Last night over at Daily Kos, I spotted a diary by Troutfishing entitled Air America/Talk To Action Show Exposes WAR on Liberal Churches. The diary directed readers to a podcast of Air America’s State of Belief episode that aired on Sunday, May 21. The episode featured
a 4-way discussion between Gaddy and three leaders (and also writers on Talk To Action) in the fight against the far right effort to take over and destabilize mainline Protestantism , to split up, neutralize, and take over churches and potentially even entire denominations.
Once I started listening, I realized that this was some disturbing, important stuff, and something that needed to be in an accessible format for posting, so I started transcribing it. You can find it as Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 at my Religious Left Blog. Some excerpts below the fold.
Gaddy: How do you get this done–what is the strategy for taking over a denomination?
Weaver: Well, you undermine confidence in the leadership. You constantly create a picture that they are doing untoward things. So you use, as John has said, propaganda language continually. And drive home wedge issues. Human sexuality is the primary one, because there is so much emotion around that question. But they also use jingoistic, patriotistic–recently United Methodist bishops, two out of three of them in November signed a very strong statement against this war as unjust and immoral. Also said the occupation, which is important, is unjust and immoral. Well, when Fox News called the White House, they had no comment. But within 10 days, the IRD did a smear piece in the Weekly Standard where Fred Barnes, who is on the board of the IRD, who’s on Fox News, and the Weekly Standard board. They also did a fund letter at Christmas time, December 22, saying that the bishops would not have defended America at Normandy. At Normandy! So we’re talking about extreme propaganda to try to divide people.
More…
Gaddy: Some of you have written, or maybe all of you have written, about the hookup between this takeover movement and Christian Reconstructionism movement, and the Dominionist movement related to that. My guess is, a lot of listeners to State of Belief are not familiar with those terms and those organizations. Give us a very quick introduction to them.
Weaver: Well, Howard Ahmanson is at the core of this. He’s a billionaire, whose wife sits on the IRD board. They are big contributors to Christian Reconstructionism. Howard Ahmanson for 23 years was on the Chalcedon Institute board. He is the primary funder. They believe that we should not have a democracy but we need to have a twisted sense of Calvinist theocracy, in which among other things, people like everyone on this radio show should be stoned to death because we don’t share their religious beliefs out of literalism out of Deuteronomy. Gays should be stoned to death, and incorrigible children.
