brucewilson
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Obama is like Hitler ; his healthcare reform legislation includes a provision to create an army of Marxist brownshirt thugs ; the hour is late, the church now faces what German churches faced, with the rise of the Nazis, in the 1930s - we must fight now, or never ; taxpayers are the Jews for Obama's ovens ; stop Obama, or face another Holocaust.
At an October 30, 2012 pastors rally in Tampa, Florida, with the election only days away, prominent Texas Southern Baptist megachurch pastor Robert Jeffress, who in 2011 attacked Mormonism (Mitt Romney's faith) as a cult, informed his audience that failing to stop President Barack Obama from gaining a 2nd term in office would be like failing to stop Hitler and could lead to another Holocaust.
The 2012 election may pivot on evangelical turnout, and now that the IRS has ceased enforcing its rule that prohibits tax deductible religious nonprofits such as churches from making political endorsements, evangelical leaders are free to openly warn their flocks that a horrific fate awaits unless they vote for Mitt Romney in the 2012 election. Typically dismissed by the left as mere lunatic hyperbole, there's a vast, dark ideological underside to such warnings.
From the far-right fever swamps of the Internet, to the leadership of the potentially revolutionary Christian right, to the heights of elite evangelicalism, at the Fellowship-sponsored yearly National Prayer Breakfast (attended by U.S. presidents since Eisenhower), conservative evangelicals paint a picture of America on the verge of full-blown, left-wing fascism.
Their evidence ? - the Obama Administration's health care reform efforts, including an HHS rule that some religious charities must offer birth control in their healthcare plans. Plus the existence of legalized abortion, and the spread of legal same-sex marriage.
While that might sound insane to American unfamiliar with such culture war tropes, these claims make eminent sense to millions of conservative evangelicals.
Pastor Jeffress' warning, of a looming 2nd Holocaust, was not an aberration - he was merely reinforcing a narrative that has been told to millions of evangelical Christians: from megachurch pulpits, from the pulpit of the Glenn Beck Show, via evangelical broadcast networks, through secular rightwing books and magazine articles, by Internet conspiracy theories.
As I wrote in an early 2010 article published by Zeek, an imprint of the Jewish Daily Forward,
"Who killed Europe's Jews? Millions on the American evangelical right have grown up believing the culprits were liberals and leftists, homosexuals, evolutionists and atheists, occult worshipers and even Jews themselves. "
While many observers have noted that American culture has split into culturally antagonistic factions, few have noted the extent to which these factions hold wildly conflicting views of reality.
This goes beyond the mere fact that more registered Republicans believe in the possibility of demon possession (68%) than believe that the Earth's climate is warming (48%).
Books like Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism, pseudo-documentaries like MAAFA 21, and of course inflammatory TV and radio monologs Glenn Beck fit into a preexisting uber-narrative in which Hitler and the Brownshirts never cracked the skulls of communists and leftists in Germany's streets because the Nazis were communists, or socialists at least, and gay as well; and all the horrors of World War Two, especially the Holocaust, were natural outgrowths of secular, Darwin-inspired eugenicist thinking. This grand narrative also presents both legal abortion and civil rights for homosexuals as signs of incipient fascism.
Here are some examples of how these themes are deployed :
-- New Apostolic Reformation prophets such as The Call cofounder Lou Engle warn that legal abortion has caused the holocaust of our time and declare that the death of "fifty million little babies" will require repayment in blood. Before late-term abortionist George Tiller's assassination, Engle compared Tiller to an Auschwitz death camp worker.
-- Evangelical propagandist Scott Lively, author of The Pink Swastika, warns Christians from America, to Africa, to Eastern Europe and Russia that Hitler and his top Nazis were gay, and that homosexuals are, by nature, sociopaths. Lively's ideas have been cited as a key inspiration for Uganda's so-called "kill the gays" bill that has loomed before Uganda's parliament since late 2009.
-- Texas megachurch pastor John Hagee broadcasts to the world that Jewish Rothschild bankers based in Europe control America through the Federal Reserve and are scheming to bankrupt the common man, and declares that Hitler was sent by God, to chase Europe's Jews toward Palestine, the only home God even intended for the Jewish people according to Hagee.
-- Demons under Illuminati sway have have infiltrated liberal churches, says a military pastor whose overseer controlled six to seven percent of active duty pastors in the U.S. military and who toured America in the 1990s promoting anti-government conspiracy theories, broadcast out over TV and radio networks that could in theory reach 10% or so of Americans, in which Bill Clinton was ready to sign the U.S. over to UN control, after which Chinese, German, and UN troops would rampage out from their secret lairs in national parks, to rape, pillage, and round up good Christian citizens, packing them into boxcars en route to secret, razor wire-ringed concentration camps. Behind the plot ? Rothschilds and other Jewish banking families, the Illuminati, and the antichrist.
Of course, conspiracy narratives are anything but new to American politics - in the 1800 presidential election, New England press and Christian pastors tarred Thomas Jefferson as an infiltrator linked to a dark conspiracy of Illuminati and Freemasons that would bring the horrors of the French Revolution to America. In the 1960s, anticommunist conspiracy theories of the John Birch Society permeated the U.S. far-right.
If anything distinguishes this new evangelical conspiracy oeuvre, it is in the supple, sophisticated quality of its narratives, that can be used at will to selectively attack, scapegoat and demonize targeted populations and organizations - Muslims and liberal Jews, gays, abortionists, liberal Christians, the Federal Reserve and the federal government, the National Park system -- all of which are reduced to minions, witting or not, of a world banker/Illuminati conspiracy that will soon be controlled by an antichrist figure who will kill up to 1/3 of the Earth's population and will be, according to pastor Hagee, homosexual and "at least partially Jewish".
The intended victims of this vast apocalyptic end-time conspiracy will be, of course, good Christians who must, it goes without saying, arm and organize themselves and be ready, at a moment's notice, to fight back. As I wrote in my Zeek story,
"In 1990 [Pat] Robertson, responding to criticism from the Miami Herald for his involvement in the Florida governor's race, vented "Do you also have a ghetto chosen to herd the pro-life Catholics and evangelicals into ? Have you designed the appropriate yellow patch that Christians should wear... ?"[...]
Robertson's views were no aberration. A video version of the Left Behind series narrative first released in 2001 by John Hagee Ministries, titled "Vanished - In the twinkling of an eye," portrays born-again Christians suffering their own "Kristallnacht" in which gays, Jews, and Catholics, led by the Antichrist, attack born-again Christians and set their churches ablaze. One burning church is identified as being in Berlin."
In the 1990s, such prophetic warnings helped give rise to the militia movement. But, largely unnoticed even by acknowledged experts who study the growth of the militant far right, starting in the late 1980s evangelicals, some with relatively high-level military backgrounds, began crisscrossing America warning of a looming, eliminationist dictatorship. Their tales were as shocking as they were unprovable - twenty thousand Chinese boxcars, fitted out with shackles and guillotines, had arrived at a West Coast port, ready for the great round up. Trust us, these former military evangelicals told their audience, We've seen it with our own eyes.
Their warnings went out via videocassettes and tapes, by fax machine and small-scale radio and television broadcast networks, sometimes even by growing evangelical broadcast networks too. Then, the rise of the Internet made the project far easier.
Former Undersecretary of Defense William Boykin was only the latest in a two and a half decade long lineage, when he stated, in a video promoted by the New Apostolic Reformation group The Oak Initiative, "Remember Hitler had the brown shirts and in the night of the long knives even Hitler got scared of the brown shirts and killed thousands of them...", then claimed that Obama's healthcare legislation was,
"laying the groundwork for a constabulary force that will control the population in America. You need to understand that this is happening in America and its fits the model that has been used when societies move to Marxism."
Why are so many conservative evangelicals hostile to the federal government ? One possible reason is the cumulative impact of such conspiracy theory narratives, which function like a CIA style infowar destabilization campaign, but directed against the United States government itself.
Fast forward to the 2012 election:
In March 2012, rising evangelical conservative Eric Metaxas, former Veggie Tales writer and author of a new bestselling biography of Hitler opponent and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, warned a select, elite audience of Opus Dei Catholics, at a Washington, D.C. Catholic bookstore, that Christian churches are now facing a threat similar to that confronted by churches during the rise of Hitler and declared,
"If we don't fight now, if we don't really use all our bullets now, we will have no fight five years from now. It'll be over. This it. We've got to die on this hill."
Then in April 2012, Illinois Catholic Bishop Daniel Jenky delivered a sermon during mass warning that President Barack Obama "seems intent on following a similar path" as Stalin and Hitler. Stated Bishop Jenky,
"Hitler and Stalin, at their better moments, would just barely tolerate some churches remaining open, but would not tolerate any competition with the state in education, social services, and health care.In clear violation of our First Amendment rights, Barack Obama - with his radical, pro abortion and extreme secularist agenda, now seems intent on following a similar path."
Bishop Jenky seemed unaware that, while Stalin's Soviet Union was officially atheist, Hitler's Germany was very far from secular.
The rise to power of the Nazis was aided early on by the Duetsche Cristen movement, whose churches were known to display the Nazi swastika alongside the Christian cross, and in his book Mein Kampf, Hitler declared that "I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord..." Most of the top Nazi leaders both publicly and privately professed Christian belief. Hitler's Third Reich even sponsored an ambitious revision the New Testament of the Bible which, rewrote and expanded the original Ten Commandments, to twelve, and recast Jesus as a warrior.
These three incidents, dire warnings from Jeffress, Metaxas, and Jenky, were not anomalies but fit into a widespread pattern in which, since the inauguration of President Obama in early 2009, prominent evangelical conservatives have accused the Obama Administration of planning to launch a full-blown fascist dictatorship.
