Frank Schaeffer's Blog, page 7

Corporate Elites Should Be Petrified of Occupy Wall Street

HOME ABOUT CONTACT ADVERTISE DONATE LOGINSEARCH: News & PoliticsWorldEconomyRightsEnvironmentMedia & CultureLivingVisionInvestigations OCCUPY WALL STREET Truthdig / By Chris Hedges 127 COMMENTSWhy Corporate Elites Should Be Petrified of Occupy Wall StreetThe occupation of Wall Street has formed an alternative community that defies the profit-driven hierarchical structures of corporate capitalism.October 10, 2011 | LIKE THIS ARTICLE ?Join our mailing list:Sign up to stay up to date on the latest Occupy Wall Street headlines via email. TAKE ACTIONChange.org|Get Widget|Start an Online Petition �

www.jpmorganchase.com/corporate/Home/article/ny-13.htmKetchup, a petite 22-year-old from Chicago with wavy red hair and glasses with bright red frames, arrived in Zuccotti Park in New York on Sept. 17. She had a tent, a rolling suitcase, 40 dollars' worth of food, the graphic version of Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" and a sleeping bag. She had no return ticket, no idea what she was undertaking, and no acquaintances among the stragglers who joined her that afternoon to begin the Wall Street occupation. She decided to go to New York after reading the Canadian magazine Adbusters, which called for the occupation, although she noted that when she got to the park Adbusters had no discernable presence.

The lords of finance in the looming towers surrounding the park, who toy with money and lives, who make the political class, the press and the judiciary jump at their demands, who destroy the ecosystem for profit and drain the U.S. Treasury to gamble and speculate, took little notice of Ketchup or any of the other scruffy activists on the street below them. The elites consider everyone outside their sphere marginal or invisible. And what significance could an artist who paid her bills by working as a waitress have for the powerful? What could she and the others in Zuccotti Park do to them? What threat can the weak pose to the strong? Those who worship money believe their buckets of cash, like the $4.6 million JPMorgan Chase gave to the New York City Police Foundation, can buy them perpetual power and security. Masters all, kneeling before the idols of the marketplace, blinded by their self-importance, impervious to human suffering, bloated from unchecked greed and privilege, they were about to be taught a lesson in the folly of hubris.

Even now, three weeks later, elites, and their mouthpieces in the press, continue to puzzle over what people like Ketchup want. Where is the list of demands? Why don't they present us with specific goals? Why can't they articulate an agenda?

The goal to people like Ketchup is very, very clear. It can be articulated in one word—REBELLION. These protesters have not come to work within the system. They are not pleading with Congress for electoral reform. They know electoral politics is a farce and have found another way to be heard and exercise power. They have no faith, nor should they, in the political system or the two major political parties. They know the press will not amplify their voices, and so they created a press of their own. They know the economy serves the oligarchs, so they formed their own communal system. This movement is an effort to take our country back.

This is a goal the power elite cannot comprehend. They cannot envision a day when they will not be in charge of our lives. The elites believe, and seek to make us believe, that globalization and unfettered capitalism are natural law, some kind of permanent and eternal dynamic that can never be altered. What the elites fail to realize is that rebellion will not stop until the corporate state is extinguished. It will not stop until there is an end to the corporate abuse of the poor, the working class, the elderly, the sick, children, those being slaughtered in our imperial wars and tortured in our black sites. It will not stop until foreclosures and bank repossessions stop. It will not stop until students no longer have to go into debt to be educated, and families no longer have to plunge into bankruptcy to pay medical bills. It will not stop until the corporate destruction of the ecosystem stops, and our relationships with each other and the planet are radically reconfigured. And that is why the elites, and the rotted and degenerate system of corporate power they sustain, are in trouble. That is why they keep asking what the demands are. They don't understand what is happening. They are deaf, dumb and blind.

"The world can't continue on its current path and survive," Ketchup told me. "That idea is selfish and blind. It's not sustainable. People all over the globe are suffering needlessly at our hands."

The occupation of Wall Street has formed an alternative community that defies the profit-driven hierarchical structures of corporate capitalism. If the police shut down the encampment in New York tonight, the power elite will still lose, for this vision and structure have been imprinted into the thousands of people who have passed through park, renamed Liberty Plaza by the protesters. The greatest gift the occupation has given us is a blueprint for how to fight back. And this blueprint is being transferred to cities and parks across the country.

"We get to the park," Ketchup says of the first day. "There's madness for a little while. There were a lot of people. They were using megaphones at first. Nobody could hear. Then someone says we should get into circles and talk about what needed to happen, what we thought we could accomplish. And so that's what we did. There was a note-taker in each circle. I don't know what happened with those notes, probably nothing, but it was a good start. One person at a time, airing your ideas. There was one person saying that he wasn't very hopeful about what we could accomplish here, that he wasn't very optimistic. And then my response was that, well, we have to be optimistic, because if anybody's going to get anything done, it's going be us here. People said different things about what our priorities should be. People were talking about the one-demand idea. Someone called for AIG executives to be prosecuted. There was someone who had come from Spain to be there, saying that she was here to help us avoid the mistakes that were made in Spain. It was a wide spectrum. Some had come because of their own personal suffering or what they saw in the world."

"After the circles broke I felt disheartened because it was sort of chaotic," she said. "I didn't have anybody there, so it was a little depressing. I didn't know what was going to happen."

"Over the past few months, people had been meeting in New York City general assembly," she said. "One of them is named Brooke. She's a professor of social ecology. She did my facilitation training. There's her and a lot of other people, students, school teachers, different people who were involved with that … so they organized a general assembly."

"It's funny that the cops won't let us use megaphones, because it's to make our lives harder, but we actually end up making a much louder sound [with the "people's mic"] and I imagine it's much more annoying to the people around us," she said. "I had been in the back, unable to hear. I walked to different parts of the circle. I saw this man talking in short phrases and people were repeating them. I don't know whose idea it was, but that started on the first night. The first general assembly was a little chaotic because people had no idea … a general assembly, what is this for? At first it was kind of grandstanding about what were our demands. Ending corporate personhood is one that has come up again and again as a favorite and. … What ended up happening was, they said, OK, we're going to break into work groups.

"People were worried we were going to get kicked out of the park at 10 p.m. This was a major concern. There were tons of cops. I've heard that it's costing the city a ton of money to have constant surveillance on a bunch of peaceful protesters who aren't hurting anyone. With the people's mic, everything we do is completely transparent. We know there are undercover cops in the crowd. I think I was talking to one last night, but it's like, what are you trying to accomplish? We don't have any secrets."

"The undercover cops are the only ones who ask, 'Who's the leader?' " she said. "Presumably, if they know who our leaders are they can take them out. The fact is we have no leader. There's no leader, so there's nothing they can do.

