Is It Good For The Jews?
By Bill Keller
March 8th, 2003

The New York Times

Two weeks ago, a group of senior intelligence officials in the Defense Department sat for an hour listening to a briefing by writer Michael Drosnin who claims — I am not making this up — that messages encoded in the Hebrew text of the Old Testament provide clues to the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden.

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Now for Drosnin’s version….
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SECRET PENTAGON BRIEFING

At the height of planning a war against Iraq, in the middle of a fierce debate over the war at the United Nations, just two days after the White House put the country on a “high terror alert,” I received an urgent phone call. “Can you come to Washington?” asked Dr. Linton Wells, director of the Pentagon’s nerve center. It was Sunday morning February 9, 2003. I was surprised to get a call over the weekend from a key member of America’s invisible government, not the government we read about in the newspapers and see on television every day, but the top secret permanent government we never see. Wells was the man who ran C3I — military shorthand for Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence. “Sure,” I said. “What brings you out on a Sunday?” “The Deputy Secretary,” said Wells, referring to his boss Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. “He just called me out of an important meeting in Colorado, and asked me to arrange for you to brief the Pentagon.” “You know I don’t have any hard information, Lin,” I told Wells, who I had known for years as a reporter who covered, and at times shared secrets with the intelligence agencies. “It’s the Bible code, right?” said Wells.

Now I was really surprised. President George W. Bush was preparing to declare war against Saddam Hussein, and in the middle of the late night strategy meetings, the architect of the war, the second highest official in the Pentagon had just ordered his top deputy to arrange a briefing on a 3000 year old code in the Bible that revealed the future. “Why the sudden interest, Lin?” I asked. “I don’t know,” said Wells. “I just follow orders. But Wolfowitz did mention the Chief of the Mossad.” I had met with the Chief of the Mossad, Gen. Meir Dagan, three times, and the head of Israel’s famed intelligence agency took the warnings in the Bible code so seriously that he urged Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to meet with me. Now, apparently, the Americans wanted to know what I had told the Israelis, and what else I knew about the dangers that might lie ahead. “Who’ll be at the meeting?” I asked Wells. “Admiral Jake Jacoby, Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and someone from the Operations Directorate of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” Lin said. “Of course, I’ll be there on behalf of Wolfowitz.” Wells had just named the entire top command of American military intelligence. Admiral Lowell “Jake” Jacoby ran the DIA, the biggest spy network in the world, far bigger than the CIA. The Department of Defense controlled 85% of the intelligence budget, including the National Security Agency, which listened in on the world, and the National Reconnaissance Office, that watched the world with spy satellites constantly orbiting the globe. The Joint Chiefs had authority over the Army, Navy, and Air Force, and its Operations Directorate handled the most sensitive missions. Wells himself was not only Wolfowitz’s top deputy, his go-to man, but orchestrated everything out of C3I, the heart of our entire military. It was clear that the Pentagon took the Bible code very seriously. “Can you be here next week?” asked Wells. “I’ll be there,” I said.

Two days later Osama bin Laden, still alive, still on the loose, still hidden, issued a new audio-tape broadcast over the Arabic news network Al Jazeera, warning of revenge for the looming war against Iraq. The country was already on a “high terror alert” for only the second time since the September 11, 2001 attacks. President Bush himself had signed off on the order. Now bin Laden made the threat explicit, and urgent. “Fight these despots,” urged the terrorist leader who had ordered the 9/11 attacks. “All who cooperate with the Americans against Iraq are hostile to Islam. We stress the importance of martyrdom attacks against the enemy.” CIA Director George Tenet told a Senate committee that “the continuing threat remains clear.” “Al Qaeda,” he said, “is still dedicated to striking the U.S. homeland.” In a joint appearance, Tenet and FBI Director Robert Mueller warned that terrorists were seeking chemical, biological and nuclear weapons to use against America. “The enemies we face are resourceful, merciless and fanatically committed to inflicting massive damage on our homeland,” said Mueller. Secretary of State Colin Powell also warned that “Al Qaeda, bin Laden, other terrorists, are trying to develop weapons of mass destruction.”

By the time I arrived at the Pentagon, Washington, D.C. was under tight guard, with F-16 fighter jets flying overhead, and armored vehicles mounted with Stinger anti-aircraft missiles patrolling the streets of the nation’s capital. At 9AM on Friday, February 21, 2003 I met with the top ten leaders of U.S. military intelligence in a conference room in the E ring of the Pentagon, the inner circle reserved for the Office of the Secretary of Defense. And I briefed them about a 3000 year old code in the Bible that warned we had only four years to figure out some way to survive, to prevent a nuclear World War III. “At the request of Secretary Wolfowitz, I’ve come today to brief you about a code in the Bible that appears to reveal events that happened thousands of years after the Bible was written,” I told the American intelligence officials seated around a big conference table, handing each of them a memo that described the ancient Hebrew code. “It was discovered by a famous Israeli mathematician, and confirmed by a senior code-breaker at the U.S. National Security Agency,” the memo stated. “I believe the code is real for a simple reason: it keeps coming true.” I gave the intelligence officials computer print-outs that made the point dramatically. “The events of September 11 were encoded in detail,” I said. “Twin Towers” appears with “Airplane” and “it caused to fall,” all in a text that is 3000 years old.

The intelligence chiefs were clearly impressed. They studied the ancient Hebrew characters. I told them that these same words had appeared in every Israeli newspaper headline the next day, and were encoded together in the Bible against odds of 10,000 to 1. I showed the American intelligence leaders a graphic image in the Bible code of the Columbia space shuttle disaster, the mid-air explosion that had killed seven astronauts just a few weeks earlier on February 1. Not only was “Columbia” encoded with “shuttle” and “fire will destroy,” but the encoding created an actual picture of the spaceship, and looked at from launch position the words “fire will destroy” formed the left wing. In fact, a fire starting in the left wing triggered the disaster.

Finally, I handed them copies of the letter I sent Israeli Prime Minister Rabin more than a year before he was killed warning him the Bible code predicted his assassination. The code table could not be more explicit: “Assassin will assassinate” crossed “Yitzhak Rabin,” the one time his full name was encoded in the Bible.

I clearly had their attention. This Hebrew code in the Bible, as unbelievable as it seemed, consistently came true. The top command of U.S. military intelligence was as interested as the leaders of Israeli intelligence. “You warned Rabin a year in advance?” asked Adm. Jacoby. “How did the Israelis react when he was killed?” “That’s when the Israelis began to take the Bible code very seriously,” I replied. “I met with the new Prime Minister, Shimon Peres, and also briefed the man he had just made the Chief of the Mossad.” Now I told the Pentagon officials who controlled all the hardware, all the technical resources of the world’s one remaining superpower, what I had really come to say. “The main reason I’ve come to see you today,” I said, “is that the code warns that we may face the ultimate danger — a nuclear World War, starting in the Middle East — within four years.” I told them that “World War” and “Atomic Holocaust” and “End of Days” were all encoded with the same year, 2006 — against odds of at least 100,000 to 1. “That doesn’t leave much time,” said Adm. Jacoby. “How clear is it, and if it’s predicted, what can we do?” “The famous Israeli mathematician who discovered the code said that this could not happen by chance,” I said. “It had to be intentionally encoded in the Bible. But I’m certain the danger can be prevented,” I added. “The Bible code reveals probabilities, every future, and what we do determines what actually happens.” “What does it say about Iraq?” asked Lin Wells, focusing on the immediate danger.

“Good news,” I said, handing him another code table. “It says that Saddam Hussein will fall in 2003. It’s encoded in the form of a question and answer: “Who is destroyed? Hussein.” And crossing his name, against very high odds, is the year, 2003.” “There’s more,” I told Wells, showing him a more detailed version of the same code table. “It says Saddam will flee, but it also indicates that he will die.”

“The same thing is encoded again — that Hussein will be forced to flee, but will die,” I said, again passing the computer print-out around the conference table. “So the outcome is already determined?” asked the man from the Joint Chiefs, who arrived late.

“No,” I said. “The Bible code is not a crystal ball. It reveals probabilities. Nothing is set in stone. But it does provide detailed information you can check out.” “However, I don’t think the real danger is Saddam Hussein, but Osama bin Laden,” I added. “Of all the information we’ve found in the Bible code one thing stands out as most useful — a clearly stated location where bin Laden, the headquarters of Al Qaeda, and all of their most dangerous weapons might be found.” There was a stunned silence. “That would be useful,” said Adm. Jacoby, breaking the silence. I gave the men who were running the hunt for bin Laden one code table after another that named the exact remote desert location, with the precise co-ordinates. “You won’t publish this, will you?” asked Wells. “Of course not,” I said. “The information is for you, not bin Laden. If I tell him, he won’t go there.” The name of the same terrorist base crossed both Hebrew spellings of “bin Laden” against odds of at least 10,000 to 1. One of the times the full hidden text stated “Army Headquarters in X.” “It might also be the location of unconventional weapons, perhaps the source of ultimate danger to the United States and the world,î I said. I showed them that the same obscure place in the Middle East was also encoded with “atomic weapon” and “atomic holocaust” and “smallpox.” Where “Army Headquarters in X” crossed “bin Laden, “missile” overlapped both in the code.

And I showed them that the terrorist base was encoded with three of the most likely targets, “Jerusalem,” “Tel Aviv” — and “New York.” “The Bible code clearly suggests that New York has not yet witnessed the worst danger,” I said. “September 11 was the beginning, not the end. And it’s all in some way tied to Al Qaeda and this same hideout.” “I don’t want to sound Apocalyptic,” I told the military leaders, “but the full scale of the danger is captured only by the words of Biblical prophecy.” “In the End of Days” appears in the original words of the Bible, crossed by “terrorism” and the name of this base,” I said. “In fact, the code states that “terrorism” will be “coordinated from hiding place X,” “in the End of Days.” I had been worried about sounding too religious, when in fact I was not religious at all, but no one in the room raised a question. I realized it was likely many, even most of the intelligence leaders were religious, and like the President himself, believed in the “End of Days.” Certainly, they all believed in the danger. At the highest levels of our government there was unanimous agreement that new terrorist attacks, on a yet greater scale, were almost inevitable. Everyone from the President on down had said it publicly. We were in a third world war, unlike any war we had ever fought before, because the enemy was hidden. And I guessed that one of the reasons this meeting had been called, that I had been asked to brief the Pentagon about the Bible code, was that on some deep level everyone knew we needed a miracle. “There’s one problem,” I said as the hour came to an end. “I can tell you where to look, but not when. I’ve never seen anything as clearly encoded as the location of this terrorist base, of bin Laden, but the code does not state a year. I can only suggest that you look now, and again, and again - because if you succeed you will stop terrorism at its source.”

The most senior official there, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Admiral Jacoby, spoke up. He was not addressing me, but all the other military men in the room. “If you looked at Normandy one day it was just a beach,” said Jacoby. “If you looked the next day, it was D-Day.” He had given our military intelligence command its marching orders — target our satellites on the location the Bible code named as bin Laden’s hideout, and don’t stop looking until you find him. My Pentagon briefing had lasted a full hour. Not one of the important people there had left even for a moment to take a phone call. The only people in the world with the military resources to make use of the information in the code had clearly taken it totally seriously. As I walked down the steps of the Pentagon, the enormity of the moment, of who I’d just met with, of what I’d just told them, of what was happening in the world, made me think of the words I said out loud when I saw with my own eyes the attack on New York September 11 — “Oh my God, it’s real.” My last doubts had been wiped out that day. I stood on my roof, watched the World Trade Towers fall, and then found the entire horror encoded in a 3000 year old text. What I had seen happen only minutes earlier was now on my computer screen in ancient Hebrew characters. On the train back to New York from my Pentagon briefing it all hit me. I had been at the center of the inner sanctum of the invisible government. I had met with its leaders. And they had believed me.