To be sure, liberals and Democrats have been known to play the "Hitler card", as this list on the conservative Free Republic website lays out.
But, whereas on the aforementioned list of offending Bush/Hitler statements from liberals I could not find any which included the word "Holocaust", amidst the current din of Obama/Hitler talk on the right Obama/Hitler/Holocaust tropes are many - And Metaxas, Jenky, and Jeffress are anything but peripheral.
Indeed, Eric Metaxas - who appears to have been groomed to step into the oversized shoes of the late Charles Colson - moves in high enough circles to have recently crossed swords with President Barack Obama, at the 2012 National Prayer Breakfast, during which Metaxas gave a speech, prior to Obama's, in which he walked right up to the edge of the Nazi comparison that he would soon make openly, by rhetorically linking Nazism and abortion, and asking his elite prayer breakfast audience (with president Obama sitting only a few feet away), "You think you're better than the Germans of that [Nazi] era? You're not. Whom do we say is not fully human today?"
Metaxas' less-than genteel speech at the National Prayer Breakfast was especially risque for the fact that Doug Coe, longtime head of The Fellowship, the global evangelical network that sponsors the elite yearly prayer breakfast event and has been tied to Uganda's so-called "kill the gays bill", has a history of praising the zealous, bloodthirsty dedication of the followers of Hitler, Lenin, and Mao - a penchant also shared by Fellowship member Rick Warren.
In all fairness, there are legitimate reasons to challenge the Obama Administration: for its authoritarianism, secrecy, and shaky human rights record, as left/liberal critics such as Glenn Greenwald and Matt Stoller have done.
But conservative Christians in the Metaxas/Jenky/Jeffress mold seem disinterested in making common cause with the left on those issues, and instead choose to peg the alleged creeping Nazification they warn about on what they define as "religious liberty" issues (which somehow fail to include concern over government-funded religious discrimination, via the Faith Based Initiative, against Jews, gays, and non-Christians), as well as on legalized abortion and the spread of legalized same-sex marriage.
It's noteworthy that with these chosen issues, the expansion of the religious liberty of evangelical Christians and organizations seems to come at the expense of the civil liberties of other Americans. In the case of abortion and same-sex marriage, the "religious liberty" agenda would use the power of the state to circumscribe the rights of women and LBGT couples, to terminate pregnancies and to marry their chosen mates: not libertarian at all.
Argues libertarian author James Veverka, during the 20th Century social conservatism, whether overtly Christian or not, has served as a coercive tool of repressive states from across the political spectrum, from left to the right. Writes Veverka,
"Uncomfortable as it makes people to compare religion with dictatorships, the most dangerous dictatorships of the 20th century were also radically socially conservative in regards to family values and sexuality...Like religious conservatives throughout history and indeed, in the present, they used the state as a coercive tool to force their version of a conscience upon the rest of people... This is not to say fundamentalists and other religious extremists are Nazis or Stalinists, but that they hold very similar views on these 'family values' and sexuality subjects and employ similar language in their positions and propaganda."
While evangelical intellectuals such as Eric Metaxas frame the legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in terms of threats to religious liberty, in 2006 noted conservative evangelical scholar David P. Gushee gave a speech in which he warned of a very different sort of threat.
At the September 2006 conference Dietrich Bonhoeffer for Our Times: Jewish and Christian Perspectives, cosponsored by the Center for Christian-Jewish Learning at Boston College, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Hebrew College, and Andover-Newton Theological School, David P. Gushee told his audience,
"Like all Germans, and many all around the world, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was deeply troubled by World War I and the cultural and political crisis that afflicted his nation after the war. And yet he never demonstrated any susceptibility to what Fritz Stern called "the politics of cultural despair." I think it was because he believed in the interpretation of history offered by biblical revelation, which though realistic about human nature and history is never a counsel of despair.It was this cultural despair--a toxic brew of reaction against secularism, anger related to the loss of World War I, distress over cultural disorientation and confusion, fears about the future of Germany, hatred of the victorious powers and of those who supposedly stabbed Germany in the back, and of course the search for scapegoats (mainly the Jews)--that motivated many Germans to adopt a reactionary, authoritarian, and nationalistic ethic that fueled their support for Hitler's rise to power. A broadly appealing narrative of national decline (or conspiratorial betrayal) was met by Hitler's narrative of national revenge leading to utopian unity in the Fuhrer-State.
Conservative American evangelicals in recent decades have been deeply attracted to a parallel narrative of cultural despair. Normally the story begins with the rise of secularism in the 1960s, the abandonment of prayer in schools, and the Roe decision, all leading to an apocalyptic decline of American culture that must be arrested soon, before it is too late and "God withdraws his blessing" from America. While very few conservative evangelicals come into the vicinity of Hitler in hatefulness, elements similar to that kind of conservative-reactionary-nationalist narrative can be found in some Christian right-rhetoric: anger at those who are causing American moral decline, fear about the future, hatred of the "secularists" now preeminent in American life, and the search for scapegoats. The solution on offer--a return to a strong Christian America through determined political action--also has its parallels with the era under consideration.
It is in part my own loyalty to Bonhoeffer's example that has led me to a rejection of the toxic politics of cultural despair and commitment to a hopeful vision of Christian cultural engagement in light of the sure advance of God's kingdom."
The prospect of Christian pastors demonizing targeted minorities from their pulpits, amidst the rise of palingenetic ultranationalist narratives calling for national renewal and rebirth, has a dark history.
The rise of Hitler and the Nazis paralleled the rise of a popular conspiratorial, accusatory German cultural narrative which claimed the nation was in decline and in moral free-fall. The narrative blamed secularism and alleged subversive elements in society, notably Jews.
The closely related "Dolchstoßlegende," the "stab in the back" myth, blamed the German loss in World War One on a Jewish conspiracy and related narratives blamed Jews as well for crime, economic hardship and alleged immorality.
As I explained in my short essay "American Dolchstoss", written to accompany a ten-minute mini-documentary, on pastor John Hagee's promotion of a contemporary version of the Dolchstoßlegende,
In the buildup towards World War Two, Hitler and his Nazis used the pretexts of alleged threats from internal and external foes to launch vicious attacks on Jews, on gays, on communists and socialists, then on liberals. The Nazis were not in the majority initially, far from it, but they knew human mass psychology, they knew the power of threats and intimidation to silence possible opposition to the gathering Reich.Few in the American Jewish community, or the Israeli Jewish community, grasp the magnitude of the anti-Jewish hatred that has been stoked, from American pulpits and American televangelist broadcast networks, literally for decades. The propaganda has been slightly coded but in the end not very subtle. Rather than directly vilify Jews, Christian fundamentalist preachers and leaders have for decades vilified groups and terms that traditionally, for better or worse, have been associated with Jews.
Christian fundamentalists have inveighed against Hollywood and "liberal media," they have singled out New York City as some purported, uniquely horrible "moral cesspool." They have railed against traditional Jewish occupational pursuits, such as law, media and journalism, blaming those for many of the evils they claim beset American society.
[...]
But anti-Jewish conspiracy theories involving evil cabals of Illuminati, Masons or Rothschilds, alleging that Jews control the World and are to be blamed for all manner of societal and national misfortune -- because they [Jews] are of, allied with and intimately related to the Devil -- are to be found nowhere in the Bible.
"New World Order" and "Protocols of The [Learned] Elders of Zion" styles of conspiricism have become interwoven in the American cultural fabric and especially on the Christian right and Pastor John Hagee, along with other prominent televangelists, routinely broadcast such ideas to millions around the globe.
Running again for a seat in the Massachusetts State Senate, Chelmsford, MA Republican Sandi Martinez has aired, according to the Lowell Sun and the Boston Globe, a number of unusual beliefs on the local Chelmsford cable access TV show she once hosted, including the view that 1980s children's shows such as "The Smurfs" and "The Care Bears" can lure children into witchcraft - which, according to candidate Martinez, is promoted in public schools. Martinez has also claimed Christianity can turn gays straight.
According to an October 19, 2010 Boston Globe story,
"On her cable access show in 2004, Martinez warned that trick-or-treating, Harry Potter books, and the “new age images” presented in 1980s-era programming such as “The Smurfs” and “The Care Bears” could destigmatize the occult and leave children vulnerable to the lure of witchcraft.
"To me, that’s what the Harry Potter thing is doing, only in a much broader scale than the Smurfs ever did,” she said. “The children are going to remember those feelings that they had watching the movies and reading the books, and they’re going to be prime targets." "
An October 31, 2012 Lowell Sun story reported that in 2004, on her cable access show, Martinez also claimed that Christianity could change the sexual orientation of homosexuals, a practice ridiculed by LGBT rights nonprofit Truth Wins Out head Wayne Besen as "pray away the gay".
According to the Lowell Sun story,
"In one segment of the show, called "Speak Out!", Martinez seems to imply homosexuals have empty and meaningless lives, and protests how Christmas has been taken out of schools along with other religious symbols, but witchcraft has been introduced into classrooms.
Martinez, a Chelmsford Republican in her fourth campaign for Senate, also compares those who've been "saved" out of homosexuality to those who've come out from satanism, and how they tell their stories of what goes on in those communities.
"We've seen former homosexuals come out, who've been saved out of the lifestyle, who will tell you it was the love of God, that their lives were sad and empty and meaningless," she said"
Martinez' statements on public schools raise another issue. As noted in a 2003 report from the liberal advocacy group People For The American Way titled "The Voucher Veneer: The Deeper Agenda to Privatize Public Education", while Sandi Martinez was serving as Massachusetts state director of the evangelical Christian group Concerned Women For America, she supported the Alliance for the Separation of School and State, by signing the group's statement which declares, "I proclaim publicly that I favor ending government involvement in education."
