The Rise of Palin, death of Weyrich, Hollywood's Philip Anschutz, Attacking Obama, Whither the Religious Left?, Rick Warren

"A 2008 Berkowitz Baker's Dozen," is a selection of 13 articles from the nearly 100 news stories, op-ed pieces, and columns I wrote in 2008. The "Baker's Dozen" contains stories that were published at Talk2Action, BuzzFlash, Media Transparency, Religion Dispatches, Inter Press Service, Right Web, Z Magazine, Dissident Voice, Smirking Chimp, and Alternet, and some venues too strange to even mention.  The list puts the year's events in perspective, and are arranged chronologically.

Some stories were ahead of the reporting curve (an April piece about the early vicious attacks from the Right on Obama); some were about issues that are rarely reported (a January piece about how Philip Anschutz, a conservative Christian theater and film mogul who is aiming to transform Hollywood); some provided historical analyses of the conservative movement (a March piece about the Heritage Foundation's 35th Anniversary & a recent piece on the death of Paul Weyrich); and others monitored the ongoing activities of the Christian Right (early work on the same-sex marriage battle in California and one on Bush's attempt to use his faith-based initiative as a legacy builder).

The List at the jump:

So, the Religious Right is dead, right? Its time has finally passed, and the movement has no more strength. It's yesterday's news, a historical relic, correct?

Not quite. It turns out the Religious Right might still have some kick left. In fact, its foot soldiers have been hard at work and just might have enough clout to pick the next head of the Republican National Committee.

I have pair of articles over at Religion Dispatches today that report some of the revelations from a new book by investigative journalist Russ Baker,  Family of Secrets:  The Bush Dynasty, The Powerful Forces that Put it in Power, and What Their Influence Means for America.

Among many other things, the book details how the patrician Bush family dynasty overcame the problems of "Poppy" Bush's preppy Episcopalianism -- to navigate the evangelicalism of the rising Religious Right, and how a conversion to evangelical Christianity was choreographed and sold to "wipe the slate clean" of young W's reckless and non-religious youth -- apparently including an illegal abortion W obtained for a girlfriend in Texas before Roe v. Wade.

With the imminent inauguration of Barack Obama, the issue of embryonic cell research is again coming to the fore. The Religious Right, looking for any issue on which to stage their comeback, will certainly do their part to make the most of it in pursuit of their never-ending culture war.

While the Religious Right claims to have a corner on being "pro-life" -- there is nothing more pro-life and pro-family than fully funding this vital medical research. I should know, because I speak from experience.

In what is a radical departure from Baptist protocol, an editor of a Baptist splinter group in Texas has called for state funding of religion.  Baptists used to champion the  cause that govenrment should not prop up religion.  Baptist in early New England did not want to pay taxes that went to supporting religious doctrines they did not agree with.  Things are changing.
     Gary Ledbetter, editor of the news magazine for Southern Baptists of Texas, a group that left traditional Baptist work in the state, has a new view of Baptist life.  Gary wants the state to give money for church ministries and that money be used to discriminate against other faiths in hiring practices.  He also sees nothing wrong with the state funds being used to win converts.  Writing in the December 31, 2008 isue of SOUTHERN BAPTIST TEXAN, Gary fears the new president will reverse a practice instigated by current President Bush.
    Most of the money handed out by Catholic Charities comes from the government.  Many denominational social programs have government funding.  These groups practice a separation of ministries.  They historically have not used state funds to promote their faith or discriminate in hiring.  Bush and his administration promised to allow this.
     This is the same magazine that claimed that the reason a gun man shot and killed several church members in Fort Worth is because of the separation of church and state.

In a story about Warren I wrote nearly three years ago, I asked: Is Rick Warren "all that?" Then, the jury was out. This is now!

With just about everyone talking about Pastor Rick Warren -- he even came up at our annual holiday brunch on Christmas Day -- I thought I would dust off a piece I wrote about Saddleback's finest back in March 2006.

At the time, Warren wasn't a household word, but he nevertheless was a man on the move; packing them in at Saddleback, giving well-attended speeches at international conferences, selling books by the millions, and hanging with U2's Bono.

These days, Warren has kind of sorta become a household word -- he came up again last night at a dinner I attended in Marin. (Some of the specifics in the story have changed, most notably some stats and details about Warren's P.E.A.C.E. initiative.)

