The "Christian" Mafia

Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff

Postby American Dream » Tue Dec 15, 2009 1:29 am

From: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/10/9/111512/684

...Part 1: Roots of dominionism...and early links to racism

Most people do not realise how long, and how deep, the connections between dominionism and racism go.

Interestingly, premillenial dispensationalist flavours of dominionism and Christian Identity (a perversion of Christianity that teaches that white people are the actual Israelis and that black people, actual Jews, etc. are "mud people") actually can be documented to have come from the same root.

The following article, which details about Aimee Semple McPherson (one of the world's first "televangelists", an early Assemblies of God preacher who later split and founded the International Foursquare church), notes how early the links go:

Daniel Mark Epstein writes in "Sister Aimee: The Life of Aimee Semple McPherson," of her background with Jeffreys.

"She called her religion the Foursquare Gospel, after a vision she had in Oakland in 1922. Aimee was preaching on the prophet Ezekiel's vision of Man, Lion, Ox and Eagle, when suddenly she began to shake with emotion. She saw in the mysterious symbols 'a complete Gospel for body, for soul, for spirit and eternity.' ... Those four cornerstones -- Regeneration, Baptism in the Spirit, Divine Healing, and the Second Coming -- upheld an evangelistic association called the Elim Foursquare Gospel Alliance, which George Jeffreys founded in Ireland in 1915. He and his brother Stephen were England's greatest evangelists after Wesley and Whitefield, and Aimee had worked with Jeffreys. The Elim Foursquare Gospel influenced the American Assemblies of God, which embraced the same four principles before Aimee had her vision in Oakland in 1922.
" 66


(Footnotes: 66. "Sister Aimee: The Life of Aimee Semple McPherson," Daniel Mark Epstein; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Pub., 1993, pp. 264-65.)

Later in the article, it notes:

This Mercaba symbol of the ox, man, lion and eagle are the same symbols used for British Israel, George Jeffrey's Elim Movement, and Aimee Semple Mcpherson's Foursquare.

"...British-Israelism is a religious doctrine first elaborated in 19th century England as a justification for British colonialism. It claimed that the English Anglo-Saxons were one of the so-called "ten lost tribes of Israel," and that the British monarch was the direct descendant of "the throne of King David." In short, the British were "God's Chosen People." The British-Israel movement spread to Canada and the US at the turn of the century.... The Canadian British-Israel Association (CBIA), through its Internet website, sells a wide variety of white racist and anti-Jewish religious propaganda. At least 40 of its books are by Howard Rand and Destiny Publishers. Rand was the major figure in establishing British-Israelism in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s..."

British Israelism spawned the Christian Identity movement, which was incorporated in Los Angeles in 1948. Spawned from it are the Posse Comitatus, Aryan Nations, The Christian Patriot branch, The Committee of the States, the Unorganized Militia and other white supremacy swill.

"...Wesley Swift's Church of Jesus Christ Christian was initially a racist sect which became Christian Identity. The central belief in Identity doctrine is the existence of two races on earth: a godly white race descended from Adam and a satanic race fathered by Satan. Swift, a Klan leader and preacher at Amy Semple McPherson's Foursquare Church in Los Angles, was never able to make much of a success out of his doctrine, but it attracted several people who became central to what was later named "Christian Identity": San Jacinto Capt, William Potter Gale and Richard Girnt Butler."

"Capt was a California Klan leader and a believer in British Israelism, a doctrine which holds that the Israelites of the Bible are not the Jews, but rather Aryan/Anglo-Saxons. Gale was a stock-broker and former Army officer who briefly served on Gen. MacArthur's staff in the Philippines. Gale in turn recruited Butler to Swift's church during the 1950's. In 1970, Swift died, triggering a dispute between Gale and Butler. Ultimately, Butler assumed control and moved the church to Idaho, where he renamed it Aryan Nations - Church of Jesus Christ Christian." 69.

Along with Charles Parham, William Branham, reportedly also KKK, taught the "two seed" theory.

* "Now remember, Satan's son was Cain..."
* "Now remember that Eve got pregnant by Satan, and in the same day..." 70.

The "two seed" theory can be found in a number of variations, however it, "...is the central tenet of Identity doctrine and the basic justification for Christian Patriots' racism and anti-Semitism. The essence of the "two seed" theory is that there are two races on earth: one godly and one satanic."

"According to the racist and anti-Semitic "two seed" theory, the white "Adamic" peoples descended from the union of Adam and Eve. But there was also another race beginning with Cain whose father was not Adam, but Satan -- who mated with Eve in the guise of a serpent. The descendants of Cain became known as the Jews. The Adamic peoples became the Aryans or Anglo-Saxons. The Pre-Adamic (non-white) races were not human at all, but descendants of the "beasts of the fields" described in Genesis, without souls and no more than cattle in the eyes of their Aryan betters. All three races could interbreed, but the non-Adamic blood acted like a poison to exterminate the Aryan race. In the eyes of white supremacists, race-mixing became a Satanic plot to exterminate God's chosen people, the white race."

"By the "two seed" theory, Jesus was not a Jew, but an Aryan. The Adamic (Aryan) people were the lost tribes of Israel, fled to northern Europe and later became the Christian nations. There are many corollaries to the "two seed" theory which provide justification for racists to claim God's favor..."71

Obviously these teachings are totally against the Word of God. From the Pamphlet, Signs of the Supernatural, a quote from a 1961 Voice, the magazine of the Full Gospel Business Men International, which said, "...'In Bible Days, there were men of God who were Prophets and Seers. But in all the Sacred records, none of these had a greater ministry than that of William Branham."



(Footnotes: 69. Christian Patriots At War with the State; Paul de Armond;
http://nwcitizen.com/... Identity
70. p.19; The Spoken Word by William Marrion Branham; The Power of Transformation, October 31, 1965, Prescott, Arizon. Vol. 17 No. 1
71. op.cit. de Armand)

As I've discussed before in my articles on dominion theology on DailyKos, "serpent seed" theology actually originated within dominionist groups--and in fact is still used by the "spiritual warfare" crowd to claim that opponents of dominionism are the literal children of the devil. The split between dominionism proper and Christian Identity occured in 1948 when the Church of Jesus Christ Christian was founded--as a split from International Foursquare.

There are a few bits of note here--William Branham was one of the first practitioners in the AoG and other pentecostal groups of what would later be termed "dominion theology"--the word-faith aka "name it and claim it" movement originates from him, as do aspects of "latter rain" theology. Charles Fox Parham, also mentioned in the article, is the actual founder of pentecostal sects including the Assemblies of God and at least one other source notes Parnham's influence in their early theology. The AoG itself has had a long historical record of involvement with dominionism--the term "dominion theology" actually arises from theology in the word-faith movement that claims that illness occurs because "Satan presently has dominion" and that pentecostals (being the only truly "saved" individuals) must "take dominion" of all things to secure God's blessing over them and participate in "spiritual warfare".

The other group of note is the group that can be truthfully stated to have been the first dominionist group in the US in action, if not in name--the Full Gospel Businessmens' Fellowship International. FGBMFI was started by an AoG preacher and effectively operates as a "business outreach" of the Assemblies, and can legitimately be seen as a front group of that denomination; they are also responsible for promotion of dominionism throughout the AoG (and even to other non-pentecostal groups--the FGBMFI is a major promoter of "sheep stealing" and infiltration of mainstream Christian churches) and is also the source of spread of most of the spiritually abusive practices within the Assemblies of God, including the theological basis for dominionism in that denomination:

(from a preliminary list of groups that may be front-groups of, or effectively run by, the Assemblies of God)

Full Gospel Businessmen's Fellowship International (a front group of the AoG targeting businessmen and other professionals; has been associated with coercive Yoido Full Gospel Church in Korea (which is the church that originated the "Third Wave" aka "Brownsville" stuff and other coercive tactics in the AoG); per multiple reports is associated with spiritual abuse as well as dominionist planning and may be particularly responsible for dominionist infiltration of the military; per this article and this article group has falsely advertised itself as interfaith group but rejects non-dominionists)

There is even some evidence that the FGBMFI may have been the original source promoting dominionism in the Southern Baptist Convention.
Going a bit further from the Assemblies of God in particular (the fact that the denomination is hip-deep within the dominionist movement, and may be its actual originator, is quite well documented especially on sites like Yurica Report and Deception In The Church) and looking at the whole "British Israelism" thing in general--the two main descendents of that theology are pentecostals (who believe that they along with the Jewish people are the "chosen people" and--in "dominion theology" popular in pentecostal circles--must create a theocracy to "secure God's blessing") and Christian Identity (which rejects outright the idea of Jews being, well, Jewish).

Another group known as the "Fellowship" or the "Family"--a secretive association of dominionist politicians and others that can be regarded as the first documented dominionist group in the US--has an even more ignoble history of links with racists. The Harper's Magazine article Jesus Plus Nothing notes how the Fellowship (aka the Family) is still incredibly influential:

Ivanwald, which sits at the end of Twenty-fourth Street North in Arlington, Virginia, is known only to its residents and to the members and friends of the organization that sponsors it, a group of believers who refer to themselves as "the Family." The Family is, in its own words, an "invisible" association, though its membership has always consisted mostly of public men. Senators Don Nickles (R., Okla.), Charles Grassley (R., Iowa), Pete Domenici (R., N.Mex.), John Ensign (R., Nev.), James Inhofe (R., Okla.), Bill Nelson (D., Fla.), and Conrad Burns (R., Mont.) are referred to as "members," as are Representatives Jim DeMint (R., S.C.), Frank Wolf (R., Va.), Joseph Pitts (R., Pa.), Zach Wamp (R., Tenn.), and Bart Stupak (D., Mich.). Regular prayer groups have met in the Pentagon and at the Department of Defense, and the Family has traditionally fostered strong ties with businessmen in the oil and aerospace industries. The Family maintains a closely guarded database of its associates, but it issues no cards, collects no official dues. Members are asked not to speak about the group or its activities.

The organization has operated under many guises, some active, some defunct: National Committee for Christian Leadership, International Christian Leadership, the National Leadership Council, Fellowship House, the Fellowship Foundation, the National Fellowship Council, the International Foundation. These groups are intended to draw attention away from the Family, and to prevent it from becoming, in the words of one of the Family's leaders, "a target for misunderstanding." [1] The Family's only publicized gathering is the National Prayer Breakfast, which it established in 1953 and which, with congressional sponsorship, it continues to organize every February in Washington, D.C. Each year 3,000 dignitaries, representing scores of nations, pay $425 each to attend. Steadfastly ecumenical, too bland most years to merit much press, the breakfast is regarded by the Family as merely a tool in a larger purpose: to recruit the powerful attendees into smaller, more frequent prayer meetings, where they can "meet Jesus man to man."

In the process of introducing powerful men to Jesus, the Family has managed to effect a number of behind-the-scenes acts of diplomacy. In 1978 it secretly helped the Carter Administration organize a worldwide call to prayer with Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat, and more recently, in 2001, it brought together the warring leaders of Congo and Rwanda for a clandestine meeting, leading to the two sides' eventual peace accord last July. Such benign acts appear to be the exception to the rule. During the 1960s the Family forged relationships between the U.S. government and some of the most anti-Communist (and dictatorial) elements within Africa's postcolonial leadership. The Brazilian dictator General Costa e Silva, with Family support, was overseeing regular fellowship groups for Latin American leaders, while, in Indonesia, General Suharto (whose tally of several hundred thousand "Communists" killed marks him as one of the century's most murderous dictators) was presiding over a group of fifty Indonesian legislators. During the Reagan Administration the Family helped build friendships between the U.S. government and men such as Salvadoran general Carlos Eugenios Vides Casanova, convicted by a Florida jury of the torture of thousands, and Honduran general Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, himself an evangelical minister, who was linked to both the CIA and death squads before his own demise. "We work with power where we can," the Family's leader, Doug Coe, says, "build new power where we can't."

At the 1990 National Prayer Breakfast, George H.W. Bush praised Doug Coe for what he described as "quiet diplomacy, I wouldn't say secret diplomacy," as an "ambassador of faith." Coe has visited nearly every world capital, often with congressmen at his side, "making friends" and inviting them back to the Family's unofficial headquarters, a mansion (just down the road from Ivanwald) that the Family bought in 1978 with $1.5 million donated by, among others, Tom Phillips, then the C.E.O. of arms manufacturer Raytheon, and Ken Olsen, the founder and president of Digital Equipment Corporation.



Less well known is the fact that the Fellowship partnered with Nazis--yes, as in old-school Nazis--before World War II in what may have been a literal act of treason. The article "Christian Mafia" details more:

The roots of the Fellowship go back to the 1930s and a Norwegian immigrant and Methodist minister named Abraham Vereide. According to Fellowship archives maintained at the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College in Illinois, Vereide, who immigrated from Norway in 1905, began an outreach ministry in Seattle in April 1935. But his religious outreach involved nothing more than pushing for an anti-Communist, anti-union, anti-Socialist, and pro-Nazi German political agenda. A loose organization and secrecy were paramount for Vereide. Fellowship archives state that Vereide wanted his movement to "carry out its objective through personal, trusting, informal, unpublicized contact between people." Vereide's establishment of his Prayer Breakfast Movement for anti-Socialist and anti-International Workers of the World (IWW or "Wobblies") Seattle businessmen in 1935 coincided with the establishment of another pro-Nazi German organization in the United States, the German-American Bund. Vereide saw his prayer movement replacing labor unions.

(The German-American Bund was a group that can legitimately be termed an American Nazi party (it was formed from the merger of two groups, one of which was the American branch of the NSDAP--the Nazi party itself). Eventually, the group was outlawed during World War II and many of its members arrested and interned for the duration as literal enemy agents.)
In other words, the whole thing was started by someone who was a sympathiser to Nazis--not neo-Nazis, the old-school kind of Nazis who killed thirteen million people in Europe.

The links don't stop there. One of the links, of interest, is to the very person who sold Norway out to the Nazis and inspired the term "quisling" for a traitor sell-soul:

One philosophical fellow traveler of Vereide was the German Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger, a colleague of Leo Strauss, the father of American neo-conservatism and the mentor of such present-day American neo-conservatives as Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz. Strauss's close association with Heidegger and the Nazi idea of telling the big lie in order to justify the end goals - Machiavellianism on steroids -- did not help Strauss in Nazi Germany. Because he was Jewish, he was forced to emigrate to the United States, where he eventually began teaching neo-conservative political science at the University of Chicago. It is this confluence of right-wing philosophies that provides a political bridge between modern-day Christian Rightists (including so-called Christian Zionists) and the secular-oriented neo-conservatives who support a policy that sees a U.S.-Israeli alliance against Islam and European-oriented democratic socialism. For the dominion theologists, the United States is the new Israel, with a God-given mandate to establish dominion over the entire planet. Neither the secular neo-conservatives nor Christian fundamentalists seem to have a problem with the idea of American domination of the planet, as witnessed by the presence of representatives of both camps as supporters of the neo-conservative Project for a New American Century, the neo-conservative blueprint for America's attack on Iraq and plans to attack, occupy, and dominate other countries that oppose U.S. designs.

What bound all so-called "America First" movements prior to World War II was their common hatred for labor unions, Communists and Socialists, Jews, and most definitely, the administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Vereide's Prayer Breakfast Movement, pro-Nazi German groups like the Bund, and a resurgent Ku Klux Klan had more than propaganda in common - they had an interlocking leadership and a coordinated political agenda.

Not only was Vereide pro-Hitler, he was the only Norwegian of note, who was not officially a Nazi, who never condemned Norwegian Nazi leader Vidkun Quisling, a man whose name has become synonymous with traitor and who was executed in 1945. Vereide and Quisling were almost the same age, Vereide was born in 1886, Quisling in 1887. They both shared a link with the clergy, Vereide was a Methodist minister and Quisling was the son of a Lutheran minister. The Norwegian link to the Fellowship continues to this day but more on that later.



Interestingly, the article also details that many of the fundamentalist churches of the time were sympathetic to Nazis (largely because the Nazis were seen as anti-Communist)
It also seems the same tactics of demonisation were actively in force as early as the 1930's from "The Fellowship" and its founder:

The Unsuccessful Right-Wing Coup Against a Democratic President

Vereide and Buchman had important allies on Wall Street. According to Marine Corps General Smedley Butler, shortly after Franklin Roosevelt was elected President in 1932, he was approached by a group of wealthy Republican industrialists to lead an anti-Roosevelt Fascist coup against the government. As with today's Fellowship, Vereide and Buchman were merely front men for anti-Socialist big businesses who hid behind the façade of a Christian evangelical movement. To them and their bankrollers, Roosevelt was some sort of anti-Christ who was going to go to bat for the workers, blacks, the poor and women while, at the same time, menacing the ultra-rich and the rising Nazi and Fascist specter in Europe. The coup was to be financed mostly by the J. P. Morgan and Du Pont financial empires. General Butler, who had no time for these industrialists since his military forays into Central America and the Caribbean as a foot soldier on behalf of wealthy capitalists, rejected their overture. Gerald MacGuire, a Wall Street bond salesman and former Commander of the Connecticut American Legion, was the chief recruiter for the coup plot. Butler informed Congress of the plans for the coup. However, Congress was owned by Wall Street and no charges were ever brought against the plotters. Butler was incensed and went public but he was dismissed as a conspiracy theorist. Not until 1967, when journalist John Spivak uncovered the secret Congressional report, was Butler's version of the events validated. In the report of the Special Committee to Investigate Nazi Propaganda Activities in the United States, Rep. Samuel Dickstein (D-NY) concluded that there was evidence of a coup plot by the right-wing against Roosevelt. However, much to Butler's chagrin, no criminal action was taken against the plotters.

Butler said MacGuire's plan was for Butler to force Roosevelt to declare he had become too sick from polio and create a powerful new Cabinet position, the Secretary of General Affairs, to run the government on his behalf. The New Deal, something the U.S. fascists and Nazis referred to as the "Jew Deal," would have be scrapped. The comparison between the Secretary of General Affairs and the present Secretary of Homeland Security is striking. If Roosevelt did not agree to the coup plotters' demand, a half million American Legion veterans would march on Washington to physically remove Roosevelt from office. But MacGuire decided that the perception management campaign would work and an armed force would not be required. He told Butler, "You know the American people will swallow that. We have got the newspapers. We will start a campaign that the President's health is failing. Everyone can tell that by looking at him, and the dumb American people will fall for it in a second..." Shortly after his testimony before the House investigation committee, MacGuire died of pneumonia at the age of 37.



