetans from nomadic families trying to make it in the big city, the situation was not only potentially dangerous if they had been caught by police but humiliating. “We were upset,” explains Tenzin. “They had told us we could learn English. We felt like fools.”
The pair had been roped into an evangelical Christian gathering. For missionaries, places like Xining provide rich pickings among so-called unreached peoples. In the city, Hui Muslims sporting white caps live side by side with Tibetans, many wrapped against the cold in colorful robes. An increasing number of the latter have come from the sprawling Qinghai-Tibet Plateau in search of work and education.
Tibet is one of the most coveted locations for nondenominational American and Korean Christian groups angling for mass conversion. Most are fundamentalist Christians who prioritize preaching and winning converts over the charitable works traditionally performed by mainstream missionaries. The more radical evangelists believe in the biblical notion of the “Great Commission” — that Jesus can only return when preaching in every tongue and to every tribe and nation on earth is complete.
On websites like the U.S.-based Joshua Project, ethnic minorities are seen as “the unfinished task.” Of these, “Tibet has long been one of the greatest challenges,” reads a summary. “In 1892 Hudson Taylor said: ‘To make converts in Tibet is similar to going into a cave and trying to rob a lioness of her cubs.’”
Missionary work remains illegal in China and is viewed as a tool of Western infiltration. In 2011, officials issued a secretive 16-page notice ordering universities to counteract foreigners suspected of converting students to Christianity. But in parts of Qinghai proselytizing is being quietly tolerated, according to Robert Barnett, a Tibet scholar at Columbia University. He cites estimates that as many as 80% to 90% of the few hundred foreigners living in Xining are fundamentalist Christians.
Barnett believes the reason for the government’s tolerant attitude is twofold. First, American missionaries, often funded by their churches, provide a valuable service teaching English for scant pay. Second, by targeting Tibetan Buddhism, missionaries might just help the government erode this integral part of Tibetan identity. Keeping a lid on restive Tibet, which China invaded in 1949–50, is paramount. Under Chinese rule, self-immolations by Tibetans protesting religious and political subjugation have become common in recent years. Tibetan-language schools have been closed down, nomads resettled in towns and cities, and monasteries subject to close police surveillance. Images of the exiled Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader, are banned.
“There is a certain underlying commonality of purpose between the evangelizers and the new modernizing Chinese state. It’s just convenient for them to use each other,” explains Barnett. “[Today missionaries] have greater opportunities coming in on the coattails of the Communist Party.”
Jason, whose name has been changed at his request, is one such American working clandestinely on a student visa. He knows foreigners who have been kicked out of more politically sensitive areas of Tibetan-populated Qinghai by authorities. ...
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But he is thriving in Xining. Leaning forward enthusiastically in the bustling Western-style business he manages, he lays out his reason for coming to China: “When I moved out one of my main agendas was to see if the teachings of Jesus work in an environment where they are not known at all.”
ReplyDeleteJason compares the Kingdom of God to an outstretched hand available for anyone to “grab.” But for most Tibetans grasping the hand of Jesus is a moot point. Some might adopt him as one of a pantheon of gods; others simply find his story unimpressive. “[Missionaries say,] ‘Well, look at the miracles Jesus is able to perform, to turn water into wine and to heal the sick,’” Elizabeth Reynolds, a Fulbright scholar researching Tibetan culture in Xining, explains. “The Tibetan goes: ‘Is that all he can do?’ It’s believed that such special phenomena [already] occur around high lamas.”
To combat such indifference, radical Christians in the past have employed tactics such as tract bombing — undercover distribution of thousands of leaflets in Buddhist areas. In one blog, published in 2006, a young zealot gives a blow-by-blow account of tract bombing among Tibet’s “satanic” monasteries. After his mission is complete, he observes: “Man how blinded these people are.”
Many missionaries today are subtler. Many become Tibet scholars in their own right. Most entrench themselves in local life. Much of the informal English instruction in Xining is run by missionaries as are the majority of the foreign cafés. They translate the Bible into Tibetan, distribute flash drives containing their beliefs and rework Tibetan folk songs with Christian lyrics. Some help run orphanages. Targeting the young is key. When a South Korean missionary asked Tenzin which Tibetans needed help, he suggested the elderly. According to Tenzin, the Korean replied: “Not old people — [we want] children.”
Aggressive tactics persist, however. In a quiet Tibetan town three hours drive from Xining, one local describes seeing a missionary throw coins into the air. “This comes from Jesus,” he declared to the astonished crowd. The same Tibetan remembers with an incredulous laugh being told that Christianity brings cash. “All Buddhist countries are poor,” the missionary said. “If you believe in Jesus, you will be rich.”
If conversions are to be found, it is among those who stand to benefit the most from missionary-led charities and social enterprises. Tibetans in Xining reported knowing at least one convert, an uneducated teenage Tibetan given a job and board by missionaries. According to sources, he hangs around hospitals, spreading the word of God and translating for nomads who do not speak Mandarin.
Open conversion, however, remains rare. Few would risk the wrath of family members by abandoning their own faith. Barnett describes hearing about one case in which relatives threatened to kill a missionary who had converted their kin. As such it is impossible to know how many converts there are. Barnett says: “I think we are going to wake up one day and see these people have made serious inroads into a culture already under threat.”
For Jason, it is about providing choice. If a Tibetan travelled to America to share Buddha’s teachings, he reasons you “have a right” to hear their views. It is misguided to think that “Tibetans are too stupid to make decisions about their own life,” he says. “Personally, I would like for all people in the world to have access to the teachings of Jesus.” Asked how he envisions Christianity in China, he insists: “I don’t think it is building big gaudy churches and having people wear suits and changing their culture.”
Back in the café, Dawa is not so sure. Religion is essential to her Tibetan identity. “I know my way,” she says resolutely. “I believe in Buddhism. They cannot change me.”
http://world.time.com/2013/03/08/good-lord-in-china-christian-fundamentalists-target-tibetans/
The dark side of home schooling: creating soldiers for the culture war
ReplyDeleteThe Christian home school subculture isn't a children-first movement. Some former students are bravely speaking out
by Katherine Stewart, The Guardian UK May 8, 2013
Several decades ago, political activists on the religious right began to put together an "ideology machine". Home schooling was a big part of the plan. The idea was to breed and "train up" an army of culture warriors. We now are faced with the consequences of their actions, some of which are quite disturbing.
According to the Department of Education, the home schooling student population doubled in between 1999 and 2007, to 1.5 million students, and there is reason to think the growth has continued. Though families opt to home school for many different reasons, a large part of the growth has come from Christian fundamentalist sects. Children in that first wave are now old enough to talk about their experiences. In many cases, what they have to say is quite alarming.
When he was growing up in California, Ryan Lee Stollar was a stellar home schooling student. His oratory skills at got him invited to home schooling conferences around the country, where he debated public policy and spread the word about the "virtues" of an authentically Christian home school education.
Now 28, looking back on his childhood, it all seems like a delusion. As Stollar explains:
"The Christian home school subculture isn't a children-first movement. It is, for all intents and purposes, an ideology-first movement. There is a massive, well-oiled machine of ideology that is churning out soldiers for the culture war. Home schooling is both the breeding ground – literally, when you consider the Quiverfull concept – and the training ground for this machinery. I say this as someone who was raised in that world."
Too frequently, Stollar says, the consequences of putting ideology over children include anxiety, depression, distrust of authority, and issues around sexuality. This is evident from the testimonials that appear on Home schoolers Anonymous, the website that Stollar established, along with several partners.
Stollar's own home schooling experience started off well. But over time, as his family became immersed in the world of Christian home schooling, his "education" became less straightforward and more ideological. "I particularly remember my science curriculum," he says. "We used It Couldn't Just Happen, which wasn't really a science textbook. It was really just an apologetics textbook which taught students cliché refutations of evolutionism."
Many parents start off home schooling with the intention of inculcating their children in a mainstream form of Christianity. However, as many HA bloggers report, it is easy to get sucked into the vortex of fundamentalist home schooling because extremists have cornered the market – running the conventions, publishing the curricula, setting up the blogs.
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As HA blogger Julie Ann Smith, a Washington state mother of seven, says:
ReplyDelete"If you are the average Christian home schooler with no agenda, and you have the choice between attending a secular home schooling convention and a Christian one, chances are you'll choose the Christian convention. But they only allow certain speakers who follow their agenda. So you have no clue. What you don't realize is that they are being run by Christian Reconstructionists."
Smith is referring to the Calvinist movement, founded by Rousas John Rushdoony, that advocates a Christian takeover of the political system in order to "purify" the nation and cleanse it of the sin of secularism. Rushdoony taught that public schools – "statist education," in his words – promote chaos, primitivism, and "a vast disintegration into the void". He advocated home schooling as a way to rear a generation that could carry out the mission of retaking the nation for Christ.
Much of fundamentalist home schooling is driven by deeply sexist and patriarchal ideology. The Quiverfull movement teaches that women need to submit to their husbands and have as many babies as they possibly can. The effects of these ideas on children are devastating, as a glance at HA's blogs show.
"The story of being home schooled was a story of being told to sit down and shut up. 'An ideal woman is quiet and submissive,' I was told time and time again," writes Phoebe. "The silence and submission I was pushed into was ultimately a place of loneliness, bitterness and almost crippling insecurity."
The fundamentalist home schooling world also advocates an extraordinarily authoritarian view of the parental role. Corporal punishment is frequently encouraged. The effects are, again, often quite devastating. "People who experienced authoritarian parents tend to turn into adults with poor boundaries," writes one pseudonymous HA blogger. "It's an extremely unsatisfying and unsustainable way to live."
In America, we often take for granted that parents have an absolute right to decide how their children will be educated, but this leads us to overlook the fact that children have rights, too, and that we as a modern society are obligated to make sure that they get an education. Families should be allowed to pursue sensible homeschooling options, but current arrangements have allowed some families to replace education with fundamentalist indoctrination.
As the appearance of HA reminds us, the damage done by this kind of false education falls not just on our society as a whole, but on the children who are pumped through the ideology machine. They are the traumatized veterans of our culture wars. We should listen to their stories, and support them as they find their way forward.
to read the links embedded in this article see:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/08/christian-home-schooling-dark-side
Genghis Christ, General Boykin, and the Fundamentalist Christian Holy War
ReplyDeleteBy Mikey Weinstein, AlterNet | Op-Ed March 8, 2014
Jerry Boykin has a grotesque conception of Jesus Christ. Most (non-fundamentalist) Christians practice their faith in a manner that holds aloft the treasured values of love, peace, and good will towards their fellow humans. Boykin, a retired U.S. Army Lieutenant General and current Executive Vice President of the ultra-right wing, fundamentalist Family Research Council (FRC), will have none of that. Instead, Boykin’s avatar is a ravenously militant and militaristic one — a deity of universal destruction, bloodshed, rabid bigotry and unadulterated hatred.
Speaking to the WallBuilders’ Pro-Family Legislators Conference last fall, Boykin staked this claim:
“The Lord is a warrior and in Revelation 19 it says when he comes back, he’s coming back as what? A warrior. A mighty warrior leading a mighty army, riding a white horse with a blood-stained white robe … I believe that blood on that robe is the blood of his enemies ’cause he’s coming back as a warrior carrying a sword. And I believe now – I’ve checked this out – I believe that sword he’ll be carrying when he comes back is an AR-15.…And the sword today is an AR-15, so if you don’t have one, go get one. You’re supposed to have one. It’s biblical.”
Jesus Christ or "Genghis" Christ?
It is absolutely critical to understand and fully internalize that Boykin is far from alone in his nightmarish conception of the Prince of Peace’s (mainstream) redeeming message. Indeed, the retired General’s forces are literally legion with some estimating that the number of adherents totals approximately 38 million people, i.e. about 12 percent of the American public. A multi-denominational grouping known as “dominionists”, these Christian extremists see themselves as a martyred and besieged demographic. They thrill to the imagined drama that they are surrounded on all sides by, among many other constituencies of Satan, 1) sodomites (the LGBT community); 2) hellbound cowards (any non-fundamentalist Christian, non-messianic Jew, or adherents of ANY other faith group or non-faith entity); 3) domestic jihadis (pretty much any breathing Muslim American or fetuses in the wombs of Muslim American women), all of whom advocate “shariah law”; 4) demonic ‘feminazis’ (women who will not merrily submit to male domination in all matters of consequence); and, 4) godless commies (i.e. anyone who hasn’t manifestly absorbed Fox News’ talking points and/or isn’t politically to the right of Ted Nugent).
In the tortured minds of these dominionists, it stands to reason that, being conveniently beset by divinely predicted enemies from all sides, they must defend themselves to the death by all means at their disposal, including armed force. But that’s not enough. As late dominionist preacher Earl Paulk stated, “Christ in us must take dominion over the earth… the next move of God cannot occur until Christ in us takes dominion.”
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Want more? The über-jingoistic words of the recently deceased dominionist Poster Child, Rev. D. James Kennedy, speak volumes: “As the vice-regents of God, we are to bring His truth and His will to bear on every sphere of our world and our society. We are to exercise godly dominion and influence over our neighborhoods, our schools, our government… our entertainment media, our news media, our scientific endeavors—in short, over every aspect and institution of human society.”
ReplyDeleteYou see, my friends, Boykin’s words of wanton war aren’t simply the idle spoutings of some crotchety, eccentric, harmless ex-soldier. They’re a de facto fatwa being issued to “American Taliban” coreligionists to forthwith forge the “Kingdom of God” through bloody sectarian armed struggle, as their twisted, dominionist version of the New Testament demands. How “bloody,” you may inquire? You want the metrics? No one describes Boykin’s dominionist wet dream with more exactitude of revulsion than the “Ragin’ Prophet” Rod Parsley who is the spiritual leader of the enormous (5,200 seat) mega-cathedral in Columbus, Ohio known as the World Harvest Church, which boasts 10,000 weekly congregant attendees. Parsley minces no words when he promises his vast flock of fanatical fundamentalists that there will be a 200 mile long river, 4 and half feet deep, filled with nothing but the human blood of those poor souls whom the weaponized
Jesus has slaughtered at the Battle of Armageddon. Parsley will then remind his followers, energetically engorged with this blood orgy promise, to “rejoice, for the worst is yet to come.”
For Boykin and his wretched ilk, Revelation 19 (“And I saw heaven opened, and behold a white horse; and he that sat upon him was called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he doth judge and make war”) is the mantra that supersedes turning the other cheek, loving thy neighbor, and other sanguine gospel messages à la The Sermon on the Mount. Per Boykin’s instructions, all good Christians need to literally become “warriors for God’s kingdom.” And they need to do it right now!
Sound familiar? Anyone? Well, it’s right out of the infamous playbook of religious supremacy and exceptionalism writ large in the blood of innocents by such villains as al-Qaeda and Anders Behring Breivik.
The Top General in the Dominionist “Army of God”
Boykin was one of the original commanders of the U.S. Army’s elite Delta Force unit, which was formed in the late ‘70’s. Boykin, then 29, apparently saw his induction into Delta as a continuation of his walk with God: “God led me into Delta Force, and He said to me, this is where you ought to be.” Boykin must have been referring to the God of “blood in fury” and the “consuming fire,” described in the Book of Ezekiel.
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Following September 11, Boykin, at the time the Commanding General of the sprawling Fort Bragg, N.C. military facility, would preach that the United States was engaged in nothing less than an all-out holy war. In paid junkets financed by influential dominionist entities, Boykin would appear onstage in churches and other locations around the nation in his full Army uniform, pointing to posters of Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein and stating that “Satan wants to destroy this nation, he wants to destroy us as a nation, and he wants to destroy us as a Christian army… [they] will only be defeated if we come against them in the name of Jesus.” It was around this time that then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld successfully nominated Boykin for a third star, placing the dominionist fascist Boykin only one rank/grade below the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
ReplyDeleteFrom 2002 to 2007, Boykin served on George W. Bush’s team as the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence in what Bush referred to as “this crusade, this war on terrorism.” It was in this lofty capacity at the highest levels of the Pentagon that Boykin became thoroughly convinced that the opponents of the U.S. were “satanic” and thus less-than-human. He became Rumsfeld’s point-man on the secretive program to restructure the notorious Abu Ghraib Prison along the lines of Guantánamo Bay’s Camp X-Ray, or in other words, to “Gitmoize” it. It was not long before Abu Ghraib became infamously plagued by horrifying reports of systemic human rights abuses. Query the role played there as a result of Boykin’s dehumanizing sectarian rhetoric of weapons-grade, inflammatory Islamophobia? After all, Boykin has made it publicly quite clear that he believes that Muslims in America do not deserve Constitutional First Amendment protections.
Commanding Officer in the Domestic Hate Lobby
Now retired from military life, Boykin is the Executive Vice President of the FRC, one of the leading anti-gay dominionist organizations in the United States and a designated Hate Group according to the venerable Southern Poverty Law Center. Birds of a bigoted feather flock together. Indeed, the FRC (which I always thought stood for “Fascist Rally Center”) is a truly vicious organization that has supported Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni’s “Kill the Gays” Bill (now the “Imprison-Gays-for-Life” Bill), as well as the anti-LGBT crackdown in Russia. The FRC also furiously supported Arizona’s defeated SB1062, the “Religious
Freedom Restoration Act,” which basically would have fully legalized the civil “right” to practice atrocious forms of discrimination and prejudice against gay and lesbian residents.
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I head-up a foundation that comprehensively clashes with Boykin on an all too frequent basis. We wage these fights on behalf of our 36,000-plus active duty and veteran clients within the U.S. military, 96% of whom are practicing Christians themselves, who’ve had their Constitutionally-guaranteed, religious rights and protections egregiously violated by unconstitutional mafiosi such as Boykin. As Founder and President of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), I’ve even been the central subject of a scurrilous recent article entitled “One of the Most Dangerous Men in America,” published in the July/August 2013 edition of Decision Magazine, a flagship publication of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. Ironically, the cover of that magazine featured a prominent photo of a coyly smiling Boykin himself juxtaposed with the incredibly duplicitous, deceitful and dishonest headline of “Religious Freedom Under Attack in our Armed Forces: Retired Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin Warns of Efforts to Trample Liberty in the Military.” And, just so you know, this month’s issue proudly trumpets Russia’s anti-gay legislation and features Vladimir Putin on the cover.
ReplyDeleteDominionist Christian Extremism: A Dire Threat
Without the slightest tacit nuance of hyperbole, one can easily assert that the militant, dominionist fanaticism of Christian fundamentalism which Boykin, and his ignominious swarms spew, mirrors the explicit extremism of the Salafi-Jihadist monsters who’ve torn the Middle East asunder. Indeed, the cruel and callous fundamentalist bigotry of Christian dominionists isn’t limited to gays and Muslims. On the contrary, it is aimed at all “blasphemers” in general, especially including other Christians whom Boykin and his fellow travelers disparagingly deem to not be “Christian enough.”
Americans who value their remaining Constitutional religious freedoms should rail against Boykin’s incitements to his vast flock to arm as for war. The dominionist “faith” is a frightening, contorted vision of theocratic tyranny dripping with unbridled hostility towards the bedrock rights and protections guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.
