Posted on 11/26/2004 10:42:12 AM PST by Former Dodger
Religious zealots riding high after W's win
Less than a month after the national elections, the mullahs of America's religious right are in full swagger. Dispensing with pretense, they are openly reconfiguring American government in the service of a narrow version of fundamentalist Christianity. For weeks, the press has focused on how a vast mobilization of evangelical voters helped President Bush to reelection. That's missing the disturbing sequel to the story: an explicit, organized campaign to erode the nation's status as a modern, secular and constitutional democracy.
Consider the following events, all of which have taken place since Election Day.
In a letter dated Nov. 3, the president of Bob Jones University, the politically influential Bible college in South Carolina, sent Bush an open letter, posted on the school's Web site.
"In your reelection, God has graciously granted America - though she doesn't deserve it - a reprieve from the agenda of paganism," wrote Bob Jones 3rd. "Put your agenda on the front burner and let it boil. You owe the liberals nothing. They despise you because they despise your Christ."
A few days later, James Dobson, the archconservative founder of Focus on the Family, a lobbying group, bluntly notified the nation that he expects Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), in line to become chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, to be an errand boy for the religious right.
Specter committed the sin of suggesting that Bush would have problems winning Senate approval of Supreme Court nominees who are determined to overturn Roe vs. Wade and outlaw abortion.
Dobson promptly went on national television to issue a political fatwa. "He is a problem, and he must be derailed," Dobson said.
Senate leaders hastily patched together a compromise that will let Specter keep his job. "He will assume his new position on a very short leash," said Mullah Dobson.
In case any other slow learners in Congress needed help, Dobson gave clear marching orders. "Especially, especially, putting conservative judges on the judiciary, that is the key to everything," he said on ABC's "This Week."
Speaking of the judiciary, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia made two appearances this week that confirm his oft-stated intent to erase traditional lines separating church and state. "We are fools for Christ's sake," Scalia said at a Red Mass, a tradition for Catholic lawyers, in Illinois. "We must pray for the courage to suffer the contempt of the sophisticated world."
A few days later, addressing Congregation Shearith Israel in Manhattan, Scalia dropped the Christ references but kept the message touting government support of religion.
"There is something wrong with the principle of neutrality," he told the congregants, according to The Jerusalem Post. The true goal, he said, "is not neutrality between religiousness and nonreligiousness; it is between denominations of religion."
In a 1960 speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, then-Sen. John Kennedy described the restraint and neutrality that government leaders should exercise with regard to religion.
"I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute," said Kennedy. "Where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials.... I believe in a President whose religious views are his own private affair."
America in the age of the mullahs has strayed a long way indeed from Kennedy's wise words.
Originally published on November 26, 2004
Are you sure you don't have her in a Muslim school?
"Convenntional wisdon" - - the last refuge of the ignorant and lazy mind.
Anyways, just for fun, here is the verbatim text of Amendment 1. (It contains nothing about "separation of church and state". That myth arose from a disgraceful, perverted, one-way take on the first line of Amendment 1, and a complete dismissal of the six words following the first comma. Spin, distort, pervert, repeat....)
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."
The opening phrase, "Congress shall make no law....", has been perverted by the liberals into prohibiting a valedictorian from praying publicly at his graduation, barring military folks from leading Boy Scout troops, and condemning public displays of the Ten Commandments.
Errol Louis and his ilk are sick dogs who are scared to death that America may be on the verge of reclaiming its moral compass.
"...your using secularism as a religion is I hope sarcasm. The belief in something that calls for the ouster of religion in civic matters or the holding of a philosophical view to exclude religion, would only oddly be held to be a religion." ~ verifythentrust
Not hardly.
Saul Alinsky - The Religious Marxist-Left follows him "religiously". Their magazine? Sojourners:
http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=magazine.article&issue=Soj0003&article=000311
Saul Alinsky's books: Rules for Radicals and Reveille for Radicals
In the 60's, as a radical hippy-type mentality herself at Wellesley, Hillary Clinton was so enamored of Saul Alinsky and his *methods* she wrote her senior thesis under his mentoring.