My March 16, 2006 piece began with a quote from Peter Drucker, one of Warren's mentors, and continued:

You may have seen him interviewed on CNN's Larry King Show; some well-intentioned person may have given you "The Purpose Driven Life," the book that has sold well over 20 million copies; you may have noted that Time magazine named him one of "15 World Leaders Who Mattered Most in 2004," and in 2005 one of the "100 Most Influential People in the World."

If you wonder whether he is "all that," consider this: In 1980 he founded Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif., with one family and now, he is presiding over a congregation averaging between 22,000 and 25,000 weekly attendees*; he's built a 120-acre campus; and he has more than 300 community ministries to groups such as prisoners, CEOs, addicts, single parents, and people with HIV/AIDS.

According to his website, "He also leads the Purpose Driven Network of churches, a global coalition of congregations in 162 countries. More than 400,000 ministers and priests have been trained worldwide, and almost 157,000 church leaders subscribe to Ministry Toolbox, his weekly newsletter."

He has spoken at the United Nations, the World Economic Forum in Davos, the African Union, the Council on Foreign Relations, Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, TIME's Global Health Summit, and numerous congresses around the world.

 

On December 29, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) filed an amended complaint in the case of its co-plaintiff, decorated combat medic Army SPC Dustin Chalker. The amendment includes a number of additional examples of the "pattern and practice" of unconstitutional promotions of religion in the military, but, most importantly, now includes that SPC Chalker's attempt to resolve his complaint through military channels failed. Chalker was informed last week that the Army has determined his objection to Christian prayers at mandatory military functions to be "unfounded."

La Figa: Rick Warren's strategy for overcoming evolutionary science is revealed.

Religion Dispatches: Michelle Goldberg writes how, (among other things) Rick Warren epitomizes the globalization of the Religious Right, and how  gays and lesbians are the new Jews.

The New Republic: (Hat tip to Christopher Hitchens, writing at Slate.)  Alan Wolfe reports that Rick Warren thinks Jews are going to hell.

We once appeared on a panel together along with Harvard's Peter Gomes at the Aspen Ideas Festival. When it came time for questions, a woman stood up, proclaimed her Judaism, and asked Warren if she was going to burn in hell. He paused before responding--and then answered her question the only way it could be answered. Yes, he said to audible gasps.

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I originally posed the question in this post in February of 2006. It was certainly not the first time we had discussed Rick Warren around here, but it is worth noting that even though no less than Harvard historian Richard Parker was taking a meat cleaver to this big hunk of Inside the Beltway baloney, the narrative has held -- the facts of his extreme views, his polarizing rhetoric and overt and highly partisan behavior over the years, not withstanding. -- FC

Is Rick Warren really a moderate? That's a question that Harvard historian Richard Parker starts to address over at TPMCafe in answer to some of the punditocratic slogans about changes going on on the religious right, and more broadly in evangelical Christianity.

Below is a repost of one of my favorite pieces from 2007. I'll be back this weekend with a new post.

The neo-orthodox Catholic Right often define liberty as "what one ought to do." But this narrow definition raises a very troubling question for those of us who value the separation of church and state: By whose standards are we to decide what "one ought to do?"

"We're in the Second Apostolic Age," declares C. Peter Wagner, "and the government of the church must be in place with apostles and prophets." This new structure is an elaboration on the "Fivefold Ministry" concept in which there are new apostles, who exercise the authority of the Biblical apostles, and new prophets, who are empowered to make new prophecies which have the force of Biblical scripture. Wagner's declaration, on the alleged Second Apostolic Age, is personally convenient because the former Fuller Theological Seminary church growth wunderkind has built, in his International Coalition of Apostles, what may constitute the largest network and political bloc  in the New Apostolic movement.

In this undated video segment recorded at an NAR conference, Peter Wagner describes the emergence of a "new wineskin", which is the new church structure of the "Second Apostolic Age" that Wagner has declared began with the new millennium . "The biggest obstacle to changing something in your church..." Wagner tells his audience, is "the spirit of religion. See, there is a demonic spirit of religion... the spirit of religion is really nasty. Because it is one of the most subtle spirits in the whole kingdom of darkness."

With an operating budget, in 2004, of 2.6 billion dollars, the Salvation Army is one of the largest providers of social services in the world. There's been some previous indication, during the last decade, that the religious culture of the Salvation Army, has been changing; as described in Michelle Goldberg's book Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism and also discussed here at Talk To Action, in 2003 the New York City social services division of the Salvation Army began a purge of gay, and Jewish and all other non-Christian employees. The religious purge triggered a New York Civil Liberties Union lawsuit that was eventually dismissed in a victory for religious nonprofits receiving public funds which practice religious discrimination in their hiring practices.

