Samuel Rodriguez has given a speech that he has proudly put up at You Tube. No one is playing “gotcha” with him, no one is putting this forward as representative of him without his knowledge, no one is lifting portions of a video out of context. This is what Samuel Rodriguez is proud to represent. In this six minute video Rodriguez clearly embraces the notion of an apostolic reordering of the church. He clearly embraces a prosperity gospel. And he clearly champions himself and his organization as an accepted blending of evangelicalism and Pentecostalism. Are the leading voices of mainstream evangelicalism really good to go with this? Is this what the evangelical center is now defined as? How can those at the National Association of Evangelicals and Christianity Today and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary—all places that proudly include Samuel Rodriguez within the elite of their institution’s leadership—claim that these views represent some extreme margin of Christianity that only the most avowed opponents of evangelicalism would view as significant, when they themselves are knowingly elevating one of the most well-known proponents of these views? And why aren't more people in the media and the general public asking them this question?

Judge Roy Moore is most famous for refusing to remove a massive Ten Commandments installation from an Alabama courthouse, a refusal that got him - as the Donald might say - fired. Newt Gingrich is renowned for breaking who knows how many of the Ten Commandments.

This year, Moore is running to regain his spot on the Alabama Supreme Court, while Newt is running to run the entire country.

If as Sammy Cahn wrote, and Frank Sinatra sang, "Love is lovelier the second time around," Gingrich may have a royal opportunity to show some 2011/2012 love for Moore.

A central feature of my work over the last four months has been exposing the contradictory positions of Samuel Rodriguez, and a major goal of mine has been to see both secular and religious institutions come to grips with his extremism and distance themselves from his work. Of particular concern to me is Rodriguez's standing within evangelical institutions that I have considered centrist or progressive. Like many writers and commentators I have considered Christianity Today a reliable bell weather of the evangelical center.

I am the humble servant of a non-profit organization and have never really aspired to be a high-powered corporate public-relations man. But today I'm going to step into that role and offer some free advice to Lowe's Home Improvement and any firm facing the threat of a boycott from fundamentalist zealots.

My advice is simple: Ignore them. When you ignore them, nothing happens. When you cave in to them, lots of things happen - all of them bad.

Christian Right pols, and those who want to be Christian Right pols and the Christian Right itself -- is changing.  Prospective presidential candidates of the party of the sainted Ronald Reagan make a point of smashing the 11th Commandment to advance their ambitions: Thou Shalt Not Speak Ill of Another Republican. This year, the aged Ron Paul has not only gotten a faith-based make-over from the man who made the presidents Bush into evangelical Christians:  Paul is also waging an aggressive web ad campaign attacking Iowa front runner Newt Gingrich.  

But perhaps most remarkable of all, is the hip hop style attack ad against Newt Gingrich distributed last week by Sioux City megachurch pastor Cary Gordon.

Kamal Saleem was the featured speaker at the November prayer breakfast sponsored by the mayor of Independence, Missouri. The January 26 Mayor's Prayer Breakfast in Ocean City, Maryland, will feature Lt. Gen. (Ret.) William "Jerry" Boykin, another regular in the anti-Muslim/Obama conspiracy theory speaking circuit.   Saleem was a speaker at TheCall Detroit on 11/11/11 and both Saleem and Boykin were featured in preparatory events in which Muslims and others were targeted as allowing demonic spirits to control the state, supposedly causing Michigan's economic woes.  Boykin serves on the board of the Oak Initiative, which has produced media featuring Saleem and Boykin, including a popular 2010 video of Boykin titled Marxism in America.

Bishop Robert Finn has many powerful friends on the Catholic Right.  As a hard charging leader of what he has called "the church militant" and one of four American Opus Dei bishops, Finn is clearly one of their own.  Nevertheless, it extraordinary that his allies have chosen to side with an element in the institutional church obsessed with unquestioned authority and against Catholic children and their families.