A search of the Internet Archive's cached website pages shows Martinez' name appearing on the group's statement from the year its website was launched, in 2006.
While Martinez has been associated with the Tea Party, her views suggest a stronger affiliation - with far-right charismatic evangelical Christianity.
A commonly view, that the Tea Party is secular, was refuted by a 2010 survey from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) which showed that "Nearly half (47 percent) of Americans who identify with the Tea Party movement also identify as a part of the religious right or Christian conservative movement".
A later, 2011 PRRI survey demonstrated an even stronger religious right / Tea Party overlap: "three-quarters (75 percent) of those who identify with the Tea Party movement describe themselves as "a Christian conservative." "
But the meaning of "Christian conservative" appears to be changing.
Republican Martinez' views on witchcraft, satanism, and the occult have become widespread in charismatic evangelical Christianity that, in turn, has become the dominant tendency in today's GOP, as demonstrated by a new Public Policy Polling survey that shows 68% of Republican voters believe that it is "possible for people to become possessed by demons".
By contrast, a 2012 Pew Research Center survey showed that only 48% of Republicans believe there is evidence that the Earth's atmosphere is warming (climate change) and a miniscule 18% percent of likely Romney voters believe that human activity is causing that warming.
Presidential candidate Mitt Romney has repeatedly waffled on the issue of climate change, and Republican moderates have accused the GOP majority of rejecting scientific research on climate change.
Among leaders in the charismatic Christian tendency coming to dominate the GOP, and which may have inspired numerous recent inflammatory statements from Republican candidates concerning rape and reproductive rights, it is a widely-held view that climate change can be caused by same-sex marriage and homosexuality, declining marriage rates, and the lack of Bible study in public schools.
Witchcraft is another major concern among charismatic evangelicals, whose Christian tendency is increasingly dominated by the movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), whose prophets claim to be able to receive extra-biblical revelation directly from God.
A September 2012 NAR-dominated rally, featuring New Apostolic Reformation prophets Cindy Jacobs and Lou Engle, was endorsed and promoted by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. Engle has been accused of backing Uganda's notorious "kill the gays" bill, and Jacobs has claimed that flocks of blackbirds fell dead from the sky, cursed by God's wrath, when President Barack Obama announced his decision to rescind the military's "Don't ask/Don't Tell" policy on LGBT citizens in the military.
In an October 3, 2011 interview with NPR's Terry Gross, on her Fresh Air WHYY radio show, intellectual godfather of the NAR C. Peter Wagner confirmed to Gross that Sarah Palin was blessed and anointed by one of his NAR colleagues, Kenyan evangelist Thomas Muthee, who called upon God to protect Palin from "every spirit of witchcraft", in a ceremony held at Palin's long-time Alaska church the Wasilla Assembly of God.
Prior to blessing Palin, Muthee made a speech in which he called upon Christian believers to "infiltrate" and occupy the "Seven Mountains", major sectors of society that include government, business, education, media, arts and entertainment, religion, and the family.
In his interview with Terry Gross, C. Peter Wagner claimed that the 1990s economic downturn in Japan was caused by an alleged sexual tryst between the Japanese emperor and a "sky goddess" who, claimed Wagner, might have been a succubus. Wagner's theory has been endorsed by former International Foursquare Gospel denomination president Jack Hayford, who gave the closing prayer at the 54th Inaugural Prayer Service for President George W. Bush, in 2001, at the Washington National Cathedral.
On September 3, 2012, independent Massachusetts U.S. Senator Scott Brown, running for re-election against Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren, joined candidate Sandi Martinez at a political rally held in Tewksbury, MA.
"Incest is so rare, I mean it’s so rare. But the rape thing, you know, I know a woman who was raped and kept the child, gave it up for adoption and doesn’t regret it. In fact, she’s a big pro-life proponent. But, on the rape thing it’s like, how does putting more violence onto a woman’s body and taking the life of an innocent child that’s a consequence of this crime, how does that make it better?" --Republican Congressional candidate John Koster (WA), 10/28/12
Now that candidate John Koster and Newt Gingrich have each so graciously pitched in, with just a few more of these cringeworthy Republican rape statements and there will be enough for a 4-column version of the Republican Rape Advisory Chart. But until then, the new 3-column chart will have to suffice (here's where the chart originated.)
Rape Tourettes now afflicts large swaths of the GOP, whose politicians apparently can't help themselves from blurting out jaw-droppingly insensitive statements, like Koster's, which is begging for savage parody (consider the song "Wild Thing", by Eric Burdon and The Animals...)
It's fair to say that just about every woman in America has herself been raped or knows someone who has been raped. That this is not foremost in the minds of leading members of today's GOP, as they continue to dig themselves in deeper by emitting yet more obtuse misogynistic verbal ejaculations, in clumsy attempts to tamp down the festering scandal, is telling.
On the upside, this is helping to surface a long-overdue national conversation, as victims of rape come out publicly and tell their stories.
Like a Rhode Island-sized iceberg breaking off Antarctica as the atmosphere warms, Republican sensibilities seem to have sheared off from the American mainstream:
Seminal rape gaffes from Republican candidates for Senate Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock were hardly the beginning - from Rush Limbaugh's radio jihad against Sandra Fluke, in which he called the college student a "slut" for arguing that health care providers should cover birth control, to the early 2012 Republican-dominated all-male Congressional panel on birth control, the entire election year seems to have been a prolonged GOP insult to slightly over 1/2 of America - we don't care what you think (or feel.) Just shut up and get over it.
But thanks to the new, "improved" three-column Republican Rape Advisory Chart, that's unlikely to happen anytime soon (note - for readers who want access to text-based versions of the statements featured in the chart, see the Stephen Colbert-inspired website http://www.dayswithoutagoprapemention.com/.)
As a parting note, I'd add this - Republican politicians whose statements are featured in the Republican Rape Advisory Chart are not saying such things for political gain. They are honestly stating their views - on abortion, rape, birth control, and women's rights - which are overwhelmingly based in their religious beliefs.
A now well-entrenched narrative held widely on the American left and in the secular mainstream claims that foot soldiers of the religious right are cynically manipulated by non-religious string-pullers in the GOP, who promise to deliver on culture war issues but never do. But most of the politicians featured on the Republican Rape Advisory Chart are in the religious right. They are true believers.
While the left berates the Fox News-addled right for the factually-challenged nature of its political narratives, the left holds its own conveniently fact-free narrative, in which the religious right has not gobbled up the once-secular Republican Party, a party that once staunchly supported women's rights, including legalized abortion and even the Equal Rights Amendment.
However, What's the Matter With Kansas-style narratives, which claim Republicans manipulate the religious right and never deliver on culture war issues, cannot accommodate the uncomfortable fact that the takeover began decades ago:
In 1986, when the well-disciplined cadres of Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition were taking over state-level Republican Party structures, a widely distributed memo from Pat Robertson to his troops read,
"How to Participate in a Political Party
Rule the world for God.
Give the impression that you are there to work for the party, not push an ideology.
Hide your strength.
Don't flaunt your Christianity.
Christians need to take leadership positions. Party officers control political parties and so it is very important that mature Christians have a majority of leadership positions, God willing."
By 2000, according to a survey sponsored and published in 2002 by Campaigns and Elections, the religious right had gained "strong" influence in 18 Republican state party structures and "moderate" influence in 26 others. As the last few years have demonstrated, that influence has only continued to grow.
Many pundits have been led astray by the rise of the Tea Party movement, and have come to believe that the Koch brothers-backed movement is secular. That is not true, according to a survey from the Public Religion Research Institute, released in October 2010, which showed that over 80% of Tea Party members surveyed considered themselves Christian and 57% considered themselves part of the Christian conservative movement.
In short, there's a reason the 2012 Republican Party platform opposes legalized abortion even in cases of rape and incest. Republican Rape Tourettes Syndrome is only an outgrowth of that party position, which in turn reflects the now-almost complete dominance of the religious right over the political party of Lincoln, Eisenhower, and Teddy Roosevelt which once upon a time, but not really so long ago or far away, in the days of Barry Goldwater, supported a woman's right to choose.
No longer.