The damnable dominionists such as Boykin, the FRC and their awful fundamentalist allies are not merely wolves in sheep’s’ clothing. They are wolves in wolves’ clothing.
Our American brothers and sisters must recognize the seething and barbarous danger wrought by this sectarian theocratic cabal before it becomes too late and it engulfs our precious freedoms rendering the rest of us impotent to resist its terrible tyranny.
We cannot merely request them to stop. We must demand it, and remember the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: “Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/22336-genghis-christ-general-boykin-and-the-fundamentalist-christian-holy-war
FRC Hot Mic: Boykin Jokes about Jews, Says Obama Supports Al Qaeda, Sends Them Subliminal Messages
ReplyDeleteBy Josh Glasstetter, Southern Poverty Law Center March 7, 2014
The Family Research Council’s executive vice president, Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin (retired), was caught on a “hot mic” following a panel yesterday at the National Security Action Summit, which was held just down the street from the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Boykin could be heard, in an awkward attempt at humor, telling a reporter from Israel that “Jews are the problem” and the “cause of all the problems in the world.” Boykin told another reporter that President Obama identifies with and supports Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood and uses subliminal messages to express this support.
Boykin appeared on a panel yesterday – “Benghazigate: The Ugly Truth and the Cover-up” – as part of the summit held near Washington, DC, which was organized by Frank Gaffney to highlight speakers, like himself, who were not invited to speak at CPAC. Gaffney has alienated himself by repeatedly claiming that the American Conservative Union, which organizes CPAC, has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Boykin, who is FRC’s second in command after Tony Perkins, fits right in at such a gathering.
After the Benghazi panel came to a close, the video feed for the live webcast went dark but audio continued to be broadcast. Boykin could be heard speaking with two reporters. His first conversation concerned Obama’s supposed support for Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood.
Boykin said that Obama’s “first real public appearance overseas was in Cairo,” and dubbed that the “notorious apology tour.” “If you understand anything about Islam,” he continued, “there are subliminal messages.” Obama’s message to them is “I understand you and I support you.”
Boykin argued that “Al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood and everybody else” are taking advantage of this support and the “opportunity that they see that they have a president that identifies with them, that has been supportive of them inside the United States and is unwilling to go against them.”
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Boykin could be heard recommending that the reporter contact FRC’s head of media relations, J.P. Duffy. He wrapped up that conversation and was approached by Henry Schwartz from IsraeliNationalNews.com, a right-wing Israeli news site run by Arutz Sheva.
ReplyDeleteA person, perhaps a PR flack, started to ask Boykin, “Would you mind doing a two minute interview with Israel, Israel National News?” (sic). Boykin cut in with “the Jews are the problem, the Jews are the cause of all the problems in the world.” The same person, or perhaps Schwartz, could be heard laughing and said “I know, I know, that’s why we’re trying to fix everything.”
Watch: http://youtu.be/yKL7zQb2sdA
Boykin has a history of making odd and outlandish comments about Jews, Muslims, Obama and much more. Boykin has said that Jews must be converted to Christianity and believes that American Jews don’t understand Hitler and support Democrats as a result. He has also argued that Obama is using the Affordable Care Act to create a Hitler-style Brownshirt army to force Marxism on America.
Boykin is best known for his animus against Muslims. He has argued that the First Amendment does not apply to Islam. He has also said that Christians must go on offense against Islam, there should be no more mosques built in America and there can be no interfaith dialogue between Christians and Muslims. Not surprisingly, Boykin’s military career was derailed by his anti-Muslim advocacy, earning him a rebuke from President George W. Bush and a Pentagon investigation that found he had violated military rules.
Yesterday’s hot mic audio demonstrates, yet again, that Boykin’s outrageous comments over the years were not misstatements. He honestly believes this stuff. Now consider the fact that he once served as Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and is still viewed as a credible expert on terrorism by Republican members of the House Armed Services Committee. No matter your politics, Boykin has no place in a reality-based foreign policy.
http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2014/03/07/frc-hot-mic-boykin-jokes-about-jews-says-obama-supports-al-qaeda-sends-them-subliminal-messages/
Good News Club Targets Children Across U.S. for Summer Salvation; Portland Fights Back
ReplyDeleteby Valerie Tarico, Away Point June 28, 2014
In past summers, Child Evangelism Fellowship has targeted children in Boston, Denver, Chicago, Little Rock, Salt Lake City, and the Twin Cities for conversion to their brand of biblical fundamentalism. This summer they chose Portland, Oregon. It may have been a mistake.
Some child advocates argue that proselytizing children for religious conversion is immoral. By contrast, Child Evangelism Fellowship boldly proclaims what they see as a God-given mission:
Child Evangelism Fellowship® is a Bible-centered worldwide organization composed of born-again believers whose purpose is to evangelize boys and girls with the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ and to establish (disciple) them in the Word of God and in a local church for Christian living.
One of their key tools is an after-school program called the Good News Club, which takes place in public grade schools across the country. Good News Clubs mix snacks, games, art projects and stories with upbeat moral lessons and the theology of blood sacrifice. In a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court, Child Evangelism Fellowship argued that they were entitled to operate in public schools because they are running a social and moral enrichment program akin to Scouting.
Much to the dismay of church-state watchdogs, a majority of the court agreed, but to call Good News Clubs moral enrichment by secular standards or to liken it to Scouting, is a stretch. Despite Evangelical influences in the Boy Scouts, scouting programs to a large degree emphasize virtues that are prized across both secular and religious wisdom traditions. Good News Clubs teach dark, divisive and potentially traumatic doctrines that are unique to fundamentalist forms of Christianity.
Attorney Eric Cernyar participated in Good News Club as a child. He now monitors Child Evangelism Fellowship activities and documentsclub practices such as deceptive marketing, authoritarian conditioning, diminishing nonbelievers, shame indoctrination, fear indoctrination, attacks on science education, and the cult technique of “mind control.”
The Good News Club curriculum is filled with over 5000 references to sin and thousands more to obedience, punishment, and Hell. It stresses Old Testament narratives of a retributive God who must punish sin, warns children that they will suffer an eternity in Hell if they refuse to believe, and stresses complete obedience as the supreme value. Good News Club tells children as young as preschoolers that they have “dark” and “sinful” hearts, were born that way, and “deserve to die” and “go to Hell.”
One Good News teaching tool is the “wordless book” in which colored pages represent key doctrines of atonement theology. The black page represents sin, seen as evil born into every human that keeps a person from getting to heaven (represented by a gold page). Red is the blood of Christ, whose death was necessary payment for sin. White represents the pure righteousness of Jesus and people who are saved by his atoning sacrifice. It’s as simple as “A,B,C”—Admit your sin, Believe Jesus can save you, and Choose Jesus as your savior. Green, the color of growth, represents the newly-saved child’s life as a budding Christian.
Each summer since 2008, Child Evangelism Fellowship has run a saturation blitz called Good News Across America in which “hundreds of volunteers” descend on a targeted city to run Bible schools “in community centers, parks, apartment complexes, playgrounds, boys and girls clubs – anywhere children gather.” Child Evangelism Fellowship boasts of reaching 2700 Denver children through these five-day “evangelistic clubs” and swelling attendance at one church from 75 to 235, almost half of whom were children.
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This summer over 100 missionaries will set up shop in Portland from July 14-26 when they will partner with 32 local churches to recruit children as young as five years old to summer day camps. If all goes according to plan, come fall these churches will institute Good News Clubs in Portland public schools. But some locals aren’t so keen on the idea. They point to the experience of Seattle parent, John Lederer, after a local church “planted” a Good News Club in his daughter’s grade school. Lederer was troubled by the treats used to entice children and the way volunteers blurred the line between school and club. But he also hated the effect on the community. “Before we were all Loyal Heights parents together. Now we’re divided into groups and labels: you’re a Christian, you’re the wrong kind of Christian, you’re a Jew, you’re an atheist.”
ReplyDeleteFor perhaps the first time, this summer Good News Across America will face organized opposition. As volunteers step up preparations for the Portland blitz, a coalition called Protect Portland Children is stepping up outreach to local media, parents, child advocates, and school administrators. Protect Portland Children says they mean no disrespect for local churches and volunteers. Rather, they hope to “spread the word that the Good News Club’s extreme teachings can be psychologically harmful to children” and that Child Evangelism Fellowship “is now targeting Portland with a major recruiting campaign.” “One of our goals is to help the next city they target and to make this a national conversation,” says member Kaye Schmitt.
Protect Portland Children points to the investigative expose by journalist Katherine Stewart, author of The Good News Club,. Like Seattle’s Lederer, Stewart dug deeper after witnessing Child Evangelism in action at her daughter’s school. And they are taking tips from Cernyar, whose website Intrinsic Dignity examines legal precedents related to use of public facilities, providing guidelines and models for parents and administrators who oppose religious bullying in public schools. Despite the Supreme Court ruling, Cernyar urges parents and district administrators to push back: “It is possible for a school district to regulate its forum to protect its students from psychologically and emotionally harmful after-class activities.”
Child Evangelism brings to the fight the clout of a national organization with over 700 paid staff in the U.S. and Canada alone and a seasoned legal team. They face a loose-knit group of volunteers. To speak in biblical archetypes, it’s a story of David against Goliath. But in one regard the opposing sides may well be evenly matched: their sense of righteous mission. On the Intrinsic Dignity site, Cernyar puts it this way:
Children have a right to develop in conditions of freedom, open inquiry, and empathy, and in respect of their inherent dignity and equality. Our mission is to challenge practices—beginning with private organizations infiltrating our nation’s public elementary schools—that shame and terrify children and assault their self-esteem.
In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus sends his disciples out into the world with these words, “be wise as serpents and harmless as doves.” It’s a shame that some Bible believers seem to have missed the second half of the sentence.
To follow this issue or lend your support, Protect Portland Children requests that you “like” their Facebook page.
Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington. She is the author of Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light and Deas and Other Imaginings, and the founder of www.WisdomCommons.org. Subscribe to her articles at Awaypoint.Wordpress.com.
to view the numerous embedded links in this blog post go to:
http://awaypoint.wordpress.com/2014/06/28/good-news-club-targets-children-across-u-s-for-summer-salvation-portland-fights-back/
Evangelical Group Aims to Convert Children as Young as Five at Portland Parks and Pools
ReplyDeleteBy ASSOCIATED PRESS JULY 22, 2014
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — An evangelical Christian group plans to try to convert children as young as 5 at Portland apartment pools, public parks and dozens of other gathering spots this summer — a campaign that's got some residents upset.
They've banded together in recent weeks to warn parents about the Child Evangelism Fellowship's Good News Club, buying a full-page ad in the local alternative weekly to highlight the group's tactics.
"They pretend to be a mainstream Christian Bible study when in fact they're a very old school fundamentalist sect," said Kaye Schmitt, an organizer with Protect Portland Children, which takes issue with the group's message and the way it's delivering it.
CEF says Protect Portland Children is a shadow group run by atheists who seek to dismantle Christian outreach. The group said its methods are above reproach.
"Children are easy to manipulate, we all know that," said CEF's vice president Moises Esteves. "We don't use any of the schemes and high-pressure tactics that we're accused of. Nothing could be further from the truth."
Esteves' group decided to hold its annual summer mission program in Portland because of the area's irreligious leanings.
Trying to reach young people in Oregon presents the group with two strongly secular demographics.
Gallup polls in 2008 and 2012 have consistently indicated that Oregon is among the least religious states in the country, with one of the fewest populations identifying themselves as "very religious."
Furthermore, focusing on young people opens the group up to an increasingly irreligious demographic. Millennials, or those born in or after the early 1980s, are the least religious generation in U.S. history, according to Pew Research.
CEF has encountered controversy before.
It won a 2001 U.S. Supreme Court case that decided they could hold chapter meetings on school grounds.
The organization was also the subject of a critical book that asserts the group advances a fundamentalist agenda and uses public spaces like schools to make children believe such views are endorsed by authority figures.
In schools, the group obtains permission slips to speak with children, but it is not required to do so in public spaces.
CEF spent last week training its volunteers, Esteves said, and will span out through the area this week trying to reach children.
"We do teach that children are sinners, but we're not nasty about it," Esteves said. "If we were nasty about it, the kids wouldn't come back." He said that they don't try to coerce the children, as "coercion leads to false conversion."
At a park on Monday, the group laid out a tarp for children and chairs for their parents. A pair of volunteers led about 12 kids through Bible verses and songs that praised a Christian god.
"My heart was dark with sin," they sang, "until the savior came in."
Mia Marceau, a mother of two in the Portland suburb of Vancouver, Washington, said she was intrigued when the group approached her apartment complex pool last week. She said she, too, believes in Jesus Christ.
Within a few hours, however, she didn't like what the group was telling her 8-year-old son and his friends: They were headed to hell, needed to convert their friends and were duty-bound to raise money for the organization.
"I raised a free thinker," she said. "He didn't buy in. All of a sudden, he's having arguments with his friends over salvation."
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/child-evangelism-fellowship-portland
Jehovahs Witness grandparents ordered to keep faith to themselves
ReplyDeleteMother argues that 4-year-old can decide on religious practices when she gets older
By Jason Proctor, CBC News October 21, 2015
A pair of devout Jehovah's Witnesses have been ordered by a B.C. provincial court judge not to talk about religion in front of their four-year-old granddaughter.
The couple lost their bid for unsupervised access to the girl because they insisted on taking her to worship at their faith's Kingdom Hall despite the repeated objections of the child's mother.
The girl is identified only as A.W. and the grandparents as A.R. and B.R. in Judge Edna Ritchie's 12-page decision. And for now, they're on a short leash.
"There are many people with strongly held religious views that do not discuss those views in front of others, and specifically not in front of children," Ritchie wrote.
Unless A.R. and B.R. can satisfy the court that they can comply with the mother's wishes, Ritchie said, "their time with A.W. must be supervised and limited."
Religious rights vs. parental responsibility
The case pits the Family Law Act against the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
The Family Law Act states that only a guardian has parental responsibilities, including decisions about religious upbringing, and the mother, M.W., is sole guardian.
But A.R. and B.R. argued that forbidding them from expressing their faith to their grandchild would violate a charter right to practise their religion.
The grandparents want A.W. to experience their religion, while M.W. insists her daughter "can decide when she is older whether or not to participate in any religious practices."
The battle is the culmination of a saga that began when the child's biological dad, L.R., told his parents he had fathered a child three weeks after A.W. was born.
L.R. was "disfellowshipped" from the Jehovah's Witness faith, a type of religious excommunication. He testified that he has little contact with A.R. and B.R. He also pays no child support and has no parental responsibilities.
A.R. and B.R. were determined to have contact with their granddaughter, and the child's mother felt it important for them to be part of their lives. She previously allowed them unsupervised access.
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Poppa and Momma vs. Grandpa and Grandma
ReplyDeleteBut according to the decision, the relationship between the "well-meaning, determined grandmother" and M.W. has been strained from the outset.
M.W. also objected to the couple insisting the girl call them Poppa and Momma instead of Grandpa and Grandma. But by far the biggest disagreement arose over visits to the Kingdom Hall.
From the time A.W. was a baby, A.R. and B.R. took her to services; M.W. said she wasn't happy, but didn't object until December 2013.
She switched the timing of their visits, but then learned from her daughter the grandparents had taken A.W. to services the following spring; A.R. insisted the child "had begged to go to Kingdom Hall."
Visits were then limited to supervised access at M.W.'s home.
But even at that, M.W. was upset to find her daughter watching a Jehovah's Witness video on A.R.'s laptop. The grandmother insisted the child had pushed the play icon before she could stop her.
Mother knows best
The judge noted that when two or more parents with different religious views share parental responsibility the court will often support the child being exposed to each religion involved.
But because A.R. and B.R. are not guardians, the court was bound to respect the decision of the mother. For that same reason, Ritchie also found the charter argument didn't apply.
The couple cited another Supreme Court of Canada case involving a divorce in which a mother with custody had obtained an order forcing her Jehovah Witness ex-husband not to discuss religion with their children.
In that case, the top court ruled a custodial parent does not have a right to limit the other parent's ability to discuss religion unless the child's best interests were threatened.
In this case, Ritchie found it wasn't fair to place A.W. in a holy war between her mother and grandparents.
"I am concerned that the applicants' demonstrated inability to respect and comply with M.W's decisions on religion will continue to cause conflict," she wrote. "It is not in A.W.'s best interests to be exposed to that conflict."
Read the Ruling at:
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2473473-jehovah.html
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/jehovah-s-witness-grandparents-ordered-to-keep-faith-to-themselves-1.3282193
Colorado school district pushes Christian ‘purity’ training for 11-year-old girls to find future husbands
ReplyDeleteby David Edwards, Raw Story January 21, 2016
Parents in Colorado have complained that a school district used its email system to advertise a Christian event which uses Bible lessons to encourage girls as young as 11 to stay “pure” while looking for a husband.
Colorado blogger Anne Landman first reported that the Western Colorado Atheists and Freethinkers had been contacted by parents after Mesa Valley School District 51 sent out an email promotion for an event called “Wake Up Sleeping Beauty: Worship At His Feet.”
The flier includes the silhouette of a girl’s face with a Bible verse from Luke 7:38.
“As she stood behind him at his feet weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears. Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them and poured perfume on them,” the flier reads.
The program, which is put on by June Fellhauer’s Wake Up Ministries, promises that girls will want to change their Facebook status to “The One Who Worships At His Feet.”
A video posted to the Wake Up Sleeping Beauty Facebook page encourages fathers to “protect her purity.” The video shows a father watching over his daughter as she puts on makeup.
In promotional videos on the Wake Up Ministries website, Fellhauer warns girls about the “gag reflex” caused by kissing with your tongue.
“I think ‘Wake Up Sleeping Beauty’ is an amazing program,” one girl declares in the video. “Especially going through the time that I was, being cheated on. That was really hard for me but it also made me realize a lot that I needed to forgive him and he didn’t have the qualities I was looking for in a husband.”
But it was the imagery from the flier sent out by District 51 that parents found so disturbing.
“The idea of a woman or girl (‘she’) crying at a man’s feet, then using her hair to wash his feet, then kissing his feet, seems pretty demeaning to me,” one parent said. “Apparently the irony of this imagery used to promote an event which purports to strengthen or support girls/women is lost on all involved.”
A complaint from the parent was quickly dismissed by the school district.
“Having reviewed the flyer and KHB-R per your request, we do not find that the flyer promotes a religious organization or demeans a person or group on the basis of gender,” District 51 Communications Specialist Jeannie Smith told the parent in an email.
Watch the video below [it had been taken off-line at the time of this posting]
http://www.rawstory.com/2016/01/colorado-school-district-pushes-christian-purity-training-for-11-year-old-girls-to-find-future-husbands/
These Christian teachers want to bring Jesus into public schools
ReplyDeleteBy Emma Brown, The Washington Post March 12, 2016
Finn Laursen believes millions of American children are no longer learning right from wrong, in part because public schools have been stripped of religion. To repair that frayed moral fabric, Laursen and his colleagues want to bring the light of Jesus Christ into public school classrooms across the country — and they are training teachers to do just that.
