America as a Christian Nation Chapter

BOOK 1, CH 4, DRAFT, AMERICA AS A CHRISTIAN NATION, ICOD 10/6/2014, SCAMINACI
Chapter 4: America as a Christian Nation/Taking Back America
Introduction
The Christian Right claims that America is a Christian nation or should become
one; to become one, the Christian Right needs to take America back from whomever
they believe is un-Christian or not sufficiently Christian—particularly from those who
support reproductive and/or same-sex rights—but generally from liberals, so-called
secular humanists, and all others not agreeing with their agenda. Not taking back
America for Christ will lead to God’s wrathful judgment on the country. While there is a
secular component to this warfare—the Christian Right versus liberals, feminists,
minorities, reproductive rights activists, or homosexuals, it is important to point out that it
is as much a religious civil war pitting Christian nationalists against all those who
oppose their dominionist objective—Catholics, Jews, Mormons, and Muslims, not to
mention other religions, agnostics and atheists. The Christian Right has identified other
enemies of its pro-nuclear, patriarchical family agenda—feminists and homosexuals, for
example—but its virulent and violent-rhetorical opposition to homosexual rights is also
used against mainline Protestant churches in an effort to delegitimize them as un-
Christian, un-godly and, in fact, satanic. And, it has also identified the granting of
homosexuals the right to marry, to have consensual adult sex, and to be ordained as
priests or elected in religious positions as a sin against God and proof that mainline
Protestant churches are demonic.
Nor is the theme of “taking back America” restricted to the Christian Right. Other
parts of what is called the hard right using more secular language or the theology of
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Christian Identity also believe they must “take back America.” In this sense, while the
Christian Zionists and the neo-Nazis are conceptually and theologically different, the
Christian Zionists and the neo-Nazis are not that far apart in terms of their anti-
Semitism.
In fact, the Christian Reconstructionist-influenced Christian Right and New
Apostolic Reformation, a hybrid of the Latter Rain and Christian Reconstructionism,
both promote physical and cultural/religious genocide against mainline Protestant
churches, the Catholic Church, Judaism and Islam, other non-Christian religions, and
non-believers. The combination of dominionism and “America as a Christian nation” is
a recipe for a theologically-induced national catastrophes in America and Israel, as well
as other countries.
The Intra-Protestant Civil War for Dominance
Richard T. Hughes suggested that it is easy to confuse the religiosity of the
Founding Fathers with the intent to create a Christian nation. Hughes noted that the
Founding Fathers were not uniformly Christian, despite Christian Right claims to the
contrary. They were, however, “religious men who built this nation on a deep and
abiding belief in God and in the moral order this God ordained.” But, Hughes pointed
out that contemporary Christians of the Founding Fathers “routinely labeled the
Founders—especially Jefferson, the principal author of the Declaration—as infidels and
atheists who promoted ‘the morality of devils.’” Their objections were grounded in three
empirical observations. First, some of the Founders were Deists who rejected the
divinity of Jesus Christ. “Second, the Declaration of Independence grounded the
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religious meaning of the American experiment not in a God exclusively revealed in the
biblical text, but in ‘Nature and Nature's God.’ That is, in the God all humans can know
and understand through nature, quite apart from the biblical revelation. And third,
orthodox Christians in the early 19th century were profoundly disappointed in the fact
that Christianity—indeed, all religion and all reference to God whatsoever—was simply
missing from the Constitution.”1
Hughes pointed out that in the 19th century Anglicans and Puritans during the
Second Great Awakening attempted to “Christianize the American republic.” The
Second Great Awakening, which lasted from 1800 to 1830, had the “ fundamental
goal…to transform the United States into a thoroughly Protestant nation: Catholics were
not part of the equation….Catholics, Jews, Muslims and members of other non-
Christian religions—not to mention atheists—were widely regarded as distinctly second-
class citizens.”2
The next great attempt to Christianize America was early in the twentieth century
driven by massive social changes and challenging scientific developments. Massive
immigration between the end of the Civil War and 1900 brought 13.5 million immigrants
to the country—many of them Catholic or Eastern Orthodox. Industrialization produced
widespread poverty and the first unionization efforts that were opposed by the
Protestants. Scholarly biblical criticism suggested that the Bible had been written by
1 Richard T. Hughes, “The Christian Right in Context, Part 1: The Long View,” The Huffington Post,
November 7, 2010, at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-t-hughes/the-christian-right-in-

co_b_777815.html.
2Richard T. Hughes, “The Christian Right in Context: Building a Christian America,” The Huffington Post,
co_1_b_777821.html.
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different authors over centuries challenging “the traditional notion that God had simply
spoken the biblical text into existence.” Darwin’s evolutionary theory and its application
to the social sciences “began to undermine both the ideal and the reality of a ‘Christian
America.’” Lastly, Freud applied an evolutionary approach to understanding God, that
is, as a human construct meant to shield primitive human beings from the vagaries and
harshness of life, but a construct that could be abandoned as humans matured as a
species. Hughes pointed out that this effort to Christianize America pitted the
fundamentalists against the modernists, with the fundamentalists fighting against “the
findings of modern science,” “to defend an inerrant Bible,” and “to free those schools
that failed to conform to a literal reading of the biblical text.” And, as Hughes put it, the
fundamentalists “devised a premillennial escape hatch [the Rapture] that assured them
of victory in the life to come even if the Modernists won the battles on this earth.”3
Religious attacks were directed against Jews and Catholics in the 1920s and
1930s. Kevin Schultz explained that in the 1920s one of the “most far-reaching and
influential visions of early twentieth-century America” was put forth by the second Ku
Klux Klan. The KKK’s slogan was “‘Native, white, Protestant supremacy’” and was
directed against the immigrant Catholics and Jews. And while the KKK lost favor due to
its methods, Schultz pointed out that the drive to create a tri-faith America had to
combat “an ascendant drive” to keep America “‘native, white, and Protestant.’” 4
3 Richard T. Hughes, “The Christian Right in Context: Building a Christian America,” The Huffington Post,

co_1_b_777821.html.
4Kevin M. Schultz, Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to its Protestant
Promise, New York: Oxford University Press, 2011: 18-21.
4
Even today, the New Apostolic Reformation and the Christian Right, despite
having Jewish and Catholic allies, are strongly anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic. For the
moment, I concentrate just upon attacks on liberal or modernist Protestants.
Allan Lichtman’s study, White Protestant Nation, found that fundamentalists
believed that “‘Modernism is inspired by Satan,’” according to Reverend T.T. Shields,
president of the Baptist Bible Union. Lichtman noted that during the “1920s,
fundamentalist Protestants spread the good news of the Gospel and challenged a
religious modernism that in their view encouraged misguided secular reform and
subordinated Christianity to flawed science, notably Darwinian evolution.” 5
Randall Balmer in his study, The Making of Evangelicalism, noted that the
fundamentalist-modernist dispute centered largely on the fundamentalists’ opposition to
Darwinian evolution and German biblical scholarship that threatened the inerrancy of
the Bible. Between 1910 and 1915, conservative theologians published a series of
pamphlets called The Fundamentals (hence, fundamentalists) which defended “the
virgin birth of Christ, the authenticity of miracles, the inerrancy of the Bible, and the
premillennial return of Jesus.” It amounted to a “full-fledged declaration of war against
what they called ‘modernism,’” according to Balmer. This war went as far as J.
Gresham Machen, a theologian at Princeton Theological Seminary, arguing that
“Protestants should take the honorable course and withdraw from Protestant seminaries
5 Allan J. Lichtman, White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement, New
York: Grove Press, 2008: 27 and 26.
5
and denominations, leaving them to conservatives, the rightful heirs of Protestant
orthodoxy.” 6
It was in the 1920s that liberalism and communism became conflated. In 1921,
“the Civic Federation warned that ‘Bolshevism and radicals’ infested mainstream
Protestant churches.” In 1928, the Daughters of the American Revolution lost a three-
day court trial in a libel suit brought by DAR member Helen Brumley Baldwin against
liberal Reverend William H. Bridge. Baldwin had sued Bridge because the latter had
written that Baldwin “had been lying about the connection between communists and
liberals.” Witnesses included at least three liberals on the DAR’s blacklist. The blacklist
of subversion, which totaled 306 groups and 218 men and women, included “labor
unions, the Federal Council of Churches [later renamed the National Council of
Churches], the NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People],
the YWCA [Young Women’s Christian Association], the American Association of
University Women, and the National Catholic Welfare Conference.” Moreover, the
fundamentalists also tended to be politically conservative. The fundamentalists
believed that “the Social Gospel movement that sought to apply Christian principles to
social reform was a trap that led Christians to embrace secular rather than spiritual
remedies for the ills of mankind…” Fundamentalists opposed “family regulation and
welfare that interfered with parental authority” and favored charity “delivered by
individuals and communities of faith” rather than by bureaucrats. 7 The fundamentalist
6Randall Balmer, The Making of Evangelicalism: From Revivalism to Politics and Beyond, Waco, TX:
Baylor University Press, 2010: 46-7.
York: Grove Press, 2008: 18, 25, and 29.
6
opposition to the Protestant Social Gospel movement and the Federal Council of
Churches probably was also driven by the fact the Social Gospel movement began
working together at the local and national levels with Catholic and Jewish charitable
groups such as the National Catholic Welfare Conference, the Knights of Columbus,
B’nai B’rith, the National Council of Jewish Women, the American Jewish Committee,
Hadassah, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Congress, and around
400 community chest organizations. 8
The war against the mainline Protestant denominations in the Federal/National
Council of Churches continued in the 1940s and up to the present day through the
vehicles of the Institute on Religion and Democracy and the New Apostolic Reformation.
In 1941, Carl McIntire, a fundamentalist preacher formed the American Council of
Churches and attacked the modernist, liberal Federal Council of Churches. McIntire
fused together fundamentalism, America as a Protestant nation, and support for private
enterprise while he attacked the Federal Council of Churches for its support of
ecumenicalism, pacifism and “social doctrines which were ‘hardly to be distinguished
from Communism.’” In 1943, the newly formed National Association of Evangelicals
attacked the Federal Council of Churches on the grounds that it “lacked ‘a positive
stand on the essential doctrines of the Christian faith’ and espoused ‘programs and
institutions which are nonevangelical or apostate.’” 9
8 Kevin M. Schultz, Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to its Protestant

York: Grove Press, 2008: 123.
7
In other words, the mainline Protestant churches were amongst the ungodly for
having rejected Christianity.
Lichtman reported that in the 1950s, the Chicago police department’s “red squad”
kept track of some 800 “‘subversive’ organizations including the League of Women
Voters, the NAACP, Planned Parenthood, the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations,
and the Federal Council of Churches.” 10
The American Council of Churches released a pamphlet, “How Red Is the
Federal Council of Churches,” while author John T. Flynn’s 1949 book The Road Ahead
seconded the accusation. A Cincinnati-based Circuit Riders group claimed the
Methodist Church promoted socialism, communism, and anti-Americanism. Lichtman
pointed out that what really exercised the fundamentalists was the Federal Council of
Churches joining the World Council of Churches in 1948, especially when the report
criticized both communism and free-market capitalism, the latter for failing to meet
human needs and increasing social inequality. McIntire responded by forming an on
paper-only International Council of Churches. 11
In the 1960s Billy James Hargis’ Christian Crusade was “the most lucrative
fundraising venture on the radical Right of the 1960s.” Hargis marketed his anti-
communist messages in sermons, radio program, books, pamphlets, films, records, and
leadership schools. Hargis “attacked the National Council of Churches as ‘Treason

York: Grove Press, 2008: 150-1.
8
against God and country’ and continuously reminded listeners that ‘America is and
always has been a Christian nation.’”12
Under the first Nixon administration, the Internal Revenue Service “probed such
mainstream left-to-center groups as Americans for Democratic Action, the Urban
League, and the National Council of Churches,” apparently because of their views on
the Vietnam War. 13
The Institute on Religion and Democracy was started in 1980 “by secular
conservatives in an apparent effort to neutralize the foreign policy views of mainstream
Protestant denominations and the National Council of Churches.” 14 Under the Reagan
administration, the Institute on Religion and Democracy “criticized liberals in both the
Protestant and Catholic churches.” The IRD “denounced the World Council of
Churches” for supporting left-wing movements and liberation theology in Central
America. 15 Russ Bellant pointed out that the IRD was funded, in part, by the Coors
family which also funded Paul Weyrich’s Free Congress Foundation and Heritage
12David H. Bennett, The Party of Fear: The American Far Right from Nativism to the Militia Movement,
revised and updated, New York: Vintage Books, 1995: 329-30.
13Allan J. Lichtman, White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement, New
14 Frederick Clarkson, Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy, Monroe,
Maine: Common Courage Press, 1997: 173.

15Allan J. Lichtman, White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement, New
9
Foundation, Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, as well as Pat Robertson’s Christian
Broadcast Network’s Regent University. 16
Sara Diamond pointed out that the IRD immediately upon being founded in 1980
“launched an all-out assault on the patriotism and theological integrity of ‘mainline’
Christians belonging to the National Council of Churches.” The IRD’s founding was
linked to an earlier effort to monitor the finances of the Methodist Church due to the
church’s funding of social justice projects. The initial effort was picked up by the Good
News Movement which had been founded in 1967 to oppose the Methodist Church’s
ecumenicalism and social justice effort—in other words to divide conservative and
liberal Methodists. The major thrust of IRD’s neo-conservative activities was to support
the Reagan administration’s policy of attempting to overthrow governments by proxy
through pro-capitalist liberation movements, such as the Contras in Nicaragua, or
promoting death squads in El Salvador. 17
Subsequent research by Frank Cocozzelli, who follows the Catholic Right at Talk
to Action, has linked some of the leadership of the Institute on Religion and Democracy
to the most conservative elements within the Catholic Church—Opus Dei—and their
battle against both mainline Protestant churches, often with their Christian Right allies,
and the liberal majority within the Catholic Church in America; Opus Dei and their
Catholic Right allies are pursuing a schismatic strategy to drive Catholic social
16 Russ Bellant, The Coors Connection: How Coors Family Philanthropy Undermines Democratic
Pluralism, Cambridge, MA: Political Research Associates, 1988: 50.

17 Sara Diamond, Spiritual Warfare: The Politics of the Christian Right, Boston, MA: South End Press,
1989: 148-9, 151-6.
10
teachings related to social justice, labor rights, protections for immigrants, freedom of
conscience, and the separation of church and state out of the Church. Leaders of IRD
also sit on the boards of other ultra-conservative organizations—Project for the New
American Century, Institute on Religion and Public Life, the Ethics and Public Policy
Center, and the American Enterprise Institute—as well as sharing funding sources with
other Christian Right organizations—the Bradley, Castle Rock, and the four Scaife
family foundations. 18
Christian Reconstructionism and America as a Christian Nation
Frank Schaeffer pointed out that when “you hear words like ‘We want to take
back America for God!’ the twenty-first century expression of such theocratic ideas can
be traced back to some of my old friends: the Reconstructionists.” Schaeffer also
pointed out that the “Reconstructionist movement is a distilled essence of the more
mainstream Evangelical version of an exclusionary theology that divides America into
the ‘Real America’ (as the Far Right claims only it is) and the rest of ‘Sinners.’” 19
Frederick Clarkson in his 1997 book, Eternal Hostility, noted that “an essential
component of the Reconstructionist worldview is a revisionist view of history called
‘Christian history,’ which holds that history is predestined from ‘creation’ through the
18Frank Cocozzelli, “The Politics of Schism in the Catholic Church,” Political Research Associates, Public
Eye Magazine, Volume 24 Number 3, Fall 2009, at http://www.publiceye.org/magazine/v24n3/politics-
schism-catholic-hurch-print.html.
Frank Cocozzelli, “The Catholic Right Part Three: Rev. John McCloskey, the Face of an Opus Dei
Agenda,” Talk to Action, May 23, 2006, at http://www.talk2action.org/story/2006/5/23/82935/0830.
Frank Cocozzelli, “The Catholic Right, Part IV: William Donohue And The Politics Of The Catholic
League,” Talk to Action, June 4, 2006, at http://www.talk2action.org/story/2006/6/4/104521/2225.
19 Frank Schaeffer, Sex, Mom, and God, Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2011: 99, 100.
11
inevitable arrival of the Kingdom God.” Christian Reconstructionists engage in
misleading and factually incorrect historical analysis to back up their claim. Rushdoony
called this effort to recast America as a Christian nation as “‘Christian revisionism.’” 20
Ten years later, Clarkson began an essay on Christian historical revisionism with
the documented claim that the “notion that America was founded as a Christian nation is
a central animating element of the ideology of the Christian Right. It touches every
aspect of life and culture in this, one of the most successful and powerful political
movements in American history. The idea that America's supposed Christian identity
has somehow been wrongly taken, and must somehow be restored, permeates the
psychology and vision of the entire movement. No understanding of the Christian Right
is remotely adequate without this foundational concept.” Clarkson pointed out that this
unsubstantiated historical claim had been “fully integrated into the ‘biblical worldview’ of
a wide theological and political spectrum of the Christian Right and Christian
nationalists.” This included the late Jerry Falwell (Moral Majority), the late D. James
Kennedy (Coral Ridge Ministries), James Dobson (Focus on the Family), Pat Robertson
(The 700 Club), and the late Rousas Rushdoony, founder of Christian
Reconstructionism. 21
Clarkson pointed out a corollary of the America as a Christian nation argument of
the Christian nationalists: “A running refrain in the revisionist narrative is that somehow
20 Frederick Clarkson, Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy, Monroe,