"There was a woman [in the medics unit]. This guy was pretending to be a reporter. The first question he asks is, 'Who's the leader?' She goes, 'I'm the leader.' And he says, 'Oh yeah, what are you in charge of?' She says, 'I'm in a charge of everything.' He says, 'Oh yeah? What's your title?' She says 'God.' "

"So it's 9:30 p.m. and people are worried that they're going to try and rush us out of the camp," she said, referring back to the first day. "At 9:30 they break into work groups. I joined the group on contingency plans. The job of the bedding group was to find cardboard for people to sleep on. The contingency group had to decide what to do if they kick us out. The big decision we made was to announce to the group that if we were dispersed we were going to meet back at 10 a.m. the next day in the park. Another group was arts and culture. What was really cool was that we assumed we were going to be there more than one night. There was a food group. They were going dumpster diving. The direct action committee plans for direct, visible action like marches. There was a security team. It's security against the cops. The cops are the only people we think that might hurt us. The security team keeps people awake in shifts. They always have people awake."

The work groups make logistical decisions, and the general assembly makes large policy decisions.

"Work groups make their own decisions," Ketchup said. "For example, someone donated a laptop. And because I've been taking minutes I keep running around and asking, 'Does someone have a laptop I could borrow?' The media team, upon receiving that laptop, designated it to me for my use on behalf of the Internet committee. The computer isn't mine. When I go back to Chicago, I'm not going to take it. Right now I don't even know where it is. Someone else is using it. But so, after hearing this, people thought it had been gifted to me personally. People were upset by that. So a member of the Internet work group went in front of the group and said, 'This is a need of the committee. It's been put into Ketchup's care.' They explained that to the group, but didn't ask for consensus on it, because the committees are empowered. Some people might still think that choice was inappropriate. In the future, it might be handled differently."

Working groups blossomed in the following days. The media working group was joined by a welcome working group for new arrivals, a sanitation working group (some members of which go around the park on skateboards as they carry brooms), a legal working group with lawyers, an events working group, an education working group, medics, a facilitation working group (which trains new facilitators for the general assembly meetings), a public relations working group, and an outreach working group for like-minded communities as well as the general public. There is an Internet working group and an open source technology working group. The nearby McDonald's is the principal bathroom for the park after Burger King banned protesters from its facilities.

Caucuses also grew up in the encampment, including a "Speak Easy caucus." "That's a caucus I started," Ketchup said. "It is for a broad spectrum of individuals from female-bodied people who identify as women to male-bodied people who are not traditionally masculine. That's called the 'Speak Easy' caucus. I was just talking to a woman named Sharon who's interested in starting a caucus for people of color.

"A caucus gives people a safe space to talk to each other without people from the culture of their oppressors present. It gives them greater power together, so that if the larger group is taking an action that the caucus felt was specifically against their interests, then the caucus can block that action. Consensus can potentially still be reached after a caucus blocks something, but a block, or a 'paramount objection,' is really serious. You're saying that you are willing to walk out."

"We've done a couple of things so far," she said. "So, you know the live stream? The comments are moderated on the live stream. There are moderators who remove racist comments, comments that say 'I hate cops' or 'Kill cops.' They remove irrelevant comments that have nothing to do with the movement. There is this woman who is incredibly hardworking and intelligent. She has been the driving force of the finance committee. Her hair is half-blond and half-black. People were referring to her as "blond-black hottie." These comments weren't moderated, and at one point whoever was running the camera took the camera off her face and did a body scan. So, that was one of the first things the caucus talked about. We decided as a caucus that I would go to the moderators and tell them this is a serious problem. If you're moderating other offensive comments then you need to moderate these kinds of offensive comments."

The heart of the protest is the two daily meetings, held in the morning and the evening. The assemblies, which usually last about two hours, start with a review of process, which is open to change and improvement, so people are clear about how the assembly works. Those who would like to speak raise their hand and get on "stack."

"There's a stack keeper," Ketchup said. "The stack keeper writes down your name or some signifier for you. A lot of white men are the people raising their hands. So, anyone who is not apparently a white man gets to jump stack. The stack keeper will make note of the fact that the person who put their hand up was not a white man and will arrange the list so that it's not dominated by white men. People don't get called up in the same order as they raise their hand."

While someone is speaking, their words amplified by the people's mic, the crowd responds through hand signals.

"Putting your fingers up like this," she said, holding her hands up and wiggling her fingers, "means you like what you're hearing, or you're in agreement. Like this," she said, holding her hands level and wiggling her fingers, "means you don't like it so much. Fingers down, you don't like it at all; you're not in agreement. Then there's this triangle you make with your hand that says 'point of process.' So, if you think that something is not being respected within the process that we've agreed to follow then you can bring that up."

"You wait till you're called," she said. "These rules get abused all the time, but they are important. We start with agenda items, which are proposals or group discussions. Then working group report-backs, so you know what every working group is doing. Then we have general announcements. The agenda items have been brought to the facilitators by the working groups because you need the whole group to pay attention. Like last night, Legal brought up a discussion on bail: 'Can we agree that the money from the general funds can be allotted if someone needs bail?' And the group had to come to consensus on that. [It decided yes.] There's two co-facilitators, a stack keeper, a timekeeper, a vibes-person making sure that people are feeling OK, that people's voices aren't getting stomped on, and then if someone's being really disruptive, the vibes-person deals with them. There's a note-taker—I end up doing that a lot because I type very, very quickly. We try to keep the facilitation team one man, one woman, or one female-bodied person, one male-bodied person. When you facilitate multiple times it's rough on your brain. You end up having a lot of criticism thrown your way. You need to keep the facilitators rotating as much as possible. It needs to be a huge, huge priority to have a strong facilitation group."

"People have been yelled out of the park," she said. "Someone had a sign the other day that said 'Kill the Jew Bankers.' They got screamed out of the park. Someone else had a sign with the N-word on it. That person's sign was ripped up, but that person is apparently still in the park.

"We're trying to make this a space that everyone can join. This is something the caucuses are trying to really work on. We are having workshops to get people to understand their privilege."

But perhaps the most important rule adopted by the protesters is nonviolence and nonaggression against the police, no matter how brutal the police become.

"The cops, I think, maced those women in the face and expected the men and women around them to start a riot," Ketchup said. "They want a riot. They can deal with a riot. They cannot deal with nonviolent protesters with cameras."

I tell Ketchup I will bring her my winter sleeping bag. It is getting cold. She will need it. I leave her in a light drizzle and walk down Broadway. I pass the barricades, uniformed officers on motorcycles, the rows of paddy wagons and lines of patrol cars that block the streets into the financial district and surround the park. These bankers, I think, have no idea what they are up against.

Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, is a senior fellow at the Nation Institute. He writes a regular column for TruthDig every Monday. His latest book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.

