Anti Semitic conspiracy theory holds that Jews control the world through cunning, intelligence, and financial manipulation. Meanwhile, one strain of American anti-Catholic conspiracy theory posits a less exalted strategy for control - a "human wave" attack in the form of a plot by the Catholic Church to establish cultural dominance in the US by flooding the US borders with immigrants ( need I say they're predominantly Catholic ? )

Now first of all, the method of the alleged plot might evoke, for some, "human wave" attacks, by indigenous populations mounting typically futile resistance against technologically superior invading colonial powers during the 18th, 19th, and 20th Centuries. Such usually ineffective tactics were often viewed as proof that human life was valued less by allegedly "primitive" cultures than by invading European and Western colonial powers, and resonances of such culturally chauvinistic attitudes certainly survive up to this day.

The idea of a "Catholic Wave" attack on American Protestant cultural dominance is actually rather silly - the Catholic Church may indeed hatch plots and schemes for all we know, but Occam's Razor suggests the simplest explanation :  Mexicans cross the border into the US in search of jobs, and their Catholic religious beliefs are quite incidental. The incentive is financial.

But, that won't stop Tom Tancredo. As Max Blumenthal narrates, in a post on his blog :

During a July 19th appearance on American Family Radio, anti-immigration movement figurehead and potential 2008 GOP presidential candidate Rep. Tom Tancredo of Littleton, Colorado, made his anti-Catholic sentiments explicit. Responding to a caller's suggestion that Catholics have a surreptitious plan to cultivate political hegemony in the US by ushering in waves of Catholic immigrants across open borders, Tancredo lays into Catholics and concluded that the caller "does have a point."

Max Blumenthal pegs anti-Catholic sentiment in the US to southern Baptism:

white nationalism is one of the most powerful currents guiding the anti-immigration movement. But there is another, less understood factor in their motivations, particular among the movement's base in the Southern Baptist-dominated South: anti-Catholic resentment.

But anti-Catholicism in America ranges beyond the sphere of Baptism, and perhaps the most virulent strain can be found in American Pentacostalism. The following excerpt - from a story by The Detroit News originally run in December 2005 - provides an illustration:

When a Genesee County Circuit judge sentenced Joseph Hanas to a year in a Christian residential outreach program for a minor drug offense, the troubled 19-year-old and his family welcomed the idea of getting professional help for his addiction. Instead, Hanas said officials at the program, run by a local Pentecostal church, told him his religion, Catholicism, was witchcraft and he had to convert to the Pentecostal faith or he would go to prison. Hanas refused and ultimately served jail time. On Monday, the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit in U.S. District Court in Detroit. Sentencing Hanas to the Inner City program violated his First Amendment rights to practice his religion, the suit contended. The lawsuit seeks to overturn the conviction.

It might be hard to guage the prevalence of such attitudes but another notorious case - from July 2005 - illustrates another apparent case of religious discrimination practiced by an entity receiving funding from the state of Mississippi :

A local Christian adoption agency that receives funds from the sale of Mississippi's Choose Life specialty car tags will not consider Catholics as adoptive parents.

Notable examples of anti-Catholicsm can also be found in the "A Beka" homeschooling curriculum, as Rethinking Schools Online reports :

Descriptions of contemporary life in European countries that are primarily Roman Catholic frequently include derogatory statements about the Church: "Almost all the children of [the Republic of] Ireland grow up believing in the traditions of the Roman Catholic church without knowing of God's free salvation." 28 A Beka's seventh grade world history book, for example, describes the early Roman church (before 500 A.D.) as "a monstrous distortion of Biblical Christianity." 29 Speaking of the Crusades, the text speculates that "if Christendom had succeeded with its crusades, distorted Christianity might have been imposed on all mankind." 30 In the chapter titled "The Age of Darkness," which is subtitled "Distorted Christianity, Holy Roman Empire, Renaissance," the author writes, "The papacy had always distorted Christianity. ·" 31 In all, the seventh grade book uses the term "distorted" or its variants 28 times in the six chapters in which its discussions of the Roman Catholic faith are most concentrated. Tenth graders using A Beka books are taught that "the doctrines and practices of the Roman church had digressed so far from Scripture that the church was compelled to keep its members from reading the Bible and discovering the truth." 32

"Legacy" organisation spotlighted

John Leland and many other dissidents who fought hard against the established Church. The established church recieved government tax support which paid their ministers and went for running the church. In other words Pastors of the Church of Engand (later Episcopal Church) and Purtain Church were employees of the state. John Leland was a Baptist who fought hard to bring about complete freedom of all beliefs not just Baptist. He didn't care if a person believed in one god, two gods, twenty gods or in no god the government should potect his/her right to do so. Thomas Jefferson quoted Leland during the 1800 election.