It is of note that "Christian Patriot" groups and even quite a few dominionists to this day condemn Roosevelt.

It doesn't stop there:

Meanwhile, Buchman's co-ideologist Vereide made his first entrée into the U.S. Congress. In 1942, he began to hold small and discreet prayer breakfasts for the U.S. House of Representatives. The next year, the Senate began holding prayer breakfast meetings. Vereide's Prayer Breakfast Movement was formally incorporated as the National Committee for Christian Leadership (NCCL). Its headquarters were in Chicago. In 1944, while Vereide's friends in Germany were being pummeled by the Allies, especially by the Soviet Red Army, NCCL changed its name to International Christian Leadership (ICL), an indication that Vereide saw an immediate need to extend his influence abroad in the wake of a certain Nazi defeat. Vereide also made plans to move his headquarters to Washington, DC. In 1944, his first ICL Fellowship House was established in a private home at 6523 Massachusetts Avenue. In 1945, Vereide held his first joint Senate-House prayer breakfast meeting. In 1945, Vereide quickly got together a group of powerful right-wingers for a prayer breakfast following the death of President Roosevelt, one of Vereide's and Buchman's most despised politicians. Roosevelt did not comport with a President who followed the dictates of "God's Will," a major Vereide and Buchman principle. At the breakfast were Senators H. Alexander Smith (R-NJ), Lister Hill (D-AL), and World Report publisher David Lawrence. Lawrence was an ardent foe of the New Deal.

After President Truman announced that he was going to continue FDR's programs - what he called the Fair Deal - the religious right of Republicans and southern Democrats decided to attack Truman. His vulnerability to charges that Communists were embedded in his administration would give rise to the cancer of McCarthyism. However, for the religious right of Vereide, Buchman, and their political allies, this was a necessary and God-driven form of political and moral cleansing. The radical right would also force Truman to consolidate power in a new post-war intelligence agency that would replace the Office of Strategic Services - the Central Intelligence Agency.



(No, the whole "Democrats are a bunch of satanists" slurs are nothing new. This group and the FGBMFI are pretty much the two big forces behind selling the Cold War as a literal Holy War to dominionists.)
Also (and this is the first I've read of this--it would be really nice to see some secondary confirmation) it seems George W. Bush may have been originally introduced to dominionism in a "faith-based coercion" program:

Bush had reason to be thankful to the Christian fundamentalists. They helped his son, George W. Bush, avoid a certain court martial and prison time. On or about April 18, 1972, the Houston Police arrested First Lieutenant George W. Bush of the Texas Air National Guard for possession of cocaine. Bush and a friend were booked into the Harris County jail.

Bush's father, who was serving as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, hurriedly flew to Houston from New York and began to make the required phone calls to keep his son from receiving a court martial, dishonorable discharge, and a prison sentence. As one senior Bush business partner recalled, then-Ambassador Bush knew that junior was in "deep shit."

Senior Bush arranged for his son to serve at a religious drug and alcohol rehabilitation center in San Diego between May and November 1972. Conservative San Diego was a major center for Fellowship activities.

The time Bush spent in religious rehab in San Diego represents part of the famous "gap" in Bush's National Guard service record. According to a fitness report on Bush issued by the White House in 2004, Bush was "Not rated for the period 1 May 72 through 30 Apr 73. Report for this period not available for administrative reasons." This represents the time Junior Bush was being shown the way from drugs to Jesus in San Diego and afterwards, his court-ordered community service penance in Houston. The senior Bush arranged to have the arrest record on Junior expunged and even his name removed from the police blotter. Later, a ruse that Junior Bush went to Alabama to work on the Republican Senate campaign of Winton Blount was concocted to throw off nosy opposition research investigators and journalists. The deception worked.

After drug rehab, Bush returned to Houston to perform prior court-arranged community service with Project P.U.L.L. (Professional United Leadership League), a Houston inner-city program to help troubled and mostly minority teens. It was run by John White, a former tight end for the Houston Oilers, who died in 1988. White's assistants told Knight-Ridder in late October 2004, that because the senior Bush was honorary co-chairman of Project P.U.L.L., he asked White to do him a favor by placing Junior Bush into a volunteer slot. One of White's administrative assistants told the news service that White recalled that Junior Bush had "gotten into some kind of trouble" but was not more specific. Willie Frazier, another former Houston Oiler and a P.U.L.L. volunteer in 1973, recalled to Knight-Ridder that the senior Bush impressed on White that an "arrangement" had to be made for the Junior Bush. P.U.L.L. closed its doors in 1989, a year after White's death but several P.U.L.L. associates remembered that unlike other volunteers, Junior Bush's hours as a volunteer had to be accounted for because he was in some kind of "trouble."

Senior Bush had a few other chores to take care of. One was to thank Harris County District Attorney Carol Vance, a past president of the National District Attorneys' Association, for helping to drop the drug charges against Junior and expunging the arrest record. According to close Bush associates, in appreciation, Mr. Vance was rewarded with a partnership at the prestigious Houston law firm of Bracewell & Patterson. First International Bank (later InterFirst Bank), on whose board Senior Bush served, was a major client of Bracewell & Patterson. InterFirst and its predecessor served as a primary money conduit for Saudi and other foreign money that was pumped into the business and political campaign coffers of both George Senior and Junior.

Vance also had links to the organization that would become Colson's Prison Fellowship Ministries, an adjunct of the Fellowship. Vance, an evangelical Methodist, ministered to inmates in solitary confinement in Texas prisons. Later, Vance would team up with Colson in a variety of prison ministry projects in the United States and Brazil. Governor Ann Richards appointed Vance to the Texas Board of Criminal Justice, the entity that oversees the state's Correction's Department. Vance convinced newly-inaugurated Governor George W. Bush to establish faith-based prisons in Texas, a move that was endorsed by Colson. Bush also permitted ministers to act as detoxification counselors without professional training and certification. In addition, churches were allowed to operate day care centers without state accreditation. Vance became one of the leading advocates of evangelical-run prisons in the United States - something that Colson, Bush, Coe, and the Fellowship all advocated.

Vance also saw Satan as being behind Ouija boards and the game Dungeons and Dragons - cultural smears that would be extended by his fellow evangelicals to other innocent children's icons like Harry Potter, The Wizard of Oz's Good Witch of the North and Wicked Witch of the West, the Vulcan Mr. Spock in Star Trek, and Jedi Knight Yoda in Star Wars, all accused of spreading Satanism and the Teletubbies character Tinky Winky, SpongeBob SquarePants, Bert and Ernie from Sesame Street, Buster Baxter the Bunny from Public Broadcasting's Postcards from Buster, and Barney the Dinosaur, all charged with promoting homosexuality.

Junior Bush's time in San Diego at a Christian drug and alcohol rehabilitation center is where the future President of the United States would first be given large doses of Jesus indoctrination. With Nixon's resignation in disgrace and the Republicans taking a beating in the 1974 elections, little did the Fellowship realize what a huge catch they had made in George W. Bush. Gerald Ford's administration vainly tried to salvage the Republican cause - but Ford would be defeated in the 1976 race against a born-again Christian, nuclear submarine commander, and former peanut farmer from Georgia named Jimmy Carter. True, Carter was an evangelical Christian but he was not the type favored by the Fellowship and their big business allies, especially two key members of the Ford administration, Chief of Staff Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. And Ford's CIA Director, George H. W. Bush, was miffed when Carter did not invite him top stay on as spy chief. Bush would have his revenge against the upstart former Governor of Georgia and peanut farmer soon enough
.


Again, confirmation of Dubya's participation in this program would be appreciated from researchers--if so, this could explain a great deal. (If confirmed, this would be an extremely powerful argument against "faith based coercion"!)

It also appears the Fellowship may have been instrumental in the infiltration of the military by dominionists:

The Fellowship also made inroads within the U.S. military, particularly the officers' ranks. Through an entity known as the Officers Christian Fellowship (OCF), the Fellowship tapped officers in all the services and future officers in the service academies to become "ambassadors for Christ in uniform." The motto of the OCF is "Pray, Discover, Obey." The Christian Military Fellowship served as the OCF's counterpart among the enlisted ranks. Adjunct Fellowship organizations targeted foreign officers and enlisted men, particularly in Great Britain and Australia; service spouses; and service mothers. The international military fellowship is known as the Association of Military Christian Fellowships (AMCF). One person close to the AMCF is Arthur E. ("Gene") Dewey, a retired Army officer who served as Colin Powell's Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees, and Migration. Dewey was also a personal consultant to Douglas Coe. In his State Department position, Dewey was an ardent foe of international family planning programs, including the denial of reproductive health care to refugee women.

Eventually, the Fellowship would count some of the military's top leaders among its members. They include former Joint Chiefs Chairman General David Jones, current Joint Chiefs chairman General Richard Myers, former Marine Corps Commandant and current NATO commander General James L. Jones, Iran-contra figure Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North, and, perhaps even more controversial than North, Army Lt. Gen. William "Jerry" Boykin, the military head of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's intelligence branch. In 2003, Boykin, in a speech to the First Baptist Church in Daytona Beach, Florida, referred to the United States as a "Christian nation" and, that in reference to a Somali warlord, he stated, " I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol."

The reverberations of Boykin's comments were felt around the world. But his allies and Fellowship compatriots, Rumsfeld, Myers, Kansas Representative Todd Tiahrt, and most important, George W. Bush, refused to condemn him. Calls for Boykin's reassignment when unheeded. Soon afterwards, Boykin's Pentagon intelligence group was discovered to have been involved with the torture and sexual molestation of prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The sexual molestation of prisoners included male and female teens being held in Iraq. Also of note is the current head executive director of the OCF. He is retired Lt. Gen. Bruce Fister, the former head of the U.S. Air Force Special Operations Command.



(Multiple pieces of documentation exist regarding Boykin being the architect of torture policies in both Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.)

Campus Crusade for Christ, an Assemblies of God-associated Christian Zionist group, and a second coercive group targeting college-age students are linked, too:

Another organization affiliated with the Fellowship is the Campus Crusade for Christ, which, in turn, runs something called the Christian Embassy, its outreach arm in Washington. There is also an "International Christian Embassy" in Jerusalem that also houses the studios of Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network. Through the Campus Crusade, the Fellowship and its affiliates seek converts among college students in the United States and abroad. An additional Fellowship activity is the National Student Leadership Program and the associated Navigators, which seek converts among college and high school-aged young people. The Fellowship's network can also reach out to other evangelicals for the purpose of political marches on Washington. Whether they are called "Jesus Marches," Promise Keeper rallies, or anti-abortion gatherings, the fundamentalists have been able to tap the support of Falwell; Richard Roberts, the son of Oklahoma-based evangelist Oral Roberts; and Florida-based evangelist Benny Hinn. In addition, the Fellowship has its own aggressive "Youth Corps," which is active seeking converts, according to Jeff Sharlet's Harper's article, in countries as diverse as Russia, Ukraine, Romania, India, Pakistan, Uganda, Nepal, Bhutan, Ecuador, Honduras, and Peru. The Fellowship seeks to groom young leaders for future positions of leadership in countries around the world. According to Sharlet, the goal of the Fellowship is "two hundred national and international world leaders bound together relationally by a mutual love for God and the family." In Fellowship-speak, the "family" is synonymous with the Fellowship. The strategy of placing Fellowship "moles" in foreign governments would pay off nicely when George W. Bush and his advisers had to cobble together a "Coalition of the Willing" to support the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

(The "International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem" is a Christian Zionist group that is one of approximately forty separate and distinct front groups of the Assemblies of God; one of the more infamous works they are linked to is a bit of Holocaust revisionism called The Pink Swastika (which is frequently quoted in AFA publications) that claims that LGBT people were not killed in the Holocaust and that in fact the Nazi party was almost entirely homosexual. The very dominionist group I walked away from has close links with the ICEJ, hence why I'm a bit aware of it.)

("The Navigators" are a "parachurch" group that is a force in hijacking more moderate Christian churches, largely target college-aged youth, promote "faith-based coercion" programs (Alpha USA is almost exclusively used by dominionist groups in the US in "stealth evangelism" campaigns, and in fact the Alpha courses (as presented in the US) are largely courses in how to conduct stealth evangelism), is part of the Colorado Springs complex of dominionist groups, requires agreement to a fundamentalist statement of faith, is quite explicitly dominionist, may well have invented stealth evangelism (the group has a very early history, dating back to the 1930's), and has been linked to the highly abusive "cell church" movement, quite possibly as one of its primary architects.) (Campus Crusade for Christ, of note, has also been noted as using abusive "shepherding" techniques as well as promotion of "bait and switch" evangelism.)

Quite a few dominionist-friendly legislators are linked to the Fellowship:

Past and current residents of the C Street Center have included former Representatives Steve Largent (R-OK) and Ed Bryant (R-TN), former Representative and current Democratic Governor of Maine John E. Baldacci, Senators Sam Brownback (R-KS) (Brownback is also a member of the right-wing Fascist-oriented Opus Dei sect within the Catholic Church), Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC), John Ensign (R-NV), and Tom Coburn (R-OK), Representatives Mike Doyle (R-PA), Bart Stupak (D-MI), Zach Wamp (R-TN), and former Senator Don Nickles (R-OK).

Other past members included Senators Sam Nunn (D-GA), Lincoln Chaffee (R-RI), Roger Jepsen (R-IA), Charles Percy (R-IL), Strom Thurmond (R-SC), David Durenberger (R-MN), Jennings Randolph (D-WV), Paul Trible (R-VA), Phil Gramm (R-TX), William Armstrong (R-CO), Lawton Chiles (D-FL), Dan Coats (R-IN), Jeremiah Denton (R-AL), John Stennis (D-MS), Al Gore, Jr. (D-TN), and Larry Pressler (R-SD), and former Representatives J. C. Watts (R-OK), Robert Dornan (R-CA), and Tony Hall (D-OH). George W. Bush named Hall, who purported to be a strong defender of human rights, to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations for World Hunger. In typical Fellowship fashion, Hall immediately began to lobby the UN on behalf of Monsanto to accept genetically-modified foods.

Other significant members of the Fellowship are Senators Charles Grassley (R-IA), Pete Domenici (R-NM), Conrad Burns (R-MT), Richard Lugar (R-IN), James Inhofe (R-OK), Bill Nelson (D-FL) (Nelson's wife Grace serves on the Fellowship Foundation's Board of Directors), and Rick Santorum (R-PA), Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN), and George Allen (R-VA), Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R-IL), Representatives Frank Wolf (R-VA), Tom DeLay (R-TX), Tom Feeney (R-FL), Curt Weldon (R-PA), Jerry Weller (R-IL), and Joseph Pitts (R-PA).

Friends of the Fellowship, if not outright members, include Senators Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Rick Santorum (R-PA), Jon Kyl (R-AZ), House Majority Whip Roy Blunt (R-MO), and former Senator Zell Miller (D-GA).


Somewhat disturbingly (yet not surprisingly), the Fellowship is also linked with "Third Wave" pentecostal churches promoting dominion theology--as noted in several areas.

If it were just a matter of dominionism being a "sister movement" to a racist ideology, or even Christian Identity being merely a racist split from pentecostalism, that'd be one thing. The problem is, the links are rather deeper than that (as noted, dominionism was essentially founded by racists) and the links continue to the present day.
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Postby Maddy » Tue Dec 15, 2009 5:23 pm

Suppose this goes here, or something:

Evangelist Oral Roberts dies in Calif. at age 91
Be kind - it costs nothing. ~ Maddy ~
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Postby American Dream » Mon Dec 28, 2009 10:54 am

http://www.swans.com/library/art15/barker39.html

The Religious Right And World Vision's "Charitable" Evangelism

by Michael Barker



"We analyse every project, every programme we undertake, to make sure that within that programme evangelism is a significant component. We cannot feed individuals and then let them go to hell."
—Ted Engstrom (former president of World Vision International) (1)


(Swans - December 28, 2009) Government organized foreign aid has long served as a vital means by which elite policymakers have cynically maintained a disparity of wealth between nations while simultaneously professing to do the opposite. In the United States, the major distributor of such "aid" is the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which presently has an annual budget in excess of $20 billion. Andrew Natsios, the former World Vision vice president, who has also served as the head of USAID (2001-05), demonstrated the manipulative nature of such large sums of money when he publicly acknowledged that he considers US-based organizations supported by this Agency to be "an arm of the U.S. government." It is however more normal for officials distributing such geostrategic funding to emphasize the apolitical nature of such monies. The mainstream media does little to challenge this myth and regularly plays up the altruistic intentions of the government. Unfortunately, this means that in recent years a large proportion of the US public has believed that foreign aid was one of the two largest items in the federal budget, even though "less than 0.5 percent of the budget went for anything remotely resembling foreign aid."

Despite their overestimation of their own government's altruism, the private philanthropy of many US citizens -- like those from many other wealthy countries -- is high. For example, according to the Giving USA Foundation, in 2005 "Americans gave away more than $260 billion to thousands of charities, philanthropies, churches, disaster relief funds, and myriad other do-good projects." This suggests that that if a sizable proportion of this money could be diverted to groups that addressed some of the root causes of injustice, the public alone could make a significant dent (independent of their government's own actions) in counteracting the influence of ruling elites. At present though, this is not the case, and most public donations are distributed (in good faith) to support charitable organizations that already obtain strong support from the US government. In part such public funding of elitist groups owes much to the fact that such organizations maintain favourable profiles in the mainstream media, and are also able to engage in expensive and sophisticated publicity campaigns to garner public support. World Vision is just one such group, and this article examines their historical ties to US foreign policy elites and New Right religious activists to demonstrate why buying a World Vision present for a loved one is not quite all it is cracked up to be.