"The victims were humiliated, threatened, and beaten; exposed to extreme cold, to heat and the sun until they became dehydrated; to thirst, hunger, sleep deprivation; they were submerged in water mixed with sewage to the point of asphyxiation; electric shocks were applied to the most sensitive parts of their bodies; they were sexually humiliated, if not raped by men and animals, or forced to witness the rape and torture of their loved ones." -- From the Valech Commission Report, on torture under the regime of Augusto PinochetWhile the Republican Party and its wealthy plutocrat backers have been accused of waging an elitist virtual war against the American majority, both Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have financial and ideological ties to rich Latin American elites who have waged real wars against average citizens in their countries. The anti-democratic ethos of today's GOP, displayed in Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's apparent contempt for 47% of U.S. citizens, is reflected in the origins of Mitt Romney's private equity firm Bain Capital, which was founded with money from Central American financiers linked to government-backed death squads in El Salvador. Paul Ryan's budgetary ideas have a similarly dark origin, in the paradigmatic case of what author Naomi Klein has dubbed "The Shock Doctrine". In August 2012, Republican political consultant Roger Stone made the accusation that the billionaire libertarian Koch Brothers had bought Mitt Romney's selection of Paul Ryan as a running mate, by offering to kick in $100 million more for "independent expenditures" in the 2012 presidential election. While the charge may never be substantiated, Paul Ryan is one of the few elected officials allowed into the inner sanctum of the Koch brothers and their fellow libertarian big money donor circle. It is also the case that Paul Ryan's Social Security privatization ideas closely track Koch Brother schemes promoted from the Koch-funded libertarian Cato Institute since 1980, over three decades ago - before Ryan had even hit puberty. Cato's website currently features the ringing endorsement of Paul Ryan,
"Ryan is an articulate defender of free enterprise, and he consistently argues not just for the practical advantages of smaller government but also about the moral imperative to cut... if the next administration is Republican, and if it decides it wants to push major reforms, Paul Ryan is uniquely qualified to lead the charge."In 2005 Congressman Paul Ryan led a failed Republican legislative push for a Social Security privatization plan that also later popped up in Ryan's 2010 "Roadmap For America’s Future". This centerpiece of Ryan's budgetary vision traces back to a vicious war on the poor and middle class that was waged over three decades ago by a South American police state. The conceptual basis of Ryan's Social Security privatization approach was hatched as the Piñera plan that was implemented under the radical right-wing Chilean torture regime of 1973 military coup leader Augusto Pinochet. The Pinochet regime honed many of the techniques later used at the Abu Ghraib prison, in Iraq, was known to dispose of its unwanted citizens by throwing them out helicopters into the sea, and ran a transnational terrorism syndicate that murdered thousands and has been accused of a 1976 car bombing assassination in Washington D.C. While the Piñera plan sought to eliminate wealth redistribution under the old pre-Pinochet Chilean pension system - by jump-starting a new pension system under which Chileans began investing in private sector pension accounts - by 2006, by broad Chilean public consensus, the original Piñera Plan was considered to be a failure and in 2008 it was substantially modified by new legislation. A report on the Chilean pension reform from the U.S. Social Security Administration explained, "The cornerstone of the new law sets up a basic universal pension as a supplement to the individual accounts system." As the the New York Times described in an April 2008 story, Chile's new law was a dramatic move away from radical libertarian privatization:
"Chile is undertaking its biggest overhaul ever of its pioneering private pension system, adding sweeping public payouts for the low-income elderly. The new $2 billion-a-year program will expand public pensions to groups left out by private pensions - the poor and self-employed, homewives, street vendors and farmers who saved little for retirement - granting about a quarter of the nation's work force public pensions by 2012."Even as political pressure to overhaul the Chilean pension system was building, in 2005 under the George W. Bush Administration Paul Ryan spearheaded an attempt to pass legislation that would have imposed a modified version of the Piñera Plan on Americans. A Long-Expected Birthday Party On February 2, 2005, at a Washington, D.C. celebration of the 100th anniversary of libertarian guru Ayn Rand's birthday, held by the Rand-devoted Atlas Society, Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan declared his fealty to the guiding principles of Rand, founder of a cultic school of thought known as Objectivism, which holds up selfishness as the highest moral virtue. Ryan was introduced by Atlas Society Director of Advocacy Ed Hudgins, who told the audience of Ayn Rand admirers,
"He is best known for his efforts in the fight to reform Social Security by allowing the expanded use of individual retirement accounts. Now, I don't know whether you [Ryan] use the 'privatization' word. We here have no problem with that [Ryan overheard laughing] but sometimes you have to do a little bit of a soft sell up there, because many members of Congress are not quite as as far-thinking as Congressman Ryan."In his speech to the Atlas Society Ryan confessed to the assembled true believers, "The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand." Then he addressed his 2005 attempt to pass legislation privatizing Social Security. In Ayn Rand's view, the paramount good is individualism, the paramount evil collectivism. Ryan told his audience,
"The fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism... when you look at the fight that we’re in here in Capital Hill, it’s a tough fight... there is no more fight that is more obvious between the differences of these two conflicts than Social Security. Social Security right now is a collectivist system, it’s a welfare transfer system."Moments later, as he declared, "what’s important is if we actually accomplish this goal of personalizing social security", Ryan could be heard laughing while the Atlas Society's Ed Hudgins, also laughing, interjected, “personalizing”. After the mirthful outburst, Ryan continued, "personalizing social security," (to laughter and applause, this time from the audience,) "think of what we will accomplish. Every worker, every laborer in America will not only be a laborer but a capitalist." "Personalizing", it was clear, was a thinly veiled code word for "privatizing" and later, during a question-and-answer period, the specific model for that project became clear: it was privatization under the vicious, bloody Latin American military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. As the Atlas Society's Ed Hudgins told the audience, with Paul Ryan enthusiastically interjecting,
"By the way, I just want to add real quickly, and I know the Congressman has I’m sure said this. [General Augusto Pinochet’s Secretary of Labor and Social Security] José Piñera, who helped privatize Social Security in Chile, who also was by the way an Ayn Rand fan--José points out the moral revolution that occurs with privatization, that is, people in Chile, you know, who thought of themselves as Marxist suddenly feel that they are owners of property [Ryan “Yeah”] and, you know, they literally get up and they start reading the Chilean equivalent of the Wall Street Journal [Ryan interjects, “That’s right”]."After his talk, during a question-and-answer period, Ryan coached the libertarian audience on how they could best lobby Congress in favor of the 2005 legislative effort, which failed after meeting stiff Democratic Party opposition, to begin privatizing social security along the lines of José Piñera's Chilean Model. The Chilean Model There was more to the "moral revolution", that Ed Hudgins and Paul Ryan agreed had followed in the wake of pension privatization in Chile, than petite bourgeoisie pension fund investors reading their Chilean "Wall Street Journals". In 1970, Chilean physicist and politician Salvador Allende, a professed marxist, won Chile's presidency in a close three-way race. Recently declassified documents reveal a massive campaign of economic sabotage was soon initiated at the command of U.S. president Richard Nixon, who ordered his operatives to "make the [Chilean] economy scream". By 1973, amidst economic disruption and growing public protest, the Chilean military took action. On September 11, 1973, in an U.S.-encouraged military coup, Chilean Air Force warplanes began bombing and strafing the National Palace, Allende's governmental headquarters; amidst a firefight, as coup forces moved in, president Allende committed suicide to avoid capture. A military junta, led by General Augusto Pinochet - who considered himself to be guided by the hand of God, commenced; over the course of his regime thousands of Chileans suspected of socialist or leftist leanings were rounded up and executed. And, in over 1,000 secret detention facilities across the country, tens of thousands of men, women, and children (by some scholarly estimates between 1.5 and 3 percent of Chile's population) were subjected by authorities to brutal beatings, sexual abuses (sometimes involving animals), electroshock, psychological torture, and even medical torture, in a pattern that foreshadowed abuses at the American-run prison at Abu Ghraib, in Iraq. It was especially hard on women; years later, a governmental commission would report that female prisoners were routinely, repeatedly, raped*. Meanwhile, American-trained economists, dominated by the privatization-obsessed "Chicago School" moved in. In Chile after the 1973 coup, the nation would become a forced libertarian experiment, imposed at gunpoint, in neo-liberal, free-market privatization. Leading the charge was José Piñera, now Co-chairman of the Project on Social Security Choice at the Libertarian Cato Institute. The "Chilean model" has been showcased so aggressively by libertarian economists and think tanks such as the Cato Institute, as a shining example of privatization, that it's difficult to find analysis even mildly critical of the torture regime-backed experiment amidst the copious pro-privatization propaganda that populates Internet searches on the subject. And José Piñera - who has built an international career advising governments, such as South Korea, on how to privatize their pension systems - vigorously denies the documented extent of the the shocking human rights abuses that went on in Chile while he treated the nation as a personal privatization laboratory. In an article posted since 2005 on his website, Piñera claimed that General Pinochet's bloody coup - which is now acknowledged to have begun with a mass execution of Chileans held at Santiago's national sports stadium - was necessary because President Allende had violated the Chilean constitution, and because, alleges Piñera, socialist and communist factions backing Allende were planning a campaign of political violence. In a 2005 Mother Jones story, writer Barbara T. Dreyfuss adds, 'In another piece, he [Piñera] claims that "there was not a systematic policy of eliminating political opponents. Most of the casualties were people using violence to oppose the new government." ' But Piñera's desperate public relations bid was overwhelmed by horrific facts that emerged as Chile sought to wrestle with its dark, recent past In 2003, Chilean President Patricio Aylwin established Chile's National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation, to investigate and document the Pinochet regime's human rights abuses and, in November 2004, the Valech Commission released its first 1200-page report, which stated that during the Pinochet regime,
"[torture was] used as a tool for political control through suffering. Irrespective of any possible direct or indirect participation in acts that could be construed as illegal, the State resorted to torture during the entire period of the military regime. Torture sought to instill fear, to force people to submit, to obtain information, to destroy an individual's capacity for moral, physical, psychological, and political resistance and opposition to the military regime. In order to "soften people up"--according to the torturers' slang--they used different forms of torture.... The victims were humiliated, threatened, and beaten; exposed to extreme cold, to heat and the sun until they became dehydrated; to thirst, hunger, sleep deprivation; they were submerged in water mixed with sewage to the point of asphyxiation; electric shocks were applied to the most sensitive parts of their bodies; they were sexually humiliated, if not raped by men and animals, or forced to witness the rape and torture of their loved ones."Also in 2004, the government of Chile officially announced a policy of paying reparations to victims of the Pinochet regime and a Chilean judge indicted Pinochet for crimes that included murder and kidnapping. A February 7, 2007 Harvard Crimson story, Torture Under Pinochet, covered more of the horrific details:
The [Chilean governmental] Report of the National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture was commissioned in 2003 to create the most comprehensive list possible of those who were imprisoned and tortured for political reasons during the military dictatorship from September 1973 to March 1990... ...The Commission took testimony from 35,868 individuals who were tortured or imprisoned improperly. Of those, 27,255 were verified and included. An unknown number of victims did not come forward to give testimony. Scholars estimate that the real number is between 150,000 and 300,000 victims. 94 per cent of the verified testimonies include incidents of torture. The short list of methods includes repeated kicking or hitting, intentional physical scarring, forcing victims to maintain certain positions, electric shocks to sensitive areas, threats, mock execution, humiliation, forced nudity, sexual assault, witnessing the torture or execution of others, forced Russian roulette, asphyxiation, and imprisonment in inhumane conditions. There are many individuals with permanently distorted limbs or other disfigurations... For women, it was an especially violent experience. The commission reports that nearly every female prisoner was the victim of repeated rape. The perpetration of this crime took many forms, from military men raping women themselves to the use of foreign objects on victims. Numerous women (and men) report spiders or live rats being implanted into their orifices. One woman wrote, “I was raped and sexually assaulted with trained dogs and with live rats. They forced me to have sex with my father and brother who were also detained. I also had to listen to my father and brother being tortured.” Her experiences were mirrored by those of many other women who told their stories to the commission.But the crimes of the Pinochet regime were not limited to the sort of horrific domestic human rights abuses chronicled in the over 27,000 confirmed cases of imprisonment and torture documented in the Valech Commission report; as described in a 2005 story by Peter Kornblah, writing for The Nation, on December 13, 2004, at a press conference, Chilean judge Juan Guzmán,
"announced that he had ordered Pinochet placed under house arrest and indicted for nine disappearances and one murder relating to Operation Condor--a Chilean-led consortium of secret police agencies that conducted hundreds of acts of state-sponsored terrorism in the Southern Cone and around the world in the mid- and late 1970s. Gasps echoed through the hall, then a ripple of applause, and then the sound of shrieks and tears as those who had lost husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, during Pinochet's seventeen-year regime reacted."Within a few years of the initial coup, Pinochet's Chile had launched a United States-assisted transnational terrorism syndicate, operating across Latin America's Southern Cone but with operations on other continents as well, known as Operation Condor. Under Condor, citizens from countries in South America's Central Cone region were abducted, secretly imprisoned, tortured, and murdered or "disappeared" - sometimes by pushing the drugged victims out of planes and helicopters into the ocean. Condor's reach extended even into the domestic United States. The program has been credited with the notorious 1976 car bombing assassination, in Washington D.C.'s Sheridan Circle, of former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier. According to an Operation Condor internal document archive discovered in the early 1990s, by its own accounting the terrorism syndicate, secretly backed by the United States, may have murdered an many as 50,000 people, "disappeared" 30,000, and imprisoned 400,000 others.