*
Book Review [excerpted]: Why the Left Is Not RightThe Religious Left: Who They Are and What They Believe by Ronald Nash Published in The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty - December 1997 by Doug Bandow http://www.fee.org/vnews.php?nid=3918
When it comes to religion and politics, most media attention is focused on the right. And it usually isn’t positive coverage. Religious conservatives are presented as threatening America’s constitutional balance, women’s right to choose, gays’ civil liberties, and much more.
Yet religious activism runs both ways. As Ronald Nash, a professor at the Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, Florida, notes in Why the Left Is Not Right, there is an active and diverse religious left in the United States. To be sure, these people, who once “proudly proclaimed their liberal or radical connections,” now “describe themselves as moderates and centrists,” notes Nash. But their policy positions remain unashamedly left-wing.
Nash divides the religious left into three parts: liberal mainline Protestants, liberal Catholics, and left-wing evangelicals. There’s no doubt where Nash stands. He argues that these groups have been used (willingly or unwillingly) by the Democrats for electoral purposes and have helped “demonize politically conservative Christians.” A prolific author and entertaining speaker, Nash obviously views himself as among the demonized right.
In his view, the central argument is not whether people of faith should be concerned about peace and justice, but what those terms mean. The evangelical left has appeared to have simply assumed the standard liberal understanding of the words and then discredited anyone (including their politically conservative brethren) who understood the terms differently and who pursued the objectives of peace and justice in a different way.
Perhaps the greatest value of Why the Left Is Not Right is that it shows how political activism by people of faith is neither new nor restricted to conservatives. Indeed, even as evangelicals were receiving exaggerated public attention for entering the political process, mainline Protestant denominations were promoting Democratic political causes domestically and communist revolutionary movements abroad. It is a story worth remembering when the media and political establishments pour obloquy on traditionally less active evangelicals and fundamentalists as they seek to protect themselves and their values from government intrusion.
Much the same politics has been on display within the Roman Catholic Church. Catholics were once “thoughtful enemies of secularism, humanism, and the liberal welfare state,” writes Nash. Many still are, but as Nash puts it, “large cracks have appeared in the political and social thinking of many educated Catholics.” The 1985 Pastoral Letter on the economy, for example, was as political as anything emanating from the Christian Coalition. Even more radical have been specific segments of the church, such as the Maryknoll Order.
However, Nash devotes most of his attention to the lesser-known left-wing evangelicalism. He argues that the New Left and “the adversary culture” of the 1960s spawned political liberalism among Protestants who purport to hold a more conservative, orthodox theological view. Nash focuses on three leading leftish evangelicals: Jim Wallis, editor of Sojourners magazine; Ron Sider, founder of Evangelicals for Social Action and author of Rich Christians in a World of Hunger; and Tony Campolo, sociology professor, well-published author, and presidential confidante.
The scrutiny is warranted.... Wallis, for instance, lives his beliefs. Two decades ago Wallis moved his magazine to a poor section of Washington, D.C., and formed a community of the same name. At the same time, however, he has, as Nash points out, remained imbued with the leftist Zeitgeist of the 1960s.
The boat people fleeing communist Vietnam, Wallis wrote, were leaving “to support their consumer habit in other lands.” Their departure should not be taken to “discredit” Vietnam.
Wallis’s views toward Cuba and Nicaragua were similarly skewed.
Wallis’s economic opinions also were long solidly collectivist. The collapse of socialism abroad seems to have chastened himhe now calls himself centrist and asserts that he is independent of Democrats and Republicans alikebut he remains wedded to interventionist policies.
Conservatives, Wallis charges, retain an “attachment to institutions of wealth and power, preference for the status quo, and the lack of a strong ethic of social responsibility.”
Unfortunately, while Wallis now criticizes abuses by government, he underestimates how the activist state promotes concentrations of wealth and power, supports the status quo, and undermines social responsibility.
Similar is Nash’s case against Ron Sider. Sider .... has always placed intentions before results. Thus, as Nash documents, Sider has long advocated the sort of government intervention that has been tried and found wanting throughout this century.