The Christian Educators Association International, an organization that sees the nation’s public schools as “the largest single mission field in America,” aims to show Christian teachers how to live their faith — and evangelize in public schools — without running afoul of the Constitution’s prohibition on the government establishing or promoting any particular religion.
“We’re not talking about proselytizing. That would be illegal,” said Laursen, the group’s executive director. “But we’re saying you can do a lot of things. . . . It’s a mission field that you fish in differently.”
Not everyone agrees that it’s acceptable for teachers to “fish” in public schools, where government officials are not allowed to promote or endorse any particular faith.
The nation has been fighting over the role of religion in public education for more than a century, and in helping public school teachers understand — and push toward — the legal boundaries of expression, Laursen and his colleagues are wading into one of the most fraught issues in American life.
Some advocates say the organization urges teachers to invite Christianity into the classroom in ways that might be unconstitutional and that are bound to make some children — and their parents — uncomfortable.
“They appear to be encouraging teachers to cross the line,” said Daniel Mach of the American Civil Liberties Union, which fought the Christian Educators Association in a 2009 court case over Florida teachers’ religious expression at school. “Decisions about the religious upbringing of children should be left in the hands of parents and families, not public school officials.”
Others say that there would be outrage if teachers of any other faith were being encouraged to express their beliefs in the classroom, legally or otherwise — particularly at a time when anti-
Muslim sentiment is on the rise and some parents have complained that academic lessons about Islam can amount to religious indoctrination.
“What this really amounts to is a privileging of the majority,” said Katherine Stewart, a journalist whose questions about Christianity in her children’s public school led her to write a 2012 book, “The Good News Club,” about evangelical Christians’ efforts to reach students in school. “If a Wiccan, Muslim or Satanist public school teacher were to try to put their sacred texts on their desk . . . they would likely be shut down.”
Laursen said he believes teachers of every faith have — and deserve — the same constitutional protections as Christian teachers when it comes to expressing religion at school.
He and some other Christian educators say the culture in many public schools feels particularly hostile to Christianity compared with other religions, making it intimidating to admit a relationship with Jesus. And they say that by explaining the law in concrete terms, the Christian Educators Association has empowered them to express their faith with new boldness.
The organization is a nonprofit with broad goals that include supporting Christian teachers and “transforming public schools through God’s love and truth.” It is a professional association that serves as an alternative to traditional teachers unions, offering its approximately 6,000 members liability insurance and other benefits.
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Although the Christian Educators Association is small, it is at the center of a pending Supreme Court case that has the potential to substantially weaken public sector unions in more than two dozen states. The association is a plaintiff in the case, Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, which challenges the right of teachers unions to collect dues from nonmembers.
ReplyDeleteThe other plaintiffs are 10 individual teachers, eight of whom are members of the association; they argue that they should not be forced to support a union that uses their dues to promote policies — and politicians — with which they fundamentally disagree.
The association, founded in 1953, also publishes a journal, produces a podcast and organizes prayer groups. It began its training program six years ago, and since then hundreds of teachers across the country have participated.
During weekend-long seminars in hotel conference rooms, the group teaches teachers that they have a right to pray with colleagues during breaks or at lunchtime. They may lead before- and after-school religious clubs for students. They can honestly answer students’ questions about their beliefs, and they may even pray with students outside work hours.
Teachers are told it’s okay to keep a Bible on their desk and teach about it in class, so long as it fits within the curriculum. And they are urged to witness for Jesus by acting in a godly manner, in part so that others might be provoked to wonder — and ask — why they have so much kindness and compassion.
If bringing nonbelievers to Jesus can be compared to growing crops, then “the part that a teacher in public school can do is till the soil and plant the seed,” said Laursen, a former teacher, principal and superintendent. “Very often, they’re not personally involved in the harvest.”
Daniel Weekends
California high school math teacher Harlan Elrich said he was inspired by the training he attended several years ago. He sends out prayers and inspirational verses to an email list of like-minded colleagues, and sometimes they pray together in person.
He plays Christian music in his classroom before and after school and sometimes during tests, if students request it. He keeps a Bible on his desk.
When a student asked him recently about the meaning of life, Elrich felt free to answer, saying that “in my view, the meaning of life is a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.”
Elrich said he would be “thrilled” to lead a student to Jesus, but he is careful to stay within the bounds of the law and does not proselytize at school.
As he put it: “I’m not going to ask a student, ‘Do you want to become a Christian?’ unless we have had a full conversation about it and they have expressed it as a possibility.”
An elementary school teacher in rural Kentucky, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid drawing attention to his community, said that after attending a weekend training session, he started scheduling weekly meetings of a Fellowship of Christian Athletes club. Students gather in the school gym just before class begins — a time when they are normally socializing and eating breakfast.
Most weeks, at least 75 percent of the school’s students participate, listening and praying as guest speakers and other students offer prayer and testimony. “I feel overly blessed with how much I’m able to do with students as far as faith,” the teacher said.
The trainings are dubbed “Daniel Weekends” for the Old Testament figure who was saved by God after he was thrown into a lion’s den. Daniel was said never to have lost his faith despite decades of exile in Babylon, where he lived among nonbelievers.
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As the Christian Educators Association sees it, Christian teachers in public schools are “modern-day Daniels,” working in schools that are hostile to their faith.
ReplyDelete“God sent Daniel, He sent Jesus, He’s sending you and me to be the light of the world,” a presenter told about two dozen teachers last month at a Daniel Weekend in Louisville. “God has a plan, a good plan, for why he has planted you where you are.”
The association allowed a Washington Post reporter to observe the final half-day of the Louisville training, declining a request to attend the entire session amid concerns that a reporter’s presence would make teachers uncomfortable and less open. The Post also interviewed 10 teachers who have participated in Daniel Weekends; most spoke on the condition of anonymity, some out of fear of provoking backlash against their schools and others because they didn’t have supervisors’ permission to speak publicly.
Teachers are nominated to participate in Daniel Weekends by former participants, pastors and principals. They attend for free, with the association covering meals and lodging.
From Friday evening until Sunday afternoon, they discuss not only the ins and outs of the First Amendment, but also how to confront the challenges they face as Christian teachers. They talk about how to communicate more openly and how to build relationships with colleagues and students. They sing together, and they pray.
Victoria Tomasheski, a middle school teacher in suburban Cleveland who first attended a training in 2012, said the weekend was both personally and professionally rejuvenating. She said that she was grateful to learn about the First Amendment and that she follows the law earnestly.
She also hopes that living according to biblical principles creates a nurturing environment and sparks those around her to ask questions. “When they ask: ‘Why are you so positive? Why do you always find a silver lining?’ It’s, ‘To be honest with you, it’s because of my faith,’ ” she said.
A teacher in a suburban Kentucky school said the Daniel Weekend he attended several years ago helped him shed his grouchy disposition and recommit to treating his students with patience and love. “That weekend sort of took me back, made me think about why I got into teaching to begin with. I wanted to be a role model for kids,” he said.
As the weekend draws to a close, teachers create plans to transform their schools — and their students — with what they characterize as God’s love and truth.
In Louisville last month, teachers were at times emotional and tearful as they explained the weekend’s impact.
Some said they were newly committed to seeing their students as children made in the image of God, deserving of love and capable of greatness. Some said they took to heart the message to be positive — to “stop whining and start shining” for Jesus. Others said they were grateful to realize that they were not the only Christians wrestling with how to be true to their faith while working in a public school.
A music teacher said that she had realized how often she stopped herself from sharing her faith — unnecessarily. “I’m really limiting the way that the Lord can use me and my school,” she said. “I’m really excited to see what He is going to do now.”
Not religion-free zones
Charles C. Haynes, a First Amendment expert at the Newseum Institute’s Religious Freedom Center, gives the Christian Educators Association high marks for its efforts to help teachers understand the law and how it applies to their lives in the classroom.
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Many people believe that public schools should be religion-free zones, but that’s simply not the case, Haynes said. While the Constitution says that government cannot establish religion, it also says that the government cannot inhibit religious freedom — a provision that allows students — and to a lesser degree, teachers — to express their faith in school.
ReplyDelete“The First Amendment does not exclude religion from public schools,” said Haynes, who co-
authored guidelines on religious expression in schools that have been endorsed by dozens of groups from across the political and spiritual spectrum, including the Christian Educators Association. “It gives us the ground rules for how religion comes into public schools.”
As agents of the government, teachers cannot inculcate religion at school, so they cannot lead students in prayer during class. But they also are private citizens with rights to free speech — so they can, for example, pray with students at church on Sunday.
Mindy Heine, a Christian parent of three who co-founded a ministry for public school parents and teachers in a Minneapolis suburb, said she appreciates teachers who legally express their faith in school.
“It’s empowering because it’s helping kids understand the Constitution and our rights,” she said. And teachers are modeling authenticity, she said, “sending students a loud message that they, too, can be confident about what they believe.”
But parents sometimes feel differently, especially when they are in the minority.
Erika Estrada, a Catholic mother of two, said that evangelical Christianity seemed to permeate her son’s elementary school in Dallas. Many teachers and students attended the same local church, Estrada said, and it felt difficult to distinguish the church from the school, White Rock Elementary.
“There’s this very prevalent message that this is our school, and you’re simply a guest,” she said. She said her son — who attended White Rock from 2005 to 2012 — felt bullied because of his Catholicism, ostracized by classmates on the playground and sometimes by teachers in the classroom.
Estrada, whose daughter still attends White Rock, said she reported her concerns about her son’s experience at the time. The current principal has not received any complaints about religious expression since she arrived at the school in 2012, according to Tim Clark, a spokesman for the Richardson Independent School District.
“RISD is confident that the school is in compliance with laws and guidelines related to religious expression in a school setting,” Clark said.
Sharif El-Mekki, a Muslim principal of a Philadelphia charter school, said he believes that children can learn powerful lessons when they see that teachers of different faiths are able to treat all of their students with equity.
But he said that teachers who are open about their faith also must be ultra-sensitive to ensuring that all students feel included. El-Mekki, who goes to the same place of worship as some of his students, said he thinks often about how to make sure that other students don’t feel slighted.
“How do I make sure that my Christian student, my atheist student, feels respected and honored?” he said. “At the end of the day, that’s my North Star.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/these-christian-teachers-want-to-bring-jesus-into-public-schools--legally/2016/03/12/bfd95986-dfd3-11e5-8d98-4b3d9215ade1_story.html
Gideons versus Godless
ReplyDeleteAbbotsford public schools criticized for distributing bibles
'It feels like I've gone back to 1942 ... saying no, you can't be handing out bibles in public schools'
By Karin Larsen, CBC News March 31, 2016
Abbotsford mother Tara MacRae was a little miffed when both her son and daughter came home from elementary school with a brochure for a Christian basketball program — Athletes in Action — that "encourages players to discover a relationship with Jesus Christ," according to its website.
"I didn't think it was appropriate because they have bible study as part of the program," said MacRae ."Distributing religious materials in the public school system is not appropriate and I think it contravenes our school act."
Free bibles
Last year the Abbotsford school district also sent home a consent form offering a free Gideons bible to all Grade 5 students. As a result, 112 bibles where distributed in Abbotsford public schools.
MacRae says schools in Abbotsford seem out of step with the rest of the province.
"We moved here in July from Coquitlam," she said. "I grew up in Vancouver. I'm 39 now and we certainly didn't get handed out bibles. And prayers had stopped long before I entered school. So it feels like I've gone back to 1942. Coming to this district where I have to say, 'no you can't be handing out bibles in our public school system.' It's crazy."
The B.C. Humanist Association believes it's also unconstitutional, not to mention unfair.
"We think schools shouldn't be a venue for religious groups to proselytize to children," said Ian Bushfield, executive director of the BCHA. "We'd rather see objective and equal discussion of religion."
Godless Comics
The BCHA has sent a letter to Abbotsford school superintendent Kevin Godden asking the district stop distributing religious materials.
Bushfield says if Gideons is allowed to distribute material through the Abbotsford school system, his organization should be granted equal access to hand out a publication called Godless Comics.
"The comics provide arguments for why some people don't believe in God," stated Bushfield.
Abbotsford school district communication manager Dave Stephen told CBC News usually he or the superintendent decides what material is handed out in schools. Stephen says the letter from the BCHA "will be reviewed in due course by our district administration."
"To be clear the only [religious group] who has ever approached the district is Gideons...and they're the only one we've ever engaged with at this level. So it's been, I guess, a legacy arrangement going on for some years in this district."
"Anybody has the ability to submit materials for distribution," said Stephen. "But now we're going to review the whole question so I'm not sure where we'll land."
'They didn't answer my question'
MacRae said she wrote both the Minster of Education and the Abbotsford school district with her concerns. Only the district sent a reply, advising that they would no longer be sending paper material home with students.
"They didn't answer my question," she said. "The didn't actually respond to whether they agreed or disagreed that distributing religious materials was appropriate."
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/gideons-versus-godless-abbotsford-public-schools-criticized-for-distributing-bibles-1.3514276
As the Religious Right Forces the Gospel Into Public Schools, Some Parents Are Opting to Homeschool
ReplyDeleteAfter their kids experienced “religious bullying,” these parents felt they had no choice but to take their kids out of public school.
By Katherine Stewart, The Nation MAY 3, 2016
One Friday afternoon, Betty Ogletree’s daughter RaMae came home in tears. “I can’t do this anymore,” RaMae cried, as Ogletree remembers it. RaMae was a straight-A fourth grader at Watauga Elementary School, a public K-5 in the bucolic town of Abingdon in southwest Virginia. But in a community where most families trumpeted their conservative Christianity, she was marked as an outsider for her lack of belief in the Gospel of Jesus. “Can you please homeschool me?” her mother recalls her pleading.
The bullying started in first grade, when Ogletree’s daughter’s classmates started pressuring her to attend a Good News Club, an after-school Bible class intended to indoctrinate young children in a conservative form of evangelical Christianity. Until 2001, Good News Clubs were generally excluded from public schools out of concern that their presence would violate the constitutional separation of church and state. But a Supreme Court ruling that year, Good News Club v. Milford Central School, deemed their presence in public schools legal.
According to Ogletree, the club’s appearance at her daughter’s public elementary school had an immediate impact. Most of the girls RaMae considered her friends signed up for the Good News Club on Tuesday afternoons. Lunchtime conversations quickly started to revolve around God and Jesus. RaMae, who had been raised with a sense of skepticism about conservative religious doctrine, made an effort to stand up for her own beliefs, and she resisted her friends’ repeated efforts to recruit her to the club. One day, however, the girls decided on an aggressive new tactic. They took away RaMae’s juice and told her they wouldn’t give it back until she sang a song about Jesus.
“This is the day my child came home and collapsed in a pile of tears on my couch,” Ogletree says. “I said, ‘No more!’ I started making phone calls and plans.’”
First, Ogletree complained to the administration. But she felt they sided with the children attending the club. “It figures,” she says ruefully. “At the school entryway there’s a large sign that spells it out, ‘In God We Trust.’”
So Ogletree made the decision to homeschool. “While some tend to see religious bullying as a ‘right,’ it is at the heart [the same as] every other kind of bullying—mean, cruel, and without forethought,” Ogletree says. “There are children committing suicide all over the US because of bullying. I refuse to let my child become a statistic.”
“I could have brought in the ACLU,” Ogletree adds, explaining why she didn’t press the administration harder on the issue. “But in this area it would have caused a shit storm and I didn’t want to put my family through that.”
There is an idea in our culture, planted and carefully tended by culture warriors on the right, that America’s public schools are godless. And most people have the impression that homeschooling is mainly for religious fundamentalists and other extremists who want to shield their children from the perceived secularism of public education. But Ogletree and her family are part of a small but growing group that is moving in the exact opposite direction. Dismayed with the overt religiosity and faith-based pressure they encounter in their public schools, they are opting to homeschool. And they are anything but extremists.
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According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), 3.4 percent of children between the ages of 5 and 17 are educated at home—or approximately 1.7 million children. The NCES cites religion as a motivator in approximately 65 percent of those families. Other estimates are even higher. In a 2006-2007 survey by the US Department of Education, 83 percent of homeschooling parents cited a desire to provide religious and moral instruction.
ReplyDeleteIt is difficult to estimate the numbers of families homeschooling for the opposite reason—because of religious intrusion into their public schools. According to Ryan Stollar, Executive Director of Homeschool Alumni Reaching Out, an educational nonprofit providing support to homeschooling families, this segment of the homeschooling population has been sorely neglected. “Conservative Christians dominate homeschooling,” he says, “and they intentionally exclude non-Christians from state organizations and local co-ops. So researchers have great difficulty reaching them through the normal networks.”
* * *
Among the many factors that came together in making the Ogletrees’ experience in Virginia possible, the most important by far was a transformation in the judicial landscape originating in the United States Supreme Court. While the media concentrated on political campaigns, the religious right worked to advance its agenda through the courts. By the start of the 21st century, their efforts had begun to pay off.
Clarence Thomas’s majority opinion on the 2001 Good News Club case opened the door to a revision of the judicial theory governing what’s known as church-planting in public schools—that is, turning public school facilities over to churches for nominal rent or no rent at all. Legal advocacy groups promptly marched through that door. Exploiting the Court’s decision, they pushed cases through the lower courts that further undermined Establishment Clause concerns that had previously impeded efforts to plant churches in public schools. As a consequence, there is now a growing network of churches operating inside public schools facilities, effectively subsidized by the taxpayer. In some communities, nearly every public elementary, middle and high school is turned into a church on Sundays.
For parents such as April, a 31-year-old mother of two living in Springfield, Missouri, the appearance of an evangelical church inside her child’s public school represented an unconstitutional entanglement between church and school. (April does not feel comfortable using her real name, as she still lives in the community.)
Not long after the Red Tree Church started holding Sunday services at April’s child’s public school, the Willard Orchard Hills Elementary School, pamphlets advertising the church started coming home with the kids on a weekly basis. According to April, the church set up promotional tables at meet-the-teacher nights and during school fairs. At these events, church staff invited parents to Sunday services and encouraged kids to join the youth ministry. The church also put up notices advertising church services on the school’s digital board.
“This is a publicly funded school, and here they are sending home these religious materials,” says April. “It just seemed to inappropriate! How is it right that the taxpayer is paying for the building, the water, the electricity, and their publicity, and sending information about the church home with my kid?”
Even worse, April says, the administration seemed to sanction the church’s proselytizing activities. “At one point, the superintendent sent around an e-mail asking everyone to pray for a particular child,” April recalls. “When you as the superintendent are sending out e-mails saying ‘God bless’ and things of that nature, you are indicating to people who don’t share your religious perspective that they are second-class citizens.”
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When asked for comment Willard Orchard Hills Superintendent Kent Medlin asserted that “Red Tree has been a respectful and welcome group for our district,” noting that written materials offered to students from outside groups are “principal-approved.” But April says the entanglement between church and school seemed disrespectful of members of the community who are members of minority faiths.
ReplyDelete“I identify as a Christian,” April notes. “But this is a total disregard for the separation of church and state.”
* * *
Public school teachers and administrators have a right to their religion. But students have rights too, and one thing public-school students have is a right to an education free of religious coercion from representatives of the state. Teachers have a duty to deliver that.
