Rick Perry has a new 30 second campaign ad airing in Iowa that features the three main characteristics of the Christian dominionist worldview.  Here is the text of the ad, as reported by Politico:

"I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm a Christian, but you don't need to be in the pew every Sunday to know there's something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can't openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school.  As president, I'll end Obama's war on religion.  And I'll fight against liberal attacks on our religious heritage. Faith made America strong. It can make her strong again."

In 1960, the Master Plan for Higher Education in California, affirmed a nearly half-century-old policy that tuition-free higher education was in the best interests of the state of California. After a recent demonstration at the University of California, Berkeley, in which one of the grievances raised by students was the rapidly rising costs of a university education, a UC spokesperson suggested that members of the Board of Regents who are well-connected and have the ability to raise large sums of money from well-heeled donors, could raise donations to benefit low-income students.

Charity, the UC spokesperson seemed to suggest, was the way to help low-income students.

What has any of this to do with developments in Canada?

A series of moves being advocated by Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper, in large part motivated by his conservative religious beliefs, could spell the beginning of the end for Canada's much-vaunted social safety net.

Champion the Vote, a project of United In Purpose, a Silicon Valley-based conservative group dedicated to registering millions of Christian voters in time for the 2012 elections, has produced a new video that features a number of religious right notables, but only one Republican Party presidential hopeful: Newt Gingrich.

Is Gingrich on his way to getting the Christian conservative stamp of approval?

"While conventional wisdom holds that Texas Governor Rick Perry is the candidate of choice for the hard evangelical right and the increasingly influential but poorly understood New Apostolic Reformation, some new evidence indicates otherwise," Talk2Action co-founder Bruce Wilson recently told me in an email. In fact, says Wilson, evangelicals may be lining up behind Gingrich, who has risen rapidly and is now number one or two in most polls.

American Center for Law and Justice leader Jay Sekulow, has just published a new booklet and DVD regarding the Islamic threat to the nation.  Lawyer and TV star Sekulow is the legal voice of the Religious Right.  His positions and warnings on the threat the nation faces from anti-Christian forces have helped Jay and his family to amass a fortune.  In Jay's latest effort,he reports on a supposed conspiracy the nation faces from its own Muslim citizens.

Nationally syndicated provocateur Ann Coulter has once again justified the murder of people of whom she does not approve.  

Media Matters reports that this time she told San Francisco radio talk show host Bryan Sussman that Occupy Wall Street protesters should be shot, much as anti-war protestors were shot in the notorious episode at Kent State during the Vietnam war.  She describes OWS protesters, in the manner of the Religious Right, as "demonic" and "evil."

One of the Religious Right's favorite tricks is to do something that pretty much everyone agrees is legal, and then thumb their noses at groups like Americans United for Separation of Church and State when nobody gets in trouble for doing it.

Here's a recent example: Earlier this week, two groups called Faith in Action and the Christian Defense Coalition brought a living Nativity scene to the sidewalk in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. The Revs. Rob Schenck and Patrick Mahoney had a camel, a donkey and people posing as Mary, Joseph and the three wise men. (For added realism, Mary was even carrying a four-month-old baby, not a doll.)

A thirteen foot tall cross atop a mountain near Camp Horno on the Camp Pendleton Marine Corps base in California has become the source of much controversy over the past few weeks, sparked by a Los Angeles Times article about a group of Marines erecting the cross on Veterans Day.

The cross put up this Veterans Day is actually the third cross to adorn this hill. The original cross, erected by a group of Marines from the 2nd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment in 2003 was destroyed in 2007 by a brush fire. That cross was then replaced in early 2008 with a second cross. The cross erected earlier this month is a fire-proof replacement of the second cross, which was also made of wood like the original one destroyed by the fire.

In virtually all cases like this -- whether its a Ten Commandments monument in a courthouse or a cross on a military base -- you'll hear the same few talking points coming from those who claim that religious neutrality by the government is somehow tantamount to persecution of Christians. I call these the "Persecuted Christians Myths," and here's how they relate to that thirteen foot tall cross at Camp Pendleton.