21 Frederick Clarkson, “Why the Christian Right Distorts History and Why it Matters,” Public Eye
Magazine, Volume 22 Number 2, Spring 2007, at http://www.publiceye.org/magazine/v21n2/history.html.
12
the original intention of God and the Founding Fathers has been thwarted by some
combination of liberals, judicial tyrants, the ACLU, secular humanists, and more.” 22
Thus, having lost America to the ungodly liberals and/or secular humanists,
Christian Reconstructionists and their allies must take it back as part of God’s plan for
America. It should not be too surprising that the Tea Party also wants to take back
America and that much of their motivation is derived from Christian nationalism.
Devin Burghart and Leonard Zeskind reported in their study of “Tea Party
Nationalism” that the “Tea Party movement has unleashed a still inchoate political
movement by angry middle class (overwhelmingly) white people who believe their
country, their nation, has been taken from them. And they want it back. The oft-
repeated Tea Party call to ‘Take it Back, Take Your Country Back’ is an explicitly
nationalist refrain. It is sometimes coupled with the assertion that there are ‘real
Americans,’ as opposed to others who they believe are driving the country into a
socialist ditch.”23
Burghart and Zeskind attributed at least some of this Tea Party nationalism to
Christian nationalism: “A word about Tea Party nationalism qua nationalism….[T]heirs
is an American nationalism that does not always include all Americans. It is a
nationalism that excludes those deemed not to be ‘real Americans;’ including the native-
22
Frederick Clarkson, “Why the Christian Right Distorts History and Why it Matters,” Public Eye
Magazine, Volume 22 Number 2, Spring 2007, at http://www.publiceye.org/magazine/v21n2/history.html.
23 Devin Burghart and Leonard Zeskind, “Tea Party Nationalism: Introduction,” August 24, 2010, at
http://teapartynationalism.com/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&layout=item&id=86&Itemid=262.
13
born children of undocumented immigrants (often despised as ‘anchor babies’),
socialists, Moslems, and those not deemed to fit within a ‘Christian nation.’” 24
Ingersoll has perceptively shown how Rushdoony’s influence on Protestant
fundamentalists and evangelicals is disseminated to Tea Party leaders such as
Representative Michelle Bachmann and resonates with the Christian Right electorate.
Bachmann’s professor and mentor at the O.W. Coburn School of Law at Oral Roberts
University was John Eidsmoe. Bachmann worked as his research assistant on his 1987
book Christianity and the Constitution. Eidsmoe argues that “‘America is a Christian
nation’” and “‘our culture should be permeated with a distinctly Christian flavoring.’” 25
Ingersoll pointed out that Eidsmoe’s analysis of the relationship between the Bible and
the U.S. Constitution follows Rushdoony’s thinking on pre-suppositionalism—that there
are two kingdoms, the church and government, and it is the responsibility of the
government, according to Eidsmoe, “‘to follow those godly principles and preserve a
system of order…but one law that governs both.’” 26
24 Devin Burghart and Leonard Zeskind, “Tea Party Nationalism: Introduction,” August 24, 2010, at
http://teapartynationalism.com/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&layout=item&id=86&Itemid=262.
25 Ryan Lizza, “Leap of Faith,” New Yorker, August 15, 2011, at
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/08/15/110815fa_fact_lizza?currentPage=all.
26 Julie Ingersoll, “Bachmann’s Law School Mentor Asserts Biblical Roots of American Political System,”
Religion Dispatches, August 10, 2011, at
http://www.religiondispatches.org/dispatches/julieingersoll/4983/bachmann%E2%80%99s_law_school_m
entor_asserts_biblical_roots_of_american_political_system/.
14
One of the chief proponents of the “America is a Christian nation” myth is the
Christian Reconstructionist and now New Apostolic Reformation’s Seven Mountains
proponent, David Barton. 27
Barton’s work is not and cannot be taken seriously as a body of scholarship. It
is, rather, an effort to construct a narrative in order to change public policy. Paul Harvey
called Barton’s efforts “ideological entrepreneurism” that is presented “for his audience
which exists in his alternate intellectual universe” with “ideas packaged as products in
order to move policy.” 28 Randall Stephens stated that Barton is “using history to craft a
very specific, anti-statist, Christian nationalist, evangelical-victimization argument in the
present.” 29 Historian John Fea called Barton “dangerous” and concluded that Barton
and his WallBuilders organization “selectively uses history to promote a religious and
ideological agenda” while demonizing all historical scholarship and suggesting that
liberal academicians have conspired to distort and remove God from American
history. 30
But, despite, or perhaps because of the shoddiness of his “scholarship,” his work
is widely referenced and cited as the basis for other actions, for example, attempts by
27 Kyle, “David Barton Advocates Seven Mountains Dominionism,” Right Right Watch, April 4, 2011, at
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/print/7086.
28 Paul Harvey, “Selling the Idea of a Christian Nation: David Barton’s Alternate Intellectual Universe,”
Religion Dispatches, May 10, 2011, at

http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/politics/4589/selling_the_idea_of_a_christian_nation%3A_david
_barton%E2%80%99s_alternate_intellectual_universe.
29 Randall Stephens, “Not into History,” US Religion, May 7, 2011, at
http://usreligion.blogspot.com/2011/05/not-into-history.html.
30 John Fea, “Should Christians Trust David Barton?,” Patheos, May 10, 2011, at
http://www.patheos.com/Resources/Additional-Resources/Should-Christians-Trust-David-Barton-John-
Fea-05-11-2011.html.
15
Republicans in Congress to pass various resolutions celebrating America’s mythical
Christian founding by devout born-again Christian fathers, or calling on all Americans—
irrespective of religion or creed—to contemplate the Ten Commandments; or, Barton
appearing on Glenn Beck’s Fox News program to claim that the Founding Fathers used
biblical scripture to shape the U.S. Constitution—claims repeated by Republican
congressmen, Chuck Norris, and John Hagee. 31 Barton on Beck’s “university program”
claimed that the “Black-Robed Regiment” were preachers who influenced the writing of
the Declaration of Independence. 32 Barton has claimed that every single one of the
amendments found in the Bill of Rights is derived from specific Bible passages. 33
Barton at a One Nation Under God conference in 2011 claimed that various parts of the
Constitution came from the Bible including a uniform immigration policy, the natural born
citizenship requirement for the office of the President, the clause on the conviction for
treason, the separation of powers, tax exemption for churches, the republican form of
government, the concept of elections, and the due process clause. But, in claiming that
31 Chris Rodda, “David Barton’s Lies in Action: Randy Forbes Reintroduces ‘Spiritual Heritage’
Resolution,” Talk to Action, May 6, 2011, at

http://www.talk2action.org/story/2011/5/6/114253/5797/Front_Page/David_Barton_s_Lies_in_Action_Ran
dy_Forbes_Reintroduces_Spiritual_Heritage_Resolution.
Chris Rodda, “It’s Back—Randy Forbes Reintroduces His Religious Heritage Week Resolution,” The
Huffington Post, May 6, 2009, at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-rodda/its-back----randy-
forbes_b_197109.html.
Chris Rodda, “Congressman Wants Citizens Of ALL Religions To Reflect On The Ten Commandments,”
The Huffington Post, March 24, 2010, at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-rodda/congressman-wants-
citizen_b_506623.html.
Chris Rodda, “No, Mr. Beck, Our Constitution Is Not Based On The Book Of Deuteronomy,” The
Huffington Post, July 8, 2010, at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-rodda/no-mr-beck-our-
constituti_b_637451.html?ir=Politics.
32 Kyle Mantyla, “The World According to Barton—Examining The Biblical Foundations of our
Government,” Right Wing Watch, July 8, 2010, at http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/world-according-

barton-examining-biblical-foundations-our-government.
33 Kyle Mantyla, “Jesus, David Barton, and the Sixth Amendment,” Right Wing Watch, May 17, 2012, at
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/jesus-david-barton-and-sixth-amendment.
16
America’s elections came from God—specifically Exodus 18—Barton unabashedly lied.
Kyle Mantyla at Right Wing Watch reported that Exodus 18’s refers to Jethro, Mose’s
father, telling Moses to appoint judges. God does not speak and the appointment of
judges has nothing to do with American elections. As Mantyla noted, “if Barton is willing
to lie about what the Bible says, it raises the question of whether there anything that he
won't he lie about?”34 Barton has even claimed that God created America’s borders in
an attempt to appeal to conservative Christians to oppose immigration reform. 35
Speaking at Liberty University in September 2011, William Throckmorton found that
David Barton within the first five minutes falsely claimed that “William Penn founded the
Quakers, the early Unitarians were an evangelical denomination and Thomas Jefferson
signed presidential documents ‘In the Year of Our Lord Christ.’” 36
Barton’s work informed the Texas School Board’s efforts to revamp American
history texts. Steven Green pointed out that the Board “relying on the expertise of
Christian nation advocate David Barton, among others, turned an ostensible goal of
34 Kyle Mantyla, “Barton: Our Government Came Right Out Of The Bible,” Right Wing Watch, November
8, 2011, at http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/barton-our-government-came-right-out-bible.
Kyle Mantyla, “Barton: God Established Elections,” Right Wing Watch, December 22, 2011, at
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/barton-god-established-elections.
Kyle Mantyla, “Barton: ‘The Due Process Clause of The Constitution Came Out Of The Bible,’” Right Wing
Watch, July 15, 2011, at http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/barton-due-process-clause-constitution-
came-out-bible.
Kyle Mantyla, “David Barton’s Relentless Dishonesty Knows No Bounds,” Right Wing Watch, June 1,
2012, at http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/david-bartons-relentless-dishonesty-knows-no-bounds.
35 Julie Ingersoll, “‘Professor’ David Barton On Immigration: God Drew Our Borders,” Religion Dispatches,
July 27, 2010, at
http://www.religiondispatches.org/dispatches/julieingersoll/3046/%E2%80%9Cprofessor%E2%80%9D_da
vid_barton_on_immigration:_god_drew_our_borders/.
36Warren Throckmorton, “William Penn founded the Quakers and other tall tales from David Barton,”
September 16, 2011, at http://wthrockmorton.com/2011/09/16/william-penn-founded-the-quakers-and-
other-tall-tales-from-david-barton/.
17
providing a balanced account of the nation’s religious heritage into a sanctification of
America’s Christian past, where the Founders were directed by divine providence and
the government and law were based on Christian principles. Anything that conflicted
with that interpretation, including the tradition of church-state separation, or contradicted
a view of American exceptionalism, was gutted from the standards.” 37
Rushdoony’s and Barton’s influence can readily be seen in former Governor and
Tea Party favorite Sarah Palin’s assertion on Fox News that the founding fathers would
“‘create law based on the God of the bible and the Ten Commandments.’” 38
The influence of the Christian Right was visible in 2007 when self-styled political
maverick Senator John McCain altered his views 180 degrees and told a Christian Right
website that “‘this nation was founded principally on Christian principles’” and that the
“‘Constitution established the United States as a Christian nation.’” 39
The Christian Reconstructionist influence was openly expressed at the 2010
Values Voter Summit hosted by Tony Perkins and his Family Research Council. Sarah
Posner not only concurred with Ingersoll’s analysis of the Christian Reconstructionist’s
pre-suppositionalism informing the Christian Right and the Tea Party movement, but
37 Steven K. Green, “Understanding the ‘Christian Nation’ Myth,” Cardozo Law Review, No. 245, 2010, at
http://www.cardozolawreview.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=147:understanding-
the-qchristian-nationq-myth&catid=18:other-de-novo-articles&Itemid=20.
38 Huffington Post, “Sarah Palin: American Law Should Be Based On The God Of The Bible And The Ten
Commandments,’” May 10, 2010, at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/10/sarah-palin-american-
law_n_569922.html.
John Willingham, “Sarah Palin and the Static God,” Religion Dispatches, May 19, 2010, at
http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/atheologies/2633/sarah_palin_and_the_static_god.
39 Jeremy Leaming, ‟Rumblings On The Right: Disgruntled Dobson Threatens Third Party At Secretive
CNP Meeting,” Americans United, October 1, 2007, at http://blog.au.org/2007/10/01/rumblings-on-the-
right-disgruntled-dobson-threatens-third-party-at-secretive-cnp-meeting/.
18
reported that Republican politicians Newt Gingrich (Catholic linked to Opus Dei), Rick
Santorum (Catholic linked to Opus Dei), and Mike Huckabee “claimed America was
founded on biblical principles, and that individual rights are given by God, not the
government.” Posner also reported that the Christian Reconstructionist presidential
candidate Michael Peroutka runs the Institute on the Constitution which provides “a 12-
part course on the ‘biblical basis’ of the Constitution” to Tea Party groups. 40
The National Center for Constitutional Studies founded by the late W. Cleon
Skousen had given its “Christian nation” pseudo-history seminars to about 250 Tea
Party groups in 2009 and 2010. The Southern Poverty Law Center noted that
Skousen’s ideas “have grown increasingly popular in both the Patriot movement and the
Tea Parties.” 41 Skousen’s books had been heavily promoted by Fox News’s Glenn
Beck, who himself went “messianic” in promoting America as a Christian nation on a
“divine mission” on television and at rallies. 42
Abe Sauer spent two years in the Tea Party movement starting with sympathy for
their ideas and a positive view of the membership. After two years, he concluded: “Two
years of Tea Party functions later, and I finally know what the Tea Party wants: A
40 Sarah Posner, “Tea Party Values,” The Nation, September 21, 2010, at
http://www.thenation.com/article/154944/tea-party-values.
41Kate Zernike, Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party America, New York: Times Books, 2010: 74-5. Ryan Lenz,
“Tea Party Patriots, Among Many, Pushing Distorted U.S. History,” Hate Watch, Southern Poverty Law
Center, June 9, 2011, at http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2011/06/09/tea-party-patriots-among-many-others-
pushing-distorted-u-s-history/print/.
42 Peter Montgomery, “Glenn Beck Goes Messianic at America’s Divine Destiny Event Before 2,500
Screaming Fans,” AlterNet, August 28, 2010, at
http://www.alternet.org/story/148011/glenn_beck_goes_messianic_at_'america's_divine_destiny'_event_b
efore_2,500_screaming_fans.
19
Christian nation.”43 Sarah Posner was one of just a handful of perceptive, long-time
analysts of the Christian Right to observe that the Tea Party was essentially an
extension of the Christian Right: “The religious right, along with business interests, is
one of the most entrenched and politically organized forces radiating from inside the
beltway. The new tea partiers set to come to Washington aren't avoiding challenging
the religious right just because they need it to form a coalition—they are it.”44
The Christian Right’s War Against Same-Sex Rights
One key element of the Christian Right and New Apostolic Reformation’s
religious war is to use same-sex marriage and other issues relevant to the LGBT
communities as a battering ram to delegitimize mainline Protestant churches—
Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran, and Episcopalian.
The Christian Right’s campaign against homosexuals was apparently sparked by
Anita Bryant’s successful effort to end legal workplace protections for homosexuals and
the unsuccessful ballot initiative campaign in California in the late 1970s. Opposition to
homosexuality in the late 1970s and 1980s raised considerable sums of money for the
Christian Right in their effort to take over the Republican Party. 45 In 1980, the Free
Congress Foundation headed by the late Paul Weyrich published The Homosexual
43 Abe Sauer, “What I Learned in Two Years at the Tea Party,” The Awl, August 16, 2011, at
http://www.theawl.com/2011/08/what-i-learned-in-two-years-at-the-tea-party.
44 Sarah Posner, “The Tea Party Illusion,” Religion Dispatches, November 2, 2010, at
http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/politics/3669/the_tea_party_illusion.
45 Bob Moser, “Holy War,” Intelligence Report Spring 2005, Southern Poverty Law Center, at
http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=522.
Southern Poverty Law Center, “A Thorn in Their Side,” Intelligence Report Spring 2005, at
http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=525.
20
Network that attempted to capitalize on the earlier efforts. In 1987, the Foundation
published a second book, Gays, AIDS, and You that “popularized many of the myths
and slogans later circulated in public homophobic campaigns.” The AIDS crisis was
exploited by the Christian Right to characterize “gay men…as a wealthy, privileged elite
misusing their power to impose their immoral agenda on society.” 46 Berlet and Quigley
pointed out in their 1995 article that the identification of homosexuals as an evil force in
society was really part of a much larger effort by the Christian Right to delegitimize a
wide swath of society as ungodly. They argued that in the view of the “theocratic
right….[s]ocial problems are caused by Satanic conspiracies aided and abetted by
liberals, homosexuals, feminists, and secular humanists.”47
Jean Hardisty, founder of Political Research Associates, noted that in the early
1990s it was starting to be evident that the Christian Right was shifting to a more
stealthy strategy regarding its opposition to homosexual rights. She observed that
Christian Right organizations when talking to the faithful “highlight the religious
principles undergirding their anti-homosexual politics,” but “in the wider political arena,
they frame their anti-gay organizing as a struggle for secular ends, such as ‘defense of
the family.’” 48
46Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons, Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort, New York:
The Guilford Press, 2000: 235, 236.
47 Chip Berlet and Margaret Quigley, “Theocracy and White Supremacy: Behind the Culture War to
Restore Traditional Values,” Political Research Associates, 1995, at

http://www.publiceye.org/magazine/v06n1/culwar.html.
48 Jean Hardisty, Mobilizing Resentment: Conservative Resurgence from the John Birch Society to the
Promise Keepers, Boston: Beacon Press, 1999: 114.
21
A 1998 report by Political Research Associates noted that the Christian Right had
formulated a new strategy of using so-called ex-gay people to advance in a kinder,
gentler fashion the right-wing’s “old, vicious homophobia.” The kinder, gentler approach
was the promise of “personal salvation for homosexuals through the ex-gay movement.”
The report noted that the “ex-gay movement serves as camouflage for a retooled and
reinvigorated assault by the Christian Right on the legal protections against
discrimination for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender persons. Furthermore, the
ex-gay movement is an integral part of a broader right-wing movement that poses a
grave threat to democracy and diversity in the US.” 49
In 2005, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) identified 12 Christian Right
groups that were leading the attack on LGBT rights: the Alliance Defense Fund, the
American Family Association, American Vision, the Chalcedon Foundation, Christian
Action Network, Concerned Women for America, the Coral Ridge Ministries/Center for
Reclaiming America, the Family Research Council, the Family Research Institute,
Focus on the Family, Summit Ministries, and the Traditional Values Coalition. 50 Five
years later, the SPLC added an additional ten groups: Abiding Truth Ministries,
Americans for Truth About Homosexuality, the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission,
the Dove World Outreach Center, the Faithful Word Baptist Church, Heterosexuals
Organized for a Moral Environment, the Illinois Family Institute, Liberty Counsel which is
49 Surina Khan, ‟Calculated Compassion,” Public Eye, October 1998, at
http://www.publiceye.org/equality/x-gay/X-Gay.html.
50 Southern Poverty Law Center, ‟‛A Mighty Army,’” Intelligence Report Spring 2005, at
http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?pid=869.
22
affiliated with Liberty University, MassResistance, and the National Organization for
Marriage. 51
Exodus International is an umbrella organization for more than 150 ex-gay
ministries. Michele Goldberg pointed out that Exodus International is part of a much
larger Christian Right effort that includes counseling centers and inpatient programs that
promotes the central belief that “homosexuality can be cured.”52 In 2009, Exodus
International merged with Transforming Congregations which is affiliated with the United
Methodist Church and OneByOne which is affiliated with the Presbyterian Church
(USA). Transforming Congregations had been affiliated with Exodus International since
2000. The Charisma magazine article on the merger noted that the emphasis was (still)
on personal salvation for homosexuals who renounce their homosexuality and change
their ways. 53
A 2006 report for the Episcopal Church identified a small group of right-wing
family foundations including the Bradley, Coors, Olin, Scaife, and Smith-Richardson, as
well as Howard Ahmanson who financed the American Anglical Council and the Institute
on Religion and Democracy in order to oppose “the Episcopal Church's consecration of
a gay bishop with a male partner, its practice of ordaining non-celibate homosexuals to
51 Evelyn Schlatter, “18 Anti-Gay Groups and Their Propaganda,” Intelligence Report Winter 2010,
Southern Poverty Law Center, at http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-

issues/2010/winter/the-hard-liners.
52 Michelle Goldberg, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, New York: W.W. Norton &
Company, 2007: 76.