Unfortunately, not all teachers are cognizant and respectful of this duty. That was the issue that persuaded Sarah Small, a mother of three from central Kansas, to homeschool. Small worked as an educator for children with disabilities and was employed by the school district. She had long observed a pervasive atmosphere of religious favoritism—according to her, several teachers seemed friendlier and more sympathetic toward the pupils in their classrooms who attended church.
But Small had always avoided conflict with her coworkers, and was especially fearful of speaking out about religious matters. “I didn’t want teachers to see me as a troublemaker or an outsider and refuse to work with me,” she says. “In fact,” she adds, “I was afraid that if I made the wrong people mad I could be fired.”
One especially egregious offender, in her mind, was a third-grade teacher who was also a Sunday-school teacher. “Half of her class was with her at church on weekends,” Small says. “I saw blatant favoritism of those kids. One day, I saw her give a child who had just been baptized a gift card that said, ‘Happy Baptism.’ She always seemed to have higher patience levels for kids who were members of her church. She seemed to give them more academic attention, and a greater number of chances at corrections when they made mistakes.”
Small recalls the example of two students in her class who had similar learning disabilities; Small was working with both, and was able to observe the teachers’ interactions with them up close. “The kid who was not attending church was often made to sit in an isolated place, separated from the rest of the students, and was sometimes treated harshly,” she says, “while the other one, who attended church, got to sit with the other students. If he didn’t finish his work on time, she would give him extra time.”
Small says this woman was a very good teacher. “But in this community, religion is so pervasive, and we are an openly atheist family. I know that as my son progressed at the school, that information would come out. My son is a high-energy kid, and I worried that she or others might use that as an excuse to label him ‘different’ or ‘a troublemaker’ as a way of punishing him for being a religious nonconformist.”
Like so many other parents, Small felt she had nowhere to turn to voice her concerns. “My hands were completely tied,” Small says. “I couldn’t complain because of my job. So when we decided to homeschool, I just told the administration that we think this is best for our family and left it at that. I have familial ties to the school and the area, so we just kept it very simple.”
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These days instead of assisting students with disabilities Small instructs her son from homeschooling curricula in math, reading, science and other topics. “I miss my job,” she says. “And income-wise, it was definitely an adjustment for our family. But I was happy to leave an atmosphere where religion was always going to be an issue.”
ReplyDelete* * *
Many parents who wish to homeschool must fulfill certain requirements, which vary dramatically by state. Thirty-six states require that parents teach certain subjects. While homeschooled students are largely exempt from assessment of their progress, those parents who wish to offer an education commensurate with that of the public school quickly find that home instruction can be as absorbing and time-consuming as any job.
“A lot of us ended up homeschooling as a worst-case scenario,” says Amy Cogswell, a mother from the suburb in central Ohio. “I wasn’t one of those people who had a baby and thought homeschooling would be sweet and wonderful. We felt like we were pushed into it because there wasn’t another option for us.”
It was the religious bullying that did it. Cogswell’s daughter’s troubles began in the second grade when a classmate told her she was going to hell. “At first my daughter brushed it off, but the bullying got worse,” says Cogswell. “Other kids would taunt her too. One day in the lunchroom, all the kids went around the table saying, ‘The Bible is real.’ My daughter defended herself saying, ‘It’s just a book of made-up stories!’ But she said the way the kids argued with her after that made her feel like they were ganging up on her.”
Things came to a head when one girl’s bullying became more aggressive. Previously, this girl had cornered Cogswell’s daughter and told her she was going to hell for nonbelief. But one day, she choked her.
According to Cogswell, the school responded to the choking incident by telling her that her daughter was “overly sensitive.” Cogswell and her family decided at that point to leave the school system. “I didn’t believe the school could guarantee my daughter’s safety. I did look into private school, but the ones around here cost at least $15,000 per year.” She says they couldn’t afford that.
“I could have stayed and fought for my daughter’s rights,” she concedes. “But I was vastly outnumbered by religious people, and honestly it wasn’t a fight I wanted to fight. It could have turned into an expensive, lengthy legal drama. So, given the options, homeschooling felt like the best choice.”
Some days, Cogswell blames herself. “It made me feel like it was my fault, because I chose to raise my daughter in a way that is not socially accepted around here,” she says. “Maybe it would have been easier if I had kept my own doubts about God to myself and just shut up and took her to church, like most of the other people around here do with their kids. But I wasn’t willing to make that concession and live in a way that didn’t reflect what I really believe. And,” she adds grimly, “I felt like my daughter was paying the price for that.”
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How did the present level of religious involvement in public schools happen in a country whose Constitution is thought to guarantee equality of all, regardless of religious belief? Much of it is traceable to the unheralded success of religious advocacy groups on the religious right, working with what was, prior to Justice Scalia’s death, a majority on the Supreme Court that tended to agree with them on many key issues. Though the recent advances in same-sex marriage rights have led many observers to declare that the culture war has ended with victory on the left, in fact the religious right has benefitted from a string of judicial successes in recent decades that have enabled religious groups to enter the public schools under the specious title of “religious liberty.”
ReplyDeleteWhile a small number of school administrators welcome the new involvement of religion in public schools, many do not. School administrators are generally preoccupied with issues of budget, management, and curriculum, and are not eager to moderate the type of religious battles that erupt as a result of religious involvement in a diverse school community. Officials at the schools of Betty Ogletree, Sarah Small, and Amy Cogswell did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
While homeschooling families often connect with one another to offer their children opportunities for socialization and group learning, nonreligious homeschoolers often feel shut out. The religious homeschooling movement often encourages Christian homeschool groups to shun nonbelievers and members of non-Christian faiths. As Stollar points out, “They intentionally create walls to keep unbelievers out.”
A widely hailed leader of the Christian homeschooling movement, Gregg Harris, urged homeschooling groups to adopt statements of faith. “A disagreement over policy or doctrine or an aggressive intruder can mean a lot of problems for the group,” he wrote. “A statement of faith, which should be affirmed by any potential group leader, ought to be broad enough to include Christians who disagree on nonessential matters (such as eschatology), but narrow enough to exclude people from a non-evangelical framework or who hold abhorrent opinions.”
Micki Carr, a Georgia mother who decided to homeschool, in part because of a perceived bias in her kids’ public school, says that when she attends state homeschooling conventions, only a tiny number of the informational booths are nonsectarian. The overwhelming majority—“perhaps 95 percent,” she says—are geared toward evangelical Christian families.
“The hardest part of homeschooling is finding secular curriculum materials to teach science, as opposed to creationism,” she says. “That goes with history as well. It’s been rewritten. Even the math books include examples that are based on the Bible.”
Carr says that the local homeschool group, the Central Savannah River Area Home Education Association, used to make you sign a statement of faith. “Now it’s a statement of agreement that if you don’t agree with what they’re doing, you have to agree not to make a fuss,” she says. “We can leave the public school that has become too religious, but secular resources on this side are still sparse in comparison.”
Betty Ogletree has homeschooled long enough now to look back on the experience with the bemusement of distance. “It’s pretty weird to be living in the middle of the Bible Belt where most people think the public schools have no religion,” she says. “But here we are homeschooling because there’s too much. The irony is not lost on me!”
http://www.thenation.com/article/as-the-religious-right-forces-its-gospel-into-public-schools-some-secular-parents-are-opting-to-homeschool/
The Radical Theology That Could Make Religious Freedom a Thing of the Past
ReplyDeleteEven devout Christians should fear these influential leaders' refusal to separate church and state.
by David R. Brockman THE TEXAS OBSERVER June 2, 2016
Though it’s seldom mentioned by name, it’s one of the major forces in Texas politics today: dominion theology, or dominionism. What began as a fringe evangelical sect in the 1970s has seen its influence mushroom — so much so that sociologist Sara Diamond has called dominionism “the central unifying ideology for the Christian Right.” (Italics hers.) That’s especially true here in Texas, where dominionist beliefs have, over the last decade, become part and parcel of right-wing politics at the highest levels of government.
So, what is it? Dominionism fundamentally opposes America’s venerable tradition of church-state separation — in fact, dominionists deny the Founders ever intended that separation in the first place. According to Frederick Clarkson, senior fellow for religious liberty at the non-profit social justice think tank Political Research Associates, dominionists believe that Christians “have a biblical mandate to control all earthly institutions — including government — until the second coming of Jesus.” And that should worry all Texans — Christians and non-Christians alike.
Dominionism comes in “soft” and “hard” varieties. “Hard” dominionism (sometimes called Christian Reconstructionism), as Clarkson describes it, explicitly seeks to replace secular government, and the U.S. Constitution, with a system based on Old Testament law.
The father of hard dominionism, the late Presbyterian theologian R.J. Rushdoony, called for his followers to “take back government … and put it in the hands of Christians.”
Rushdoony’s legacy has been carried on by his son-in-law, Tyler-based economist Gary North, an unapologetic theocrat who in 1982 called for Christians to “get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political, and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God.” (North, founder of the Institute for Christian Economics, did not respond to my request for comment.)
Mainstream Texas political figures don’t go quite that far. Instead they trade in “soft” dominionism. While soft dominionists do not advocate replacing the Constitution with biblical law, they do believe that Christians need to regain the control over political and cultural institutions that they (supposedly) lost after the Founding period.
Top Texas political figures have had links to dominionism for years. In 2011, the Observer covered then-Governor Rick Perry’s ties to a branch of the movement, the New Apostolic Reformation. Since then, the relationship between dominionism and right-wing politics has become even cozier.
Case in point: Ted Cruz. Although Cruz is too politically savvy to openly endorse dominionism, key figures on his team are explicit dominionists.
The most important may be his father, evangelist Rafael Cruz, a frequent surrogate for Cruz on the political stage.
Cruz père espouses Seven Mountains Dominionism, which holds that Christians must take control of seven “mountains,” or areas of life: family, religion, education, media, entertainment, business and government. Speaking at the Texas GOP Convention in Dallas in May, Rafael Cruz claimed that God inspired the Founders to produce the Constitution, and declared that “biblical values” have made America the greatest country on earth. He encouraged Christian pastors to run for public office at every level, and called upon all Christians to exercise their “sacred responsibility” to vote for candidates who uphold biblical values.
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As for what Thomas Jefferson famously called Americas “wall of separation between Church & State,” Cruz claimed in a 2016 sermon that it was meant to be a “one-way wall” — preventing government from interfering in religion but allowing the Church to exercise dominion over government. (I have to wonder whether a “one-way wall” is really a wall at all.…)
ReplyDeleteAnother Seven Mountains Dominionist active in Cruz’s failed presidential bid was David Barton, who managed one of Cruz’s super PACs. On a 2011 radio program Barton said that Christians need to “be able to influence and control” the “mountains” in order to “establish God’s kingdom.” An amateur historian, outspoken Christian Americanist, and long-time Texas GOP activist, Barton runs WallBuilders, an Aledo group that seeks to “exert a direct and positive influence in government” and to assist public officials in developing “policies which reflect Biblical values.” (Barton also played a key role in incorporating Christian Americanism into the Texas curriculum standards.)
Perhaps the most powerful dominionist in Texas politics is Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick. In a 2012 sermon and again at the 2015 Texas Tribune Festival, he said that the United States was founded on the Bible. Patrick has also made it clear he believes the Bible should determine public policy. In 2014, Patrick said that elected officials must look to Scripture when they make policy, “because every problem we have in America has a solution in the Bible.” (Where the Bible addresses problems like greenhouse gas emissions or cybersecurity, I’m at a loss to explain, even with 20 years of biblical study behind me.) His call for a “biblically-based” policy mindset “doesn’t mean we want a theocracy,” he insisted. “But it does mean we can’t walk away from what we believe.” For Patrick, not “walking away” seems to mean basing policy on his own religious beliefs — as he showed when he opposed same-sex marriage on biblical grounds. (Patrick also did not respond to my request for comment.)
Another dominionist active in Texas politics is conservative firebrand-slash-medical-doctor Steven Hotze. Hotze is linked to Gary DeMar, a dominionist writer and lecturer. DeMar has called for the United States to be governed by Old Testament law, including instituting the death penalty for gay/lesbian sex. As recently as 2013, Hotze was an officer of DeMar’s dominionist think tank American Vision; its mission is “to Restore America to its Biblical Foundation.”
Hotze also heads the influential (and hate-group certified) Conservative Republicans of Texas (CRT). In a promotional video, Hotze explains that CRT “is committed to electing Republicans” who will “defend the constitutional liberties that arose from the Christian heritage of our Founding Fathers.” (Hotze did not respond to my requests for comment.)
In short, dominionism has risen from an obscure fringe movement to the highest reaches of government here in Texas. No doubt Rushdoony would be pleased. The rest of us, however, have good reason to be troubled.
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The dominionist goal of having Christianity shape law and policy amounts to the very governmental establishment of religion that the First Amendment explicitly prohibits. It would also appear to violate the Texas Bill of Rights, which states that “no preference shall ever be given by law to any religious society or mode of worship.”
ReplyDeleteOf course, dominionists insist that none of this matters, because the Founders intended to create a “Christian nation.”
Even if some of the Founders did mean for Christianity to be normative for law and policy, the question today is: Which Christianity? Christians disagree sharply on a whole host of issues, and dominionists simply don’t speak for many Texas Christians. For example, Hotze’s CRT supports capital punishment and wants to eliminate entitlement programs, and would deny marriage to same-sex couples, while Patrick would deny Texans reproductive choice and transgender people access to appropriate public restrooms. Those positions directly oppose the gospel as many Christians, myself included, understand it. And in seeking to make law and policy conform to the Bible, dominionists don’t speak for the growing number of non-Christians and religious “nones” — those who are religiously unaffiliated, including atheists and agnostics.
To be clear, I’m not saying that religion has no place in the public square. Far from it: religious persons have just as much right as anyone else to advocate laws and policies that line up with their beliefs and values. Government officials, however, are in a different position. No, they don’t have to “walk away from what they believe,” as Patrick puts it. Their religious beliefs can inform their personal morality in office — don’t lie, don’t steal, and so on — and give them comfort and hope or motivate them to serve others. But they can’t make policy based on those beliefs. Government officials have a duty to uphold the Constitution, not to enact their personal religious convictions. They are obliged to serve all of the people, not just members of the officials’ own religious community.
Ironically, for all their talk about what those Founders intended, it seems that dominionists have failed to heed the wisdom of two of the most prominent, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Madison warned that when government prefers one religion over others, religion suffers. A government that can make Christianity the official religion, he observed, can just as easily prefer one form of Christianity over others — for instance, Catholicism over evangelicalism.
For his part, Jefferson appealed to history. Whenever government officials “have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible” (my emphasis), he wrote, they have ended up creating “false religions.”
Christians who seek political domination would do well to heed those wise words.
David R. Brockman, Ph.D., a religious studies scholar and Christian theologian, is an adjunct lecturer in religion at Texas Christian University. He is the author of Dialectical Democracy through Christian Thought: Individualism, Relationalism, and American Politics.
https://www.texasobserver.org/dominion-theology/
ReplyDeleteTAKING AIM AT RELIGION ITSELF, APOSTLES PRIME NETWORKS FOR REAL-WORLD VIOLENCE
BY FREDERICK CLARKSON, Religion Dispatches FEBRUARY 27, 2024
It is more than paradoxical that an ostensibly Christian university leader would say, “We are here to put a knife to the throat of religion.” But that’s what Apostle Greg Hood, the founder of Kingdom University in Franklin, Tennessee believes so heartily he emblazoned it on a KU t-shirt.
This is not a hoax. In fact, the bloody tee epitomizes the paradoxes of the New Apostolic Reformation—a movement that says it means to bust out of the “demonic prison” of religion, knives out. Religion is, of course, one of the seven mountains of culture that NAR seeks to conquer to achieve Christian dominion (the other six being government, family, education, business, media, and arts & entertainment). The rhetoric they employ when discussing how to do it can be violent, if not always t-shirt worthy. But understanding the paradox of religion killing religion helps us understand this campaign for a paradigmatic change in the direction of American and world Christianity.
There’s a certain tension in the NAR, between the metaphorical and the physical; the hyperbolic and the actual. But most often, these are not mutually exclusive.
They are unambiguous about seeking to remove “demonic obstacles” to the re-emergence of what, in their view, is the church as intended by Jesus. They call this first century-style church “the Ekklesia”—which is Greek for church. The demonic infrastructure impeding God’s intentions for the Ekklesia includes religious institutions; church offices and leaders; denominations; and, not only denominational doctrines, but even traditional prayers. (And, of course, everyone who doesn’t share their religious and political views.)
“Religion when pure is very powerful,” writes Apostle Chuck Pierce in his introduction to the late C. Peter Wagner’s 2005 book, Freedom from the Religious Spirit: Understanding How Deceptive Religious Forces Try to Destroy God’s Plan and Purpose for His Church. “However,” he adds, “religion is also defined as an organized system of doctrine with an approved pattern of behavior.”
Pierce, who’s on the faculty of Kingdom University (the new apostolic school that features the bloody t-shirt) continues, “Demons of doctrine rob individuals of their freedom to worship a holy God in purity.” And they do this, he says, “by instituting rules and regulations for their worship.”
Pierce, like other apostolic leaders, says he communicates directly with God and issues prophecies on God’s behalf. “I have always had to maneuver past spirits of religion that would resist this gift of God,” he complains. “Demons hate revelation from God. They resist those gifts… that bring revelatory freedom… They attempt to stone the revelation of apostles and prophets because this revealed word establishes God’s foundation in the Church for this age.”
These prominent apostles aren’t merely talking about ossified institutions, feckless leaders, stale ideas, empty rituals, or guardians of the status quo in various Christian denominations. And while the theological details can be fluid to say the least, they all involve some version of the Ekklesia taking political power or leading an End Times army (or both) along with a heavenly host of angels.
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There is no Plan B
ReplyDeleteNevertheless, it was probably all but inevitable that these revolutionaries would themselves seek to institutionalize. In fact, KU isn’t the first to do so. Other movement-affiliated schools to follow this path include Wagner University (named for founder C. Peter Wagner) and Apostle Bill Johnson’s Bethel School for Supernatural Ministry, both in California; Charis Bible College in Colorado (see RD coverage here and here); and Apostle Randy Clark’s ministry in Pennsylvania, which has long sponsored several institutions of higher learning, including the Global Awakening Theological Seminary.
But the trend is epitomized by KU whose program claims to feature weekend classes held mostly via streaming video, on about 20 “campuses” at apostolic centers in 10 states and four countries. US campuses include Tony Kemp Ministries in Quincy, Illinois; Freedom & Fire Church in Winslow, Indiana, and King’s Gate Worship Center in Tupelo, Mississippi.
The movement that so often casts traditional forms of seminary and higher education as demonic is, paradoxically, creating its own system of higher education, religious training, and credentialing.
That may be why Apostle Dutch Sheets in a recently removed video seeks to assure prospective students that KU is no traditional seminary:
“It’s not so much about theology and training in a Bible school setting, it’s more of the instruction—hands on, live, what is God saying to the Church today? And how do we prepare ourselves for what he is about to do?”
For two decades Sheets and Pierce have led the development of the politics of the Ekklesia in each state. Their success may be measured in part by the supernaturally-charged politics of the NAR that’s powered many recent electoral campaigns, most prominently those of Donald Trump, but also the 2022 GOP gubernatorial candidacies of state Sen. Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania and State Sen. Brian Dahle in California.