Mark Burnett is the creator of such television programs as Survivor, Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?, Shark Tank, Oprah's All-Stars, Martha Stewart, The Contender, On the Lot (a collaboration with Stephen Spielberg), The Restaurant, Rock Star, Combat Missions, My Dad Is Better Than Your Dad, Bully Beatdown, Starmaker, Expedition Africa, Toughest Cowboy, Wedding Day and How'd You Get So Rich?

Now, he appears to have signed a deal with the charismatic televangelist Joel Osteen, for a new reality television show starting sometime next year.

People for the American Way hosted a forum at the National Press Club on religion, history, law, and the Constitution on November 8.  The forum focused on the "often peddled myth that America was founded specifically as a Christian Nation and the effects of this narrative on today's religious and political dialogue."  The forum included panelists John Ragosta, Jamie Raskin, Julie Ingersoll, and John Kinney, and was moderated by PFAW's Peter Montgomery.  The full transcript can now be accessed online here and video excerpts can be viewed here.

On a recent appearance on Sean Hannity's radio program, Frank Luntz told the radio talk show host's audience that he was surprised how quickly Newt Gingrich had risen in Republican Party polls over the past few weeks. He pointed out that the former Speaker of the House has an "intellect" and a "vision" and knows how to "change things." Luntz added: "It is almost as if he is the ultimate anti-Obama candidate. Obama is about words, and Gingrich is about ideas."

It is more than interesting that the man who for nearly two decades has helped poison the political debate, consistently using words to deflect and destroy ideas, would make that statement.

After nearly two decades of producing books - most notably, Words that Work: It's Not What You Say it's What People Hear -- and dozens of strategic memos for the GOP, organizing who knows how many focus groups, making countless appearances on Fox News, being named by Time magazine as one of "50 of America's most promising leaders aged 40 and under" (he's older than that now) and named one of the four "Top Research Minds" by Business Week, does Frank Luntz have anything new to say?

Michele Bachmann is the kind of Christian Right candidate that would have been difficult to imagine just a generation ago.  Hers is a tricky project: trying to be the hardest core of Christian rightists, while not unduly alarming more moderate evangelicals and others in the Republican Party.  Last summer, Michele Bachmann was profiled by The New Yorker and shown to have explicitly dominionist ideas and influences.  When she was asked by Christianity Today about this and the resultant controversy, she dodged the question.  Then her faith outreach director, longtime Christian Right activist Peter Waldron appeared on a conservative Christian radio talk show in Iowa and explained how the Holy Ghost had told him to support Bachmann.

But there is more worth noting about Peter Waldron's role in the campaign.

[update, March 2015: since writing this story, I have learned that David Barton was advertised as a speaker at a New Apostolic Reformation event, Convergence 2009. As a general rule, NAR events feature NAR leadership only. Together with Barton at Convergence 2009 was Jim Garlow, who in 2014 joined one of the NAR's major leadership bodies, the United States Coalition of Apostolic Leaders.

update, April 2016: Barton also was advertised as a speaker at the 2011 New Apostolic Reformation event Justice at The Gate event along with NAR apostles Jim Garlow, Ed Silvoso, and Alice Patterson, with whom Barton has worked closely in a GOP effort to woo African-Americans and other minority voters.]

Who is an apostle? Back in 2010, the membership list of C. Peter Wagner's International Coalition of Apostles was put behind a website firewall, accessible to ICA members only. And the ICA is only one of many apostolic networks in the growing NAR.

While Wallbuilders head David Barton has played a prominent role in Newt Gingrich's Renewing American Leadership initiative as well as in the Champion The Vote / United in Purpose promotional video "One Nation Under God"--which features only one 2012 election presidential candidate, Newt Gingrich, and kicked off the CTV/UIP voter registration drive in earnest, in early November 2011--Barton's long association and collaboration with top NAR apostles suggests that David Barton can himself be considered as one of the more significant apostles in Peter Wagner's movement.

Barton has never, to the best of my knowledge, been officially listed as an apostle or prophet in the various U.S. or international apostolic and prophetic networks of the global NAR movement. But this is unsurprising given Barton's specialty, the manufacture of a misleading genre of pseudo-history which claims America was founded as an expressly Christian nation.

Barton's pseudo-history is popular both among charismatic strains of evangelicalism (such as the NAR) but also within anti-charismatic evangelical tendencies whose members might shun Barton's work, especially if he were officially aligned with the NAR - a movement that many anti-charismatic evangelicals consider wildly heretical.