53Adrienne S. Gaines, “Ex-Gay Ministry Expands Reach Through Merger,” Charisma Magazine, July 15,
2009, at http://www.charismamag.com/index.php/news/22637-ex-gay-ministry-expands-reach-through-
merger?tmpl=component&print=1&layout=default&page=.
23
the priesthood, and its willingness to permit the blessing of same-sex relationships.” 54
Max Blumenthal reported that Christian Reconstructionist Howard Ahmanson and his
wife paid more $1 million dollars to the Anglican Council to redouble its efforts in
opposing the Episcopal Church’s support of gay rights. 55
In 2011, the North Carolina Council of Churches, an affiliate of the National
Council of Churches, consisting of seventeen denominations including Episcopal,
Lutheran, Roman Catholic, Baptist, Reformed, and Methodist churches was attacked by
the Institute on Religion and Democracy for selecting an openly gay man as president. 56
Contrary to the fairly widespread misperception that the Tea Party movement is
solely concerned with such secular issues as taxes, deficits, and government spending,
a major segment of the Tea Party movement is opposed to gay rights and have
challenged the United Methodist Church in a manner similar to the attacks by the
Institute on Religion and Democracy and its renewal allies.
Tea Party Nation, the third largest of the Tea Party umbrella groups founded by
Judson Phillips in Tennessee, denounced the United Methodist Church on the grounds
that it supports the DREAM Act which would allow children of undocumented workers to
54 Jim Naughton, “Following the Money,” Episcopal Diocese of Washington D.C., May 2006, at
http://www.edow.org/follow/part1.html.
55 Max Blumenthal, “Avenging angel of the religious right,” Salon, January 6, 2004, at
http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2004/01/06/ahmanson/print.html.
Julie Ingersoll, “Theocracy: ‘What Would Be So Bad About It?,’” Religion Dispatches, January 21, 2011,
at
http://www.religiondispatches.org/dispatches/julieingersoll/4087/theocracy:_%E2%80%9Cwhat_would_be
_so_bad_about_it%E2%80%9D.
56Frederick Clarkson, “Far-Right IRD Blasts Church Group for Electing Openly Gay President,” Religious
Right Watch, January 19, 2011, at http://www.religiousrightwatch.com/2011/01/far-right-ird-blasts-church-
group-for-electing-openly-gay-president.html.
24
attend college and earn their citizenship; for supporting health care reform; supporting
climate change science; opposing the war in Iraq; supposedly opposing Israel; and,
having a social justice agenda that “is like reading a socialist wish list.” Phillips wrote
his organization’s members: “‘In short, if you hate America, you have a great future in
the Methodist Church.’” 57 Phillips called the United Methodist Church “‘the first Church
of Karl Marx.’” 58
In language in keeping with current attacks on LGBT rights by Christian Right
organizations, Judson Phillips denounced the LGBT communities for pushing America
towards “‘national suicide’” and the “‘queering of America’” with its “‘homosexual
agenda.’”59 Tea Party Nation coordinated and spearheaded an effort by 150 local Tea
Party leaders to oppose the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. 60 Phillips also opined that
the Democratic Party was the “‘Party of Treason’” and in an obvious slur attacked the
openly gay Representative Barney Frank for trying to screw the military, just as he did
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. 61
57Bill Berkowitz, “Why is the Tea Party Targeting the Methodist Church?,” Talk to Action, January 4,
2011, at http://www.talk2action.org/story/2011/1/4/1145/25053.
58Nick Wing, “Tea Party Nation’s Judson Phillips Wants To See Methodist Church Disbanded,” The
Huffington Post, December 20, 2010, at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/20/judson-phillips-tea-
party-methodist_n_799351.html.
59 Brian Tashman, “Tea Party Nation: Gay Rights Will Doom America,” Right Wing Watch, June 24, 2011,
at http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/tea-party-nation-gay-rights-will-doom-america.
60 Paul Steinhauser, “Battle over who speaks for Tea Party movement,” CNN Political Ticker, November
22, 2010, at http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2010/11/22/battle-over-who-speaks-for-tea-party-

movement/#more-136667.
61 Brian Tashman, “Tea Party Nation’s Latest Homophobic Attack Targets Barney Frank,” Right Wing
Watch, July 20, 2011, at http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/tea-party-nations-latest-homophobic-
attack-targets-barney-frank.
25
The New Apostolic Reformation’s War Against Same-Sex Rights
The New Apostolic Reformation’s use of the homosexual issue as a battering
ram against mainline Protestant churches represents a continuation of the war started
by the Christian Reconstructionists and their allies but pursued along a different front,
but probably in collaboration with the Christian Right’s Institute on Religion and
Democracy.
This stealth strategy of using religious tolerance and pluralism to destroy the
separation of church and state, as well as mainline Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish
organizations, is the tactic of the New Apostolic Reformation—which itself is derived in
part from Christian Reconstructionism. The New Apostolic Reformation’s actions are
very consistent with the Christian Reconstructionist strategy of promoting sectarian
strife.
For example, the Salvation Army partnered with the C. Peter Wagner’s Wagner
Leadership Institute to create its own War College dedicated to “‘train this generation’s
warriors to win the world for Jesus.’” In 2003, the Salvation Army’s federally-funded
New York City division began a purge of gay, Jewish, and other non-Christian staff
members. Though the Salvation Army lost its lawsuit, the Obama administration
continued to allow religion-based discrimination to occur while continuing to fund
George Bush’s faith-based social service program. 62
62 Michelle Goldberg, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, New York: W.W. Norton &
Company, 2007: 129.

Bruce Wilson, “Salvation Army Moves Towards New Apostolic Reformation Theology,” Talk to Action,
December 26, 2008, at http://www.talk2action.org/story/2008/12/26/134754/19.
Bruce Wilson, “The Salvation Army Purge of Gays and Jews, and the New Apostolic Reformation,” Talk to
Action, December 11, 2013, at http://www.talk2action.org/story/2013/12/11/91324/593/.
26
Clarkson pointed out in 1997 that Gary North, a leading Reconstructionist,
advocated that the Reconstructionists and their allies “temporarily advocate pluralism
while plotting for the takeover,” work to ensure that there is a sharp division of opinion in
society, and exploit the situation in “‘an escalating religious war.’” 63 The religious war
against same-sex rights is a key element in this strategy. In fact, Clarkson in 2013
noted that right-wing Protestants and right-wing Catholics had joined forces via the
“Manhattan Declaration” to undermine America’s secular democracy through opposition
to reproductive choice, opposition to marriage equality, and promotion of their own self-
serving conceptualization of “‘religious liberty.’” 64
Jay Michaelson’s 2013 report for Political Research Associates revealed that the
Christian Right, including right-wing Catholic intellectuals and funding sources, had
recast the issue of religious liberty as their right to discriminate against women and the
LGBT and to oppose access to contraception, reproductive rights, same-sex marriage
rights in the private sphere on the grounds that federal anti-discrimination laws
amounted to Christian persecution of Christian businesses. Michaelson noted that new
religious liberty campaign was “a movement with old roots in Christian Domionism” and
63
Frederick Clarkson, Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy, Monroe,
64 Frederick Clarkson, “Tying the Knot: Christian Right Seeks Renewal in Deepening Catholic-Protestant
Alliance,” Public Eye Magazine, Summer 2013, at http://www.politicalresearch.org/wp-

content/uploads/downloads/2013/08/PESummer2013_finalpdf.pdf.
27
that “the campaign’s endgame is a ‘Christian nation’ defined exclusively in conservative
terms.”65
According to Tabachnick’s analysis, Rick Joyner, an “apostle” and head of
Morning Star Ministries and the Oak Initiative, believes in a coming “‘Great Christian
Civil War’” within the church between the “‘blues’” and the “‘greys.’” She pointed out
that Joyner argues that “the ‘greys’ must accept the outpouring of the Latter Rain and
end their escapist fantasies about the Rapture.” 66 Tabachnick updated her analysis in
2011 and pointed out that this Great Christian Civil War was “about cleansing
Protestantism of its toleration of homosexuals, a woman's right to choose, and most
importantly—of its toleration for religious pluralism, separation of church and state, and
secular government. Again, toleration of those things of which they disapprove is not a
virtue, but a sign that one is controlled by demons.” She also pointed out that while
there are Catholic politicians involved with the NAR, such as Kansas Governor Sam
Brownback, a “closer look would reveal that the apostles view some of their fellow
activists—Catholics, Mormons, and others—as literally controlled by demons…”67
Clarkson wrote a 2006 report on the role of the Institute on Religion and
Democracy in attacking mainline Protestant churches over the issues of the ordination
65Jay Michaelson, Redefining Religious Liberty: The Covert Campaign Against Civil Rights, Political
Research Associates, 2013, at http://www.politicalresearch.org/wp-
content/uploads/downloads/2013/04/PRA_Redefining-Religious-Liberty_March2013_PUBLISH.pdf.
66 Rachel Tabachnick, “The ‘Lions In the Pews,’” Talk to Action, September 24, 2008, at
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2008/9/24/82239/9750/.
67 Rachel Tabachnick, “Why Have the Apostles Behind Rick Perry’s Prayer Rally Been Invisible to Most
Americans?,” Talk to Action, August 11, 2011, at
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2011/8/11/1448/56498/Front_Page/Why_Have_the_Apostles_Behind_Ri
ck_Perry_s_Prayer_Rally_Been_Invisible_to_Most_Americans_.
28
of gay priests and same-sex marriage. The battle would determine whether the
mainline churches constituting 25 percent of the U.S. population, 50 percent of the
members of Congress, and holding hundreds of billions of dollars in real estate and
other assets would be “marginalized, perhaps forever.” Clarkson reported that the IRD
“remains a well-funded and influential hub for a national network of conservative
factions called the Association for Church Renewal. The member organizations, called
‘renewal’ groups, variously seek to neutralize church tendencies of which they don’t
approve; drive out staff they don’t like; and seek to take over the churches, but failing
that—taking as many churches and assets out as possible.” The main targets of the
IRD, the Association for Church Renewal, and their affiliated ‘renewal groups’ are the
United Methodist Church, the Episcopal Church, and the Presbyterian Church in the
USA, as well as the National and World Council of Churches. Clarkson listed 22
members of the Association for Church Renewal. 68
Randall Balmer attended a strategy session in May 2005 and reported the
content of the meeting in his 2006 book, Thy Kingdom Coming. Balmer reported that
the meeting was called by the Association for Church Renewal which was founded in
1996. It consists of around 30 “evangelical ‘renewal groups’ within mainline (generally
liberal) Protestant denominations.” The Association for Church Renewal “functions with
the assistance of the Institute on Religion and Democracy.” One of the participants was
Karen Booth representing the Transforming Congregations group. Balmer noted that
these “‘renewal groups’” function as a “‘church within a church.’” Adherents see
68 Frederick Clarkson, ‟The Battle for the Mainline Churches,” Public Eye Magazine, Spring 2006, at
http://www.publiceye.org/magazine/v20n1/clarkson_battle.html.
29
themselves as “the remnant of the faithful in an ecclesiastical context that has
succumbed to liberalism.” The main issues that these “renewal groups” focused on
were the ordination of gay priests and same-sex marriage within the church. Balmer
noted that these were “litmus test for these evangelicals.” Balmer further reported that
“[e]veryone agreed that attitudes toward homosexuality constituted the demarcation line
between conservative and liberal, orthodox and something somehow less than
Christian.” These evangelicals described these issues as a “‘deception that is demonic
in nature’” and “‘evil.’” 69
Balmer’s description suggests that the strategy session he attended may have
been linked to the New Apostolic Reformation.
Rachel Tabachnick has reported that some renewal groups are linked to the
NAR. According to her, the NAR’s “Transformations movies have played a significant
role in the charismatic ‘renewal’ movements which have divided the Mainline Protestant
churches in the U.S., and this influence can clearly be seen in the Anglican renewal
movement’s extensive ties to George Otis, Jr. and Alistair Petrie, the Canadian apostle
whose role is bringing Episcopalians/Anglicans into charismatic or ‘Spirit-filled’ belief.”70
In 2008, the Institute on Religion and Democracy formed the Renewal and
Reform Coalition, with its allies the Good News and the Confessing Movement. The
Renewal and Reform Coalition, along with its other allies Transforming Congregations
69
Randall Balmer, Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens
America, New York: Basic Books, 2006: 26-29.
70 Rachel Tabachnick, “Resource Directory for the New Apostolic Reformation,” Talk to Action, January
20, 2010, at http://www.talk2action.org/story/2010/1/20/131544/037.
30
and UMAction tried to sway the votes of African delegates at the United Methodist’s
Church General Conference by providing free cell phones. 71 A subsequent
investigation led by Reverend Kapya Kaoma for Political Research Associates found
that the Institute on Religion and Democracy and the Confessing Movement had gone
to Africa prior to the General Conference to train the delegates and coach them on their
voting. In an interview with Kathryn Joyce, the Reverend observed that “Africans have
become a powerhouse to change the direction of the American churches. They have to
depend on Africa to bring change at home….As a result, as the mainline churches are
moving forward on LGBT issues, the leadership is afraid of what Africa will say. But
they should really be afraid of the renewal movement. They’ve stopped progress in the
Protestant church because of Africa.” 72
The IRD, Good News, and Confessing Movement had also formed a second
coalition called the Coalition for United Methodist Accountability to secretly fund five
individuals who had sued the United Methodist Church’s General Board of Church &
Society related to the church’s Building Endowment Fund. The legal issue was whether
assets and funds derived from the church’s involvement in the temperance movement
could be used to fund other church-related missions. A defeat would have crippled the
United Methodist Church’s humanitarian efforts in under-developed countries. 73
71Steven D. Martin, “United Methodist Renewal Groups Handed Their Hats In Ft. Worth,” Talk to Action,
April 29, 2008, at http://www.talk2action.org/story/2008/4/29/85253/9103.
72 Kathryn Joyce, ‟The Anti-Gay Highway: New Report Details Mutually Beneficial Relationship Between
US Evangelicals and African Antigay Clergy,” Religion Dispatches, November 18, 2009, at
http://www.religiondispatches.org/dialogs/print/?id=2046.
73 Steven D. Martin, “IRD Endangers United Methodist Church By Joining Lawsuit,” Talk to Action, April
31
Anti-Catholicism in the Christian Right
Anti-Catholicism in America has a long history stretching back to the colonial
period. Despite the fact that Catholic groups have cooperated with the Christian Right
in opposing abortion and same-sex rights, and the Opus Dei-linked elements of the
Catholic Right have taken up the laissez faire economic doctrine of the Christian Right
as well as opposing the separation of church and state, the Catholic Church is still
considered by leading strategists and operators in the Christian Right to be a false
church.
David Bennett pointed out in the colonial period “Almanacs, tracts, sermons and
periodicals vilified Catholicism.” The Catholic Church was called the “‘Whore of Rome’”
while the Pope was considered to be associated with Satan. 74
In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan in the context of the Red Scare and rise of
Protestant fundamentalism, focused its rhetorical attacks on the Roman Catholic
Church, Jews and aliens. The Catholic Church and Catholics in general were
considered ungodly, irreligious, under the Pope’s despotism, unfit for public office, not
trustworthy, and un-American. 75
Steven D. Martin, “United Methodist Renewal Groups Handed Their Hats In Ft. Worth,” Talk to Action,
April 29, 2008, at http://www.talk2action.org/story/2008/4/29/85253/9103.
74 David H. Bennett, The Party of Fear: The American Far Right from Nativism to the Militia Movement,
revised and updated, New York: Vintage Books, 1995: 20.

32
In 1924, the KKK was deeply involved in the political campaign against New York
Governor Al Smith who was “everything the Klan abhorred: an Irish Catholic who had
risen to power in the New York City political machine and a fierce enemy of Prohibition.
He was both the embodiment of the alien menace and spokesman for the values of the
jazz age, of Manhattan with its speakeasies and sexual freedom, of modernity and all its
evils.” 76
Berlet and Lyons pointed out that nativists “condemned ‘Papism’ as fake
Christianity: an idolatrous perversion that mocked Holy law….They denounced
Catholics as foreign agents secretly plotting to take over the country and deliver it to the
despotism of the Pope or European monarchs…[and] the long-standing argument that
Catholics were agents of Satan because the Pope was the Antichrist.” 77
Sara Diamond pointed out that during John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign
in 1960 “Norman Vincent Peale and other evangelicals associated with Christianity
Today united under the auspices of a National Association of Evangelicals committee
called Citizens for Religious Freedom….Their goal was to promote the impression that
Kennedy’s candidacy represented a dangerous intrusion by the Roman Catholic Church
into U.S. politics…[and] challenged Kennedy’s patriotism by insinuating that as
President he would be beholden to the Vatican.” John Turner’s examination of the Bill
Bright and the Campus Crusade for Christ revealed that Bright believed that Kennedy’s

77Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons, Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort, New York:
The Guilford Press, 2000: 47.
33
election “would be ‘the last time we’ll see a free election in America.’ Bright’s fears were
common in evangelical circles.” Peale’s evangelical effort to revive crude anti-Catholic
slurs failed under withering criticism from liberal Protestant, Jewish, and Catholic
criticisms. But, after Kennedy’s election Bright endorsed the effort to create Christian
Citizen, an evangelical group that used an American flag overlaid with a cross as its
logo. The group claimed that “‘America, and the Constitution, is primarily a story of
Christians…carrying out their convictions.’” 78
David Bennett pointed out that even though the New Right strategists and
pastors helped put together a coalition of evangelical Protestants and Catholics in their
anti-abortion efforts in the 1980s, and did not revive the anti-Catholic tirades of their
nativist roots, they still believe “Catholics are following the wrong path if they truly seek
personal salvation. But if Catholics do share the social and political agenda of the
enlightened, they can be welcomed as allies in the struggle to save the nation.” 79 Kevin
Schultz reported that the Christian Right has co-opted the tri-faith term of “Judeo-
Christian” and used opposition to abortion, same-sex rights, and strong support for
Israel to bring conservative Catholics and Jews into a Protestant-dominated
78 Sara Diamond, Roads to Dominion: Right-wing Movements and Political Power in the United States,
New York: The Guilford Press, 1995: 104.

