Well…I don’t know how to get this across any more directly than to play the words that are falling straight out of the horse’s mouth!

Enter Queen Esther…

Hooboy! I am tellin’ya…I should get combat pay for just watching all this! Her snarky, smirking arrogance is unpalatable. For one thing, “In God We Trust” was first introduced during the American Civil War, but did not become an official motto until 1956. Christian zealots then and now continue to assert falsely that America was founded as a Christian nation, and they often cite this motto as evidence.

Palin's 2 Cents

Palin’s 2-cents worth (In God We Trust first appeared on the 2 cent coin) is as relevant as the 2 cent piece. During the 1950s when this issue was again brought up in politics, America was hysterical about the “red scare” of communism. Now – we have millions of mis-informed alarmists scurrying to and fro shouting “socialism”, “Marxism”, “facsism” and “communism”!

Palin inarticulately feeds this frenzy and adds her Christian Dominionist propaganda to the mix. She throws out words like worldview, founding fathers, Christian nation, and unalienable like she actually knows what they all mean. She doesn’t. But let me tell you what she is driving at. She is becoming more and more bold at revealing her beliefs…beliefs that would lead to America as a theocracy under the rule of Christian Dominionists.

I read a great article on “News That Matters” and am re-posting this snippet from their post:

By Jeff Green

(Palin quoted from the O’Reilly Show)

“I think we should keep this clean, keep it simple, go back to what our founders and our founding documents meant. They’re quite clear that we would create law based on the God of the Bible and the 10 commandments, it’s pretty simple.”

So said Sarah Palin on FOX the other night and I’m willing to agree. Let’s go back and rewrite the entirety of US Federal and local laws based on Leviticus.

So, here we go:

• From now on you will be paid on the day you’ve worked, no more of this every two weeks crap.
• It will be an insult before God to cut your hair,
• Or to wear two different fabrics at the same time.
• If you get caught wearing any of those cotton/poly blends you will be stoned to death. And I don’t mean with a mean Thai stick, but with real rocks thrown by your god-fearing neighbors, none of whom have committed sins.
• In order to save money at home you may now sell your daughters into slavery.
• All your debts will be forgiven every seven years.
• All our laws will be thrown out and rewritten every seven years.
• For you farmers and gardeners, you’ll leave the corners of your fields and the fruit that has fallen off your trees unharvested so that those who are hungry may come and eat.
• You will no longer be able to have a cheeseburger and a shake, doing so will get you stoned to death.
• If you have sex out of wedlock, both of you will be killed and please, don’t have sex with your mom.
• Clams? Shrimp? Pork Sirloin? Just for the heathens – who will be killed.
• Masturbation? Oy vey! You are unclean and anything you’ve touched will be unclean. In order to make clean you must take two doves and ritually sacrifice them. Then you’re kosher again.
• Woman having their periods? For seven days you are unclean and again, anything you touch will also be unlcean. And in order to get clean again… yeah, get those doves ready.
• If you plant corn and beans in the same garden plot you will be killed.
• And lastly, you have to be nice to immigrants.

I said it last week and I’ll say it again, Sarah Palin is the stupidest woman we’ve ever let go before a microphone. ~ News That Matters

Preachin' Palin

They really think the rest of us do not still have our Bibles and know how to read them? I know how ludicrous this sounds, but seriously…exactly WHAT part of the Bible is Palin & Co. suggesting we base our laws on? And what portions are we to believe they are omitting? It is all very frightening, indeed…

Since we know that this is just a sampling of the violent and retributive biblical law laid out in the Bible I would like to ask all of you to add more to this list. It is important to show just how extreme this notion is, and while still in the midst of having to answer hate mail from “Christian Patriots” telling me how violent the Koran is – they do seem to completely ignore how violent the Old Testament is!

When it is unfolding right before our eyes, it is time to stop doubting and start pushing back.

My next post will elaborate further on Palin’s appearance at the “Women of Joy” conference that O’Reilly showed a very brief clip of in his “interview” above.

Yeah, right! These holier-than-thou hypocrites are un-be-lievable!!!

Hypo-homophobe

“I have spent much time as a mental health professional and as a Christian minister helping and lovingly caring for people identifying themselves as ‘gay.’ My hero is Jesus Christ who loves even the culturally despised people, including sexual sinners and prostitutes. Like Jesus Christ, I deliberately spend time with sinners with the loving goal to try to help them,” wrote Rekers.

Where IS that lightening bolt when you need it???

“Like John the Baptist and Jesus, I have a loving Christian ministry to homosexuals and prostitutes in which I share the Good News of Jesus Christ with them (see I Corinthians 6:8-11). Contrary to false gossip, innuendo, and slander about me, I do not in any way ‘hate’ homosexuals, but I seek to lovingly share two types of messages to them, as I did with the young man called ‘Lucien’ in the news story: [1] It is possible to cease homosexual practices to avoid the unacceptable health risks associated with that behavior, and [2] the most important decision one can make is to establish a relationship with God for all eternity by trusting in Jesus Christ’s sacrifice on the cross for the forgiveness of your sins, including homosexual sins. If you talk with my travel assistant that the story called ‘Lucien,’ you will find I spent a great deal of time sharing scientific information on the desirability of abandoning homosexual intercourse, and I shared the Gospel of Jesus Christ with him in great detail.”