World Vision's Cold Warriors

According to their Web Site, "World Vision began with the vision of one man -- the Reverend Bob Pierce" who, when on a trip to China in 1947, felt compelled to sponsor the upbringing of a "battered and abandoned" child named White Jade. Reverend Pierce then "began building an organisation dedicated to helping the world's children, and in 1950 World Vision was born." World Vision now works with children from all over the world, but their "first child sponsorship programme" was launched in 1953 "in response to the needs of hundreds of thousands of orphans at the end of the Korean War." The initial focus of World Vision's activities is particularly noteworthy because of the integral role that the Korean War fulfilled in the history of US militarism. (2)

Although not mentioned on World Vision's official "History" page, since 1947 Reverend Pierce had been a full-time travelling evangelist for the Youth for Christ movement -- an organization born in the mid-1940s -- which shortly took Pierce "to Asia to evangelize American servicemen." So it is intriguing that David Stoll observes that World Vision "was a product of the Cold War"; noting that one of Reverend Pierce's first overseas campaigns was in China, "where Youth for Christ hoped that evangelical Christianity would stiffen the resistance to communist advance." (3) Conceived as a bulwark against communism, World Vision's work in Vietnam and Cambodia was "heavily subsidized by USAID, [which] rais[ed] understandable fears about its objectives." (4)

In her book Spiritual Warfare: The Politics of the Christian Right (South End Press, 1989), Sara Diamond writes of the "disastrous implications" of the "unchecked intervention in the culture and political economy of Third World communities" as manifested in the "escalation of Christian Right missionary relief and development work, [which is] increasingly organized in such a way as to attract both more participants and more grant money from the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID)." (5) Greg Grandin concurs with this analysis, observing how during the 1980s: "In order to bypass public and Congressional opposition, the White House outsourced the 'hearts and minds' component of its Central American wars to evangelicals." This war on people's minds is clearly a massive growth industry and the U.S. evangelical missionary project now "has an annual income of two billion dollars, equivalent to one fifth of aid transferred by [nongovernmental organizations] worldwide." (6) Given such well-funded trends, it is not surprising that in Ecuador (as reported in 1981) the Catholic human rights organization Pax Christi denounced World Vision as a "Trojan Horse" for US foreign policy. (7) Thus as Stoll writes:

One of the first things Ecuadorians noticed about World Vision was the discrepancy between what it said and what it did. Although the group described itself as Christian, not evangelical, it was channeling its help exclusively through evangelicals. Instead of working through the cabildo -- the elected council in Quichua villages -- it was bypassing them and turning its funds over to evangelical leaders. The ensuing quarrels were breaking up mingas, the communal workdays in Quichua culture.

Ecuadorians were still debating a similar discrepancy in the work of the Summer Institute of Linguistics. Despite claims to be a non-sectarian scientific organization, it had turned out to be an evangelical mission. Now that SIL had lost its government contract, Ecuadorian opponents suspected that World Vision had inherited the same objectives. It was as if the whole operation was calculated to sharpen conflicts between Catholics and Protestants, divide communities, and make it harder for peasants to fight for their rights. (p.289)

Billy Graham's Evangelical World Vision

To gain a little insight into the controversial nature of World Vision's humanitarian forays it is important to examine the influence of Youth for Christ's first full-time employee, the Reverend Billy Graham. Graham is an integral character in the global evangelical project, and the former president of World Vision International, W. Stanley Mooneyham (1969-82), had prior to taking up this appointment served as Graham's personal assistant, and then as vice president of international relations for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. Indeed, World Vision provides an excellent example of the philosophy of new evangelicalism in practice, and their work responds to the National Association of Evangelicals' call "for the application of Christianity to every aspect of life including the social." (8) Here of course it is vital to note that Graham played an important role in "leading the way" at the National Association of Evangelicals, ensuring that new evangelicalism was rapidly "transformed from a small group of denominational leaders into a national movement." (9) Furthermore, Graham's ties to World Vision continue through his son, Franklin Graham, as when Pierce was forced to resign from his position as World Vision's president in 1967, he founded a new organization, Samaritan's Purse, and Franklin "became Pierce's protégé"; then when Pierce died in 1978, the young Graham became Samaritan Purse's new president (a position he maintains to this day).

While Billy Graham is largely heralded by the mainstream media as an apolitical crusader for justice, this myth has been utterly dispelled by investigative journalist Cecil Bothwell. Indeed, Bothwell concludes his book-length review of Graham's life by surmising: "In every way, Graham was the spiritual father of today's right-wing religious leaders who inject themselves into the realm of politics." Bothwell adds: "More than any other public figure in our history, Graham undermined the Founders' sceptical deism and sought to rebrand the United States as a Christian nation, its armies the rightful instruments of Christian crusade and empire." (10) So while in the past Graham's evangelical career has been associated with moderate evangelism, in actual fact his pragmatic approach quickly brought him into close alliances with more conservative forces. Bearing this in mind it is appropriate that the well-known funder of the Religious Right, the Arthur S. DeMoss Foundation, has been a major supporter of Graham's son's group, Samaritan Purse, as well as funding the work of other conservative groups like Campus Crusade for Christ (whose founders included Billy Graham; see later) and Servant Group International.

One reason so few people are aware of Graham's conservative pedigree is not least the support he has gained from the mass media. From his early days as an evangelist with Youth for Christ he had the backing of the strongly anti-communist Hearst media empire. Moreover, Graham's ability to harness the arts of "Madison Avenue" in the service of evangelism also helped ensure that he received the backing of "the hierarchy of New York's mainline Protestant denominations." As Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett recount in their book, Thy Will Be Done, the Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil (HarperCollins, 1995), in the 1950s:

A vision of global missions persuaded [John D. Rockefeller] junior to OK a $50,000 donation. It was done quietly, without press releases or fanfare, a secret affirmation that helped make the New York Crusade "a turning point in Graham's American ministry." It also was a turning point for Fundamentalism, ending its isolation on the fringe of American religious life and giving the movement the second wind it needed to make its postwar revival a durable mass phenomenon.

[...]

Billy Graham's enormous success with Manhattan's business elite in 1957 signified that the U.S. Christian Fundamentalist movement, like the United States herself, was at the edge of a major transition. Graham's organization gave the movement a new corporate cohesiveness; his moderate evangelizing of modernist Protestants set the tone for the movement's future success. This success, in turn, fed upon a United States that was in cultural discontinuity with the old order. In the 1950s, the era of small-business ethics finally gave way in mainstream America to the march of the modern corporation and its big-business ethic of efficiency and conformity within a mass culture. (p.294) (11)
In addition to these excellent elite connections, Graham created his own evangelical media empire to further consolidate his views in the popular consciousness of US citizens, and one small but significant publication in this regard was Christianity Today. Founded in 1956 with the financial support of J. Howard Pew (of Pew Charitable Trusts fame), Christianity Today's founding executive director was Graham's father-in-law, L. Nelson Bell, who served in this position until his death in 1973. Here it is important to recognize that when Graham began dating L. Nelson Bell's daughter (and his future wife) Ruth McCue Bell in the 1940s her father was considered to be "one of the most powerful men in the Christian missionary world." Later in the 1960s, L. Nelson Bell even served as the head of the Asheville chapter of the radical anti-communist witch-hunters, the John Birch Society. (12)

Bible Translators, and the Vision (for a New Right) World

Long-time John Birch Society supporter Nelson Bunker Hunt (a man "not known for his scruples... own[ing] oil and gas leases all over the world") (13) can at this point be indirectly connected to Graham through the controversial Wycliffe Bible Translators -- an organization that works closely with the aforementioned Summer Institute of Linguistics. (14) This is because Graham served on Wycliffe's board of directors "from about 1958 until 1961," while some time later Hunt acted as a trustee of the Wycliffe Bible Translators' "largest undertaking to date, the International Linguistic Center." (15) Although Graham left Wycliffe's board because of a "dispute over the founder's fundraising tactics," his Billy Graham Evangelistic Association "continued to provide funds to Wycliffe well into the 21st Century." (16) Given these links it is fitting that just prior to his death in 1982, Wycliffe Bible Translators' founder, Cameron Townsend, was...

... listed as one of several dozen Christian leaders in the Religious Roundtable, a New Right vehicle "to fight in the political arena for pro-God, pro-family, pro-American causes." The Roundtable was organized in 1979 by a former Wycliffe Associates board member, E.E. McAteer, who had just introduced a flag and Bible entrepreneur named Jerry Falwell to his associates in Washington, thereby helping to launch the Moral Majority. (17)

Here it is important to pause to examine the organizations that eventually evolved into the Religious Roundtable, as the...

... first major effort to build a national movement of conservative evangelicals came in 1974. Arizona Congressman John Conlan and Bill Bright, president and founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, devised a plan to politicize and educate people in every Congressional district who would become part of a national grassroots effort to elect evangelical Christians sharing a conservative political agenda. At the center of their plan was Third Century Publishers, organized in 1974 to publish books and other materials promoting a conservative political and economic philosophy based on scriptural principles. Its chief publication was One Nation Under God by Rus Walton, intended for use in the study of "Christian economics." In addition to his post as editor-in-chief of Third Century, Walton was a director of the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Conservative Union. (18)

In the same year John Conlan and Bill Bright created the soon to be defunct Christian Embassy, an organization whose board included "religious leaders such as Billy Graham, W. A. Criswell, Norman Vincent Peale, and Harold Lindsell of Christianity Today." (19) Graham was a "long-time friend" of Bright, and upon his death in 2003, he commented: "He is a man whose sincerity and integrity and devotion to our Lord have been an inspiration and a blessing to me ever since the early days of my ministry."

Bright is best known for founding the Campus Crusade for Christ in 1951 with the help of Billy Graham amongst others -- an organization Bright had led until 2000 when he passed the reigns of the Crusade over to Steve Douglass (who presently leads the organization along with the associated Campus Crusade for Christ International). Not surprisingly, given the conservative nature of this organization, the right-wing philanthropist Nelson Bunker Hunt rears his head again, as he served as the past chairman of the executive committee of Campus Crusade for Christ International's Here's Life Campaign, and funded the production of Bright's world-famous Jesus film (1979). In 1994 Bright went on to co-found the right-wing Alliance Defense Fund with Larry Burkett (amongst others), (20) an individual who just over a decade earlier had founded the National Christian Foundation with Terry Parker (an individual who went on to serve as a board member of the neoconservative Family Research Council), and Ron Blue (who is presently a board member of Campus Crusade for Christ International). (21)

Returning to the conservative Wycliffe Bible Translators, to this day Wycliffe's work remains connected to World Vision luminaries. For example, Wycliffe board member Atul Tandon is the senior vice president of donor engagement for World Vision U.S. Furthermore, Wycliffe board member, and author of The U.S. Military/NGO Relationship in Humanitarian Interventions (US Army Peacekeeping Institute, 1996) Chris Seiple is the son of the former long-serving president of World Vision U.S., Robert Seiple (1987-98). (22) Like his father, Chris is intimately enmeshed within powerful elite networks and he is a senior fellow at the neoconservative Foreign Policy Research Institute, (23) a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (London), (24) and serves as the president of the Institute for Global Engagement (which was co-founded by his father). (25)

The current chair of the Wycliffe Bible Translators' fourteen-person-strong board of directors is former World Vision International board member Brady Anderson. Prior to becoming the US Ambassador to Tanzania (1994-7), Anderson had spent six years working with Summer Institute of Linguistics (in Kenya, Ethiopia and Tanzania), and after vacating his post as the US Ambassador to Tanzania, he served for two years as the USAID administrator (1999-2001). (26) In 2001 Anderson was succeeded at USAID by Andrew Natsios, an individual who had previously served as a vice president of World Vision (from 1993 until 1998). As if this evidence of the intimate relations maintained between World Vision and the US government were not enough, in an interview conducted in 2004 Anderson observed how World Vision had been "the largest handler of food in the world, and almost all the food was donated by the U.S. government." (pdf) An important point given that the US government does not donate food out of generosity; rather their food distribution networks are considered to be an integral weapon through which to promote their geostrategic interests. (27)

The affiliations of another Wycliffe board member, Tom Lin, further serve to expand our understanding of the type of work being undertaken by World Vision, as he is presently the regional director (central US) of the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship -- an "evangelical campus mission" that was formed in 1941. Again the Fellowship is directly connected to right-wing elites, as their Internet editor and media coordinator, Gordon Govier, is the secretary of the arch-conservative organization Gegrapha. (28) Incidentally, World Vision's former events and communications director T. Diane Bryhn was appointed (in 2003) to be Gegrapha's first executive director. (29) World Vision also maintains direct connections to the Fellowship as the latter's board of trustees includes Dolphus Weary, who is a former board member of World Vision U.S., and the former president of the Fellowship, Stephen Hayner, is a board member of both World Vision International and the International Justice Mission. (30)

Finally, considering the longstanding allegations that global evangelism has served the foreign policy interests of the US government and their allied mining corporations, it is fitting that Kevin Jenkins, the new head of World Vision International, is a board member of the Canadian-based global energy company Nexen, a corporation that is involved in the highly destructive mining of Canada's tar sands on the land of Canada's First Nations people.

Concluding Notes

If you believe in the goals of Christian evangelism, or alternatively are a strong supporter of the US government's brutal foreign policy, then World Vision is the charity for you. If, however, you identify with neither of the above, then spending your hard earned wages on financing Christian imperialism is not sensible. (31) Contrary to the popular imagery presented in their celebrity-backed promotional materials, World Vision is not helping to make the world a better, more just place. To be fair though, few, if any, of the huge nongovernmental organizations vying for our attention (or money) administer more than Band-Aids to help cover-up the ongoing exploitation and destruction of life. That said, million dollar Band-Aids do provide an effective means of letting otherwise concerned citizens sleep well at night under the misapprehension that they have compensated for their government's unjust foreign policies. Yet meaningful solutions require more than Band-Aids; indeed, equitable solutions demand an active citizenry that engages in the politics of life and death, and the rejection of the anti-democratic initiatives promoted by elite powerbrokers, be they Christian or otherwise.

The old saying goes: "Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime." However, if there are no fish to harvest because they have been stolen to support the "teachers'" conspicuous overconsumption, what then? Spending money on, or buying "presents" for, those who are oppressed by capitalism's endless quest for profit does not sustain democracy or address the root causes of exploitation. By all means we should maintain solidarity with the oppressed, but before we send "aid," we must ensure that we have done everything in our power to end the manner by which we benefit from their hardship. There is no doubt that the downtrodden will find it much easy to rise up from poverty when they are not being crushed by imperialism.

First and foremost we need to understand how our political system thrives off global inequality. In 1948, for example, the reasons for this enduring exploitation were put on the (then secret, now declassified) record by the head of the US State Department Policy Planning Staff, George Kennan. He observed:

[W]e have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population. [...] In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.

Lending your support to massive nongovernmental organizations, like World Vision, will not address the problems caused by such antidemocratic governmental objectives. Instead we must challenge such unjust applications of power at all levels. The solution is simple: join or create a locally-based group run on equitable principles, invite your friends to join you, and be sure to address the root causes, not the symptoms, of our world's problems.


Notes

1. Graham Hancock, Lords of Poverty: The Power, Prestige, and Corruption of the International Aid Business (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1991), p.9. (back)

2. David Horowitz, From Yalta to Vietnam; American Foreign Policy and the Cold War (Penguin, 1967); Jon Halliday, "What Happened in Korea? Rethinking Korean History 1945-1953," Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 5, (1973); Bruce Cumings, North Korea: Another Country (The New Press, 2004). (back)

3. David Stoll, Is Latin America Turning Protestant?: The Politics of Evangelical Growth (University of California Press, 1990), p.284, p.282. "After the Kuomintang regime fell, Pierce led campaigns in South Korea just before war broke out in 1950. As the red tide surged forward, he came home with movie footage showing the plight of refugees and began raising money to help them." (p.282) (back)

4. Ellsworth Culver served as the executive vice president of World Vision International from 1958 until 1961, "and led the organization's expansion throughout Asia and Latin America." Later during the "Cambodian refugee crisis" he became executive vice president (1978-81) of Food for the Hungry, a group that was founded in 1971 and which "embraces an intensely personal and biblical response to God's call to end physical and spiritual hungers worldwide." Food for the Hungry's current president, Benjamin Homan, recently and simultaneously acted as the chair of USAID's Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid. In addition, before joining Food for the Hungry as vice president of mobilization in 2003, Marc Kyle and his wife Beth served seven years in the Philippines with Wycliffe Bible Translators. One particularly interesting sponsor of Food for the Hungry's work is the right-wing religious activist, Howard Ahmanson, who is also a member of the secretive Council for National Policy (see footnote #21). In 1982, Culver co-founded the Christian nongovernmental organization Mercy Corps, and went on to serve as their president from 1984 until 1993 (for further details see "Alternative Dispute Resolution or Revolution"). World Vision International continues to maintain close connections to US foreign policy priorities in Asia as evidenced by their current board member Kleo-Thong Hetrakul, who from 1998 until 2000 was the executive director at the International Monetary Fund, "looking after 12 countries in South-East Asia and the Pacific."