read the rest of this story
I first titled this piece "Mourdock Inflames GOP's "Divine Rape" Problem", but then came across this - a truly inspired graphic (click on image for full graphic) from a Daily Kos website contributor that presents various controversial Republican statements on rape in easy-to-grasp color-coded categories, "Gift-From-God Rape", "Legitimate Rape", "Honest Rape", and so on. Enjoy.
My own version of the incomparable Republican Rape Advisory Chart is my essay on recent GOP rape statements below:
"Life is that gift from God that I think even if life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen" - Richard Mourdock
[UPDATE: According to CBS News, the Romney campaign now states that, while it disagrees the recent statement on rape from Indiana Republican candidate for U.S. Senate Richard Mourdock, it will nonetheless still support his candidacy.]
We've been here before - in 1990, Republican Clayton Williams, vying with for Ann Richards for the Texas governor's seat, erased his narrow lead and handed Richards the election by suggesting that women being raped should just "relax and enjoy it."
But the 2012 election has been especially notable for explosive Republican statements about rape, which might well determine which party will control the U.S. Senate on November 7th. First, Missouri Republican candidate for U.S. Senate Todd Akin resurrected a 13th Century Medieval medical theory by claiming that women who were victims of "legitimate rape" (implying, of course, that some rape might be "legitimate") could shut down their own fertility, preventing conception.
Akin's comments led to quick calls from top Republicans, such as vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan, for him to pull out of the Missouri Senate race. Akin's real crime, it seems, was in his bluntness, for stating directly what Ryan put much more obliquely, when he suggested in an interview that rape is another "method of conception". In Ryan's delicate way of putting it, the woman who had been raped was conveniently absent.
Now, Indiana Republican for U.S. Senate Richard Mourdock has further inflamed the controversy by stating, in a debate last night, that all pregnancies, even those conceived during rape, are a "gift from God". It's the sort of thinking you'll find coming out of the militant wing of the anti-abortion movement (which Todd Akin was a foot-soldier in) and the Pro-Life movement, that's standing behind Richard Mourdock despite his statement on God and rape.
But if all pregnancies - even those caused by rape - are indeed a "gift from God", from there it's no great logical stretch to conclude that, in some way, God is "pro-rape". Republicans in the Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock mold seem fatally attracted to this, like moths to a flame. They know they can't go there, not even close: ah, but they must. In reality, Akin and Mourdock are stating, albeit clumsily, accepted Republican Party positions.
That's the real scandal, argued CNN's John Avlon, in an August 21, 2012 op-ed:
"Akin was trying to articulate his opposition to abortion, even in cases of rape and incest. This is a position that vice presidential hopeful Paul Ryan -- primarily a courageous fiscal conservative -- has supported throughout his career, even penning a 1,500-word essay on the subject with the eye-opening title "The Cause of Life Can't Be Severed From the Cause of Freedom." "
Ryan's essay, which astutely noted that automobiles have no inherent rights because they are not human beings, claimed that liberals have the agenda of "reducing the number of human beings who can make choices" whereas conservatives "see human beings as assets, not liabilities"; the proper role of government, stated Ryan, is "to secure the right to life and the other human rights that follow from that primary right."
Ryan's upbeat essay, published in 2010 by the Heritage Foundation neatly skirted the public relations quagmire that the position life, according to divine will, begins at conception, opens up. Ryan knows where to stop short; Akin and Mourdock fell in.
In a way, Richard Mourdock went even further than Todd Akin, who referenced a medical theory that's obsolete by only six or seven centuries. Mourdock suggested that God micromanages the world so intensively that he "intends" every pregnancy which results from rape to happen - that's over 30,000 divine interventions per year, according to an estimate of the number of women who get raped and conceive annually in the U.S.
But if God intervenes in the day-to-day, in all matters big and small, then it would also seem to be true that God intended presidential candidate Mitt Romney to step in it by releasing a political ad, just three days ago, in which Romney endorsed Richard Mourdock.
Who does God really endorse ? What party plank does God back ? One rampant meme in wide circulation leading up to the 2008 election was this; God is neither a Republican nor a Democrat. Fair enough.
But days before the 2012 presidential election, aging evangelical superstar Billy Graham broke ranks and issued a high-profile non-endorsement of Mitt Romney, broadcast to the nation through full-page ads in USA Today and the Wall Street Journal in which Graham called on voters to support "Biblical values", foremost of which, it seems, is opposition to same-sex marriage rather than concern for poverty - despite the fact that the former is rarely mentioned in the Bible, the latter on almost every other page.
Graham's high profile bid to rally suspicious evangelical voters to Mitt Romney backfired badly when an LGBT rights group discovered a webpage on Graham's Billy Graham Evangelistic Association website, apparently written by Graham himself, that identified Mormonism as a "cult". The subsequent scandal produced dozens, maybe hundreds, of story titles with "Mormon" and "cult" in them, thus reinforcing a preexisting campaign that claims to have enlisted almost 1.4 million evangelical voters to, in effect, bow out of the race altogether by pledging to vote for Jesus Christ as a write-in candidate for president when they vote in November 6th.
In both cases - opposition to Roe v. Wade and to same-sex marriage, evangelical conservatives have claimed to speak for God and in both cases it has backfired, badly. What's an impartial observer to think ? If God exists, it may well be the case that she dislikes those who presume to speak in her name.
Let's have Christ our President Let us have him for our king Cast your vote for the Carpenter That you call the Nazarene The only way we can ever beat These crooked politician men Is to run the money changers out of the temple Put the Carpenter inWhile Guthrie's and Keller's interpretations of Christ seem to inhabit very different spots on the political spectrum, Bill Keller has nonetheless managed to put Christ for President on the 2012 political map and his website is racking up pledges at an astonishing rate. As of August 18, 2012, 320,000 had pledged on Keller's website to vote for Jesus, reported the religion news site TheGodDiscussion.com. Now, little more than two months later, evangelist Bill Keller's www.votingforjesus.com website boasts 1.375 million pledges, and counting. More pledges flood in at the rate, during Eastern U.S. daytime hours at least, of almost 1,000 per hour. Keller's army of Jesus write-in voters might top out at somewhere between 1.5 million and 2 million pledges - so the effort could, in theory at least, lock up roughly one percent of all eligible American voters. What's so bad about Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, that between 1.5 and 2 million Christians might vote (or pledge to do so, at least) for Jesus as a write-in candidate ? Bill Keller explains,
"If President Obama is re-elected, his anti-American, socialist policies will continue, as will his attacks on Christianity and Christian churches. He will continue to support abortion, homosexuality, the enemies of Israel. How can a true follower of Christ vote in good conscience for a man who has proven to be a true enemy of God and His Word and will continue to be so in his next term? If Mitt Romney is elected, he will be the fulfillment of his cult's polygamist, pedophile, racist, con artist, murdering founder Joseph Smith's "White Horse" prophecy that Romney and all Mormon's believe. That prophecy says that the United States will facing great economic and social unrest, a Mormon will be elected President, declare a national emergency and set aside the US Constitution and enact a Mormon theocracy."After I signed up on Keller's pledge list. I received the following confirmation email:
"PLAN OF ACTION! HOW YOU CAN HELP GET OUT THE VOTE FOR JESUS!!! Please share the http://votingforjesus.com website with everyone in your email address book. "Share" the website on your Facebook page and ask all of your friends on Facebook to do the same. "Tweet" the page to your Twitter followers and ask your followers to re-tweet it to theirs. Share the website with your pastor, those in your church, as well as with everyone in any Bible studies or ministries you are with. Post the website on every message board and chatroom you frequent. Seek the Lord and ask Him how you can get the word out to as many people as possible. You will be getting special emails every few weeks to help aid you in sharing this critical information out to the masses! In His love and service, Your friend and brother in Christ, Bill Keller"
On Thursday and Friday Billy Graham's BGEA ran high-profile full page ads, in 2012 election battleground state newspapers, encouraging voters to support "Biblical values" - foremost among which, according to the ads, is opposition to same-sex marriage. Then, on late Friday, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association pulled the plug on the over-$75 million dollar a year nonprofit organization's website, in a striking counterpoint to the BGEA's byline: "Always Good News".