K…K…K ( I know I am starting to sound like Joe Pesci from Lethal Weapon) but is anyone else more than just a little disturbed by this? And are you not growing as tired as I by the quick, “Oh! But he is not one of us!” proclamations anytime that one of their own is discovered to step outside their box. I do recall doing a post on this on www.theopalinism.com/blog…http://www.theopalinism.com/blog/2009/06/27/grand-ol-party-i-dont-think-this-is-what-they-meant/

I have been thinking to myself recently that I must ha am ready for that, have all my ducks in a row…no my facts…articulate them…and be poised for opposition. Well, I really am ready for all of the above. And when I see these lunatics I realize…why in the hell am I in the least bit concerned about push-back?? They will oppose what ever I bring to the table, and I am not going to change their agenda.

I AM reminded that it is the 70% of the rest of America that truly concerns me. Think about all the people you know…no matter the political persuasion. No matter their denial of political interest or affiliation at all. No matter whether they are religious, non-religious or somewhere in between, This is about all the rest of us in America who have not drunk the Kool Aid! Republicans (secular), Dems, non-partisan, a-political, etc…I can’t say it enough! Start talking to those around you. Even if seems inconsequential.

An undeniable duo

We ARE making a difference…we WILL win…and a sign of that is to watch tomorrow as poor lil’ Franklin Graham is relegated to public grounds outside the Pentagon (where he should have been all along) as he does his prayer as though in some sort of defiance of our President and government.

He will be having a virtual tantrum for all the world to see because even after going to his “daddy”, Obama would not cow-tow to his foot-stomping, “but I wanna!”

Ah shucks, Frankie…AMEN!

Texas is the 2nd largest purchaser of textbooks in the U.S. behind California. Because of that buying power, they have tremendous influence in what is edited out, and added in to textbooks that are distributed to all 50 states.

Just a FEW proposed changes

Texas school districts are able to buy books that the state board rejects but designates as containing at least half the required curriculum — but they’ll have to use their own money to do so. Almost all currently use state funds to buy textbooks off the approved list, said Suzanne Marchman, a spokeswoman for the Texas Education Agency.

One publisher said Tuesday that changes in technology, including the introduction of online components, make it easier and cheaper to tailor textbooks to specific states and requirements, and downplayed the impact that Texas’s decisions would have on the rest of the country.

“We now have the ability to deliver completely customized content” to different states, said Joseph Blumenfeld, spokesman for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, one of three major publishers that supply Texas with most of its social studies textbooks.

But some historians weren’t so certain. Fischer, who is a historian at University of Northern Colorado, noted that first-year teachers fall back on what’s most readily available to them — their textbooks.

This is clearly not simply a problem for students in Texas and we must all get involved in fighting this distortion of American history before the final board vote in May.

Alex and I are working diligently on preparing a series of posts on the “Texas 11″ who voted to approve some 100 changes to history textbooks that will push a perception that we were founded as a Christian nation; removal of the word “democratic” to insert “constitutional republic”; strip Thomas Jefferson because he is seen as secular (which = anti-Christian to these zealots) and inserting John Calvin; add Newt Gingrich and Phyllis Schlafly, but remove Ted Kennedy and Caesar Chavez…and the horrific list of ReBiblican changes goes on and on.

When we start posting our “Texas 11″ series in the next day or so, you will see clearly how this ties into the 7 Mountain Mandate that I have been telling you about. For those who are unfamiliar, please click on the video to the right of this post and watch the their own promo of the 7MM. To give you an idea of what I am referring to with the members themselves here is what Cynthia Dunbar is spewing…thanks to this article that you can read in its entirety at RightWingWatch.org…

“Faith 2 Action‘s Janet Porter continues to move ahead with her organizing for the “May Day: a Cry to God for Our Nation in Distress” prayer rally at the Lincoln Memorial on May 1:has explained that the event is designed to break the curse that our nation is under for having elected President Obama, and now she’s picking up some interesting new supporters for her effort:

Porter said Cynthia Dunbar, a lawyer who serves on the Texas State Board of Education, will attend and ask God for forgiveness for how the nation has removed Him from American schools.

“She is going to come to May Day and repent for how we have taught our children lies, not only in revisionist history but also evolution, how we’ve kicked God out of school,” Porter said. “She will repent on behalf of the education system, and she’s also going to welcome God back in.”

Dunbar played a central role in Texas’ recent rewriting of its social studies requirements in order to make them better reflect the conservative worldview and, given her views, it is no surprise that she would team up with the likes of Porter:

In 2008, Cynthia Dunbar published a book called “One Nation Under God,” in which she stated more openly than most of her colleagues have done the argument that the founding of America was an overtly Christian undertaking and laid out what she and others hope to achieve in public schools. “The underlying authority for our constitutional form of government stems directly from biblical precedents,” she writes. “Hence, the only accurate method of ascertaining the intent of the Founding Fathers at the time of our government’s inception comes from a biblical worldview.”