According to World Vision U.S.'s 2007 Annual Report their total revenue for 2007 was $957 million, $427 from private cash contributions, $220 from government grants (23%), $301 million from gifts-in-kind, and $9 million from other income. In terms of expenses 86% went on programs, 9% on fundraising, and 5% on management and general. $185 million was utilized for child sponsorship, and $166 million for the gifts in kind (52% of which were classified as pharmaceuticals and medical supplies). (back)

5. Sara Diamond, Spiritual Warfare: The Politics of the Christian Right (South End Press, 1989), p.vi. "'Humanitarian aid' and 'psychological operations' are two areas of 'total war' where the Christian Right serves U.S. foreign policy objectives best. Acting either as 'private' benefactors or as agents of the U.S. government, Christian Right 'humanitarian' suppliers and promoters of anticommunist ideology use religion to mask the aggressive, cynical nature of 'humanitarian' projects. Cloaked as missionary evangelism, the 'spiritual warfare' component of counterinsurgency escapes serious attention by anti-intervention activists who are justifiably preoccupied with stopping more massive, direct forms of U.S. militarism." (p.162) "The U.S. AID is an arm of the U.S. State Department, and its relief and development projects are designed to increase Third World political and economic dependence on the United States. Because World Vision's evangelism and humanitarian programs are woven together in a seamless web, AID directly finances World Vision's proselytization of Third World aid recipients." (p.220) Diamond provides an overview of World Vision's dubious record of collaborating with US foreign policy elites (pp.220-2). (back)

6. Julie Hearn, "The 'invisible' NGO: US evangelical missions in Kenya," Journal of Religion in Africa, 32 (1), 2002, p.40. "Although primarily perceived as an aid agency, evangelism lies at the heart of World Vision's work. It has spent years working on how to bring conversion with development and in 1997 launched a two-year research project into their relationship. Its newsletter explains, 'often it takes a deep look into the culture of a particular people to discover those issues that will ultimately determine whether a given development effort will bring spiritual transformation'." (p.54) (back)

7. David Stoll, Is Latin America Turning Protestant?, p.268. See, Frank Viviano, Pacific News Service, "CIA Church Group in Honduras," Guardian (New York), August 26, 1981, p.13. (back)

8. Erica Bornstein, The Spirit of Development: Protestant NGOs, Morality, and Economics in Zimbabwe (Stanford University Press, 2003), p.19, p.20. "The theology of World Vision and that of the new evangelicals grew both out of and in reaction to Fundamentalism. The Fundamentalists of the 1920s were reacting to secularizing tendencies in the United States, and in the process, they developed an anti-modernist doctrine called 'dispensationalism.' Dispensationalism was a version of pre-millennialism: the doctrine that Christ will return personally to found a kingdom in Jerusalem where he will reign for one thousand years. ... Fundamentalism's anti-modernist interpretation of the Bible insisted on the inerrancy of biblical scripture. Every word was the perfect word of God. Fundamentalists interpreted cataclysmic biblical prophecies literally." (p.19)

"Ties between Fuller's mission school and World Vision, the mission organization, ran deep. In 1954, one of World Vision's board members was Carlton Booth, Professor of Evangelism at Fuller Seminary. In 1966, the Missions Advance Research and Communications Center (MARC) began at World Vision in association with Fuller, as the research and publishing arm of World Vision. Fuller's School of World Mission trained World Vision staff, and World Vision staff taught, and continue to teach today, at Fuller Seminary. There was such cross-fertilization between Fuller and World Vision that a World Vision employee said in a 1994 interview, 'The idea of World Vision was started in conversations in the basement of Fuller Theological Seminary." (p.20) (back)

9. David Farber and Jeffe Roche, The Conservative Sixties (Peter Lang Publishing, 2003), p.129. (back)

10. Cecil Bothwell, The Prince of War: Billy Graham's Crusade for a Wholly Christian Empire (Brave Ulysses Books, 2007), p.196, p.197. (back)

11. "Key support for Graham came from Robert J. McCracken, Rev Harry Fosdick's successor at Riverside Church; Union Theological Seminary president Henry Pitney Van Dusen, a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation; and mining scion Cleveland E. Dodge." (p.293) "Billy Graham's New Testament of a living, forgiving God, now projected on television screens in millions of homes, offered solace to the lonely, the alienated, the guilt stricken, and the powerless. His predecessor, Dwight Moody, had attacked satanly labor unrest and sinful cities and stoked millenarian hopes among hard-pressed smallholders for the Second Coming and an end of the world that was ruining them; in so doing, he had married his career to the solid citizens of the industrial trusts who were bringing this corporate world into being -- families like the Rockefellers. His own son-in-law, Rev. Arthur Packard, even ended up working for Nelson's father in Room 5600. Five decades after Moody's first triumphant 'campaign' in New York, it was left to Billy Graham to usher into the corporate culture the last vestiges of the rural population that had migrated to the new corporate suburbias." (p.294) However, such Rockefeller-backed evangelism took an undesirable turn in the 1960s, when fundamentalist preachers obtained "corporate angels like the Pews of Philadelphia and the Hunts of Texas, men whose wealth offered Fundamentalism unprecedented financial means to enter politics on a more sophisticated level. Through the modern corporation and the armed forces, Fundamentalism had experienced men and women who had seen the world and learned modern organizational, fund-raising, communication, and transportation skills. So armed, all the furies of the Religious Right focused their hatred on the one man standing in the way of the Republican nomination of ultraconservative Barry Goldwater: the quintessential liberal of the Eastern Establishment, Nelson Rockefeller." (p.408) Indeed, as Steve Bruce writes in The Rise and Fall of the New Christian Right: Conservative Protestant Politics in America, 1978-1988 (Oxford University Press, 1988), in the 1950s "John D. Rockefeller gave a large gift to the newly formed World Council of Churches -- the fundamentalists' 'great Satan'." (p.53)

"Most of the well-known names of American revival religion -- Oral Roberts and Billy Graham since the 1940s and 1950s, and Pat Robertson, Jimmy Swaggart, and Jim Bakker among contemporaries -- are Pentecostals. Only a few are fundamentalists, such as Jerry Falwell and Tim LaHaye. There used to be considerable differences in doctrine and organizational style between fundamentalists and Pentecostals, to the point of bitter animosity. These differences narrowed gradually in the context of the American postwar consensus and in particular since they came together in a then-political alliance with the New Right in the mid-1970s; even so, the differences remain significant enough to bear in mind." Jan Nederveen Pieterse (ed), Christianity and Hegemony: Religion and Politics on the Frontiers of Social Change (Berg Publishers, 1992), p.8. (back)

12. Cecil Bothwell, The Prince of War, p.20. (back)

13. During the 1960s the billionaire Nelson Bunker Hunt was a financial and vocal supporter of the John Birch Society, and in the late 1970s he became a council member of the Society. More recently Bunker has rejoined the John Birch Society as a council member. Bunker has been a major funder of the Right and has been closely associated with the secretive Council for National Policy, a former haunt of the infamous televangelist Reverend Pat Robertson. Furthermore, Bunker was an important financial funder of Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network, and he even played a significant role (in the mid-1980s) in supporting a campaign to help Pat Robertson become the president of the United States. (back)

14. Wycliffe Bible Translators was established in 1942 by a former missionary named William Cameron Townsend, who had "resolved that every man, woman and child should be able to read God's Word in their own language." Named after John Wycliffe, the man who first translated the Bible into English, Townsend who was based in Guatemala, had initially founded "Camp Wycliffe" in 1934 (as a linguistics training school), but by 1942, this camp "had grown into two affiliate organizations, Wycliffe Bible Translators and the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL)." David Stoll writes in his book Fishers of Men or Founders of Empire? The Wycliffe Bible Translators in Latin America (Zed Books, 1983), that "although SIL denies that it evangelizes ... [c]onveniently enough, Bible translation is an intensive form of Bible study." (p.6) Indeed, Stoll points out how SIL's "aura of scientific legitimacy evaporated after 1973, when a shoe-string anti-imperialist research body partially supported by WCC sources, the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA), published Laurie Hart's `The Wycliffe Translators: Pacifying the Last Frontiers'. Based on Barbados positions and Wycliffe's own literature, Hart demonstrated that SIL and WBT were one disturbing organization. Highlights included: 1) its enthusiasm for the Vietnam War; 2) its view of indigenous religion as 'Satan's stronghold'; 3) the Ecuadorian branch's use of airplanes, wing-mounted loudspeakers and converts to push hostile Auca Indians out of the way of U.S. oil companies and into a reserve; 4) the Colombian branch's alleged complicity in police and army repression of Guahibo Indians in 1970; and 5) its immunity from protest due to friends high in government." Although Stoll does not agree with political implications undergirding this anti-imperialist report -- in fact, he regularly refers to such authors as conspiracy theorists -- he writes that: "With the important exception of the Guahibo charge, the factual basis [of the report] was beyond dispute." (p.142) With regards conspiracies, Stoll adds: "Dismissing SIL's explanations, conspiracy theorists interpreted its activities as a mode of North American infiltration designed to control strategic areas, facilitate internal repression, and establish a popular base for a repeat of history: eventual U.S. military intervention." (p.227)

Stoll notes how: "Even if one does not care to accept SIL members' claims to innocence, they may be sincere. 'We don't even know what the CIA is,' a member despaired as her branch was driven from Mexico with a CIA reputation. The danger her organization poses is not primarily that of a 'front' for something else. While the Summer Institute was organized as an intrigue, it is clearly an evangelical intrigue with its own jealously guarded objectives. The deeper problem is the group's naivete, its capacity for looking the other way and serving dictatorships, if that will serve the Great Commission, its susceptibility to contractual extortion and right-wing propaganda, such that members can easily come to believe that the trap into which they have stepped is the Lord's plan. Of this there is no better illustration than Bible translation in Vietnam." (pp.85-6)

Enrique Mayer in his review of Soren Hvalkof and Peter Aaby's edited book Is God an American? An Anthropological Perspective on the Missionary Work of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (Survival International, 1981) surmised that: "The SIL claims that it does not force anyone to become a Christian, yet the local situations that they consciously manipulate create enormous pressure for the natives, so that the choice given to them to convert or not to convert is, in reality, no choice at all. People who refuse to convert are ostracized and marginalized; communities are split into warring factions and the real defenders of native traditions become outcasts in their own societies." American Ethnologist, 10 (3), (1983), p.618. (back)

15. David Stoll, Fishers of Men or Founders of Empire? The Wycliffe Bible Translators in Latin America (Zed Books, 1983), p.261. He adds, the International Linguistic Center "is modest, even humble compared to another of Bunker's charities, the Campus Crusade for Christ of Wycliffe supporter Bill Bright. By 1982, Hunt and Bright plan to raise $1 billion for world evangelism." (p.262) (back)

16. Cecil Bothwell, The Prince of War, p.65. (back)

17. Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett, Thy Will Be Done, the Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil (HarperCollins, 1995), p.262. Edward McAteer "was more than a friend of Cam Townsend; he was a major figure on the board of Wycliffe Associates." Colby and Dennett continue: "The sheer human energy amassed by Wycliffe Associates was impressive, but the financial core was fueled by reliable wealthy SIL backers like North Carolina's James A. Jones, one of the largest contractors for military bases in Vietnam, and oilman Nelson Bunker Hunt of Texas. 'Bunker Hunt had helped me considerably,' McAteer freely offered." (p.805) "Cam was one of those who followed McAteer into the founding meeting of the Religious Roundtable. If he had any reservations about where this would lead SIL and how it would play in Latin America (where Reagan's name was anathema because of his condemnation of Carter's Panama Canal treaty), Cam's base of support in the homeland and his top financial backers left him little choice. He was, at the end of his career, trapped by the Far Right Fundamentalist base on which he had built Wycliffe's success at home." (p.805) (back)

18. Robert Wuthnow and Robert Liebman, The New Christian Right: Mobilization and Legitimation (Aldine Transaction, 1983), p.50. (back)

19. Robert Wuthnow and Robert Liebman, The New Christian Right, p.51. (back)

20. For criticism of the Alliance Defense Fund, see Bill Berkowitz, "Crusade for a Christian nation," Zmag, June 2005. (back)

21. The "strategic partner" of the National Christian Foundation is the longstanding Christian youth group, Young Life (an organization that was formed in 1941). Notably E. Peb Jackson formerly served as a senior vice president of public affairs for Young Life, before later becoming a founding board member of the right-wing pressure group Focus on the Family, and a board member of the Council for National Policy (1998-99 and 2001-03) -- a "secretive group of the foremost right-wing activists and funders in the United States" whose early supporters included Nelson Bunker Hunt. Jackson is presently the vice president of global initiatives at Rick Warren's Saddleback Church/Purpose Driven Ministries "where he oversees the Ministry's... work in Africa, especially Rwanda." (Incidentally, Pastor Rick Warren has stated that one of his "most important role models" is Billy Graham.)

The Council for National Policy (CNP) "was founded in 1981 when Tim LaHaye, a leader of Moral Majority, proposed the idea to wealthy Texan T. Cullen Davis. Davis contacted billionaire Nelson Bunker Hunt, and from that point on they began recruiting members. By 1984, the Council had four hundred members." Tom Ellis succeeded LaHaye in 1982 as president of the CNP, and "[a]fter Ellis' one-year term as president of CNP in 1982-83, he was succeeded by Nelson Bunker Hunt, Pat Robertson, and Richard DeVos of the Amway Corporation." Not surprisingly, the John Birch Society's (JBS) "influence on the political goals of the CNP is significant. ... By 1984, John Birch Society Chairman A. Clifford Barker and Executive Council Member William Cies were CNP members." Russ Bellant, The Coors Connection: How Coors Family Philanthopy Undermines Democratic Pluralism (South End Press, 1991), pp.36-7, p.38. Also see, Deborah Huntington and Ruth Kaplan, "Whose Gold is behind the Altar? Corporate Ties to Evangelicals," in: Marlene Dixon, Susanne Jonas and Tony Platt (eds), World Capitalist Crisis and the Rise of the Right (Synthesis Publications, 1982).

Formed as an offshoot of Young Life, in 1961 the Young Life Foundation was established "for the sole purpose of financially encouraging the strategic ministry work of Young Life," and their current board of trustees includes conservative notables like Newton Crenshaw, who is the vice president of the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and Company, L. Brooks Entwistle, who is the managing director and CEO of Goldman Sachs India, and Bruce Hosford who serves on the chairmans' council of the neoliberal "environmental" group Conservation International.

The current executive vice president and chief operating officer of the International Justice Mission is Scott Lewis, who prior to joining the Mission in 2006 had spent 21 years working with Young Life. Another person who like Lewis has devoted a large chunk of his life to working with Young Life is Jay Grimstead, who similarly worked for them for 20 years. Grimstead is the founder and director of the theocratic Coalition on Revival. Set up in 1984 the Coalition is a Reconstructionist/Dominionist group, and another notable person who has signed up to the Coalition on Revival's Manifesto is Ted Engstrom, who is a former president of World Vision International. (Not surprisingly given this background Grimstead considers Francis Schaeffer to be "his mentor" and close personal friend.) According to Martin Durham, Reconstructionism was "[c]reated initially by the Presbyterian thinker (and John Birch Society activist) R. J. Rushdoony at the end of the 1950s"; see Martin Durham, The Christian Right: The Far Right and the Boundaries of American Conservativism (Manchester University Press, 2000), p.109. (back)

22. From 1987 until 1998, Robert Seiple was president of World Vision U.S., and just prior to this he had spent five years as president of Eastern College and Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary. After leaving World Vision in 1998 he joined the Clinton administration spending two years as the first U.S. ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom. Then in 2000, Seiple along with the aid of his wife co-founded the Institute for Global Engagement, a faith-based NGO that at present "sponsors two educational divisions," the Council on Faith and International Affairs, and the Global Engagement Network. Notable members of the Institute's six-person-strong board of directors are Nicole Bibbins Sedaca (who is the senior director in the U.S. Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor), John Jenkins (who is a board member of the National Association of Evangelicals), and the Institute's president Chris Seiple (the son of Robert Seiple).

The nexus between neoconservatives and evangelical "humanitarianism" was highlighted by Conn Hallihan in his article "The Right's stuff in Africa: Necons, evangelicals and Sudan" (Counterpunch, March 15, 2007). Hallihan demonstrated how when the infamous neoconservative Elliot Abrams was appointed chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (in 1999), he "began levering U.S. foreign policy away from a concern for poverty toward a focus on 'religious persecution' in the Sudan, Russia and China." Fellow Commission member Robert Seiple was specifically mentioned along with former USAID administrator Andrew Natsios as one of the "key actors for the Bush Administration in Sudan." For a detailed analysis of the problems associated with calls for a humanitarian intervention in Sudan, especially from the religious Right, see "The Project for a New American Humanitarianism: Olympian ambitions from Darfur to Tibet and Beijing." (back)

23. Harvey Sicherman, the President and Director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, formerly served as Special Assistant to Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig, Jr. (1981-82) and was a member of the Policy Planning Staff of Secretary of State James A. Baker III (1991-92). At present Sicherman is an adjunct scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank that is affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. (back)

24. The British-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (whose US-branch counts Peter Ackerman among its board of directors). For criticism of Ackerman see http://michaeljamesbarker.wordpress.com/icnc/ (back)

25. Chris Seiple's presidency of the Institute for Global Engagement is particularly interesting as the Institute sponsors the Council on Faith and International Affairs, which publishes a journal called the Review of Faith and International Affairs. Here on the journal's multi-faith advisory board one finds individuals like Larry Jones (who is the director for field programs for the Wycliffe affiliate, The Seed Company), Bryant Myers (who is vice president for development and food resources at World Vision International), and Jean Bethke Elshtain, the secretary of the notorious National Endowment for Democracy (an organization that undertakes overtly the type of democracy-manipulating work that used to be undertaken covertly by the CIA). Additionally, two other notable advisory board members of the Review of Faith and International Affairs are Dudley Woodberry, who formerly acted as the coordinator and acting senior associate of the Muslim track of Billy Graham's Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization, and Gary Haugen, who is the president and CEO of the International Justice Mission (see footnote #30). (back)

26. Brady Anderson has also served as the former chair of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation. Earlier still he had served as Special Assistant to Governor Bill Clinton (from 1979-81). (back)

27. Susan George, How the Other Half Dies: The Real Reasons for World Hunger (Penguin, 1976), see Chapter 8, "Food Aid?... Or Weapon?" As George writes: "Herbert Hoover was the first modern politician to look upon food as a frequently more effective means of getting one's own way than gunboat diplomacy or military intervention, and as a means of supporting US farmers in the bargain." (p.193) (back)

28. According to their Web site, "Gegrapha began as a small prayer group in the mid-1980s when a group of Christians working for several media outlets in Washington began gathering to pray for the life of Terry Anderson, the one-time bureau chief for Associated Press who was abducted in 1985 by Muslim extremists. By the time Terry was released in 1991, the group had become close-knit and its participants wanted to continue meeting."