John G. Turner, Bill Bright & Campus Crusade for Christ: The Renewal of Evangelicalism in Postwar
America, Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008: 108-9.
34
conservative Christian Right aligned against more liberal Protestants, Catholics and
Jews, as well as Muslims. 80
Despite strategic cooperation between members of the Catholic leadership in the
United States and the Christian Right, including perhaps an unintended boost to the
New Apostolic Reformation, the Catholic Church is still viewed as a false church, the
whore of Babylon, and the Pope as the Antichrist.
The Left Behind series of novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins has had a
profound influence upon the Christian Right’s membership. There are 12 novels in the
series with total sales of 63 million copies. A “Kids Series” has sold an additional 12
million copies. Tyndale House, which published the series, announced in 2011 that the
series of 12 novels would be repackaged and sold in three four-volume sets.
Michele Goldberg pointed out that “Protestant hostility to Catholicism has
certainly not disappeared.” The Left Behind series of novels has a Catholic cardinal
among the Antichrist’s inner circle. She noted that Bob Jones University still considers
the Catholic Church a ‘cult,’ and that “[m]any evangelical colleges bar Catholics and
Jews from their faculty.” 81
Michele Goldberg suggested that the prevalence in the belief of
dispensationalism could be attributed to the success of the Left Behind series. 82 Bill
80 Kevin M. Schultz, Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to its Protestant

81Michelle Goldberg, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, New York: W.W. Norton &
Company, 2007: 70.
82Michelle Goldberg, ‟Antichrist politics. For many fervent Christians, support for Israel has less to do with
Ariel Sharon than preparing for Armageddon,” Salon, May 24, 2002, at
35
Berkowitz called LaHaye “the undisputed King of the Apocalyp$e.’” Berkowitz cited a
series of public opinion surveys which showed that 65 percent of evangelical leaders
believe that Jesus will return to earth and rule for 1,000 years; 67 percent of white
evangelicals believe natural disasters are indicators of the End Times; and, 52 percent
of Republicans also believe that natural disasters are indicators of the End Times. 83
LaHaye was the founder and first president of the secretive Council for National
Policy that brings together top Christian Right strategists, organizations, and
billionaires/millionaries to plot strategy and operations. 84 Chip Berlet put LaHaye’s
political activism and book publishing into perspective. In 1979, LaHaye was the head
of the Moral Majority that he helped found. The strategic problem was how to mobilize
evangelical Christian to take over the Republican Party. In 1979, his wife founded
Concerned Women for America. In 1980, LaHaye published The Battle for the Mind
which is “essentially ‘his blueprint on how conservative Christians can take over the
government of the United States.’” In 1981, he founded the Council for National
Policy. 85 Thus, his Left Behind series and other non-fiction writings has a political
import.
http://archive.salon.com/politics/feature/2002/05/24/dispensational/index.html.
83 Bill Berkowitz, “Tim LaHaye: The King of the Apocalyp$e Returns,” Talk to Action, May 13, 2011, at
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2011/5/13/123338/251.
84 Russ Bellant, The Coors Connection: How Coors Family Philanthropy Undermines Democratic
Pluralism, Cambridge, MA: Political Research Associates, 1988: 36-7.

85 Chip Berlet, ‟The World According to Tim LaHaye: Chapter Six—The Council for National Policy,” Talk
to Action, July 31, 2006, at http://www.talk2action.org/story/2006/7/31/94353/6835.
36
Chip Berlet summarized the series of apocalyptic, End Times novels. “In the
contemporary Left Behind series of novels, the primary focus is the post-Rapture
tribulations and the struggle of the remaining Christians (aghast that they failed to be
considered worthy of Rapture) to return to the path of piety. They must struggle against
a vast Satanic conspiracy to construct a collectivist global New World Order and one-
world religion led by the Antichrist and the False Prophet. In the Left Behind series,
LaHaye and Jenkins have conveyed to millions of Americans what they perceive to be
manifestations of moral relativism such as the feminist movement, abortion, and
homosexuality.” Berlet noted that the novels’ theme of moral relativism was a
continuation of the thesis he pushed in his earlier non-fiction book The Battle for the
Mind. 86
Starting in the mid-1980s, Chuck Colson—a member of The Family and political
ally to Erik Prince and Bill Bright—worked with Protestant leaders, and Lutheran
minister converted to Catholic priest John Neuhaus, to draft the 1994 manifesto
“Evangelicals and Catholics Together: The Christian Mission in the Third Millenium” to
help bring conservative Catholics into a coalition. Jeremy Scahill described the ECT
manifesto as “a marriage of the historical authority of the Catholic Church with the
grassroots appeal of the modern conservative U.S. evangelical movement—bolstered
by the cooperation of largely secular and Jewish neoconservatives.” The ECT
manifesto was passionately opposed to abortion, wanted a greater influence of religion
(Judaism and Christianity) in politics and public education, endorsed neoliberal
86 Chip Berlet, ‟Imagining Satan (Part Two), Talk to Action, December 11, 2006, at
37
economic policies, and opposed multiculturalism on the grounds that it was anti-
Western and anti-American. It was signed by Archbishop of New York John Cardinal
O’Connor and Pat Robertson. 87 The ECT manifesto was also a “rhetorical veneer
glossed on a commitment to fight a common enemy,” that is, reproductive and same-
sex rights. 88
The logical follow-on manifesto to the Evangelicals and Catholics Together was
the 2009 Manhattan Declaration that was formulated by top right-wing strategist Robert
P. George, a professor of jurisprudence at Princeton University, and whose preparatory
meetings were hosted by Catholic Archbishop Timothy Dolan, now the president of the
U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops. Dolan also signed the Declaration. 89
Charles Colson was on the drafting committee of the Manhattan Declaration and
was “signed by more than 150 American ‘mainstream’ (mostly Evangelical) conservative
religious leaders.” The manifesto’s signers declared that they would not obey
government “edicts” that “compel” their organizations to participate in “abortions,
87 Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, revised and
updated, New York: Nation Books, 2008: 83-5.

John G. Turner, Bill Bright & Campus Crusade for Christ: The Renewal of Evangelicalism in Postwar
America, Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008: 228.
88 Randall J. Stephens and Karl W. Giberson, The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age,
Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press (Harvard), 2011: 254.

89 Frederick Clarkson, “Catholic Church to Amp-Up the Culture Wars,” Talk to Action, November 18, 2010,
at
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2010/11/18/02354/261/Front_Page/Catholic_Church_to_Amp_Up_the_C
ulture_Wars.
38
embryo-destructive research…or any other anti-life act…nor will we bend to any rule
purporting to force us to bless immoral sexual partnerships…” 90
Close observers of the Christian Right at Americans United, People for the
American Way, Religion Dispatches, and Talk to Action noted its theocratic intentions,
its tendency to promote sectarian strife, 91 as well as its significance in bringing the
Catholic leadership closer to the New Apostolic Reformation.
Clarkson noted that the Manhattan Declaration represented an “unprecedented
level of public support from top Catholic Bishops and Cardinals. The manifesto itself
has lent itself to a common agenda to guide their coalitional politics.” Part of that
common agenda was the follow-on electoral effort in late 2010 by NAR apostle Lou
Engle for the Pray & Act political rallies staged in cooperation with Newt Gingrich’s (a
convert to Catholicism) Renewing American Leadership. The Pray & Act political-
religious rallies reduced the Manhattan Declaration to three essential issues for
conservative evangelical voters to consider in the voting booth: protecting life under all
conditions, protecting traditional marriage, and religious liberty and individual
90 Frank Schaeffer, Sex, Mom, and God, Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2011: 115, 113.
91 Sandhya Bathija, “Praying For Theocracy?: Across The Country, Groups Seek To Impose ‘Religious
Law,’” Americans United, November 20, 2009, at http://blog.au.org/2009/11/20/praying-for-theocracy-
across-the-country-groups-seek-to-impose-religious-law/.
Sarah Posner, “Manhattan Declaration Is The New Old Culture War,” Religion Dispatches, November 23,
2009, at
http://www.religiondispatches.org/blog/2058/manhattan_declaration_is_the_new_old_culture_war.
Frank Cocozzelli, “The Madness of Robert P. George,” Talk to Action, December 31, 2009, at
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2009/12/31/84037/372. Rob Boston, “Catholic, Evangelical Declaration
Signers Seek To Nuke The Church-State Wall,” Americans United, January 2010, Church and State, at
http://www.au.org/media/church-and-state/archives/2010/01/manhattan-project.html.
Peter Montgomery, “‘Christian’ Manifesto Comparing Liberals to Nazis Gathers Signatures of Religious
Right Leaders—and Catholic Bishops,” AlterNet, February 10, 2010, at
http://www.alternet.org/news/145500/'christian'_manifesto_comparing_liberals_to_nazis_gathers_signatur
es_of_religious_right_leaders_--_and_catholic_bishops/.
39
conscience. 92 In late 2011, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops renewed their call
for “religious liberty” first expressed in the Manhattan Declaration and amped up their
alleged persecution by federal and state governments. The Conference complained
that health care reform requiring insurance companies to cover contraception, and other
legislation legalizing same-sex marriage at the state and local levels of government,
plus the refusal of the Obama administration to defend the Defense of Marriage Act,
compelled them to violate their religious principles. Archbishop Dolan accused the
federal and state governments, as well as reproductive rights and same-sex rights
groups, of attempting to “‘neuter religion’” and “‘push religion back into the sacristy,’” or,
in other words, into a church’s backroom or out of the public square. 93
Thus, given how close some of the Catholic hierarchy has come to supporting
the Christian Right’s agenda over the past two decades and given the influence of
LaHaye’s writings among the Christian Right’s leadership and faithful, it is incumbent to
examine how anti-Catholic LaHaye’s writings actually are.
Carl E. Olson, who was raised in an “anti-Catholic, Fundamentalist home”
examined LaHaye’s and others writings regarding the End Times, or, the Book of
Revelations. He found LaHaye’s novels and other dispensationalist and biblical
prophecy authors to be strongly anti-Catholic. Olson noted that “the dispensationalist
system has historically been antagonistic to Catholicism in both content and tone and
92 Frederick Clarkson, “When Politics Means the End of the World (as we know it),” Talk to Action, August

93 Laurie Goodstein, “Bishops Open ‘Religious Liberty’ Drive,” New York Times, November 15, 2011, at
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/15/us/bishops-renew-fight-on-abortion-and-gay-marriage.html?_r=1&hp.
40
holds many beliefs that are contrary to Catholic doctrine. Therefore, it is not surprising
that many of the most well-known popularizers of this belief system—authors such as
Hal Lindsey, Dave Hunt, Tim LaHaye, Salem Kirban, Chuck Smith, Jack Chick, John
Hagee and Grant Jeffrey—are critics of the Catholic Church either explicitly or in a more
subtle fashion.”94
Rachel Tabachnick observed that in the biblical prophecy and New World Order
conspiracy theories genre, there is some overlap in anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic
writings by LaHaye and Hagee regarding the use of Alexander Hislop’s conspiracy
theory. According to Tabachnick, “in overt anti-Semitic media the ‘Mystery Babylon’
religion is claimed to have been passed on to the Hebrews during the biblical
Babylonian captivity and is the source of occult powers used to manipulate financial
markets. Another elaborate version of the ‘Mystery Babylon’ narrative has been used
against the Roman Catholic Church. Alexander Hislop popularized this conspiracy
narrative in 1853 in a pamphlet called The Two Babylons, in which he claimed that the
Catholic Church veered from Christianity during the reign of Constantine to embrace the
occult worship of Mystery Babylon initiated by Nimrod and Semiramis. John Hagee tells
a similar narrative of the history of Catholicism and describes the destruction of Rome
and ‘Romanism’ in the end times.” 95
94 Carl E. Olson, Will Catholics Be ‘Left Behind’? A Catholic Critique of the Rapture and Today’s Prophecy
Preachers, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2003: 45-6.

95 Rachel Tabachnick, “Part Two: The Prophecy/Conspiracy Genre,” Talk to Action, December 8, 2010, at
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2010/12/8/185728/155/Front_Page/Part_Two_The_Prophecy_Conspirac
y_Genre.
41
Olson noted that LaHaye repeatedly described Catholicism as “‘Babylonian
mysticism,’” praised Hislop’s work, and has defended himself against charges of being
anti-Catholic by claiming that he is “‘anti-false religion.’” Olson pointed out that
LaHaye’s and Jenkins’ non-fiction book Are We Living in the End Times? made “the
remarkable and unsubstantiated claim that ‘Every false religion in the world can be
traced to Babylon.’ Babylon ‘is the mother of all false religions and Jerusalem is the
mother of true faith,’ while Rome ‘is the mother of an unholy mixture of the two.’” 96
Olson pointed out that in LaHaye’s non-fiction book Revelation Unveiled that his view of
the Catholic Church as apostate and a false religion is explicit: “As LaHaye writes
elsewhere, ‘Rome’s false religion too often gives a false security that keeps people from
seeking salvation by faith. Rome is also dangerous because some of her doctrines are
pseudo-Christian. For example, she believes properly about the personal deity of Christ
but errs in adding Babylonian mysticism in many forms and salvation by works.’” 97
The same message can be found in John Hagee’s sermons, books, and videos.
Like LaHaye, Hagee is a heavyweight in the Christian Right, particularly with his
leadership in the Christian Zionist movement. Sarah Posner called Hagee’s Christians
United for Israel (CUFI), “Christians United for Profit.” CUFI is the “most visible
organization of American Christian Zionists” and “shows how the Word of Faith melds

42
with conservative evangelicalism, movement conservatism, and the GOP.” 98 Hagee
and Christian Zionism’s anti-Semitism will be covered below.
Tabachnick noted that Hagee’s (like LaHaye) anti-Catholic “Mystery Babylon”
sermon “bears striking similarities to the anti-Catholic narrative of Alexander Hislop,
author of The Two Babylons, or The Papal Worship, a virulent anti-Catholic conspiracy
theory first published as a pamphlet in 1853.” Tabachnick observed that Hagee’s four-
part sermon “‘Prophecy for the 21st Century’” which includes the sermon “‘Mystery
Babylon, The Great Mother of Harlots’” is some of “Hagee's most blatant anti-Catholic
material in which he clearly claims that ‘Romanism’ is the apostate church, a world-wide
religious system that is rejected by God and will be destroyed in the end times”
Tabachnick pointed out that Hagee’s “Whore of Babylon” church includes other
apostate churches “who believe in the use of intermediaries (priests), sacraments, ritual
and repetition (liturgy), belief in purgatory, belief in works as opposed to grace, and
other features Hagee claims are part of the demonic and false religion of Semiramis.”99
The “Whore of Babylon” slander is taught to the Christian Right’s homeschooling
children—the very ones expected to be part of Joel’s Army or to attend Christian
nationalist colleges, universities and law schools, and enter the government, the
military, or law enforcement.
98 Sarah Posner, God’s Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters, Sausalito,
CA: PoliPoint Press, 2008: 100-1.