Then she pushes forward: “We as a nation were intended by God to be a light set on a hill to serve as a beacon of hope and Christian charity to a lost and dying world.” But the true picture of America’s Christian founding has been whitewashed by “the liberal agenda” — in order for liberals to succeed “they must first rewrite our nation’s history” and obscure the Christian intentions of the founders. Therefore, she wrote, “this battle for our nation’s children and who will control their education and training is crucial to our success for reclaiming our nation.”

After the book came out, Dunbar was derided in blogs and newspapers for a section in which she writes of “the inappropriateness of a state-created, taxpayer-supported school system” and likens sending children to public school to “throwing them into the enemy’s flames, even as the children of Israel threw their children to Moloch.” (Her own children were either home-schooled or educated in private Christian schools.)

You have to remember, Christian Dominionists literally call public schools, “Institutions of Satan”. This is their terminology, not mine.

When I asked, over dinner in a honky-tonk steakhouse down the road from the university, why someone who felt that way would choose to become an overseer of arguably the most influential public-education system in the country, she said that public schools are a battlefield for competing ideologies and that it’s important to combat the “religion” of secularism that holds sway in public education.[...]

Here is the video promoting this “May Day is Pray Day 2010″ event as they rally to reclaim America for Christ.

As I say, if anyone thinks that Dominionism is fabricated, exaggerated, or a conspiracy theory…we need look no further – right now – than the Texas 11 and what they are doing as we speak. Education is one of their most sought after of the 7 Mountains!

How people get recruited into coercive groups: A view from an ex-Quiverfull survivor

by dogemperor

Wed Mar 17, 2010 at 10:07:53 AM PDT

Probably one of the main questions–right next to “How do we stop dominionists?”–I’m asked when writing is “Why do into coercive religious groups in the first place?”

One thing to note is that, in general, people less join a coercive group and more are recruited into a coercive group or are raised in a coercive group.

A new article by Jonathan Rice and Vyckie Garrison–the latter of whom runs No Longer Quivering, a support forum for ex-Quiverfull survivors–gives a glimpse of how coercive group recruitment works from a first-hand view.

A glimpse on a disturbing dominionist movement

Some of my longterm readers may be familiar with the term “Quiverfull”–I’ve mentioned it in my series on religiously motivated child abuse in relation to Michael and Debi Pearl (a series that is, unfortunately, timely again due to the recent death by chastening rod of a seven-year-old girl) and particularly in regards to my writing on Bill Gothard’s “Bible-based” coercive group empire.

For those uninitiated, “Quiverfull” is a movement within both “independent fundamentalist Baptist” and neopentecostal-dominionist (including New Apostolic Reformation/Joel’s Army) circles that promotes the idea of dispensing with any form of contraception whatsoever–even the rhythm method is prohibited–and actively attempting to have as many children “as God will allow”.

In NAR circles in particular, this is explicitly seen as a method to breed as many future members of “God’s Army” as possible using justification not dissimilar to that of the King of England in “Braveheart” (“If we can’t burn them out, we’ll breed them out”); segments of the Quiverfull movement also increasingly push for home births without medical assistance and even “unregistered births” (where the birth is never registered with the state Department of Human Resources or other state birth registries and where the child is never signed up for Social Security).

In fact, the term in its modern use does have NAR-ish roots–the term “Quiverfull” denotes having a “full quiver” of arrows to defeat The Enemy (in this case, secular society)–only in this case, the metaphorical “arrows” are children who are reared from birth onwards in a regimented, socially isolated manner.  (In general, the only typical contacts kids in “Quiverfull families” have are with families of other members of the movement.)  The term ultimately stems from a scripture-twisting of Psalms 127:4-5:

[4] Like arrows in the hand of a warrior
are the sons of one’s youth.
[5] Happy is the man who has
his quiver full of them!
He shall not be put to shame
when he speaks with his enemies in the gate.

(RSV.  In context, this is a psalm of Solomon stating that true protection is in the hands of God and that true preparedness and security only comes from God.  Prior verses explicitly note that a watchman’s duty is in vain unless God is the foundation of the country, among other things.)

Promotion of “Quiverfull” is commonly done via dominionist correspondence-school circles promoting themselves as “Christian homeschooling”; the Pearls’ and Gothard’s empires have largely grown, in fact, through dominionist correspondence-school support networks.

A related phenomenon is that of “purity balls”–also written about in part one of my series on religiously motivated child abuse–where daughters sometimes as young as four are symbolically “married” to their fathers until such time as they are married legally–often to an arranged spouse.

As I’ve noted, the movement is heavily connected with dominionism and would constitute a coercive group in and of itself.  As the article notes:

These children are homeschooled for the most part, in the hopes that they’ll become an army of the Lord’s mighty warriors who, through sheer demographic force, reclaim America for God. Females are kept in perpetual servitude from earliest childhood, wherethey are considered the property of their fathers and spend their days caring for younger siblings. When a girl reaches puberty she must pledge her virginity/purity to her father (often in writing). Once the father finds a suitor to his liking, he transfers his ownership of the young lady to her husband. Adult women in the movement are not allowed to work outside the home, and usually forbidden to speak in church (obviously, they can never be ordained!). And based upon a quirky interpretation of an obscure biblical passage (Isaiah 3:12), they are also forbidden to vote.