“When we are born again,” says Sheets, in a 2021 “Daily Prayer with Dutch” video, “we are no longer simply humans… we are a new race of supernatural beings called Christians.” NAR is about the organization of this supernatural race into the Ekklesia, whose purpose he says is “managing and governing the earth.”
In fairness, Sheets also tells viewers: “obviously we are not to expand the Christian faith or God’s rule by physical force or domination, as some religions do. We are to invade, quote-unquote, our culture, workplace, city, nation, etcetera, with the spiritual might of God’s kingdom.”
But Sheets’ vision is not always so restrained. He often suggests that the final battle to bring in the Kingdom is either already underway or about to break out—and that the Ekklesia will be in it to win it. For example, in a June 2022 “Daily Prayer” video titled “Taking territory for Christ,” Sheets explains that what Jesus wants, “[he] will do through us. We are Plan A. And there is no Plan B.” He ticks off words from scripture that, he says, apply to Plan A: fight, warfare, endurance, victory, overcomer, conqueror, power, and authority.
Trampled under the feet of the Ekklesia
At a June 2023 conference led by Apostle Tim Sheets (brother of Dutch), which took place at the Oasis Church in Ohio, Hood announced that he’d had a dream in which God said to “Deploy the Ekklesia.”
In a conference recording Hood makes the ahistorical claim that pastors led the American Revolution against “the Crown that was oppressing the nation.” He then claims:
“I believe we are in that day again. I believe we are in a day in which God is raising up… apostolic leaders that are leading an apostolic company into a new kind of revolution for this nation.”
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He goes on to float a conspiracy theory about how the criminal indictments against Donald Trump are “not about things that he’s done wrong,” but the result of an unnamed “they” who are trying to keep him out of the presidential race. Hood then claims (this was prior to Trump’s January 6 indictment), that “they” want to convict him of “treason” and “execute him to make a point to anybody else that comes up and stands in their way.” It should be noted that, while it may be the most accurate word to describe his actions, Trump was not charged with treason, and death is not a punishment for the crimes for which he stands accused.
ReplyDeleteSome NAR apostles and prophets, including Hood and the brothers Sheets, say that God speaks to them through dreams. In Hood’s dream, he says, he was with several apostles in a “command center” at the Oasis Church. The date was January 7, 2020, suggesting that what was occurring was a continuation of what got started on the 6th. Hood describes seeing keys like what the president of the United States would need to unlock the nuclear football. “The church” he says, “is getting ready to release a powerful force… that the enemy will not be able to withstand.”
“We’re not dealing here with politics… or bad presidents,” he declares. “We’re dealing with demonic strongholds that are controlling people, that are using people to keep their agenda.”
Switching back to his dream in the “command center,” Hood recounts:
“[Apostle Jane Hamon, daughter-in-law of Bill Hamon] was releasing armed drones towards Washington DC. Each of these drones had targets they were locked on and I knew that most of the targets were political targets, unrighteous rulers, people that had partnered with the Enemy and his agenda; people within the system that had compromised and that so had sold America out; these were being eliminated, removed from their offices and their voices were rendered helpless.”
He nevertheless claims “we’re not attacking people”—even as he employs military metaphors and scenarios in which people would inevitably be killed in real life, including by nuclear weapons and drone strikes.
“Wicked things… are happening in our nation,” he says, because “wicked people are ruling at the moment.”
Back in the dream, Dutch Sheets was wearing a general’s uniform with the name “Dutch Patton”—which Hood took to mean General George Patton, who during WWII famously carried an ivory-handled Colt .45 engraved with his initials, GSP. Hood incorrectly claims it was pearl handled and engraved with “Isaiah 45”—like the one carried by General Dutch in the dream. (Isaiah 45 introduces the story of the Persian King Cyrus, who Apostle Lance Wallnau famously linked to Donald Trump as part of an effort to justify his candidacy to evangelical Christians.)
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Hood goes on to say that the Ekklesia is about to go out on the “battlefield” to “reclaim geography that belongs to God… to take back those nations that have been under the tutelage and oppression of demonic forces.”
ReplyDeleteAt the end of the dream, “number 45” (he never refers to Trump by name) comes to the command center and gives a “medal of freedom” to Sheets—“knowing of what had been done, that what had been accomplished was from the efforts of both.”
This is interesting in light of the actual role of the Sheets brothers in facilitating the events of January 6th.
Hood offers a slick mix of historical revisionism and biblical and dream interpretation to envision the role of the Ekklesia. He casts apostles as they appeared in his dream as central figures in history; and the members of the church as heroic martyrs in the conflict to come. He urges them not to fear death when they stand on the ramparts where God has assigned them. “Only you will behold and see the reward of the wicked. The reward of the wicked is slaughter. It is being trampled under the feet of the Ekklesia.”
The Ekklesia, of course, is to ascend and conquer the 7 mountains of culture. One who epitomizes what’s possible is Tom Parker the elected Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court who grabbed headlines with his theocratic concurring opinion in a case where the court ruled that frozen embryos are people. Parker has been involved with NAR for years, and will no doubt serve as a role model for future generations.
I believe that children are our future
Even as top apostles prime the pump for possible real-world violence, and encourage the Ekklesia to envision themselves as an End Times army, they are, paradoxically, also planning for the future governance of society. While it’s not uncommon for churches to sponsor Christian schools, at least one apostolic center, Impact Church International in Concord, North Carolina, not only hosts a KU campus, but also the K4-12 Daniel Christian Academy, which is explicitly devoted to teaching about the seven mountains of dominion.
Apostle and Pastor Donna Wise of Impact Church International claims in a 2022 post that too often the church, broadly speaking, is “concerned more with numbers and dollars rather than a powerful ‘Ekklesia’ whose purpose is to bring the will and rule of God into our nation.” The result, she says, is a “culture of darkness filling our religious assemblies, governments and schools.”
Taking churches to church is de rigueur among some NAR leaders.
Indeed, Apostle Jim Garlow brought a similar message to City Elders, a NAR political project, in September 2023. What’s actually important, he says, in a video of his speech, isn’t how many people attend Sunday services, but “how many are deployed into action—who are actually threats to the enemy of God.”
A more explicit example of the bloody t-shirt’s meaning would be difficult to find.
see the photos and links embedded in this article at:
https://religiondispatches.org/taking-aim-at-religion-itself-apostles-prime-networks-for-real-world-violence/
The peril radicalizing some evangelicals goes beyond Christian nationalism
ReplyDeleteChristian supremacists are plotting the end of America as we know it.
By Matthew D. Taylor, Religion News Service April 4, 2024
I grew up in a conservative, evangelical Christian household and attended private evangelical schools where we pledged allegiance to the Christian flag (yes, there is a Christian flag) alongside the American flag every morning. We would belt out “God Bless America” with gusto.
My teachers, classmates and I were attached to a somewhat mythological story of America’s Christian heritage. We were the type of sentimental Christian nationalists that Donald Trump is targeting with his recent turn as a Bible salesman.
But the primary way we applied our ideals came when we voted like any of our neighbors. We didn’t menace American democracy. But today, at the other end of the Christian nationalism spectrum, is a more perilous style of Christian politics, presented by very hard-line, very programmatic Christians who aim to dominate society.
If you’re unacquainted, Christian nationalism refers to how some (not all) American Christians blend their religious devotion with nationalistic ardor, aiming to refashion America as a Christian nation. Some conservative Christians have begun pushing back on this phrase, claiming that “Christian nationalist” is a slur, representing a progressive effort to make the idea of Christians involved in politics sound scary.
As a scholar who’s studied American Christianity for years, I can confidently state that the term is not an insult. Rather, it’s descriptive: When people blur any religious identity with their partisan political identities, we call that religious nationalism. It’s an extremely common phenomenon, occurring in numerous modern nations, from India to Turkey to Brazil. “Christian nationalism” is just the Christian variety.
Yes, some commentators do paint with too broad a brush in how they categorize or describe Christian nationalism. As with me and my schoolmates, some forms of Christian nationalism pose no imminent threat to American democracy.
But there is a new breed of chauvinistic, theologically bull-headed Christian nationalists who might be better called “Christian supremacists.” These hard-liners believe that Christianity deserves a privileged space in American society — that Christians, being better than other human beings, should be entitled to a superior form of citizenship. They claim that Christians are even destined by God to rule over society.
What is hazy nostalgia to the “God Bless America” crowd is an organized theological and political program for the Christian supremacists. They are deadly serious.
There are at least two major strands of Christian supremacy operating in the U.S. today: the highbrow Calvinists and the populist charismatics. Both groups are Protestant, and both have theological roots in an obscure group of Reformed (Calvinist) American theologians called the “Christian Reconstructionists,” who emerged in the 1960s and 1970s.
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The Reconstructionists draw inspiration from 16th-century theologian John Calvin’s Geneva, a theocratic city-state where unrepentant heretics could be executed by a government that enforced orthodoxy.
ReplyDeleteThough certainly not representative of all Calvinists, today’s Reconstructionists have embraced a vision of what they call “dominion theology.” They interpret certain Bible passages to mean that Christians must “take dominion” over every society and remake it into the kingdom of God. Today, they hold conferences with titles such as “Blueprints for Christendom 2.0” and talk about how they will help Jesus the “warrior-king” to “dominion-ize” this world.
These theological intellectuals of the Christian far right are radicalizing more run-of-the-mill Christian nationalists. Reconstructionist luminaries today include people like Stephen Wolfe, a scholar with a Ph.D. in political theory who argues full-throatedly in his book “The Case for Christian Nationalism” that “Non-Christians … are not entitled to political equality.”
Like good Calvinists, the Reconstructionists are intellectual and systematic, imagining detailed programs by which Christians can re-Christianize America and, ultimately, the world. They hope their heady ideas will help trigger such a global crusade, while recognizing that their high-octane Calvinist theology will never be everyone’s cup of tea.
So beginning in the 1980s, the Reconstructionist theologians intentionally spread their ideas into other Christian communities and networks, sometimes with the more rigid Calvinist casing shaved off. They especially cross-pollinated with a rapidly growing segment of American Christianity that gets little media coverage: nondenominational charismatic Christians.
Charismatic Christians are those who are trying to restore the more supernatural dimensions of early Christianity — speaking in tongues, performing miracles and believing in modern prophecies. This is the world of next-gen televangelism, ecstatic megachurches and itinerant prophets. Nondenominational charismatics are the energetic, tech-savvy, insurgent populists of American Christianity.
Many of these nondenominational charismatics eagerly embraced the Reconstructionists’ dominion ideas (if not their formal Calvinism), giving rise to the populist charismatic style of Christian supremacy. At the front of this pack is a pastor (sometimes referred to as prophet) named Lance Wallnau, who has taken some of these dominion theology ideas and rebranded them as a prophecy called the Seven Mountain Mandate.
Wallnau’s vision of Christian supremacy entails dividing society up into seven “mountains” or arenas of influence (religion, family, government, education, media, entertainment and commerce) and urging Christians to conquer the top of every mountain in their community or nation so that Christian influence will trickle down into society.
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These Seven Mountains programs are fueling many local conservative Christian groups to take over city councils or school boards, making the dominion program tactical and marketable. Wallnau is also a leader in a nondenominational movement called the New Apostolic Reformation, which has helped spread this Seven Mountains prophecy everywhere within evangelical circles.
ReplyDeleteNot coincidentally, Wallnau was also one of the first Christian leaders to endorse Donald Trump in the 2016 campaign cycle. Wallnau is the author of some of the prophecies and theology that now customarily present Christian support for Trump not merely in terms of achieving conservative Christian goals or choosing the lesser of two evils, but as a positive good, ordained by God to be president again.
As I detail in my forthcoming book, “The Violent Take It by Force,” and in a recently released audio-documentary series, Wallnau used prophetic propaganda to galvanize and mobilize charismatic Christians to endorse Trump’s election lies. In this sense, he was one of the principal theological architects of the Jan. 6 riots at the U.S. Capitol, and he was even there at the Capitol that day to speak at one of the instigating rallies.
This all goes beyond a baseless slur. I recommend to those Christians of the kind I grew up with that you might get over the sting of being labeled, perhaps unfairly, as a Christian nationalist. Christianity is slowly losing its privileged place in American society, and I understand that that feels strange, but you should be far more concerned about the real-life religious extremism that is burbling up in your midst, causing many to cross the line from “God Bless America” Christian nationalists to ardent Christian supremacists.
Some of the most beautiful and treasured parts of American democracy — the equality of all citizens, the separation of church and state, and freedom to believe in and practice any (or no) religion — are the targets of the Christian supremacists, who seek not comity but domination, not peace but a sword. They are plotting the end of America as we know it. Openly.
(Matthew D. Taylor is a senior scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies in Baltimore and is the author of the forthcoming book “The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy.”
see the links and photos embedded in this article at:
https://religionnews.com/2024/04/04/the-peril-radicalizing-some-evangelicals-goes-beyond-christian-nationalism/
US supreme court opened Pandora’s box … and Ten Commandments law flew out
ReplyDeleteLouisiana’s demand to display the religious text in public schools is part of an effort to make the US a theocratic state
by Ed Pilkington, The Guardian June 21, 2024
Louisiana’s decision to force public schools to display the Ten Commandments is the latest fallout from a spate of controversial rulings from the rightwing supermajority of the US supreme court which has opened up a Pandora’s box that is fueling efforts to turn America into a theocratic state.
The new law, signed on Wednesday by the hard-right governor, Jeff Landry, puts Louisiana in the vanguard of a decades-long movement to obliterate the foundational US separation of church and state. It puts wind in the sails of those who want the US to be reinvented as an overtly Christian nation, and comes in the wake of two highly contentious opinions from the highest court.
Both rulings, delivered within six days of each other in 2022, were backed by the six ultra-conservative justices who now have a stranglehold on the country’s most powerful court. The supermajority is one of the main legacies of Donald Trump, who placed three of the justices on the bench.
The 2022 decisions chipped away at the bedrock principle that has guided the US since its inception. Enshrined in the first amendment of the US constitution, it stipulates that all faiths should be free to worship, yet none enjoy priority status as an established state religion.
“There’s no question that Christian nationalists are capitalizing on the recent supreme court cases. They are hopeful that the court is beyond repair and will undo years of precedent about religion in public schools,” said Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Freedom from Religion Foundation which is part of a coalition of groups challenging the new Louisiana law in the courts.
The first of the supreme court’s radical rulings, Carson v Makin, was delivered on 21 June 2022. In it, the conservative justices required the state of Maine to fund religious instruction in rural areas lacking a public high school – a command that flew in the face of the specific edict of James Madison, the main author of the first amendment, against taxpayers funding religious activity including education.
In a dissenting opinion, the liberal justice Sonia Sotomayor bluntly accused her rightwing peers of dismantling “the wall of separation between church and state that the framers fought to build”.
The second ruling, issued less than a week later on 27 June 2022, landed an even greater punch on the settled law relating to church-state relations. The decision, Kennedy v Bremerton, in effect overturned more than 40 years of supreme court precedent – it was as audacious and extreme a measure in the field of religion as the Dobbs ruling, which overturned Roe v Wade in that of abortion.
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The Kennedy case concerned a football coach, Joe Kennedy, who had been placed on administrative leave by his public school outside Seattle after he repeatedly ignored instructions and held prayer sessions with student players after games on the 50-yard line. Kennedy falsely claimed the prayers were “personal” and “private”, when in fact he had a long track record of leading student athletes in prayer stretching back years.
ReplyDeleteThe supreme court opinion, in siding with Kennedy, scrapped what has become known as the Lemon test, which since its elucidation in 1971 has clarified for judges how they should view whether government actions touching upon religion are constitutional. The test said that the courts had to consider whether such action had a “secular legislative purpose” – it should neither advance nor inhibit religion, and must avoid fostering “an excessive government entanglement with religion”.
The Kennedy ruling, written by one of Trump’s appointees, Neil Gorsuch, threw out that tried and tested formula and replaced it with a far more vague prescription based on “history of tradition”. Such woolly definitions are proving popular among the all-powerful rightwingers – they applied exactly the same recipe to the regulation of guns in their 2021 Bruen ruling, with similarly explosive results.
Sotomayor’s response to Kennedy v Bremerton was even more visceral than her previous outburst. She wrote a 35-page dissenting opinion that was longer than Gorsuch’s majority ruling.
It was certainly more angry. Sotomayor said the decision put the constitutional right to the free exercise of faith ahead of the establishment clause which prohibits government from forming an established religion. She pointed out that legal precedent demanded that those two potentially conflicting precepts should be ranked equally.
“This decision does a disservice to schools and the young citizens they serve, as well as to our nation’s longstanding commitment to the separation of church and state,” the justice wrote. Then she gave a chilling prediction: “In doing so, the court sets us further down a perilous path in forcing states to entangle themselves with religion, with all of our rights hanging in the balance.”
Louisiana’s governor must have been paying attention. By signing the new Ten Commandments law he has fulfilled Sotomayor’s warning.
He is taking the US down a perilous path that is all but certain to lead to the supreme court. The same supreme court that opened this Pandora’s box, and that shows no desire to close it.
to see the links embedded in this article go to:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jun/21/louisiana-ten-commandments-law
Oklahoma state superintendent orders public schools to teach the Bible
ReplyDeleteRyan Walters calls Bible ‘necessary document to teach kids’ and says Ten Commandments will also be required learning
by Erum Salam, The Guardian June 28, 2024
Oklahoma’s state superintendent has announced that all schools are required to teach the Bible and the Ten Commandments, a dramatic move that reignites the conversation about the separation of church and state.
In a state board of education meeting on Thursday, state superintendent of public instruction Ryan Walters announced a new memo “that every school district will adhere to, which is that every teacher, every classroom in the state will have a Bible in the classroom and will be teaching from the Bible in the classroom to ensure that this historical understanding is there for every student in the state of Oklahoma in accordance with our academic standards and state law”.
Walters called the Bible “one of the most foundational documents used for the constitution and the birth of our country”.
He added: “The Bible is a necessary historical document to teach our kids about the history of this country, to have a complete understanding of western civilization, to have an understanding of the basis of our legal system.”
Walters is also behind the recent push to create a new religious charter school which, like public schools, are funded by taxpayer dollars. But in a 6-2 decision, the Oklahoma supreme court ruled that the contract between the Oklahoma statewide virtual charter school board and the religious charter school was unconstitutional.’
In his opinion, state supreme court justice James Winchester wrote: “Under Oklahoma law, a charter school is a public school. As such, a charter school must be nonsectarian. However, St Isidore will evangelize the Catholic faith as part of its school curriculum while sponsored by the state.”
Walters faced calls for impeachment last year after sharing a TikTok video posted by far-right influencers that incited violence, including bomb threats at public school librarians.
He has also used social media to rail against “woke ideology”.
“Democrats say it doesn’t exist. The liberal media denies the issue. Even some Republicans hide from it,” Walters said on Twitter/X in 2023. “Woke ideology is real and I am here to stop it.”
The move in Oklahoma come amid a growing movement across the country led by religious activists to push Christianity in the public education curriculum.