99Rachel Tabachnick, “Renewed Controversy Over Hagee’s Sermons,” Talk to Action, November 1,
43
Rachel Tabachnick summarized the work of Frances Paterson’s 2003
examination of the major textbooks published by Protestant fundamentalist publishers
used by homeschoolers and schools—A Beka Books, Bob Jones University Publishing,
and Accelerated Christian Education. Thus, this is the information that young
fundamentalist children are socialized into believing about other religions—all very
much consistent with traditional Protestant beliefs, as well as with the more recent
works of LaHaye, Hagee, and others.
Tabachnick’s summary included: “traditional African religions are ‘false religious
beliefs;” “Non-Christians are described as living in ‘spiritual darkness;” “‘God used the
Trail of Tears to bring many Indians to Christ;’” “Islam is also portrayed as a false
religion;” “Jews are also to be considered to be in need of conversion;” “Non-evangelical
and non-fundamentalist Protestant denominations are described as liberal, a dirty word
in these texts.”
Paterson dedicated an entire chapter to anti-Catholicism found in the publishers’
textbooks. According to Tabachnick’s summary, “Catholicism is described with terms
such as ‘distorted,’ ‘false,’ and ‘error.’ A Bob Jones high school text states, ‘The seed of
error that took root during the fourth and fifth centuries blossomed into the Roman
Catholic Church—a perversion of biblical Christianity’…. An A Beka text reads, ‘The
doctrines and practices of the Roman church had digressed so far from Scripture that
the church was compelled to keep its members from reading the Bible and discovering
the truth.’ The A Beka text also repeatedly uses the term Romanism, which has
44
pejorative connotations and has been used as a slur against Catholics for
generations.” 100
New Apostolic Reformation’s Anti-Catholicism (and anti-everybody else)
It is not clear that there are significant differences between LaHaye’s eschatology
of the rapture and the New Apostolic Reformation’s rejection of the rapture. Berlet
noted that LaHaye has created a “‘pre-tribulation tribulation—that is, the tribulation that
will engulf this country if liberal secular humanists are permitted to take control of our
government—it is neither predestined nor necessary. But it will deluge the entire land in
the next few years, unless Christians are willing to become much more assertive in
defense of morality and decency than they have been during the past three
decades.’” 101 Berlet also noted that with the introduction of the pre-tribulation tribulation
in LaHaye’s writings, “there is a secular-humanist conspiracy, in league with the devil, to
destroy Christianity before the Rapture. And if that happens, there will be no Rapture,
there will be no Christians going to heaven, and we are all in deep trouble.” 102 In other
words, even if there is a rapture, Christians have to become more politically involved in
resisting this demonic evil of liberalism and secular humanism.
Strategists of the New Apostolic Reformation have altered the theology of the
end times without preventing their strong participation within the Christian Zionist
100
Rachel Tabachnick, “The ‘Christian’ Dogma Pushed by Religious Schools That Are Supported by Your
Tax Dollars,” AlterNet, May 23, 2011, at http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/151046.
101 Chip Berlet, The Christian Right, Dominionism, and Theocracy—Part Five,” Talk to Action, December
102Chip Berlet, “Palin’s Religious Beliefs Must Be Explored,” The Huffington Post, September 10, 2008, at
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chip-berlet/palins-religious-beliefs_b_124613.html.
45
organization like Pastor Hagee’s Christians United for Israel. Instead of Christian
believers being raptured before Christ’s return, the Christians of the New Apostolic
Reformation remain on the earth in the form of an all-powerful, purified church to
“cleanse the earth and punish the evil themselves.” They are Joel’s Army and they
command the Seven Mountains of society. 103
Berlet noted that the purpose of LaHaye’s writings was to foment insurrection
against the federal government and the U.S. Constitution. “So the outcome of Tim
LaHaye's ‘non-fiction’ writing, the Left Behind series of novels, and the video game, is
the training of young Christian evangelicals to rebel against the elected government of
the United States when they decide government leaders are in service to the antichrist.
And the task for these young Crusaders is to gun down the agents of Satan and their
witting and unwitting allies among the ranks of the non-believers. And from the Left
Behind novels, we know this list is likely to include not just secularists, but also
homosexuals, feminists, abortion providers, as well as Jews, Catholics, Hindus, and
Muslims...especially Muslims.” 104
In 2006, the Left Behind: Eternal Forces video game was released by a company
linked to Pastor Rick Warren, author of The Purpose Driven Life and head of
Saddleback Church. Jonathan Hutson, who broke the story through a series of Talk to
Action articles on the video game, its creators, and marketing strategies, described the
103Rachel Tabachnick, “The ‘Lions In the Pews,’” Talk to Action, September 24, 2008, at
104Chip Berlet, ‟The World According to Tim LaHaye: Chapter One—Hunting Down the Enemies,” Talk to
Action, June 26, 2006, at http://www.talk2action.org/story/2006/6/26/122744/780.
46
game thusly: “You are on a mission—both a religious mission and a military mission—to
convert or kill Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, gays, and anyone who advocates
the separation of church and state—especially moderate, mainstream Christians. Your
mission is ‘to conduct physical and spiritual warfare’; all who resist must be taken out
with extreme prejudice.” 105
Despite theological and ideological differences, there are some parallels between
the Left Behind novels and video game that was first published in 1995 and the 1978
novel The Turner Diaries written by William Pierce, head of the neo-Nazi group the
National Alliance. Both are set in the future. In the Left Behind novels the small band of
white nationalists is replaced by a remnant of fundamentalist Christians who have not
been raptured, but are fighting an evil worldwide government. The victims in Left
Behind are not specifically targeted because of their race or ethnicity, but rather their
religious views which cut across race and ethnicity. But, the overarching theme for
these right-wing novels and video games is the same—true believers, whether they are
fundamentalist Christians or hardcore white nationalists—need to resort to violence,
cleanse the territory of their enemies, and destroy the federal government.
To paraphrase and summarize Zeskind’s summary of Pierce’s book, the central
war is between a small band of white nationalists resisting a multiracial federal
government intent on implementing a harsh gun control law. A secondary war is
between the white nationalists who kill white ‘race traitors,’ as well as killing African
Americans, Latinos, and Jews. The small white nationalist group is eventually
105Jonathan Hutson, “The Purpose Driven Life Takers (Part 1),” Talk to Action, May 29, 2006, at
47
successful in defeating the federal government, subduing the population through
terrorism and dictatorship, and, creates the conditions for the white race to triumph in
Europe and around the globe. Zeskind pointed out the book had an overt political
message that conservatives were too materialistic and individualistic to revolt and
rule. 106
Four years before the Left Behind video was released, Resistance Records
which was owned by the neo-Nazi National Alliance released a CD-ROM video game
called “Ethnic Cleansing” with the objective to kill African Americans, Hispanics, and
Jews. Resistance Records was also planning to release a Turner Diaries video game.
The racist and anti-Semitic World Church of the Creator released games for children
revolving around running a concentration camp for Jews and killing African American
men. 107 Once the anti-immigrant groups became popular on the right-wing, white
supremacists put out a variety of video games in which the objective was to kill
Hispanics crossing the border. 108
It is obvious that the Left Behind: Eternal Forces video game would be seen by
Rick Warren as appealing to evangelical and charismatic youth being indoctrinated by
the New Apostolic Reformation’s Joel’s Army propaganda. Warren is the most famous
student of C. Peter Wagner’s, founder of the New Apostolic Reformation. Wagner, in
106 Leonard Zeskind, Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins
to the Mainstream, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2009: 30.

107 Anti-Defamation League, “ADL Report: Growing Proliferation of Racist Video Games Target Youth on
The Internet,” February 19, 2002, at http://www.adl.org/PresRele/Extremism_72/4042_72.asp.
108Anti-Defamation League, “Anti-Hispanic Video Games Spread On Internet,” May 24, 2006, at
http://www.adl.org/PresRele/Extremism_72/4823_72.htm.
48
fact, identified Warren as a New Apostolic Reformation pastor. 109 While Hutson’s initial
article identified Warren’s dominionist agenda and stealth tactics, Dog Emperor writing
at Talk to Action and Corrente Wire, definitively established close linkages between
Warren and Joel’s Army, other New Apostolic Reformation organizations linked to Joel’s
Army, Warren’s apparent promotion of Seven Mountains dominionism using similar
rhetoric, and Warren’s use of deceptive NAR tactics. 110
The Left Behind novels and video game represent the purpose of Joel’s Army.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks militant groups, reported in 2008 its
concern over Joel’s Army: “According to Bentley and a handful of other ‘hyper-
charismatic’ preachers advancing the same agenda, Joel's Army is prophesied to
become an Armageddon-ready military force of young people with a divine mandate to
physically impose Christian ‘dominion’ on non-believers….‘The pitch and intensity of the
military rhetoric of this branch of the global Dominionist movement has substantially
increased since the beginning of 2008,’ writes The Discernment Research Group, a
Christian watchdog group that tracks what they call heresies or cults within Christianity.
‘One can only wonder how long before this transforms into real warfare with actual
warriors.’” 111
109Discernment Research Group, “Who’s Who in New Apostolic,” HereScope, December 29, 2005, at
http://herescope.blogspot.com/2005/12/whos-who-in-new-apostolic.html.
110 Dog Emperor, “Rick Warren’s Dirty Dominionist Secret,” Talk to Action, June 1, 2006, at
Dog Emperor, “Rick Warren’s Connections to Joel’s Army,” Corrente Wire, December 31, 2008, at
http://www.correntewire.com/rick_warrens_connections_joels_army.
111 Casey Sanchez, “‘Arming’ for Armageddon,” Intelligence Report Winter 2008, Southern Poverty Law
Center, at http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=964.
49
The only apparent differences between the anti-Catholicism of the Christian Right
noted above and the New Apostolic Reformation is that the latter use spiritual warfare
and pray for the death of Catholics (particularly Mother Theresa), believe that the
Roman Catholic Church is under the spell of a specific demon, and are willing to destroy
artworks deemed to be idolatrous—much as the Taliban destroyed revered Buddhist
statues in Afghanistan.
In 1997, 26 members of the New Apostolic Reformation went to base camps at
Mt. Himalaya and, according to Wagner’s World Prayer Center, on an ‘assignment from
God…to take down the foundations of The Great Babylon, the harlot over many waters,
who supported the false systems of the world.” The group leader, Prophetess Ana
Mendez, Special Task Coordinator of the World Prayer Center, reported that Operation
Ice Castle was directed against the ‘Queen of Heaven,’ a target identified as ‘a demonic
power misinterpreted as Mary by some Christian churches, honoured by Muslims as
Fatima, and known to others as Diana or Artemis.” Wagner’s World Prayer Center’s
after-action report claimed the following successes as a result of their spiritual warfare
operation: “‘the huge fire in Indonesia, the largest Muslim nation; an earthquake
destroyed the basilica of Assisi, where the Pope had called a meeting of all world
religions; a hurricane destroyed the infamous temple 'Baal-Christ' in Acapulco, Mexico;
Princess Diana died, a representative of the British throne, to which Sir Edmund Hillary
dedicated Mount Everest; and Mother Teresa died in India, one of the most famous
advocates of Mary as Co-Redeemer.’” 112
112Rachel Tabachnick, “Killing Mother Theresa with their Prayers,” Talk to Action, October 20, 2008, at
50
Tabachnick noted that the New Apostolic Reformation’s “leadership is strongly
opposed to the Roman Catholic Church despite their attempts to portray a unity with
Catholic believers. For them it represents the ultimate example of an institutionalized
apostate church. Wagner and his leading Apostles take trips to foreign countries to hold
extended prayer vigils and conduct spiritual warfare to ‘confront the Queen of
Heaven.’ This refers to a super demon from the time of the Babylonian empire which
they believe is the source of Mary veneration in the Roman Catholic Church. This is a
similar concept to that of the Great Harlot of Mystery Babylon frequently featured in
John Hagee's sermons.” 113
Bruce Wilson pointed out that the NAR’s “Spiritual Warfare/Spiritual Mapping
comes freighted with a comprehensive ideology casting all non-Christians, and
denominational Christians and Catholics as well, as under demonic influence.”114 The
NAR’s chief strategist, C. Peter Wagner, depicts the Roman Catholic Church as
“corrupted…by a demon known as the ‘religious spirit’ which is the spirit of empty
legalism and religious ritual.” 115 Tabachnick noted that Wagner developed Strategic
Level Spiritual Warfare techniques of “spiritual mapping, warfare prayer, and
‘Reconciliation’ events…to remove ‘generational curses’ from certain populations such
as Native Americans, African Americans, Roman Catholics, and those of non-Christian
113 Rachel Tabachnick, “Palin’s Churches and the Third Wave,” Talk to Action, September 5, 2008, at
114
Bruce Wilson, “Jack Hayford Backs Odd Theory: Sex With a Demon Drove Down Japanese Stock
Market,” Talk2Action, July 25, 2009, at http://www.talk2action.org/story/2009/7/25/92152/3919.
115 Bruce Wilson, Movement Behind Uganda’s ‘Kill the Gays’ Bill Organizing in Newark,” Talk To Action,
January 21, 2010, at
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2010/1/21/15336/6128/Front_Page/Movement_Behind_Uganda_s_quot_
Kill_the_Gays_quot_Bill_Organizing_in_Newark.
51
faiths.”116 Diane Buker, responsible for the Southeast Strategic Prayer Network in the
United States, maintains the BattleAxe website that “attack[s] the Catholic Church along
with Mormonism, Scientology and Freemasonry as a ‘corrupt religious system.’” 117
Bruce Wilson pointed out that leaders such as C. Peter Wagner, Cindy Jacobs,
Ed Silvoso and “others in the New Apostolic movement cast their net of purported
‘witchcraft’ and ‘idolatry’ over objects associated with major world religious traditions
such as Catholicism, Mormonism, and all Eastern religions, and also many native art
objects.” Wilson’s article provided instances where Cindy Jacobs or other NAR leaders
had destroyed native art in Hawaii and the Argentinian city of Resistencia. In
Resistencia in 1990, for example, Jacobs, Wagner, and Silvoso urged the residents to
burn or otherwise destroy such items as “pictures, statues, Catholic saints, [and] Books
of Mormon…[and] native art.” There were at least 20 other categories of items for
destruction. In Cindy Jacobs’ book Deliver Us From Evil, she called for the destruction
of “‘African masks…statues of Hindu gods and statues of Buddha.’” Another NAR book,
Ridding Your Home of Spiritual Darkness, calls for the destruction of ‘Buddhas,…Hindu
images; fertility gods or goddesses (or any type of god or goddess); Egyptian images;
Greek god;…or any other image of any person, idol, god, or demonic figure which is
considered an object of worship or spiritual power in any culture of the world.’” With the
116Rachel Tabachnick, “Rachel Maddow, There is Much, Much More to the Story of Rick Perry’s
Apostles,” Talk to Action, July 16, 2011, at
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2011/7/16/115221/583/Front_Page/Rachel_Maddow_There_is_Much_M
uch_More_to_the_Story_of_Rick_Perry_s_Apostles.
117Bruce Wilson, “Palin Put Religious War Advocate On Alaska Suicide Prevention Council,” Talk to
Action, October 14, 2008, at http://www.talk2action.org/story/2008/10/13/171018/17/.
52
exception of objects from evangelical Christianity and Judaism, the second book also
calls for the destruction of objects associated with “Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian
Science, Baha’i, Yoga, and Transcendental Meditation.”
Wilson noted that it “is characteristic of the movement that religious items
associated with major world religions such as Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and
Islam are lumped together with ‘pornography,’ ‘drugs,’ and faddish commercialized
occult objects such as Ouija Boards….What’s so striking about this outlook is that it
extends even to native art objects. One would have to look back hundreds of years for
a comparable totalistic imperative to annihilate entire religions and cultures.” 118
C. Peter Wagner, the head of the New Apostolic Reformation, in addition to
believing in the destruction of other religions either through mass conversions or cultural
genocide, also believes that a democratic majority can deprive a minority of their
constitutional rights, for example, of same-sex marriage rights. Wagner also believes
that “‘Dominion has to do with control. Dominion has to do with rulership…Dominion
means ruling as kings.’” 119
Leading New Apostolic Reformation’s strategists—including C. Peter Wagner
and Rick Warren—have been linked to the promotion of a legislative bill in Uganda that
would result in the wholesale murder of homosexuals. The same “Transformation” and
spiritual warfare networks that are operating in Uganda also operate in many American
118Bruce Wilson, “New Apostolic Reformation Leaders Burn Native Art,” Talk to Action, October 19, 2010,
at http://www.talk2action.org/story/2010/10/19/8306/2124.
119
Frederick Clarkson, “More Reportorial Pooh Poohery about Dominionism,” Talk to Action, October 18,
53
cities where they work with local police departments to target undesirables linked to
crime. 120
Thus, turning America into a Christian nation is not merely a bad interpretation of
history. It could very well result in cultural and physical genocide in the United States
against the wrong kind of Christians—mainline Protestants, Catholics, Mormons—as
well as Jews and Muslims, other non-Christians, non-believers, as well as liberals,
scientists, and humanists. As Chris Hedges noted in his discussion of the Left Behind
series, “It is a small step from this toxic rhetoric and exclusive belief system to the
disempowerment and eradication of nonbelievers…” 121
The Anti-Defamation League’s 1994 report on the Religious Right specifically
claimed that the Christian Reconstructionists’ “efforts to remake America as ancient
Israel entails the abolition not merely of the federal government and public education,
but also…the entire Western liberal tradition….[T]here would be no place in this
120 Kathyrn Joyce, ‟The Anti-Gay Highway: New Report Details Mutually Beneficial Relationship Between
US Evangelicals and African Antigay Clergy,” Religion Dispatches, November 18, 2009, at
http://www.religiondispatches.org/dialogs/print/?id=2046.
Michelle Goldberg, ‟Uganda’s Radical Anti-Gay Measure and the American Religious Right,” Religion
Dispatches, November 30, 2009, at
http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/religiousright/2070/uganda's_radical_anti-
gay_measure_and_the_american_religious_right?page=entire.
Bruce Wilson, “Rick Warren’s Dissertation Advisor Leads Network Promoting Uganda Anti-Gay Bill,” Talk
to Action, December 4, 2009, at http://www.talk2action.org/story/2009/12/4/134435/084.
Bruce Wilson, Movement Behind Uganda’s ‘Kill the Gays’ Bill Organizing in Newark,” Talk To Action,
Talk to Action Site Administration, “With ‘Kill the gays bill’ pending, American anti-gay ministry plans
Uganda rally,” April 9, 2010, at http://www.talk2action.org/story/2010/4/9/17756/91905.
Kristin Rawls, “How Deep Is the Republican Christian Right’s Connection to the Anti-Gay Bills Sweeping
Sub-Saharan Africa?,” AlterNet, February 7, 2012, at http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/153723.
121Chris Hedges, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, New York: Free
Press, 2006: 95.
54
reformed society for Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, Baha’is, humanists, atheists, or
even non-reconstructionist Christians….Indeed, the writings of leading members of the
movement suggest that any dissenters could be ‘eliminated.’” 122
In early 2011, Christian Right strategist William Lane Craig, “an extensively
educated, widely published, widely read theological scholar and debater” justified
genocide by citing God’s approval of the genocide and infanticide of the Canaanites.
According to Craig, “‘So whom does God wrong in commanding the destruction of the
Canaanites? Not the Canaanite adults, for they were corrupt and deserving of
judgement. Not the children, for they inherit eternal life.’” As Greta Christina pointed
out in reference to Craig and others who believe that the Bible is the inerrant word of
God, “you put yourself in the position of defending genocide. You put yourself in the
position of defending infanticide. You put yourself in the position of defending slavery,
rape, forced marriage, ethnic hatred, the systematic subjugation of women, human
sacrifice, and any number of moral grotesqueries that your holy book not only defends,
but praises to the skies and offers as models of exemplary behavior.” 123
In mid-2012, pastor Charles Worley of the Providence Road Baptist Church in
North Carolina (an Independent Baptist congregation), just prior to the ballot vote on
same-sex marriage in that state called for all homosexuals to be rounded-up and put
into concentration camps until they died a natural death. Bill Leonard, who grew up an
122 Anti-Defamation League, The Religious Right: The Assault on Tolerance & Pluralism in America, New
York: ADL, 1994: 119.