Lurking beneath the QF/CP lifestyle lies the teachings of R.J. Rushdoony, the leading exponent of a dire and militant form of Calvinism called “Christian Reconstructionism.” In his massive tome Institutes of Biblical Law, he advocated the overthrow of modern democracy, replacing it with a theocratic state in which all the laws of Leviticus are imposed (including the death penalty for disobedient children, adulterers and homosexuals). Also, as per his reading of the Bible, the theocratic state would reintroduce slavery. Hard-line QF/CP believers think that creating a population explosion of their own is the most effective means of bringing this dystopic vision to fruition.

It is not an exaggeration in some cases–particularly Gothard’s program–to compare the general setup to a dominionist version of Taliban-era Afghanistan.

* * *

Surprisingly enough, most people have seen a Quiverfull family on TV–though they might not have known it.

And, of note, there is at least one Quiverfull family that has become famous–the Duggar clan, who are known Gothard acolytes and whom are presented as pretty much the poster children for the Quiverfull movement.

Another Quiverfull family, alas, became quite infamous.  This was, unfortunately, the family of Andrea Yates–who was involved in a dominionist church that promoted Quiverfull theology, and who ultimately ended up drowning five of her young children as a result of postpartum depression complicated by what may well have been cult-related complex PTSD.

* * *

As with most coercive religious movements, there are walkaway networks for support.  The best known by far is No Longer Quivering, run by Vyckie Garrison (who is herself not only an ex-Quiverfull survivor, but prior to walking away was a major promoter in the movement).  The images one gets are of a highly patriarchial, overtly female-hostile, coercive religious movement (and it does meet the characteristics of an overt coercive religious group, particularly in its isolation of members) in which women are expected to give all, up to and including their bodies and health, for the whim of their leaders.

And it’s through these forums that we get a rare glimpse into what it is like to be recruited into a Bible-based cult.

Like a frog being boiled in water

People have asked me repeatedly how folks get recruited into coercive groups.  As I am a multigenerational walkaway–that is, I was raised in a coercive group rather than joining one as a teen or adult–it’s hard for me to answer this personally; pretty much, most of my life “Jesus Camp life” was all I knew, and my experiences have been more of essentially resocialising myself (not unlike a kid who was raised by wolves and having to figure out human culture).

Johnathan W. Rice’s recent article in Salon Magazine, Fear And Loathing In Jesusland, describes a story I’ve heard across ex-cult forums from recruitees who became walkaways–that you’re never given the “Full Monty” straightaway but are gradually inducted.

The big difference, here, is that–for one of the first times since Matt Taibbi’s “The Great Derangement”–this is talking about a non-negligible part of the dominionist movement:

In mid-February 2010, a thread title on the forum caught my eye: How did you get yourself into this mess? The author, a female refugee from the movement, was wondering how she and so many others could have fallen for it in the first place.

After reading it, I again realized how closely the QF/CP movement intersects with mainstream evangelicalism and fundamentalism; and how easily I too could have been recruited, given the wrong circumstances. How, one may ask, do people get into such a seemingly bizarre religious movement? And how had I (in the past) been in danger of being sucked in myself?

The answer boils down to one simple word: “gradually.”

The substance of my gradual experience, which I’ll summarize here, is the shared story of countless rank & file believers who come under the broad labels “Pentecostal,” “charismatic,” “evangelical,” and “fundamentalist.”

In the beginning, as a teen in the mid 1970s, my cousin, followed by my mother, became born-again Christians. It was really positive in those days: God loves you and has a wonderful plan, and so forth. It was all about having a new life, full of purpose and meaning. A life in which the very Creator of the Universe actually cared about little people like us!

Among other things, a big thing that the more coercive groups in the movement (including not just Campus Crusade and YWAM, but the infamous Maranatha) were involved in was “love-bombing”–smothering people with affection, making them feel wonderful and loved.  The author himself experienced some of this, and also describes how after the “love-in” the indoctrination started to trickle in, eventually becoming a torrent:

It was all really positive in those early, idealistic years. Loving Jesus, hoping to save the world, helping homeless people, having an abundance of real friends who stood with me through thick and thin: it was all good; really good. The song that often brought tears to my eyes in the early days was written by Keith Green immediately upon his conversion (before he’d entered into his extremist phase): Like waking up from the longest dream How real it seemed Until your love broke through

But gradually…

A radio program called Focus on the Family that I used to hear doling out advice to crisis-wracked families, was becoming politicized. Through the show, and then through the warnings of Tim LaHaye and others, I began learning of sinister threats being hatched against us by people called “Secular Humanists.” LaHaye, in a breathless, frenzied spiel, warned of the threat as follows. Humanists, he said: have been “planted” in strategic places in the United Nations, they teach children in public schools “to read the words scientific humanism as soon as they’re old enough to read,” and 275,000 humanists control the American government, education, and media.[2]

As conspiracy-paranoia mounted, politics in church began to subvert the innocent, Jesus-loving expressions of faith I’d known in the beginning. Our churches started distributing candidates’ score cards in the foyers, telling us to vote accordingly.

