To say that the Kansas City Star missed the story is an understatement. The newspaper reported Thursday on a supposedly modest news conference about what appears to be, oh say, a handful of people who were upset by a teeny governmental thingie. The paper somehow failed to note the most important fact: For the first time in the history of Kansas and Missouri, mainstream clergy and people of faith have come together to battle the religious right.

I realize that the purpose of this site is not to debate the premises of organized religion, but I think that an understanding of the dynamics of our society is required if the mission of those following this site's aims is going to be successful.

Yesterday another Gallup poll on evolution was released.

Why I think this is relevant below:

A friend drew my attention to the Constitution Restoration Bill, and suggested that I post my thoughts here. The Bill would limit the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court, in a way that concerns those who are opposed to theocrats and dominionists. I am puzzled because the bill has attracted controversy, but when you look at its words it appears not to work. Have the drafters got it wrong, or am I missing something? I think that it is a very bad bill anyway, whether or not it would work, although I am neither a US citizen nor a US resident.

[ excerpt from Washington Monthly story, When Would Jesus Bolt?, by Amy Sullivan ]

The holy skirmish down in Alabama, with its "GOP blocks votes on Bible class bill" headlines, may seem like just a one-time, up-is-down, oddity. But it's really the frontline of a larger war to keep Democrats from appealing to more moderate evangelical voters. American politics is so closely divided that if a political party peels off a few percentage points of a single big constituency, it can change the entire electoral map. To take the most recent example, African Americans, who represent 11 percent of the electorate, cast 88 percent of their ballots for Democrats nationally. But Bush was able to get those numbers down to 84 percent in key states like Ohio and Pennsylvania in 2004--and kept the White House as a result. Republican strategists recognized that a significant number of black voters are very conservative on social issues but have stayed with the Democratic Party because of its reputation for being friendlier to racial minorities. The GOP didn't need a strategy to sway the entire black community; it just needed to pick off enough votes to put the party over the top.

Democrats could similarly poach a decisive percentage of the GOP's evangelical base. In the last election, evangelicals made up 26 percent of the electorate, and 78 percent of them voted for Bush. That sounds like a fairly inviolate bloc. And, indeed, the conservative evangelicals for whom abortion and gay marriage are the deciding issues are unlikely to ever leave the Republican Party. But a substantial minority of evangelical voters--41 percent, according to a 2004 survey by political scientist John Green at the University of Akron--are more moderate on a host of issues ranging from the environment to public education to support for government spending on anti-poverty programs. Broadly speaking, these are the suburban, two-working-parents, kids-in-public-school, recycle-the-newspapers evangelicals. They may be pro-life, but it's in a Catholic, "seamless garment of life" kind of way. These moderates have largely remained in the Republican coalition because of its faith-friendly image. A targeted effort by the Democratic Party to appeal to them could produce victories in the short term: To win the 2004 presidential election, John Kerry needed just 59,300 additional votes in Ohio--that's four percent of the total evangelical vote in the state, or approximately 10 percent of Ohio's moderate evangelical voters. And if the Democratic Party changed its reputation on religion, the result could alter the electoral map in a more significant and permanent way.

The danger here is the constant temptation of a slide to the center - in tactical terms that may be advisable, but without a long term strategy to counter the cultural advance of the Christian right such short term tactics will merely amount to a replay of the Clintonian strategy of the 1990s which - though locally successful - did nothing to address, stem, or even recognize the long term cultural advance of the Christian right termed by Michelle Goldberg as The Long March Through the Institutions

To bring the TTA community up to speed on the IRD attack on the Episcopal Church and to add another response to the Shadow War discussion, I want to direct everyone's attention to fall 2003, immediately after the consecration of Gene Robinson, when the AAC (the IRD's Episcopal arm) made a commitment to "guerrilla warfare" within the church.  

From the notes of a meeting between the "Global South Primates" and AAC/IRD affiliated Bishops 11/20/03

Fred Clarkson has a birthday this week--thanks, Fred, for all the work and contributions you've made this year, and all the rest!!

I posted this earlier on my own blog. I hope you enjoy reading it here. If you choose to visit my blog, I would be honored if you left a comment.

Hello,
I thought someone might find my story interesting.
----Mark Tribble

This is actually an old story, but today was the first I'd heard of it.

A few years ago, TBN founders Jan and Paul Crouch diverted some $32 million of TBN funds (all from donations, no doubt) into making movies.  Naturally, they put their son, Matthew Crouch in charge, and he churned out a couple of B-movies: "The Omega Code" (a modest success) and "Meggiddo" (a huge commerical and financial flop).

Since then Crouch's company, Gener8xion Entertainment (8X), appears to have had a hand in a couple of small movie projects, but nothing major. But they are now working on a new movie "One Night with the King" based on the story of Esther, from the Old Testament.

As I was looking up information on the movie, I found out, to my surprise, that 8X is now a public company.  As I dug a little deeper, it seems that Crouch took over another production company, CDMI productions and made a packet in the process:

Read on...

Missouri House Concurrent Resolution 13: Resolves that voluntary prayer in public schools, religious displays on public property, and the recognition of a Christian God are not a coalition of church and state.

The story is here.

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. - Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson, criticized by some evangelicals recently for his comments about Venezuela's president and the prime minister of Israel, has lost a bid for re-election to the National Religious Broadcasters' board of directors.

Robertson, founder of the Virginia Beach-based Christian Broadcasting Network, was one of 38 candidates for 33 board seats during the NRB's recent convention. The group mostly represents evangelical radio and TV broadcasters.

During his broadcast today, Focus on the Family founder and president James Dobson promoted his organization's annual ex-gay conference, Love Won Out, in which gays and their families are told that homosexuality is "preventable and treatable." Then, he presented evidence that "the pendulum is swinging back," informing his listeners that he had just received a thank you note from new Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. Dobson praised his listeners for helping to helping to seat John Roberts and Alito in time for a partial-birth abortion case ("in this case, [your activism] absolutely affected history," he told his audience).