"I wonder what new doors to evangelism might be opened in sophisticated, tolerant, politically correct America if Christians started expressing their faith by encouraging those who possessed artifacts of magic or unclean books to burn them publicly?" -- C. Peter Wagner, from The Book of Acts: A Commentary, 1994, Regal Books

"Our team took a strong stance against the witchcraft in the area... We burned piles of fetishes and saw many captives set free from the curses of the enemy they had invited unwittingly into their lives." -- December 2009 report from Heidi & Rolland Baker's IRIS Ministries team in Mozambique

This May 2012, the monthly print issue of Christianity Today, founded by Billy Graham in 1956 and considered by some to be the leading evangelical magazine in America, ran a feature article on one of the New Apostolic Reformation's top female leaders, Heidi Baker, and even put Baker's picture on the May issue's front cover.

Is the New Apostolic Reformation an ideologically radical, possibly eliminationist movement that's deeply controversial even within conservative evangelical Christianity? Or, as suggested by a nationally promoted John Templeton Foundation-funded academic research project based out of the University of Akron, the Flame of Love Project, are the NAR's apostles and prophets "exemplars of Godly Love" who should be held up, before America, as behavioral role models?

Americans don't agree on much, but one thing pretty much everyone can agree on is that Congress is not a very popular institution right now. A recent poll found that only 8 percent of us think Congress is doing a good job.

Americans United's Legislative Department works with members of Congress and knows that there are lots of good men and women serving in that body. So what accounts for this?

Writing in the May issue of Vanity Fair magazine, journalist Todd S. Purdom warns that "just because [Glenn Beck] may have fallen off your radar" since his glorious days at Fox, "doesn't mean that millions of faithful listeners don't still harken to his every dog-whistle warning."

Not only does Beck's plate runneth over with a See's Candies-like assortment of religious ramblings, politically polarizing schemes and entrepreneurial undertakings, so too does his bank account, which, as Forbes magazine has pointed out, hovers around the $40 million-a-year mark.

Since Beck has seized the title of the "busiest man in show business" from Ryan Seacrest, it may behoove you to allow him back into your life!

Less than ten days after taking office in January 2001, President George W. Bush gathered a host of religious folks at the White House and announced his faith-based initiative, the cornerstone of his compassionate conservative agenda.

It became, as The Christian Science Monitor's G. Jeffrey MacDonald recently termed it, "one of the flash points of the culture wars that raged as he came to office in 2001."

However, the clashes of Bush era culture wars pale in comparison to the enmity of Religious Right activists who denounce President Barack Obama's all-out "War On Religion." This flies in the face of reality, since less than a month into his presidency, President Obama signed an executive order creating the White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships.

[NAR leaders, who claim to be able to work miracles via their iPhones, have ties to major U.S. politicians including Sarah Palin, Rick Perry, and Newt Gingrich and have led politicized prayer events attended by Senators Sam Brownback and Jim DeMint. To underscore the political nature of the NAR, Wagner Leadership Institute faculty member Julius Oyet claims to have helped conceive of Uganda's Anti Homosexuality Bill, and WLI teacher Mary Glazier, a longtime friend to Sarah Palin according to Charisma magazine, claims to have in 1995 hounded out of Alaska a women accused of witchcraft.]  

For any religious tradition with a heavily political bent, the ability to receive from God new teachings that have the force of scripture is powerful - for example, enemies can be targeted and demonized with ease. On February 3, 2008, C. Peter Wagner, perhaps the most significant leader in the movement he has named and played a key role in organizing, the New Apostolic Reformation, led a ceremony at the Everett, WA-based Sonrise Chapel near Seattle, for the commissioning of ICA apostle Dan Hammer as the chancellor of the newly-founded Wagner Leadership Institute Seattle. Prior to commissioning Hammer, Wagner declared that "the Holy Spirit still speaks to us today and we can hear from the Lord, and He gives us information, actually, that you can't find in any of the 66 books of the Bible--even though none of it contradicts the Bible."

A couple weeks ago, many people were introduced to Christian nationalist pseudo-historian David Barton when Jon Stewart had him on The Daily Show to interview him about his New York Times bestseller The Jefferson Lies. People were apparently quite curious about who this Barton guy was -- so much so, in fact, that he became the #1 Google trend the next day.

Right now, I'm scrambling to quickly write a little book specifically debunking all the lies in Barton's new book. I hadn't planned to post any excerpts of what I'm writing until my book was closer to being done, but yesterday I came across one particular lie from Barton that is so incredible that I just have to share it. For anyone who's ever wondered just how far Barton will go, I think this one answers that question.

Part Two

It was a pivotal moment in American evangelicalism when Christianity Today featured a New Apostolic leader on its May cover.  More shocking is that this historic development included claims by Heidi Baker that her only tie to the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) has been annual attendance at a conference.  The author and editorial staff failed to challenge this assertion or to include information about Baker's significant role in the NAR or her role in Revival Alliance, a partnership that brought together the six major New Apostolic ministries of Baker, Che Ahn, John Arnott, Randy Clark, Bill Johnson, and Georgian Banov. It was an incomplete view of one of the most powerful women in the apostolic and prophetic movement and promoted Baker's ministry without providing readers any information about the dramatic changes in structure and ideology that New Apostolics have introduced into the evangelical world.

Over the past few months, there have been hunks of bad news about Groupon, the original "Deal of the Day" web site, which currently has 16 million users. According to Reuters, the once innovative company "has lost more than half its market value this year on concern about waning demand for its daily deals and the company's accounting troubles."

Now, Morality in Media, a longtime Christian conservative organization is adding to Groupon's woes by launching a nationwide boycott of the company, claiming that Groupon is shamelessly offering discounts to businesses involved in hardcore pornography.

The religious right, with Billy Graham himself weighing in, has just convinced North Carolina voters to undermine their own economic well-being. I doubt many North Carolina residents asked, in the abstract, whether they would vote to sabotage their own state's economy would answer "yes!" But that's what 61% of Tar Heel state voters have probably just done.

He was on his school's tennis team and the student-athlete honor roll, but now Kevin Forts, rather than preparing for his college graduation, is banned from his college campus for the foreseeable future. Forts' banning is due to either his arrest for assaulting his girlfriend on campus, and/or his recent acknowledgement that he an admirer of Anders Behring Breivik, the self-confessed Norwegian mass murderer. Breivik is now on trial in Norway for last July's bombing in central Oslo that killed eight people, and a shooting rampage at a political youth camp on the island of Utoya that killed 69 others, most of whom were teenagers.

Forts, a student at Assumption College, a Catholic college in Worcester, Massachusetts, recently garnered a huge chunk of his fifteen-minutes by claiming, in an interview with a Norwegian tabloid, that Breivik is a patriot and that his action "demonstrates a sense of nationalism and a moral conscience."

Last month I wrote about Religious Right pseudo-historian David Barton's new book The Jefferson Lies, which attempts to prove that Thomas Jefferson was an orthodox Christian and not really a strong advocate of church-state separation.

Reading that thing just about drove me bonkers. Barton wrenches material from context, tells half of the story and sometimes just makes things up. It's an appalling example of what I call "historical creationism."

The cover story of the May issue of Christianity Today features Heidi Baker, a significant leader in the "apostolic and prophetic" movement or New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), who misleads readers about her role in the movement. What is worse is that the author and editorial staff of Christianity Today failed to question the claim that Baker's only ties to the NAR are through her loyalty to leaders of the Toronto Blessing and participation in their annual Catch the Fire conference.