There are well over 1,000 formal organizations dedicated to Religious Conservative activism, with vast sums of money involved. The Far Right has many thousands of dedicated True Believers who work mightily for Christian Supremacy in the U.S., meeting very little opposition. Politicians won’t touch the subject for fear of committing quick professional suicide.
When Hillary Clinton used the phrase “VAST RIGHT WING CONSPIRACY” there were a hundred conservative web sites that sprang into action to ridicule the idea that they were in a conspiracy. NOw there are a thousand such sites all dedicated to praising any stupidity of Bush to realize their dream of a Christian theocracy. They will swallow any administration adventure and will readily change our Constitution to suit their specific religious beliefs.

looks like I was attributing too much ‘Lubavich’ to Mrs Ahmansons … it was the comments she made to ‘salon.com’ about 613 versus 7 Laws that did it …

With financing from a handful of conservative donors, including the Scaife family foundations, the Bradley and Olin Foundations and Howard and Roberta Ahmanson’s Fieldstead & Company, the 23-year-old institute [on Religion and Democracy] is now playing a pivotal role in the biggest battle over the future of American Protestantism since churches split over slavery at the time of the Civil War.

The Institute has brought together previously disconnected conservative groups within each denomination to share resources and tactics, including forcing heresy trials of gay clergy members, winning seats on judicial committees and urging congregations to withhold money from their denomination’s headquarters…

Rev. Robert Edgar, a former Democratic congressman who is general secretary of the National Council of Churches, an ecumenical alliance that is dominated by the mainline churches and a principal target of the Institute’s criticism, argued that it spoke for only about a third of mainline hurchgoers. “They have caused so many internal issues that some progressive leaders are afraid to take the courageous positions they would have taken a few decades ago because a third of their parishioners would cut their legs off.”

But in an interview last week, Roberta Ahmanson, a member of the Institute’s board and the wife Howard Ahmanson, a banking heir from California, contended that the Institute’s orthodoxy resonated far more widely…

Mrs. Knippers and Mrs. Ahmanson both noted that the impetus for the founding of the Institute came from a labor union activist, not right-wing
financiers. Mrs. Knippers said the initial idea came from David Jessup, a staunchly anti-communist union activist and Methodist who objected to church aid to Vietnam and Nicaragua under their leftist regimes.

The Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, a Roman Catholic priest and former Lutheran minister, wrote its founding statement and other neoconservatives joined an advisory board. (In addition to Father Neuhaus, the Institute’s board of directors currently includes Mary Ellen Bork, wife of Judge Robert H. Bork, Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard and Fox News, and Michael Novak of the American Enterprise Institute.)

Ms. Knippers, who spoke during two interviews in the last three months, said that during the 1980’s the Institute’s initial budget of about $300,000 came entirely from a few conservative foundations, including the Scaife family foundations, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation as well as from the Ahmansons’ philanthropic arm Fieldstead & Company…

Mrs. Ahmanson, who is Presbyterian, said she and her husband, who is Episcopalian, were motivated mainly by theological concerns. “My husband and I are what we call classical Christians,” Mrs. Ahmanson said, explaining their view that Christians should stick to the the fifth century St. Vincent of Lerins’s orthodox standard of “what has been held everywhere in every
time by everyone.” She added, “It is only in the last hundred years or so that there has been an elite, if you will, who have argued with that.”

http://www.yuricareport.com/Dominionism/ConservativesPlantoSplitChurches.html

To Sunfell:

Damn right this push for creationism is happening. In Barron County, WI, USA. The County passed a resolution which mandates that “Intelligent Design” be taught in SCIENCE classrooms! This is the real dumbing down, where we consign the next generation of leaders to the intellectual trash heap of anti-science flat worlders. Scary stuff? Hell yes…

A little off topic for a laugh:
Ok, Les: your trackbacks are now 666, is that not awesome?!

Total damage done so far:

  * 2599 entries
  * 18888 comments
  * 666 trackbacks

I’m English, so I have some distance from the US and its woes, and I can tell you this :in the US the meanings of the words ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ have actually been reversed from what they would have been in traditional European usage say a hundred years ago. ‘Liberal’ used to mean a supporter of the Free Market, versus ‘conservative’ which meant a supporter of the traditional society headed by the Church and the Monarch, who were expected to restrain the market in favour of a more classical notion of ‘civilisation’. In the US now it is only the ‘paleo-conservatives’ who have any sense of this change, and they have delusions of their own (see what I said about Lew Rockwell Dot Com in my previous post.)
Similarly, the word ‘anti-Semitic’ has come to mean anti-Jewish, so that it is now possible to accuse anti-zionist Arabs of being ‘anti-Semites’, despite the fact that the average Arab is more Semitic than the average Jew.
These alterations and indeed reversals of meaning are not random. They are products of your media ownership with its specific biases and projects.