Gegrapha was loosely brought together in the mid-1980s by David Aikman, a senior correspondent for Time magazine, however, their website notes that: "Beginning in late 1998, the Fieldstead Foundation gave two generous grants that enabled the prayer group to consolidate itself as an international fellowship for Christians in the secular media under the umbrella of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington." These connections are significant as the Fieldstead Foundation was set up by the arch-conservative religious philanthropist, Howard F. Ahmanson, Jr., while the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) which was formed in 1976 has been described by Tom Barry as "the first neocon institute to break ground in the frontal attack on the secular humanists." He continues that since founding the Center it "has functioned as the cutting edge of the neoconservative-driven culture war against progressive theology and secularism, and the associated effort to ensure right-wing control of the Republican Party. It explicitly sought to unify the Christian right with the neoconservative religious right, which was mostly made up of agnostics back then." Barry writes:

"Elliott Abrams, when serving as EPPC president, said that human rights should be a 'policy tool' of the U.S. government. Working closely with Newt Gingrich and the Republican Congress, EPPC together with the Christian Coalition and Family Research Council lobbied for the creation of a new permanent commission that focused on religious persecution. The main countries of concern listed in the congressional deliberations were China, Sudan, North Korea, Cuba, Laos, Saudi Arabia, and Indonesia, as well as general condemnation of Muslim nations. Abrams became a founding member of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and served as its chairman until mid-2001, when he joined the Bush administration." (back)

29. She presently serves as a communications advisor at AGR Petroleum Services, and as the executive producer at Winged Victory Films. (back)

30. Founded in 1997, the International Justice Mission describes itself as a "human rights agency that secures justice for victims of slavery, sexual exploitation and other forms of violent oppression." Gary Haugen's International Justice Mission is a member of a controversial antislavery umbrella group known as the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking (see "Combating [Some] Slavery"). Haugen himself was a Ford Foundation scholar in international law (at University of Chicago), and in 1994 he "served as the Officer in Charge of the U.N.'s genocide investigation in Rwanda." He worked for controversial group Human Rights First during the 1980s, and is the author of Just Courage: God's Great Expedition for the Restless Christian (IVP Books, 2008).

Current board members include Renee Stearns, who is the wife of World Vision U.S. president Richard Stearns, 1998 to present (who as recently as 2006 served on USAID's Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid), and Jacquelline Cobb Fuller, who is head of advocacy and communications for Google Foundation, and had previously served as deputy director of global health at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Fuller ghost-wrote the award winning autobiography of the well-known conservative Kay Coles James, Never Forget, Transforming America: From the Inside Out (Zondervan, 1995). James is a trustee of the Heritage Foundation, and was the former Dean of the School of Government at Pat Robertson's Regent University -- Robertson is of course an infamous neoconservative Christian Zionist.

Jan Nederveen Pieterse writes how: "In the United States, the major popularizer of Christian Zionism as a political prophecy was William E. Blackstone, author of the bestseller Jesus is Coming (1881). Blackstone organized the first American lobby for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine and initiated an intensive campaign which had the support of U.S. senators, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and business figures such as John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, and Charles B. Scribner." Later, Pieterse writes how in 1981 Rabbi Marc Tannenbaum of the American Jewish Committee noted that: "The evangelical community is the largest and fastest growing block of pro-Israeli, pro-Jewish sentiment in this country. Since the 1967 War, the Jewish community has felt abandoned by Protestants, by groups clustered around the National Council of Churches, which, because of sympathy with third world causes, gave an impression of support for the PLO. There was a vacuum of public support to Israel that began to be filled by the fundamentalist and evangelical Christians." Jan Nederveen Pieterse, "The history of a metaphor: Christian Zionism and the politics of apocalypse," in Jan Nederveen Pieterse (ed), Christianity and Hegemony: Religion and Politics on the Frontiers of Social Change (Berg Publishers, 1992), pp.215-6, p.219. (back)

31. James Petras criticises the manner by which millionaire nongovernmental organizations like World Vision "collaborate with Euro-American imperialism," noting that they are so well supported by Western governments precisely because their work "undermine[s] social movements via class collaborationist 'community' and 'family development'" schemes. James Petras, The New Development Politics: The Age of Empire Building and New Social Movements (Ashgate, 2003), p.149. (back)
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Re: The "Christian" Mafia

Postby ninakat » Sun Jan 24, 2010 7:02 pm

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Re: The "Christian" Mafia

Postby Maddy » Sun Jan 24, 2010 9:44 pm

Author: They don't read the Bible but convinced God is on their side.


Because if they did, they couldn't validate what they're doing.
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Re: The "Christian" Mafia

Postby American Dream » Tue Jan 26, 2010 12:27 pm

While I have some significant differences with Dave Emory's meta-thesis, he, as usual, has lots of relevant information for those who can think for themselves... >A.D.


Spitfire List.com - Web site and blog of anti-fascist researcher and radio personality Dave Emory..

FTR #697 Christian Fundamentalism and the Underground Reich

By Dave Emory - January 13, 2010 @ 3:00 pm in For The Record



[3]introduction: Recent decades have seen the growth of the Christian Right, a major force within the Republican Party and on the American political landscape itself. The Family [4], a recent book by Jeff Sharlet [5] has gained considerable traction and sets forth the profound influence wielded within U.S. power structure by an organization called The Family, founded in the 1930’s by a Norwegian immigrant named Abram Vereide [6] (usually referred to by those familiar with him as “Abram.”) Although its primary influence is within the GOP, the Family has considerable gravitas within the Democratic Party as well.

This program highlights the organization’s profound relationship with the Underground Reich and the Bormann capital network [7]. Vereide and his associates played a significant role in neutralizing the de- Nazification of Germany and the political rehabilitation of Third Reich alumni for service both in the “New” Federal Republic of Germany and U.S. intelligence. (Vereide is pictured below and at right with then President Eisenhower in 1960.)

Thus: “Between the Cold War establishment and the religious fervor of Abram and his allies, organizations that came of age in the postwar era–the National Association of Evangelicals [8], Campus Crusade [9], the Billy Graham Crusade [10], Youth For Christ [11], the Navigators [12], and many more–one finds the unexplained presence of men such as [Nazi agent Manfred] Zapp, adaptable men always ready to serve the powers that be.”

After delineating the pre-war and wartime careers in the United States of Nazi spies Manfred Zapp [13] (pictured above and at left) and Baron Ulrich von Gienanth [14], the program notes that they were among those who became close associates of “Abram” in his “saving” of Third Reich alumni for duty in the Cold War. They were typical and by no means the worst of the Nazis recruited by Vereide and his associates.

Program Highlights Include: Vereide’s “saving” of Hermann J. Abs [15] (right), “HItler’s Banker” so that he might become “Adenauer’s Banker”. Vereide’s role in saving manufacturing plants of top Nazis from seizure by the Allies; Vereide and his associates’ successful efforts at aiding the rearming of Germany for the Cold War; Vereide’s successful attempt to lift travel restrictions on “former” Gestapo officer von Gienanth; projections by anti-fascists during the war that the Third Reich’s plans to survive military defeat would involve networking with reactionary U.S. fundamentalists; Nazi general Reinhard Gehlen’s [16] “post-intelligence” career as a religious evangelist.

1. We begin by examining the background of Manfred Zapp, a Nazi spy who became a close evangelical associate of Abram Vereide and the Family.

Manfred Zapp, a native of Dusseldorf by way of Pretoria, merited a line in the news when he stepped from an ocean liner onto the docks of New York City on September 22, 1938, a warm windy day at the edge of a South Atlantic hurricane. Just a few words in the New York Times’ “Ocean Travelers” column, a list of the travelers of note buried in the back of the paper. By the time he left the United States, his departure would win headlines. . . .

The Family by Jeff Sharlet; Harper Perennial (SC); Copyright 2008 by Jeff Sharlet; ISBN 978-0-06-056005-8; p. 144. [17]

2. Zapp ran the Transocean News Agency, a Nazi espionage and propaganda outfit disguised as a journalistic operation.

. . . Zapp had been given charge of the American offices of the Transocean News Agency, ostensibly the creation of a group of unnamed German financiers. He had recently left a similar post in South Africa. “It is of paramount importance,” the German charge d’affaires in Washington had written Zapp the month before his arrival, “that a crossing of wires with the work of the D.N.B.–Deutschland News Bureau–”be absolutely avoided.” DNN was transparently the tool of the Nazi regime and thus under constant scrutiny. Transocean, as an allegedly independent agency, might operate more freely. “My task here in America is so big and so difficult,” Zapp wrote the German ambassador to South Africa a month after he arrived, “that it demands all my energies.”

Ibid.; p. 145. [17]

3. Note that Zapp’s activities in the U.S. involved networking with members of the New York elite whom he believed (in many cases correctly) to be sympathetic to fascism. Like many Nazi and fascist sympathizers, Zapp disdained many of the superficial trappings of fascism, while valuing the corporatist philosophy at the foundation of the system.

What was Zapp’s task? During his American tenure, he flitted in black tie and tails from Fifth Avenue to Park Avenue enjoying the hospitality of rich men and beautiful women–the gossip columnist Walter Winchell wrote of Zapp’s “madcap girlfriend,” a big-spending society girl who seemed to consume at least as much of Zapp’s attention as the news. He avoided as much as he could discussions of what he considered the tedium of politics. His friends knew he had dined with Cordell Hull, the secretary of state, and Roosevelt himself, and some must also have known that he had worked quietly–and illegally, if one must be technical–against the president’s reelection. But one did not ask questions. He traveled, though no one was quite sure where he went off to. One moment he was hovering over the teletype in Manhattan; the next he was to be found in Havana, on the occasion of a meeting of foreign ministers. Some might have called him a Nazi agent, there to encourage Cuba’s inclinations–a popular radio program, transmitted across the Caribbean, was called The Nazi Hour–but Zapp could truthfully reply that he rarely stirred from the lobby of the Hotel Nacional, where he sat sipping cocktails, happy to buy drinks for any man–or, preferably, lady–who cared to chat with him. . . .

Ibid.; pp. 145-146. [3]

4. More about Zapp’s networking with elements of the American elite who harbored fascist sympathies.

. . . . To Zapp, totalitarianism–the term he preferred to fascism–was, once pruned of its absurdities, a sensible and lovely idea. The torches and the “long knives,” the death’s-head and all that red-faced singing and table pounding, these activities Zapp did not care for. He actually preferred life in America, the canyons of Manhattan and the gin-lit balconies of the city’s best people, conversations that did not begin with “Heil Hitler!” Zapp signed his letters with this invocation, and a portrait of the Fuhrer hung in his office, but Zapp the journalist was too sensitive a recording device to enjoy all that arm snapping. If only Manhattan and Munich, Washington and Berlin, could be merged. It was a matter not of warfare but of harmony, democracy’s bickering and bile giving way to the “new conception,” in which power and will would be one.

Ibid.; p. 146. [3]

5. Eventually, Zapp’s espionage activities caused him to fall afoul of the U.S. authorities.

Within a year, however, Zapp found cause to resist returning to that fine new system. After a series of unsolved murders and perplexing explosions and intercepted transmissions led the FBI to raid his front organizations in Boston, Baltimore, Buffalo, Denver, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Zapp’s spartan office off Fifth Avenue, where they found what they believed to be evidence of the orchestration of it all, Zapp began to reconsider his enthusiasm for Hitler’s new order. He had failed the Fuhrer. How would his will judge him? What power would be exerted in the Gestapo “beating rooms” that Transocean employees had once considered themselves privileged to tour?

The FBI seized him and his chief deputy and whisked them away to cold, bare rooms, on Ellis Island, no less, where not long before, the rabble of Europe had been processed into “mongrel” America, land of “degenerate democracy,” as Roosevelt himself quoted Zapp in a speech denouncing Germany’s “strategy of terror.” . . .


Ibid.; pp. 146-147. [3]

6. Another of the Nazi agents with whom Abram Vereide and the Family would network after the war was Baron Ulrich von Gienanth [14], the Gestapo chief of the German embassy in Washington and a member of the SS.

. . . . On the other were men such as Zapp. Along with a D.C.-based diplomat named Ulrich von Gienanth (whom he would rejoin after the war in Abram’s prayer meetings), Zapp considered the coming conflict between the United States and the Reich one to be resolved through quiet conversation, between German gentlemen and American “industrialists and State Department men.”

Von Gienanth, a muscular, sandy-haired man whose dull expression disguised a chilly intelligence, “seems to be a very agreeable fellow,” Zapp wrote his brother, who had studied in Munich with the baron-to-be. Only second secretary in the embassy, von Gienanth maintained a frightening grip over his fellow diplomats. He was an undercover SS man, the ears and eyes of the “Reichsministry of Proper Enlightenment and Propaganda,” charged with keeping watch over its secret American operations. He was, in short, the Gestapo chief in America. While Zapp worried about his legal prospects in the Indian Summer of 1940, von Gienanth was likely waiting for news of a major operation in New Jersey: the detonation of the Hercules gunpowder plant, an explosion that on September 12 killed forty-seven and sent shockwaves so strong that they snapped wind into the sails of boaters in far-off Long Island Sound. . . .

. . . . Von Gienanth’s initiatives were whimsical by comparison. Once for instance, he paid a pilot to dump pro-Nazi antiwar fliers on the White House lawn. He devoted himself to changing Goebbels’ gold into dollars, and those dollars into laundered “donations” to the America First Committee, where unwitting isolationists–Abram allies such as Senator Arthur Vandenberg and America First President Robert M. Hanes among them–stumped for recognition of the “fact” on Hitler’s inevitability
.

Like Zapp, von Gienanth considered himself a commonsense man.

And Zapp–Zapp simply reported the news and sold it on the wire. Or gave it away. To the papers of Argentina, Mexico, Brazil and to the small-town editors of America’s gullible heartland, Zapp offered Transocean reports for almost nothing. In some South American countries, 30 percent or more of foreign news–the enthusiastic welcome given conquering German forces, the Jewish cabal in Washington, the moral rot of the American people–was produced by or channeled through Zapp’s offices. On the side, he compiled a report on Soviet-inspired “Polish atrocities” against the long-suffering German people and distributed it to thousands of leading Americans, the sort sympathetic to the plight of the persecuted Christian. Zapp’s sympathetic nature would prove, after the war, to be as genuine as his distorted sense of history’s victims. . . .


Ibid.; pp. 147-148. [17]

7. Next, the broadcast sets forth Abram [Vereide] and the Family’s positioning as a vehicle for the recruitment of Nazis to serve both the U.S. and the “New” Federal Republic of Germany. The organization involved in this served as a principal moral compass for much of the American power elite during the Cold War and through the present. The organizations which rescued and rehabilitated Third Reich alumni are at the foundation of the contemporary evangelical establishment.

. . . Establishment Cold Warriors of [Marshall Plan administrator Donald C.] Stone’s ilk dominate the history books. Zapp, the ally with an ugly past, is his dark shadow. But Abram and the influence of his fellow fundamentalists would remain invisible for decades, their influence unmarked by media and academic establishments. The role played by fundamentalists in refashioning the world’s greatest fascist power into a democracy would go unnoticed. So, too, would the role of fascism–or, rather, that of fascism’s ghost–in shaping the newly internationalist ambition of evangelical conservatives in the postwar era.

Between the Cold War establishment and the religious fervor of Abram and his allies, organizations that came of age in the postwar era–the National Association of Evangelicals, Campus Crusade, the Billy Graham Crusade, Youth For Christ, the Navigators, and many more–one finds the unexplained presence of men such as Zapp, adaptable men always ready to serve the powers that be. From American Christendom, Zapp and his ilk took the cloak of redemption, cheap grace, in the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of their most famous victims. To it, they offered something harder to define. This is an investigation of that transmission; the last message from the Ministry of Proper Enlightenment; the story of American fundamentalism’s German connection. . . .


Ibid.; pp. 151-152. [17]

8. When Abram got around to “saving” Third Reich alumni for service to the “New Germany,” as well as U.S. intelligence, he selected some genuinely ripe individuals.

Gedat was among the least tainted of the men that Abram and Fricke, and later Gedat himself, gathered into prayer cells to help forge the new West German state. But they were repentant men, this they testified to at every session. Repentant for what? It was hard to say. Every one of them claimed to have suffered during the war years. Men such as Hermann J. Abs, “Hitler’s banker” and a vice president of Abram’s International Christian Leadership (ICL), German division; Gustav Schmelz, a manufacturer of chemical weapons; Paul Rohrbach, the hypernationalist ideologue whose conflation of Germany with Christianity, and most of Europe with Germany, had inspired the Nazis to understand their war-hunger as divine; and General Hans Speidel, who had accepted the surrender of Paris on behalf of the Fuhrer in 1940, insisted that he had never believed Hitler, had been forced into his arms by the Red Menace, had regretted the unfortunate alliance with such a vulgar fool, a disgrace to God’s true plan for Germany. They had done nothing wrong; they, too, if one gave it some though, were victims.

Perhaps some of them were. That is one of the many clever strategies of fascism: persecution belongs to the powerful, according to its rules, both to dole out and to claim as the honor due martyrs. Abram did not ask questions; he simply took out his washcloth and got busy with the blood of the lamb. He scrubbed his “new men” clean. Did it work? Abs, “Hitler’s banker,” became “Adenauer’s banker,” a key figure in the West German government’s financial resurrection. Schmelz kept his factory. Rohrbach wrote on, authoring tributes to Abram’s International Christian Leadership in the Frankfurter Allgemeine.

And Speidel? He was a special case, a co conspirator with Rommel in the attempted assassination of Hitler, the “July Plot” of 1944. There was something almost American about him; like Buchman, like Barton, he considered Hitler’s racial policies a distraction from his really good ideas. For this ambivalence, the Allies rewarded him: he served as commander in chief of NATO ground forces from 1957 to 1963, when Charles de Gaulle, unpersuaded of his reconstruction, insisted on his ouster.

Such men are only a few of those whom Abram helped, and by no means the worst. There were Zapp and von Gienanth, there were “little Nazis” Abram championed for U.S. intelligence positions, and there were big ones: Baron Konstantin von Neurath, Hitler’s first foreign minister, and General Oswald Pohl, the last SS commander of the concentration camps, among them. For those beyond hope of blank-slate reinvention, Abram and his web of Christian cells led medical mercy (von Neurath, sentenced to fifteen years for crimes against humanity, was released early in 1953; Abram took up his case up his case upon learning from von Neurath’s daughter that her father, classified as a “major War Criminal,” was receiving less than exemplary dental care in prison) or expediency(it was unjust, they felt, that Pohl, who while imprisoned by the Allies wrote a memoir called Credo: My Way to God–a Christ-besotted path that did not include acknowledging his role in mass murder–should be left wondering when he would be hanged.)