123Greta Christina, “One More Reason Religion Is So Messed Up: Respected Theologian Defends
Genocide and Infanticide,” AlterNet, April 25, 2011, at
http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/150742.
55
Independent Baptist and is a professor of church history at Wake Forest Divinity School
condemned and prayed for Worley for calling for the un-Christian establishment of
concentration camps that would end in genocide. 124
And, the Good News Clubs which stealthily bring fundamentalist Christianity into
public schools through after-school programs are including in their fall 2012 student
curriculum a discussion of Saul and the Amalakites. Katherine Stewart, who wrote a
2012 book on the subject, reported that over 100,000 children between the ages of four
and twelve will be guided on why it is biblical to commit genocide by killing, according to
the biblical story, “‘men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and
donkeys.’” According to the Child Evangelism Fellowship’s teacher guide for the Good
News Club teachers, teachers are to emphasize that “if God gives instructions to kill a
group of people, you must kill every last one.” Moreover, the curriculum guide also
instructs teachers to emphasize that “the Amalakites were targeted for destruction on
account of their religion, or lack of it” (emphasis in original). Stewart cited a historical
study which found that this biblical story “has been used to justify genocide throughout
the ages,” including the Puritans against Native Americans, Catholics versus
Protestants (and vice-versa), and Hutu against Tutsi in Rwanda. 125
124Bill Leonard, “A Baptist shame,” Associated Baptist Press, May 24, 2012, at
http://www.abpnews.com/opinion/item/7444-a-baptist-shame. Frederick Clarkson, “Baptist Professor
Opposes Gay Concentration Camp,” Talk to Action, May 25, 2012, at
125Katherine Stewart, “How Christian fundamentalists plan to teach genocide to schoolchildren,” The
Guardian (UK), May 30, 2012, at http://m.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/may/30/christian-
fundamentalists-plan-teach-genocide?cat=commentisfree&type=article.
56
In other words, young Christians are being instructed and guided that if God—
apparently operating through religious authorities—instructs you to kill non-believers,
then you must commit complete genocide, to include destroying their means to eat.
This Good News Club/Child Evangelism Fellowship teaching is consistent with the Left
Behind series of novels and video games, and, consistent with the teachings of the New
Apostolic Reformation.
But, the above examples are not idiosyncratic to particular individuals or groups.
Colonel V. Doner, a leading Christian Reconstructionist and Christian Right strategist,
explained in his 2012 book Christian Jihad why he left the movement that the neo-
fundamentalist worldview and dominionist agenda is based, in part, on fear of God’s
wrath. He noted that the “fundamentalist God is Yahweh—the God of wrath. He is the
war God of the ancient Hebrew prophets…..He’s the God of the Crusades, the
Inquisition, the Puritans, the Calvinists, and American Revivalists.” He is the God for
Joshua, Moses’s right-hand man, who destroyed Jericho and then slaughtered every
man, woman, child, cattle, sheep, and donkeys. It is Gideon’s God, who with 300 men
slaughtered 135,000 men who worshipped false gods. 126
Gary Cass published an article in Charisma magazine, “Why I Am Absolutely
Islamophobic,” that was withdrawn without retraction after it was heavily criticized,
though no editor was disciplined. Cass, a founder of the Christian Anti-Defamation
Commission, was the former executive director of D. James Kennedy’s The Center for
Reclaiming Christ for America, is an advocate of both Islamophobia and genocide
126
Colonel V. Doner, Christian Jihad: Neo-Fundamentalists and the Polarization of America, Denver:
Samizdat Creative, 2012: 103, and 52-3.
57
against Muslims. After rejecting as impractical converting all Muslims in America to
Christianity and deporting all Muslims in America, Cass proposed a third public policy—
violence. Cass argued, “The only thing that is biblical and that 1400 years of history has
shown to work is overwhelming Christian just war and overwhelming self-defense.
Christian Generals Charles Martel in 732 and Jon Sobieski in 1672 defeated Islamic
Turks and their attempts to take the West. Who will God raise up to save us this time?
Will God even intervene or turn us over to the Muslims for turning against Him?”
Central to his theme of perpetrating genocide against Muslims in America was his
advice to “obtain a gun(s), learn to shoot, teach your kids the Christian doctrines of just
war and self-defense, create small cells of family and friends that you can rely on if
something catastrophic happens and civil society suddenly melts down.” 127
In the next section, Jews are brought into special focus as they are either to
convert to fundamentalist Christianity or be killed—a second Holocaust all in the name
of Jesus.
The New Anti-Semitism of the Christian Right: Love the Jews to Death
There is a long history of periodic episodes of anti-Semitism in America and it is
not my intent to recount this history. 128 There appears to be three types of anti-
127 Frank Schaeffer, “Is it Just Charisma magazine or are all Charismatic Christians Into Genocide?,”
Patheos, October 6, 2014, at http://www.patheos.com/blogs/frankschaeffer/2014/10/is-it-just-charisma-

magazine-or-are-all-charismatic-christians-into-genocide/.
Gary Cass, “I’m Islamophobic, Are You?,” Defend Christians, September 4, 2014, at
http://defendchristians.org/commentary/im-islamaphobic-are-you/.
128David H. Bennett, The Party of Fear: The American Far Right from Nativism to the Militia Movement,
revised and updated, New York: Vintage Books, 1995.
Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons, Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort, New York:
The Guilford Press, 2000.
58
Semitism in the current Christian nationalist movement. The basic model is derived
from the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” which is a narrative that Jews secretly control
the international and American financial systems in order to achieve world domination.
It has many variations but its essential features create a common, understandable
narrative across such diverse groups as Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition of the
1980s-1990s, John Hagee and the Christian Zionists, the Patriot Christian militia, and
the neo-Nazis. The second and third variants of anti-Semitism are hidden by the ardor
of Christian Zionism emanating from the fundamentalist and evangelical belief in the
apocalypse at the End Times.
The Christian Right’s Zionism is best exemplified by Pastor John Hagee who has
argued that virulent and violent anti-Semitism is God’s plan for Israel leading up to the
Second Holocaust, that is, the bloodthirsty return of the supernatural Jesus who
demands that Jews either seek salvation through him or face holy extermination. On
the other hand, it is not clear that the Christian Zionists actually rely upon a supernatural
Jesus to perpetrate a Second Holocaust given their Left Behind narrative. In the
meantime, this variant of Christian Zionism is heavily involved with recruiting Jews to
Christianity before Christ’s return.
The New Apocalyptic Reformation’s anti-Semitism has much in common with
Hagee’s narrative with a twist—the Second Holocaust is not perpetrated by a
Allan J. Lichtman, White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement, New York:
Grove Press, 2008.
Leonard Zeskind, Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to
the Mainstream, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2009.
59
supernatural Jesus, but apparently by real-life Americans recruited and indoctrinated
into the supernaturally holy Joel’s Army.
Notwithstanding the Christian Right’s strong support for Israel, Jean Hardisty
noted in 1999 that a “substantial part of the Jewish community…[regards] the Christian
Right as anti-Semitic. Even while supporting Israel, some Christian Right organizations
have simultaneously promoted a greater Christian presence in Israel and have
proselytized for Jews to convert to Christianity.” Other aspects of the Christian Right
that cause concerns are calls for America to return to its “‘Christian roots,’” “‘America is
a Christian nation,’” and “‘Judeo-Christian’” as a description of America’s theology. 129
Kevin Schultz has pointed out that since the 1970s the Christian Right has appropriated
the term “Judeo-Christian” to suggest Protestant supremacy in an effort to reclaim
America from the Jews, Catholics and Protestants who originally championed “Judeo-
Christian” as an expression of America’s tri-faith creed that resulted in a greater
secularization of the country from the 1950s onwards. 130
In 1994, the Anti-Defamation League warned in a major report that over the past
15 years “an exclusionist religious movement in this country has attempted to restore
what it perceives as the ruins of a Christian nation by seeking more closely to unite its
version of Christianity with state power.” 131 In 2005, the ADL again was alarmed by the
129Jean Hardisty, Mobilizing Resentment: Conservative Resurgence from the John Birch Society to the
Promise Keepers, Boston: Beacon Press, 1999: 23.
130Kevin M. Schultz, Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to its Protestant
131 Anti-Defamation League, The Religious Right: The Assault on Tolerance & Pluralism in America, New
York: ADL, 1994: 1.
60
stated objectives and rhetoric of such key groups as the Alliance Defense Fund, the
American Family Association, the Family Research Council, and the Focus on the
Family, as well as around 50 groups in the Arlington Group organized by the Free
Congress Foundation. Though the ADL did not believe the Christian Right’s goals were
motivated by anti-Semitism, it did believe that their agenda “goes well beyond legitimate
engagement in controversial social and political issues to a fundamental usurpation of
all that America represents.” In fact, the ADL described a totalitarian Christian society
as the Christian Right’s ultimate goal: “We are facing an emerging Christian Right
leadership that intends to ‛Christianize’ all aspects of American life, from the halls of
government to the libraries, to the movies, to recording studios, to the playing fields and
locker rooms of professional, collegiate and amateur sports, from the military to
SpongeBob SquarePants.” 132 In fact, the ADL essentially describing the the Christian
Reconstructionism’s dominionism and the Seven Mountains campaign of the New
Apostolic Reformation that had evolved from the Christian Reconstructionist agenda.
Rachel Tabachnick described ten major tendencies within the Christian
nationalist movement that jeopardize Israel and worldwide Jewry. These include:
Christian Zionism opposes religious pluralism in the Middle East, promotes Israeli
expansion of a Greater Israel that could kill millions of people, opposes all peace plans
on the grounds that peace is part of the antichrist’s plan, and “demands the creation of a
Christian Zion or Christian Israel in preparation of the Millennium;” the use of biblical
132Abraham H. Foxman, “Religion in America’s Public Square: Are We Crossing the Line?,” excerpts from
an address, November 3, 2005, Anti-Defamation League at
http://www.adl.org/Religious_Freedom/religion_public_square.asp.
61
imagery of “‘hunters’” and “‘fishers’” in Christian Zionist texts aligns the interests of hard
core anti-Semites and Christian Zionists, respectively. The “‘hunters’” conduct a
worldwide anti-Semitic campaign to drive Jews to Israel where “‘fishers’” harvest Jewish
converts to Christianity. In Pastor John Hagee’s version, Hitler was a “‘hunter’” whose
Holocaust partially fulfilled God’s plan for Israel; Christian Zionists use Federal Reserve
and New World Order conspiracy theories which are prevalent across the entire the
spectrum of the right-wing to advance “anti-Jewish conspiracy narratives…[through]
Christian Zionist apocalyptic literature;” Christian Zionists promote the idea that biblical
genealogy determines national destinies, which in the case of Christian Identity theology
leads to the conclusion that Jews are the offspring of Satan, while certain white
American Christians are God’s chosen people; there are also various Christian Right
groups who see themselves as “‘Jews’” with a right to land in Israel. Hagee has claimed
that Hitler was half-Jewish. Tabachnick noted that an alteration or revision in biblical
genealogy could delegitimize Jewish claims to the land of Israel. Christian Zionists
have been rewriting the history of the Holocaust to claim that the Holocaust’s “heroes
are ‘true’ Christians while the Nazis are portrayed as liberals, communists, gays and
atheists…as villains in the Holocaust. Christian Zionists also conflate or submerge
Nazism into Communism to produce a “single anti-Christian entity.” [It should be noted
that the Tea Party movement’s anti-Obama campaign typically equates liberalism with
Nazism and/or Communism—no doubt playing upon a theme already prevalent in
Christian Right circles.] “‘Blessing Israel’ means cleansing Israel of its evils, including
Judaism, in preparation of the Christian Millennium.” Israel’s image is increasingly
marketed through Christian Zionist media outlets that feature Christian Right
62
personalities that drive away moderate Christians and Jews, as well as antagonizing
Muslims. Christian Zionists are coopting Jewish holidays and symbols so that Christian
Zionists and Messianics can “together become the ‘real Jews’ or ‘new covenant Jews’
and so deny the legitimacy of rabbinic Jewry.” Tabachnick noted that Third Wave
charismatics, that is, the New Apostolic Reformation, are marketing their brand of
Christian Zionism as being “benign and having no end times motivations. Again, this is
not true.”133
In addition to the Christian Zionists and the Christian Identity adherents who
believe that the Jews no longer are the chosen people, the political-business-military
elites in The Family also believe that God’s covenant with the Jews has been broken
and that The Family’s “core members call themselves the new chosen.” 134
Both Frederick Clarkson and Michelle Goldberg note that Christian
Reconstructionists believe they are the “new chosen” people. According to Clarkson,
“Christians of the correct sort” are “commanded to do what ‘Adam in Eden and Israel in
Canaan failed to do…create the society that God requires.’” Goldberg noted that
Christian Reconstructionism is the “most radical faction of covenant theology” and
“believe it’s man’s job to create Christ’s kingdom before he comes back.” 135
133
Rachel Tabachnick, “Top Ten Reasons Christian Zionism ‘Impairs Israel’s Interests,’” Talk to Action,
October 19, 2009, at http://www.talk2action.org/story/2009/10/19/133852/88.
134 Jeff Sharlet, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, New York:
Harper Perennial, 2008: 27.

135Frederick Clarkson, “Christian Reconstructionism Part 1: Overview and Roots,” Public Eye Magazine,
March/June 1994, at http://www.publiceye.org/magazine/v08n1/chrisre1.html.
Michelle Goldberg, “Ron Paul’s Christian Reconstructionist Roots,” The Daily Beast, January 3, 2012, at
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/01/02/ron-paul-s-christian-reconstructionist-roots.print.html.
63
Thus, across the Christian Right at the elite and populist levels, Christian
dominionism and status as the new chosen people are definitely linked—at the apparent
expense of the Jews. As we shall see, denial of their religious status is a precursor to
their threatened physical existence.
The Protocol Model of Anti-Semitism
The basic model of the Christian Right’s anti-Semitism is rooted in the Tsarist
police’s fabrication of “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.” It essentially lays
out a secret plan for Jews to achieve world domination. It was revived after the Russian
Revolution of 1917 by émigré czarists to discredit the Bolsheviks. The forgery was
eventually published by Henry Ford’s newspaper The Dearborn Independent and the
book The International Jew: the World’s Foremost Problem sold half a million copies in
the United States. 136
Berlet and Lyons pointed out that the basic Protocols model has a variant that
mixes anti-Semitism with “historic U.S. Anglophobia and contends that the royal family’s
intermarriage with Jews resulted in the Rothschild’s family exerting total control over the
financial center called the City of London, which in turn is alleged to control world
finance.” They pointed out that another “U.S. corollary is that British and/or Jewish
banking families created the Federal Reserve system to extend Jewish/British control
over the U.S. economy.” 137
136 Anti-Defamation League, “A Hoax of Hate: The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion,” Special
Report, at http://www.adl.org/special_reports/protocols/protocols_intro.asp.
137
Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons, Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort, New
York: The Guilford Press, 2000: 193.
64
Henry Ford’s anti-Semitic campaign in the 1920s spawned the Christian Identity
movement in the United States in the 1930s. William J. Cameron, the Independent’s
editor, headed the Anglo-Saxon Federation which advocated British Israelism—the
“doctrine that Anglo-Saxons were the descendants of the lost tribes of Israel; they, not
the Jews, were the true Chosen People.” Cameron fused this doctrine with racism and
conspiratorial anti-Semitism to create the Christian Identity religious doctrine that
apparently did not increase in salience and popularity among white supremacists until
the 1950s when U.S. Supreme Court decisions undermined white supremacy in tandem
with the growth of the Civil Rights Movement. According to Leonard Zeskind’s expert
analysis, Christian Identity theology helped explain why the white supremacists had
been defeated by Satanic Jews and sub-human blacks. 138 The Christian Identity
religion undergirds what is commonly called the hard-right ranging from the Christian
Patriot militia to the Ku Klux Klan to the neo-Nazis and other white supremacists or
nationalists. 139 Christianity Identity theology “appropriated Hislop’s ‘Mystery Babylon’
but applied it to Jews instead of the Roman Catholic Church. The ‘Mystery Babylon’
138Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons, Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort, New
York: The Guilford Press, 2000: 107.
the Mainstream, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2009: 178, for a thorough discussion of the theology
see pp 177-83. Two-seed Identity believers are more likely to advocate a violent racial war against Jews
and non-whites than one-seed believers.
139Anti-Defamation League, “Christian Identity,” at
http://www.adl.org/learn/ext_us/Christian_Identity.asp?LEARN_Cat=Extremism&LEARN_SubCat=Extremi
sm_in_America&xpicked=4&item=Christian_ID.
Daniel Levitas, The Terrorist Next Door: The Militia Movement and the Radical Right, New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 2002: 1-10, for the influence of Potter Gale’s fusion Christian Identity and right-wing
conspiracies to create Posse Comitatus and its offspring the Christian Patriot militia.
65
religion, or devil worship, is the source of the occult powers with which they claim Jews
control the world.”140
Zeskind has noted that hard-right white nationalists, which largely follow the
Christian Identity theology, have two points of convergence with the larger Christian
nationalist movement. Both movements “believe that feminists, gay men, and lesbians
are destroying the (white) nuclear family. And they share the notion (with many outside
their immediate ranks) that middle-class white people—men in particular—are actually
victims in contemporary society.” Moreover, conceptualizing America as a Christian
nation automatically “relegates Jews and other non-Christians to a secondary status.”141
In fact, the Christian nationalist and white nationalist movements also share a
narrative of the New World Order that is subjugating and persecuting patriotic, liberty-
loving, God-fearing fundamentalist Christians (and Identity Christians) to a combination
of liberals or secular humanists, feminists, and homosexuals all for the benefit of Satan.
The Christian nationalists also share with the Christian Identity religion the idea that
white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants of a certain persuasion are the real Jews. And, the
Christian Zionists provide a biblical justification for virulent and violent anti-Semitism that
helps propel Israel towards fulfillment of the fundamentalist End Times apocalyptic orgy
of death.
140Rachel Tabachnick, “Conspiracy as Prophecy,” Talk to Action, June 12, 2009, at