I had told the most important people in American military intelligence that we faced a danger so great it was only captured by the words of Biblical prophecy — “Armageddon,” the “End of Days,” the “Apocalypse” — and they had taken this Hebrew code in a 3000 year old text so seriously that the full resources of the Pentagon would now be committed to preventing the horror. “The data has been input,” said Lin Wells when he called from C3I a few days later. “The coordinates are in our satellite system. Your meeting went very well. All the intelligence people are taking this very seriously. I briefed Wolfowitz. We’re already looking for bin Laden.” But I knew that the war in Iraq would soon divert the U.S. from its search for the fugitive terrorist leader, and I feared that although we might forget about him, he would not forget about us. I flew to Israel and met with its top intelligence analyst, General Yossi Kuperwasser, at Israeli military headquarters the Kirya. I had met with Kuperwasser before, and like most officials at the highest level of Israeli intelligence he listened to the warnings in the Bible code because they kept coming true. The code also agreed with Israel’s own best estimate of when it might face an “atomic holocaust” — 2006. I showed him a new code table. “In Jerusalem” was encoded with “mega-terror” and “war,” crossed by “bin Laden.” “The odds against it happening by chance are three million to one,” I told Kuperwasser. “Bin Laden is going to strike Israel if you don’t find him first.” I had already given the Israelis the same information I had given the Pentagon, the name of bin Laden’s hideout encoded in the Bible. “We already looked,” said Gen. Kuperwasser. “We’ll look again. We’ll keep looking.” I knew they would. The Israelis had a very clear sense that their survival was at stake. They did not have our technical resources. Just a very strong will to survive.

But the United States, according to all reports, was as vulnerable to a terrorist attack today, as it had been on September 11. “A year after 9/11, America remains dangerously unprepared to prevent and respond to a catastrophic attack on U.S. soil,” said a Council on Foreign Relations report issued in October 2002. “In all likelihood, the next attack will result in even greater casualties.” And on July 24, 2003 a bi-partisan Congressional report made a scathing indictment of the intelligence community for failing to prevent 9/11, and warned that we were still not prepared to prevent another terrorist attack. On the same day I sent a new letter to Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz. It stated: “I believe the next major terrorist attack is not far off, and that this time we may lose an entire city, not just two tall buildings. There is a warning of a new attack on New York, perhaps as early as 2004.” The attack on September 11, 2001, had been encoded in the Bible for 3000 years. But we had failed to find the warning until it was too late. On the day of the attack, right after the towers fell, the Israeli scientist who discovered the code, Dr. Eliyahu Rips, had found the Hebrew date equivalent to September 11 crossed by “Twin Towers.” In the same place, the original words of the Bible said, “And there fell of the people that day about three thousand men.” “All of the first newspaper accounts, all the television reports, said that the number dead was six thousand,” said Rips. “It wasn’t until months later that we found out it was really three thousand. But the Bible code stated the true death toll on the day of the attack.”

Now, as the countdown from 9/11 to Armageddon continued, I again searched the code. There were two years encoded with “New York,” 2001 and 2004. And crossing 2004 were ominous words: “from the fire of a missile.”

The danger might be right upon us. I asked Dr. Rips to re-calculate the odds against all of it — the city, the two years, the danger — appearing together in the Bible. “It is at least 10,000 to 1,” he told me. And now we saw that exactly the same warning, “from the fire of a missile,” also appeared against very high odds with five related dangers in the Bible code. “War of terrorism” was encoded with “from the fire of a missile,” as was “chemical attack” and “atomic weapon.” “Terror, 5764,” the Hebrew year equivalent to 2004, was also encoded with “from the fire of a missile,” apparently confirming next year as a strong probability. Finally, “from the fire of a missile” was crossed by “the war started.” It suggested that a terrorist missile attack might trigger an all-out war. Dr. Rips calculated the odds again and said that taken all together it appeared that the probability was many millions to one. The Bible code clearly suggested a missile as the weapon, terrorists as the enemy, and New York as the target — perhaps as early as 2004. But every year in the near future was encoded in the Bible with great danger, in New York and on a global scale, until it peaked in 2006.

At the end of July 2003, just before President Bush left the White House for an August vacation at his ranch in Crawford, I sent him a new letter through his friends in Texas. It warned: “The Bible code states the final danger in modern terms — “Atomic Holocaust” and “World War” are both encoded in the Bible. And both are encoded with the same year — 2006.” For years I had been warning world leaders that an ancient prophecy was about to come true, that the Apocalypse long foretold by all the West’s three major religions was also encoded in the Bible. On September 11 I had seen it begin to unfold just down the block from my home in New York. Now it seemed that the warning I just sent President Bush might come true almost immediately: “September 11 was not the end of the danger, but the beginning.”

Copyright 2004 Michael Drosnin

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

RNC Creates Web Sites To Criticize Kerry
The Associated Press
September 29th, 2004

Web Sites Aimed at Religious Groups, Criticizes John Kerry on Abortion, Civil Unions

WASHINGTON - Republicans have one message for followers of many faiths: Sen. John Kerry is wrong.

Wrong for Catholics, Mormons and Evangelicals says a number of Web sites that the Republican National Committee has created. Each Web site compiles excerpts of Kerry’s comments and Senate voting record on social issues such as abortion, civil unions for same sex couples and school choice.
Some headlines on the Web site for Catholics say, “Kerry Said Vatican Should Not Instruct Catholic Politicians, Calling It ‘Inappropriate’” and “Kerry Expressed ‘Moral Outrage’ With Vatican’s Statement On Gay Marriage.” Kerry is Catholic.

Kerry campaign spokesman Phil Singer said the tactic is “premised on the tactics of division, smear and insult. It’s unfortunate, it’s un-American and John Kerry is going to continue to make his case and make sure his record is not twisted by the Bush attack machine.”

At least one religious coalition, the left-leaning Interfaith Alliance, has called the Web sites insensitive, saying the GOP is trying to interpret religious beliefs for political advantage. Interfaith Alliance president Rev. C. Weldon Gaddy called the tactic “abhorrent.”

RNC spokeswoman Tara Wall said the sites are part of an effort by Republicans to reach out to diverse groups.

A group of pediatricians, among them author and child development specialist Dr. T. Berry Brazelton, criticized President Bush, arguing that the Republican’s policies neglect children’s health care and young Americans deserve better.

Some three dozen doctors, including six former presidents of the American Academy of Pediatrics, signed a statement criticizing the incumbent’s health policies, saying his administration has reduced funding for prevention and left 27 million children without health insurance at some time in 2002-2003.

“If not reversed, these ill-advised tax and budget policies will erode decades of hard-won health gains for children,” the statement said.

The group cited, among other items in the Bush budget: a $200 million cut in funding to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), tax and budget policies forcing states to make cuts at local levels, and inadequate funding for Head Start, a popular preschool program.

The doctors praised the policies of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, citing his goal of having every child receive affordable health care.

Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson issued a statement saying Bush is advancing children’s health care, and condemned the group for bringing the topic into the political arena.

“It is absurd and despicable that doctors are playing politics with children’s lives,” Thompson said.

If young Americans aren’t drafted to vote, they may very well be drafted to serve in Iraq, MTV’s Rock the Vote says.

A new initiative by the nationwide youth voter campaign is using the idea of a potential draft to inspire voter registration in the last days before the election. Visitors to the group’s site can send out mock draft cards to would-be voters, urging them to show up at the polls on Nov. 2.

The effort points out, among other things: It would take two or three days for a draft to be authorized and plans set in motion, 20-year-olds would be the first to be called up, and women would be more likely to be included in the draft.

Two Vietnam veterans groups opposed to Democratic Sen. John Kerry are launching a direct mail campaign and TV ad featuring the wives of two prisoners of war.

Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and POWs for Truth say they are spending $1.4 million to run the TV ad in Pennsylvania, New Mexico and Nevada starting Thursday and on national cable networks.

“All of the prisoners of war in North Vietnam were tortured in order to obtain confessions of atrocities,” said Mary Jane McManus, whose husband was shot down over Hanoi three months after they married. Phyllis Galanti, whose husband was shot down over North Vietnam, then says: “On the other hand, John Kerry came home and accused all Vietnam veterans of unspeakable horrors.”

In his Senate testimony after the war, Kerry cited reports from other soldiers of atrocities.

Associated Press Writers Emily Fredrix and Liz Sidoti contributed to this report.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

A Turn To The (Religious) Right
By Dr. Robert Abele
September 13th, 2004

Yubanet

If John Kerry has anything going for him that separates him from George W. Bush, it is the fact that he is not involved in the so-called “religious right” of America. This is the name given by the media to a well-organized band of fanatic biblical fundamentalists who are hell-bent on turning our democracy over to (their concept of) God. In the highest leadership circles of this movement, there is open talk of the goal of obtaining a theocracy in the U.S. Part of their method in achieving this goal is to attempt to convince Americans, as they have convinced Mr. Bush, that the United States was founded to be a Christian nation. The frightening fact about this movement is not that it is being pushed by an extremist wing of “religious” America, but that they have in fact to a large degree taken over the Republican Party, making it and its policies extremist. When their candidates become our elected officials, as in fact the current situation stands today, they have halfway achieved their goal,. An equally frightening and perplexing fact about this movement is that they call themselves “Christian” but will stop at nothing to get their dogmatic ideology adopted as the universal law. The most bothersome thing about this movement it is that their theocratic end justifies any means necessary to its achievement, including lying and cheating, as we will see below.
This writing aims to make a first contribution to challenging this movement, first by rejecting the revisionist history advocated by this vocal minority to have their form of religious government accepted as the only one allegedly intended by the Founders of this great country. The focus of the first part of this article, then, will be the attempts of these Christian zealots to have people believe that the United States was founded as a Christian nation. Second, the main figures of this movement who serve in Congress, their positions and their proposed legislative agendas will be highlighted.

The preference of ideology to the pursuit of truth of the people who would make theocratic claims concerning the founding of our constitutional democracy is demonstrated in the method that is their favored one: find “proof quotes” from the Founders to demonstrate their preconceived position. This method, however, demonstrates the logically fallacious and intellectually dishonest process of violently ripping quotations out of the context of their use. For example, let us take two quotations often used in this process. The first one is from George Washington, the second from Thomas Jefferson. The Washington quotation frequently used to demonstrate the “religious right” point is this: “It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible.” This quotation is frequently found on fundamentalist Christian web sites, without provision of citation. I searched forty-eight such sites before I found one that stated that the line allegedly uttered by Washington was from a speech he gave to the Dutch Reformed Synod in 1789. After extensive research, I was finally able to obtain a copy of this speech. I found three things in this research: first, it is not a speech; it is a letter Washington wrote. Second, it is an obscure letter, not easily found, and not certainly in the usual collections of his works. Third, it is only three paragraphs in length, and in it Washington never once utters such a line. In fact, there is nothing even close to this line in his speech, nor in any of the other speeches, letters, or writings of Washington I have read to date. This is not to argue, of course, that Washington never said such a thing. It is to argue that it is intellectually dishonest to throw such quotations around when one cannot site the source of it. Or worse, as in the Christian web site in which I found this speech, to forge the footnote!

The quotation from Jefferson is even more easily dispensed with when one puts it in its context. The quotation used by fundamentalist Christians is this: “I am a real Christian.” While Jefferson certainly did pen those words, he was explicitly making reference in that very sentence to the ethics of Jesus, not the overtly religious overtones of the gospel. Just two sentences earlier in that same letter, he makes a direct reference to his own “version” of the New Testament, in which he cut the ethical sayings of Jesus out of a Bible and placed them on blank pages of a book. Jefferson saw Jesus as a great ethical philosopher, but certainly did not understand him as in any way divine or even claiming divinity. On most Christian accounts, this excludes him from the “chosen elect” of “true believers.” Thus, Jefferson was claiming that he was “a real Christian,” that is, one who follows the ethical teachings of Jesus, rather than those “false Christians” who used their profession of faith in the divinity of Jesus to gain, increase, and consolidate their religious and/or political power. It takes an incredible twisting and turning of Jefferson’s words, as use of this quotation does, to argue for the alleged “Christianity” of this Founder of the country. At best, this method, then, is superficial; at worst, it is downright dishonest.