.... Nash points out that “Ron Sider, the person who comes closest to being a moderate member of the evangelical Left, has himself spent years trying to elect liberal, typically Democratic, candidates to public office.”
Tony Campolo is probably the most public of the three, given his high-profile contacts with President Bill Clinton. Campolo also criticizes government, but seems committed to statist remedies when it comes to solving specific problems. ...
Through his analysis, which concludes with chapters on economics and poverty, Nash shows how even the best-intentioned of religious believers can come up with solutions inimical to the interests of those they wish to serve. .....
Why the Left Is Not Right deals seriously with an important subject. Despite the public perception that religious activists gravitate toward the right, many people of faith have embraced collectivist remedies despite the ill effects on those most in need.
In short, Nash’s basic thesis is correct: the left is not right.
Zondervan • 1996 • 222 pages • $10.99 paperback
Doug Bandow, a nationally syndicated columnist, is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and the author of Beyond Good Intentions: A Biblical View of Politics (Crossway).
No, and she's not in a Protestant school either.
Regarding religion, free expression is not the same thing as coercion. And, if every idea in the Bible must be banished from consideration then we'd better repeal the murder and theft laws. We'd better teach our school children that lying is just another lifestyle choice that some people make. Heck, aren't most people born dishonest anyway? So cheat and lie, kiddies. You were born for it.
Nice try, but no kewpie doll. All three groups described are religious believers. The association of secularists, who are not espousing a religion, but the absence of it in government, with a religion is just false, a misuse of words, and comparable to leftest use of propaganda. Let's make our points without such drivel.
"to erode the nation's status as a modern, secular, constitutional democracy."
has someone issued an edict, declaring the United States a secular democracy? (one smells authoritarianism in the air)
I recently watched a "made-for-TV" movie called 'The Contender' which was about a woman who was nominated by the President to take over as Vice President in his administration. It was first broadcast about five years ago.
This movie was as brazenly and sickenly liberal as it gets. During hearings before Congress, the nominee speechified about how big-government and liberal/socialist policy WAS her religion. It was jaw dropping. You had to see it to believe it, but it shamelessly and clearly exemplified the common liberal mindset.
I resemble that remark! Truly a misunderestimation of justice!
There were some threads about it on here when it came out. I saw it. It made Gary Oldham's character, the conservative senator, a real characature and glorified the libs. Usual pap!
You are quite uninformed. Embarrassingly so.
you shouldn't blame yourself. You want to call black white and night day and I just don't get it. My ignorance is certainly no fault of yours. You did your best.
You seem to have a peculiar fear of "protestant clerics,"
especially the idea that they may do something to your daughter in public schools.
If you want to keep her "safe" from Christian teachings other than your own idiosyncratic brand, public school would be the "safest haven" you could ask for.
Liberalism IS a "faith" whose bottom line premise is the "basic goodness" of human beings. Those who hold that faith "believe" that utopia on earth is possible with the right leadership.
Our founding documents are based upon the premise that even though people are capable of doing good, fallen man is NOT basically good, and therefore men must be protected from each other by a totally objective rule of law undergirding a Constitution that guards absolute moral truths concerning the source of mankind's rights.
Liberalism may involve faith, but it is not a religion. Many beliefs, even philosophies involve faith. Theories involve an element of faith, but they are not religions. To label humanism or secularism as religions and then treat them with the same legal status is incorrect, illogical and just propaganda. Something we rail at the liberals about.
You need to get up to speed - FAST!
Absolutely right. Perhaps you know, where did the term "separation of Church and State" originally come from?
Supposedly it derives from the clause you posted, but I have never seen it actually in the Constitution.
we have already established my ignorance and your inability to teah me, take a break. I'm just a simple person who remembers when words had real meaning and could not be twisted into straw men for the sake of political and social discourse. Sorry you wasted your time.
There is a completly undeniable separation of church and state. I want the government to keep its filthy nose out of our religion.
I have read the Constitution many times and have never seen a seperation of church and state in there. Government may not endorse a particular religion, but there is no seperation.
Funny how Leftists fear nonviolent Christians while they cheer violent Islamofascists who saw people's heads off and videotape it for later viewing.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.