to the Mainstream, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2009: xviii.
66
But, there is still another point of convergence between the Christian Right and
the white nationalist movement which is another variant of the Protocols of Zion model,
namely, the attack on multiculturalism by fourth generation warfare proponent William S.
Lind, then the director of cultural conservatism at the Free Congress Foundation. In this
variant, economic Marxism is converted into “cultural Marxism” and the destruction of
Western society, particularly America, is conducted through dominance of the culture
rather than the banking system and the Federal Reserve.
The Southern Poverty Law Center observed that the “most significant institutional
support for the theory of cultural Marxism comes from [Paul] Weyrich, [William] Lind,
and their Free Congress Foundation” and that it spread into the white nationalist
movement with such proponents as Pat Buchanan, the white supremacist Council of
Conservative Citizens, the neo-Confederate League of the South, and the Americans
for Immigration Control. The SPLC noted that “[r]ight-wing ideologues, racists and other
extremists have jazzed up political correctness and repackaged it—in its most virulent
form, as an anti-Semitic theory that identifies Jews in general and several Jewish
intellectuals in particular as nefarious, communistic destroyers.” Lind, deliberately
identified the intellectual proponents of the Frankfurt School as Jewish at an anti-
Semitic conference Holocaust-denial conference sponsored by Willis Carto in 2002.
Lind told the audience, “‘These guys were all Jewish.’” In a 2000 speech to Accuracy in
Academia, Lind noted that “members of the Frankfurt School are Marxist, they are also,
to a man, Jewish.” He noted that members of the Frankfurt School left Germany in
1993 and shifted “their focus from Critical Theory about German society, destructive
criticism about every aspect of that society, to Critical Theory directed toward American
67
society.” In an undated paper Lind wrote even more explicitly about this alleged
Frankfurt School Jewish plot to destroy America by suggesting that once they arrived in
America they “shifted…focus from destroying traditional Western culture in Germany to
destroying it in the United States. To do so, it invented ‘Critical Theory.’” 142
Though many who followed Lind’s writings and the Free Congress Foundation
noted the propagation of their theory of “cultural Marxism” or “political correctness” into
the white nationalist movement, none have linked it to fourth generation warfare. But,
Lind did explicitly in his 1994 U.S. Marine Corps Gazette article. Lind informed his
Department of Defense audience, despite the fact that the commander-in-chief was a
Democrat, that “cultural radicals” or “cultural Marxists” who are elites who dominate the
universities, media, and entertainment industry are destroying “our traditional, Western,
Judeo-Christian culture.” This common national culture was being replaced by a
fracturing of identity “based on ethnic groups, gender, sexual identity, and class.” And,
while many Christian Right leaders talk about “religious war” or a “culture war” or use
militaristic language—which many liberals apparently consider just rhetoric—Lind
142 Bill Berkowitz, “Reframing the Enemy,” Intelligence Report Summer 2003, Southern Poverty Law
Center, at http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?pid=112.
Southern Poverty Law Center, “Mainstreaming Hate. A Key ally of Christian right heavyweight Paul
Weyrich addresses a major Holocaust denial conference,” Intelligence Report Fall 2002, at
http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=40#.
Bill Lind, ‟The Origins of Political Correctness,” Accuracy in Academia, February 5, 2000, at
http://www.academia.org/the-origins-of-political-correctness/.
William S. Lind, ‟What is Cultural Marxism?,” Maryland Thursday Meeting, no date, at
http://www.marylandthursdaymeeting.com/Archives/SpecialWebDocuments/Cultural.Marxism.htm.
68
informed an audience that takes warfare seriously: “The next real war we fight is likely
to be on American soil.” 143
The New World Order—Anti-Semitism, Apocalyptic Conspiracism
The fundamentalist rejection of the Enlightenment exemplified by the
fundamentalist-modernist clash incorporates apocalyptic conspiracism—the belief that
there are secret elites plotting against upstanding Christians and for the anti-Christ.
From the Russian Revolution up to the start of the Cold War, the secret elites were
Jews, liberals, secular humanists, socialists and communists. Books in this genre
tended to be overtly anti-Semitic. The Cold War, particularly for Christian
fundamentalists and right-wing conservatives surrounding Barry Goldwater, including
the John Birch Society, anti-Semitism was more muted. Nevertheless, liberals, Wall
Street bankers, the Federal Reserve, and the Council on Foreign Relations were viewed
as part of a larger communist or Satanic conspiracy to subjugate patriotic Americans.
As Berlet put it, “subcultures among Protestants and Catholics keep conspiracist ideas
alive within Christianity just as various non-religious subcultures spread apocalyptic
conspiracism in secular society. Today, Christians with a conspiracist interpretation of
the Book of Revelation are especially alert to betrayal by political leaders whom they
suspect of promoting collectivism and a tyrannical one-world government.” 144
143
William S. Lind, Major John F. Schmitt, and Colonel Gary I. Wilson, “Fourth Generation Warfare:
Another Look,” U.S. Marine Corps Gazette, December 1994, at http://www.mca-
marines.org/gazette/fourth-generation-warfare-another-look.
144Chip Berlet, “Dances with Devils: Key Narrative Roots,” Public Eye magazine revised, April 15, 1999,
at http://www.publiceye.org/apocalyptic/Dances_with_Devils_1-01.html.
69
In 1991, Pat Robertson, then head of the Christian Coalition, published The New
World Order book that combined at least three anti-Semitic source books—Nesta
Webster’s World Revolution and her Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, and
Eustace Mullin’s Secrets of the Federal Reserve—with biblical prophecy and
apocalypticism. Berlet and Lyons noted that Robertson’s book signified a conscious
decision to “embrace Bircherite conspiracism” and was the “logical culmination of the
U.S. Hard Right’s shift of scapegoats—from the Red Menace…to today’s global elites
behind the secular humanist conspiracy.” 145 Rachel Tabachnick at Talk to Action
pointed out that Robertson’s book “was a watershed moment in making a virulent anti-
Semitic conspiracy theory again acceptable as a religious narrative.” Robertson used
the “‘Mystery Babylon, mother of harlots’” conspiracy linking the Freemasons and
Illuminati to the French Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the New World Order.
His Mystery Babylon was the Jewish version of the conspiracy that is also used against
the Catholic Church. 146
Especially noteworthy about Robertson’s book was that his “New World Order”
narrative spans different movements—Christian Right, Christian Patriot militia, and neo-
Nazis—and comes in anti-Semitic and Christian Zionist versions. Tabachnick noted
“remarkable similarities between the New World Order conspiracy of white supremacist
groups and that of Christian Zionist end times prophecy….While it may sound
counterintuitive that Christian Zionists would embrace the same basic narrative as
145
Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons, Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort, New
York: The Guilford Press, 2000: 259, 258.
146 Rachel Tabachnick, “Conspiracy as Prophecy,” Talk to Action, June 12, 2009, at
70
overtly anti-Semitic white supremacist groups, the storylines are indeed parallel and
sometimes almost identical. Both anti-Semitic and philo-Semitic versions of the
narrative are increasingly being marketed side by side and even from the same
organizations.”147 Bruce Wilson has noted that “[f]used with Christian supremacist
narratives claiming America was founded as an explicitly Christian nation, New World
Order conspiracy narratives have permeated American government and politics, and
the United States military. Because the theories are disguised as Biblical prophecy they
can be spread readily, to little notice from secular society.”148 Rachel Tabachnick has
observed that since “the early 1990s tales of the New World Order have been
continuously marketed to millions of Americans through end times prophecy media.”149
And Chip Berlet noted that both LaHaye and Robertson draw upon and circulate
“conspiracist claims and themes that originated in the John Birch Society in the
1960s.” 150
Christian Zionism: Love the Jews to Death
Pastor John Hagee, the Christian Right leader of the formidable Christians
United for Israel organization, has direct links to and support from Israel’s Likud
147Rachel Tabachnick, “Conspiracy as Prophecy,” Talk to Action, June 12, 2009, at

148 Bruce Wilson, “Defense Department-Certified Agency Newsletter Suggests Killing Democrats,”
Talk2Action, June 23, 2009, at http://www.talk2action.org/story/2009/6/23/111516/011.

149Rachel Tabachnick, “The Prophecy/Conspiracy Genre—Using End Times Prophecy to Mainstream
New World Order Narratives,” Talk to Action, December 8, 2010, at
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2010/12/8/153719/789/Front_Page/The_Prophecy_Conspiracy_Genre_U
sing_End_Times_Prophecy_to_Mainstream_New_World_Order_Narratives.
150Chip Berlet, ‟The World According to Tim LaHaye: Chapter Eight—The Age Old Conspiracy,” Talk to
Action, September 18, 2006, at http://www.talk2action.org/story/2006/9/18/193359/696.
71
government, as well as such Jewish moral leaders as Elie Weisel, probably due to his
strong support for right-wing Israeli politics, neo-conservative U.S. foreign policy, and
generating about $50 million dollars in donations to Israeli charities. 151
Michele Goldberg pointed out that the Left Behind series and similar
dispensationalist scenarios “includes apocalyptic warfare in Israel and the violent death
of most of the world’s Jews….[M]uch of their literature dwells on the details of Jewish
torment with disquieting relish.” 152 Hagee’s apocalyptic End Times scenario advocates
that Israel and the United States engage in a nuclear war with Israel in order to fulfill
God’s plan. 153 Chip Berlet, who has spent decades studying the Christian Right
concluded that the Christian Right’s ubiquitous support of Israel is grounded in an
apocalyptic vision in which the Jews are destroyed. 154
Hagee has propounded a New World Order conspiracy theory at least as anti-
Semitic as Robertson’s. According to Tabachnick at Talk to Action, “Hagee claims that
a coming economic crisis will be intentionally induced by an ‘unseen government’ and a
151 Rachel Tabachnick, “Israeli Ambassador Rejects American Jews, Embraces Hagee, Christian
Zionists,” Talk to Action, October 16, 2009, at http://www.talk2action.org/story/2009/10/16/152246/04.
Max Blumenthal, “Elie Wiesel Appears With End Times Pastor John Hagee, Hagee Trashes Obama,” The
Huffington Post, October 30, 2009, at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/max-blumenthal/elie-wiesel-
appears-with_b_339120.html.
Bill Berkowitz, ‟The Pastor that Said God Sent Hitler to Hunt the Jews is on the comeback trail,” Talk to
Action, May 19, 2010, at http://www.talk2action.org/story/2010/5/19/115311/352.
152
Michelle Goldberg, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, New York: W.W. Norton &
Company, 2007: 72.
153Sarah Posner, “Pastor Strangelove,” The American Prospect, May 21, 2006, at
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?articleId=11541.
Bruce Wilson, “Holocaust For Zion: CUFI’s Christian Zionism Made Simple,” March 2, 2007, at
154
Chip Berlet and Nikhil Aziz, “Pastor Hagee’s Armageddon Politics,” The Huffington Post, May 22,
2008, at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chip-berlet/pastor-hagees-armageddon_b_103161.html.
72
Rothschild owned Federal Reserve, paving the way for the fierce-featured, gay, part-
Jewish antichrist who will come to power when he rescues the world economy.” 155
Hagee has also claimed that Adolph Hitler was half-Jewish and a descendant of
Esau—a central tenet of the Christian Identity religion—for those who believe in the
one-seed theory, that is, Eve was impregnated by Adam (not also the snake) and that
the enmity between Jews and Gentiles is related to the clash between Esau the hunter
and Jacob the farmer. Moreover, both Hagee and Hitler have similar conspiracy
theories that the Jews were secretly behind America’s and Germany’s financial policies
that were driving both countries to ruin. 156 Zeskind pointed out that “Identity theology
rings with many of the same themes as Hitler’s secular anti-Semitism. In Mein Kampf,
Jews were painted as the source of both capitalism and communism; they allegedly
provoked international war to destroy Aryans and parasitically sucked the life from
others’ cultures.” Bruce Wilson has suggested that Hagee “holds beliefs about liberal
Jews that mirror sentiments to be found on conspiratorial websites promoting the
155Rachel Tabachick, “No Debate on Hagee?,” Talk to Action, June 8, 2008, at

156 Bruce Wilson, “Nationally Prominent Mega-Pastor Hagee Claims Hitler Was a ‘Half-Breed Jew,’” The
Huffington Post, August 1, 2009, at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-wilson/nationally-prominent-

evan_b_249279.html.
Bruce Wilson, “Hagee, Hitler Pushed Almost Identical anti-Jewish Banking Conspiracy Theories,” Talk to
Action, June 16, 2008, at http://www.talk2action.org/story/2008/6/16/163859/055.
the Mainstream, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2009: 180-1. Christian Identity has a two-seed and
one-seed theory that is central to understanding their theology. Two-seed adherents believe that Eve
was impregnated by Adam who begat Abel and the serpent who begat Cain. Cain is considered the
father of the Jews and “Jews are thus genetically predetermined to be the embodiment of Satan on
earth,” according to Zeskind. One-seed adherents believe Eve was impregnated by Adam. The one-
seed adherents believe that Jacob-Israel is the father of the Anglo-Saxon and kindred peoples, while
Esau is the father of the Jews. Thus, Jews are a Satanic force though not because of genetics. But,
Zeskind points out, according to the one-seed theory, “the Satanic nature of the Jews is regarded as
unchanging and unchangeable and considered biologically derived and racial” and a “sign of God’s
hatred of the Jews.”
73
debunked ‘Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion’ and also the beliefs of the KKK and
American Neo-Nazi groups such as Christian Identity.” 157
Hagee also believes that virulent, violent anti-Semitism—up to and including
Hitler’s Final Solution—is all part of God’s plan for the End Times. “‘Hunters’” such as
Hitler or the KKK/neo-Nazis are necessary to drive the Jews back to Israel—a
necessary precondition for Christ’s return and the Second Holocaust. 158 Mike Bickle,
the former head of the Kansas City Prophets and current head of the New Apostolic
Reformation’s International House of Prayer, has echoed Hagee’s views on hunters and
fishers numerous times between 2004 and 2009. Bickle has called Hitler a biblically-
mandated hunter, has “claimed that Jews collectively are ‘under the discipline of God
because of…perversion and sin,’” and claimed that in “near future Jews who refuse to
convert to Christianity and move to Israel will be pursued by ‘hunters’ sent by God and
can expect to be thrown into ‘prison camps’ and ‘death camps.’”159
to the Mainstream, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2009: 181-2.

Bruce Wilson, “John Hagee and Christian Identity Leader Agree on Alleged ‘Satanic Liberal Jewish
Conspiracy,’” Talk to Action, March 10, 2007, at http://www.talk2action.org/story/2007/3/10/165413/896.
158Bruce Wilson, “Audio Recording of McCain’s Political Endorser John Hagee Preaching Jews Are
Cursed and Subhuman,” Talk to Action, May 15, 2008, at
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2008/5/15/141520/281/Front_Page/Audio_Recording_of_McCain_s_Politi
cal_Endorser_John_Hagee_Preaching_Jews_Are_Cursed_and_Subhuman.
Rachel Tabachnick, “Hagee vs. Hagee—In His Own Words,” Talk to Action, May 21, 2010, at
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2010/5/21/162959/223/Front_Page/Hagee_vs.
Bruce Wilson, “Dear Newt Gingrich, Your Ally John Hagee is Demon-Casting, Jew-Bashing Exorcist,”
Talk to Action, April 15, 2011, at http://www.talk2action.org/story/2011/4/15/113719/928.
159Bruce Wilson, “IHOP Head Mike Bickle Predicts Coming ‘Prison Camps’ For Jews,” Talk to Action,
October 18, 2011, at
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2011/10/18/15172/771/Front_Page/IHOP_Head_Mike_Bickle_Predicts_C
oming_quot_Prison_Camps_quot_For_Jews_.
74
Another apparent theological point of convergence between Hagee’s Christian
Zionism and the Christian Identity religion is the belief that certain white, Anglo-Saxon
Protestants are the real Jews, while the actual Jews are not really Jewish.
Sarah Posner reported in her book, God’s Profits, that Hagee’s followers around
the country celebrate their “‘Hebraic roots’” to “claim ownership of the world’s most hotly
contested piece of real estate: not for the Jews but for the Second Coming of Christ.”
Moreover, Hagee has his followers learning “seven feasts” that are, in fact,
unrecognizable bastardizations of actual Jewish holidays, as well as bringing his
followers to visit Israel in order to better acquaint them with the ways of Jewish rabbi
(Christ) and the land of Israel. 160 Bruce Wilson pointed out that in Hagee’s version of
the rapture and tribulation “the born again Christians of the Tribulation are the ‘new
Jews.’ In Hagee’s futuristic version it is the churches that are burning, New Testaments
in the fire, and Christians being beaten and killed by those who are left behind. The ‘left
behind’ who are led by the antichrist to kill the Christians are clearly gays, Jews, and
Catholics, and people of other faiths or no faith.” 161
Rachel Tabachnick has reported that “the core of the Christian Zionist agenda is
the termination of Judaism as a religion separate from Christianity….There is currently
disagreement about the timing, and where the born again believers will be during the
Tribulation, but the ending is always the same—the ‘restoration’ and ‘salvation’ of Israel
160
Sarah Posner, God’s Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters, Sausalito,
CA: PoliPoint Press, 2008: 91, 94, 97-8, 98-99.
161Bruce Wilson, “Greatest John Hagee Hits, Pt. 1: Sourced Hagee Quotes at Your Fingertips,” Talk to
Action, May 28, 2008, at http://www.talk2action.org/story/2008/5/28/6363/30439.
75
is the trigger which brings about the Christian millennial utopia. This is achieved
through the termination of Judaism, one way or another.”” Part of this termination
appears to be the two-fold effort to claim that Israeli Jews discriminate against
Messianic Christians in Israel and for Christian Zionist organizations to engage in
aggressive proselytizing among Jews in an effort to convert them to Christianity before
Christ’s return. 162
In a follow-on article, Tabachnick noted the Christian Zionist organizations such
as the Worldwide Biblical Zionists, a project of World Likud and its evangelical arm
World Evangelical Zionists, are bringing to Israel “Christian Zionists who view
themselves as Israelites with rights to the land of Israel.” Tabachnick warned that
Christian Zionists are “not passively waiting for a Messiah and then determining who
was right, as Jewish leaders joke when they are defending Christian Zionists. These
are groups of activist who are working to make their prophesied millennial utopias a
reality, as quickly as possible.” 163
In 1996, the Southern Baptist Convention adopted a policy of converting Jews to
Christianity. A Jews on First report on messianic Jesus-worshipping churches which
adopt Jewish holidays and nomenclature (priests calling themselves rabbis) suggested
162Rachel Tabachnick, “Israeli Ambassador Rejects American Jews, Embraces Hagee, Christian
Zionists,” Talk to Action, October 16, 2009, at http://www.talk2action.org/story/2009/10/16/152246/04.
163Rachel Tabachnick, “Worldwide Biblical Zionists,” Talk to Action, October 19, 2009, at
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2009/10/19/175932/60/Front_Page/Worldwide_Biblical_Zionists.
76
that the Jewish façade of these churches was an attempt to convert Jews through
deception. 164
The policy of converting Jews to a very specific conservative form of Christianity
is rather widespread, judging by a July 2014 blog post on Concerned Women For
America’s website—a women’s organization started by Beverly LaHaye, wife of Tim
“Left Behind” LaHaye. The blog post came in the midst of Israel’s brutal invasion of
Gaza in which at least 500 Palestinians, 77 percent civilians (an early United Nations
estimate)—including women and children, had been killed, many more wounded, and
over 100,000 people displaced from their homes—and the conflict showing no signs of
letting up after three weeks. In 2009, a similar Israeli invasion of Gaza killed at least
1,300 and wounded another 5,400 wounded, with 80 percent of the crops destroyed, a
decline of 85 percent in gross domestic product, 22,000 buildings destroyed or
damaged. 165
According to the CWA blog, Christians had to stand with Israel in order to convert
them to Christianity: “‘Furthermore, as Christians we are called to protect Israel and
stand with this nation of people that God has blessed. Not only should we push for
164Jews On First, ‟Southern Baptists Rely on Deception in Effort to Convert Jews,” June 25, 2007, at
http://www.jewsonfirst.org/07cprint/baptist_messianic_print.html.
165 Lizzie Dearden, “Israel-Gaza conflict: 80 per cent of Palestinians killed by Israeli strikes are civilians,
UN report says,” The Independent (UK), July 15, 2014, at
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israelgaza-conflict-80-per-cent-of-palestinians-
killed-by-israeli-strikes-are-civilians-un-report-says-9606397.html.
Francesca Albanese, “The deafening silence around the Hamas proposal for a 10-year truce,” Mondo
Weiss, July 22, 2014, at http://mondoweiss.net/2014/07/deafening-silence-proposal.html.
CNN, “Palestinians: 1,300 killed, 22,000 buildings destroyed in Gaza,” January 19, 2009, at
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/01/19/gaza.war/.
77
strong foreign policy, but we must also be in prayer for our Jewish friends. Ultimately,
God is eager to bring his people back to Him and to direct their zeal for the law into a
zeal for Christ’s already accomplished salvation on the Cross for both Jews and
Gentiles alike.’” 166
The viewpoint of Concerned Women For America is entirely consistent with the
overall thrust of the Christian Right’s Christian Zionism. Victoria Clark in her book,
Allies for Armaggeddon, quoted American-Israeli journalist Gershom Gorenberg who “is
equally repelled and alarmed by Christian Zionist anti-Semitism. According to
Gorenberg, “Christian Zionists ‘don’t love real Jewish people. They love us as
characters in their story, in their play, and that’s not who we are, and we never
auditioned for that part, and the play is not one that ends up good for us.’” Gorenberg
further argued that “‘They’re steering American policy in a direction that is very, very
dangerous for Israel…pressing for Israel to hold on to territory even when the Israeli
political ground has recognized the need for some sort of pull-back.’” 167 Max
Blumenthal’s granular analysis of Israel’s internal self-destruction of democracy for the
objective of achieving a Greater Israel revealed that Christian Zionists are actively
involved in the destruction of Bedouin and Palestinian homes and agriculture, as well as
166Miranda Blue, “CWA Urges Support For Israel So Jews Can Be Converted To Christianity,” Right Wing
Watch, July 22, 2014, at http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/cwa-urges-support-israel-so-jews-can-be-
converted-christianity.
167Victoria Clark, Allies for Armageddon: The Rise of Christian Zionism, New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2007: 228.
78
actively funding Israeli settlers and Israeli charities, and indirectly assisting Israeli
corporations in the incorporation of Palestinian lands under Israeli domination. 168
The New Apostolic Reformation’s Christian Zionism
There is an overlap between the anti-Semitism of the Christian Right and the
New Apostolic Reformation. Many of Pastor Hagee’s leadership team in his Christians
United for Israel are apostles in the New Apostolic Reformation, especially Stephen
Strang, the head of Strang Communications and publisher of Charisma magazine, and
regional director Robert Stearns who publishes Kairos, a second apostolic
publication. 169 Stearns also founded The Day of Prayer for the Peace of Jerusalem
which has close ties the NAR’s Toward Jerusalem Council II. 170
The New Apostolic Reformation shares with the Christian Zionists like Hagee’s
Christians United for Israel a determination to convert Jews to evangelical Christianity.
Stearns is also affiliated with the “Israel Mandate” that is coordinated by Mike Bickle’s
International House of Prayer and other apostles and prophets. This group teaches “an
elaborate narrative of the end times in which believers are not snatched from the earth
before the final battles of the ‘Tribulation’ period, but fight in these battles
themselves. One prerequisite for what they believe to be the imminent end times, is the
conversion of Jews to charismatic evangelicalism.” The Israel Mandate, Toward
168 Max Blumenthal, Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, New York: Nation Books, 2013: 170-182.
Bill Berkowitz, ‟Heads Up: Prayer Warriors and Sarah Palin Are Organizing Spiritual Warfare to Take
169
Over America,” AlterNet, March 1, 2010, at http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/145796.