Second, this fundamentalist dogma that the United States was founded as a “Christian nation” fails to delineate clearly two important issues: the activity or goal of founding a democratic form of government, and the fact that many of the Founders were believers in a deity. The textual evidence nowhere indicates that the purpose of their founding such a government was exclusively or even predominantly religious in nature. Nowhere is the division between these categories more clear than in Thomas Jefferson’s intellectual hero, John Locke. Locke explicitly states in his Two Treatises of Government - and it is clearly echoed in Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence - that the founding of a democratic commonwealth was for the purpose of ensuring our “lives, liberties, and properties.” Nowhere does Locke say that the purpose of a democratic form of government was religious in nature. In fact, Locke states quite precisely in his “Letter Concerning Toleration [of religion]” that “the whole jurisdiction of the magistrate reaches only to…civil concernments,” and that the state “neither can nor ought in any manner to be extended to the salvation of souls.” Moreover, the fact that Jefferson and other Founders appealed to God in their writings does not mean that we are a theocracy! All one need do is read Article VI, Section 3 of the Constitution to make this point abundantly clear. This Article reads in part as follows: “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” When fundamentalists attempt to make the Founders out to be Christian and therefore founders of either a religious or a Christian democracy, they do terrible damage to the fundamental aim of democracies of the eighteenth century: freedom of the individual. Even if this happened to be informed by their faith, it is only that: to be informed is not to be determined by or subservient to their faith. Their primary concern was with the “natural law” of human reason and individual liberties. Divine revelation had nothing to do with their political aims. On the contrary, to a man they clearly believed that rationality was to be the guiding light of democracy, not appeals to the divine. Let us examine a statement from Thomas Jefferson in this regard: “Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage to reason, than that of blindfolded fear…” (Letter to his nephew, Peter Carr)

Third, and more to the point, although some of the Founders were Christian, many more were Deists. There is a fundamental difference between what Deists believe and the doctrines of mainstream Christianity. Deists maintain that a Divine Creator of the universe exists, but deny that he is personally interested in human history. Accepting no revelations, no persons as “God incarnate,” the Deists reject the divinity of Jesus as well. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin were indubitably Deists; they admitted to such many times in their writings. For just one of many examples, I will quote the “real” Thomas Jefferson, far more accurately referred to as a Deist than a Christian. This should demonstrate the misleading nature of any attribution of Christianity to him: “The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But may we hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with this artificial scaffolding…” There are numerous such passages in the writings of Jefferson, if fundamentalist Christians would but just look before attempting to write their revisionist histories.

Furthermore, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, the former the author of the Declaration of Independence, the latter the author of the Constitution and the First Amendment to our Constitution protecting religious freedom, were both very alarmed at the possibility that some parties would attempt to foist their single-minded Christian religious beliefs on the majority. Both of them wrote and lobbied extensively for laws prohibiting this kind of interference from Christians in politics. For instance, Jefferson wrote in his “Act for Establishing Religious Freedom” in Virginia that “no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever.” Madison, for his part, maintains in his “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments,” his opposition to a Virginia bill to tax people to pay those who taught the doctrines of Christianity, that “the Bill implies either that the Civil Magistrate is a competent Judge of Religious Truth; or that he may employ Religion as an engine of Civil policy. The first is an arrogant pretension falsified by the contradictory opinions of Rulers in all ages, and throughout the world; the second an unhallowed perversion of the means of salvation.” Even more to the point, says Madison, “A just Government needs [religious clergy] not.”

Fifth, the position as stated by those who subscribe to the “Christian nation” dogma fails to make another critical distinction: that between religious belief and Christianity. There is no doubt that the Founders partook in the former practice; there is considerable doubt that this is the same practice as the latter. One will read precious few references to Jesus or Christ in most of the writings of the “big name” Founders. Even where one does find these references, it is not at all in reference to the forming of the new democratic government. This indicates clearly that the Founders had something else in mind than creating a government based on or imbued with, religion, least of all the Christian version. Furthermore, assuming that the alleged Christianity of the Founders could be established with certitude, it does nothing at all to “prove” that they therefore wanted to establish a Christian nation. To reach this conclusion would require a quantum leap in logic.

When all of these issues are considered, one is only left to conclude that the fundamentalist position on this issue is not fundamentally rooted in reason or in history, but rather in a vain desire to proselytize for a distinctively Christian revisionist history. When any group uses the banner of a political party in order to engage in dogmatic ideological assertions of an allegedly religious nature, that group in effect hijacks the political process only for the purpose of achieving their own narrow ends. When that happens, it must be challenged by the majority of citizens. In this case, it is important to challenge the people who espouse such positions, in the name of intellectual honesty, to do more reading and thinking, beyond what their Bible allegedly tells them.

However, we cannot stop our analysis of the “religious right” here, because we must come back to today and examine their current activities. The “Christian nation” movement that is gaining a very strong foothold in American politics today is not simply the run of the mill version of biblical fundamentalism. Rather, it is a movement designed specifically to attack the Constitution and the broad view of freedoms guaranteed by the Bill of Rights (see the writings of religious right writers such as Gary North, R.J. Rushdoony, Greg Bahnsen, Gary DeMar, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Tim LaHaye, and others for first-hand statements to this effect). Their goal, at its most extreme, is a biblical theocracy. Theocracy in their case means that the principles of one single religion, in this case, Christianity and its notion of divinely ordained rule, are to be the governmentally recognized and supported interpretation of jurisprudential decisions and legislative proposals. The movement that is gaining strength in the right-wing of the Republican Party and thus in the U.S. Senate and House or Representatives, is every bit as ideologically entrenched, and every bit as dangerous to democracy, as fundamentalist Muslims who argue for a Mid-East Islamic theocracy. Consider the main players who belong to this movement, and who have the ear, as well as the support and confidence of, President Bush: Karl Rove, John Ashcroft, Tom DeLay, Bill Frist, Mitch McConnell, Rick Santorum, Bob Bennet, Kay Bailey Hutchison, Jon Kyle, George Allen, Antonin Scalia, and others, mentioned below. These politicians, and one Supreme Court Justice, are all supported by the movement for theocracy, if not financially, at least ideologically. The connection of all of these people to the radical Christian right has been documented by investigative journalists such as Rob Boston, Kimberly Blaker, and Frederick Clarkson, among others. Consider further that the Texas Republican Party Platform now reads: “The Republican Party of Texas affirms that the United States is a Christian nation.” The movement is generally referred to in the media as “the religious right,” but their main movers and organizers specifically include Pat Robertson’s “700 Club,” the Rutherford Institute, and The National Reform Association, among others. These headliner organizations state their missions forthrightly: “Jesus Christ is Lord in all aspects of life, including civil government.” Or, as John Ashcroft has stated it on his swearing in as Attorney General: “We have no king but Jesus.” The main movers behind this movement include Paul Weyrich, Gary North, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and others.

More specifically, this group of radical right Christians, through their well-funded representatives and senators, has sponsored “The Constitutional Restoration Act of 2004.” It was introduced into both Houses of Congress this past February, and includes “the acknowledgement of God as the sovereign source of law by an official in his capacity of executing his office.” The sponsors of the bill: Rep. Robert Aderholt (Alabama), Rep. Michael Pence (Indiana), Sen. Richard Shelby (Alabama), Sen. Zell Miller (Georgia), Sen. Sam Brownback (Kansas), and Sen. Lindsey Graham (South Carolina).

Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-Alabama) is in the process of garnering support for a bill he hopes to sponsor next year, entitled “The Ten Commandments Defense Act.” He states that the intent of the bill is to acknowledge that “The Supreme Court does not always have the final authority over the interpretation of the Constitution.” Rather, the Bible is to be viewed as the last line of interpretation of the Constitution.

Judge Scalia, in an address to the Chicago Divinity School in 2002, said “government…derives its moral authority from God. It is the minister of God with powers to ‘avenge’ to ‘execute wrath’ including even wrath by the sword.” In an article in the magazine First Things, Scalia wrote: “Indeed, it seems to me that the more Christian a country is, the less likely it is to regard the death penalty as immoral.”

These developments are alarming for many and obvious reasons, but I will limit myself to two of them here. First of all, the overwhelming preponderance of the evidence indicates quite clearly that these ideas are not included in the structure of the government the Founders established. Second, whenever one party attempts to have their rigid ideology adopted as the exclusive position of a nation, the freedom of citizens so central to democracy dies.

It is important to conclude with a key qualifier here. Not all people who consider themselves fundamentalist or evangelical Christians are consciously or by necessity supporting the movement toward theocracy. I am acquainted with many well-meaning fundamentalist Christians who would not have any part of this movement. However, they need to know what cause they are supporting when they vote for candidates who espouse “religious right” causes such as those we have seen above.

There are many perils to our democracy today, many of them coming from within it: paperless voting machines, invasion of countries without pretext, and single-minded ideologies posing as monolithic truth, with the supporters galvanized around the notion that no truth exists apart from theirs, and who will go to any length to force that putative truth through the political process. Eternal vigilance against their eternal hostility is the responsibility of all who truly respect the democratic process. Such is the case with the “Christian nation” hypothesis: it does not stand against the weight of history or reason, and must be rejected by all who can think critically.

(For more information on this subject, including the specifics concerning legislative actions mentioned above, there are two journalists who write extensively on it: Frederick Clarkson and Rob Boston. They each have a number of books and articles tracking the “religious right.” For more, see the following sources: Frederick Clarkson, Eternal Hostility; Clarkson, What is Christian Reconstructionism?; Kimberly Blaker, ed., The Fundamentals of Extremism; Katherine Yurica, The Yurica Report; Tom Paine.com; Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore, The Godless Constitution; Leo Pfeffer, Church, State, and Freedom; Rob Boston, Pat Robertson, the Most Dangerous Man in America?; and the web sites for “Americans United for Separation of Church and State” and “People for the American Way.”)

(For information written by the main organizers of the religious right today, see: Henry A. Wallace, Democracy Reborn; Christian Gallery.com; Chuck Baldwin, Renew America; R.J. Rushdoony, Institutes of Biblical Law; Gary North, Christianity and Civilization; and James Kennedy, Character and Destiny: A Nation in Search of its Soul.)

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Dr. Robert Abele is a professor of philosophy at Illinois Valley Community College, located near Chicago. He has written articles on political philosophy and also on ethics and warfare, and is now in the process of completing a book on ethics and the invasion of Iraq. He also has a new book entitled A User’s Guide to the USA PATRIOT Act, published by University Press of America, due out in November. He can be reached by email.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

BILL MOYERS KEYNOTE ADDRESS (PART ONE)
Call To Renewal - May 24, 2004
Washington, DC
Sojourners Magazine

August 2004 Issue

I was honored by your invitation to share this day with you. Call to Renewal is an inspiration to me and so is Jim Wallis – for his witness of faith, his generous heart, his way of life, his engagement with politics, and his magazine: I could not do without Sojourners. I also appreciate Jim because he knows there are different kinds of Baptists in America. Not everyone knows this, and it can be confusing when a young reporter, learning you are a Baptist, asks: Oh, like Jerry Falwell? I reminded her that there are more than two dozen varieties of Baptist in this country. Pat Robertson is a Baptist. So is Bill Clinton. Al Gore is a Baptist. So is Trent Lott. Jesse Jackson is a Baptist. So is Jesse Helms. Richard Gephardt is a Baptist. So is Newt Gingrich. Small wonder Baptists have been compared to jalapeno peppers: one or two makes for a tasty dish, but a whole bunch of them together in one place brings tears to your eyes.
So I thank Jim Wallis for discerning the difference. I trace my own spiritual lineage back to a radical Baptist in England named Thomas Helwys who believed that God, and not the King, was Lord of conscience. In 1612 Roman Catholics were the embattled target of the Crown and Thomas Helwys, the Baptist, came to their defense with the first tract in English demanding full religious liberty. Here’s what he said:

Our Lord the King has no more power over their [Catholic] consciences than ours, and that is none at all. …For men’s religion is betwixt God and themselves; the King shall not answer it; neither may the King be judge betwixt God and man. Let them be heretics, Turks, Jews or whatever. It appertains not to the earthly power to punish them in the least measure.