Wall Street Protests and the Religious Right

If the Wall Street protests are to mean anything long term they have to also focus on the enablers of the top 1 percent that have raped the 99. Fundamentalist religion made this rape possible. The source of the empowering of the top 1 percent super wealthy and the economic rape of rest of us is the religion of Evangelical fundamentalism. Note I didn't say religion per se, but religious fundamentalism is responsible.
Why?
Because without the fundamentalists and their "values" issues the lower 99 percent could not have been convinced to vote against their (our) economic self-interest, in other words, vote for Republicans serving only billionaires instead of the rest of us. Wall Street is a legitimate target for long overdue protest but so are the centers of religious power that are the gate keepers of Republican Party "values" voters that make the continuing economic rape possible.
Fundamentalist religion -- Evangelical and Roman Catholic alike -- has delegitimized the US Government and thus undercut its ability to tax, spend and regulate
The fundamentalist have replaced economic and political justice with a bogus (and hate-driven) "morality" litmus tests of spurious red herring "issues" from abortion to school prayer and gay rights. The result has been that the masses of lower middle class and poor Americans who should be voting for Democrats and thus their own economic interests, have been persuaded to vote against their own class and self interest.
This trick of political sleight of hand has been achieved by this process:
Declare the US Government agents of evil because of the fact that "the government" has allowed legal abortion, gay rights etc.,
Declare that therefore "government is the problem" not the solution,
Now that the government is the source of all evil thus anyone the government wants to regulate is being picked on by satanic forces. The US Government is always the bad guy,
Thus good God-fearing folks will always vote for less government and less regulation because "the government" is evil,
So unregulated corporations, banks and Wall Street are always right and represent "freedom" while government is always wrong and represents "tyranny."
Like most Evangelical/Roman Catholic fundamentalist movements in history, from the Bay State colonies to the Spanish Inquisition, the American Religious Right of today advocates the fusion of state power and religion through the reestablishment of the "Christian America" idea of "American Exceptionalism" (i.e., a nation "chosen" by God), the form of government adopted by the Puritans' successors during the age of early American colonialism.
Thus the division between "Real Americans" and the rest of us is the "saved" and "lost" paradigm of theological correctness applied to politics. Thus President Obama isn't a Real American, or even a born American, he's the "Other," a Muslim, an outsider, above all "not one of us."
In other words you're not just wrong but evil if you disagree with the Elect over abortion or for that matter trying to bring peace to the Middle East and thus "not supporting Israel." Because God has "chosen" the Jews to fulfill prophecy etc., etc..
"Bring America back to the Bible" is really no more subtle than the claim of the Iranian Mullahs to rule in "God's name" so that Iran too can come back to God. And if you can get Americans to worry about the Bible and not fairness and justice then you have handed a perpetual victory to Goldman Sacks and company.
How Did We Get Here?
The unstated agreement went like this: Republicans will pander to the Religious Right on the social issues - abortion, gay rights, prayer in schools, creationism in text books, and not so subtly the endorsement of religious schools to help white evangelicals and Roman Catholics avoid integration, as long as the Religious Right turned a blind eye to the fact that the Republican Party would A), do nothing substantive to change much about abortion etc., and, B) sell the soul of the country to corporate America, a country-within-a-country where one percent of the population have more wealth than the 99...
What few people seem prepared to do is look at or admit the larger problem: no political protest will change anything in America until the masses protest the religious fundamentalist's stranglehold on this country via having hijacked the Republican Party too. Deference to religion masquerading as politics must end, now.
Religion Masquerading as Politics
Religion masquerading as politics is not true religion or politics-- it is a theocracy-in-waiting. This charade of power grabs in God's name needs to be exposed then destroyed.
Democracy will not survive the continuing dirty combination of theocracy and oligarchy. That's where we're headed bankers running the world backed by preachers who don't care about God but care about power.
The timely destruction of the economic elites and their religious facilitators begins by calling fundamentalist/Evangelical/Roman Catholic "religion" what it is: a political grab for power based on literal madness of the sort that makes the not-so-bright terrified of modernity, truth, science and facts and leads them to deny evolution and global warming while believing that Jesus will come back any day now.
To the post-Roe Religious Right, hating America became the new patriotism. If it had not been for the Evangelicals demonizing the Federal Government over abortion and gay rights (as they did before over civil rights) how else would the economic oligarchy have gotten away with making the underclass vote against their own interests?
The "I vote pro-life" bumper sticker says it all
And that is why we need to strip off the mask of moral and religious posturing masquerading as politics. We're dealing with our own version of the "holy" men who run Iran and Saudi Arabia. And they are just as backward here as they are there. They are also winning -- in the short term anyway.
The Evangelical Right has stalled and perhaps destroyed the Obama presidency. And they are only getting going as their 87 "Tea Party" congressional freshmen proved by being willing to plunge the US economy over a cliff in order to satisfy their hunger to clip the wings of the "evil" US Government and render it useless.
What we face is not a loyal opposition but a force within America as alien as the Taliban, and with the same alienated aims where our government is concerned. What we witnessed in the last congressional elections was not an election as we understand the term but the start of a putsch. When back in the 1970s and 80s my late evangelical father and I were running around signing up Republican leaders like Ronald Reagan to "take a stand on abortion" we were outsiders and agitators. But today the agitators are now actually running the heart of the Republican Party. Some of the most extreme of their number -- Perry and Bachmann -- are actually running for president.
Rick Perry et al
That's why no one was surprised that Rick Perry kicked off his presidential race with a prayer meeting surrounded by extremist bigots from the far, far Evangelical right. This was as "normal" today as it is to see the Saudi Royals paying tribute to Shariah Law and giving ten lashes to women who drive.
Conclusion Protest Churches and Religious Organisations, not Just Wall Street
Again: If the Wall Street protests are to mean anything they have to not just protest Wall Street and inequality but also protest the root source of America's tilt to the far unregulated corporate right . It is time to also protest outside mega churches, Evangelical publishing houses, religious organisations that lead the "moral" crusades against women and gays and all the rest.
Fundamentalist religion of all kinds is the enemy of democracy and thus of America. It is the enemy of working people everywhere too when it's bogus moral crusades empower the rich to thumb their noses at our government.
Fundamentalist religion here and around the world must be stopped in its anti-fact, anti-progress crusade. The alternative is chaos, decline, oligarchy and theocracy.
Frank Schaeffer is a writer and his new book is Sex, Mom, and God: How the Bible's Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics--and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway.

The Truth

Hedges: No way in US system to vote against banks TheAlyonaShow 3,104 videos Subscribe19,228 Like Add to Share

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Between Occupy Wall Street, in New York, and the other cities it's spread to, as well as the October 2011 movement that just began here in D.C, something seems to be happening in this country. Earlier at Freedom Plaza Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author, tells us what this could lead to.

532 likes, 9 dislikesAs Seen On:reddit: the front pag...Show more Top Comments

A clear and articulate analysis. Hedges is courageous in telling it like it is. He is one of the few public intellectuals not afraid to use words like "fascism" and "Marxism" objectively. Most people use these words to instil fear or to skirt critical criticism. Pity the Tea Partiers will not spend 10 minutes to sit down and follow Chris through this interview with an open mind.

Myrmecia 23 hours ago 8

Chris Hedges is as serious, moral, adult, informed and relevant as this RT show could aspire to. TY for this interview with him. Keep it up, I'll re-subscribe. His comments on teaparty and the fascist hatred of regulations imposed by the people (as government when it works) are well understood - he has seen this in other places before now. Alex Jones, seen here occasionally, is not "news" but is the ideological agenda of exactly that fascist entity represented by Texas Freedom Works.

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Home > Events & Activities > Events > Frank Schaeffer: Sex, Mom, and GodFrank Schaeffer: Sex, Mom, and GodTuesday, September 27, 20116:30pm @ Central Library

In his New York Times best-selling book, Frank Schaeffer uses his life as a lens through which to view a larger narrative: the rightward lurch of American politics since the 1970s.

The central character is Schaeffer's far-from-prudish evangelical mother, who sweetly but bizarrely provides startling juxtapositions of the religious and the sensual throughout Schaeffer's childhood.