And then there was a radio preacher, William Steuart McBirnie, whose Voice of Americanism program daily rehashed senator McCarthy’s and Carl McIntire’s Red Scare fundamentalism, updating it for the mid-1980s. We had much to fear and many to loathe.

([2] Tim LaHaye, The Battle For the Mind (Old Tappan, NJ: Revell, 1980), pp. 27, 74, 97, 179. Summarized in George M. Mardsen, Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism ( MI: Wm.B. Eerdmans Publishing Co, 1991), p. 109.)

In addition to describing a phenomena I’ve witnessed myself–the increasing radicalisation of “Christian Contemporary” performers, including Steve Taylor and Carmen (the latter of whom actually co-published (with Ron Luce of Teen Mania Ministries, an infamous NAR group targeting–naturally–teenagers) a guide for teenagers on how to recruit fellow teens into Bible-based coercive groups using love-bombing and harassment)–he notes personally meeting Francis and Frank Shaeffer, two major leaders of the dominionist movement in the late 70s and early 80s.  (Frank Schaeffer later left the dominionist movement and has written a tell-all book, “Crazy for God”, describing his own experiences; reportedly, per the book, he initially recruited his own father into the movement.)

Of note, the author almost makes a point I have been writing about for well over five years–that dominionism is less a political movement and more of a series of Bible-based cults that have as a common goal the establishment of a dominionist-supremacist government:

Most cults have a well-planned program for the indoctrination of new recruits, in which they deceitfully hide their more bizarre teachings from seekers (an exoteric/esoteric truth divide). The new convert is only taught the vision piecemeal; gradually gaining deeper (and weirder) knowledge over a period of months or years.

But with us, although it may have appeared that way, it wasn’t exactly so. I later realized I was living in the midst of a drastic change in popular American Christianity. The movement still really was (for the most part) benign when I joined. The resentful loathing was added gradually, not as a planned indoctrination program, but because the church genuinely was in the midst of radical transition during 1980s and ‘90s.

I myself would agree and disagree with his statement–what he may not have been aware of is that, particularly during the 80s and 90s, there was an organised campaign (beginning as early as the waning days of the Latter Rain movement in the 40s) to explicitly steeplejack the non-Christian-Nationalist segment of the evangelical movement.  Legitimate “Charismatic” movements in Catholic and Protestant denominations were taken over from within by neopentecostal “cuckoo churches”.

In this case, the cult recruitment was less of individual people and more of a takeover-from-within and indoctrination of a very large chunk of the evangelical movement–one particularly mediated by New Apostolic Reformation groups as well as a group calling itself the Institute for Religion and Democracy that was closely connected to Christian Reconstructionists.  (Probably the prototypical example, in fact, was the ultimately successful steeplejacking of the Southern Baptist Convention–formerly a conservative but relatively mainline denomination, it has gone hard-dominionist and is now quite possibly undergoing a second “consolidation” steeplejack by NAR-linked groups.)

The NAR takeovers and plans for steeplejacks–particularly of non-NAR-linked charismatic worship groups–is, to this day, woefully under-documented (about the only people who’ve written on this regularly are myself, Bruce Wilson, Rachel Tabachnik, and Katherine Yurica and to a lesser extent Sara Diamond), so that’s an understandable lapse–to someone who didn’t grow up in one of the major foci of the NAR movement (as I did), it would appear that the evangelical movement just “radicalised slowly”.

Interestingly, it turns out I’m not the only one to make that argument–theologian Richard T. Hughes noted in a recent article the likelihood that the evangelical movement had essentially been steeplejacked by Christian Reconstructionists and the NAR for purposes of promoting “Christian supremacy”:

This definition of the kingdom of God as a kingdom of political power helps explain why so many fundamentalist and evangelical Christians lent such broad support to America’s war against Iraq. It also helps explain the rise of the Christian Reconstruction Movement led by the late R. J. Rushdoony, a Calvinist who argued that Christians should control civil government and that biblical law should govern the United States. It also helps explain a large and thriving contemporary network, closely akin to the Christian Reconstruction Movement, called the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) — a network that works through business, politics, religion, and the media to promote Christian control of the United States and even the world.

And by 1985–and definitely by 1992–Rice was experiencing a classic hallmark of coercive religious groupthink: An “us versus them” seige mentality, a Culture Of Fear, that every researcher on coercive religious groups from Robert J. Lifton on has defined as a red flag warning of a cult:

And thus by 1985, my original faith, though still there, was mixed with anger, resentment and fear—a sense of being under siege.

After another few years, the Rev. Don Wildmon, who Max Blumenthal would later describe as “churlish,”[4] started telling us to boycott Mennon Speed Stick deodorant because it was advertised on a TV show which he, and therefore God, didn’t approve of.

Then, in 1990, James Dobson openly began using the language of civil war: “Nothing short of a great Civil War of Values rages today throughout North America. Two sides with vastly differing and incompatible world views are locked in a bitter conflict that permeates every level of society.”[5]

Whether the timing of Dobson’s drum beating was cunning or just plain lucky, I don’t know. But it certainly was fortuitous.
. . .
Civil War. What a great idea! Brother against brother. A woman against her coworker. Neighbor against neighbor. Divide and conquer. A nation’s unity destroyed. And when all was said and done, Dobson emerged from the fray as the new Republican Kingmaker.