Lizwah, the discussions here can be a little intimidating at times, I’ll agree. But I doubt the answer to our woes is to dumb ourselves down. How about if we just provide people with dictionaries?

Sound bites and simple phrases can be effective but they also can mislead if too simple. For instance, the “War on Drugs” seems like an innocent goal we can all get behind. But what about the other pushers/suppliers: the doctors and pharmaceutical companies? Prescription drug addiction is just as much a problem as illegal drug or alcohol abuse. Are we fighting a real war on drug abuse or just a pretend one?

Often the message, hot button, or remedy really can be too simplistic and uninformative.

So long as liberals view themselves as “other” in the realm of politics, they fail to gain the ear of those who view themselves as “united.” We need to reclaim the language of discussion and engage in speech that all find relevant. No more the wordy declamations of the educated – and therefore perceived as privileged – what we need are selling points. Hot buttons. Talk to me, I am barely able to understand most of the posts here, yet I am an educated, atheist, feminist, Democrat woman. What is our problem? Why can’t we just say what we mean? IE: I don’t mind paying taxes, if it means my children will be well educated. I don’t agree with amending the constitution to eliminate rights. Am I stupider than I thought, or are you guys too smart for my kind?

Some people get a little confused by the fact that there are two opposed factions within American Calvinism, one of which believes that ‘The Church’ has replaced ‘The Jews’ as ‘God’s Chosen People’ and the other which does not – this latter group are the Dispensationalists, who are waiting for the Rapture and therefore are not interested in any sort of world-wide ‘Dominion’. What we are talking about is therefore the former group. Its leading ideologue nowadays for my money is Gary North, who writes for Lew Rockwell Dot Com. This in itself is strange considering that Lew Rockwell is (a) Catholic and (b) Libertarian. The connection seems to be that they all regard fiat money (i.e. the inflationary non-gold-based stuff your divinely guided government is currently trying to buy up the planet with) as the root of all evil.

Some key funders in the Christian Right are in both camps, such as Howard Ahmanson. To be precise, he is a Dominionist but his wife Roberta appears to be a Dispensationalist, with what look like links to Chabad-Lubavich. Naturally, the question of whether Israel will be destroyed before or after it becomes the center of a New World Order raises much speculation among these people : according to the Dominionists, Jesus will appear in the rebuilt Temple and one third of Israel will recognise him while the other two thirds will be killed in the battle of Armageddon, while according to the Dispensationalists Jesus will appear in the rebuilt Temple and reconfirm the Old Testament covenant with the surviving Jews, all true Christians having been raptured. Either way, the money shot is this – either way, the essence of ‘God’s Promise’ as all of them agree is that financial imperialism is divinely ordained as a means of rulership : “For YHWH thy God will bless thee, as He promised thee; and thou shalt lend unto many nations, but thou shalt not borrow; and thou shalt rule over many nations, but they shall not rule over thee. ” (Deuteronomy ch 15, v 6). This may seem not to apply to the USA, currently the world’s largest debtor, but you must remember that the real rulers are not the politicians, who are simply hired help, but the bankers.

I have been studying Dominionists and AOG churches for some time, and have seen this growing into the virulent mess it currently is.

To be blunt: it scares the crap out of me. Yes, the mainstream press continues to either ignore or gloss over the Dominionists steady subversion of our country because they’re still stuck in that ‘oh, they’re just fundies, and you know how those fundies are- they’re just a bunch of harmless cranks’ mindset.

No, they’re not. They’ve taken over the Republican Party, creep like kudzu into our school boards, and government, and have been steadily infiltrating our military for at least two decades. I saw the latter first hand, where ‘sky pilots’ were tolerated, if not encouraged, and anyone not a ‘true believer’ was harassed, hassled, and sometimes even drummed out of the forces.

And if you still don’t believe me, consider this: the cover story on October’s “Wired” magazine is about the Dominionist’s ‘war against evolution’- they want to replace it in schools with a barely disguised Creationist-inspired “Intelligent Design”. In some places, they’ve actually succeeded.

Scary stuff…

Sunfell

I just read the “Yurika Report” and did a little searching on the Internet for “Christian Dominion”  Maybe it’s because I just saw “Fahrenheit 911” last night (yes, I’m behind the times), but Yurika sounds believable to me.  On the “Coalition on Revival