Schaeffer asks what the leading right-wingers and the paranoid fantasies of their "echo chamber" are really about. Here's a hint... sex.

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Play audioFrank Schaeffer: Sex, Mom, and GodTuesday, September 27, 2011Central Library

In his New York Times best-selling book, Frank Schaeffer uses his life as a lens through which to view a larger narrative: the rightward lurch of American politics since the 1970s.

The central character is Schaeffer's far-from-prudish evangelical mother, who sweetly but bizarrely provides startling juxtapositions of the religious and the sensual throughout Schaeffer's childhood.

Schaeffer asks what the leading right-wingers and the paranoid fantasies of their "echo chamber" are really about. Here's a hint... sex.

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A Big "Thank You!" to the Republicans For Setting the Stage For Global Destruction

The Republicans are now the anti-science party

On climate change and evolution, the party's presidential hopefuls are wilfully ignorant

(First published in the NYT and UK Guardian)

reddit thisComments (247) Paul KrugmanThe Observer, Sunday 4 September 2011Article history

Jon Huntsman Jr, a former Utah governor and ambassador to China, isn't a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination. And that's too bad, because Mr Hunstman has been willing to say the unsayable about the Republican party in the United States, namely, that it is becoming the "anti-science party". This is an enormously important development. And it should terrify us.

To see what Mr Huntsman means, consider recent statements by the two men who actually are serious contenders for the Republican nomination:Rick Perry and Mitt Romney.

Mr Perry, the governor of Texas, recently made headlines by dismissingevolution as "just a theory", one that has "got some gaps in it", an observation that will come as news to the vast majority of biologists. But what really got people's attention was what he said about climate change: "I think there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects. And I think we are seeing almost weekly, or even daily, scientists are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change."

That's a remarkable statement – or maybe the right adjective is "vile".

The second part of Mr Perry's statement is, as it happens, just false: the scientific consensus about man-made global warming – which includes 97% to 98% of researchers in the field, according to the National Academy of Sciences – is getting stronger, not weaker, as the evidence for climate change just keeps mounting.

In fact, if you follow climate science at all, you know that the main development over the past few years has been growing concern that projections of the future climate are underestimating the likely amount of warming. Warnings that we may face civilisation-threatening temperature change by the end of the century, once considered outlandish, are now coming out of mainstream research groups.

But never mind that, Mr Perry suggests; those scientists are just in it for the money, "manipulating data" to create a fake threat. In his book Fed Up, he dismissed climate science as a "contrived phoney mess that is falling apart".

I could point out that Mr Perry is buying into a truly crazy conspiracy theory, which asserts that thousands of scientists all around the world are on the take, with not one willing to break the code of silence. I could also point out that multiple investigations into charges of intellectual malpractice on the part of climate scientists have ended up exonerating the accused researchers of all accusations. But never mind. Mr Perry and those who think like him know what they want to believe and their response to anyone who contradicts them is to start a witch hunt.

So how has Mr Romney, the other leading contender for the Republican nomination, responded to Mr Perry's challenge? In trademark fashion: by running away. In the past, Mr Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, has strongly endorsed the notion that man-made climate change is a real concern. But last week he softened that to a statement that he thinks the world is getting hotter, but "I don't know that" and "I don't know if it's mostly caused by humans". Moral courage!

Of course, we know what's motivating Mr Romney's sudden lack of conviction. According to Public Policy Polling, only 21% of Republican voters in Iowa believe in global warming (and only 35% believe in evolution). Within the Republican party, wilful ignorance has become a litmus test for candidates, one that Mr Romney is determined to pass at all costs.

So it's now highly likely that the presidential candidate of one of our two major political parties will either be a man who believes what he wants to believe, even in the teeth of scientific evidence, or a man who pretends to believe whatever he thinks the party's base wants him to believe.

And the deepening anti-intellectualism of the political right, both within and beyond the Republican party, extends far beyond the issue of climate change.

Lately, for example, the Wall Street Journal's editorial page has gone beyond its long-term preference for the economic ideas of "charlatans and cranks" – as one of former president George W Bush's chief economic advisers famously put it – to a general denigration of hard thinking about matters economic. Pay no attention to "fancy theories" that conflict with "common sense", the Journal tells us. Because why should anyone imagine that you need more than gut feelings to analyse things like financial crises and recessions?

Now, we don't know who will win next year's presidential election. But the odds are that one of these years the world's greatest nation will find itself ruled by a party that is aggressively anti-science, indeed anti-knowledge. And, in a time of severe challenges – environmental, economic, and more – that's a terrifying prospect.

©New York Times

Sunday, August 28, 2011(First published HERE this article...

Sunday, August 28, 2011(First published HERE this article is by a young evangelical writer who does not list his name. ) Warning: This is a longish piece with links to many important articles. I think it will be worth your while, but make sure you have a few minutes to digest it.



I have been dealing this week with a major frustration: Extremely poor reporting and commentary in major secular media on Governor Perry and Michelle Bachmann has led to a flurry of superficial rejoinders by Christian thinkers who I respect and whose opinions matter. Key examples of the former are Ryan Lizza's lengthy piece in The New Yorker on Bachmann,Sarah Posner's post at Slate, and Bill Keller's article in the New York Times Magazine; key examples of the latter are Lisa Miller and Michael Gerson inThe Washington Post, Charlotte Allen in The Los Angeles Times andDouglas Groothius and Scot McKnight at Patheos. Even Ross Douthat, while going further in his acknowledgement of the seriousness of the questions, still misses the core issues.



What I believe has happened (and please give me your feedback on this) is that evangelicals have gravitated to the worst aspects of the secular articles—namely, the underlying fear of any type of religious presence in the public arena and the ignorance of the complexity and diversity of evangelicalism—to dramatically underplay the legitimate concerns over Perry's and Bachmann's religio-political vision. The Christian writers who I mentioned (and there aremany others) are either focusing too narrowly on specific errors in the secular media (Groothius, Allen do this I believe) or too broadly on the question of religion and public life (Miller, Gerson and McKnight do this). What they are missing is the mountain of serious scholarship and thoughtful writing that is the foundation of genuine concerns over the types of ideas and spiritualities that have had, according to Bachmann and Perry themselves, a significant influence on them and their staff.

We are at an important time in the 2012 campaign when reporters and citizens are taking their first serious look at the candidates. These initial impressions can be significant. I am genuinely concerned that evangelicals who are in positions of leadership, and are opinion shapers, are moving too quickly to construe the questions over Perry and Bachmann's religio-political worldview as "just another example" of the secular media's ignorance of or disdain for traditional religious beliefs. They risk papering over profound differences that moderate evangelicals have had with the authors and institutions that have shaped Bachmann and Perry. What I am providing here, then, is a link to resources for thoughtful people who want to think again about Bachmann and Perry. What the evidence shows in plain sight is the influence of aspects of Protestant thought that many evangelicals have traditionally found troubling and suspect. Whether it should be labeled "dominionism", "reconstructionism", "fundamentalism" or "neopentecostalism" is a question beyond my expertise, but that it not be confused with mainstream evangelicalism or conservative Christianity is imperative. If we allow the likes of George Grant and the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) to be confused with mainstream evangelicalism we risk damage to our credibility, damage to the gospel, and damage to the broader argument that religion and religious institutions have a vital role to play in promoting the global common good. And we risk legitimizing and even encouraging aspects of thought and action that some of us have spent much of our professional lives resisting and challenging. Reading Ralph Reed this week is a case in point. He is clearly seeking to interpret the recent controversies as evidence of a decades long pattern of misunderstanding the "evangelical vote". I think Reed has made a career out of misrepresenting evangelicalism, and I think he is doing it again. Before we cede the ground to Reed, lets be sure that we have examined these new leaders carefully, and be sure that we really want to help frame them as evangelicals to the broader culture.