In such a milieu, those negative traits of resentment and fear had become almost central, my original faith being sickly, barely alive and far beneath the surface. We were now in the midst of full-blown culture-war. And all that the churches and Christian mailing list materials were trumpeting was also confirmed by an outside source: The Rush Limbaugh show.

By 1992 I’d made the full transition from a spirituality of awe, joy and wonder to one of hatred, fear and all-around loathing. We Christians were under siege.

“They” were taking away our freedoms. “They” had planted Secular Humanist agents in every ‘government school,’ brainwashing the next generation. Not only that, The New Age Movement (painted as a well-organized conspiracy rather than the loosely knit spiritual fad that it was) was out to forge a One World Government and wipe the final vestiges of Christianity from the face of the earth.

([5] James Dobson, Children at Risk (Dallas: Word Publishing, 1990), pp. 19-20.)

In noting that the movement was increasingly trending towards “two-minute hates”, Rice also notes how the “Rambo Jesus” meme was becoming increasingly popularised:

As the content of our faith changed, so did our conceptualization of Jesus. He was no longer a God of love, but a muscle-bound tyrant. Speaking of the Christian Right in 2009, journalist Max Blumenthal’s following description also summarizes the view of Jesus that was gaining ascendancy among us in the 1990s:

The movement’s Jesus is the opposite of the prince of peace. He is a stern, overtly masculine patriarch charging into the fray with his sword raised against secular foes; he is “the head of a dreadful company, mounted on a white horse, with a double-edged sword, his robe dipped in blood,” according to movement propagandist Steve Arterburn. [Mega-church pastor] Mark Driscoll…stirs the souls of twenty-something evangelical men with visions of “Ultimate Fighting Jesus…”

A portrait of virility and violence, the movement’s omnipotent macho Jesus represents the mirror inversion of the weak men who necessitated his creation. As [Erich] Fromm explained, “the lust for power is not rooted in strength, but in weakness [italics in original]. It is the expression of the individual self to stand alone and live. It is the desperate attempt to gain secondary strength where genuine strength is lacking.” [8]

([8] Max Blumenthal, Republican Gomorrah, pp. 9, 10.)

Rice also notes that he now considers himself lucky that he was not within proximity of the more charismatic promoters of Quiverfull–as he, already inducted within what he has all-but-admitted was a coercive religious group, would have been the perfect recruit:

I knew three Quiverfull families back in those days, though I didn’t yet know the term. Two of them had become discredited in my sight, one badly so. The other had moved far across the country to the Bible Belt, and thus their influence on me was minimal.

But: supposing a well-spoken, polished QF/CP promoter, who in outward appearance had an exemplary life and family, had befriended me then. And supposing this theoretical person had possessed a charismatic personality. Had this happened, I very well could have bought into the QF/CP vision.

The angry and ever-intensifying Christian Right machine had changed our churches into pre-stocked ponds in which QF/CP and other extremists fished. I was one of those pre-stocked fish.

I just happened (by no virtue of my own at the time) to always be on the other side of the pond when people like Nancy Campbell, R.C. Sproul Jr., Doug Phillips, et al., went fishing.

That’s why I find it no surprise that so many of the former QF/CP people (like Vyckie Garrison, for example) are so smart and articulate. People don’t join the movement because they’re idiots. On the contrary, they join because they’re thoughtful, intelligent human beings who really care about their country; who are concerned about the kind of world in which their children and grandchildren will live.

But these same good qualities became a curse when cunning fascist leaders subtly began to channel them for their ends. And thus over the gradual course of time—sometimes even a decade—we (both “regular” believers and QF/CP Christians) became foot soldiers in a zombie-army, doing the political bidding of our Christian Right masters.

In other words…the process of recruitment is a gradual one.  People generally don’t join knowing the “full deal”–they are recruited with something innocuous, then the indoctrination begins over time until they’ve been recruited and are marching lockstep to a leader’s command.

The process is not unlike the old yarn on how to boil a frog.  Put a frog in boiling water, he’ll jump right out (just like nobody would willingly join a coercive religious group if they knew it was coercive).

Put a frog in body-temperature water, though, and slowly turn up the heat…by the time the frog realises what’s going on, he’s cooked.

And so it is with recruitment in coercive religious groups…and the “Bible-based” coercive groups at the heart of the dominionist movement are absolute masters at turning up the water very, very slowly for a whole kettle of frogs.

And how the frog realises, “oh dear, I’m in a pot”

Interestingly, Rice ended up walking away in a similar way to myself–only in his case, he ended up going to the Emerald City of the dominionist movement, Colorado Springs, and saw for himself that the Emerald City isn’t nearly as pretty without the glasses on:

As I headed toward Colorado in a U-Haul van, my knowledge of that city was minimal. I knew it was America’s new evangelical Mecca, populated with scores of Christian organizations; and I loved the beautiful Front Range Mountains I’d seen on my visit a month before.

