There has been quite a dust cloud stirred up by the widespread massacres of strawmen in recent months.   It is a common spectacle in America these days to see fresh such clouds blowing through the media and hanging like smog over L.A. after yet another pundit of some prominence has delivered yet another thrashing to some unfortunate pile of cleverly bound hay.  

The real problem they would have us believe is not the Religious Right and those dynamic elements of the New Apostolic Reformation and the American Family Association that organized a prayer rally of some 20,000 people to (unofficially) launch Gov. Rick Perry's presidential campaign -- an unprecedented event in all of American presidential political history.  (Oh no, it couldn't be any of that!)   The real problem, you see, is liberal writers -- particularly Jews -- who noticed.  Also caught up in the massacre of the strawmen is everyone who has ever written about such matters as NAR, dominionism, and Christian Reconstructionism.  

Then along comes blogger Fred Clark (great name, no relation) offering us goggles to help us see through the miasmic remains of the strawmen.

Street Prophets:  Linkage publishes the first in a series of reports on a local Religious Right organization in Vallejo, California, and how it is was founded and is led by figures of the New Apostolic Reformation.

Debating Obama:  Greg Metzger discusses how C. Peter Wagner's vision of the New Apostolic Reformation is influenced by the Christian Reconstructionism of R.J. Rushdoony.

Slacktivist:  Fred Clark (no relation) considers some of the odd efforts to downplay or deny the significance of dominionism and related matters.    

Pinsky refers to Barton as a "splinter, marginal figure."  That is simply not accurate. Barton has become a staple of conservative cable news, talk radio, Christian radio and Republican campaigns.  I wish it were the other way around, but David Barton has become more influential in American evangelicalism and in American politics than Jim Wallis has ever been.

That this fact is unpleasant does not make it untrue.

Talk to Action:   Mark I. Pinsky apparently registered for this site over the weekend in order to add to his remarkable list of unsubstantiated charges against unnamed writers.  In a comment thread he recycles his claim that they are motivated by election year politics -- and adds that their work is also tainted by financial and career advancement motives.  Oh yeah.  And that they are "a lot of alarmists and conspiracy theorists" too.  Suffice to say that all this comes from the same guy who in USA Today compared the well-researched and carefully presented work of four Jewish writers with the false claims of the vile, anti-Semitic forgeries known as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Catholic Bishop Robert Finn of Kansas City-St. Joseph, Missouri has for some time, had evidence problem. He apparently withheld from police specific evidence implicating a pedophile priest for five months, and failed to come forward until the priest was arrested.  What's more Finn had been warned about the priest a year earlier.

And now that evidence, along with the testimony of Finn, and that his Vicar, Monsignor Robert Murphy, went before a Clay County grand jury and a similar panel in Jackson County, both focusing on child sexual abuse issues.

Robert Jeffress, speaking at the recent  Values Voter Summit, voiced his endorsement of Rick Perry and stated that Christians were not to vote for Perry's rival because he is a Mormon.  Jeffress made national headlines by his surprising comments.  To those acquainted with Jeffress and his church, the comments were more expected than stunning.

Beyond Rick Perry's high-profile Friday endorsement from Baptist pastor Robert Jeffress, who openly calls Mormonism a "cult", Perry has worked closely with the charismatic evangelical tendency known as the New Apostolic Reformation, which dominated Perry's August 6th presidential campaign launch event, The Response, and whose top leaders advise burning Books of Mormon.

The website currently rotates a big red "Stop the EPA" with "Latino, Black Unemployment at Depression Levels: EPA's Answer??? Kill More Jobs" and other headline banners.  This is the Affordable Power Alliance, an affiliate of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), organizations claiming to represent struggling "African Americans, Hispanics, elderly, poor, farmers, and small businesses."  The board members include New Apostolic Reformation apostles/prophets Harry Jackson, Jr. and Samuel Rodriguez.  On October 5, Jackson was featured on Townhall.com with an attack on the Evangelical Environmental Network as a politically-driven effort, along with claims that there is no credible evidence that mercury from power plants endangers children.