QUALITY RESEARCH OF DOMINIONISM

I know that some of you probably have closed your minds to the signficance of dominionism and others of you have probably not even heard of the term. If you are going to properly understand Bachmann and Perry you need tothink anew about dominionism and its current enthusiasts in what is called the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR). So far as I can tell the lead researcher on this is Rachel Tabachnick. A very helpful interview by Terry Gross gives an excellent overview of her research.

This is a key quote from the interview:

"Having the Southern Baptist background and growing up in the Deep South has helped me to be able to do this research and has also helped me realize something that might not be apparent to some other people looking at the movement," she says. "This is quite radically different than the evangelicalism of my youth. The things that we've been talking about are not representative of evangelicalism. They're not representative of conservative evangelicalism. So I think that's important to keep in mind. This is a movement that's growing in popularity, and one of the ways they've been able to do that [is because] they're not very identifiable to most people. They're just presented as nondenominational or just Christian — but it is an identifiable movement now with an identifiable ideology." [Emphasis added]

This interview has given her scholarship a broader audience and she has prepared a summary of her work here. She has a devestating critique of Lisa Miller's analysis of dominionism here. I am not speaking for the quality of all of the work done by the organization that she works for because I don't know enough about it, but she has done her homework, she knows the broader religious landscape and she is onto something vital that some of the Christian reports have been woefully ignorant of. The complete layout of the 150 articles she and others at her organization have done in the last three years on the NAR is here. She is also the leader of NARwatch, a great resource that many of us (including me!) have been ignorant of for too long. You won't agree with everything there, but Rachel and her colleagues are the premier source for information if you really want to know what this movement is about and why it matters to the broader questions around religion in public life.

BACHMANN, WALDRON AND DOMINIONISM

I know that many of you are, like me, leery of guilt by association arguments. Tangential connections and obscure linkages is the stuff of conspiratorial thinkers on each side of the political spectrum. That is not the point of this next section at all. Peter Waldron is not an obscure, third tier adviser. Any of us who know politics know the importance of staff, particularly in the formation and development of a campaign and its theme. Peter Waldron is a central figure in the development of Bachmann's campaign in Iowa and now in South Carolina. The Atlantic has an overview of his past work and Richard Bartholomew details his connections to the global church. Fred Clark looks at Waldron's writing and Warren Throckmorton provides basic evidence of Waldron's take on "dominion". Kyle Mantyla goes into greater detail than Rizza did about Bachmann's mentor, John Eldsmoe, and pushes back against efforts to downplay the influence of dominionism on Bachmann's politics.

PERRY AND THE RESPONSE

For Governor Perry the best place to start is with a profile of him for the Texas Observer. I know that magazine is to the left of most of us, and I know that this article suffers from some of that malady, but it does lay down some important benchmarks for understanding Perry and his decision to hold The Response prayer rally just days before announcing his run for president. In discussing The Response I want to be clear that I do believe in spiritual warfare and in the power of prayer. Having said that, I have often been around people who hold very different understandings of prayer and spiritual warfare. I try not to judge them and I hope they don't judge me. My point in digging into some of these beliefs is because the way that the people in the network around Perry do "spiritual warfare" is directly relevant to their relationship with Perry and his with them. I believe reports about the principal individuals and institutions that shaped The Response are important to understanding the worldview of Perry and to raising the question of whether his spiritual politics is just "more of the same" or whether it is something we should be cautious about labeling evangelical. Here is an important article by Tabachnik on how controversial this type of prayer is even among folk who are way more charismatic than the average evangelical. Sometimes we can forget how difficult reporting on this type of spirituality can be for a non charismatic and we assume that the person is being condescending. Read this reporter's genuine struggle to explain in these two posts what these NAR folk mean by "spiritual warfare" and ask yourself if this is "more of the same" debate over religion and public life.

The institutions that support these beliefs and spirituality are not distantly connected to Perry. It is not as if Perry has in any way distanced himself from or tried to explain carefully his relationship with them. If Perry wanted Christians and the national media to not view him as linked to this movement then he would have organized his famous "The Response" prayer rally much differently than he actually did. I know some evangelicals think the media made to much of his prayer rally, but I think that when you actually look at the national coverage the opposite is true. The national media at the event was too ignorant of the individuals and institutions represented there to really grasp who it was that Perry was embracing (literally) at this event. That is why the best immediate report on the event came from a Texan who is fully immersed in the religious landscape of the state. He had this to say about it:

there were plenty of moments that should've startled the national press corps. For example, right before Perry's sermon he hugged and thanked one Alice Patterson, an "apostle" from San Antonio who Perry says he frequently prays with.Who was this woman, one of two people he had next to him as he began speaking?Patterson was active in the Texas Christian Coalition in the 90s but has since flung herself into the New Apostolic Reformation movement…[she has written that] [t]he Democratic Party… is "an invisible network of evil comprising an unholy structure" released by Jezebel (emphasis in the original). Yes, that Jezebel.And she knows because she saw her – literally – in 2009 at a prophetic prayer meeting.I saw Jezebel's skirt lifted to expose tiny Baal, Asherah, and a few other spirits. There they were–small, cowering, trembling little spirits that were only ankle high on Jezebel's skinny legs. Elsewhere in the book, Patterson writes that the "Church is not to provide for widows less than 60 years old. ...If she is younger than 60, this scripture says that she should return to the home of her parents with the object of getting married." She also writes that the "minimum wage is against the Word of God" and that taxes should be no more than the biblical tithe (10 percent) for all Americans, rich or poor.Imagine for a second that Barack Obama had been a close prayer partner with someone who had the equivalent of Patterson's beliefs. Further imagine that Obama had "initiated" an exclusionary religious event and put someone like Patterson on a short list of organizers. Imagine that Obama had then embraced this person on stage before launching into a 12-minute sermon that suggested that a majority of the world's population was condemned to hell. [emphasis added]

The more you dig into The Response the more convinced you will become that these types of stories are going to go from a trickle to a current in the months to come. Evangelical writers, and the broader media, have to decide how they really want to frame these stories and how they want to engage the debate that these stories will fuel, because they are not going away. Perry and Bachmann are tied to aspects of Christianity in America that many of the evangelicals I know would have serious reservations about and would not want to feel obliged to defend or own. As Rachel Tabachnik puts it:



"It is those dismissing the threat of Dominionism who threaten to paint all evangelicals with one brush. I agree that it is true that most evangelicals have no theocratic intentions, but as the New Apostolic Reformation's activism becomes more widely publicized (and it will), some Americans may assume that the apostles are representative of American evangelical belief. Lisa Miller and the other naysayers are not helping to educate the public on the differences between the New Apostolic Reformation and the majority of conservative evangelicals and this is tragic, most of all for evangelicalism."