But my main source of information was a book I’d read seven years prior, Ted Haggard’s, Primary Purpose: Making It Hard for People to Go to Hell from Your City.[9] In it, I’d read the amazing story of how Haggard and his initially small band of followers had transformed the supposedly pagan, anti-Christian city into God’s own country. Through spiritual mapping (identifying the ruling demons in a given area) and systematic warfare-prayer walks through each neighborhood (in which those demons were expelled from the region, presumably to resettle in Washington state, California, New York and Massachusetts), Colorado Springs was now the godliest place in America: truly a city that was “hard to go to Hell from.”

Or so I thought…

Although the organization that employed me was benign and apolitical, through my involvement with it I was exposed to the other big ministries in the area. Year after year I witnessed countless episodes of hypocrisy and self-congratulatory backslapping amongst Christian Right leaders.

I soon felt uneasy amongst people I’d once greatly admired. The church we attended turned out to be a de facto outpost of the Republican Party, and according to the pastor’s bizarre interpretation of an Isaiah passage, God had foreordained Republican Jesus to defeat Babylonian Saddam Hussein.

By 2005, the church was showing a smiling picture of Sam Brownback each Sunday on the large overhead screen. The pastor would then instruct us to stretch forth our hands and pray fervently for him. Brownback, dubbed “God’s Senator” by Jeff Sharlet, was a near-perfect embodiment of America’s new civil religion. He was a syncretic marvel who could glide effortlessly between his (Fundamentalist) Topeka Bible Church, Roman Catholicism, and a smattering of Orthodox Judaism.

One cold winter Sunday, the pastor excitedly told us of the senator’s latest mystical experience: Brownback, the pastor claimed, had just been to Valley Forge with a group of prayer leaders. There, he knelt at the exact spot where George Washington had once famously prayed. While on his knees in the snow, Brownback had received “the spiritual mantle of George Washington,” an anointing which would send him to the Whitehouse in 2008—but only if God’s people prayed long and hard enough.

Growing weary of weekly political rallies, we soon dropped out of the church. As the Iraq War went sour and the federal deficit went into the trillions under the “godly” Bush, I became increasingly disillusioned. Then came wave upon wave of varied Republican scandals; so many that they soon became an endless blur in my mind, and would have remained so to this day had Max Blumenthal not compiled them all under one cover in Republican Gomorrah.

I realized that we’d been duped by the Christian Right: the politicians they promoted were not godly at all. They’d exploited a few causes that people felt passionately about, using them to con millions of voters. It had nothing to do with God’s will, only the will to power.

([9] Florida: Creation House, 1995.  Of note, the book wass a major “how to” guide for NAR churches, though a bit less so now due to Haggard’s outing as gay.)

In addition to finding out that the local dominionist churches were essentially doing political stumping disguised as sermons, he also made the unhappy discovery (through his daughter, no less) that Colorado Springs was considered the methamphetamine capital of Colorado; even worse, around the time he left (in 2007) a major scandal broke regarding a human-trafficking ring where Asian women were being kidnapped and forced to work as de facto indentured servants in massage parlors.

More to the point, his breaking point was, interestingly, the same as mine–discovering that the moral crusaders were lying out their teeth:

During that season I also learned we’d been lied to. Contrary to the jeremiads of the Christian Right’s propaganda industry, it wasn’t “America’s godless, secular intelligentsia” who had removed the Bible and the knowledge of God from our educational system. In reality, Christians themselves had caused it nearly 200 years ago.

By the 1820s, America’s public schools were in a dilemma. Calvinists wanted the schools to teach only Calvinism, but Arminians (mostly Methodists) wanted them to teach only their doctrines. Several other sects were making demands of their own. And all of them agreed that no matter which version of Christianity won out in the classrooms, it should never be Roman Catholicism, which they all abhorred with equal passion. The endless infighting overwhelmed school authorities, who eventually gave up on the teaching of religion, substituting a vague, generic moral science in its place.[10]

The same thing goes for taking Bible reading out of public schools. No, it wasn’t a cabal of Secular Humanists in the early 1960s, but Christians themselves who brought it about, through viscous infighting between Protestants (most of whom championed the King James Bible) and Catholics who could only accept the Douay-Rheims translation.

Speaking of the “Bible Wars” in the mid-nineteenth century, Stephen Prothero writes, “The most visible battlefield in these early culture wars was Philadelphia, where Protestant-Catholic riots over whose Bible would be read in public schools left over a dozen people dead and Catholic churches burned to the ground in 1844.”[11] In addition to outright violence and murder, the endless polemical clashes between these groups caused school administrators to become weary and wary. As a result, by the 1870s, public schools in many states had not only done away with Christian education, but Bible reading and hymn singing as well.

Contrary to what we’d learned from the Christian Right, the rulings of 1962 and ’63 were merely the final few nails in the coffin—not the beginning of a cultural decline engineered by Secular Humanists.
. . .
Living in Colorado Springs and learning what I did there was like Neo swallowing the red pill. I’d seen the truth about The Matrix. I could never go back; life couldn’t continue as it had before.

([10]  Stephen Prothero, Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—And Doesn’t (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), pp. 109-120.
[11] Ibid, pp. 121-127.)