Now, the Salvation Army appeared to have developed a working relationship with C. Peter Wagner's New Apostolic Reformation. The War College, a recent Salvation Army creation with campuses in Chicago and Vancouver, British Columbia, "is affiliated with the Wagner Leadership Institute" and teaches doctrines of the New Apostolic Reformation, a movement surveyed in a 36 page report recently published here at Talk To Action. As the website for the War College's Chicago branch declares, "You may have heard of The Salvation Army's bold foray into radical battle schooling. The War College has been created to train this generation's warriors to win the world for Jesus." Peter Wagner's doctrine includes the expectation that the drive for world conquest will, if necessary, be fought with guns and bullets rather than prayers and evangelism.

I have a long article in the current issue of The Public Eye: The Culture Wars Are Still Not Over
The Religious Right in the States and Beyond.  

(The shorter version was featured on AlterNet on Christmas Day.)

Excerpts from The Public Eye piece on the flip.

As seems to be happening with increasing frequency, a story I'd previously posted at Talk To Action, almost exactly two years ago in this case, has suddenly become rather timely.

A number of political bloggers [1, 2, 3] have noted Rick Warren's support for the virulently anti-gay Archbishop of Nigeria, Peter Akinola, but the story has lacked some needed historical context; In 2006, Warren publicly lionized (literally) Akinola three months after the Archbishop had endorsed legislation more draconian than comparable anti-gay statutes passed prior to World War Two under the Third Reich.

(Dedicated to the memory of Sarah Horowitz)

Recently, a close friend e-mailed a copy of the powerful and moving eulogy that conservative author and activist David Horowitz delivered at a celebration for his daughter, Sarah, who passed away earlier this year. While many are aware of actor Mike Farrell's work as president of Death Penalty Focus and Sister Helen Prejean and her decades of anti-death penalty activism, few know about Sarah Horowitz.  

Around the same time I received Horowitz's remarkable eulogy, I also received a copy of a report on the death penalty that was produced by the Austin-based Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.  

My story about Sarah Horowitz's anti-death penalty activism and the state of the death penalty as we leave 2008 is at Religion Dispatches.

 "Death Penalty, Debated (Dedicated to the memory of Sarah Horowitz) starts out like this:

The death penalty may seem like a distant and abstract issue for people who are threatened by layoffs or unable to make their house payment or pay the rent. However, while the country is largely focused on daunting economic problems, questions about social justice and the death penalty are still very much with us. And those committed to its abolition continue to press their cause.  

A "remarkable person who led an extraordinary life," [Sarah Horowitz] had a long list of accomplishments: advanced degrees, an undying commitment to peace, social justice and helping the disadvantaged, a strong connection to her Jewish faith, and a willingness to put her convictions to the test, whether by working in a village in El Salvador or walking the snowy streets of Iowa for then-Senator Barack Obama during the Democratic Party primaries.  

The rest of the story can be found by going to ReligionDispatches.org and clicking on the Archive icon.

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Entered without comment:

The controversy over Barack Obama's decision to ask Pastor Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at his inauguration refuses to die down. Discontent over the matter continues to simmer around the Web, and now the pundits are weighing in.

This morning, two Washington Post columnists commented - coming to radically different conclusions.

Street Prophets:   Pastordan is

"waiting very patiently for my friends in the Religious-Industrial Complex to explain why, despite all evidence to the contrary, they thought it was a good idea to mainstream Rick Warren as a "moderate Evangelical."

Liberal Oasis: Bill Scher has a podcast up of our interview in which we discuss the Rick Warren flap and Dispatches from the Religious Left.

The Public Eye:  Abby Scher discusses post-Palin feminism:

From the podium at the Christian Right's Values Voter Summit in mid-September, National Review Institute's Kate O'Beirne, 59, pronounced that the "selection of Sarah Palin [as the GOP vice presidential nominee] sounded the death knell of modern American feminism."

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As both a Catholic and an activist for embryonic stem cell research I am often left shaking my head at the theology used to oppose this promising research. This was once again the case with recently with both Rick Warren and the Vatican its most recent pronouncement on the issue.

This past week was quite a bit of hubbub over President-elect Obama's choice of Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inauguration ceremony. The source of contention has been Pastor Warren's divisive views on social issues. One of those issues is near and dear to my heart: embryonic stem cell research.