In June, Louisiana became the first state to pass a new law requiring all public school classrooms to display the Ten Commandments in classroom. Parents and civil rights groups are suing the state over the law.
to see the links embedded in this article go to:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jun/27/oklahoma-public-schools-bible-teachings
Christian Nationalists Accelerate Their Plan to Dismantle Public Education
ReplyDeleteState legislatures are passing bills to erode church-state separation in public education programs throughout the US.
By Eleanor J. Bader , Truthout June 30, 2024
When Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz attended the 2023 Turning Point USA convention, he gave the Christian nationalists in attendance a preview of the National Prayer in School Act, a bill he introduced into the House of Representatives shortly after the convention. His speech electrified the crowd: “The beautiful new Supreme Court that President Trump gave us just might uphold a constitutional law based on the values that the country was built on,” he began.
Gaetz later became more explicit, posting a speech on Instagram in support of the legislation: “Our country’s educational policy forbids students and faculty from praying while endlessly promoting degenerate LGBT and anti-white propaganda,” he said. “My legislation unlocks religious freedom.” As written, the Act would erode church-state separation, giving students, faculty and staff the right to pray on school grounds — something that has been barred for more than 50 years.
The bill is currently in the House Judiciary Committee. While its chances of passage are considered slim by policy watchers on both sides of the aisle — multiple sources told Truthout that they doubt that it will get out of Committee — state legislatures throughout the country are eroding the separation of church and state, zeroing in on public education and restoring “voluntary” school prayer; permitting (and in some places, requiring) the posting of “In God We Trust” in classrooms; allowing unlicensed chaplains to counsel K-12 students; authorizing release time so that students can attend religious instruction during class time; and providing vouchers of up to $16,000 per student per year to subsidize tuition at private, religious academies.
Meanwhile, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, an attempt by the Catholic Archdiocese to acquire state funding to open the nation’s first government-financed religious charter program was recently rebuffed by the state’s highest court. St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School was set to open in the fall of 2024; according to the school’s promotional materials it intended to teach a curriculum “steeped in the richness of Catholic intellectual tradition.”
Oklahoma education authorities had approved St. Isidore’s bid to start the school last summer, but opponents appealed the decision to the state Supreme Court where judges were asked to consider whether sanctioning the use of tax dollars to open a wholly online and explicitly religious K-12 program violated the First Amendment.
Many were outraged by the plan. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools joined the ACLU and a slew of human rights groups and public school supporters to challenge the proposed program’s overreach into secular society.
For the moment, they’ve won.
“The right’s attempts to get religion into public schools have increased and we are seeing more and more intrusions,” Allison Gill, vice president of legal and policy at American Atheists, Inc., told Truthout. “Public education is one of America’s most important cultural achievements and public schools are a cultural landmark. Our democracy depends on robust public programs.”
According to Gill, the many attacks on public schooling are meant to dismantle public education, a longstanding goal of conservative individuals like former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos whose American Federation for Children has funneled millions of dollars to candidates and incumbents who support an anti-public education agenda. Groups, including the Alliance Defending Freedom, First Liberty Institute, Heritage Foundation and Moms for Liberty have also jumped onto this bandwagon.
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Their efforts, Gill explained, have received a boost from federal Supreme Court decisions, state-level legislation, and state courts that are friendly to Christian nationalists. As a result, attacks on public education and the separation of church and state are accelerating rapidly.
ReplyDeleteErosion Has Accelerated Since 2005
According to Daniel Mach, director of the ACLU’s program on freedom and belief, the once-significant wall between church and state has been weakening for decades, but the process accelerated when John Roberts became chief justice of the Supreme Court in 2005. “Donald Trump is fully on board with the assault on church-state separation, but the winnowing away of barriers and protections preceded him,” Mach told Truthout. And since Trump was elected, conservative activism to bring religious doctrine into public school classrooms has seen a rapid series of successes in the courts.
Policy researcher Bryan Patrick Kelley has written extensively about religion and public education and credits several Supreme Court decisions for blurring the lines. Among them: 2000’s Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe, which sanctioned student-led voluntary prayer on school grounds; 2017’s Trinity Lutheran v. Comer, which found that it was discriminatory for the government to refuse to provide supplies to a parochial preschool simply because a faith group ran it; 2020’s Espinoza v. Montana which, along with 2022’s Carson v. Makin, allows students to use publicly funded vouchers to attend private religious schools; and 2022’s Kennedy v. Bremerton, which affirmed a high school football coach’s right to pray at the 50-yard line, with students present, after every game.
Additional court decisions permit students to distribute religious literature to classmates during lunch as well as before and after school, and to lead Bible study groups on school grounds as long as no one is coerced to attend them.
These decisions have resulted in the U.S. becoming a state-by-state patchwork, with differences appearing both between and within states, and leading many educators to be concerned about what is and is not allowed. Their questions prompted the Department of Education to issue clarifying guidelines in 2023 following the Kennedy decision. Among other things, the guidelines state that public schools cannot provide “religious instruction meant to indoctrinate students into specific belief systems,” but can teach classes that cover religion “as a subject of inquiry” and can discuss the ways different religions have influenced art, literature, music and history.
But numerous right-wing groups, both religious and not, are pushing back against this fault line.
“Oklahoma is the vanguard of the religious public school movement,” Mach explains. “The gist of the lawsuit for those who challenged the Archdiocese is that charter schools are public, not private. The goal of the lawsuit was to prevent the state of Oklahoma from carrying out the contract with the Archdiocese and stop public money from being spent on religious education programs. We [at the ACLU] see the idea of a religious public school as oxymoronic.”
For the time being, this argument has prevailed, but an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court is likely.
In addition to the ACLU litigation, Mach reports that a separate lawsuit was filed by Oklahoma’s Republican Attorney General Gentner Drummond to stop St. Isidore’s from opening. “Drummond was able to go directly to the state Supreme Court to oppose tax money being used for St. Isidore’s,” Mach said. “The ACLU believes that if St. Isidore’s was a private school, it would have been able to impose its own rules on students and staff, but public schools can’t and must obey anti-discrimination laws covering hiring and admissions.”
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In arguing against the Archdiocese, Drummond told the local press, “The framers of the U.S. Constitution and those who drafted Oklahoma’s Constitution clearly understood how best to protect religious freedom: by preventing the State from sponsoring any religion at all.”
ReplyDeleteThe State-Level Assault on Public Education
Nik Nartowicz, state policy counsel at Americans United for Separation of Church and State, reports that 15 separate bills (in 15 different states) to allow chaplains to counsel public school students — often at no charge to cash-strapped schools — have been introduced this year. Although so far only Florida and Louisiana have given chaplains the green light in 2024, adding these two states means that more than a dozen now allow chaplains (most of whom do not have counseling credentials) to interact with kids on school grounds. Texas was the first to sanction this in 2023.
That said, the plan did not roll out as seamlessly as Texas Gov. Greg Abbott intended.
“In Texas, 25 of the most populous districts, with a combined student body of more than 1.8 million students, rejected the idea of chaplains coming in,” Nartowicz told Truthout.
Nartowicz added that the bill’s opponents include many religious leaders who made it clear that “they saw untrained chaplains in schools as a bad idea.”
Dissenting clergy have emphasized that anyone who can pass a background check can call themself a chaplain, which allows them to go into the state’s public schools. Courses in counseling methods and child development are not required.
Then there’s the issue of release time. In early June, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt signed House Bill 1425, allowing parents to pull their kids out of school for “religious or moral instruction” for up to three weekly class periods. Similarly, Tennessee lawmakers recently passed a bill to allow students to miss up to one hour of classroom work a day specifically for religious classes or religious activities.
Meg Kilgannon, senior fellow for education studies at the right-wing Family Research Council, posits the rationale for this: “Religious release programs may bring whole families back to the church and into a relationship with Jesus Christ,” she told The Washington Stand magazine.
Other efforts to bring Jesus into public education are less obvious.
Since 2023, 18 states have passed legislation to allow (and in some places, require) the words, “In God We Trust,” to be affixed to classroom walls. In late June, Louisiana went one step further, becoming the first state to require the posting of the Ten Commandments in every schoolroom. A challenge from Americans United for Separation of Church and State, The Freedom from Religion Foundation, the ACLU, and other proponents of church-state separation has been filed. At press time, six other states are considering copycat measures.
Taking Funds Away From Public Schools
Vouchers pose yet another affront to education by shifting funding from public to private entities.
“The current Supreme Court rulings seem to indicate that they want to make it easier for states to create voucher programs that mainly benefit religious private schools,” Steven Emmert, executive director of the Secular Coalition for America told Truthout. “Vouchers are a gift to people who want to send their kids to private schools and do not need public money to do so. This takes funding from public education and gifts it to people who already have money.”
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According to The Washington Post, subsidy amounts vary by state (and usually range between $10,000 and $16,000 per student per year); during the 2023-24 academic year, 4.7 million kids (out of a total U.S. student population of 49.6 million) in 29 states and Washington, D.C., received financing to attend private schools, most of them religious. Many of these students have never attended public schools.
ReplyDelete“Vouchers started in Milwaukee in 1990. Proponents argued that the funding was needed to give low-income kids and kids with individualized educational programs additional opportunities for equitable schooling,” Emmert said. “This has now expanded to a universal entitlement” in many states, which means families at any income level can receive these vouchers if they don’t want to send their children to public schools.
Allison Gill at American Atheists calls the shift to universal eligibility a direct dismantling of public education. “The Supreme Court ruled that states with voucher programs have to give them to people who want their kids to go to religious schools,” she said. “If this is extended to all 50 states, it will weaken public education considerably.”
This is not accidental, she adds, but while the process of divestment has been unfolding for decades, the movement began to pick up speed in 2016 when Christian nationalists formed Project Blitz — helmed by the conservative organizations WallBuilders, the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation, and the Pacific Legal Foundation. Project Blitz’s purpose — never hidden — was to inject religion into public life, attack LGBTQIA equality, undermine public education, decimate reproductive choice, and oppose racial progress, all while couching their agenda in the language of parental rights and religious liberty.
In the eight years since Project Blitz was founded, Christian nationalists have done extensive organizing, laying out a game plan for not only ensuring Trump’s presidential victory come November but for making inroads (and eventually controlling) every aspect of our social and political lives: arts/entertainment, business, education, family, government, media and religion. (Some Christian nationalists, including the New Apostolic Reformation, call this vision for a religious state the Seven Mountains Mandate.)
“Right now, it looks like the right is throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks,” Nartowicz said. “We’re seeing school prayer bills, release time legislation, ‘In God We Trust’ signs and Ten Commandments postings, expanded universal voucher programs, chaplains in schools, and an attempt to use public funds for religious education. We know that this broad attack is meant to undermine public education and promote Christian nationalism. But we also know that religious activist forces comprise a small minority of the U.S. population.”
Meanwhile, he says, Americans United for Separation of Church and State along with other groups are continuing to sound a loud alarm about right-wing incursions into political life, opposing bills to undercut public school funding, and building alliances and educating the public about the insidious threats the right poses to secular democracy.
“Our members are people of all faiths and people of no faith,” he said, “We’re here and we plan to continue doing the work of keeping church and state separate.”
to see the links embedded in this article go to:
https://truthout.org/articles/christian-nationalists-accelerate-their-plan-to-dismantle-public-education/
SCHOOL OF FEAR - The Rise of Christian Dominionism ~ JONATHON SAWYER
ReplyDeleteTalk Beliefs - cults and belief systems podcast
August 28, 2024
JONATHON SAWYER is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Colorado, researching and speaking out about religious and political extremism and its effect on schools and education.
These concerns come from spending his formative years in a school associated with the New Apostolic Reformation – a movement that focuses on what it calls “spiritual warfare”.
https://youtu.be/B0qKRdw4zF0?feature=shared
LINKS FOR JONATHON SAWYER
SITE: https://www.jonsawyer.org/
TWITTER/X: https://x.com/jonsawyerco
INSTA: / sawyerjes
PUBLICATIONS:
Un (hidden) from self: On LGBTQ students and the conspiratorial demonology of the New Apostolic Reformation https://bit.ly/4cr84lC
Rising Influence of New Apostolic Reformation Teachings is Ominous Sign For the US — Especially For LGBTQ Students https://bit.ly/3Asb0kF
PODCASTS:
Part One: Parental Paradox with Jon Sawyer: IndoctriNation Podcast https://bit.ly/478Yzqp
Part Two: Multi-Layered Trauma with Jon Sawyer: IndoctriNation Podcast https://bit.ly/3MaKVcs
YouTube:
(Un)hidden from self: LGBTQ students & the New Apostolic Reformation - by Jonathon Sawyer for PIPATL https://bit.ly/3YP7jzy
Should Christian men run America? Hell no, say abuse survivors in new documentary
ReplyDeleteIn ‘For Our Daughters,’ a new film from Kristin Kobes Du Mez, author of ‘Jesus and John Wayne,’ abuse survivors argue that if pastors can’t keep their own churches safe, they should not be running the country.
by Bob Smietana, Religion News Service September 19, 2024
Christa Brown has heard former President Donald Trump and his supporters boast of returning Christians to power in the United States — and returning the nation to what they say are its Christian roots.
She wants none of it.
Brown, a sexual abuse survivor and longtime advocate for abuse reform in the Southern Baptist Convention, has seen what happens when Christian men have power over women in the church. The thought of them having the same power over the country makes her quake.
“I have seen what it means for the largest evangelical Protestant faith group in the country, and it is bloody awful,” Brown says in a new short film about the connections between abuse and Christian nationalism called “For Our Daughters.”
“That is not the country I want,” Brown says.
Brown is one of several abuse survivors, most with Southern Baptist ties, featured in the film — which also includes clips of Trump promising power to Christian leaders, along with photos of pastors with Trump. Among those pastors is Robert Morris, a former faith adviser to the former president who recently stepped down from his Dallas megachurch after the revelation that he’d sexually abused a 12-year-old girl in the past.
The film also highlights videos of a pair of congregations cheering for abusive pastors, as well as clips of right-wing pastors such as Doug Wilson, who teaches that women were designed to serve men and make babies, and Joel Webbon, a Texas pastor who believes women should no longer have the right to vote.
“Godly women want to feed their men,” Wilson says in one video clip. “Godly women are designed to make the sandwiches.”
The 30-minute film was a labor of love for Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a professor of history at Calvin University, and award-winning filmmaker Carl Byker. The two have been working on a long project about Jesus and John Wayne but worried the voices of abuse survivors might get overshadowed in a longer documentary.
“We needed to let these women speak,” said Du Mez, who featured the stories of survivors like Brown and Woodson in her bestselling book, “Jesus and John Wayne.”
Byker said the film, which will begin streaming on YouTube on Sept. 26, was inspired by the stories of survivors and also by a story from his childhood about how women are mistreated in churches. When he was 12, he recalled, the church his family attended held a vote on a new pastor.
“I asked my mom, ‘When are you going to put your ballot in the box?’” he said in a phone interview. “And she replied, ‘Oh, women aren’t allowed to vote.’ I thought, something is seriously wrong here.”
Du Mez hopes the film will help explain why so many evangelical Christians are willing to support Trump despite his abusive behavior, like that described in the “Access Hollywood” tape in which then-candidate Trump boasted of sexually assaulting women. A clip from the tape is played in the film.
In many churches, she said, power has become more important than morality.
Du Mez said that not all evangelical churches are abusive — but too many of them have allowed abuse to be covered up and have tolerated abusive pastors for too long.
“This is not in any way a blanket condemnation of everybody who attends an evangelical church or of all evangelical leaders,” she said in an interview. “But it is calling out a pattern that happens all too frequently in evangelical churches, and just putting it on display for people to see.”
Brown has seen that pattern firsthand for years. As an advocate for abuse reform, she was ignored by SBC leaders for years. She was also labeled as being part of a “satanic scheme” to bring down the SBC.
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Brown sees parallels between the way faith has been used to attack abuse survivors and the way it is used in politics to promote causes such as Christian nationalism.
ReplyDelete“I believe faith is being exploited to legitimize authoritarianism in the political arena,” Brown said.
The title of “For Our Daughters” came from conversations Du Mez had with evangelical women after publishing “Jesus and John Wayne,” which describes the toxic masculinity found in some evangelical settings. Those women, she said, thanked her for the book, saying that they hoped things would be better for their daughters because of it.
One of the most powerful moments in the film occurs when a photo of young women, including then-teenager Jules Woodson, is shown with Andy Savage, a former youth pastor who later admitted to what he called “sexual misconduct” involving Woodson. That’s followed by Woodson telling her story about abuse at the hands of Savage, and then how it was covered up and she was blamed.
Years later, Savage admitted having a “sexual incident with a female high school student” during a service at the Memphis, Tennessee, megachurch where he served as pastor. The congregation responded with a standing ovation.
“I mourn for that girl,” Woodson said during an interview. “What happened changed the trajectory of my life, and I wonder what it would have been like, had everything not happened.”
Woodson rejected the idea that Christian men need to be in charge of America.
“God doesn’t need these people,” she says in the film. “I mean, let’s talk about narcissism. For these men to think that they are so important to the mission, to God, to the nation. Give me a break.”
The film also features Tiffany Thigpen, who was assaulted by a pastor named Darrell Gilyard as a teenager and later testified against him when he was accused of abusing girls at another church. She recounts how for years her pastor had told her to be silent and told her that any controversy about Gilyard — who was a protégé of Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell Sr. as well as SBC leaders such as Jerry Vines and Paige Patterson — would blow over. Gilyard was eventually convicted in 2009 and sentenced to three years in prison. A few months later, he was back in the pulpit.
Thigpen worries that some Trump supporters will reject the film and the concerns of survivors by labeling them a part of a liberal agenda to oppose the former president. She said she has bigger concerns, mainly that too many of her fellow Christians act in ways that are contrary to the teaching of Jesus.
“They’re doing everything against what’s supposed to be right and good and true,” she said. “The fact that they have platformed Donald Trump as a savior and as the answer that God’s provided for us. It just shows how far we have lost our minds.”
Attorney and abuse advocate Rachael Denhollander, whose testimony helped convict former USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar, says churches that teach that women must submit to the authority of men, and that God gave men absolute power over women, can create an abusive culture.
“And so men think they can get away with abuse because they actually can get away with it,” she says in the film.
Denhollander said in an interview that many Christians rallied to her side when she testified against Nassar. But she thinks that had her abuser been a pastor or someone like Trump, things would have been very different.
“Here’s the reality,” she said. “Had I been victimized by Donald Trump instead of Larry Nassar, my community would not only not be supporting me — they would be actively vilifying me. They would be actively supporting and voting for an abuser.”
to see the links and photos embedded in this article go to:
https://religionnews.com/2024/09/19/should-christian-men-run-america-hell-no-say-abuse-survivors-in-new-documentary-jesus-john-wayne/
Sep 26, 2024
ReplyDeleteFor Our Daughters is a powerful new documentary that addresses the urgent issues facing women of faith in America. Directed by Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Carl Byker and presented by Kristin Kobes Du Mez, the New York Times bestselling author of Jesus and John Wayne, the film is a timely exploration of the intersection of faith, politics, and women's rights in America.