The King was the Good King James I – yes, that King James, as in King James Bible. Challenges to his authority did not cause his head to rest easily on his pillow, so James had Thomas Helwys thrown into prison, where he died.

Thomas Helwys was not the first or last dissenter to pay the supreme price for conscience. While we are not called upon in America today to make a similar sacrifice, we are in need of his generous vision of religious freedom. We are heading into a new religious landscape. For most of our history our religious discourse was dominated by white male Protestants of a culturally conservative European heritage, people like me. Dissenting voices of America, alternative visions of faith, race, and gender rarely reached the mainstream. A friend on the west coast once sent me a clipping from a cartoon strip showing two weirdoes talking in a California diner. One weirdo says to the other, Have you ever delved into the mysteries of Eastern religion? And the second weirdo answers: Yes, I was once a Methodist in Philadelphia.

Once upon a time that was about the extent of our exposure to the varieties of religious experience. It’s different now. Immigration has added more than 30 million people to our population since the late 1960s. The American gene pool is mutating into one in which people like me will be a minority within half a century. I only need visit my grandchildren in St. Paul, Minnesota to see how America is being re-created right before our eyes. Once upon a time the Twin Cities were populated by the descendents of Martin Luther. Now the heirs of Leif Ericsson live down the street from the descendents of Montezuma and Genghis Kahn. Diana Eck describes traveling the country and seeing an America dotted with mosques in places like Toledo, Phoenix, Atlanta. We have huge Hindu temples - in Pittsburgh, Albany, California’s Silicon Valley. There are Sikh communities in Stockton and Queens, New York, and Buddhist retreat centers in the mountains of Vermont and West Virginia. The world keeps moving to America bringing new stories from the four corners of the globe. Gerard Bruns calls it a contest of narratives competing to shape a new American drama.

The old story had a paradox at its core. In no small part because of Baptists like Thomas Helwys and other freethinkers, the men who framed our Constitution believed in religious tolerance in a secular republic. The state was not to choose sides among competing claims of faith. So they embodied freedom of religion in the First Amendment. Another man’s belief, said Thomas Jefferson, neither picks my pocket not breaks my bones. It was a noble sentiment often breached in practice. The red man who lived here first had more than his pockets picked; the Africans brought here forcibly against their will had more than their bones broken. Even when most Americans claimed a Protestant heritage and practically everyone looked alike we often failed the tolerance test; Catholics, Jews, and Mormons had to struggle to resist being absorbed without distinction into the giant mix-master of American assimilation. So our troubled past with tolerance requires us to ask how, in this new era when we are looking even less and less alike, are we to avoid the intolerance, the chauvinism, the fanaticism, the bitter fruits that mark the long history of world religions when they jostle each other in busy crowded streets.

It is no rhetorical question. My friend Elaine Pagels, the noted scholar of religion, says There’s practically no religion I know of that sees other people in a way that affirms the other’s choice. You only have to glance at the daily news to see how passions are stirred by claims of exclusive loyalty to one’s own kin, one’s own clan, one’s own country, and one’s own church. These ties that bind are vital to our communities and our lives, but they can also be twisted into a noose.

Everyone here knows that religion has a healing side, but it also has a killing side. In the opening chapter of the Book of Genesis – the founding document of three great faiths — the first murder rises from a religious act. You know the story: Adam and Eve become the first parents to discover what it means to raise Cain. They have a second son named Abel. Both boys want to please God so both bring God an offering. Cain is a farmer and offers the first fruits of the soil. Abel is a shepherd and offers the first lamb from the flock. Two generous gifts. But God plays favorites and chooses Abel’s offering over Cain. Cain is so jealous he strikes out at his brother and kills him. Sibling rivalry for God’s favor leads to violence and ends in death.

Once this pattern is established, it’s played out in the story of Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers, and down through the centuries in generation after generation of conflict between Muslims and Jews, Jews and Christians, Christians and Muslims, so that the red thread of religiously spilled blood runs directly from East of Eden to Belfast, Bosnia, Beirut, Belfast and Baghdad. In our time alone the litany is horrendous. I keep a file marked Holy War. It bulges with stories of Shias and Sunnis in fratricidal conflict. Of teenage girls in Algeria shot in the face for not wearing a veil. Of professors whose throats are cut for teaching male and female students in the same classroom. Of the fanatical Jewish doctor with a machine gun mowing down thirty praying Muslims in a mosque. Of Muslim suicide bombers bent on the obliteration of Jews. Of the young Orthodox Jew who assassinated Yitzhak Rabin and then announced to the world that Everything I did, I did for the glory of God.

Of Hindus and Muslims slaughtering each other in India, of Christians and Muslims perpetuating gruesome vengeance on each another in Nigeria. There’s a large folder about Timothy McVeigh blowing up the Federal building in Oklahoma City, killing l68 people, in part as revenge against the U.S. government for killing David Koresh and his followers. We didn’t realize it at the time but the first strike on New York’s World Trade Center in 1993 was a religious act of terror; the second one on 9/ll claimed over three thousand lives. Meanwhile, groups calling themselves the Christian Identity Movement and the Christian Patriot League arm themselves, and Christians intoxicated with the delusional doctrine of two l9th century preachers not only await the Rapture but believe they have an obligation to get involved politically to hasten the divine scenario for the Apocalypse that will bring an end to the world. Sadly, Christians, too, can invoke God for the purpose of waging religious war.

Consider the American general who has turned up as a force in the web of command and action leading to the torture and humiliation of prisoners in Iraq. General William Boykin, you may recall, is the commander who lost l8 men in Somalia trying to capture a warlord in the notorious Black Hawk Down fiasco of 1993. He later described the conflict as a battle between good and evil. I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol. According to Sidney Blumenthal in The Guardian on May 20, Boykin became a circuit rider for the religious right, active in a group called the Faith Force Multiplier that advocates applying military principles to evangelism. Their manifesto summons warriors in [a] spiritual battle for the souls of this nation and the world. Traveling the country with his slide show, while an active member of the United States military command, General Boykin declared that Satan wants to destroy this nation, he wants to destroy us as a nation, and he wants to destroy us as a Christian army. The forces of Satan will only be defeated, said the general, if we come against them in the name of Jesus. You might have thought that kind of fatwa from a high military officer would have struck the powers-that-be in the Pentagon and White House as somewhat un-American, if not unchristian. But not only was General Boykin kept in office, he has now turned up as a principal in the chain of command leading to the Iraqi prison.

It was Boykin, says Blumenthal, who flew to Guantanamo and ordered Major General Geoffrey Miller, then in charge of prisoners at the highly secret Camp X-Ray, to go to Iraq and extend the methods practiced at X-Ray to the prison system there, on orders of Secretary Rumsfeld. This is the same General Boykin who last June publicly announced that George Bush was not elected by a majority of the voters. He was appointed by God. I’m not making this up. Onward Christian Soldiers is back in vogue and the 2lst century version of the Crusades has taken on aspects of the righteous ferocity that marked its predecessors. To be furious in religion, said the Quaker, William Penn, is to be furiously irreligious.

So Jim Wallis has called you together at a time of testing—for people of faith and for people who believe in democracy. How do we nurture the healing side of religion over the killing side? How do we protect the soul of democracy against the contagion of a triumphalist theology in the service of an imperial state? At stake is America’s role in the world. At stake is the very character of the American experience—whether We, the people is the political incarnation of a spiritual truth – one nation, indivisible—or a stupendous fraud.

There are two Americas today. You could see this division in a little noticed action last week in the House of Representatives. Republicans in the House approved new tax credits for the children of families earning as much as $309,000 a year – families that already enjoy significant benefits from earlier tax cuts—while doing next to nothing for those at the low end of the income scale. This said the Washington Post in an editorial called Leave No Rich Child Behind – is bad social policy, bad tax policy, and bad fiscal policy. You’d think they’d be embarrassed but they’re not.

Nothing seems to embarrass the political class in Washington today. Not the fact that more children are growing up in poverty in America than in any other industrial nation; not the fact that millions of workers are actually making less money today in real dollars than they did twenty years ago; not the fact that working people are putting in longer and longer hours just to stay in place; not the fact that while we have the most advanced medical care in the world, nearly 44 million Americans – eight out of ten of them in working families—are uninsured and cannot get the basic case they need.

Nor is the political class embarrassed by the fact that the gap between rich and poor is greater than it’s been in 50 years – the worst inequality among all western nations. They don’t seem to have noticed that we have been experiencing a shift in poverty. For years it was said that single jobless mothers are down there at the bottom.

For years it was said that work, education, and marriage is how they move up the economic ladder. But poverty is showing up where we didn’t expect it - among families that include two parents, a worker, and a head of the household with more than a high school education. These are the newly poor. These are the people our political and business class expects to climb out of poverty on an escalator moving downward.

Let me tell you about the Stanleys and the Neumanns. During the last decade I produced a series of documentaries for PBS called Surviving the Good Times. The title refers to the boom time of the 90s when the country achieved the longest period of economic growth in its entire history. But not everyone shared equally in the benefits. To the contrary. The decade began with a sustained period of downsizing by corporations moving jobs out of America and many of those people never recovered what they lost.

We found two families – one black, one white—in Milwaukee whose breadwinners were laid off in the first wave of layoffs in 1991. We reported on how they were coping with the wrenching changes in their lives, and we stayed with them over the next ten years as they tried to find a place in the new global economy. They’re the kind of Americans my mother would have called the salt of the earth. They love their kids, care about their communities, go to church every Sunday, and work hard all week - both mothers have had to take full-time jobs. Although they were running hard they kept falling behind. During our time with them the fathers in both families became seriously ill. One had to stay in the hospital two months, putting his family $30,000 in debt because they didn’t have adequate health care. At one point we were there when the bank started to foreclose on the modest home of the other family because they couldn’t meet the mortgage payments after Dad lost his good-paying manufacturing job.

Like millions of Americans, the Stanleys and the Neumanns were playing by the rules and still getting stiffed. By the end of the decade they were running harder just to stay even, and the gap between them and prosperous America was widening and hardening.

What turns their personal tragedy into a political travesty is that they are patriotic. They love this country. But they no longer believe they matter to the people who run the country. When our film opens both families are watching the inauguration of Bill Clinton on television in 1992. By the end of the decade they were no longer paying attention to politics. They don’t see it connecting to their lives. They don’t think their concerns will ever be addressed by the political, corporate, and media elites who make up our dominant class. They are not cynical, because they are deeply religious people with no capacity for cynicism, but they know the system is rigged against them. And they’re right.

Continued on PART TWO…..

BILL MOYERS KEYNOTE ADDRESS (PART TWO)
Call To Renewal - May 24, 2004
Washington, DC
Sojourners Magazine

August 2004 Issue (Cont.)

For years now a small fraction of American households have been garnering an extreme concentration of wealth and income while large corporations and financial institutions have obtained unprecedented levels of economic and political power over daily life. In 1960, the gap in terms of wealth between the top 20% and the bottom 20% was 30 fold. Four decades later it is more than 75 fold. Such concentrations of wealth would be far less of an issue if the rest of society was benefiting proportionately and equality was growing. That’s not the case. As an organization called The Commonwealth Foundation Center for the Renewal of American Democracy sets forth in well-documented research, working families and the poor are losing ground under economic pressures that deeply affect household stability, family dynamics, social mobility, political participation, and civic life.
And household economics is not the only area where inequality is growing in America. We are also losing the historic balance between wealth and commonwealth. The report goes on to describe a fanatical drive to dismantle the political institutions, the legal and statutory canons, and the intellectual and cultural frameworks that have shaped public responsibility for social harms arising from the excesses of private power. That drive is succeeding, with drastic consequences for an equitable access to and control of public resources, the lifeblood of any democracy. From land, water and other natural resources, to media and the broadcast and digital spectrums, to scientific discovery and medical breakthroughs, and even to politics itself, a broad range of the American commons is undergoing a powerful shift in the direction of private control.