Are the Far Right Evangelicals Really No Threat?

AUGUST 23, 2011sexuality/gender politics culture science (a)theologies booksPoliticsESSAYAugust 22, 2011Paranoia and the Progressive Press: A Response to WaPo's Religion ColumnistBy PETER MONTGOMERYLETTER (1) WRITE A LETTER EMAIL PRINT SHARE Lou Engle, yelling from the stage

Peter Montgomery

Peter Montgomery, an associate editor for Religion Dispatches, is a Senior Fellow at People For the American Way Foundation where he was on staff for 15 years. Before that he was associate director of grassroots lobbying for Common Cause and wrote for Common Cause Magazine, an award-winning journal featuring investigative reporting about the federal government.

Last week, Lisa Miller, noted religion writer and editor (Newsweek and the Washington Post) filed an op-ed in which she fulminated against "the left" and journalists who have raised concerns about the influence of dominionist thinkers on Republican presidential candidates like Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry.

"Beware False Prophets who Fear Evangelicals," the headline reads. And the opening salvo sums up her attitude: "Here we go again. The Republican primaries are six months away, and already news stories are raising fears on the left about 'crazy Christians.'"

It's true that political reporters can stumble when covering religion, but Miller is making a more sweeping charge: that "leftists" and journalists are unfairly hyping the influence of far-right leaders and painting all evangelicals with the same brush. She doesn't make the case.

Miller links to recent in-depth articles from the Texas Observer, The New Yorker, and The Daily Beast, but doesn't really engage substantively with any of their reporting. Instead, Miller gives a pro forma acknowledgment that the stories "raise real concerns" about candidates' worldviews while portraying the articles broadly as evidence of unfair attacks on evangelicals from a hysterical anti-Christian "left." She calls dominionism "the paranoid mot du jour."

If It Quacks Like a Duck

It may be the "word of the day," as journalists continue to educate themselves and their readers on this particular strand of thinking, but that doesn't mean an investigation of the role of "dominionism" in religious right rhetoric and strategy is a paranoid project. (The urge to investigate, or to interpret, can be too easily dismissed as paranoid. But if not for such "paranoia," what exactly would the role of journalists be?)

So, as background: dominionism refers to a theological tenet at the core of the religious right movement—that Christians are meant to exercise dominion over the earth. As RD readers know, dominionist thought is not a new phenomenon. It may be true, as evangelical leader Mark DeMoss says in Miller's story, that "you would be hard-pressed to find one in 1,000 Christians in America would could even wager a guess at what dominionism is." But it's certainly not true of the leaders of the religious right political movement. Their followers are hearing dominionist teaching whether they know it or not.

In recent years, there has been a very visible embrace by traditional religious right leaders of the rhetoric of "Seven Mountains," a framework created by former Campus Crusade for Christ director Bill Bright. It puts dominionist thinking in clear, user-friendly lay language. The "Seven Mountains" of culture over which the right kind of Christians are meant to have dominion are business, government, media, arts and entertainment, education, the family, and religion. (Some folks rearrange the categories a bit to explicitly include the military.)

The language has been used by Pentecostal leaders of the New Apostolic Reformation, a group that sees itself creating a new church and an army of spiritual warriors who will hasten the return of Christ by taking dominion over the earth. But the Seven Mountains framework has also become a sort of lingua franca among the religious right, forming the basis for Janet Porter's May Day rally on the mall last year as well as the National Day of Prayer and Jim Garlow's Pray and Act campaign. The Family Research Council and prominent religious right figures like Harry Jackson and David Barton all use the language.

In other words, this is not a movement dreamed up by people with no understanding of Christianity who simply want to stir up fear of conservative evangelicals. The increasingly widespread use of "Seven Mountains" rhetoric reflects an effort by a broad swath of conservative evangelical leadership to adopt a shared set of talking points, if you will, to unite theologically disparate elements in common political cause to defeat the Satanic/demonic enemies of faith and freedom: secularists, gays, liberals, and the Obama administration.

C. Peter Wagner is the founder of the New Apostolic Reformation and author of Dominion!: How Kingdom Action Can Change the World. His official bio says "In the 2000s, he began to move strongly in promoting the Dominion Mandate for social transformation, adopting the template of the Seven Mountains or the 7-M Mandate for practical implementation." Wagner was an endorser of Texas Governor Rick Perry's prayer-rally-cum-presidential launch and dozens of members of the New Apostolic Reformation were involved in organizing and speaking at the event.

Shouting "Harlot" in a Crowded Theater?

In an online conversation about her article, Miller criticizes coverage of the movement's excesses, saying "that clips in which ministers shout 'harlot' over and over are likely to inflame more than they are to elucidate," saying that "the left needs to search its soul, as it were, and see that it's guilty of the same kind of demonizing that one sees on the right." That is just one of several false equivalences Miller lays out, and it's an irresponsible assertion.

I agree that it can be uncomfortable to watch Lou Engle screaming from a stage, but it is even more uncomfortable to see him in a leadership role with other religious right leaders and members of Congress, as he was at the Family Research Council's "prayercast" asking God to defeat health care reform. Engle, who declares that "the church's vocation is to rule history with God," introduced Michele Bachmann at that event.

Miller seems unfamiliar with, or uninterested in, the extent to which dominionist and reconstructionist thinking is reflected in the worldview of Michele Bachmann. (Miller says Pat Robertson, who ran for the presidency in 1988, was a dominionist; implying that Bachmann and other contemporaries are self-evidently not). It is not some kind of guilt-by-association stretch to ask what it means that Bachmann describes Christian Reconstructionist John Eidsmoe as a mentor and major influence on her thinking. Neither is it surprising that Rick Perry's political prayer rally would bring greater attention to the extremist nature of the event's sponsors and speakers, which has been extensivelydocumented.

Dominionist thinking within the religious right has real-world consequences that justify concern. In the online discussion of her article, Miller wrote that she didn't see much difference between Jerry Falwell creating Liberty University to train evangelical Christians to be active citizens and a Mormon sending her kid to BYU or a Catholic sending her kid to Georgetown.

But there is a difference. Maybe Miller should read Sarah Posner's recent article for RD on the approach to law that presidential candidate Michele Bachmann studied at the precursor to Robertson's Regent University law school, or her exposé on the approach currently taught students at Liberty's law school. On a recent exam, for example, students were asked about a case -- one which Liberty Counsel lawyers were currently involved in -- regarding a woman had renounced her homosexuality and was refusing to honor the court-ordered custody arrangement for a child she'd had with a former partner. The exam asked whether students, as Christian lawyers, would advise the woman to honor the court orders, or defy "man's law" in order to follow "God's law." Students who said they would advise her to obey court orders got bad grades. Also, in the real world, Liberty Counsel's client fled the country with the child in defiance of multiple court orders and has become a folk hero to many in the religious right.

Liberty's goal is to fill state and federal judgeships and legislatures with people who embrace this view of the law; people like Michele Bachmann.