A career Republican Congressional staffer retired and published an essay for Truthout in September -- that went viral. Mike Lofgren wanted us to know what, in broad strokes, had gone wrong with politics and government. He thinks one major factor has been the rise of the Religious Right in the GOP. Like other Republicans before him, from Barry Goldwater, to John Danforth, to John Dean who each belatedly spoke out, we need to consider his perspective as that of someone who played ball, worked with and even advanced some of the very elements he now criticizes.

Nevertheless, it is worth hearing and carefully considering what he has to say, not only about what it means to be a professional working in such an ideologically charged environment, but how he views liberals and Democrats as having been weak and ineffectual in response. (I wish he had provided more details.) There is a refreshingly honest and thoughtful -- if rueful -- quality to his words that puts in perspective a great deal of what we read from all sides, especially as the campaign season kicks in hard.

I have excerpted a few relevant quotes below, which I offer without evaluation -- but the entire essay, if you have not already considered it, is worth the time.

The Religious Right vote is always split among various GOP candidates for president.  And every candidate has their own approach to maximizing their share.  As the critical Republican Iowa caucuses draw near Yahoo News has an eye-opening profile of Ron Paul's efforts to craft his own image as a Christian conservative, to reach out to conservative Christian voters, and how this is central to his campaign this year.  

One of Paul's senior advisers is faith outreach specialist Doug Wead who quoted his boss to a reporter for Yahoo News:  

"You know, the libertarians are just baffled by me.  They didn't think it was possible for someone to come this direction.  A person of faith."

The article also underscores how the Religious Right's theocratic policy agendas on reproductive and gay rights tend to emphasize national policy. And while Ron Paul's theocratic views are compatible, he insists that these matters should not be enforced via national policy but at the state level.   (Like leading Christian Reconstructionists, Paul emphasizes that generally government functions should be handled at the most local level possible.)  Interestingly, Yahoo News adds but does not detail how "Paul often articulates a biblical foundation for his economic policies."

To paraphrase a popular English proverb, and please excuse the simultaneous bastardization of the title of a Billy Ocean song: "When the going gets tough, the tough gets gosh darned desperate."

Although Texas Governor Rick Perry has a predilection for delivering evil pronouncements at the drop of his multi-gallon hat, desperation is the mother of re-invention. While it's not quite yet Hail Mary time, Perry's recent television advertisement -- now running in Iowa - is clearly a desperate ploy; an attempt to garner attention when the spotlight is more clearly focused on Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney.

Given the nature of its message, however, some might characterize it as a "cry for help."

(As of 7:34 A.M. Pacific Coast Time, Rick Perry's homophobic & hateful television ad titled "Strong" had been viewed more than 2,700,000 times -- with 10,081 likes and 419,902 dislikes.)

The Republican Jewish Coalition hosted a presidential-candidates forum on Wednesday, December 7 at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in Washington, D.C.

Guess which candidate wasn't invited?

Michelle Bachmann and her apocalyptic religious views that leaves Jews stranded in a desert wasteland? Wrong, she was there. Mitt Romney and John Huntsman of the Mormon crew that has fancied converting to Mormonism Jews that were killed in the Holocaust in order to swell their numbers in Heaven? Wrong, they were there.  The uninhibited-unexpurgated Herman Cain? He was invited and he accepted, but since ... uh, you know what, he didn't appear. Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum? Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

The only top-tier GOP presidential candidate not invited to participate in the daylong festivities is Texas Congressman Ron Paul.

Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) ran unsuccessfully for the GOP nomination for president in 2008.  But after John McCain became the nominee, he held a news conference to endorse Rev. Chuck Baldwin, the presidential candidate of the theocratic Constitution Party.  (Baldwin is a Pensacola megachurch pastor and the party's 2004 vice presidential candidate.)  

While Paul's far right views are well known, his abandonment of the GOP when it mattered, much less so. (And while I may have missed something, Paul's 2008 defection has not come up this election season.)   But it does suggest a certain fragility on the right edges of the GOP that might matter this year.  Chuck Baldwin is not well known outside of the Religious Right.  But the leading candidate for the CP nomination this year is former Democrat, former Republican Rep. Virgil Goode of Virginia.  Goode is a member of the CP executive committee and has said he will announce his intentions early in 2012.