The surprise outage of the flagship global evangelizing organization website comes days before the 2012 presidential election, and on the heels of a widening scandal that opened up when aging evangelism superstar Billy Graham made a widely-heralded non-endorsement of presidential contender Mitt Romney and, soon after, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association website scrubbed a page on which Graham identified Mormonism as a "cult", along with the Unification Church and Scientology.
On Friday, October 19th, the Washington Post ran a satirical essay, by a Mormon university professor, with the title "Mormon says he’ll miss ‘cult’ lifestyle". The same day, the website of Christianity Today, considered by many to be the world's leading publication for evangelical Christianity, featured a story titled Should the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association have Removed Mormons from "Cult" List?.
The Christianity Today op-ed followed an earlier CT wire service story, from the Religion News Service, which quoted my observation that - despite the previous scrubbing of a BGEA website page on which Billy Graham explicitly identified Mormonism as a "cult" - the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association website still featured pages which insinuated to website visitors that Mormonism is a "cult" and explicitly stated that followers of the world religion are not Christians (Mormons consider themselves fully Christian.)
To secular audiences, it is hard to overemphasize the earthquake-scale magnitude of this scandal within modern American evangelicalism -- superstar evangelist Billy Graham was friend and confidant of multiple presidents, such as Richard Nixon, and was widely viewed as a more sophisticated and inclusive counterweight to theologically rigid tendencies within Christian fundamentalism. Graham was heavily criticized by fundamentalists for his willingness to appear in public with representatives of non-Christian faiths.
But even as Billy Graham has aged, and his perhaps less-diplomatic* son Franklin Graham has taken over the vast business franchise bequeathed to him by his superstar father, fast rising tendencies within American evangelism such as the New Apostolic Reformation -- which former co-architect of the religious right Colonel V. Doner, in a new 2012 book, warns could become an "American Jihad" -- are displacing strands of evangelicalism that embody Billy Graham's carefully cultivated ecclesiastical and religious inclusivity.
Top leaders of the New Apostolic Reformation have called upon their followers to burn the Book of Mormon, the principal scripture that differentiates Mormonism from Protestant and Catholic Christianity.
In early Fall 2012, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association was a co-sponsor of the New Apostolic Reformation-dominated Philadelphia "America For Jesus" rally. A letter of support from the 93 year-old Billy Graham was read at the "America For Jesus" rally, which was sponsored by top NAR apostles and prophets including Cindy Jacobs, who has claimed that flocks of blackbirds dropped dead from the sky because of God's wrath at Barack Obama's decision to rescind the Department of Defense "Don't Ask/Don't Tell" policy concerning the sexual orientation of LGBT members in the U.S. military.
Other prominent NAR sponsors included Dutch Sheets, The Call founder Lou Engle, and National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference President Samuel Rodriguez. In August 2011, after unprecedented media scrutiny (see: 1, 2, 3) of the New Apostolic Reformation following a high-profile Houston, Texas NAR apostle-dominated religious rally called "The Response" that kicked off Texas Governor Rick Perry's failed bid for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, New Apostolic Reformation intellectual godfather C. Peter Wagner authored an op-ed for Charisma Magazine, the leading magazine of the Christian charismatic movement, titled The New Apostolic Reformation Is Not a Cult .
While some liberal publications such as Mother Jones have characterized the NAR movement as "small", the apostles of the New Apostolic Reformation - under attack for years by traditional Christian fundamentalists who accuse the NAR of being a "cult" or even the end-time church of the Antichrist - have nonetheless blessed U.S. vice presidential candidates and tutored U.S. state governors on how to establish Christian theocracy, and sit on the boards of leading evangelical publications such as Christianity Today.
The NAR also claims, as an acolyte, former Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, who shut down the Florida vote recount in the 2000 election that sent George W. Bush to the White House.
Like the Mormon Church, New Apostolic Reformation doctrine includes the teaching that prophets can receive prophetic teachings from God which can augment biblical scripture - a teaching that Billy Graham prominently included as a characteristic of cults in one of his now-scrubbed Billy Graham Evangelistic Association website pages.
One possible factor that may have inclined Billy Graham and Franklin Graham to weigh in so heavily against the reelection of President Barack Obama: immediately following his 2008 election as president, Obama is reported to have rebuffed Graham's overture to serve as spiritual "mentor" to the new president.
A 2012 survey sponsored by the liberal evangelical Sojourners organization, founded by pastor Jim Wallis, showed that only 29% of young evangelical Christians believed that "Christian leaders should endorse political candidates in elections". Young Christians interviewed for the survey reported that "Same-sex marriage/Homosexuality" was the second most common theme they heard from the pulpit, closely trailing the issue of poverty - which is, by many magnitudes, a dramatically more prominent concern of biblical scripture as compared to biblical teaching on homosexuality.
*In 2010 Franklin Graham was dis-invited from a scheduled appearance at the Pentagon, because of his past statements attacking Islam.
"A religion or religious sect generally considered to be extremist or false, with its followers often living in an unconventional manner under the guidance of an authoritarian, charismatic leader." -- from The Free Dictionary definition of the term "cult" "
" "cult" is how many evangelical Christians define Mormonism. Not surprisingly, "cult" is a four-letter word (in both senses) in Mormon circles." -- from The Rise of Mormonism, Rodney Stark and Reid L. Neilson, Columbia University Press, 2005
As Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics told the Boston Globe, for an October 13, 2012 story, "Romney is counting on evangelicals. The irony is that this is a shotgun marriage between two very different religions but they are completely dependent upon one another for victory."
But even before that Boston Globe story hit the press, an emerging public relations debacle of the first order was undermining consummation of the "shotgun marriage" and now, with only three weeks before the 2012 presidential election, millions of Americans are confronted by news stories with headlines that feature the terms "Mormon" and "cult".
On October 11, 2012, aging evangelical icon Billy Graham met, prayed with, and in effect endorsed presidential candidate Mitt Romney. But Graham's endorsement backfired when an LGBT rights group discovered an article on the website of Graham's flagship organization, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, apparently authored by Billy Graham himself, that labeled Mormonism a "cult".
In a textbook case of ineffective damage control, Graham's BGEA proceeded to wipe the offending article from the BGEA website but left in place other BGEA website articles that conveyed the same message.
Visitors to the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association website who use the site's search engine to search for the term "Mormon" will get six search results; the first will be a page featuring Billy Graham's own definition of what a "cult" is, an explanation that clearly encompasses Mormonism.
On that page, featuring an entry from Graham's My Answer column, Billy Graham explains,
"[Cult] Members reject what Christians have believed for almost 2,000 years, and substitute instead their own beliefs for the clear teachings of the Bible. Often, they add to the Bible by claiming that the books their founder wrote or "discovered" are from God, and have equal authority to the Bible."
Founder of Mormonism Joseph Smith discovered new books of scripture that comprise the Book of Mormon which, according to the Mormon faith, augments and completes biblical scripture.
The BGEA website My Answer column was preceded by a question posed to Graham, "This couple keeps coming to our house and inviting us to come to their assembly hall to study the Bible. I'd like to know something about the Bible, but a friend of mine says this group is a cult. What exactly is a cult? They seem like nice people."
The question mirrored narratives that launch numerous evangelical books attacking Mormonism which designate it as a "cult", including the 1998 book Mormonism Unmasked, by R. Philip Roberts, which opens with a chapter titled "Mormons on Your Doorstep".
Mormonism Unmasked is published by the B&H Publishing Group, a division of LifeWay Resources, the main publishing wing of the Southern Baptist Convention, which officially designates Mormonism as a cult and claims 16 million members - slighter more than the estimated number of Mormons worldwide, about 14 million.
LifeWay publishes several books attacking Mormonism. CEO of LifeWay is Thom S. Ranier, who also happens to have an article published on the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association website, in which Ranier describes his travels with his wife across the United States, announcing in the article's title that,
"We heard from Christians who were once Mormons, Hindus, Jehovah's Witnesses, agnostics, witches, Buddhists, Unitarians, New Agers, Muslims, Satanists and non-Messianic Jews."
While it is not immediately apparent to many secular observers, designations of Mormonism as non-Christian or a "cult" are extremely offensive to Mormons. According to the Mormon Voices website,
"Use of such a term [cult] to describe Mormonism is highly offensive to members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. "Cult" carries the connotation of dangerous, even violent groups whose beliefs are irrational and whose practices are immoral and lawless (Koresh and the Branch Davidians, Heaven's Gate, Aum Shinrikyo, and The People's Temple are all prominent examples) . The term cannot be applied to Mormons unless it is so broadly defined that its use could be applied to virtually any religious body.Like racist language, the use of the word "cult" to describe a religion usually tells us very little about the religion, but a great deal about the person using the word."