Recounting chilling stories of abuse and betrayal, For Our Daughters honors the brave sexual and spiritual abuse survivors who have shared their stories, at great cost. It delves into how the church has cared more about power and political influence than justice and love, and how the harm done to women and children inside faith communities threatens to extend to all women given what is at stake this election season.
https://youtu.be/IkES4X_qb6c?feature=shared
Please find the SOCIAL TOOLKIT HERE (https://www.forourdaughtersfilm.com) to help us spread the word.
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Christian Nationalists Dream of Taking Over America. This Movement Is Actually Doing It.
ReplyDeleteThe New Apostolic Reformation is “the greatest threat to US democracy you’ve never heard of.”
By Kiera Butler; Photography by Caroline Gutman, Mother Jones November+December 2024 Issue
One August evening, I drove through the cornfields and dairy farms of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, to attend a government-themed prayer night at Ephrata Community Church. The sprawling house of worship looks like an office park and houses a cafe and an indoor playground in addition to a large sanctuary. This event, however, was in a converted barn across the parking lot called Gateway House of Prayer. For the last 15 years, it has been open 24 hours a day for the faithful to worship when the main church is closed, with parishioners keeping watch in shifts.
It was a Thursday night. Gradually, about 22 congregants, mostly seniors, all of whom were members of the community, filtered in. Over the next two hours, the group prayed, sometimes quietly and sometimes very loudly, and sometimes in strings of syllables, a charismatic Christian tradition known as speaking in tongues. Of the prayers that I could understand, many were what you’d hear in any church—gratitude for God’s goodness or entreaties for family members going through hard times.
But interspersed were more unsettling messages: frequent references to the “enemy,” to a battle between good and evil, to a “spiritual war” playing out in our country. One prayer leader encouraged attendees to join a pair of “prophets” who were taking daily Communion for 90 days at exactly 4:14 p.m. Why so precise? The answer can be found in two Old Testament verses: Esther 4:14, which says Christians are called to speak up in the face of persecution, and Nehemiah 4:14, which “is about fighting,” the prayer leader said, “on behalf of our sons, our daughters, our families.”
The devotees she mentioned were leaders in the New Apostolic Reformation, a charismatic evangelical Christian movement led by a loose network of self-appointed prophets and apostles, who claim that God speaks directly to them, often in dreams. They believe that Christians are called to wage a spiritual battle for control of the United States. In the vanguard of an ascendant Christian nationalist movement, they are seeking an explicitly Christian command of public schools, social policy, and all levels of the government, including the courts. Some scholars claim NAR is the fastest-growing spiritual movement in the United States. Evangelical writer C. Peter Wagner described it as the most significant shake-up in Protestantism since the Reformation. Its laser focus on starting a spiritual war to Christianize America has led the Southern Poverty Law Center to call NAR “the greatest threat to US democracy that you have never heard of.”
Estimates of Christians influenced by NAR vary widely, from 3 million to 33 million. But the number of adherents isn’t the extent of its influence; its main tenets have moved beyond the confines of churches and into the political mainstream, largely thanks to traveling apostles and prophets who preach at evangelical churches all over the world. Fred Clarkson, a senior research analyst with the extremism watchdog group Political Research Associates, described the New Apostolic Reformation as a seismic cultural shift. “It’s the transformation of an entire society with this certain kind of Christo-centric worldview,” he told me. “We’re talking about something so transcendentally revolutionary that most people never even thought about something like this.”
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Donald Trump’s former national security adviser Mike Flynn has hosted NAR leaders on his “ReAwaken America” tour, and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has worked with its apostles. Just this past weekend, GOP vice presidential hopeful Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) appeared in Pennsylvania at an event hosted by Lance Wallnau, a Texas business strategist-turned-NAR superstar. Wallnau, who has called Kamala Harris a “Jezebel” and speculated that people on the political left may be controlled by demons, helped develop Project 19, a right-wing political initiative to win 19 key counties in swing states for Trump.
ReplyDeleteI asked Clarkson for a metaphor to describe how New Apostolic Reformation concepts have spread beyond the confines of the movement. At first, he suggested the cellular process of osmosis, or perhaps a tea infusion, but neither accounts for the intentionality of the movement’s leaders. “How do you infuse your Christian ideas into Babylon?” he asked, referring to an ancient city that rejected God. “That’s the nature of their thinking. It can be deeply subversive. It can also be utterly in your face.”
Since 2016, many NAR prophesies have concerned Trump, whom adherents see as having been divinely chosen to lead the country. Trump’s introduction to the movement came in 2002 when he invited Florida apostle Paula White-Cain to be his personal minister after seeing her preach on television. By the time he became president, he had acquired a handful of other NAR spiritual advisers: most notably, a South Carolina–based apostle named Dutch Sheets and prophet Cindy Jacobs, who helms an influential ministry in Texas. Throughout his presidency, Trump’s NAR counselors were mostly ignored by White House reporters, dismissed as latter-day versions of evangelical pastor Billy Graham with Richard Nixon, or Jeremiah Wright with Barack Obama. Yet “these are the key religious people around Donald Trump and the people who brought him the presidency,” Clarkson said. “They’re the people who influenced his presidency and the people who are leading the religious wing of his reelection campaign.”
As the 2020 election drew near, their role became more important. White-Cain warned her followers that Christians who don’t support Trump will “have to stand accountable before God one day.” Shortly after Trump’s defeat, Sheets became an influential figure in the “Stop the Steal” campaign, leading rallies across the country. He warned that the results of the presidential election were “going to be overturned and President Trump is going to be put back in office for four years.” Around the same time, White-Cain gave a speech imploring religious Americans to “strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike until you have victory.”
Eight days before the Capitol insurrection of January 6, 2021, a group of apostles held a strategy meeting with Trump and his advisers. In a January 1 blog post, Sheets shared a dream from a prophet named Gina Gholston, in which she described “moving toward the Capitol, not at a full gallop, but at a steady, determined, fast trot. As we began, written in white letters on the ground in front of us were the words, ‘DON’T STOP.’” A year after the insurrection, Sheets recounted a dream in which Trump had told him that he would be a “political martyr” because, he had said, loosely quoting the Bible, “‘God has put the tools in me to tear down, root up, and confront the system.’”
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NAR leaders have targeted the Supreme Court, too. In 2018, during Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s contentious confirmation hearings, Sheets urged his followers to ask God to grant them “a majority of Justices who are Constitutionalists, literalists (meaning they believe the Constitution is to be taken literally, exactly as it is written), and who are pro-life.” He prayed for “another vacancy on the Court soon,” which he felt was “coming quickly.” In a broadcast, Wallnau, the NAR leader who recently hosted Vance in Pennsylvania, described the accusations of rape against Kavanaugh as a spiritual attack.
ReplyDeleteThe apostles’ visions for the Supreme Court didn’t get much mainstream attention—until the New York Times broke a series of stories about flags displayed at the homes of Justice Samuel Alito. Outside his main residence was an upside-down American flag, a symbol associated with the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election. At his vacation home in New Jersey, the Times’ Jodi Kantor later reported, flew an “Appeal to Heaven” flag—belonging to Alito’s wife, Martha-Ann—showing a lone pine tree, a Revolutionary War symbol that had been revived and popularized by none other than Sheets. Rolling Stone found the same flag fluttering outside the Maine vacation home of Leonard Leo, the deep-pocketed conservative judicial kingmaker whose largesse has extended to several justices and their families.
Meanwhile, NAR apostles have ensured that their teachings have spread into local civil societies. In Redding, California, the 11,000-member Bethel Church now funds the local police force and trains public school teachers. In Pasadena, Korean American apostle Ché Ahn’s Harvest Rock Church bankrolled local candidates, including one for state Senate. The Remnant Alliance, an NAR-affiliated group, teaches Christians across the nation to run for school boards.
And then there is Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a county of 550,000 people spread out over a patchwork of fertile farmland, where I traveled to understand what this kind of local transformation looks like. Since the mid-1600s, Pennsylvania has been known for religious fervor. First came the Quakers, followed shortly after by the Anabaptists, or “plain” people. Ephrata, for example, was a hub for the Brethren, but the area is also known for Mennonites and particularly the Amish. Today, Lancaster also has become an NAR hub. A popular sports event venue hosts far-right Christian conferences. NAR-affiliated churches control the school boards. One local group holds Bible study in public schools; another baptizes students in portable troughs in front of public high schools.
At the prayer night I attended, spiritual warfare rhetoric was on full display. An elderly woman described Lancaster public schools as being “so infiltrated with evil,” she prayed that “school boards would open up their eyes and ears and stop just screaming things that they think are good. If they did their homework, they’d see they’re not good.” Another woman announced that she had a vision of a claw machine. Instead of cheap prizes at the arcade, her claw—which symbolized the demonic influence of secularism—had picked up people’s minds so that they “can’t discern what’s right and wrong.” Her metaphor became an entreaty to God: “And I want to say…drop those minds and take them back for the Lord.” Someone blew a shofar, the ram’s horn that ancient Israelites used to call their armies to battle.
“We declare that this gender confusion would be stopped in the mighty name of Jesus!” cried another man, clad in the iconic Trump campaign T-shirt bearing the mugshot of the former president emblazoned with the word “wanted”—not for a crime but for another term in office. “We say, ‘Fight, fight, fight, hallelujah!’” he said. “We take the example of Donald Trump!” The group broke out in a chorus of “Fight, fight, fight!”
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The New Apostolic Reformation may be influential, but it’s also hard to pin down. With no single leader, annual conference, or website outlining statements of belief, it isn’t a distinct Protestant denomination, like Baptists or Presbyterians, but a vast and amorphous network of prophets and apostles who oversee their own ministries, issue prophetic declarations, and journey to churches all over the world to spread their ideology. Though many adherents fit the stereotype of the white, male Christian nationalist, some of the most prominent American apostles are African Americans and women; some of the most powerful global apostles come from African nations. But in Lancaster, the churches are overwhelmingly white.
ReplyDeleteThe term “New Apostolic Reformation” was coined in the 1990s by the influential evangelical writer Wagner, who emphasized that he was not the movement’s leader—because it had none. It was instead a coming together of several smaller sects that shared a belief that God appointed apostles and prophets who possessed special “gifts of the spirit,” like the ability to perform miracles, for instance, or speak in tongues. In what became known as the “fivefold ministry,” NAR churches organized themselves into five areas of leadership: apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers. Leaders were urged to “use their influence to create an environment in which the blessings and prosperity of the Kingdom of God can permeate all areas of society,” to conquer “the Seven Mountains: Religion, Family, Education, Government, Media, Arts & Entertainment, and Business.”
It was Wallnau who popularized this doctrine of Christian dominion, which is sometimes known as the Seven Mountain Mandate, or 7MM. According to a recent Denison University poll, between March 2023 and January 2024, the percentage of Christian Americans who believed in the Seven Mountain Mandate increased from just under 30 percent to 41 percent. The concept routinely appears in conservative political discourse. Alabama Chief Justice Tom Parker, who championed fetal personhood in a February 2024 ruling, said in an interview with a prominent NAR apostle that “God created government” and “that’s why he is calling and equipping people to step back into these mountains.”
Promoting a Christian nation has seeped into some of the Supreme Court justices’ opinions. In the 2019 case American Legion v. American Humanist Association, the court ruled in favor of the American Legion, which had erected a 40-foot cross on public land in Maryland. Alito wrote that taking down the cross would be “aggressively hostile to religion.” In the 2022 Kennedy v. Bremerton School District case, the court ruled 6–3 in favor of a public high school football coach who lost his job for routinely leading prayers during games. Writing for the conservative majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch unilaterally declared that the court had “long ago abandoned” a decades-old precedent that established that government employees can’t advance a particular religious ideology.
After the court declined in February to take up a case filed on behalf of people who had been removed from a jury because of their belief that gay marriage was wrong, Alito wrote in an unusual personal statement that he worried “Americans who do not hide their adherence to traditional religious beliefs about homosexual conduct will be ‘labeled as bigots and treated as such’ by the government.”
The perception that Christians are being persecuted by the government is a potent rallying cry of the Christian nationalist movement. Elliot Mincberg, a Supreme Court scholar and fellow with the pro-democracy organization People for the American Way, said, “There’s very little question that [Christian nationalist] views are very much reflected in where this Supreme Court majority is on religion and church and state.”
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Clarkson has watched as the ideas popularized by NAR—the Seven Mountain Mandate, the fivefold ministry, and the concept of spiritual warfare—have infiltrated churches that aren’t officially connected to the movement. “There are so many Christianities, and they change over time—this is a perfect example,” he said. “People don’t necessarily know where every belief they hold came from.”
ReplyDeleteNAR also appropriates Jewish imagery. Two days after I heard one shofar at Ephrata, I attended an all-day “prayer burn” at a barn in the countryside where several attendees blew them. Others wore tallitot, or Jewish prayer shawls. A group of tween dancers carried a chuppah, a four-posted canopy often used in Jewish weddings. The group sang in Hebrew as they danced the hora, a standard feature in Jewish celebrations. Then, one of the NAR leaders I recognized from Ephrata took the microphone and began to speak about Jesus. “He’s the Lord of hosts,” she said. A cacophonous roar of shofars came from the crowd.
When I asked an attendee about all the Jewish references, she explained that it was simply a way to acknowledge the shared heritage between Christians and Jews. But that’s not the whole story, as Clarkson later reminded me. Many NAR adherents believe “that they have a special role as Christians in the end-times to deliver Israel”—a time when Jews will finally recognize Jesus as their Savior.
Lancaster has been home for centuries to the plain people, the Amish, the Mennonites, and the Brethren who, to various degrees, eschew machines and other trappings of modernity. But its demographics have shifted markedly over the last few decades. About 7 percent of Lancaster’s senior citizens are people of color, compared with a quarter of the youth. The gap between registered Democrats and Republicans has also narrowed.
Much of this purpling is taking place in the cobblestone streets and stately brick buildings of Lancaster City, which has welcomed 5,000 refugees to its population of 58,000 over the last 20 years. When I visited, I encountered a street festival in full swing. Young people grabbed overflowing plates of chicken tikka from an Indian food truck, and a crowd around the main stage danced to the music of a Liberian hip-hop artist.
City officials may embrace this diversity, but county leaders don’t. In February, the Lancaster City Council passed a law prohibiting police and city employees from asking people about their immigration status; county commissioners promptly declared Lancaster a “non-sanctuary” county. In June, after the City Council passed a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, County Commissioner Josh Parsons called the move a “propaganda victory for Hamas.” Lancaster’s overwhelmingly Republican state representatives tend to side with the county, even publicly denouncing the city’s efforts to welcome immigrants.
These state representatives regularly interact with NAR leaders. In May, two of them met with Sean Feucht, an NAR-aligned pastor who travels the country holding prayer rallies on the steps of state Capitol buildings. Also present at the meeting was a local self-proclaimed prophet named Abby Abildness, who works with the state’s prayer caucus group inside the Capitol to promote Christian initiatives in government. She has spoken candidly about her desire to blur the boundaries between church and state. “We need them and they need us,” she said, “because we can’t go write those laws.”
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NAR influence in Lancaster churches began appearing in the early 2000s, but the Covid culture wars accelerated its spread. Six years ago, when Rebecca Branle, the owner of a local bike shop and mother of three, moved to Ephrata, she knew her family might stand out because they didn’t attend church. “We weren’t religious like everyone else, but I didn’t think it was that big of a deal,” she recalls. But in 2020, the pandemic hit, and once-negligible differences became “flash points.” After Branle posted a rainbow flag and a Black Lives Matter sign on her property, someone shot a bullet through the barn window, and in another incident, someone left a single slab of granite outside; “Look Behind You” was written on it in permanent marker, accompanied by a smiley face with the eyes crossed out. In smaller print appeared “Gays will burn in hell” and “You can repent.” She was scared for her family’s safety, but also confused: “Especially this community of people who say they’re so religious, suddenly this kind of talk is okay with them?”
ReplyDeleteThe pandemic frightened many evangelical church leaders as well, but not because of the illness. Closing churches and mask mandates, which some considered offensive to God, were the real concern. Some pastors called vaccines the “mark of the beast.” To them, the pandemic’s major lesson was that government had become too powerful—and Christians had neglected to exert influence over that mountain.
Don Lamb, an ebullient, redheaded pastor whose complexion turns ruddier when he gets excited, felt the impact of Covid profoundly. We sat in the basement of LifeGate church in the small Lancaster enclave of Elizabethtown, population 12,000, and Lamb described how once his congregation of 150 “were just doing our things, staying within our four walls, preaching the gospel.” But when mask mandates came into effect, “it was authoritarian into the nth degree, and so that awoke the church to say, ‘We need to be involved here.’” In sermons, Lamb and his brother and co-pastor, Doug, urged their congregation to oppose not only pandemic restrictions but also mail-in ballots, critical race theory, “pronoun protocols,” and other culture war issues. When Joe Biden won the 2020 election, the Lambs believed that his victory was the result of coordinated election interference by the left.
On January 6, 2021, Don Lamb and several parishioners went to the rally outside the US Capitol. What was meant to be a peaceful gathering, he said, became violent only after police “were already throwing or launching flash-bang grenades at the audience.” He believes that the protesters who breached the building were set up and that the chaos could have been avoided. “We could have surrounded the Capitol with 100,000 Christians arm to arm just saying, ‘Grace, Amazing Grace,’” he said, “and there would have been no protesters who would have broken that line.”
Lamb follows Lance Wallnau, and he subscribes to the Seven Mountain Mandate. Trump, he told me, “was providentially given the stage of America.” Yet he doesn’t consider his church to be part of NAR. The term “Christian nationalism” irks him. The real problem with our nation, he says, is “liberal nationalism’s” obsession with cancel culture, identity politics, and elite institutions. “Who gets to define the vision of society—only the liberals and secularists?” he asked me. “That’s what makes us more determined to fight.”
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Don and Doug Lamb often refer to the persecution of Christians in their sermons. The previous Sunday, Doug began by urging his congregation to love their neighbors, even those with whom they disagreed. But by hour’s end, he was berating Muslim immigrants in England who have “taken over the entire country” instead of assimilating. When a Muslim visits, he said, “They’re not coming as a guest. They want to take over your house.” He likened this to the futility of seeking peace with those who follow Satan—like gay people who “destroyed the church in America,” he said. “You can’t compromise the truth and have peace with people who are diabolically opposed to what you believe.” Later, Lamb clarified that a better way to phrase this sentiment might have been: “You shouldn’t compromise the truth to be at peace with those who oppose you.”
ReplyDeleteSome LifeGate congregants appear to be using those messages to inform local politics. In 2021, three church members won seats on the Elizabethtown school board, flipping it to a conservative majority. This past June, the school board voted to work with the Independence Law Center, a Christian law firm that has worked with school boards to ban transgender athletes in the county. A tertiary branch of the Family Research Council—a group that has long advocated against the separation of church and state—the law center has deep ties to NAR and is steeped in Washington’s extreme conservative religious right.
After our conversation, Don took us on a tour of his church. In the cozy, sunlit sanctuary, someone had left a flyer on a pew. The heading read, “Practical areas to prepare to speak out to societal issues.” The fourth item advised Christians, “People don’t care that you are a Christian, a citizen, or even a female…you are the enemy! Note: This would not happen to Muslims, Atheists, or BLM groups.” Lamb later told me that “You are the enemy of their agenda” would have been more accurate.