And what is driving this shift? Contrary to what you learned in civics class in high school, it is not the so-called democratic debate. That is merely a cynical charade behind which the real business goes on—the none-too-scrupulous business of getting and keeping power so that you can divide up the spoils. If you want to know what’s changing America, follow the money. The veteran Washington reporter, Elizabeth Drew, says the greatest change in Washington over the past twenty-five years – in its culture, in the way it does business and the ever-burgeoning amount of business transactions that go on here – has been in the preoccupation with money. Jeffrey Birnbaum, who covered Washington for nearly twenty years for the Wall Street Journal, put it even more strongly: [Campaign cash] has flooded over the gunwales of the ship of state and threatens to sink the entire vessel. Political donations determine the course and speed of many government actions that deeply affect our daily lives. It is widely accepted in Washington today that there is nothing wrong with a democracy dominated by the people with money. But of course there is. Money has democracy in a stranglehold and is suffocating it. During his brief campaign in 2000, before he was ambushed by the dirty tricks of the religious right in South Carolina and big money from George W. Bush’s wealthy elites, John McCain said elections today are nothing less than an influence peddling scheme in which both parties compete to stay in office by selling the country to the highest bidder.

Hit the pause button here and recall Roger Tamraz. He’s the wealthy oilman who paid $300,000 to get a private meeting in the White House with President Clinton; he wanted help in securing a big pipeline in Central Asia. This got him called before Congressional hearings on the financial excesses of the 1996 campaign. If you watched the hearings on C-Span you heard him say he didn’t think he had done anything out of the ordinary. When they pressed him he told the Senators: Look, when it comes to money and politics, you make the rules. I’m just playing by your rules. One Senator then asked if Tamraz had registered and voted. And he was blunt in his reply: No, Senator, I think money’s a bit more than the vote. That’s the shame of politics today.

Listen to one summary of the consequences:

When powerful interests shower Washington with millions in campaign contributions, they often get what they want. But its ordinary citizens and firms that pay the price and most of them never see it coming. This is what happens if you don’t contribute to their campaigns or spend generously on lobbying. You pick up a disproportionate share of America’s tax bill. You pay higher prices for a broad range of products from peanuts to prescriptions. You pay taxes that others in a similar situation have been excused from paying. You’re compelled to abide by laws while others are granted immunity from them. You must pay debts that you incur while others do not. You’re barred from writing off on your tax returns some of the money spent on necessities while others deduct the cost of their entertainment. You must run your business by one set of rules, while the government creates another set for your competitors. In contrast the fortunate few who contribute to the right politicians and hire the right lobbyists enjoy all the benefits of their special status. Make a bad business deal; the government bails them out. If they want to hire workers at below market wages, the government provides the means to do so. If they want more time to pay their debts, the government gives them an extension. If they want immunity from certain laws, the government gives it. If they want to ignore rules their competition must comply with, the government gives its approval. If they want to kill legislation that is intended for the public, it gets killed.

I’m not quoting from Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. Or Mao’s Little Red Book. I’m quoting Henry Luce’s TIME magazine. TIME concludes that America now has government for the few at the expense of the many.

That’s why the Stanleys and the Neumanns were turned off by politics. It’s why we can’t put things right. And it’s wrong. Hear the great justice Learned Hand on this: If we are to keep our democracy, there must be one commandment: ‘Thou shalt not ration justice.’ He got it right: The rich have the right to buy more homes than anyone else. They have the right to buy more cars than anyone else. More gizmos than anyone else; more clothes and more vacations. But they don’t have the right to buy more democracy than anyone else.

I know, I know: This sounds very much like a call for class war. But the class war was declared a generation ago, in a powerful paperback polemic by a wealthy right-winger, William Simon, who was soon to be Secretary of the Treasury. By the end of the 70s corporate America had begun a stealthy assault on the rest of our society and the principles of our democracy. Looking backwards, it all seems so clear that we wonder how we could have ignored the warning signs at the time. What has been happening to the middle and working classes is not the result of Adam Smith’s invisible hand but the direct consequence of corporate activism, intellectual collusion, the rise of a religious orthodoxy that has made an idol of wealth and power, and a host of political decisions favoring the powerful monied interests who were determined to get back the privileges they had lost with the Depression and the New Deal. They set out to trash the social contract; to cut workforces and their wages; to scour the globe in search of cheap labor; and to shred the social safety net that was supposed to protect people from hardships beyond their control. Business Week put it bluntly: Some people will obviously have to do with less….It will be a bitter pill for many Americans to swallow the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more.

To create the intellectual framework for this revolution in public policy, they funded conservative think tanks – the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institution, and the American Enterprise Institute – that churned out study after study advocating their agenda. To put political muscle behind these ideas, they created a formidable political machine. One of the few journalists to cover the issues of class – Thomas Edsall of the Washington Post – wrote – and I quote: During the 1970s, business refined its ability to act as a class, submerging competitive instincts in favor of joint, cooperate action in the legislative area. Big business political action committees flooded the political arena with a deluge of dollars. And they built alliances with the religious right – Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition – who happily contrived a cultural war as a smokescreen to hide the economic plunder of the very people who were enlisted as foot soldiers in the war.

And they won. One of the richest men in America and the savviest investor of them all – Warren Buffett – put it this way: If there was a class war, my class won. Well, there was, Mr. Buffett, and as recent headline in the Washington Post proclaimed: ‘BUSINESS WINS WITH BUSH.

Look at the spoils of victory:
Over the past three years, they’ve pushed through $2 trillion dollars in tax cuts – almost all tilted towards the wealthiest people in the country.
Cuts in taxes on the largest incomes.
Cuts in taxes on investment income.
And cuts in taxes on huge inheritances.

More than half of the benefits are going to the wealthiest one percent. You could call it trickle-down economics, except that the only thing that trickled down was a sea of red ink in our state and local governments. Forcing them to cut services and raise taxes on middle class working America. Now the Congressional Budget Office forecasts deficits totaling $2.75 trillion over the next ten years.

These deficits have been part of their strategy. The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan tried to warn us, when he predicted that President Reagan’s real strategy was to force the government to cut domestic social programs by fostering federal deficits of historic dimensions. President Reagan’s own Budget Director, David Stockman, admitted as such. Now the leading rightwing political strategist, Grover Norquist, says the goal is to starve the beast – with trillions of dollars in deficits resulting from trillions of dollars in tax cuts, until the United States government is so anemic and anorexic it can be drowned in the bathtub.

Take note: The corporate conservatives and their allies in the political and religious right are achieving a vast transformation of American life that only they understand because they are its advocates, its architects, and its beneficiaries. In creating the greatest economic inequality in the advanced world, they have saddled our nation, our states, and our cities and counties with structural deficits that will last until our children’s children are ready for retirement; and they are systematically stripping government of all its functions except rewarding the rich and waging war. And, yes, they are proud of what they have done to our economy and our society. If instead of producing a news magazine I was writing for Saturday Night Live, I couldn’t have made up the things that this crew in this town have been saying.

The president’s chief economic adviser says shipping technical and professional jobs overseas is good for the economy.

The president’s Council of Economic Advisers reports that hamburger chefs in fast food restaurants can be considered manufacturing workers.

The president’s Labor Secretary says it doesn’t matter if job growth has stalled because – and I quote – the stock market is the ultimate arbiter.

And the president’s Federal Reserve Chairman says that the tax cuts may force cutbacks in Social Security – but hey, we should make the tax cuts permanent anyway.

You just can’t make this stuff up. You have to hear it to believe it. This may be the first class war in history where the victims will die laughing. But what they are doing to middle class and working Americans and the poor – and to the workings of American democracy – is no laughing matter. It calls for righteous indignation and action. Otherwise our democracy will degenerate into a shell of itself in which the privileged and the powerful sustain their own way of life at the expense of others and the United States becomes another Latin America with a small crust of the rich at the top governing a nation of serfs.

Your Call for Renewal comes, then, at a time of testing. Over the past few years, as the poor got poorer, the health care crisis worsened, wealth and media became more and more concentrated, and our political system was bought out from under us, prophetic Christianity lost its voice. The religious right drowned everyone else out. And they hijacked Jesus. The very Jesus who stood in Nazareth and proclaimed, The Lord has anointed me to preach the good news to the poor. The very Jesus who told 5000 hungry people that all of you will be fed, not just some of you. The very Jesus who challenged the religious orthodoxy of the day by feeding the hungry on the Sabbath, who offered kindness to the prostitute and hospitality to the outcast, who said the kingdom of heaven belongs to little children, raised the status of women, and treated even the taxpayer like a child of God. The very Jesus who drove the money changers from the temple. This Jesus has been hijacked and turned into a guardian of privilege instead of a champion of the dispossessed. Hijacked, he was made over into a militarist, hedonist, and lobbyist….sent prowling the halls of Congress in Guccis, seeking tax breaks and loopholes for the powerful, costly new weapon systems that don’t work, and punitive public policies.

Let’s get Jesus back.

The Jesus who inspired a Methodist ship-caulker named Edward Rogers to crusade across New England for an eight hour work day. Let’s get back the Jesus who caused Frances William to rise up against the sweatshop. The Jesus who called a young priest named John Ryan to champion child labor laws, unemployment insurance, a minimum wage, and decent housing for the poor – ten years before the New Deal. The Jesus in whose name Dorothy Day challenged the Church to march alongside auto workers in Michigan, fishermen and textile workers in Massachusetts, brewery workers in New York, and marble cutters in Vermont. The Jesus in whose name E.B. McKinney and Owen Whitfield challenged a Mississippi system that kept sharecroppers in servitude and debt. The Jesus in whose name a Presbyterian minister named Eugene Carson Blake - Ike’s Pastor - was arrested for protesting racial injustice in Baltimore. The Jesus who led Martin Luther King to Memphis to join sanitation workers in their struggle for a decent wage.

That Jesus has been scourged by his own followers, dragged through the streets by pious crowds, and crucified on a cross of privilege.
Mel Gibson missed that.

He missed the resurrection—the spiritual awakening that followed the death of Jesus. He missed Pentecost.

Now comes the resurrection all over again. Our times cry out for a new politics of justice. This is no partisan issue. It doesn’t matter if you’re a liberal or a conservative, Jesus is both and neither. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Democrat or Republican - Jesus is both and neither. We need a faith that takes on the corruption of both parties. We need a faith that challenges complacency at all power. If you’re a Democrat, shake them up. If you’re a Republican, shame them. Jesus drove the money changers from the temple. We must drive them from the temples of democracy.

Let’s get Jesus back.
But let’s do it in love.

I know it can sound banal and facile to say this. The word love gets thrown around too casually these days. Don’t you just love this? I loved that movie. I’d love to get away for the weekend. And brute reality can mock the whole idea of loving one another. We’re still living in the shadow of Dachau and Buchenwald. The smoke still rises above Kosovo and Rwanda, Chechnya and East Timor. The walls of Abu Ghraib still shriek of pain. What has love done? Where is there any real milk of human kindness?

But the love I mean is the love described by Reinhold Niebuhr in his book of essays, Justice and Mercy, where he writes: When we talk about love we have to become mature or we will become sentimental. Basically love means…being responsible, responsibility to our family, toward our civilization, and now by the pressures of history, toward the universe of humankind.

So let us love our country. But let us remember the words of G.K. Chesterton: To say my country, right or wrong, is something no patriot would say except in dire emergency; it is like saying, ‘my mother, drunk or sober.’

Let us love our neighbor, but let’s not allow him to poison our well — from ignorance or intent.