Amidst a fast-growing swarm of articles covering the scandal, a few have attempted an upbeat spin - such as the Charlotte Observer story Graham family ties tighten with Romney as presidential election nears (subtitled "Evangelistic Association's website cuts Mormonism from listing of `cults' "), also syndicated in the Kansas City Star, which claimed,
"The Grahams' actions could further cement conservative Christian support for Romney in the Nov. 6 election, even though most evangelicals don't consider him a Christian.That religious divide cost Romney heavily in the South Carolina primary, when he finished a distant second to New Gingrich, a Catholic but twice divorced."
But another Charlotte Observer story published the previous day, syndicated from the Religion News Service, Billy Graham website scrubs Mormon 'cult' reference, by RNS reporter Daniel Burke (also published by the Washington Post) noted continued anti-Mormon bias at Billy Graham's BGEA website:
"According to the liberal website Daily Kos, the belief that Mormons are members of a cult is built into the BGEA's website. The site is programmed to call up articles about cults, including one authored by Billy Graham, when readers search for "Mormon.""Billy Graham's own website is automated so that Christians who search for the term `Mormon' will get this page result and be informed, straight from Billy Graham himself, that the Mormon Church is in reality a cult," said Daily Kos writer Bruce Wilson."
The spreading story is hardly limited to liberal audiences - the conservative evangelical Christian Post was one of the early venues to pick it up, as Article Calling Mormonism a 'Cult' Removed From Billy Graham Website; Mormon convert Glenn Beck's The Blaze ran a version titled Article Calling Mormon Faith a `Cult' Was Scrubbed From Billy Graham's Web Site Following His Meeting With Romney.
Even on Beck's The Blaze story, rancorous arguments broke out in the comments section, and the comment thread attached to the Christian Post story was strongly anti-Mormon and antagonistic to Billy Graham's Romney endorsement, with one commenter remarking,
"Disgusting, whether you believe Mormonism is a cult or not. This is unfortunately a familiar theme. Evangelical "leaders" being co-opted by a poliltian and toning down the truth in order to curry political favor. They are either naive or responding to the siren call of political power.....or maybe both."
At The Blaze, a commenter named THERAPTURECOMES proclaimed,
"To all mormons, and all those that claim that mormonism is a part of Christianity. I warn you in all love that you have been deceived and I ask you to abandon your cults.I have shown clearly that mormonism is not Christianity and is not of the bible and my warning is clear also.
Time is running out..."
Back in 2011 a series of attacks from leading conservative evangelicals darkly warned that Ayn Rand devotees, Paul Ryan included, might be worshiping at the altar of crypto-satanism. Now, within the last 24 hours, a flurry of mainstream media articles cover a controversy erupting after evangelism superstar Billy Graham prayed with (and in effect endorsed) candidate Mitt Romney and observers noticed that an article on the website of Graham's flagship Billy Graham Evangelistic Association identified Mormonism as a "cult".
Yes, really: This year, the Party of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Eisenhower is championed by one candidate conservative evangelical Christians suspect of worshiping odd, fecund Gods who live, love, and multiply on strangely-named foreign planets, and by another candidate enthralled by an economic philosophy that helped birth Anton LaVey's Church of Satan.
This train wreck wasn't supposed to happen.
A few months ago, despite ongoing, savage swipes from prominent fundamentalist pastors who called Mormonism a "cult", the Republican Party sloughed off evangelical right challengers in the 2012 presidential primaries, along with its "anyone but Mitt" syndrome, to pick a Mormon as the GOP standard bearer in the 2012 presidential election.
Then, Mitt Romney doubled down on the "cult" issue by picking, as his vice presidential running mate, a Congressman who as recently as 2010 (in official campaign ads no less) had praised a libertarian philosopher accused, in mid 2011 by a leading hard-right Catholic journal, of promoting a thinly-veiled form of satanism.
For a party that not too long ago under George W. Bush had managed to artfully wrap its bloodier instincts in the evangelical cloak of many colors that was "compassionate conservatism", Paul Ryan's radical budget - that provoked ire from across the Catholic political spectrum - and Mitt Romney's apparent disgust at the mooching "47% percent" of America - threatened to open up a rift between religious conservatives who see some sort of proper role for government in mitigating the worst effects of laissez faire capitalism, and secular conservatives who envision anarcho-capitalism as the road to a glorious, Ayn Rand-inspired utopia in which the "producers" would finally relegate the mooching masses to their proper, subordinate status in great chain of being.
It didn't help that Paul Ryan's plan for privatizing Social Security was, at base, a rehash of the Ayn Rand-inspired libertarian Piñera Plan cooked up under the Chilean dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet - whose military regime helped refine torture methods later employed in Iraq at Abu Ghraib and has become known for "disappearing" thousands of its citizens, often by pushing them out of helicopters into the sea.
This is the dilemma - will modern American conservatism continue to pay at least lip service to traditional Christian social justice teaching, or will it break with that moral touchstone and remake itself as a party which cleaves to a Hobbesian social contract that reduces American society to an atomized struggle of all against all, nasty, brutish, and short?
Leading up to the 2012 electoral cycle, the eminence grises of the evangelical right tried to ward off the looming amoral libertarian menace of Paul Ryan, Rand Paul, Ron Paul Ron Johnson, and the growing Randian horde in Congress and the Senate:
In early 2011, former George W. Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, who was well-placed to known which way the wind was blowing, launched, from his perch as an op-ed columnist for the Washington Post, a withering preemptive attack against rising Ayn Rand worship within the GOP:
Rand's novels are vehicles for a system of thought known as Objectivism. Rand developed this philosophy at the length of Tolstoy, with the intellectual pretensions of Hegel, but it can be summarized on a napkin. Reason is everything. Religion is a fraud. Selfishness is a virtue. Altruism is a crime against human excellence. Self-sacrifice is weakness. Weakness is contemptible.
More firepower was, it seems, needed and soon the late Chuck Colson, beloved by evangelicals since his noisy Born Again conversion (and book) weighed in, in a scathing review of the 2011 movie adaption of Ayn Rand's book "Atlas Shrugged".
Colson lambasted followers of Ayn Rand as "cranks and crypto-cultists" and noted, too, that some "powerful committee members on Capital Hill indoctrinate their staffers with her tracts" - in a not-too-subtle reference to Congressman Paul Ryan's repeated declarations that Atlas Shrugged was required reading in his office.
But even that wasn't enough, apparently, so a searing June 2011 article, The Fountainhead of Satanism, published in the hard-right neoconservative Catholic journal First Things, posed the question - what if prominent U.S. congress members had been requiring their staffers to read Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey's book The Satanic Bible and were giving out the book as a Christmas gift? Wrote author Joe Carter,
"to be a follower of both Rand and Christ is not possible. The original Objectivist was a type of self-professed anti-Christ who hated Christianity and the self-sacrificial love of its founder. She recognized that those Christians who claimed to share her views didn't seem to understand what she was saying.Many conservatives admire Rand because she was anti-collectivist. But that is like admiring Stalin because he opposed Nazism.
[...]
Few conservatives will fall completely under Rand's diabolic sway. But we are sustaining a climate in which not a few gullible souls believe she is worth taking seriously. Are we willing to be held responsible for pushing them to adopt an anti-Christian worldview? If so, perhaps instead of recommending Atlas Shrugged, we should simply hand out copies of The Satanic Bible. If they're going to align with a satanic cult, they might as well join the one that has the better holidays."
In the comment section attached to his article, Carter openly acknowledged that his article referred directly to Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan.
A little later, in July 2011, compassionate conservatism's uber-guru Marvin Olasky tried to pin the ruckus on liberals, claiming in an article at his World magazine that,
"For nearly a decade Democrats have sought a religious wedge issue that could separate big chunks of white evangelical voters from their Republican home. Now they've found it, and are thrusting at the Social Darwinist/Ayn Rand underbelly of American conservatism."
But Olasky couldn't conceal his revulsion at Rand's inversion of the traditional Christian moral ethos, and called conservatives, including Paul Ryan by name, to account:
"I read Atlas Shrugged recently and respected its support for innovators who pour themselves into their businesses and its disdain for bureaucrats who think entrepreneurialism is easy and automatic. I also was amazed at the viciousness of Rand's view of Christianity, leading up to its conclusion, where the book's hero traces in the air the Sign of the Dollar, a replacement for the Sign of the Cross.[...]
...this, sadly, is the book that a budget expert I admire, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., recommends-apparently without caveat-and tells his staffers to read. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., is also a Rand fan...
...Ryan and others, if they want support from Christians, cannot merely react to the left's criticism with a shrug: They should show what in Rand they agree with and what they spurn. The GOP's big tent should include both libertarians and Christians, but not anti-Christians."
But that's precisely what Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan did; like Rand's Atlas, he shrugged.
When controversy surfaced over his past praise for Ayn Rand's ideas (which in 2005 Ryan credited as inspiring his decision to go into politics) Paul Ryan spoke out, denouncing Rand's atheism but little else.
Now charges of cultism are swirling around Mitt Romney and, unlike the attacks against Paul Ryan and the Randians back in 2011, they may be less than fair:
In classic sociological and anthropological definitions, cults tend to revolve around one or several charismatic figures, and are organized in concentric rings, with an inner circle of acolytes around those charismatic figures and outer rings of followers with successively less devotion, access, and perceived authority.
In that view, most religions (Christianity included) begin as cults, and the ones that successfully evolve into religions (such as Christianity and Mormonism) eventually develop fixed doctrine, established ecclesiastical hierarchy, and so on.
If anything, the conservative evangelical Christian animus against the Mormon Church has much to do with the fact that Mormonism has long been one of the fastest growing religions in the U.S. and the world.