Branle, the Ephrata resident whose barn was vandalized, understands how it feels to be seen as the enemy. When she emailed local police about veiled threats she had received, an officer responded: “Can you elaborate on specifically what you perceive the threat to be? This appears to be a statement of opinion, which is protected speech.” After reporting a few more incidents to police, “I just stopped talking to them,” she said. “It felt a lot like it wasn’t helping.”
Groups affiliated with NAR are also the quiet heartbeat of institutions serving Lancaster’s neediest residents. TNT Youth Ministry, an evangelical group, provides classroom volunteers and field trip chaperones, and it runs Bible studies in local public schools. Another NAR-adjacent ministry, REAL Life Community Services, boasts that it is the “only full-time social services department” in one town.
Community service is a typical mission of faith groups the world over. But for Christians who believe they are called to influence the government, the objective is not spurred by faith alone. Rachel Tabachnick, an extremism researcher who studies NAR, notes that many of its adherents believe that “the way that you’re going to heal society is that you’re going to eliminate many government functions.” The church, not the government, will decide “whether to feed you or house you or clothe you.”
While in Lancaster, I visited the Blessings of Hope food distribution center, a Walmart-size grocery store that collects surplus food from manufacturers and makes it available to food pantries throughout the region at a deep discount. Rows of shelves filling the cavernous warehouse were crammed with giant bags of nacho cheese, dried chow mein noodles, gefilte fish, and onion ring mix. An army of volunteers, mostly women, many wearing the traditional haube hair covering for married Mennonite women, unloaded pallets of boxes.
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David Lapp, a 42-year-old father of 12 and CEO of Blessings of Hope, was in charge. He grew up Amish and speaks with the German-inflected lilt typical of the plain communities in the region. In the early 2000s, he and his eight brothers began to read more about evangelical Christianity. By 2006, after the Amish officially excommunicated them for straying from the church’s teachings, they began to follow NAR leaders, including prophet Andrew Wommack, who believes there is “a demonic deception that is blinding” those who spoke out against Trump. They have helped convert several Amish people, introducing them to Wommack’s work. Several of the Lapp brothers founded Blessings of Hope in 2006, and it has become a massive operation spread across five warehouses, providing 50,000 meals a day. Their work has drawn national attention: Ivanka Trump toured the distribution center during the 2020 campaign.
ReplyDeleteLapp still dresses in the style of the Amish, with a handmade collared shirt, suspenders, and a bowl cut, because “we felt like God asked us to keep the traditional garb more as a bridge back to our people.” He sees his work as a divine calling. His organization’s closest competitor, he said, is the behemoth nonprofit Feeding America, which he described as “more of a government-run, government-funded organization” whose church participants “are not allowed to share the gospel when they’re giving out food.” Lapp, who believes in the Seven Mountain Mandate, sees publicly funded food pantries as a missed opportunity for the church. When government administers social services, he said, “they’re going to miss the hearts of the people.”
Back at Ephrata Community Church, I attended a Saturday evening service in the main building. Toddlers danced in the aisles as the worship band jammed. Some of the congregants had brought shofars in zippered carrying cases. After a somewhat banal sermon, I met executive pastor Jim Ehrman, who told me that he had only recently learned about NAR. Ephrata Community Church, he explained, had long had a “loose affiliation” with apostle Randy Clark, but “we don’t have a reference for it other than a group we care about was accused of being that.” I pressed further. Wasn’t his church about to host John Bevere, an NAR-affiliated pastor who has warned against the practice of tolerance?
“I had no idea he would have been associated with it,” Ehrman said. As far as the Seven Mountain teaching was concerned: “We do agree [the mountains] are there, but we’re very much like, ‘No, it’s who you are and how you carry yourself into those.’ There’s not some…mandate to take over.” When I told him about the prayer night, he seemed bemused. All the talk of spiritual warfare I had seen was “just the frame and the language they pick up,” he said.
Was Ehrman just being coy about his church’s connections to the New Apostolic Reformation, or was he genuinely naive to a movement that was so powerful and pervasive? In a sense, it didn’t matter. Another imperfect metaphor for the influence of NAR is climate change. Like it or not, it’s happening. The question for many pastors is how to steer their congregations through an increasingly chaotic and extreme religious landscape.
For Ehrman, the label was unimportant. What mattered was that armies of angels were indeed battling with the principalities of darkness. “There are literally unseen beings who are at odds with the work of God…on this earth,” he said. “And we believe that they are trying to influence things as well.”
Additional reporting by the Lancaster Examiner.
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Jason Yates promoted Christian values as CEO of My Faith Votes. He now faces child porn charges.
ReplyDeleteYates was charged with eight felony counts after a relative allegedly found a stash of child porn on a hard drive in his office.
by Bob Smietana, Religion News Service November 5, 2024
The former president of an evangelical get-out-the-vote nonprofit, which seeks to motivate Christian voters to promote family values and “biblical truth” in the public square, was charged Monday (Nov. 4) with eight counts of possessing child pornography.
Jason Yates, former CEO of My Faith Votes, was charged during a video court hearing in the District Court of McLeod County, Minnesota. State officials allege that from February 2023 to July 2024, Yates possessed a hard drive with digital pornographic images of minors under 14 years of age.
The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension began investigating the 55-year-old Yates at the end of July after a relative, identified in court documents as “Witness #2,” accidentally discovered a hard drive containing over 100 images of child porn in Yates’ office, according to a statement of probable cause filed in the case. That relative told a second relative, identified as “Witness #1,” who turned the hard drive over to law enforcement. According to court documents, the hard drive allegedly contains both still images and videos of pornography involving minors under 14.
During an interview on Sept. 13, Yates allegedly confirmed that the hard drive did not belong to Witness #2 but declined to give law enforcement a password for encrypted files on the hard drive.
“Defendant stated that he had a prior conviction, which had been expunged, related to CSAM/child pornography,” the complaint filed against Yates alleges.
An attorney for Yates declined to comment.
For much of its history, Jason Yates was the CEO and president of My Faith Votes. He was still listed as CEO on the group’s website as of Aug. 19 but his name and image were removed sometime after that date.
“In early August 2024, the My Faith Votes board of directors separated Jason Yates from My Faith Votes and board member Chris Sadler assumed the position of Acting CEO. Over the last three months Chris has been working with the dedicated My Faith Votes team to encourage millions of Christians to vote, pray and think biblically about this election in America,” a spokesperson for My Faith Votes told RNS in an email.
The group’s website blames Christians for failing to stand up against “secular progressives” — which the group faults for a host of social ills.
“As a result of apathy at the voting booth and in public life, we’ve suffered devastating moral decay, declining religious freedom, immoral national debt, and the erosion of traditional family values,” the group’s website reads.
In early July, a few weeks before the hard drive allegedly containing child porn was turned over to police, Yates wrote an op-ed for The Washington Times, urging Christians to fight “sexually deviant” messages aimed at children, mainly about LGTB issues.
“This infernal programming is being downloaded into our children, and it becomes far easier when it finds no resistance in our public square — when it is allowed to fill the void left by the absence of our faith,” he wrote.
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A biography of Jason Yates from April 2024 describes him as having left a corporate career in 2015 to become CEO of My Faith Votes. Along with promoting voting among Christians, he served on the board of several other ministries.
ReplyDeleteYates’ hearing on Monday occurred just a few hours before My Faith Votes held an online pre-election prayer event, urging listeners to vote for candidates who support Christian values.
Founded as the Vision Charitable Trust in 2007, My Faith Votes began spending millions starting in 2016 to motivate Christian votes. The group was founded by Sealy Yates, an influential Christian literary agent for best-selling authors such as Chuck Swindoll, John Maxwell, Mark Driscoll and Ben Carson — with Carson serving as an honorary chairman when the nonprofit began focusing on voting. Former presidential candidate turned conservative talk show host Mike Huckabee currently serves as the group’s honorary chair.
Sealy Yates did not respond to a request for comment. His relationship to Jason Yates is not clear.
Wired magazine recently described My Faith Votes as one of a group of nonprofits aimed at rallying support for former President Donald Trump through get-out-the-vote efforts. My Faith Votes is also one of the partners of the “Letter to the American Church” film based on a book by pro-Trump radio host Eric Metaxas, which claims America is being overtaken by secular forces.
Jason Yates expressed concern in an interview this past summer that evangelical Christians might sit out elections and said, as a result, My Faith Votes was asking Christians to sign a pledge to vote in every election.
“As a Christian, I commit to voting for candidates and policies that uphold the sanctity of life, the traditional family, religious liberty, and justice for all,” the pledge reads. “I believe that my biblical values should guide my choices at the ballot box, ensuring that our nation’s laws and leaders reflect God’s truth and righteousness.”
My Faith Votes also produced a series of videos, called “Think Biblically,” aimed at educating church small groups about social and political issues. Launched this past summer, the video series features speakers such as Albert “Al” Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary; Texas pastor and author Voddie Baucham; and former Planned Parenthood staffer-turned-anti-abortion advocate Abby Johnson.
“It’s time Christians let their faith guide their politics — aligning their views with God’s Word and boldly confronting today’s cultural challenges,” Yates said in a video announcing the series. “It’s critical that we reject apathy and think biblically about the issues in front of us, and this series is the ideal resource to help Christians navigate every political issue through the lens of the Word.”
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Christian Nationalists Are Reshaping Texas’s Public School Curricula
ReplyDeleteThe Texas State Board of Education will pay districts $60 a student to use a curriculum infused with Christian content.
By Eleanor J. Bader, Truthout December 15, 2024
When Texas elementary school students return to the classroom next fall, they may be studying from textbooks with messages about patriotism, American exceptionalism and the superiority of the free enterprise system. Some of these textbooks will likely also offer a hefty dose of Christian content, with Bible-infused lessons in their English and language arts classes.
“The flag evokes feelings of pride and respect, reminding us of the freedoms and rights that we cherish as Americans,” one lesson in a State Board of Education- approved textbook begins.
Another lesson, called “Tommy’s Big Dream,” introduces a third grader who hopes to become an entrepreneur. “His favorite class is social studies where he learns about free enterprise,” the textbook states. “This means people in America can open businesses.… Tommy admires local shopkeepers who sell books, toys and treats.… He wants to be like them, using creativity and hard work to succeed. One day, he shares his dream with his teacher who says, ‘In America, you can do anything you set your mind to.’ This makes Tommy feel proud to live in a place where dreams can come true with hard work.”
Other textbooks tout different messages.
Some minimize the foundational impact of slavery in the United States, while others celebrate the architectural splendor of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello plantation without mentioning that enslaved people built it. Similarly, a state-sanctioned 5th-grade textbook cites Abraham Lincoln’s “deep Christian faith” and credits Jim Crow laws with encouraging the development of numerous Black businesses.
Others focus on creationism.
And still others ignore climate change, environmental degradation and the many social movements that shaped the 20th and early 21st centuries.
All told, the approved textbooks include a great deal of questionable content and represents the fruit of a six-and-a-half-decade campaign to change what public school students are taught in Texas and beyond.
The Long Fight for Education Censorship
The story begins in 1961, when Mel and Norma Gabler, Christian fundamentalists from Longview, Texas, created Educational Research Analysts (ERA) to review every textbook used in Texas public schools. The couple were well-versed in the power of organizing and understood that because Texas was — and still is — the second-largest textbook purchaser in the U.S., it had clout. Their initial goals? Making sure that textbooks promoted the teaching of creationism over evolution and showcased the superiority of free enterprise and Christian morality. They also pushed for abstinence-only sex education classes and sought to eradicate what they saw as “liberal bias” in education. The group is now run by Neal and Judy Frey, evangelicals who’ve extended ERA’s agenda to include opposition to marriage equality and trans rights.
Slowly but surely, their dogged work has paid off. According to the National Center for Science Education, the Gablers’ first big victory came in 1982, when the Texas State Textbook Committee rejected a top-rated world geography book called Land and People because it said that “biologists believe that human beings, as members of the animal kingdom, have adjusted to their environment through biological adaptation.” Mention of both the Big Bang Theory and the fact that the earth is millions of years old were additional nails in Land and People’s coffin, and the Gablers testified to the committee that “mammals were created, not developed.”
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This ball has continued to roll. Zeph Capo, president of the Texas chapter of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and a former middle and high school biology teacher, told Truthout that some school districts have “removed all mention of environmental change from the curriculum, barring teachers from discussing it even if it is in the news or is being directly experienced.”
ReplyDeleteIn fact, says Kasey Meehan, director of PEN America’s Freedom to Read Project, in May 2024 the Cypress Fairbanks Independent School District in Houston — the third-largest district in the state — removed 13 “controversial” chapters from five science textbooks that covered vaccines, epidemics and climate change.
“This speaks to the narrow ideological viewpoint that is attempting to reshape public education in Texas and throughout the country,” Meehan told Truthout. “For the most part book publishers have mobilized in defense of literature and against book bans more generally, but textbook companies have not publicly reacted to content shifts.”
Perhaps this is because the American Association of Publishers estimates that the textbook industry brings approximately $9 billion a year into the coffers of such industry giants as Cengage Learning, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw Hill, Pearson and Scholastic.
Legislative Changes Bolster Content Changes
A variety of restrictive measures, passed by the Texas legislature, have reinforced these omissions and distortions of fact.
In 2010, for example, the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) standards developed by the State Board of Education mandated that social studies classes inform students that Moses and King Solomon inspired U.S. democracy; that segregated schools did not always lead to inferior instruction for Black children; and that the framers of the Constitution were influenced by ideas generated during the Protestant reformation regarding individual responsibility, freedom to worship and self-governance.
A decade later, in December 2021, the Texas statehouse passed Senate Bill 3. That bill banned the teaching of the 1619 Project (a history of slavery’s impact on the U.S. created by Nikole Hannah-Jones and The New York Times) and critical race theory, and required instruction on American exceptionalism, patriotism, free markets and entrepreneurship in all Texas schools. Then, HB 900, the Restricting Explicit and Adult Designated Educational Resources Act — now partially enjoined — was passed to restrict “sexually explicit” materials from being stocked by school libraries or sold to school districts. It also required students who want to read books deemed “sexually relevant” to get parental permission.
In November 2024, the state board went one further, voting to approve a Bible-infused curriculum for the state’s 2.3 million kindergarten to 5th grade students. Included are lessons about the golden rule and Jesus’s sermon on the mount. The plan was developed by a state-created entity called Bluebonnet Learning, which has deep ties to the evangelical community.
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According to the education news outlet The74million.org, the Bluebonnet curriculum utilizes materials developed by eSpired, a company co-founded by Christian nationalist and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, Trump’s nominee to become ambassador to Israel. A section on the golden rule, for one, was “lifted wholesale from the covers of the company’s books,” The74Million reports. (Geared mostly to Christian homeschoolers, eSpired’s other titles include The Kid’s Guide to Free Speech and Cancel Culture and The Kid’s Guide to Fighting Socialism, both $21.90.)
ReplyDeleteThe upshot, Houston TV station KPRL2 noted, is that Christian references appear three times in kindergarten curricula, four times in first grade and 17 times in grade two.
The state board of education has stressed that local school districts do not have to use this curriculum. Nonetheless, those that opt in will receive an extra $60 per student. This “incentive,” says Alejandra Lopez, president of the San Antonio Alliance of Teachers and Support Personnel, Local 67, “puts districts in a difficult position, forcing them to ask themselves if $60 per student is worth blurring the lines between church and state.”
It may be a tough call.
Texas currently spends $9,871 a year on each student enrolled in Texas public schools, an amount that has remained stagnant since 2019; this is far below the $12,612 national per pupil average. Moreover, while a small segment of Texas teachers and school staff are organized, public workers in the Lone Star State are barred from bargaining collectively.
Clay Robison, a spokesperson for the Texas State Teachers Association, an affiliate of the National Education Association, says that this means that while the union can advocate for policies it supports, its 68,000 members are limited in the scope of what they can do.
Robison told Truthout that 60 percent of the 5 million kids enrolled in Texas public schools are economically disadvantaged. “They do not respond well to books that say hard work will lead to success since their experience often tells them something different. They need to learn the truth, which is why we believe teachers should be able to teach history lessons that include the negative parts.”
Similarly, Capo of the AFT told Truthout that teachers are becoming increasingly disheartened by the state’s indoctrination of kids. “We have a code of ethics for educators that says that we will not provide preferential treatment to any group of students. We’re now asking ourselves if the curriculum created by Bluebonnet runs afoul of this by prioritizing Christian students over Jewish, Muslim or nonreligious ones. We’re working to see if this will give us leverage.”
Advocates and educators are using other tactics to push back against the curricular changes as well.
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Caro Achar, engagement coordinator at the ACLU of Texas, acknowledges that unions are facing an uphill battle but adds that there is an “active network of people who are fighting for the right to speak out and defend the freedom to learn.” The most important thing for advocates of free speech and religious freedom to do right now, Achar says, is testify at local school board meetings and make their opposition to adoption of the curriculum known before it takes effect next fall. “Parents have the right to support their kids in learning to think critically and study history in an inclusive classroom,” she said. “Students have the right to learn the truth. The $60 per head bounty is a big temptation for districts, but they have to resist. We’re pointing out that losing the ability to think critically will cost more than $60 per student in the long run. Kids who are half-educated cannot thrive.”
ReplyDeleteThey also fail to thrive when they feel their identities are under attack.
Zoe Fasolo, a therapist whose practice includes many adolescents who identify as trans, nonbinary or queer, told Truthout that students can be adversely impacted by discussion of curricular changes. Although she is not based in Texas, she said that, “The number one risk for these kids is suicide, and it is often difficult to keep them safe. People are scared about losing access to hormone replacements once Trump takes office. It’s scary and I have no reassuring words. Even worse, when kids are working hard and still struggling, they conclude that they must be doing something wrong if they are not like little Tommy. They get demoralized.”
Teachers Try to Mediate But Often Lack the Resources to Help
Many teachers and school workers, of course, try to be there for their students — but union activists report that many of their colleagues are fearful of reprisals. Some self-censor, knowing that they are walking a hard to navigate line.
“Our legislature meets every two years,” Alejandra Lopez of the San Antonio Alliance of Teachers and Support Personnel told Truthout. During the next session, which begins in January, she expects one of the biggest issues will be universal school vouchers, a benefit that is purportedly meant to give every parent the financial support to send their kids to parochial or private schools but which instead undermines public education. “This is the war Gov. Greg Abbott has been fighting,” she says. “We’re concerned that there may be some trading, getting lawmakers to vote for vouchers in exchange for a per pupil increase in state funding for those who remain in the public schools.”
Unsurprisingly, this is not what most parents want. Ailen Arreaza, director of the national advocacy group Parents Together, told Truthout that, “What we consistently hear from parents is that they want safe, fully funded schools with the resources they need to give their children a clear pathway to work or college when they graduate. They trust teachers and want their kids to be able to make a good life for themselves however they define that. They know that if only one worldview is presented in class, it makes the schools feel unsafe for students who are not part of that group. No one we work with is worried about the lack of Biblical instruction in their child’s classroom.”
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