Well, that didn't take long. Back on September 2, Rachel Tabachnick wrote a piece about Samuel Rodriguez' ties to the New Apostolic Reformation. Rodriguez, for those who don't know, has been vice president of Rick Joyner's Oak Initiative. I say "has" because after being confronted with the Oak Initiative's extreme stances by freelance journalist Greg Metzger, Rodriguez has resigned from the Oak Initiative. (h/t to Right Wing Watch)
Although I received glowing testimonies to Rodriguez's character before the interview, I was skeptical. My decades of experience with evangelical and fundamentalist leaders had taught me to hope for the best, but expect the worst. Yet I found that Rev. Rodriguez was genuinely troubled by Tabachnik's charges. He challenged some of the details of her story, but on the principal point—his relationship with the Oak Initiative—he agreed that there was cause for concern. He knew instinctively as I read to him the Oak Initiative's views about Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood that this was an affront to what he wished to stand for. While he pleaded ignorance with regards to the details of the Oak Initiative's agenda and website (he claimed he had barely been involved), he assured me that by the end of the day he would resign from the Board and make clear his regret. Five hours later I received an email with his letter to the Executive Board of NHCLC responding to Tabachnik's article and detailing the steps he was taking to denounce extremism, steps that include his resignation from the board of the Oak Initiative. It was, as a mutual friend of mine and Samuel's put it, the most that could be hoped for.
In a statement, Rodriguez denounced "all vestiges of Islamophobia or any other platform that engages in fear-mongering." However, one has to wonder about Rodriguez' sincerity, given the links that his National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference has.
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