Now with so Baptist Churches having schools of their own, they are seeking funds from the government. Suddenly they give up the precious right of a free church for money to enroll students. What the government funds, it controls

This email is going out all over the web. I checked the preambe for New York state and it's accurate, but don't know about the others. Senders are using it as proof that the founders wanted God in the U.S. Constitution, and readers are encouraged to send it to everyone they know.

Here are the state preambes whizzing around cyberspace:

The religious right has lost control of the Kansas board of education!

Yesterday, Kansas voters took to the polls to decide a number of primary contests including a handful of challengers to members of the state's anti-evolution board of education.

Focus on the Family opposes a creative pro-gay ad with a stylistic copycat and a gigantic persecution complex.

Days of prayer and fasting announced: will Islamic extremists be encouraged?

What term or phrase most accurately describes the movement we keep writing about at Talk To Action? The Reverend D. James Kennedy defined it at a Reclaiming America for Christ Conference in 2005 this way:

Our job is to reclaim America for Christ, whatever the cost. As the vice regents of God, we are to exercise godly dominion and influence over our neighborhoods, our schools, our government, our literature and arts, our sports arenas, our entertainment media, our news media, our scientific endeavors -- in short, over every aspect and institution of human society.

This will be a very brief diary entry, as I wanted to draw additional attention to both a specific article and the ongoing work of a researcher.

Marley Greiner, a researcher, activist, writer for the Columbus, Ohio Free Press and blogger behind
Theoconia: a Central Ohio Theocon Report has written an important initial article in the Free Press on Ron Luce and the Teen Mania Ministries Battlecry initiative:

photo credit: Marley Griener

And the article itself-
Teen Mania: Lift the Banner by Marley Greiner

   

I had asked in a previous thread about Presbyterian groups working to change who can be ordained, and I found one.  Granted, while my motives are less than pure (gay pastors means the fundies who lied to me leave the PCUSA), I thought the rest of y'all would be interested for more principled reasons:

Just six days after I wrote how religious supremacists are threatening worker safety, (see A Culture of Life or Death?) President Bush has nominated an industry-friendly candidate to implement better coal-mining policies.

From The NewStandard:

The nation's largest environmental group says the Bush administration is burying any hope of implementing better coal-mining policies after nominating an industry-friendly candidate to the federal agency charged with setting environmental standards for surface-mining operations.

    The Sierra Club is opposing Bush's nomination of John Correll to direct the US Department of Interior's Office of Surface Mining (OSM). The environmental watchdog maintains that Correll's record of weakening industry regulations and dismantling health and safety standards endangers public health and the environment.

In The Rise and Fall of Ralph Reed: The former whiz kid of the Christian Coalition couldn't rally his base under the shadow of Jack Abramoff, James Carney of  Time Magazine - which heralded Reed's meteoric rise to power in a 1995 front cover story entitled "The Right Hand Of God" - details the lurid details of Reed's political self-immolation :

Reed was the preternaturally boyish spear carrier for the religious right, the brash Evangelical who transformed the Christian Coalition into a populist power center, then helped usher Republicans into control of Congress and George W. Bush into the presidency. The next step was launching his own political career in his native Georgia: Reed would be elected Lieutenant Governor this November, then Governor four years hence. After that, his friends said, the White House would be within reach. The young man who at 33 graced TIME's cover in 1995 as "The Right Hand of God" might appear there again, perhaps a decade from now, taking the oath of office on the steps of the U.S. Capitol.....

....those who know him say he blames the media--particularly the Atlanta Journal-Constitution--for their extensive coverage of his business ties to Abramoff, his friend from their days running the College Republicans in the early 1980s. For a high-profile religious conservative like Reed, the stories of being paid millions by one Indian tribe to run a religious-based antigambling campaign to prevent another tribe from opening a rival casino made him look like something worse than a criminal--a hypocrite. He had once called gambling a "cancer" on the body politic. And the e-mails to Abramoff didn't help, especially those that seemed to suggest that the man who had deplored in print Washington's system of "honest graft" was eager to be part of it. "I need to start humping in corporate accounts!" he wrote Abramoff a few days after the 1998 election. [ emphasis mine ]

Now, I'm generally no fan of mainstream media, but this is a fine piece of writing - and, how fitting. Time has neatly bracketed both ends of Reed's career as religious right potentate.

Talk To Action did extensive early coverage - going back  to the very beginning of 2006 at least - of Reed's unravelling. Our site section on Ralph Reed and Jack Abramoff features seventeen stories : enjoy !