Miller goes after other straw men. She argues that liberals seem to presume that "a firm belief in Jesus equals a desire to take over the world." Who, exactly? (And what a neat way to deny the voices of progressive, or even radical-left Christians.)

She compares "anxieties among liberals about evangelical Christians" with charges made by some far-right Christians that Obama was the Antichrist seeking world domination. Seriously? Where's the evidence for this leftist anti-Christian jihad, especially from someone who several paragraphs later says she is making a plea for "a certain amount of dispassionate care in the coverage of religion"?

Miller writes, "Certain journalists" (no names here),

use 'dominionist' the way some folks on Fox News use the word 'sharia.' Its strangeness scares people. Without history or context, the word creates a siege mentality in which 'we' need to guard against 'them.'

Really? There is an extraordinary propaganda campaign built around convincing Americans that sharia law and Muslims generally pose a dire threat to the Constitution. But how many members of Congress, state legislatures, presidential candidates, and cable news personalities are ranting about the need to pass laws against dominionist teaching, or for that matter to restrict the ability of Christian evangelicals to build churches or engage in politics? Exactly none.

Miller isn't the only one to make this kind of false equivalence. Jonathan Tobin, writing inCommentary, claims that reporters are portraying Perry and Bachmann as theocratic Manchurian candidates and that those reporters are the moral equivalent of right-wing activists who suggest Obama wants to impose Islam on America. "Rather than worrying about Christians plotting to take over America, we ought to be more concerned with liberal journalists resorting to religious bigotry to smear conservatives."

Is anything more predictable in our current political culture than liberals being charged with religious bigotry?

It's true that Christian conservatives "thrive in a mindset of persecution," as Miller quotes a scholar saying. That's why religious right leaders have for decades been telling evangelicals that liberals and feminists and secular humanists and gays are hostile to religious liberty and are on the verge of criminalizing Christianity and dragging preachers from their pulpits and tossing them into jail. It's ludicrous, though apparently still energizing.

But here's the truth: religious right activists don't need journalists portraying them as "freaky and dangerous" in order to see themselves as "political activists on behalf of God." That's what Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry and religious right leaders tell them they are, over and over again.

Bachmann Is Lying

AlterNet / By Frank Schaeffer -(Cross posted on Alternet)

Are Michele Bachmann's Views About 'Christian Submission' Even More Extreme Than She's Letting On?The people, churches and groups that shaped Bachmann's thinking are far more anti-woman than most Americans fully comprehend.August 15, 2011 | Photo Credit: Agence-France Presse {AFP] LIKE THIS ARTICLE ?Join our mailing list:Sign up to stay up to date on the latest headlines via email. TAKE ACTIONChange.org|Get Widget|Start an Online Petition �

Michele Bachmann told a barefaced lie the other day. She was asked in the Republican candidates' debate with the other Republican contenders, "As president, would you be submissive to your husband?"

Bachmann answered: "Marcus and I will be married for 33 years this September 10th. I'm in love with him. I'm so proud of him. And both he and I — what submission means to us, if that's what your question is, it means respect. I respect my husband. He's a wonderful, godly man, and a great father. And he respects me as his wife."

She either lied, has changed her mind, or she says one thing to a national audiance and another to her hard-right evangelical followers.

Here's what she said in answer to the same question in 2006: "The Lord says be submissive. Wives, you are to be submissive to your husbands."

As Jill Lawrence noted:

Back in October 2006, recounting her life journey to an audience at the Living Word Christian Center, Bachmann talked about "receiving Jesus" at 16, studying hard, meeting her future husband at college, and earning a law degree. "My husband said 'Now you need to go and get a post-doctorate degree in tax law.' Tax law! I hate taxes—why should I go and do something like that?" she told the audience. "But the Lord says be submissive. Wives, you are to be submissive to your husbands." Bachmann said she never had taken a tax course, "never had a desire for it," but "I was going to be faithful to what I felt God was calling me to do through my husband." Later, when the opportunity to run for Congress arose, "my husband said, 'You need to do this,' and I wasn't so sure." She became sure two days later, after praying and fasting with her husband.

The real story here is that Bachmann understands just how extreme her part of the evangelical movement is. She also understands that a certain amount of godly lying will be needed to mask that. She understood that the question she was asked the other day was about a biblical teaching that is misogynistic to the core and advocates total submission of a wife to a husband. It is teaching she's signed on to long ago.

The people, churches and groups that shaped Bachmann's thinking are far more anti-woman than most Americans fully comprehend.

There is a background to this.

The issue of wifely submission is at the heart of the entire anti-feminist agenda that shaped Bachmann. I should know. As I describe in my book Sex, Mom and God, the current crop of religious right leaders -- including Michele Bachamnn -- got their ideas and inspiration from my family's work, books and film series. As the New Yorker correctly noted about my late father and the movies I directed when I was his nepotistic sidekick:

[Bachmann and her husband] experienced a life-altering event: they watched a series of films by the evangelist and theologian Francis Schaeffer called "How Should We Then Live?" Schaeffer, who ran a mission in the Swiss Alps known as L'Abri ("the shelter"), opposed liberal trends in theology. One of the most influential evangelical thinkers of the nineteen-seventies and early eighties, he has been credited with getting a generation of Christians involved in politics. Schaeffer's film series consists of ten episodes tracing the influence of Christianity on Western art and culture, from ancient Rome to Roe v. Wade… He repeatedly reminds viewers of the "inerrancy" of the Bible and the necessity of a Biblical world view. "There is only one real solution, and that's right back where the early church was," Schaeffer tells his audience. "The early church believed that only the Bible was the final authority. What these people really believed and what gave them their whole strength was in the truth of the Bible as the absolute infallible word of God." …Francis Schaeffer instructed his followers and students at L'Abri that the Bible was not just a book but "the total truth." He was a major contributor to the school of thought now known as Dominionism, which relies on Genesis 1:26, where man is urged to "have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth."

Bachmann's Reconstructionist Gurus

Besides my father, Bachmann signed on as a follower of other leading "Reconstructionists" teaching "dominion." And out of that movement came the big family, home-school movement that included a push to restore "traditional" roles of women.

This is a subject I know something about because I was the person who discovered and promoted one of the leading anti-feminist leaders who teaches absolute submission of women to their husbands -- and not in the "We respect each other" Bachmann-style whitewash.

In fact, the whole conservative evangelical movement Bachmann is part of is distinguished by its hatred of the feminist movement top to bottom.

In her hedging about what submission means to her, Bachmann has signaled with a wink and a nod to the Fox News crowd that she'll have to soft-peddle some of her harsher views – at least as she'd theoretically apply them to other ordinary evangelical moms not running for president.

The Reconstructionist Patriarchy Movement

In 2009, over 6,000 women met in Chicago for the "True Woman Conference," to call women to "Complementarianism" -- in other words, to join the Reconstructionist Patriarchy Movement called by another less-forbidding name. The organizers used their conference to launch the "True Woman Manifesto." A clause in the preamble read, "When we respond humbly to male leadership in our homes and churches, we demonstrate a noble submission to [male] authority that reflects Christ's submission to God His Father."

"We are believing God for a movement of reformation and revival in the hearts and homes of Christian women all around this world," the group's leader, evangelical best-selling author/guru and "motivational speaker" Nancy Leigh DeMoss, said in her opening remarks.

