"We were taught to vomit demons into bags. It was a very, very weird situation." -- Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi, describing his experiences at John Hagee's San Antonio Cornerstone Church

"Last night at Cornerstone Church we were privileged to have, as our speaker, Newt Gingrich. He gave a wonderful delivery of the theme, 'Rediscovering God in America.' " -- John Hagee (video of Gingrich at Cornerstone)

But recently, Gingrich and other top Republicans have taken to personally courting far right leaders and celebrities--who have been accused of helping to incite domestic terrorism, who promote falsified versions of American history, who are on record (in print, that is) accusing police nationally of conspiring to cover up an alleged wave of ritual child sacrifice, who claim to cast out demons, and who are under fire for a range of anti-Jewish slurs, from scapegoating George Soros to comparing Reform Judaism to radical Islam.

[video, below, showcases various inflammatory John Hagee claims from his sermons and books]

The avenger of blood

In short, Gingrich is helping to mainstream and legitimize the fringe. To give one noteworthy example:

During a December 2007 rally in Kansas City, The Call Founder Lou Engle railed against legalized abortion, forecasting it would lead to a second American civil war, and challenged his audience, "One of the names of God is 'avenger of blood'; Have you ever worshiped that aspect of God lately ?" In a March 11, 2009 post on his personal blog, Engle compared late-term abortion doctor George Tiller to an "Auschwitz death camp worker." On May 31, 2009, Tiller was assassinated, in the lobby of his Wichita, Kansas church, during a Sunday service.

Five days later, Lou Engle laid hands on and blessed Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee, in a ceremony at a Virginia Beach megachurch.

A year after that, Engle led a Kampala, Uganda rally featuring the leading authors and proponents of the country's so-called "Kill the gays" bill. Engle has publicly boasted that one of his sons specializes in casting out "homosexual spirits" and declared that San Francisco's Castro District is "where the homosexuals boast the dominion of darkness."  

[video, below: Lou Engle prays over Newt Gingrich]

Gingrich for president!

As widely heralded, Newt Gingrich has now formally declared his bid for the presidency in the 2012 election, and so the former House Speaker's political alliance with evangelical figures such as Lou Engle, John Hagee and David Barton, leaders in a notably bigoted stream of aggressive Christian nationalism, and Fox show host Glenn Beck, who has attacked liberal Jews and called President Obama a racist, becomes an issue of concern to voters.

While Gingrich has spoken at Hagee's San Antonio church, co-produced video chats with the portly pastor, and been a semi-regular speaker at Hagee's Christians United For Israel events, John Hagee's publicly aired views range (see attached video) from endorsement of exorcism, and fulminations against Jewish Rothschild bankers, to claims that police are covering up a national epidemic of ritual child sacrifice.

God sent Hitler?

Some relevant history: In May 2008 I published a short video, with excerpts from a 2005 John Hagee sermon, that was widely credited, by the New York Times and other mainstream media outlets, with causing then-Presidential candidate John McCain to renounce his long sought and loudly trumpeted political endorsement from Hagee that McCain had announced at a February 2008 national press conference.

As journalist Max Blumenthal prophetically noted at the time, "McCain's reversal on Hagee's endorsement does not in any way signal that Hagee will suddenly recede from politics, or that the pastor's influence in Washington will wane."

True to Blumethal's prediction, in the lead up to the 2012 presidential election John Hagee is once again being aggressively courted by Republican presidential hopefuls, who are quite aware that the evangelical right constitutes a key part of their party's voter base. Fraught with peril, Hagee, dubbed Pastor Strangelove in a trenchant article by journalist Sarah Posner, nonetheless seems politically indispensable.  

In my short video, picked up by the Huffington Post, then by Keith Olbermann's Countdown, then by mainstream media around the world, pastor Hagee stated that "God sent a hunter. Hitler was a Hunter" and explained that the Nazi persecution of Europe's Jews was God's way of persuading them to move to Palestine.

Hagee, who subsequently held a late May 2008 press conference to complain he was being stigmatized for statements that he had made "decades ago", went on to write a wildly deceptive letter of "apology" to Abe Foxman and the ADL, for a sermon pastor Hagee said he'd given in the late 1990's. But in the actual offending sermon, which was then only two and a half years old (and it was sold by Hagee's ministry as a DVD through 2008), the Texas pastor referenced the 2005 hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Since 2008, research colleagues and I have uncovered a wide range of even more aggressively bigoted material from Hagee, including his 2003 claim that Rothschild bankers control the US economy (a slur gaining widespread traction especially given the globally significant financial machinations of Goldman Sachs) which the Anti Defamation League identifies as a "Classic Anti Semitic Myth" (see attached video.)