Let us love our enemy, even as we resist his aggression. We cannot defeat the terrorists if we become like them. We cannot stand up to the religious right if we imitate them.

What I’m talking about will be hard, devoid of sentiment and practical as nails. But love is action, not sentiment. Someone asked a few years ago, who gave us the authority to change the meaning of the Church? How did we let creed override compassion? Drive though any city, he said, and you’ll pass so many churches. You pass the Presbyterian Church and say: They’re Calvinists. They believe in predestination. You drive past the Methodist church and say, They accept infant baptism. You drive past the Catholic Church and say, They believe in papal infallibility. And it’s true—theological formulations give shape to our beliefs. Intellectual assent provides a foundation to our faith. But when the church was young and fair, and people passed by her doors, they did not comment on the difference or the doctrines. Those stern and taciturn pagans said of the Christians: How they love one another! It started that way soon after the death of Jesus. His disciple Peter said to the first churches, Above all things, have unfailing love toward one another.

I looked in my old Greek concordance the other day. That word unfailing would be more accurately rendered intense. It was also Peter who said that love covers a multitude of sins. I struggled with that one a long time. I was never sure I understood the idea or liked it: Love covers a multitude of sins. But I saw it in a new light one day when I opened an envelope from my second grandson Thomas. Thomas sent me a drawing he had made of a man. And what a man it was! He had a green head, one large blue hand, and one small red hand. One of his eyes was pink, the other yellow. He was a deformed creature if you ever saw one. At first I took it as Thomas’ effort to draw a picture of me. So I didn’t pay attention to the disproportion in the picture; I didn’t see the deformity; I saw only a figure drawn for me by a little boy who loves me. And I knew that one day this little boy would be drawing with strong and clear strokes. And why could I see past those deformities to the gift of the drawing and the promise of a child’s potential? Because I love this child, and this child loves me, and love covers a multitude of imperfections.

Glenn Tinder reminds us that “none are good but all are sacred”. I want to think this is what the founders meant when they included the not-so-self-evident assertion that all men are created equal. Truly life is not fair and it is never equal. I believe the founders were speaking a powerful spiritual truth that is the heart of our hope for this country. They saw America as a great promise – and it is. But America is a broken promise, and we are here to do what we can to fix it—to get America back on the track. St. Augustine shows us how: One loving soul sets another on fire. But to move beyond sentimentality, what begins in love must lead on to justice. Your Call to Renewal is the fight of our lives.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

The Jesus Landing Pad
By Rick Perlstein
The Village Voice

May 18th, 2004

Bush White House checked with rapture Christians before latest Israel move

It was an e-mail we weren’t meant to see. Not for our eyes were the notes that showed White House staffers taking two-hour meetings with Christian fundamentalists, where they passed off bogus social science on gay marriage as if it were holy writ and issued fiery warnings that “the Presidents [sic] Administration and current Government is engaged in cultural, economical, and social struggle on every level”,this to a group whose representative in Israel believed herself to have been attacked by witchcraft unleashed by proximity to a volume of Harry Potter. Most of all, apparently, we’re not supposed to know the National Security Council’s top Middle East aide consults with apocalyptic Christians eager to ensure American policy on Israel conforms with their sectarian doomsday scenarios.

But now we know.
“Everything that you’re discussing is information you’re not supposed to have,” barked Pentecostal minister Robert G. Upton when asked about the off-the-record briefing his delegation received on March 25. Details of that meeting appear in a confidential memo signed by Upton and obtained by the Voice.

The e-mailed meeting summary reveals NSC Near East and North African Affairs director Elliott Abrams sitting down with the Apostolic Congress and massaging their theological concerns. Claiming to be “the Christian Voice in the Nation’s Capital,” the members vociferously oppose the idea of a Palestinian state. They fear an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza might enable just that, and they object on the grounds that all of Old Testament Israel belongs to the Jews. Until Israel is intact and David’s temple rebuilt, they believe, Christ won’t come back to earth.

Abrams attempted to assuage their concerns by stating that “the Gaza Strip had no significant Biblical influence such as Joseph’s tomb or Rachel’s tomb and therefore is a piece of land that can be sacrificed for the cause of peace.”

Three weeks after the confab, President George W. Bush reversed long-standing U.S. policy, endorsing Israeli sovereignty over parts of the West Bank in exchange for Israel’sdisengagement from the Gaza Strip.

In an interview with the Voice, Upton denied having written the document, though it was sent out from an e-mail account of one of his staffers and bears the organization’s seal, which is nearly identical to the Great Seal of the United States. Its idiosyncratic grammar and punctuation tics also closely match those of texts on the Apostolic Congress’s website, and Upton verified key details it recounted, including the number of participants in the meeting (”45 ministers including wives”) and its conclusion “with a heart-moving send-off of the President in his Presidential helicopter.”

Upton refused to confirm further details.

Affiliated with the United Pentecostal Church, the Apostolic Congress is part of an important and disciplined political constituency courted by recent Republican administrations. As a subset of the broader Christian Zionist movement, it has a lengthy history of opposition to any proposal that will not result in what it calls a “one-state solution” in Israel.

The White House’s association with the congress, which has just posted a new staffer in Israel who may be running afoul of Israel’s strict anti-missionary laws, also raises diplomatic concerns.

The staffer, Kim Hadassah Johnson, wrote in a report obtained by the Voice, “We are establishing the Meet the Need Fund in Israel,’MNFI.’ . . . The fund will be an Interest Free Loan Fund that will enable us to loan funds to new believers (others upon application) who need assistance. They will have the opportunity to repay the loan (although it will not be mandatory).” When that language was read to Moshe Fox, minister for public and interreligious affairs at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, he responded, “It sounds against the law which prohibits any kind of money or material [inducement] to make people convert to another religion. That’s what it sounds like.” (Fox’s judgment was e-mailed to Johnson, who did not return a request for comment.)

The Apostolic Congress dates its origins to 1981, when, according to its website, “Brother Stan Wachtstetter was able to open the door to Apostolic Christians into the White House.” Apostolics, a sect of Pentecostals, claim legitimacy as the heirs of the original church because they, as the 12 apostles supposedly did, baptize converts in the name of Jesus, not in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Ronald Reagan bore theological affinities with such Christians because of his belief that the world would end in a fiery Armageddon. Reagan himself referenced this belief explicitly a half-dozen times during his presidency.

While the language of apocalyptic Christianity is absent from George W. Bush’s speeches, he has proven eager to work with apocalyptics,a point of pride for Upton. “We’re in constant contact with the White House,” he boasts. “I’m briefed at least once a week via telephone briefings. . . . I was there about two weeks ago . . . At that time we met with the president.”

Last spring, after President Bush announced his Road Map plan for peace in the Middle East, the Apostolic Congress co-sponsored an effort with the Jewish group Americans for a Safe Israel that placed billboards in 23 cities with a quotation from Genesis (”Unto thy offspring will I give this land”) and the message, “Pray that President Bush Honors God’s Covenant with Israel. Call the White House with this message.” It then provided the White House phone number and the Apostolic Congress’s Web address.

In the interview with the Voice, Pastor Upton claimed personal responsibility for directing 50,000 postcards to the White House opposing the Road Map, which aims to create a Palestinian state. “I’m in total disagreement with any form of Palestinian state,” Upton said. “Within a two-week period, getting 50,000 postcards saying the exact same thing from places all over the country, that resonated with the White House. That really caused [President Bush] to backpedal on the Road Map.”

When I sought to confirm Upton’s account of the meeting with the White House, I was directed to National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones, whose initial response upon being read a list of the names of White House staffers present was a curt, “You know half the people you just mentioned are Jewish?”

When asked for comment on top White House staffers meeting with representatives of an organization that may be breaking Israeli law, Jones responded, “Why would the White House comment on that?”

When asked whose job it is in the administration to study the Bible to discern what parts of Israel were or weren’t acceptable sacrifices for peace, Jones said that his previous statements had been off-the-record.

When Pastor Upton was asked to explain why the group’s website describes the Apostolic Congress as “the Christian Voice in the nation’s capital,” instead of simply a Christian voice in the nation’s capital, he responded, “There has been a real lack of leadership in having someone emerge as a Christian voice, someone who doesn’t speak for the right, someone who doesn’t speak for the left, but someone who speaks for the people, and someone who speaks from a theocratical perspective.”

When his words were repeated back to him to make sure he had said a “theocratical” perspective, not a “theological” perspective, he said, “Exactly. Exactly. We want to know what God would have us say or what God would have us do in every issue.”

The Middle East was not the only issue discussed at the March 25 meeting. James Wilkinson, deputy national security advisor for communications, spoke first and is characterized as stating that the 9-11 Commission “is portraying those who have given their all to protect this nation as ‘weak on terrorism,’ ” that “99 percent of all the men and women protecting us in this fight against terrorism are career citizens,” and offered the example of Frances Town-send, deputy national security adviser for combating terrorism, “who sacrificed Christmas to do a ’security video’ conference.”

Tim Goeglein, deputy director of public liaison and the White House’s point man with evangelical Christians, moderated, and he also spoke on the issue of same-sex marriage. According to the memo, he asked the rhetorical questions: “What will happen to our country if that actually happens? What do those pushing such hope to gain?” His answer: “They want to change America.” How so? He quoted the research of Hoover Institute senior fellow Stanley Kurtz, who holds that since gay marriage was legalized in Scandinavia, marriage itself has virtually ceased to exist. (In fact, since Sweden instituted a registered-partnership law for same-sex couples in the mid ’90s, there has been no overall change in the marriage and divorce rates there.)

It is Matt Schlapp, White House political director and Karl Rove’s chief lieutenant, who was paraphrased as stating “that the Presidents Administration and current Government is engaged in cultural, economical, and social struggle on every level.”

Also present at the meeting was Kristen Silverberg, deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy. (None of the participants responded to interview requests.)

The meeting was closed by Goeglein, who was asked, “What can we do to assist in this fight for these issues and our nations [sic] foundation and values?” and who reportedly responded, “Pray, pray, pray, pray.”

The Apostolic Congress’s representative in Israel, Kim Johnson, is ethnically Jewish, keeps kosher, and holds herself to the sumptuary standards of Orthodox Jewish women, so as to better blend in to her surroundings.

In one letter home obtained by the Voice she notes that many of the Apostolic Christians she works with in Israel are Filipino women “married to Jewish men,who on occasion accompany their wives to meetings. We are planning to start a fellowship with this select group where we can meet for dinners and get to know one another. Please Pray for the timing and formation of such.” Elsewhere she talks of a discussion with someone “on the pitfalls and aggravations of Christians who missionize Jews.” She works often among the Jewish poor,the kind of people who might be interested in interest-free loans,and is thrilled to “meet the outcasts of this Land,how wonderful because they are in the in-casts for His Kingdom.”

An ecstatic figure who from her own reports appears to operate at the edge of sanity (”Two of the three nights in my apartment I have been attacked by a hair raising spirit of fear,” she writes, noting the sublet contained a Harry Potter book; “at this time I am associating it with witchcraft”), Johnson has also met with Knesset member Gila Gamliel. (Gamliel did not respond to interview requests.) She also boasted of an imminent meeting with a “Knesset leader.”

“At this point and for all future mails it is important for me to note that this country has very stiff anti-missionary laws,” she warns the followers back home. [D]iscretion is required in all mails. This is particularly important to understand when people write mails or ask about organization efforts regarding such.”

Her boss, Pastor Upton, displays a photograph on the Apostolic Congress website of a meeting between himself and Beny Elon, Prime Minister Sharon’s tourism minister, famous in Israel for his advocacy of the expulsion of Palestinians from Israeli-controlled lands.

His spokesman in the U.S., Ronn Torassian, affirmed that “Minister Elon knows Mr. Upton well,” but when asked whether he is aware that Mr. Upton’s staffer may be breaking Israel’s anti-missionary laws, snapped: “It’s not something he’s interested in discussing with The Village Voice.”