It was a fabulous opening weekend for Courageous, the Kendrick brothers' new "action-dramedy" movie. While Dolphin Tale, Brad Pitts' Moneyball, and Lion King 3D battled it out for the top three spots nationally, Courageous and 50/50 were basically tied for fourth and fifth place.

In fact, the Orlando Sentinel's Roger Moore pointed out, the pre-premiere outreach "aimed at churches" paid off. As fandango.com reported, Courageous led in the "pre-sales race" for this past "weekend's new openings," selling more than $2 million in tickets.

And, in Kinston, North Carolina, where the Kendrick brothers' marketing strategy worked like a charm, the Bethel Free Will Baptist Church bought over 1,000 tickets, guaranteeing 5 sell-outs for the film.

It was bad enough when Mark I. Pinsky recently took to the op-ed page of USA Today to smear four Jewish writers who have had the temerity to write critically and well about dominionism and related matters -- comparing their work to historic anti-Semitic smears including the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.  Then Jim Wallis chimed in last week, accusing unnamed liberal writers of engaging in thought crimes against evangelicals.  His charges were as unsubstantiated as Pinsky's, whose essay he praised and linked to.

Some of us who figured to be among the unnamed decided it was time to speak, perchance to be heard.  So we wrote an Open Letter to Jim Wallis asking that he please stop mischaracterizing our work and that he rethink and renounce his endorsement of Pinsky's outrageous smears.  I am pleased to report that our modest effort has helped spark some discussion in the greater blogosphere.

Fourteen authors, journalists and bloggers who have written about the Religious Right and such related topics as Dominionism and the New Apostolic Reformation, including several contributors to Talk2action.org, have asked the Rev. Jim Wallis, president of Sojourners, to stop making false characterizations of writers in the field. We also ask that he "rethink" and "withdraw" his related endorsement of an essay in USA Today by Mark Pinsky, which named and equated the work of four Jewish writers in this field, including myself, with some of the worst anti-Semitic smears in history.  Following is the open letter.

[image, right: screen shot from page 81 of Willie Wooten's 2005 book Breaking The Curse Off Black America]

In 2005, Justice at The Gate ministry head Alice Patterson endorsed a 2005 book, by her fellow apostle Willie Wooten, which blamed Martin Luther King, Jr. for an alleged 40-year curse on African Americans and provided, as documentation of King's alleged misdeeds, a website link to writing posted at a white supremacist, Holocaust denial website that calls for repeal of the 19th Amendment.

Church & State:   Joe Conn discusses the strange media downplaying and denialism about dominionism.  

In August, pundits and political pugilists were suddenly debating "dominionism" and its reach in American religious and political life...  Is the influence of dominionism something that Americans should take seriously? The answer is an emphatic yes. The concept in modern times was spawned by ultra-conservative theologians with relatively small followings, but the idea has spread far beyond those original boundaries.

Debating Obama:  Greg Metzger discusses C. Peter Wagner's appearance on Fresh Air.

Wagner... was very forthright about his and NAR's strong support for The Response. It will be interesting to see if individuals and institutions who have gone to great lengths to smear critics of [Rick Perry's prayer rally] The Response as being ignorant of evangelicalism will now be equally strong in admitting that they were ignorant of how profoundly  The Response was shaped by a movement deeply troubling to mainstream evangelicals I have been in touch with since this interview was aired. Wagner confirms quite clearly that The Response was a significant step forward in NAR's work in America.

C. Peter Wagner was quite forthcoming on many issues in his October 3 Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross. He talked openly about the New Apostolic Reformation's agenda for the movement's apostles to have authority over churches; suggested that Sarah Palin should have been anointed by leadership in private, so that it would not have created such controversy; talked about his work with Ted Haggard and claimed his prophets knew of Haggard's homosexuality in advance; and confirmed that he was present at Rick Perry's prayer event.  But Wagner downplayed the meaning of "taking dominion" over society and was dishonest about the movement's well-established demonization of other religions.  He even claimed to support religious pluralism.