A professed demon-casting exorcist prone to telling an anecdote of how he once chucked out a devil from a woman Hagee says had the face of a cat, John Hagee has cultivated close ties to far-right lightning rods such as the Fox-empowered Glenn Beck, notorious for his Jew-bating attacks on financier George Soros and his claim that President Barack Obama has a "deep seated hatred for white people."

But Hagee is also well tapped into the political mainstream. He has been on a first name basis with a succession of Israeli prime ministers, been courted by many of the Republican Party's leaders of the past decade, and been  photographed next to Mikhail Gorbachev, George Bush Sr., Dick Cheney, and Condaleeza Rice.

David Barton

In May 2010, Glenn Beck and Newt Gingrich could be found together onstage before 10,000 National Rifle Association members, deriding "Marxist revolutionaries" in the Obama Administration. Meanwhile, in the same year, Beck began a weekly series, on his Fox show, which showcased David Barton, whose lessons on the revisionist Christian nationalist view of American history are apparently so essential that another potential 2012 presidential candidate, Mike Huckabee, was recently moved to state that they should be taught to every American citizen, at gunpoint if necessary.

David Barton, former Vice Chair of the Texas Republican Party who was credited by Time as one of the 25 most influential evangelists in America, specializes in falsifying American history to bolster the claim, widely popular on the American evangelical right, that the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation, a national heritage stolen, according to Barton, by secularists.

While Glenn Beck aired David Barton's teaching on his Fox show, Barton critic Chris Rodda, author of Liars For Jesus: The Religious Right's Alternate Version of American History, ran an ongoing series debunking each successive history lie of Barton's aired every week.

Other notable Bartonabilia: the website of David Barton's nonprofit organization Wallbuilders has, since as least 2003, featured writing, by a member of Barton's Wallbuilders board, that appears to sanction "Biblical slavery."

Barton, Hagee, and Beck: the terrible troika

Over the past two years, John Hagee has solidified his alliance with Barton and Glenn Beck, to the point that the two now appear to be acting almost as Hagee's de-facto emissaries, in a surprise trip to Israel during which Glenn Beck announced he was to meet (it hasn't happened so far) with current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a personal friend of John Hagee's who routinely sends his Likud Party allies to speak at Hagee's events and participates by telecast. Beck is currently scheduled to keynote John Hagee's July 18-20, 2011 Christians United For Israel summit in Washington, DC.

On August 27, 2010, John Hagee joined David Barton and Glenn Beck at Washington DC's Kennedy Center, for a rally in advance of Beck's "Restoring Honor" weekend Christian nationalist extravaganza at the Lincoln Memorial. Also joining the troika was U.S. Republican Congressional Representative Randy Forbes, who each year introduces a "spiritual heritage" congressional resolution packed with Barton-scripted American history lies.

Each of these Gingrich allies, Beck, Barton, and Hagee, promotes a conspiratorial narrative of "cultural complaint" which blames an alleged American national decline on creeping secularism. In a September 2006 conference co-hosted by the United States Holocaust Museum, noted conservative evangelical scholar David P. Gushee stated that similar narratives helped fuel the rise of German fascism and warned that,

"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."

Newt Gingrich himself is author of the best-selling 2006 book Rediscovering God In America, which asserts that "There is no attack on American culture more destructive and more historically dishonest than the secular left's relentless effort to drive God out of America's public square." Newt Gingrich has stated that if he decides to run for president in the 2012 election his campaign will rely heavily on David Barton's advice.

Gingrich's 2006 book, although far more careful than David Barton's style of history revisionism, nonetheless contains a version of a history lie that Barton has removed from more recent editions of his book Original Intent, the claim (as Gingrich puts it) that "when Thomas Jefferson wrote the first plan of education adopted by the District of Columbia, he used the Bible and Isaac Watt's hymnal as the principal texts for teaching reading to students" (Rediscovering God, page 46.)

As Chris Rodda explains,  

"the Washington D.C. school board story is probably the single most popular religious right lie about Thomas Jefferson and public education, with various versions appearing on countless Christian American history websites and in almost every religious right American history book.

[...]

This myth about Jefferson and the Washington D.C. schools was created by combining two things. One is that, in 1805, Jefferson was elected president of the Washington City school board. The other is an 1813 report by the teacher of one of the city's early public schools, showing that the Bible and Watts's Hymns were used as reading texts in that school. The problem with the story is that the school that these books were used in didn't exist until several years after Jefferson left Washington and the school board.