When occupation forces charged Abs with war crimes, he offered a novel defense. He did not deny what he had done for Hitler; he simply declared that he had done it for money, fascism be damned. He would gladly do as much for the Allies. And so he did, a task at which he so excelled that he would come to be known as the wizard of the “German Miracle.” His past was forgotten–a phrase that must be written in passive voice in order to suggest the gentle elision of history in the postwar years, undertakenby those eager to see a conservative German state rise from the ashes, a sober son of Hitler’s fatherland that would inherit the old man’s hatred for one radicalism but not his love of another. . . .


Ibid.; pp. 165-167. [5]

9. Senator Alexander Wiley (R-Wisconsin) was another close associate of Abram’s. Wiley was instrumental in the successfully lobbying (along with Abram and his aide Otto Fricke) for the rearming of the German army against the former Soviet Union.

. . . . Senator Wiley wanted total war. Take the men of Hitler’s old panzer divisions, bless ‘em under Christ, and point ‘em toward Moscow. Abram’s German point man, Otto Fricke, wasn’t so blood-thirsty; he merely wanted twenty-five rearmed German divisions to slow the Russian invasion he saw coming. “What Do We Christians Think of Re-Armament?” was the theme of one of Fricke’s cell meetings in 1950. They were conflicted, tempted to take “malicious joy that the ‘Allies’ are now forced to empty with spoons the bitter soup that has been served by the Russians.” The judgments at Nuremberg had dishonored the Wermacht, and the dismantling had insulted and robbed Germany’s great industrialists, Krupp and Weizacker and Bosch–all well represented in Fricke’s cells. By all rights they should stand down, refuse to rearm, let the Americans defend Christendom from the Slavs. But there it was: Christendom. They were Christian men, chosen not by a nation but by Jesus himself to lead their people into the “Order” God revealed to them in their prayers. “To accomplish these tasks,” the Frankfurt cell concluded, “the state needs power and this powerfulness is indispensable for the sake of love.” . . .

Ibid.; p. 171. [5]

10. Vereide and the Family were successful in obtaining permission for former SS/Gestapo officer von Gienanth to travel outside of Germany.

. . . . Von Gienanth was bound to the Fatherland. This, he complained to Abram, was an impediment to reconstruction. He’d wanted to attend a conference in Atlantic City with further ideas of expansion in mind. Would the American military really say that a man of his stature would blemish the boardwalk? He was on a list of undesirables, he had learned from certain connections–probably ICL men within the occupation. This would be “undesirable,” he thought, if he had been a communist. “But I don’t see any sense in including people of my attitude”–ex-fascists ready to make common cause with the United States.

Among the many testimonies von Gienanth collected on his own behalf was a letter from an American diplomat’s wife who insisted the baron had not been a Nazi so much as an “idealist.” Eventually, von Gienanth had believed, “the good and conservative element of the German people would gain control.” Fascism had been like strong medicine, unpleasant but necessary to what von Gienanth had always believed would be the reestablishment of rule by elites like himself. “In the coming years of reconstruction,” his advocate wrote, “such men will be needed who can be trusted.”

Abram contacted the Combined Travel Board that decided on which former Nazis could be allowed to leave the country. The baron was needed , Abram insisted. There were high Christian councils to be held in The Hague. “Expedite the necessary permit.”

Should that argument prove inadequate, Abram hired von Gienanth’s wife, Karein, as a hostess on call for Americans traveling on Christian missions. She was an American citizen, though she’d spent the war with her SS officer husband. Now her American passport was being threatened. Abram saved it. That summer, he sent the baron and his wife a gift of sort: a congressman from California, to be a guest on the baron’s estate. The following winter Senator Frank Carlson visited. “As you know,” Abram advised Karein, “he is one of the closest friends and advisers to Eisenhower.”

A “serene confidence has filled me,” she replied, “as to President Eisenhower’s guidance by God.” That summer, her husband flew with her to England, his passport evidently restored.


Ibid.; pp. 173-174. [5]

11. Next, the program notes a function convened at the castle of the Teutonic Order (Teutonic Knights) in Bavaria. (For more about the history of the Teutonic Knights, see Paul Winkler’s The Thousand-Year Conspiracy [18], available for download for free on this website.) Note that major players from the German power elite, business partners with their cartel associates in the U.S. and elsewhere in the West, as well as key political figures, were lectured to by Christian fundamentalist “converts”–”some of the best minds of the old regime.”

The assembled received “a letter of repentance for the sins of denazification signed by more than thirty congressmen including Wiley and Capehart and a young Richard Nixon. [19]”

. . . . The first meeting at Castle Mainau had taken place in 1949, the same year the Allies allowed Germans to begin governing themselves again. The 1951 meeting was planned to mark what Abram considered the complete moral rehabilitation–in just two years–of Germany. Abram wanted the Americans to go to them, a grand contingent of senators and representatives.

. . . . General Speidel was there, as was Rohrbach, the propagandist: There were representatives from the major German banks and from Krupp and Bosch, and there was the president of Standard Oil’s German division. There was at least one German cabinet member, parliamentarians, mayors, a dozen or more judges. A U-boat commander, famed for torpedoing ships off the coast of Virginia, cut a dashing figure. A gaggle of aristocrats, minor princes and princesses, barons and counts and margraves were intimidated by some of the best minds of the old regime. There was the financial genius Hermann J. Abs, and a fascist editor who hd once been a comrade of the radical theorist Walter Benjamin before throwing his lot in with the Nazis.

Wallace Haines spoke for Abram. He stayed up all night before his lecture, praying for the spirit that spoke aloud to his mentor. The Americans, God told him to say, were thrilled with the “eagerness” of the Germans to forget the war. The Americans came to the Germans humbled, he told them. Haines brought proof of their new-found wisdom: a letter of repentance for the sins of denazification signed by more than thirty congressmen including Wiley and Capehart and a young Richard Nixon. . . .


Ibid.; pp. 175-176. [5]

12. Eventually, Vereide, the Family and their Nazi and fascist associates (on both sides of the Atlantic) were successful in getting the rigorous de-Nazification program rescinded. Note the reference to the “Morgenthau boys.” This is a reference to former Treasury Secretary Robert Morgenthau, who favored a rigorous approach to de-Nazification that included the de-industrialization of Germany. For more about this topic, see FTR #578 [20], as well as All Honorable Men [21], available for download for free on this website.

Of particular significance is the fact that Vereide was able to intercede on behalf of industrial plants to prevent their de-Nazification.In this regard, Vereide was doing the work not of the Lord, but of the Bormann capital network [7].

. . . . For years, Manfred Zapp had been Abram’s harshest correspondent, constantly warning that the “man on the street” with whom he seemed to spend a great deal of time had had enough of America’s empty promises. America had committed “mental cruelty,” he charged, holding “so-called war criminals” in red coats–the uniforms of the Landsberg Prison–awaiting execution indefinitely.

Abram agreed, and sent to the occupation government letters signed by dozens of congressmen demanding action.

America prevented German industry from feeding the nation, Zapp argued.

Abram agreed, and intervened time and again on behalf of German factories. He saved as many as he could, though a steel foundry named for Hermann Goering was beyond even his powers of redemption.

America had put leftists and trade unionists and Bolsheviks in power, Zapp complained.

Abram agreed. The cleansing of the American occupation government became an obsession, the subject of his meetings with the American high commissioner John J. McCloy and his weekly prayer meetings with congressmen.

“Idealists” were prevented from serving their people, said Zapp. The man on the street was losing faith in the American religion. “Freedom in their interpretation is the ideal for which we shall fight and die but the reality is nothing else but a beautiful word for services for Western powers . . . The word freedom is not taken seriously anymore.”

Within a few years, nobody cared. The “Morgenthau Boys” were as much a part of the past as the history no German cared to speak of. . . .


Ibid.; pp. 177-178. [5]

13. Published before the 1944 Normandy invasion, Curt Riess’ The Nazis Go Underground forecast that the Third Reich’s strategy for going underground would involve liaison with American Protestant fundamentalists.

Also of interest to Berlin—particularly in view of the coming underground fight of the Nazis—must be the Fundamentalist Protestants, who have a considerable following in Michigan, Kansas, Colorado, and Minnesota. To be sure, some of the Fundamentalists are among the most courageous fighters for democracy, but a great many of them are definitely pro-Hitler. Their reason for this stand is that Fundamentalists do not believe in freedom of religion, and they do believe that the Jews should be punished because they killed Christ. They say that Hitler has been sent by God to ‘save Christianity and destroy atheistic Communism.’ To many of them Japan is the ‘oriental outpost of Christianity’ destined to save Asia from the danger of a ‘Communistic China.’

The Nazis Go Underground; by Curt Riess; Copyright 1944 by Curt Riess; Doubleday, Doran and Co., Inc. [HC]; pp. 125-126. Library of Congress Control Number: 44007162. [22]

14. In the context of this discussion, it should be recalled that Nazi spy chief Reinhard Gehlen [16] became an evangelist after his formal retirement from being the head of the German intelligence service. [Chief of Hitler's intelligence apparatus for the Eastern front in World War II, Gehlen jumped to the CIA with his entire organization which became: the CIA's department of Russian and Eastern European affairs, the de-facto NATO intelligence organization and finally the BND, the intelligence service of the Federal Republic of Germany.]

In this context, it should be remembered that Gehlen reported to Bormann’s security chief, Heinrich Muller and that he was clearing his postwar actions taken in conjunction with US intelligence with Admiral von Doenitz (Hitler’s nominal successor as head of state) and General Franz Halder, his former chief-of-staff. In his operations, Gehlen was operating as part of the Underground Reich.

Today, on the threshold of three score years and ten, General Reinhard Gehlen has found a surprising new field of activities. He has become an evangelist. With still unimpaired energy he has taken over the direction of a campaign for building new churches and schools for the Evangelical Church in Catholic Bavaria. After a life of seclusion he frequently attends meetings all over the province at which appeals for new funds are launched; on occasion he does not disdain to visit members of his religious community in order to encourage the enterprise and to pass the begging bowl. . .

Gehlen: Spy of the Century; by E.H. Cookridge; 1973 [SC] Pyramid Books; Copyright 1971 by European Copyright Company Limited; ISBN 0-515-03154-2; p. 450.

Article printed from Spitfire List: http://spitfirelist.com

URL to article: http://spitfirelist.com/for-the-record/ ... und-reich/

URLs in this post:

[1] Side 1: http://emory.kfjc.org/archive/ftr/600_699/f-697a.mp3
[2] Side 2: http://emory.kfjc.org/archive/ftr/600_699/f-697b.mp3
[3] Image: http://jeffsharlet.com/
[4] The Family: http://www.amazon.com/Family-Secret-Fun ... 927&sr=8-1
[5] Jeff Sharlet: http://www.jeffsharlet.com/
[6] Abram Vereide: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2003/03/0079525
[7] Bormann capital network: http://spitfirelist.com/books/martin-bo ... -in-exile/
[8] National Association of Evangelicals: http://www.nae.net/about-us/statement-of-faith
[9] Campus Crusade: http://www.ccci.org/
[10] Billy Graham Crusade: http://www.tbn.org/index.php/2/4/p/106.html
[11] Youth For Christ: http://www.yfc.org/
[12] the Navigators: http://www.navigators.org/
[13] Manfred Zapp: http://www.namebase.org/xyou/Manfred-Zapp.html
[14] Baron Ulrich von Gienanth: http://www.archives.gov/research/holoca ... g-165.html
[15] Hermann J. Abs: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/peopl ... 92727.html
[16] Reinhard Gehlen’s: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB146/index.htm
[17] The Family by Jeff Sharlet; Harper Perennial (SC); Copyright 2008 by Jeff Sharlet; ISBN 978-0-06-056005-8; p. 144.: http://www.jeffsharlet.com
[18] The Thousand-Year Conspiracy: http://spitfirelist.com../../../../../b ... -the-mask/
[19] Richard Nixon.: http://spitfirelist.com../../../../../tag/nixon/
[20] #578: http://spitfirelist.com../../../../../f ... t-sunrise/
[21] All Honorable Men: http://spitfirelist.com../../../../../b ... rable-men/
[22] The Nazis Go Underground; by Curt Riess; Copyright 1944 by Curt Riess; Doubleday, Doran and Co., Inc. [HC]; pp. 125-126. Library of Congress Control Number: 44007162.: http://spitfirelist.com../books/the-naz ... derground/
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Re: The "Christian" Mafia

Postby American Dream » Mon Feb 01, 2010 9:41 am

At National Prayer Breakfast, Obama to Address Shadowy Christian Group Tied to Uganda's 'Kill the Gays' Bill

By Adele M. Stan, AlterNet
Posted on February 1, 2010


http://www.alternet.org/story/145366/


The National Prayer Breakfast, an annual Washington exercise attended by politicians of all stripes who wish to demonstrate their piety, is one of those must-go events for the U.S. president, or so the conventional wisdom has it. Every president since Dwight D. Eisenhower has attended.

But the prayer breakfast, however benign it may seem on the surface, is really a display of power for an underground religious group that often shapes U.S. foreign policy in ways not easy to see, and sometimes at odds the policy goals of the government itself. This Thursday, President Barack Obama is expected to address the gathering, as he did last year. But if there was ever a year for the president to back out, to have a sudden scheduling conflict, it's this one.

The breakfast draws leaders from all sectors of society, including a hefty contingent from the military. It's a coveted invitation.The event is usually the only public sighting of its sponsor,.the shadowy right-wing religious network known as the Family. Around the periphery of the event, the Family does what it does best: bringing together leaders from developing countries of special concern to U.S. business interests with members of Congress and people in government who hold the keys to the foreign aid kingdom.

"This is the bullying tactics of banality," said Jeff Sharlet, author of the definitive book, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, in an interview with AlterNet. "This is not about a banality of evil, but the evil of banality. The breakfast itself is a very bland event, but it's surrounded by this week-long lobbying festival which isn't visible."

Introductions are made and meetings arranged for foreign dignitaries through the auspices of a the Family, led for the past 40 years by Washington insider Doug Coe and comprising powerful men from all over the world, including a number of prominent members of Congress. That group of powerful men also includes two behind a controversial anti-gay law in Uganda, proposed by two politicians with strong ties to the Family. The law carries the death penalty for something called "aggravated homosexuality."

The Prayer Breakfast is closed to the media, except for those in the press corps that travels with the president. "It's a private event," explained Joe Mitchell of the National Prayer Breakfast Committee via a voice mail left in response to AlterNet's request for access. Invitations to the Prayer Breakfast go out on congressional letterhead, Sharlet said, even though the stated purpose of the gathering is distinctly Christian and not ecumenical -- a violation of the spirit of the First Amendment. "So, too bad Muslims, too bad, Jews -- this event is not for you," Sharlet said.

So why does the president feel he must give his props to a group that often works against the national interest, and whose most prominent congressional members -- Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C.; Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., and Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., to name a few -- have acted as his nemeses? Power. It's all about the group's perceived power in the very structure of the U.S. government. "You don't want to alienate them," one religious right leader explained to Sharlet.

Obama will seek to keep his own participation in the event low-key, Sharlet told AlterNet when he sat down with us in December. "He'll give a bland, kind of useless address," Sharlet predicted.

Yet a spate of recent scandals and exposes of the group's coddling of anti-democratic heads of state makes this the perfect time for a U.S. president to step off the Familiy's bandwagon. Indeed, his very presence lends legitimacy to a group that enacts its goals through informal lobbying and back-room deals, all knitted together through "prayer cells" of people with the power to effect the Family's right-wing, free-market agenda.

In his State of the Union speech, Obama decried the outsized roll of lobbyists in U.S. policy. But while the Family lobbies and lobbies hard, it does so without a license, so to speak. Because its influence is conducted through an underground network of people who hold positions of power in the government, its "lobbyists" never have to register as such. They're just "followers of Jesus," in the group's own parlance, who have big jobs.

"I hope there will be defections at the edges," Sharlet said -- at least in the private dinner parties and prayer meetings arranged with Congress members for the Family's key men.

Tough Year: Sex Scandals and Uganda's 'Kill the Gays' Bill

It's been a tough year for the Family (also known as the Fellowship). First, there were the very public sex scandals of powerful lawmakers involved in the Family -- South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, Sen. John Ensign of Nevada and Rep. Chip Pickering of Mississippi, all of whom lived, at one time or another, in the Family's infamous C Street house in Washington, DC.

Just as the noise about the sex scandals began to die down came word of Uganda's proposed Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009, a proposal introduced in the Ugandan parliament that would criminalize the advocacy of LGBT rights and punish certain acts by gays with death. The foremost advocates for the bill, which is still under consideration, are two politicians that Family members refer to as "key men." A key man is believed to occupy a position of worldly power because he was anointed by God to actualize the Family's socially conservative, pro-business theology, which hangs on the notion of a supply-side Jesus. It doesn't matter if he's a murderous dictator or known adulterer: what matters is his power.

In the U.S., Uganda's Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009 has become known as the "Kill the Gays" bill. Thanks to the persistence of bloggers like Sarah Posner of Religion Dispatches, Jim Burroway of Box Turtle Bulletin and Christian psychologist Warren Throckmorton, and the platform given the issue by MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, leaders of the Family have been forced to distance themselves, at least publicly, from the two Ugandan key men behind the bill: MP David Bahati and James Nsaba Buturo, minister of state for ethics and integrity.

When Bahati told a Ugandan newspaper that he would attend and speak at the U.S. National Prayer Breakfast, the Family's Bob Hunter issued a statement saying that Bahati was not invited to the breakfast, and that he had declined an earlier invitation, issued before he introduced the bill, to attend as a volunteer. In response to a query from AlterNet, Hunter said Buturo "has never been on any list and has no invitation." However, Hunter could not confirm whether or not Buturo planned to be in the U.S. for the Family's lobbying fest during the week of the prayer breakfast, saying he'd had no communication with the Ugandan official and had never met him.

"I think if the Family could make that bill go away, they would. It's too extreme," said Jeff Sharlet, who sat down with AlterNet last month to discuss where the shadowy network, now the focus of more attention than its leaders ever wished it to have, finds itself in the age of Obama.

Indeed, the unwanted light the Uganda bill has cast on the Family has forced the group to respond in the open; Bob Hunter has become a de facto spokesperson for the group on the issue, even appearing on "The Rachel Maddow Show" (in an appearance Sharlet helped to arrange) to distance the Family from what Sharlet calls "this genocidal bill."