It was much the same with me–finding out I was being lied to was the “red pill” that eventually led me to reality in the end.

And it is precisely this breeding of a Culture of Fear that causes thousands–if not millions–of children to be subjected to religiously motivated child abuse; the same one that forces women to live under a system of religiously motivated patriarchy that places them at grave risk of religiously motivated spousal abuse…

…and it can be said that the Fear Engine, at its core, and the hypermasculine bravado is the very engine running the dominionist movement.

UPDATE:  And if you are wondering where in the hell I have been..

I apologise I’ve been scarce here for the past, oh, year on DailyKos.  There’s actually a good reason, though. :3

Specifically, I’m in the process of writing a book (actually, a whole series of books to be co-authored) and working on the formative stages of a new NGO.

First, the books:

Presently working with Leah Burton (author of Close Call) on an upcoming book on Palin’s dominionist connections (tentatively titled “Palin’s Brain”) and a wider expose of the GOP’s takeover by dominionists (working title: “God’s Own Party”).

After that, I’m going to be working on a dedicated book on the subject of religiously motivated domestic abuse (with an emphasis on religiously motivated child abuse) with Burton and Vyckie Garrison of No Longer Quivering.

In the meantime, myself and a mess of other folks (including Vyckie) are in the organisational stages of a new NGO–the Take Heart Project, the first NGO worldwide to focus on assisting women and children wishing to escape from coercive patriarchial groups, particularly the Quiverfull movement.  (We’re not just focusing on direct assistance but things like educating therapists, pastors, doctors, legal personnel, social workers, and so on who may interact with ex-Quiverfull survivors; there are a lot of overlapping issues including custody issues, mental health issues, medical neglect issues, and so on.)

Incidentially, we’re also looking for a few folks to help out, particularly therapists and persons who have accounting experience (particularly people who have accounting experience who have worked the books with a nonprofit organisation in past).  If you may be able to help out (especially with the accounting) please contact Vyckie at her blog.

Let’s start with Neal…Horsley…and the name is not made up, which you might think it is after reading this:

Neal Horsley, anti-abortion activist from Georgia, christiangallery.org, called for the arrest of all homosexuals. Horsely admitted on the Fox News Radio’s The Alan Colmes Show May 2006, that he’s had sex with mules. He told the San Francisco Examiner about the sex he’s had with other men… and with a watermelon.  He would kill his own son if he tried to prevent him from seceding from the union. Horsley thinks the best way pro-life advocates can overturn Roe v. Wade is to “take over a state, then hole up and wait for the United States army to come for a kind of Alamo last stand.”  to secede from the Union. Horsely put photographs on his Web site of naked men engaging in homosexual acts and a nude woman engaging in bestiality amid shots of grotesquely maimed fetuses. As a drug dealer he was convicted of possession of hashish with intent to sell. He calls for “the establishment of a new government, one that can obey God’s plan for government.”

He was fired when he made national headlines for setting up the Nuremberg Files site that listed the addresses and phone numbers of abortion doctors, and crossed off their names as they were killed. The efforts to shut him down went all the way to the Supreme Court.

He is also embraced proudly by a militant anti-abortion hate group called the Army of God. I will not link to them directly. It is a horrific site. But the Wiki page gives you basic information.

So what is Mr. Studdly up to now, you might ask?

By Mike Morris from the Atlanta Journal

Neal Horsley was taken into custody Wednesday in Carrollton by members of the Atlanta police fugitive squad and U.S. Marshal’s office, according to Carrollton police.

Horsley was booked into the Fulton County Jail, charged with terroristic threats, criminal defamation and using the Internet to disseminate threats. During a hearing Thursday morning at the jail, Magistrate Judge James Altman set bond for Horsley at $40,000 on all three charges.

As a condition of his bail, Horsley must remain at the home of his son, Nathanael Horsley of Gainesville, Altman said. In addition, there must be a land-line in the home.

Thomas More Legal Center is a particularly pernicious group that was founded by ultramontane Catholic Thomas Monaghan (who also funded the Army of God-linked Operation Rescue when he was CEO of Domino’s and who now is trying to set up an ultramontane-Catholic-only gated community in Florida).

One of the more notorious cases Thomas More Law Center has been involved in was Planned Parenthood vs American Coalition of Life Activists.  (ACLA, of note, was the group behind the Neal Horsley “Nuremburg Files”–an Army of God-authored hit-list of clinic workers and their families, including dossiers of travel, personally identifying info including license plate registration info and surveillance of homes, and so on; when a clinic worker would be assassinated by an Army of God domestic terrorist, their name would be struck through. It’s widely considered among researchers in anti-abortion domestic terrorism that the ACLA operated as a barely legal wing of the Army of God domestic terror network.)  Planned Parenthood eventually brought a RICO suit (under the then-new FACE Act); Thomas More Law Center defended ACLA.  (ACLA lost, and they were forced to take the material down and disband. The content has since been mirrored on another Army of God-linked site at christianliberty.net; the site owner is a close associate of David Leach, himself linked with Scott Roeder and a similar “Nuremburg Files”-esque website that explicitly targeted Dr. George Tiller and workers at his clinic.)