170Rachel Tabachnick, “Lou Engle Only One of Many of Sen. Brownback’s NAR Apostle Problems,” Talk
to Action, October 17, 2010, at http://www.talk2action.org/story/2010/10/17/11135/471/.
79
Jerusalem Council II, the Road to Jerusalem, and the Day of Prayer for the Peace of
Jerusalem “are all working frantically to make sure that enough Jews are converted to
bring about the anticipated end times events as soon as possible.” 171
Governor Rick Perry’s Christians-only spiritual launching of his presidential bid in
August 2011 featured several leaders from the New Apostolic Reformation including
apostles Mike Bickle, Lou Engle (TheCall), and Don Finto—all of whom fulfilled the
event’s goal of attempting to get Jews, other Christians, and non-Christians to convert
to their own brand of Christianity. The event also included John Hagee. 172
Parenthetically, apostles Lou Engle (TheCall) and Rick Joyner (Morningside Ministries
and Oak Initiative) are planning another TheCall event in Detroit for November 11,
2011, to convert Muslims to their brand of Christianity. 173
171Rachel Tabachnick, “Texas Gov. Rick Perry Partnering with New Apostolic Groups for Houston ‘Call to
Prayer,’” Talk to Action, June 6, 2010, at
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2011/6/6/112828/5087/Front_Page/Texas_Gov_Rick_Perry_Partnering_
with_New_Apostolic_Groups_for_Houston_quot_Call_to_Prayer_quot_.
172Sarah Posner, “The View from a Jew at a ‘Solemn Assembly’ Like Rick Perry’s,” Religion Dispatches,
June 13, 2011, at
http://www.religiondispatches.org/dispatches/sarahposner/4747/the_view_from_a_jew_at_a_%E2%80%9
Csolemn_assembly%E2%80%9D_like_rick_perry%E2%80%99s.
Miranda, “Fact Sheet: Gov. Rick Perry’s Extremist Allies,” Right Wing Watch, August 5, 2011, at
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/fact-sheet-gov-rick-perry%E2%80%99s-extremist-allies.
Rachel Tabachnick, “Watching Live Steaming of Rick Perry’s Parade of Apostles,” Talk to Action, August
6, 2011, at
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2011/8/6/163145/3097/Front_Page/Watching_Live_Steaming_of_Rick_P
erry_s_Parade_of_Apostles.
Sarah Posner, “Rick Perry’s Jesus Imperative: A Report from Saturday’s Mega-Rally,” Religion
Dispatches, August 7, 2011, at
http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/politics/4972/rick_perry%E2%80%99s_jesus_imperative%3A_a
_report_from_saturday%27s_mega-rally/.
173Rachel Tabachnick, “Spiritual Warfare,” Dome Magazine, October 17, 2011, at
http://domemagazine.com/features/cov101711.
Brian Tashman, “Engle, Joyner Come Together To Promote TheCall,” Right Wing Watch, August 29,
2011, at http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/engle-joyner-come-together-promote-call.
80
A second overlap of anti-Semitism with the Christian Right is the promotion of the
idea that Jews control America’s wealth. The NAR takes this one step further and calls
for the godly to take the wealth of the godless. Of course, the godless are not only
Jews, but everyone not in the Christian Right. 174 Every year the NAR holds a Kingdom
Economic Yearly Summit which features sessions on supernatural wealth creation and
“‘The Secrets of Jewish Prosperity.’” 175
Pastor Thomas Muthee from South Africa, who anointed then Governor Sarah
Palin, claimed in a 2005 video promoting the Seven Mountains doctrine that Christians
need to seize the wealth of the ungodly and run the economy like the “‘Israelites.’” 176
Cindy Jacobs, a NAR apostle, also believes that Christians should emulate “‘those
Jews, they’re so wealthy.’” 177 One of the NAR apostles, the late (died May 2011) retired
Colonel Jim Ammerman, who controlled around 8 percent of the chaplains in the U.S.
Department of Defense through his accrediting agency, Chaplaincy of Full Gospel
Churches, believes that Jews are under the control of Satan and control the U.S. and
international economy. 178
174Rachel Tabachnick, “Resource Directory for the New Apostolic Reformation,” Talk to Action, January
175Rachel Tabachnick, “Generational Curses, Deliverance Centers, and the Kingdom Health Care
System,” Talk to Action, November 23, 2009, at
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2009/11/23/2349/5841/Front_Page/Generational_Curses_Deliverance_C
enters_and_the_Kingdom_Health_Care_System.
176JTA, “Palin pastor: ‘Israelites’ run economy,” September 25, 2008, at
http://www.jta.org/news/article/2008/09/25/110553/palinpastormuthee.
177
Bruce Wilson, “Media Gives Palin’s Strange New Global Christianity a Pass,” The Huffington Post,
April 2, 2009, at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-wilson/media-gives-palins-strang_b_182295.html.
178Bruce Wilson, “Movement Behind Uganda’s ‘Kill the Gays’ Bill Organizing in Newark,” Talk To Action,
81
NAR apostle Tom Hess is a major figure in Christian Zionist circles.
Tabachnick’s analysis of his book, Let My People Go! The struggle of the American Jew
to come home to Israel, reveals that it combines all the features of Christian Zionism
and right-wing anti-Semitism. It demonizes secular and religious Jews for putting a
curse on America through its “‘slavery to materialism’” and support for abortion. The
Jews should voluntarily return to Israel in order to save America from “‘the judgment of
God.’” It again casts Christian Zionists as the fishers who entice Jews to return to Israel
voluntarily instead of facing God’s wrath in the form of Hitler and Hitler-like hunters who
drive Jews to Israel. It also casts good Jews and Jewish leaders as those playing their
assigned role in the Christian end times narrative (convert to evangelical Christianity)
and bad Jews as those who defy God by staying in their home countries or do not follow
the end times narrative. 179
Conclusion: The Christian Right and Cultural/Physical Genocide
Both the Christian Right and the New Apostolic Reformation, much like their
fundamentalist Protestant forebearers, hold other religions in utter contempt as being
false religions or ungodly. Strategists and proponents of the New Apostolic Reformation
have not been shy or coy in calling for the destruction of religious objects associated
with these other religions. Nor have they hidden their vicious enmity by praying for the
death or destruction of religious persons or property. Both the Christian Right and the
179
Rachel Tabachnick, “Fishers and Hunters—the Continuing Saga of Christian Zionism,” Talk to Action,
October 2, 2008, at http://www.talk2action.org/story/2008/10/2/115153/281/.
82
New Apostolic Reformation through the Left Behind series of novels, video games of the
same genre, or their support for Joel’s Army propagate the view that in the End Times
their enemies—both religious and secular—will be destroyed.
Viewed in the larger context of remaking America as a Christian nation and
taking it back from the “secular humanists” allegedly controlling the major institutions of
America and secretly plotting for its destruction, William Lind’s linkage of Fourth
Generation Warfare to “cultural Marxism” demonstrates that it is entirely consistent with
the agenda of the Christian Right. While there is much more to the strategy of Fourth
Generation Warfare to be discussed in Part II, the analysis to this point strongly
suggests that the Christian Right’s pronouncements about a civil war within the church,
a civil war within America, and taking the country back from a political elite secretly bent
on destroying America is not just rhetoric or hot air.
The racial and ethnic aspect is clouded by the religious element, but the Christian
Right with their anti-Catholic Left Behind novels, general dispensationalist writings, and
incorporation of the “Harlot of Babylon” conspiracy theory has to be also considered as
anti-Latino, who are predominantly Catholic, as well as anti-Semitic. The New Apostolic
Reformation’s anti-Catholicism should be viewed as anti-Latino, despite having
Reverend Samuel Rodriguez in a leadership position across several organizations.
Similarly, the New Apostolic Reformation’s view that African Americans have a
generational curse and that they vote predominantly for the Democratic Party, which is
under the influence of a satanic demon, suggests that the NAR is anti-African American,
83
despite the leadership position of Bishop Harry Jackson in several organizations,
coalitions, or operations.
It is also fairly clear that the agency of this cultural, religious and physical
destruction is not some supernatural or divine Jesus—but Christian nationalists who are
dominionists or Seven Mountains adherents and fall under the influence of the Christian
Right or the New Apostolic Reformation.
The New Apostolic Reformation’s theology, based on a mixture of Latter Rain
and Manifest Sons of God, is apparently quite clear that the leadership—the apostles
and prophets—that direct this national and international movement, as well as its
followers in Joel’s Army, are, in fact, the second coming of Jesus. 180 Thus, there is no
supernatural Jesus who will be leading the destruction, but flesh-and-blood Americans.
And, despite theological and ideological differences with white nationalist groups
influenced by the Christian Identity religion such as neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, a small
portion of the Christian Patriot militia, or the anti-immigration vigilante groups, the
concept of ethnic cleansing or a race war or a religious war—which just happens to be
for a white, fundamentalist Protestant victory—covers the entire spectrum of the right-
wing.
180Sandy Simpson, “The Third Wave ‘New Apostolic Reformation,’” Deception in the Church, October
2002, at http://www.deceptioninthechurch.com/thirdwaveteachings.html.
Joseph Chambers, “Dominion Theology and Joel’s Army,” Rapture Watch, July 9, 2008, at
http://rapturewatch.wordpress.com/2008/07/09/dominion-theology-and-joels-army/.
84
The irony of the Christian Right—the varying shades of proponents of Christian
Reconstructionism’s dominionism, the elite fundamentalists in The Family, or the self-
described apostles of the New Apostolic Reformation—is that these are the very groups
trying to construct a New World Order, a one-world government, the discipling of
countries around the world, based on an imaginary supernatural Jesus who is returning
in the form of American political and economic elites backed by a Joel’s Army inside
and outside the Department of Defense.
85

America as a Christian Nation Chapter

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BOOK 1, CH 4, DRAFT, AMERICA AS A CHRISTIAN NATION, ICOD 10/6/2014, SCAMINACI

Chapter 4: America as a Christian Nation/Taking Back America

they believe is un-Christian or not sufficiently Christian—particularly from those who

support reproductive and/or same-sex rights—but generally from liberals, so-called

secular component to this warfare—the Christian Right versus liberals, feminists,

minorities, reproductive rights activists, or homosexuals, it is important to point out that it

oppose their dominionist objective—Catholics, Jews, Mormons, and Muslims, not to

enemies of its pro-nuclear, patriarchical family agenda—feminists and homosexuals, for

example—but its virulent and violent-rhetorical opposition to homosexual rights is also

used against mainline Protestant churches in an effort to delegitimize them as un-

Protestant churches are demonic.

In fact, the Christian Reconstructionist-influenced Christian Right and New

Apostolic Reformation, a hybrid of the Latter Rain and Christian Reconstructionism,

both promote physical and cultural/religious genocide against mainline Protestant

non-believers. The combination of dominionism and “America as a Christian nation” is

a recipe for a theologically-induced national catastrophes in America and Israel, as well

The Intra-Protestant Civil War for Dominance

Richard T. Hughes suggested that it is easy to confuse the religiosity of the

Founders—especially Jefferson, the principal author of the Declaration—as infidels and

divinity of Jesus Christ. “Second, the Declaration of Independence grounded the

missing from the Constitution.”1

Second Great Awakening attempted to “Christianize the American republic.” The

Christian religions—not to mention atheists—were widely regarded as distinctly second-

driven by massive social changes and challenging scientific developments. Massive

to the country—many of them Catholic or Eastern Orthodox. Industrialization produced

November 7, 2010, at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-t-hughes/the-christian-right-in-

America.’” Lastly, Freud applied an evolutionary approach to understanding God, that

harshness of life, but a construct that could be abandoned as humans matured as a

November 13, 2010, at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-t-hughes/the-christian-right-in-

moment, I concentrate just upon attacks on liberal or modernist Protestants.

Allan Lichtman’s study, White Protestant Nation, found that fundamentalists

believed that “‘Modernism is inspired by Satan,’” according to Reverend T.T. Shields,

subordinated Christianity to flawed science, notably Darwinian evolution.” 5

fundamentalist-modernist dispute centered largely on the fundamentalists’ opposition to

pamphlets called The Fundamentals (hence, fundamentalists) which defended “the

premillennial return of Jesus.” It amounted to a “full-fledged declaration of war against

Gresham Machen, a theologian at Princeton Theological Seminary, arguing that

York: Grove Press, 2008: 27 and 26.

and denominations, leaving them to conservatives, the rightful heirs of Protestant

the YWCA [Young Women’s Christian Association], the American Association of

fundamentalists also tended to be politically conservative. The fundamentalists

individuals and communities of faith” rather than by bureaucrats. 7 The fundamentalist

York: Grove Press, 2008: 18, 25, and 29.

400 community chest organizations. 8

The war against the mainline Protestant denominations in the Federal/National

In 1941, Carl McIntire, a fundamentalist preacher formed the American Council of

ecumenicalism, pacifism and “social doctrines which were ‘hardly to be distinguished

from Communism.’” In 1943, the newly formed National Association of Evangelicals

institutions which are nonevangelical or apostate.’” 9

Promise, New York: Oxford University Press, 2011: 26-27.

York: Grove Press, 2008: 123.

having rejected Christianity.

and the Federal Council of Churches.” 10

The American Council of Churches released a pamphlet, “How Red Is the

seconded the accusation. A Cincinnati-based Circuit Riders group claimed the

Methodist Church promoted socialism, communism, and anti-Americanism. Lichtman

human needs and increasing social inequality. McIntire responded by forming an on

paper-only International Council of Churches. 11

leadership schools. Hargis “attacked the National Council of Churches as ‘Treason

York: Grove Press, 2008: 149.

York: Grove Press, 2008: 150-1.

always has been a Christian nation.’”12