In addition to its work in Israel, the Apostolic Congress is part of the increasingly Christian public face of pro-Israel activities in the United States. Don Wagner, author of the book Anxious for Armageddon, has been studying Christian Zionism for 15 years, and believes that the current hard-line pro-Israel movement in the U.S. is “predominantly gentile.” Often, devotees work in concert with Jewish groups like Americans for a Safe Israel, or AFSI, which set up a mostly Christian Committee for a One-State Solution as the sponsor of last year’s billboard campaign. The committee’s board included, in addition to Upton, such evangelical luminaries as Gary Bauer and E.E. “Ed” McAteer of the Religious Roundtable.

AFSI’s executive director, Helen Freedman, confirms the increasingly Christian cast of her coalition. “We have many good Jews, of course,” she says, “but they’re in the minority.” She adds, “The liberal Jew is unable to believe the Arab when he says his goal is to Islamize the West. . . . But I believe it. And evangelical Christians believe it.”

Of Jews who might otherwise support her group’s view of Jews’ divine right to Israel, she laments, “They’re embarrassed about quoting the Bible, about referring to the Covenant, about talking about the Promised Land.”

Pastor Upton is not embarrassed, and Helen Freedman is proud of her association with him. She is wistful when asked if she, like Upton, has been able to finagle a meeting with the president. “Pastor Upton is the head of a whole Apostolic Congress,” she laments. “It’s a nationwide group of evangelicals.”

Upton has something Freedman covets: a voting bloc.

She laughs off concerns that, for Christian Zionists, actual Jews living in Israel serve as mere props for their end-time scenario: “We have a different conception of what [the end of the world] will be like . . . Whoever is right will rejoice, and whoever was wrong will say, ‘Whoops!’ ”

She’s not worried, either, about evangelical anti-Semitism: “I don’t think it exists,” she says. She does say, however, that it would concern her if she learned the Apostolic Congress had a representative in Israel trying to win converts: “If we discovered that people were trying to convert Jews to Christianity, we would be very upset.”

Kim Johnson doesn’t call it converting Jews to Christianity. She calls it “Circumcision of the Heart”,a spiritual circumcision Jews must undergo because, she writes in paraphrase of Jeremiah, chapter 9, “God will destroy all the uncircumcised nations along with the House of Israel, because the House of Israel is uncircumcised in the heart . . . [I]t is through the Gospel . . . that men’s hearts are circumcised.”

Apostolics believe that only 144,000 Jews who have not, prior to the Second Coming of Christ, acknowledged Jesus as the Messiah will be saved in the end times. Though even for those who do not believe in this literal interpretation of the Bible,or for anyone who lives in Israel, or who cares about Israel, or whose security might be affected by a widespread conflagration in the Middle East, which is everyone,the scriptural prophecies of the Christian Zionists should be the least of their worries.

Instead, we should be worried about self-fulfilling prophecies. “Biblically,” stated one South Carolina minister in support of the anti-Road Map billboard campaign, “there’s always going to be a war.”

Don Wagner, an evangelical, worries that in the Republican Party, people who believe this “are dominating the discourse now, in an election year.” He calls the attempt to yoke Scripture to current events “a modern heresy, with cultish proportions.

“I mean, it’s appalling,” he rails on. “And it also shows how marginalized mainstream Christian thinking, and the majority of evangelical thought, have become.”

It demonstrates, he says, “the absolute convergence of the neoconservatives with the Christian Zionists and the pro-Israel lobby, driving U.S. Mideast policy.”

The problem is not that George W. Bush is discussing policy with people who press right-wing solutions to achieve peace in the Middle East, or with devout Christians. It is that he is discussing policy with Christians who might not care about peace at all,at least until the rapture.

The Jewish pro-Israel lobby, in the interests of peace for those living in the present, might want to consider a disengagement.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Bush Campaign Seeks Help From Thousands of Congregations
By David D. Kirkpatrick
The New York Times

June 3rd, 2004

The Bush campaign is seeking to enlist thousands of religious congregations around the country in distributing campaign information and registering voters, according to an e-mail message sent to many members of the clergy and others in Pennsylvania.

Liberal groups charged that the effort invited violations of the separation of church and state and jeopardized the tax-exempt status of churches that cooperated. Some socially conservative church leaders also said they would advise pastors against participating in such a partisan effort.
But Steve Schmidt, a spokesman for the Bush administration, said “people of faith have as much right to participate in the political process as any other community” and that the e-mail message was about “building the most sophisticated grass-roots presidential campaign in the country’s history.”

In the message, dated early Tuesday afternoon, Luke Bernstein, coalitions coordinator for the Bush campaign in Pennsylvania, wrote: “The Bush-Cheney ‘04 national headquarters in Virginia has asked us to identify 1,600 `Friendly Congregations’ in Pennsylvania where voters friendly to President Bush might gather on a regular basis.”

In each targeted “place of worship,” Mr. Bernstein continued, without mentioning a specific religion or denomination, “we’d like to identify a volunteer who can help distribute general information to other supporters.” He explained: “We plan to undertake activities such as distributing general information/updates or voter registration materials in a place accessible to the congregation.”

The e-mail message was provided to The New York Times by a group critical of President Bush.

The campaign’s effort is the latest indication of its heavy bet on churchgoers in its bid for re-election. Mr. Bush’s top political adviser, Karl Rove, and officials of Mr. Bush’s campaign have often said that people who attended church regularly voted for him disproportionately in the last election, and the campaign has made turning out that group a top priority this year. But advisers to Mr. Bush also acknowledge privately that appearing to court socially conservative Christian voters too aggressively risks turning off more moderate voters.

What was striking about the Pennsylvania e-mail message was its directness. Both political parties rely on church leaders - African-American pastors for the Democrats, for example, and white evangelical Protestants for the Republicans - to urge congregants to go the polls. And in the 1990’s, the Christian Coalition developed a reputation as a political powerhouse by distributing voters guides in churches that alerted conservative believers to candidates’ position on social issues like abortion and school prayer. But the Christian Coalition was organized as a nonpartisan, issue-oriented lobbying and voter-education organization, and in 1999 it ran afoul of federal tax laws for too much Republican partisanship.

The Bush campaign, in contrast, appeared to be reaching out directly to churches and church members, seeking to distribute campaign information as well as ostensibly nonpartisan material, like issue guides and registration forms.

Trevor Potter, a Washington lawyer and former chairman of the Federal Election Commission, said the campaign’s solicitation raised delicate legal issues for congregations.

“If the church is doing it, it is a legal problem the church,” Mr. Potter said. “In the past, the I.R.S. has sought to revoke and has succeeded in revoking the tax-exempt status of churches for political activity.”

If a member of the congregation is disseminating the information, however, the issue is more complicated. If the congregation had a table where anyone could make available any information whatsoever without any institutional responsibility or oversight, then a member might be able to distribute campaign literature without violating tax laws. But very few churches have such open forums, Mr. Potter said. “The I.R.S. would ask, did the church encourage this? Did the church permit this but not other literature? Did the church in any way support this?”

Mr. Bernstein, the e-mail message’s author, declined to comment. Mr. Schmidt, the campaign spokesman, said the e-mail message only sought individual volunteers from among the “friendly congregations,” not the endorsements of the any religious organizations or groups.

“The e-mail is targeted to individuals, asking individuals to become involved in the campaign and to share information about the campaign with other people in their faith community,” Mr. Schmidt said. “Yesterday, a liberal judge from San Francisco overturned a partial-birth abortion ban which banned that abhorrent procedure. That is an example of an issue that people of faith from across the United States care about.”

He said that the Pennsylvania e-mail message was part of a larger national effort. The number of congregations mentioned - 1,600 in just one state - suggests an operation on a vast scale.

But even some officials of some conservative religious groups said they were troubled by the notion that a parishioner might distribute campaign information within a church or at a church service.

“If I were a pastor, I would not be comfortable doing that,” said Richard Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. “I would say to my church members, we are going to talk about the issues and we are going to take information from the platforms of the two parties about where they stand on the issues. I would tell them to vote and to vote their conscience, and the Lord alone is the Lord of the conscience.”

The Rev. Barry Lynn, executive director of the liberal Americans United for Separation of Church and State, argued that any form of distributing campaign literature through a church would compromise its tax-exempt status. He called the effort “an absolutely breathtakingly large undertaking,” saying, “I never thought anyone could so attempt to meld a political party with a network of religious organizations.”

In a statement, Rev. Dr. C. Welton Gaddy, president of the Interfaith Alliance, a liberal group, called the effort “an astonishing abuse of religion” and “the rawest form of manipulation of religion for partisan gain.” He urged the president to repudiate the effort.

In a statement, Mara Vanderslice, director of religious outreach for the Kerry campaign, said the effort “shows nothing but disrespect for the religious community.” Ms. Vanderslice continued: “Although the Kerry campaign actively welcomes the participation of religious voices in our campaign, we will never court religious voters in a way that would jeopardize the sanctity of their very houses of worship.”

How many congregations or worshippers will choose to cooperate remains to be seen. In an interview yesterday, the Rev. Ronald Fowlkes, pastor of the Victoria Baptist Church in Springfield, Pa., said he had not seen the e-mail message but did not think much of the idea.

“We encourage people to get out and vote,” Mr. Fowlkes said, but as far as distributing information through church, “If it were focused on one party or person, that would be too much.”

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Moon Over Washington
by John Gorenfeld
The Gadflyer

June 9th, 2004

Why are some of the capital’s most influential power players hanging out with a bizarre Korean billionaire who claims to be the Messiah?

http://gadflyer.com/articles/?ArticleID=131

Should Americans be concerned that on March 23rd a bipartisan group of Congressmen attended a coronation at which a billionaire, pro-theocracy newspaper owner was declared to be the Messiah – with royal robes, a crown, the works? Or that this imperial ceremony took place not in a makeshift basement church or a backwoods campsite, but in a Senate office building?
The Washington Post didn’t think so. For a moment on April 4, a quote from the keynote speech was in the Web version of its “Reliable Sources” column. The speaker: Sun Myung Moon, 84, an ex-convict whose political activities were at the center of the 1976-8 Koreagate influence-peddling probe. That’s when an investigation by Congress warned that Moon, after having befriended Richard Nixon in his darkest hour, was surrounding himself with other politicians to overcome his reputation: as the leader of the cult-like Unification Church, which recruited unwary college students, filled Madison Square Garden with couples in white robes, wed them in bulk and demanded obedience.

That was before he launched the Washington Times – “in response to Heaven’s direction,” as he would later say – and a 20-year quest to make his enemies bow to him. He has also claimed, in newspaper ads taken out by the Unification Church, that Jesus, Confucius, and the Buddha have endorsed him. Muhammad, according to the 2002 ad, led the council in three cries of “mansei,” or victory. And every dead U.S. president was there, too – because Moon’s gospel is inseparable from visions of true-blue American power.

Now, this March, Moon was telling guests at the Dirksen Senate Office Building that Hitler and Stalin, having cleaned up their acts, had, in a rare public statement from beyond the grave, called him “none other than humanity’s Savior, Messiah, Returning Lord and True Parent.”

But not long after it appeared on the Post’s web site, the paper erased the quote. Columnist Richard Leiby told me via e-mail that it shouldn’t have gone out in the first place. The paper replaced it with breaking news about “Celebrity Jeopardy!” with Tim Russert.

The Return of the King

So no one covered this American coronation, except Moon’s own Times, which skipped the Messiah part. It wasn’t in other newspapers, which only wink at the influence of Moon’s far-right movement in Washington, when they cover it at all.

In fact, the only place you could read about the new king, unless you bookmarked Moon’s Korean-language website, was in the blog world. There, dozens of the most CSPAN2-hardened cynics reacted to the screenshots with a resounding “WTF,” the sound of dismay and confusion at a scene that news coverage hadn’t prepared them for. The images might as well have come from Star Trek’s Mirror Universe.

