1. Huckabee: Face of the Future
This month's Charisma magazine devotes its cover story to the future of Mike Huckabee, "The Preacher Who Would Be President." Last summer, Charisma's publisher, Stephen Strang, became one of the first prominent evangelicals to support Huckabee, when he was still nothing but an asterisk. Now, even though he didn't get the nomination, he may well represent the future of the movement.
Reflecting the sense of regret permeating the religious right for having failed to recognize Huckabee's promise as a presidential candidate, and its great disappointment in being left with Sen. John McCain, the piece lays the blame at the feet of "party elites." These elites -- Washington insiders like Jay Sekulow, Paul Weyrich, and Gary Bauer -- forgot "that God is the one who exalts rulers," according to Huckabee fundraiser Brant Frost IV. Mat Staver, who heads Jerry Falwell's legal organization, Liberty Counsel, told the magazine that "some" in the Republican Party establishment "do not want an evangelical to be president. They want evangelical votes. But they do not want evangelicals to have a significant voice in American public policy."
Charisma concludes -- as I've reported throughout the campaign -- that charismatic evangelicals shunned these elites and got behind Huckabee early, including Larry Huch, John Hagee (who later endorsed McCain), Keith Butler, the late John Gimenez, and Kenneth Copeland. Huckabee, who is a Southern Baptist but calls himself a "Bapti-costal" (or Baptist/Pentecostal) to reflect his embrace of the charismatic religious expression (some of which, like speaking in tongues, historically has been shunned by the Southern Baptist Convention), is seen now as an architect of a new conservative evangelical movement. That new movement will harness the power of grassroots activists, many of whom became politically active for the first time through Huckabee's campaign, and who either didn't wait for or rejected the guidance of the traditional religious right powerbrokers. James Dobson -- he's so twentieth century.
2. Money Makes the World Go 'Round
This week kicks off the Trinity Broadcasting Network's (TBN) thrice-annual festival of greed, the "Praise-A-Thon," which features some of the biggest names in televangelism taking to the airwaves to beg viewers round-the-clock to give money to TBN -- a non-profit organization that lavishes its executives with enormous salaries and perks, and sits atop over $300 million in assets. In TBN's world, your gift to the network represents your obedience to God because it's really God's money, and if you keep it for yourself you're disobeying God.
Monday's Praise-A-Thon featured back-to-back preaching by three of the targets of Republican Sen. Charles Grassley's investigation into alleged abuse of tax-exempt status: Benny Hinn, Creflo Dollar, and Paula White. Monday also marked the deadline for the Grassley targets to respond to the inquiry, and Dollar, like his mentor Kenneth Copeland, has refused to comply -- a move that could provoke the Senate Finance Committee to subpoena the documents.
Ministry Watch, a conservative evangelical group that rates ministries based on their financial transparency (the Grassley targets get an "F"), has been one of the leading evangelical critics of the televangelists' lack of transparency. But that doesn't mean the group wants a change in the law -- to the contrary, it's hoping for voluntary compliance.
As conservatives, said the group's spokesperson Warren Smith, "our natural inclination is that government has no business poking its nose into religious activities." Maybe it's just a leap of faith, but Smith's hoping that Copeland and Dollar will voluntarily become transparent as a result of the probe -- and not that Congress will change the tax code to require it. "If we get new regulations," said Smith, "we won't have Grassley to blame, we'd have Kenneth Copeland and Creflo Dollar to blame."
3. McCain Advisers: The New Deal Is Satanic
No one believes for a minute that John McCain really views prosperity televangelist Rod Parsley as a "spiritual guide." After all, for McCain, who's apparently queasy about talking about his personal faith to groups like the Council for National Policy and the Values Voter Summit, listening to Parsley would be uncomfortable. As uncomfortable for McCain, perhaps, as recalling that his campaign advisor Charlie Black served on the host committee for a 2004 coronation of Moon in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, as John Gorenfeld reveals in his new book and video about the Rev. Sun Myung Moon,.