In essence, Sharlet explained, the situation with Uganda and the anti-gay bill is a case of the Family's own power getting away from it. Uganda has long been a special project of the group, which conducts its own ad hoc foreign policy through the influence of its members.

Uganda's present dictator, Yoweri Museveni, is another of the Family's key men, Sharlet said. There's plenty of precedent for the Family's involvement with dictators: one key man of the 1980s was former Somalian dictator Siad Barre. The Family helped him American aid and arms, which he used, according to Sharlet, to "lay his country to waste."

"And recently now, I've noticed that Museveni's becoming sort of an American proxy for dealing with Somalia, which is a big problem for us," Sharlet said. "Somalia is a haven for al Qaeda; it's a lawless state."

The Family's presence in Uganda likely helped pave the way for other U.S. conservative Christian evangelical groups, such as Pastor Rick Warren's "Purpose-Driven" group, and the anti-gay ministries of Scott Lively, Caleb Lee Brundidge and Don Schmierer, whose anti-gay rhetoric at a Ugandan seminar influenced the authors of the "Kill the Gays" bill.

"I think the Family opened the doors to Uganda for what they consider [to be] an evangelical revival, and the result was to make this country sort of a guinea pig for experiments in the American culture war," Sharlet said. "This is a way foreign policy often works; political experiments happen at the fringes and policies that can't be implemented here at home are tried out there."

The outrage over Uganda's Anti-Homosexuality bill is affecting official U.S. foreign policy.The State Department issued a statement decrying the bill, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (who, during her Senate term, participated in the Family's Senate prayer group) expressed her concern during a 45-minute telephone call with Ugandan President Museveni, after which he directed parliament to suspend action on the bill -- stopping short of killing it. President Obama has also condemned the legislation.

The Uganda bill, Sharlet said, is just one example of how the Family's off-the-shelf foreign policy impacts the U.S. national interest. "From what my inside sources tell me, they drive the State Department crazy. This is a constant pain in the neck for the State Department -- you know, you've got a senator just sort of dropping in on a foreign leader without clearing it."

The Family and the Tea Party Movement

Though the Family itself is non-partisan, its ideology appeals most strongly to conservative Republicans, a handful of whom have emerged as favorites of the Tea Party crowd: Senators Jim DeMint of South Carolina, Tom Coburn and James Inhofe of Oklahoma, and Rep. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, to name a few of the Family's better-known congressional members. (Democrats in the news associated with the Family include Rep. Bart Stupak of Ohio and Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida; for more on the Family's influence on the health care debate, see AlterNet's October report here.)

"That's an interesting overlap. That's an interesting convergence of social movements," Sharlet told AlterNet. "The Family represents, as they have put it in the past, the avant-garde of American fundamentalism. They're an elite -- Tea Parties [as in Tea Party protests] are not their style. Doug Coe probably finds this the tackiest, most galling -- you know, just, oh, terrible." Nonetheless, Sharlet said, "You've got to look at the way these two movements work together. And when I say work together, I don't mean that they're getting together in a back room and coming up with a plan; I'm talking about a social movement. The left doesn't want to admit that over on the right they have social movements, too."

Successful social movements find their strength in the "convergence" of various streams of activism, Sharlet said. "And those moments of convergence are where you see social movements sometimes making great strides. You go back to the 1960s, civil rights, you have a convergence between radicals, between people who have been in the trenches of civil rights forever, and white, middle-class liberals." The right-wing elites of the Family, Sharlet explained, "are going for that convergence."

As evidence, Sharlet cited the Manhattan Declaration, a sort of right-wing Christian manifesto whose signers range from Roman Catholic bishops and cardinals to such populist Protestant evangelical figures as Harry Jackson, the right's point man on opposing same-sex marriage, and convicted Watergate felon Chuck Colson, founder and leader of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

Transparency -- Not Conspiracy -- Is the issue

While it's tempting to view the Family as a conspiracy of master manipulators who direct the every move of those affiliated with the group, Sharlet strongly cautions against taking this view. "I get so frustrated with people on the left who want to look at the right as one great big Borg. Basically they think Shell Oil is sitting in their back room pulling all the strings, and that it's all related to one scheme. It's not."

The Family's influence simply doesn't work that way, he said. And there are times when the Family's intervention may actually prevent bad things from happening to people in the nations led by the Family's key men. The real problem is the organization's lack of transparency.

"I think this really goes to the sore spot or the touchy nerve, which is the utilitarianism of American political thought, so that someone like Senator Coburn or Senator Inhofe -- they feel if they're over in Africa or the Middle East and trying to help these people, that one, they should be given tremendous credit for their good intentions," Sharlet explained. "And, two, if they do manage to avert a conflict through this kind of backroom dealing and rogue foreign policy, then the ends justify the means.

"Frankly, that's an idea that's seductive to a lot of people in the United States -- and not just on the right," he continued. "And we sort of forget about the whole conversation about democracy. We forget, as the Family goes and works behind the scenes and works through its 'God-chosen elites' and 'anointed leaders' -- every time they do that, they are breaking down the democratic process.

"What if they're not the puppet masters?" he asked. "What if their intentions really are good? And in fact, they have accomplished, here and there, some good things. They have averted a conflict. Do we then just drop our questions? Or do we say, you know what, good intentions are not enough, democratic process is what we need. And do we dig into the export of American political and economic religion? Because that's what it is. Free-market gospel. And say, look, what are the costs and consequences of that? Those are harder questions for us to deal with -- the more important questions."

Embodied in the First Amendment are several complementary but competitive concepts: freedom of religion, freedom from government involvement in religion, and freedom of expression. The Family has every right to have its members express their religious views, and to act within the law as their faith informs them to do. But its insidious existence, at a cellular level, in the very muscle of American might infects U.S. policy with a theology shared by only a very few citizens. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, the cliche goes. Until the Family chooses to wield its power in the light of day, no president should grant it the glow of legitimacy.



CORRECTION: The original version of this story inaccurately stated that Uganda President Yoweri Museveni introduced the former Somali dictator Siad Barre to the Family. In fact, Barre's relationship with the Family predated Museveni's.

Adele M. Stan is AlterNet's Washington bureau chief.
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Re: The "Christian" Mafia

Postby Uncle $cam » Tue Feb 02, 2010 10:41 am

Suffering raises up those souls that are truly great; it is only small souls that are made mean-spirited by it.
- Alexandra David-Neel
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Re: The "Christian" Mafia

Postby Maddy » Tue Feb 02, 2010 10:58 am

If there's a Satan, this is it. These "preachers" are nothing but sorcerers.

And no marvel; for even Satan fashioneth himself into an angel of light.
2 Corinthians 11:14

I pity their followers.

Edit: awesome video.
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Re: The "Christian" Mafia

Postby American Dream » Tue Mar 02, 2010 9:32 am

Heads Up: Prayer Warriors and Sarah Palin Are Organizing Spiritual Warfare to Take Over America

By Bill Berkowitz, AlterNet
Posted on March 1, 2010


http://www.alternet.org/story/145796/


Imagine a religious movement that makes geographic maps of where demons reside and claims among its adherents the Republican Party's most recent vice presidential nominee and whose leaders have presided over prayer sessions (one aimed at putting the kibosh on health-care reform) with a host of leading GOP figures.

It's a movement whose followers played a significant role in the battle over Proposition 8, California's anti-same-sex marriage initiative, and Uganda's infamous proposed Anti-Homosexuality Law, more commonly associated with the Family, a religious network of elites drawn from the ranks of business and government throughout the world. But the movement we're imagining encompasses the humble and the elite alike, supporting a network of "prayer warriors” in all 50 states, within the ranks of the U.S. military, and at the far reaches of the globe -- all guided by an entire genre of books, texts, videos and other media.

Imagine that, and you've just dreamed up the New Apostolic Reformation, the largest religious movement you've never heard of.

NAR's videos, according to researcher Rachel Tabachnick, "demonstrate the taking control of communities and nations through large networks of 'prayer warriors' whose spiritual warfare is used to expel and destroy the demons that cause societal ills. Once the territorial demons, witches, and generational curses are removed, the 'born-again' Christians in the videos take control of society."

The movement's notion of "spiritual warfare" has spread from the California suburbs to an East-Coast inner city, and has impacted policy decisions in the developing world. Movement operatives are well-connected enough to have testified before Congress and to have received millions of dollars in government abstinence-only sex-education grants, and bizarre enough to maintain that in its prototype communities, the movement has healed AIDS, purified polluted streams and even grown huge vegetables. Leaders in the NAR movement refer to themselves as "apostles."

In the days leading up to the historic vote on health-care reform in the Senate, Apostle Lou Engle led the Family Research Council's "Prayercast” against health-care reform, a Webcast featuring Republican Senators Jim DeMint (S.C.) and Sam Brownback (Kans.), and Rep. Michele Bachmann (Minn.). Earlier in the year, Engle, who leads the group TheCall, prayed over Newt Gingrich at a Virginia event called Rediscovering God in America. In 2008, Engle, at an event he staged at San Diego's Qualcomm Stadium, advocated acts of Christian martyrdom to end abortion and same-sex marriage. This "apostle" claims LGBT people are possessed by demons. And Engle is not the only NAR apostle with political connections.

Presidential campaign watchers got their first taste of the New Apostolic Reformation when it was revealed that Sarah Palin, while mayor of Wasilla, had been prayed over in a laying-on-of-hands by Rev. Thomas Muthee of Kenya, director of the NAR East Africa Spiritual Warfare Network, in a ceremony designed to protect Palin from witches and demons. Muthee, it turns out, is famous in his native land for driving out of town a woman he deemed a witch, a charge that had her neighbors calling for her stoning.

Palin, according to Alaskan Apostle Mary Glazier, became part of her prayer network at the age of 24. Wasilla is no stranger to wandering NAR leaders. Last June, Apostle Lance Wallnau stopped through in the course of his world travels, promoting the movement's Reclaiming the Seven Mountains of Culture campaign at Wasilla Alaska Assembly of God Church -- the very church at which Muthee laid hands on Palin. (The "seven mountains" are the realms of business, government, media, arts and entertainment, education, the family and religion.) Other NAR luminaries dropping by Wasilla last year include leading international Apostles Naomi Dowdy and Dutch Sheets.

Apostle Samuel Rodriguez heads an organization of 15 millions Hispanic evangelicals (the Sacramento, Calif.-based National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference) and was courted by both Democratic and Republican candidates during the 2008 presidential election.

In 2006, former Senator Rick Santorum, R-Penn., who appears to be positioning himself for a run at the presidency, took the stage with Apostle Alistair Petrie at a NAR "Transformation Summit" in Ephrata, Pennsylvania.

The International Transformations Network conferences led by Apostle Ed Silvoso have featured Hawaii's Republican Lt. Gov. James "Duke” Aiona (who is currently running for governor) and Uganda First Lady Janet Museveni. Silvoso has been hosted abroad by heads of state, including Ugandan dictator Yoweri Museveni and Gloria Arroyo, president of the Philippines.

Apostle Julius Oyet was recognized by the Ugandan Parliament for the draconian anti-gay bill recently introduced in that country, and is a star in one of the movement's Transformation movies. An influential Guatemalan pastor, Apostle Harold Caballeros, made a quixotic run for the presidency of that country in 2007.

Christian publishing magnate Stephen Strang is an apostle, as well as a director for John Hagee's Christians United for Israel, while Apostle Tom Hess hosts the annual Christian Government Leaders Conference in the Israeli Knesset.

Outside the realm of politics, Apostle Jim Ammerman, as head of a pentecostal chaplains' organization, accounts for more than 270 chaplains, including U.S. military and civilian chaplains. "Ammerman is a former military chaplain whose Chaplaincy of Full Gospel Churches was approved in 1984 by the Department of Defense as an endorsing agency to place chaplains in the United States Military," writes Rachel Tabachnick.

Apostle Bernard Wilks, in conjunction with Apostle Ed Silvoso's International Transformation Network, has assigned a "prayer warrior" to almost every single street in Newark, New Jersey, to pray for "transformation” of the city.

The movement has emerged from the largest single block of Protestant Christianity on the globe -- sometimes called charismatic, neo-charismatic or neo-Pentecostal -- one often overlooked since its adherents do not comprise a single denomination, and often belong to churches characterized as "non-denominational."

Charismatic Christians are born-again believers who have a secondary conversion experience, one they claim gives them supernatural gifts, such as speaking in tongues, casting out demons, faith healing, and other "signs and wonders" they believe will help to evangelize the world in preparation for the end times. Charismatics are typically Protestant, but there is also a movement of charismatic Catholics.

At the top of the New Apostolic Reformation authority structure is Presiding Apostle C. Peter Wagner, a longtime Christian educator (who recently enjoyed a brief blip of fame when he was revealed as the graduate school mentor of Rick Warren, author of The Purpose-Driven Life and pastor of Saddleback Church in California). Wagner partnered with Ted Haggard, then pastor of the New Life Christian Church in Colorado Springs, to build the initial nerve center of the movement in that town. (Haggard went on to become president of the National Association of Evangelicals, but resigned both that post and pastorship of his megachurch in 2006 when he was famously disgraced by revelations of a gay affair and drug use.)

AlterNet turned to Rachel Tabachnick for insight on the New Apostolic Reformation and its political impact. Tabachnick is a nationally recognized researcher and writer on the religious right and its "end-times" narratives.

Bill Berkowitz: Most people are unaware of the New Apostolic Reformation. Tell us what we should know.

Rachel Tabachnick: Imagine for a moment that a large block of the evangelical world decided to re-organize themselves in a hierarchy somewhat resembling the Roman Catholic Church, with leaders in authority over each nation and region. And additionally imagine that every person -- from the individual congregants to the top leaders -- would have someone to whom they are accountable. It seems unthinkable, but this is exactly what the "apostles" and "prophets" [of the New Apostolic Reformation] are doing.

C. Peter Wagner streamlined the ideology and named it the New Apostolic Reformation. Wagner serves as the presiding apostle of the International Coalition of Apostles (ICA) which includes several hundred apostles across the U.S. and about 40 nations, international training centers and prayer warrior communication networks in all 50 states and worldwide. Those in the top tier of Wagner's network each have apostolic authority over other ministries, sometimes hundreds or even thousands. (See Talk2Action's Resource Directory for the New Apostolic Reformation.)

This is not just a church movement. [Those called] market apostles work in business, finance, communications, media and also lead the Reclaiming the Seven Mountains of Culture mandate. Bruce Wilson [a co-founder of Talk2Action] and I have both written about this campaign encouraging Christians to take dominion over seven spheres of government and society.

Enterprises known as "kingdom businesses" play an important role: A Toronto apostle's ministry includes an oil and gas company; two ICA apostles head Markets Unlocked, a business matchmaking system that connects kingdom business customers and suppliers, and claims exclusive agreements for over a half billion dollars of products and services. Trained intercessors are now paid to pray for businesses, and ICA apostles work closely with the International Christian Chamber of Commerce.

Apostles are also active providing social services, which Wagner describes as a method for accessing government and society. Apostle Doug Stringer, who is a former fitness instructor, is now listed as a policy expert at the Heritage Foundation, and claims to have distributed $30 million of gifts and donations during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. He has expanded operations to Fiji, Poland and Southeast Asia.

Wagner teachers that there will soon be a "great transfer of wealth" from the ungodly to the godly and has set up structures in preparation. The Wagner Leadership Institute teaches courses in prophecy as well as foreign currency exchange.

BB: How is the movement structured, and how has it grown so rapidly?

RT: Church growth is the key concept. Other Christian dominionist movements propose austere biblical law but Wagner explained in his 2008 book that he believes rapid growth of the movement will allow Christians to take dominion inside a democratic framework.

Wagner, who will be 80 this year, was a professor of church growth for 30 years at Fuller Theological Seminary, and promoted explosive mega-church growth. He has mainstreamed the concept of cell church structures, a strategy which began in Asia and South America and has resulted in congregations of tens of thousands. Cell churches are organized like a pyramid marketing scheme with small groups, usually with no more than 12, tasked with spinning off new cell groups and growing the church. This also resembles a military structure: Each cell group has a leader and lower level leaders answer to and are accountable to their superiors, on up the chain.

Such "spiritual accountability" schemes used to be called shepherding, but because of bad press and reports of coercive and abusive practices, it has been rebranded as "discipling." Lay people in cell groups perform many of the functions that would normally be carried out by pastors, and pastors become like corporate CEOs. This is how many of today's megachurches function. In his role as a church growth specialist, Wagner was able to repackage radical shepherding and cell structures as mainstream concepts for church growth.

These authoritarian strategies were further sanitized by Wagner's most famous student, Saddleback Church 's Rick Warren. Recently, while commenting about Uganda's proposed draconian anti-gay legislation, Warren denied that Wagner was his dissertation adviser. However, I have a copy of the dissertation which lists Wagner as "mentor,” and also explains Warren's desire to rid churches of voting, boards, and democratic structure. In Wagner's 1999 book Churchquake: How the New Apostolic Reformation is Shaking up the Church as We Know It, Wagner describes this radical re-structuring: "The traditional concept is that the congregation owns the church and that they hire the pastor to do their ministry for them. New apostolic churches, like Rick Warren's, turn this around 180 degrees…”

The New Apostolics are now trying to apply shepherding to entire communities and even nations. Sara Diamond, a pioneer in the field of dominion theology, warned in 1989 that charismatic shepherding was becoming a "masterpiece of political strategy." Some of the very same religious right strategists that Diamond wrote about in 1989 are now apostles in the ICA.

BB: What do the terms 'spiritual mapping' and 'spiritual warfare' mean and how do they function?

RT: Spiritual warfare is not a new concept; it can mean something as benign as a person's internal struggle to resist evil. These days, the New Apostolics have co-opted the term.

During the 1990s, in a frenzied effort to evangelize the world before 2000, Wagner proposed that instead of winning souls one by one, entire geographic areas and "people groups" could be targeted, therefore speeding up the process.