So it's less than surprising that the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association would try to tar Mormonism, a business competitor, as a "cult" - a term that since the 1970s has in American culture, especially in evangelical culture, picked up dark connotations; for many evangelicals, even cults which do not feature overt Satan worship are halfway there nonetheless.
When casual visitors to the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association website punch the word "Mormon" into the website's search engine, what search results will they get? - The first hit is a BGEA page on which Billy Graham himself explains that,
"A cult is a group that claims that it, and it alone, has the truth about God and offers the only way to salvation. Members reject what Christians have believed for almost 2,000 years, and substitute instead their own beliefs for the clear teachings of the Bible.Often, they add to the Bible by claiming that the books their founder wrote or "discovered" are from God, and have equal authority to the Bible. In reality, however, those books deny what the Bible says about God or Jesus, or about the way of salvation."
It's no secret that Momonism's founder Joseph Smith did indeed discover new scripture.
The less than obvious but fully absurd aspect of this is that, while Graham's definition could be seen as applying to Mormonism, it also pegs a fast-rising tendency within conservative evangelical Christianity itself, the New Apostolic Reformation - a tendency whose apostles and prophets dominated The Response, the August 2011 religious rally that kick-started Texas Governor Rick Perry's failed bid for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.
in August 2011, NPR's Fresh Air dedicated an entire hour long segment to the New Apostolic Reformation - who were the religious leaders up onstage at Perry's event? Few seemed to know.
Then, in early October, Fresh Air host Terry Gross interviewed NAR guru C. Peter Wagner himself - the low-key, elderly academic who has played a key role in shaping and organizing the emerging NAR.
If the New Apostolic Reformation had been competing* with Mormonism for sheer doctrinal color, Wagner hardly could have done better - during the interview Wagner told Gross that the early 2011 tsunami which ravaged Northern Japane, and the Japanese economic downturn of the 1990s, both may have been caused by what Wagner described as a sexual tryst between the Japanese emperor and a "sky goddess" who, according to Wagner, may have been a succubus.
Of course, Republican politicians vying for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination who had noteworthy ties to the New Apostolic Reformation didn't prevail - and so the Japanese emperor and the succubus did not become a presidential campaign issue.
Rather, Republican success or failure in the 2012 presidential election may hinge on internecine doctrinal disputes within conservative evangelicalism, disputes that will help determine evangelical voter turnout -- Is Mitt Romney a cultist? Is Paul Ryan a crypto-satanist? And more importantly, for evangelicals who agree with one or both propositions, does politics trump theology or does theology trump politics ?
Reports from my sources suggest that, efforts from party fixers and evangelical kingmakers notwithstanding, the latter may prevail.
As usual, mainstream media won't likely acknowledge the intensity of these conflicts roiling the depths of American religious conservatism. But if I'm wrong, you heard it here first.
*There are many similarities between the Mormon Church and the New Apostolic Reformation - for example both have apostles and prophets, who talk to God on an ongoing basis and thus can, in effect, write new scripture (Wagner is quite direct about this).
On Tuesday April 21, 2009, Minnesota Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachmann was granted 5 minutes by the House Speaker pro tempore, and proceeded to emit a short pious speech on behalf of the Congressional Prayer Caucus, that included the following history lie, which was then duly entered into the Congressional Record:
George Washington, our first President, demonstrated that he was not offended by the image of the risen Christ. In fact, our Nation's first President let his views be known quite clearly on his inauguration by a prayer which George Washington himself gave at his inauguration. He said, and I quote, Mr. Speaker:'Almighty God, we make our earnest prayer that Thou wilt keep the United States in Thy holy protection; that Thou wilt incline the hearts of the citizens to cultivate a spirit of subordination and obedience to government; and entertain a brotherly affection and love for one another and for their fellow citizens of the United States at large. And finally, that Thou wilt most graciously be pleased to dispose us all to do justice, to love mercy, and to demean ourselves with that charity, humility and pacific temper of mind which were the characteristics of the Divine Author of our blessed religion, and without a humble imitation of whose example in these things we can never hope to be a happy nation. Grant our supplication, we beseech Thee, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.'
It wasn't the first time that the falsified, debunked "Washington's Prayer" has been declaimed in Congress - it has been recited numerous times by members of Congress and the Senate and even more frequently by chaplains - but Bachmann might well be the first member of Congress to have attributed the debunked "prayer" to Washington's inaugural speech, a bizarre tactic considering how easy it is to access the text of Washington's speech at the U.S. National Archives.
In my two previous installments of this sporadic series, I've covered the promotion of falsified American history in Book From Alan Grayson Opponent Todd Long Features Falsified American History and In '05 and '08, Todd Akin Entered Christian Nationalist History Lies in the Congressional Record.
But among the packs of history falsificationists roaming the chambers of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, Michele Bachmann is almost suis generis (I suspect that only Congressman Randy Forbes comes close, but that's for a later installment.)
As came out late last year (see this New Yorker story), Bachmann's ties to the unregenerate Christian Reconstructionist, falsified history-addled core of the religious right trace back to her days as a student at Oral Roberts University, when she worked as a research assistant for Law Professor John Eidsmoe, on his book Christianity and the Constitution, published in 1987.
That's even earlier than when now-disgraced pseudo-historian David Barton came out with his landmark history lie-packed book The Myth of Separation which claimed (among other things) that scheming liberals, humanists, and secularists had reversed the original meaning of church-state separation as envisioned by the founders. Explains Chris Rodda, author of Liars For Jesus: The Religious Right's Alternate Version of American History,
"Eidsmoe is another Christian nationalist history revisionist, whose Christianity and the Constitution book predates the first edition of Barton's book The Myth of Separation by a year. In fact, some of Barton's lies are adaptations of Eidsmoe's lies and half-truths, a number of which are debunked in my book. But I had no idea that Bachmann had been involved with Eidsmoe or his book until she talked about it at the [2012] Rediscover God in America conference, or that it was Eidsmoe who introduced her to Barton's material."
So, given how important Barton has been to the field, Michele Bachmann can therefore lay claim to being a grand dame of Christian nationalist American history lies, because she helped to establish some of them.
That quote above is from an extended story in which Rodda debunks a personalized history lie, about her genealogy, that Michele Bachmann seems to have cooked up while campaigning in the 2012 Republican presidential primary, to appeal to Iowa voters. At the March 24-25 "Rediscover God In America" conference, held early 2012 in Iowa, Bachmann trotted out her alleged "Iwegian" (Iowa-Norwegian) roots by claiming to be a 7th-generation Iowan.
But that's trivial compared to the great history lie classics of the Barton/Eidsmoe genre, one of which Bachmann deployed in early 2009, to attack President Barack Obama - who, in an April 2009 press conference in Ankara, Turkey, had stated "we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation" - a statement that provoked outrage among evangelical Christian nationalists. In her brief April 21, 2009 speech, on behalf of the Congressional Prayer Caucus (a hotbed of history lie promotion, it seems), attacking President Obama's statement, Congresswoman Bachmann began,
"Mr. Speaker, over the course of the last few weeks, President Obama made the statement while in a foreign country that we are not a Christian Nation, that we are not a Jewish Nation or a Muslim Nation. He said we are citizens with shared values...
After starting with some real Christian piety from Lincoln, then moving on to emit the falsified "Washington's prayer", Bachmann concluded her mini-sermon with,
"with all due respect, Mr. Speaker, I think it's so important, on behalf of the Congressional Prayer Caucus of this Congress that, as the National Day of Prayer approaches, that all American citizens do what our first president prayed in his inaugural prayer... and we would do well to humbly not forget God, but to humble ourselves before an almighty God and not expect that it is we ourselves that have created these blessings for our country, but that it is a gracious heavenly God who holds our nation in His hands."
Briefly, the myth of "George Washington's Prayer" is one of the most persistent and most absurd of the history lies -- while it has been repeatedly, endlessly debunked, the Internet is nevertheless littered with versions of the "prayer" -- which was concocted by excerpting and then rewriting a passage from George Washington's famous June 8, 1783 Circular Letter (to the governors of the original 13 colonies) announcing the disbanding of the Continental Army after the end of the Revolutionary War.
(It's an extremely important document - Washington was fantastically popular at the time and some were encouraging him to use his position as head of the army to make himself king.)
Versions of the falsified "Washington's Prayer" have for many years been featured in the program of the annual National Prayer Breakfast, held by the Fellowship - the neo-fundamentalist Washington-based evangelical network of political and business elites tied to Uganda's so-called "kill the gays" bill.
The falsification itself is not a recent creation -- in my story linked above, I traced it as far back as an 1850s British abolitionist tract. But it may be older still. And why do these history lies even matter? As journalist Frederick Clarkson explains is his essay History is Powerful: Why the Christian Right Distorts History and Why it Matters,
The notion that America was founded as a Christian nation is a central animating element of the ideology of the Christian Right. It touches every aspect of life and culture in this, one of the most successful and powerful political movements in American history. The idea that America's supposed Christian identity has somehow been wrongly taken, and must somehow be restored, permeates the psychology and vision of the entire movement. No understanding of the Christian Right is remotely adequate without this foundational concept.
But the Christian nationalist narrative has a fatal flaw: it is based on revisionist history that does not stand up under scrutiny. The bad news is that to true believers, it does not have to stand up to the facts of history to be a powerful and animating part of the once and future Christian nation. Indeed, through a growing cottage industry of Christian revisionist books and lectures now dominating the curricula of home schools and many private Christian academies, Christian nationalism becomes a central feature of the political identity of children growing up in the movement. The contest for control of the narrative of American history is well underway.
History is powerful... We need it in order to know not how the religious Right is wrong, but to know where we ourselves stand in the light of history, in relation to each other, and how we can better envision a future together free of religious prejudice, and ultimately, religious warfare.