The other day I wrote piece for Religion Dispatches (Gimme That Old Spice Religion) that highlighted, among other things, one of the struggles of today's theocrats living in a constitutional democracy that is not much to their liking. The problem is the right of women to vote. Many a theocrat believes that God is against it, and will wax nostalgic for the halcyon days of yore when, well... things were different. But since women do have the right to vote, what then should theocrats do?  

I linked to a 2005 essay by theocratic theorist Brian Abshire that seeks to address this knotty problem.

It was originally, and apparently exclusively, posted at the web site of Vision Forum, headed by Christian home schooling entrepreneur, Doug Phillips. But nerves seem to be raw about this subject. Abshire's essay has suddenly apparently been scrubbed from the site. But thanks to the archival wonders of the internet, you can scrub but you can't hide!

Much more on the flip.

Paul Weyrich, widely considered the "Godfather" of the modern conservative movement, died on Thursday, December 18, after a long illness.

I have a story about Weyrich and his nearly forty-year contributions to the growth of conservatism on Religion Dispatches.

"Paul Weyrich, 'Godfather' of Modern Conservative Movement, Dead at 66," starts out like this:

For most Americans, the death of Paul Weyrich will not resonate; after all, most Americans have probably never heard of the man. He wasn't a dashing celebrity, a sports star, a captain of industry, or a prominent public political figure; he wasn't a regular guest on the premier talking-head TV programs; he never held elected office; there was no hint of a Ted Haggard/Newt Gingrich-like "values" scandal in his life. But Weyrich, who died after a long illness on Thursday, December 18 at the age of 66, and who wasn't reticent about sharing his ideas and opinions, was, in fact, the connective tissue of the modern conservative movement.

In his book, With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America, William Martin pointed out that after Weyrich came to Washington in the late 1960s, he "received a revelation [about] how he might accomplish his dream [bringing together working-class Catholics and evangelical Protestants] when he attended a political strategy session run by liberal operatives."

Although Weyrich hadn't been invited to the confab--and to my knowledge he never revealed how he got there--Martin's book quoted him as saying that "there before my eyes was revealed the modus operandi of the left:"

They had all these different groups, including religious groups, networking with people on the Hill, formulating strategy for offering amendments, and then executing that strategy with media, with demonstrations, with lawsuits, with studies, with political action, by targeting people--all the different elements of the political process.
Weyrich acknowledged that from that moment on, his life was "changed": He spent the early part of the 1970s working "to get these people who really have the same morals, who have the same ideals, but who came to it from different traditions to work together."

For nearly forty years, Weyrich contributed his ideas, organizational acumen, and fundraising skills to help build what evolved from an undisciplined gaggle of organizations that made up what was loosely called the New Right in the 1970s to the powerful political movement (although somewhat weakened after the recent election of Barack Obama) that it is today. Before there was a Heritage Foundation, a Moral Majority, a Ronald Reagan presidency, and before the so-called Republican Revolution of 1994, Weyrich had his eyes on the prize: steadfastly working to figure out how conservatives could regroup and rebuild from the ashes of the overwhelming defeat suffered by Senator Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election.

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Pioneering conservative activist Paul Weyrich died on December 18 at the age of 66. Though Weyrich was commonly regarded as a behind-the-scenes Beltway operator, he achieved one of his most enduring goals in the backwaters of the South.

In 1971, before the Roe v. Wade decision riveted America, the Supreme Court ruled in Green v. Connally to revoke the tax-exempt status of racially discriminatory private schools in 1971. At about the same time, the Internal Revenue Service moved to revoke the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University, which forbade interracial dating (blacks were denied entry until 1971.) The decisions infuriated a popular evangelical pastor from Lynchburg, Virginia named Jerry Falwell. "In some states it's easier to open a massage parlor than to open a Christian school," Falwell complained.

'The Trials of Ted Haggard'

In the midst of the controversy over Pastor Rick Warren delivering the invocation at the inauguration of President Barack Obama, the death of Paul Weyrich, the "Godfather" of the modern conservative movement, the torching of Sarah Palin's Wasilla Bible Church, and the removal of Richard Cizik from his leadership post with the National Association of Evangelicals, comes this piece of news to brighten or, at the least, lighten up your day.

Are you ready?

According to the Associated Press, "The Trials of Ted Haggard," directed by Alexandra Pelosi, daughter of U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is set to air Jan. 29 on HBO. AP also reported that Haggard has agreed to promote the documentary.

Since Haggard's story includes drugs and sex -- I'm not sure how much rock n roll -- think of the possibilities!

After all, it's not television, my friends. It's HBO.