First, we’re shown a rabbi blowing a ram’s horn. Most Jews would hold off on this until the High Holy Days, but it probably counts if the Moshiach shows up in a federal office building at taxpayer expense. Then we see the man of the hour, Moon, chilling at a table at the Dirksen in a tuxedo, soaking all this up. He claps. He’s having a ball.

Cut to the ritual. Eyes downcast, a man identified as Congressman Danny K. Davis (D-Ill.) is bringing a crown, atop a velvety purple cushion, to a figure who stands waiting austerely with his wife. Now Moon is wearing robes that Louis XIV would have appreciated. All of this has quickly been spliced into a promo reel by Moon’s movement, which implies to its followers that the U.S. Congress itself has crowned the Washington Times owner.

But Section 9 of the Constitution forbids giving out titles of nobility, setting a certain tone that might have made the Congressional hosts shy about celebrating the coronation on their websites. They included conservatives, the traditional fans of Moon’s newspaper: Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA.), Rep. Chris Cannon (R-Utah), Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md.) and Republican strategy god Charlie Black, whose PR firm represents Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. But there were also liberal House Democrats like Sanford Bishop (D-Ga.) and Davis. Rep. Harold Ford (D-Tenn.) later told the Memphis Flyer that he’d been erroneously listed on the program, but had never heard of the event, which was sponsored by the Washington Times Foundation.

Rep. Curt Weldon’s office tenaciously denied that the Congressman was there, before being provided by The Gadflyer with a photo depicting Weldon at the event, found on Moon’s website. “Apparently he was there, but we really had nothing to do with it,” press secretary Angela Sowa finally conceded. “I don’t think it’s quite accurate that the Washington Times said that we hosted the event. We may have been a Congressional co-host, but we have nothing to do with the agenda, the organization, the scheduling, and our role would be limited explicitly to the attendance of the Congressman.”

The spokeswoman for one senator, who asked that her boss not be named, said politicians weren’t told the awards program was going to be a Moon event. The senator went, she said, because the Ambassadors promised to hand out awards to people from his home state, people who were genuinely accomplished. When the ceremony morphed into a platform for Moon, she said, people were disconcerted.

“I think there was a mass exodus,” she said. “They get all these senators on the floor, and this freak is there.”

A new world order

The last time someone declared himself Emperor of the United States, it was the Gold Rush’s Joshua Norton, a sort of failed dot-commer of the 1850s. But he was broke, whereas a random sampling of Moon’s properties might include a healthy chunk of the U.S. fishing industry, the graphic tablet company Wacom, and swaths of real estate on an epic scale. The money-losing Times is paid for by the $1 billion he’s sunk into it, along with untold funding for conservative policy foundations like the American Family Coalition.

George Soros has recently gotten lots of coverage as a supposedly eccentric billionaire influencing U.S. politics. But Soros is no Moon. In Moon’s speeches, a “peace kingdom” is envisioned, in which homosexuals – whom he calls “dung-eating dogs” – would be a thing of the past. He said in January: “Gays will be eliminated, the three Israels will unite. If not, then they will be burned. We do not know what kind of world God will bring, but this is what happens. It will be greater than the communist purge but at God’s orders.”

And ignoring every mainline Christian denomination’s rejection of the idea of Jewish collective guilt, Moon’s latest world tour calls on rabbis to repent for betraying Christ, the Jerusalem Post reported last week. Speaking in Arlington, VA in 2003, Moon said Hitler killed six million Jews as a penalty for this rejection. And he’s frank about calling for democracy and the U.S. Constitution to be replaced by religious government that he calls “Godism,” calling the church-state separation the work of Satan. “The church and the state must become one as Cain and Abel,” he said in the same sermon.

Towards this end, Moon’s “Ambassadors for Peace” have been promoting his goal of a “Religious United Nations” organized around God, not countries. In the June 19, 2003 Congressional Record, Rep. Davis joins Rep. Weldon in thanking Moon and the Ambassadors for “promoting the vision of world peace.” He praises their plan to “support the leaders of the United Nations” through interfaith dialogue. Much of the dialogue has consisted of getting Moon’s retinue of rabbis, ministers and Muslim clerics to hug each other, and be photographed handing out awards to politicians. The Ambassadors have addressed the United Nations and the British House of Lords. They have also honored at least one neo-Nazi, William Baker, former chair of the Holocaust-denying Populist Party.

And far from the free lunches that Emperor Norton received in San Francisco, Moon’s groups have taken home grant money from the Bush Administration, which has given his anti-sex missionaries $475,000 in Abstinence-Only dollars to bring Moon’s crusade against “free sex” to both black New Jersey high-schoolers and native Africans. The Centers for Disease Control briefly announced that another Moon foundation was the only group qualified to receive another, no-bid grant for HIV education in Africa. Only after a competitor raised objections did the CDC cancel the grant program entirely. Meanwhile, one of Moon’s top political movers, David Caprara, has been appointed by George W. Bush to head AmeriCorps VISTA; and another former church VIP, Josette Shiner, was given a senior trade position.

Friends in high places

In the early stages of the Reagan Revolution that embraced the Washington Times and Moon’s anti-Communist movement, it was embarrassing to be caught at a Moon event. Until George H.W. Bush appeared with Moon in 1996, thanking him for a newspaper that “brings sanity to Washington,” famous guests often spoke at front groups that concealed ties to the Unification Church. Bill Cosby was horrified to discover he’d agreed to speak at one. The reputation of future “Left Behind” author Tim LaHaye suffered after his wife accidentally gave Mother Jones a recording of him dictating a fond letter to Moon’s lieutenant Bo Hi Pak, plotting to replace Vice-President Bush with Jerry Falwell on the 1988 ticket. To many Christians, Moon was offensive, preaching that Jesus failed and that he would clean up the mess.

But now that he’s forged unbreakable ties with conservative Christians, Moon has moved on to African-American ministers, and, through them, allies in the Democratic Party. This has been below the radar of the press, but not for lack of outlandishness. Moon celebrated Easter Sunday, 2003 by launching a coast to coast series of “tear down the cross/Who is Rev. Moon?” events, targeting pastors in poor neighborhoods. From the Bronx to L.A., Moon’s people were convincing pastors to pull the crosses off their walls and replace them with his Family Federation flag. An old hymn was invoked: “I’ll trade the old cross for a crown.”

To Congressmen attending earlier stops in this roadshow, all this mysticism may have seemed too murky and exotic to understand. But the storyline is simple enough, if you take a step back.

Moon’s newest followers were invited to tear down the traditional symbol of Christianity, told they could swap it for a crown. But unlike the crown in the hymn, it wasn’t for them. It was the one that Congressmen gave, March 23 at the Dirksen Senate Office Building, to a wealthy right-wing newspaper owner, one described by Time magazine in 1976 as “megalomaniacal,” not much of an exaggeration for someone who claims to be the Second Coming. Unless of course he actually is.

The next day, according to a speech posted to a Moon mailing list and Usenet by a Unification church webmaster, Damian Anderson, Moon said he was leaving the country. “True Father spent 34 years here in America to guide this country in the right way,” he told followers. “Yesterday was the turning point.” But you can’t buy Moon’s high opinion of your country so easily (he’s called the U.S. “Satan’s harvest”).

America, he said, was on the road to its doom. Why? “Homo marriage.”

See the pictures of the March 23rd episode in the halls of Congress here….
http://www.gorenfeld.net/blog/2004/05/im-and-i-approve-this-messiah.html

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Reason: The Only Oracle Of Man
A Compendious System Of Natural Religion
By Col. Ethan Allen

INTRODUCTION
Colonel Ethan Allen, the author of Oracles of Reason, was the son of Joseph Allen, a native of Coventry, Connecticut, a farmer in moderate circumstances. He afterwards resided in Litchfield, where Ethan was born in the year 1739. The family consisted of eight children, of whom our author was the eldest. But few incidentsconnected with his early life are known. We are appraised, however, that notwithstanding his education was very limited, his ambition to prove himself worthy of that attention which superior intellect ever commands, induced him diligently to explore every subject that came under his notice. A stranger to fear, his opinions were ever given without disguise or hesitation; and an enemy to oppression, he sought every opportunity to redress the wrongs of the oppressed.
At the braking out of the Revolutionary War, he raised in Vermont, where he had resided, a company of volunteers, consisting of two hundred and thirty, with which he surprised the fortress of Ticonderoga, May 10, 1775, containing about forty men, and one hundred pieces of cannon. He was unfortunately taken prisoner in September following, in an attempt on Montreal, and suffered a cruel imprisonment for several years. For an account of which, the reader is referred to his narrative, contained in a memoir of the author, by Mr. Hugh Moore, Plattsburg, 1834.

Soon after the close of the revolution, Col. Allen composed following work; which, on account of the bold and unusual manner, particularly in this country, that the subject of religion is treated, he had great difficulty to get published. It lay a long time in the hands of a printer at Hartford, who had not the moral courage to print it.

It was finally printed by a Mr. Haswell, of Bennington, Vt. in 1784. Not long after its publication, a part of the edition, comprising the entire of several signatures, was accidentally consumed by fire. Whether Mr. H. deemed this fire a judgment upon him for having printed the work or not, is unknown — but, the fact is, he soon after committed the remainder of the edition to the flames, and joined the Methodist Connection; so that but few copies were circulated.

Col. Allen died in the town of Burlington, Vt., on the 12th of February, 1789, of apoplexy.

READ THE COMPLETE TEXT HERE:
http://libertyonline.hypermall.com/allen-reason.html

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

God Put Bush In Charge, Says The General Hunting bin Laden
By David Rennie
The London Telegraph

October 17th, 2003

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/10/17/wboyk17.xml

The general leading the hunt for Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein has publicly declared that the Christian God is “bigger” than Allah, who is a false “idol”, and believes the war on terrorism is a fight with Satan, it emerged yesterday.
Investigative reporters from the Los Angeles Times and NBC television have dug up two years’ worth of seemingly incendiary comments from Lt Gen William “Jerry” Boykin, the newly promoted deputy undersecretary of state of defence for intelligence.

Gen Boykin has repeatedly told Christian groups and prayer meetings that President George W Bush was chosen by God to lead the global fight against Satan.

He told one gathering: “Why is this man in the White House? The majority of Americans did not vote for him. He’s in the White House because God put him there for a time such as this.”

In January, he told Baptists in Florida about a victory over a Muslim warlord in Somalia, who had boasted that Allah would protect him from American capture. “I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real god and his was an idol,” Gen Boykin said.

He also emerged from the conflict with a photograph of the Somalian capital Mogadishu bearing a strange dark mark. He has said this showed “the principalities of darkness. . . a demonic presence in that city that God revealed to me as the enemy”.

On the Middle East, Gen Boykin told an Oregon church in June that America could not ignore its Judaeo-Christian roots. “Our religion came from Judaism and therefore [Islamic] radicals will hate us forever.”

In the same month, Gen Boykin told an Oklahoma congregation that Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were not the enemy.

“Our enemy is a spiritual enemy because we are a nation of believers. . . His name is Satan.”

The disclosures will doubtless be seized on by Muslim critics as proof that the US-led war on terrorism is a crusade against Islam. It is a charge that Mr Bush has worked hard to refute.

Though careful to respect minority religions within its ranks, the US military is strikingly devout from top to bottom. Mr Bush and several key figures in his administration are staunch Christian conservatives.

Few outside the Pentagon noticed when Gen Boykin, a 13-year member of Delta Force, the top-secret commando unit modelled on the SAS, was promoted this summer, with responsibility for speeding the flow of top-secret intelligence to commandos hunting bin Laden and other high-value targets.

At a routine press conference yesterday, Donald Rumsfeld, the normally confident defence secretary, appeared wrong-footed by the controversy. He hailed the general’s “outstanding record” and said his comments were made “in his private capacity”.

However, Mr Rumsfeld was careful to cite Mr Bush’s injunctions against viewing Islam as the enemy.

Gen Boykin told NBC that he would be curtailing his speeches to religious groups. “I don’t want to come across as a Right-wing radical,” he said.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)