These new strategies include "Strategic Level Spiritual Warfare" and "spiritual mapping," designed to win territory. This is accomplished by doing battle with demons or principalities that they believe cause entire ethnicities, religions, and geographic areas to resist conversion. After expelling the demons, the evangelized population can take "dominion" over local government and culture. Then the community supposedly experiences a foretaste of "God's Kingdom on earth." These mini-utopias are advertised as having reduced poverty, corruption, disease, and even healing the environment. This is the ultimate faith-based initiative: remove the demons and society will be healed.

Spiritual mapping is the reconnaissance mission for spiritual warfare and involves the literal mapping of neighborhoods and cities to determine where the demons are. This includes generational curses, or those things in a city's history that allowed demons to take hold of the entire populis. Spiritual mapping is the ideological foundation for the now popular "prayer walking" and the formation of many city-wide prayer groups.

Wagner, George Otis, Jr., Ed Silvoso, Ted Haggard, John Dawson of Youth With a Mission, and others created an entire genre of books, texts, videos and other media teaching spiritual mapping and strategic level spiritual warfare. Their access to the interdenominational world missions' movement in the 1990s helped them spread these techniques rapidly around the globe.

The Transformations movies produced by Otis, Jr. are promotional "documentaries" showing prototypes of this process in which supernatural transformation of a community takes place including the healing of AIDS, instantaneous purifying of polluted streams, and even growth of huge vegetables. These movies have been shown to millions globally, and Transformations organizations worldwide are attempting to replicate these prototypes in their local communities.

Uganda is featured in several of the series of Transformations movies, which include top political, military and religious leaders. Bruce Wilson's recent video, Transforming Uganda, documents Silvoso's claim that his International Transformation Network is "discipling" every region of Uganda and 14,000 churches across th at country.

It is important to note, however, that this supernatural warfare isn't limited to faraway places and underdeveloped countries. The Transformations ideology originated from Western evangelicals -- witch-hunting and all -- and the prototypes have included cities like Hemet, California. Ugandan Julius Oyet, who starred in one of the Transformations movies is a key figure in the recent proposed draconian anti-gay legislation in that country.

BB: How are these strategies put into practice? Where have they been tried successfully? Where have they failed?

RT: Although many of the claims made in the Transformations movie can be easily disproved, the movement's advancement appears to be partially due to the promotion of the Transformations prototypes.

Supernatural healings of AIDS, spontaneous destruction of property of other belief systems, and even claims that the prayers of the movement have killed other humans are featured in films shown worldwide, including to mainline Protestant churches and renewal groups which have subsequently broken from their parent denominations.

For instance, the Transformations movies claim there have been thousands of cases of miraculous curing of AIDS in Uganda. Conversely, medical leaders are warning that claims of miraculous healing are interfering with the treatment of HIV/AIDS. Since altering their AIDS programs to abstinence-only programming promoted by U.S. evangelicals, Uganda has had an increase, not decrease of new AIDS cases.

To give you an idea of how deeply entrenched the New Apostolics are in this policy consider this example of one of the most celebrated abstinence-only programs in the U.S. Recapturing the Vision and Vessels of Honor are names for abstinence-only programs headed by Jacqueline del Rosario, who testified for renewal of Title V abstinence-based funding in Congressional hearings in 2002. Since 2001, her Miami organizations have been the recipient of $3,147,589 of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services grant money, and significant sums from other public sources, despite the fact that her organization was one of four in a long-term federally funded study which show ed no measurable results.

Del Rosario was a speaker, along with Wagner and other top apostles, at a conference in January, where she was described as an apostle in the promotional literature. Her relationship with the apostles is not new, however. She incorporated her organizations in the mid 1990s with leading Florida apostle Diane Buker, head of Battle Axe ministries, and Cindy Trimm, described as a "general in the art of strategic warfare." Buker is the author of God's Power to Multiply for Wealth and her Battle Axe Brigade ministry Web site features virulent attacks on Catholicism and other faiths. It certainly makes you question what is being taught in faith-based programming [financed] with millions of our tax dollars.

Another political area in which New Apostolics are deeply entrenched is John Hagee's Christians United for Israel. Hagee is still teaching that the Rapture may happen any moment, but many of his directors and leadership are New Apostolics who teach that they must take "dominion" over the earth, including Israel, before Jesus can return. These include ICA Apostle Stephen Strang who heads the Strang charismatic publishing empire, and regional director Robert Stearns, who publishes another leading New Apostolic journal titled Kairos. Stearns also leads the largest single international Christian Zionist event, which involves 200,000 churches worldwide -- and his ministry has been endorsed by the Knesset's Christian Allies Caucus and by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

BB: Are there politicians involved with NAR?

RT: The Transformations movies show access to many political figures from Fiji to South America to Africa. Uganda is a prime example and the movies are corroborated in this respect by active participation of political leaders in Transformation organizations.Transformation Hawaii has the full participation of Lt. Governor James “Duke” Aiona, who has spoken at conferences and even written for the movement. Lou Engle, a prophet in Wagner"s inner circle, has recently been on the news leading an anti-health care reform Prayercast with Republican Senators Jim DeMint and Sam Brownback, and Rep. Michelle Bachmann, among others. In May, Engle led another televised event in which he prayed over Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee.

The New Apostolic movement more closely resembles a political campaign than a denomination. PrayforNewark is a citywide prayer project in which every precinct has been mapped out and every street assigned to a volunteer. PrayforNewark is part of Ed Silvoso's International Transformation Network (ITN), the same operation that is "transforming" Uganda, and promoting the belief that homosexuals are possessed by literal demons. Silvoso's ITN is also active in numerous other locations in the U.S. and worldwide.

BB: Where does Sarah Palin fit into all this?

RT: The movement made early inroads in Alaska through an ICA apostle named Mary Glazier, who claims that a 24-year-old Palin joined her spiritual warfare network. These communication networks allow apostles to disseminate new prophecy to their "prayer warriors." During the presidential election this included prophecies about Palin, including one in which Glazier described a vision that Palin would take the "mantle" of leadership after a period of national mourning, apparently following John McCain's demise.

The first Transformation film so impressed pastors in Wasilla, Alaska, that they contacted some of the religious leaders featured in the movie including Thomas Muthee, who was shown driving a witch out of Kiambu, Kenya. Wasilla Assembly of God developed an ongoing relationship with Muthee and a 2005 church video shows him anointing Palin. Unfortunately the press picked up on the witch part of the story, and not the more important fact that Palin has ties to top leaders of the New Apostolic Reformation.

BB: Why should the American people be concerned about the New Apostolic Reformation?

RT: I believe this movement's threat to separation of church and state is greater than some of the more overtly theocratic movements of the religious right. The inclusion of women and all races in leadership roles, and their enthusiastic sponsorship of social services conflicts with a popular notion about religious fundamentalism. Despite their radical strategies, leaders in the movement have been labeled in the press as moderate, including Apostle Samuel Rodriguez -- president of the Sacramento, Calif.-based National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference -- who has been described as a "new evangelical."

Unsuspecting people are certainly becoming involved in New Apostolic activities without understanding its agenda. For example, the Global Day of Prayer sounds benign but was founded by Graham Power, head of the Africa division of Silvoso's International Transformation Network. Numerous citywide prayer efforts and pastors' networks are under the auspices of Wagner's apostles. Charities, social services, and "reconciliation" events appear to welcome all, but are designed as stealth evangelism to advance the "Kingdom."

In June, Lance Wallnau, an ICA apostle and motivational speaker for the Seven Mountain campaign, spoke on stealth evangelism at Wasilla Assembly of God. In Guatemalan jails, according to Wallnau, New Apostolics teach prisoners a secularized version of "Kingdom" worldview for a full year before making any attempt to convert them to "born-again" Christianity. Wallnau encouraged the congregation to follow this example for infiltrating the seven spheres of society.

Peter Wagner's ideas have spread widely into mainstream of evangelicalism, to little public notice. Ted Haggard, former president of the National Association of Evangelicals, partnered with Wagner in founding the New Apostolic Reformation and building its early headquarters, the World Prayer Center in Colorado Springs. Despite the fact that Haggard has written books on New Apostolic strategies, his participation in promoting this radical reformation of both church and society is so little known, it could be described as "Haggard's other secret."



Bill Berkowitz is a freelance writer covering right-wing groups and movements. Rachel Tabachnick has provided research on the religious right to political campaigns and regularly contributes to Talk2action.org, Political Research Associates' The Public Eye, and the Jewish Daily Forward's Zeek.
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Re: The "Christian" Mafia

Postby American Dream » Sun Apr 04, 2010 9:04 am

Ethics Complaint Leveled at Right-Wing Congressional Members of Shadowy Christian Group

By Adele M. Stan, AlterNet
Posted on April 2, 2010

http://www.alternet.org/story/146285/


A group of congressmen and senators living in a posh townhouse on Capitol Hill may now have to answer to the ethics committees in their respective chambers, thanks to letters of complaint filed by the watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. At issue is the modest rent paid by the conservative male lawmakers -- who hail from both political parties -- to live in the house owned by The Family, the shadowy, right-wing religious group that sponsors the National Prayer Breakfast and shores up the work of dictators throughout the developing world. (See AlterNet's interview with Jeff Sharlet, the journalist who first uncovered the work of The Family, which is also known as The Fellowship.)

Named in the complaint to the Senate committee (PDF) are Senators Tom Coburn, R-Okla.; John Ensign, R-Nev.; Jim DeMint, R-S.C., and Sam Brownback, R-Kans. CREW's letter to the House committee (PDF) names as recipients of a probable "gift" of a rent subsidy Representatives Bart Stupak, D-Ohio; Zach Wamp, R-Tenn.; Mike Doyle, D-Penn., and Heath Shuler, D-N.C. (Coburn, Ensign and DeMint are among the group of Family members AlterNet investigated when examining Republican opposition to health-care reform.)

CREW alleges that the lawmakers pay below-market rent for their rooms in the restored 19th-century property, receiving lodging and housekeeping for $950 month in a neighborhood where a one-room efficiency apartment can go for as much as $1,700. Essentially, the CREW complaints say that the rents are being subsidized by the entity that owns the house, and that subsidy, according to ethics rules, amounts to the sort of "gift" that is banned under ethics rules, according to CREW Executive Director Melanie Sloan.

"Rarely does someone – particularly a member of Congress – receive something for nothing," Sloan said in a statement, "so you can’t help but wonder exactly what these members may be doing in return for all of this largess. Of course, this is the reason the gift ban was enacted in the first place. This situation cries out for an immediate ethics inquiry.”

In a related story, ClergyVOICE, a group of Protestant religious leaders called on the Internal Revenue Service to investigate the tax implications of accepting a subsidized rent. Earlier this year, the C Street house had its tax-exempt status revoked: its owners had claimed the house to be a church, and thereby exempt from paying property taxes.

AlterNet was unable to reach the congressmen named, finding their offices closed for Good Friday, Stupak and Doyle told the AP that they no longer live in the house, and they believed the rent to be fairly assessed.

But how does this compare to a group of people renting a Capitol Hill house and divvying up the rent? Surely, if you found a house for, say, $5,000 per month, and divided it between five people, you might come up with a comparable rent.

"Yeah, but usually they're not $1.8 million houses," Sloan said when reached by AlterNet in her Washington, D.C., office."While I'm sure there are a lot of people sharing group houses that are a lot less expensive, they're not that level of house. And as I understand it, it's quite a nice house, too. It's not exactly falling apart."

Indeed, I can attest to the fact that the house is rather nicely appointed, with handsome furnishing and a crystal chandelier in its front room, which is visible from the street.

"And other group houses don't come with housekeeping services, including sheets and towels," Sloan said.

Sen. Coburn, through his spokesperson, disputed that he receives housekeeping services at C Street, according to the Associated Press. Neither housekeeping or meals are included in his $950 monthly rent, an unnamed spokesperson told the AP.

"He's doing his own laundry? He's doing his own towels? Well, I'm surprised," Sloan said. "But I don't think other people have disputed that."
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Re: The "Christian" Mafia

Postby Sounder » Tue Jan 10, 2012 8:16 am

bump
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Re: The "Christian" Mafia

Postby Allegro » Tue Jan 10, 2012 10:38 am

Thanks, AD, for this thread.
Sounder wrote:bump
Thanks, Sounder, for the reminder!
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Re: The "Christian" Mafia

Postby Sounder » Tue Jan 10, 2012 12:28 pm

I find it appropriate that the NAR folk want to create a top down authority structure to replace the typical protestant custom of the congregation choosing their minister.

One more tool in the box I suppose. To be Charismatic means to be extra enthusiastic about the big man theory of reality.

Rachel Tabachnick: Imagine for a moment that a large block of the evangelical world decided to re-organize themselves in a hierarchy somewhat resembling the Roman Catholic Church, with leaders in authority over each nation and region. And additionally imagine that every person -- from the individual congregants to the top leaders -- would have someone to whom they are accountable. It seems unthinkable, but this is exactly what the "apostles" and "prophets" [of the New Apostolic Reformation] are doing.

C. Peter Wagner streamlined the ideology and named it the New Apostolic Reformation. Wagner serves as the presiding apostle of the International Coalition of Apostles (ICA) which includes several hundred apostles across the U.S. and about 40 nations, international training centers and prayer warrior communication networks in all 50 states and worldwide. Those in the top tier of Wagner's network each have apostolic authority over other ministries, sometimes hundreds or even thousands. (See Talk2Action's Resource Directory for the New Apostolic Reformation.)

This is not just a church movement. [Those called] market apostles work in business, finance, communications, media and also lead the Reclaiming the Seven Mountains of Culture mandate. Bruce Wilson [a co-founder of Talk2Action] and I have both written about this campaign encouraging Christians to take dominion over seven spheres of government and society.
All these things will continue as long as coercion remains a central element of our mentality.
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Re: The "Christian" Mafia

Postby American Dream » Sun Jan 11, 2015 11:27 am

Saturday, January 10, 2015

The Family Part I

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Across the blogosphere there are no shortage of accounts of "occult" secret societies infiltrating the American political spectrum in a bid to destroy Christianity and control the world. Certainly this blog has considered more than its far share of secretive orders over the years and this has required a great deal of research on the part of this writer. As this research has become more in depth over the years I have learned that, if nothing else, while there likely are secretive orders that influence international affairs, they are far stranger than the typical Alex Jones bot can scarcely imagine.

Case in point is the bizarre Christian sect known sometimes as "The Family" or "The Fellowship." It has existed since the 1930s, has steadily accumulated political influence for decades as well as cultivating a very close relationship with the US national security apparatus and has been involved in a host of intrigues. And yet it is rarely if ever mentioned by conspiracy theorists despite ample documentation of its extensive influence on the American political landscape. He's an overview of the outfit's more recent activities:

"The group is best known for hosting the National Prayer Breakfast each February with the President of the United States. Also known as the 'Family,' the group includes Republican U.S. Senator Don Nickles (OK), Charles Grassly (IA), Pete Domenici (NM), John Ensign (NV), James Inhofe (OK) --a sponsor of the Constitution Restoration Act --and Conrad Burns (MT). The 'invisible' brotherhood also includes Democratic Senator Bill Nelson (FL).

"The House is represented by Republicans Jim DeMint (SC), Frank Wolf (VA), Joseph Pitts (PA), and Zach Wamp (TN), as well as a lone Democrat, Bart Stupak.

"Anthony Lappe, a former mainstream journalist who later became a founder and editor of Guerrilla News Network (http://www.gnn.tv), has written, 'The Fellowship is one of the most secretive, most powerful religious organizations in the country. Its connections reach to the highest levels of the U.S. government and include ties to the CIA and numerous current and past dictators around the world.' In the spirit of Straussian Neocon secrecy, its members, according to Lappe, have 'denied owing any allegiance to the group, and several professed ignorance of even the most basic facts about the organization.'

"Jeffrey Sharlet, editor of another courageous and important alternative journalism Web site, Killing the Buddha (http://www.killingthebuddha.com) and co-author of Killing the Buddha: A Heretic's Bible (The Free Press, 2004), infiltrated the Fellowship's Arlington, Virginia, mansion, dubbed Ivanwald, then published an eye-opening article in Harper's magazine in March 2003.

"'I have lived with these men,' wrote Sharlet, a half-Jewish New Yorker, 'not as a Christian --a term they deride as too narrow for the world they are building in Christ's honor --but as a 'believer.' These powerful 'believers'... populate an 'invisible' association, though its membership has always consisted mostly of public men.'

"To foster the interests of God on earth, Sharlet reported, 'regular prayer groups have met in the Pentagon and at the Department of Defense, and the Family has traditionally fostered strong ties with businessmen in the oil and aerospace industries.'

"In a December 8, 2003, story in the Washington Post, headlined 'Northern Virginia Neighbors Up in Arms Over Secretive Enclave,' reporter Annie Gowen noted, 'In its mission to create global harmony, the Fellowship has for decades quietly brought together third world leaders, disgraced captains of industry, members of Congress, and ambassadors.' Among the Fellowship's famous guests, the Post revealed, have been Palestinian leaders and terrorist Yasser Arafat. In his Harper's article, Sharlet reported that other notable colleagues in Christ have included 'Brazilian dictator General Costa e Silva... [Indonesian dictator] General Suharto (whose tally of several hundred thousand "Communists" killed marks him as one of the century's most murderous dictators)... Salvadoran General Carlos Eugenios Vides Casanova, convicted by a Florida jury of the torture of thousands... and Honduran General Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, himself an evangelical minister, who was linked to both the CIA and the death squads before his demise.'

"The Family's financial backers include, among others, Tom Phillips, former CEO of Big Three arms manufacturer Raytheon. Even more troubling, however, is the 'Christian' worldview that the Family forges behind closed doors.

"'The Family's leaders,' Sharlet established from his three-week infiltration, 'consider democracy a manifestation of ungodly pride and "throwaway religion" in favor of the truths of the Family. Declaring God's covenant with the Jews broken, the group's core members call themselves "the new chosen."'

"In a Guerrilla News Network interview with Lappe, Sharlet went even further than what he reported in Harper's. 'The goal [of the Family] is an "invisible" world organization led by Christ,' he said. 'The core issue is capitalism and power.' Sharlet left no doubt about the clear message he received at Ivanwald: 'You guys are here to learn to rule the world.'"

(Fixing America, John Buchanan, pgs. 69-70)


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