We all know that McCain thinks it's increasingly difficult "to do the Lord's work in the city of Satan," but does he really think, like Parsley preached this week, that Social Security is satanic because it "conditioned Americans to expect that the government would take care of them?" (Hagee also thinks government programs are satanic.) Or does McCain expect, as Parsley gleefully does, that he will have a "ringside seat" for the "deafening shouts from the modern sea of agnostic, and atheistic, and apostate voices" as they are "cast alive into the lake that burns with fire and brimstone?"
Why is everyone in the presidential campaign worried about the economy, Parsley growled in his Sunday sermon, arguing that any economic assistance provided by the government -- such as relief to homeowners victimized by mortgage lending abuses or universal health insurance -- is itself a sign of the Antichrist consolidating power. "In tough times like these," Parsley went on, "people make the mistake of putting their faith in political masterminds" who "promise to provide everything," instead of resisting the mark of the beast. That beast, he warns, will preach "tolerance and inclusion on a global scale" and if you reject the mark, "you will be accused of being intolerant and exclusionary." (Who might he be suggesting is the Antichrist?)
In short, Parsley thinks that the United States government has been controlled by Satan since the New Deal. He relishes watching agnostics, atheists, and people he considers apostates be burned alive at his fantastical end of days. This is not new stuff for Parsley, or for Hagee, for that matter. They've been preaching this sort of nonsense for years. Yet they get invited to the White House, and Hagee even gets meetings with president's national security team. And we all know how close they are with the presumptive Republican nominee.
4. John Hagee: I Heart Catholics. My PR Firm Said So.
In his ministry newsletter last week, Hagee wrote to his followers:
This past Sunday I read a statement to the congregation prepared for the secular media who have involved me in a media firestorm of their own making. The secular media is desperately attempting to portray me as anti-Catholic and a religious bigot. I fired back this Sunday with the following statement being released today by my New York PR firm 5W....
In my writings, I have never stated that the great whore is the Catholic Church. Quite to the contrary, the Book Revelation teaches clearly that the great whore will be an apostate church made up of all Christians from all denominations that stray from the path of God and embrace a godless lifestyle including the sin of anti-Semitism.
Now if you watch the video that the Catholic League's Bill Donohue was talking about, you'll see that Hagee does not explicitly say that the great whore was the Catholic Church -- but because Dohonue has such a big media megaphone, he was able to direct an inordinate amount of attention to Hagee's anti-Catholicism. But what is also deserving of attention -- his denigration of women, feminists, environmentalists, and the LGBTQ community, his spurious claims to love the Jews, and his calls for world-ending wars -- got swept under the carpet when Donohue put his megaphone away.
5. Between a Monument and a Hard Place.
The Supreme Court will decide whether a municipality that allows the Ten Commandments to be displayed in a public place must allow other religious monuments to be displayed alongside them.
That's the upshot of the Court's decision on Monday to review the 10th Circuit's decision in Pleasant Grove City v. Summum, in which the court of appeals ruled that if the Pleasant Grove City, Utah allows the Ten Commandments to be displayed in a public park, then the city must also allow the Summum organization to install a monument to its "Seven Aphorisms" alongside it. (The Court ruled three years ago that municipalities could display the Ten Commandments as part of a historical, but not a religious, exhibit without running afoul of the constitutional ban on government establishment of religion.) Summum describes itself as "an informal gathering of people who are seeking to understand themselves, to know who they truly are inside. Summum is not about doctrine, dogma, or beliefs, but about gaining the experiences that will awaken us to the spirit within and to our place in the matrix of Creation's formulations."
If that all sounds a bit new-agey for Jay Sekulow of Pat Robertson's American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), you can see why he has fought the case all the way to the highest court in the land. "A host of federal, state, and local government bodies," ACLJ wrote in its brief, "are now sitting targets for demands that they grant 'equal access' to whatever comparable monuments a given group wishes to have installed, be it Summum's Seven Aphorisms, an atheist group's Monument to Freethought, or Rev. Fred Phelps's denunciation of homosexual persons."
Wait a second. Is denunciation of homosexual persons a religious principle?
As Barry Lynn of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State put it, "government officials could have avoided this controversy by refusing to put up the Ten Commandments in the first place."
Contact me at tapthefundamentalist AT gmail DOT com.