Women are "called to encourage godly masculinity" by submitting to men, says the "True Woman Manifesto" those leaders assembled to sign. Women must "submit to their husbands and [male-only] pastors."

According to this view of what I'll call Godly Groveling Women, women must "honor the God-ordained male headship" of their husbands by allowing their men to rule them. Thus, selfish "rights" (as in the Bill of Rights) are "antithetical to Jesus Christ." So The Godly Groveling True Woman believes that she must (as it were) rent her womb to God (and thus to a Reconstructionist revolution in whatever name) in order to embrace "fruitful femininity."

For those who missed the conference, the way to a "Complete Submission Makeover" was made easy. According to the True Woman Web site, "Don't miss out—take the 30-Day True Woman Make-Over to discover and experience God's design and calling for your life! Join Nancy Leigh DeMoss on a journey through Proverbs 31, 1 Timothy 2:9–10, and Titus 2:1–5. For thirty days, we'll send this email directly to your inbox, complete with biblical teaching; helpful links, printable downloads, and recommended resources."

What Nancy Leigh DeMoss was doing with her Complete Submission Makeover was to extend the reach of a fringe fundamentalist movement—the "Quiverfull Movement"—into the evangelical mainstream. (The name of the Quiverfull Movement alludes to Psalm 127:3: "Lo, children are an heritage of the LORD and the fruit of the womb is his reward. As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are children of the youth. Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them: they shall not be ashamed.")

Some Quiverfull leaders have argued against allowing daughters to attend college, as "worldly outsiders" might destroy their faith. Daughters, they say, should stay at home after they graduate from homeschooling. Daughters should practice being a "helpmeet" to their fathers, training to someday "serve" those godly husbands God will send their way. Some Quiverfull women are not allowed to drive. Others make lists of daily tasks to submit to their husbands for an okay. Quiverfull wives are carrying on at least one of Mom's rules, however: They believe it is their duty to be sexually available to their husbands at all times. If a husband strays because of a wife's refusal, it's her fault.

Mary Pride

Mary Pride, the modern-day patriarchy/Quiverfull movement's female founder, was frequently quoted at the True Woman Conference. Pride paved the way for the modern-era "submission movement" decades ago. She did so with my help.

Pride was one of my father's followers and began to write me fan letters in the 1970s after I'd emerged as a successful rabble-rousing antiabortion leader. By then I was doing the rounds, speaking at the biggest and most politicized churches of the day, including Jerry Falwell's Liberty Baptist. I was even pursuing my own evangelical media side project: the business of publishing and promoting far right books.

As a moonlighting literary agent, I represented my parents, as well as Dr. C. Everett Koop, John Whitehead, and several other Religious Right and (emerging) neoconservative authors.

In the early 1980s, Mary Pride sent me a manuscript for her first book,The Way Home, which was to become the bible for the big-family/homeschool movement that Bachmann is part of.

Pride told her life story—how she "moved away" from her "feminist" and "anti-natal" beliefs and embraced Christianity. She explained how she found "true happiness" in the "biblically mandated role of wives and mothers as bearers of children." Pride wrote that "the church's sin which has caused us to become unsavory salt incapable of uplifting the society around us is [the] selfishness [of] refusing to consider children an unmitigated blessing." In The Way Home Pride pitched huge families as the only way for women to be truly happy and the only way to change America and bring it back to its so-called Christian foundation.

Pride was interested in more than women just having babies; she wanted those babies indoctrinated. So Pride called for unleashing a new generation of godly homeschooled children onto the slumbering American mainstream in order to reform it.

Pride's overnight success occurred for several reasons. She was a capable writer and was speaking to Jesus Victims who could be swayed by "the Bible says" arguments. Pride's success was also yet more evidence of the backlash against Roe v. Wade.

Pride cashed in on the Reconstructionists' semiunderground network of homeschool groups founded by Rushdoony that Michele Bachmann has been part of.

I was in a good position to launch not only Pride's book but also any project I wanted to get behind. It was in this capacity as a brash young wheeler-dealer, literary agent/author/filmmaker to the Religious Right, and evangelical/pro-life link to the emerging neoconservative movement that I launched Mary Pride. And she, in turn, started a large movement that—like so much else that has come from the Reconstructionist-inspired Religious Right since the 1970s—flew under the radar of the mainstream media.

And if you want to know who Michele Bachmann's bedrock supporters are you could overlap everyone in America who is raising their children according to Mary Pride and Bachmann's donor list.

Many Reconstructionist-influenced pastors began using Pride's materials almost as soon as they were published because (at last) here was a woman telling other women to submit to men. And as luck would have it, Pride and her husband were computer experts back when few people were. So Quiverfull adherents were some of the first Internet users to grasp the potential of home computers. Homeschool groups began to network, and Pride became the leader of the evangelical homeschool movement, which she, only second to John Rushdoony, created in its anti-American incarnation.

Anti-American Bachmann and Company

When I say "anti-American," I mean anti-American as America actually is: multicultural, pluralistic, gay embracing, multiethnic, and based on a secular Constitution and the secular rule of law. Mary Pride and company would have claimed to be patriotic, but their loyalty was to a "Christian America." They seemed to have nothing but contempt for America as it actually was.

The Christian homeschool movement drove the evangelical school movement to the ever-harsher world-rejecting far right. This happened because evangelical homeschoolers like Bachmann have been demanding ever-greater levels of "separation" from the Evil Secular World.

It wasn't enough just to reject the public schools. How could the Christian parent be sure that even the evangelical schools were sufficiently pure? And so the Christian schools radicalized in order to not appear to be "compromising" with the world in the eyes of increasingly frightened and angry Jesus Victim parents.

The irony was that Pride preached a dogmatic, stay-at-home, follow-your-man philosophy for other women while turning her lucrative homeschooling empire into a one-woman industry. So Pride may be added to the list of powerful women -- like Michele Bachmann -- who just love those "traditional roles" for other women. And Pride's successor in the patriarchy movement, Nancy Leigh DeMoss, was also one of those do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do best-selling career women doing high-paid speaking gigs while encouraging other women to stay home and submit to their men.

Nancy Leigh DeMoss happened to be the daughter of a former friend of my mother's, Nancy DeMoss, who was instrumental in my parents' rise to evangelical superstardom. Nancy DeMoss was also pivotal in the role of facilitator and financier when it came to seamlessly merging Reconstructionist ideology with the "respectable" mainstream evangelical community. I worked closely with Nancy on several projects. She generously supported my various Schaeffer-related antiabortion movies, books, and seminar tours. She also took "our" message much further on her own by underwriting a massive multi-million-dollar well-produced antiabortion TV and print media ad campaign inspired by our work.

Soon after the death of her wealthy husband, Arthur DeMoss, Nancy DeMoss became my mother's friend and an ardent Schaeffer follower. She took over her late husband's foundation as CEO, and besides underwriting several Schaeffer projects, she contributed millions to Republican and other far right causes (including $70,000 to start Newt Gingrich's political action committee, GOPAC). She also helped the Plymouth Rock Foundation, a Reconstructionist-aligned group.

The De Moss machine will make Michele Bachmann's win possible, if she does win the nomination. This machinery has been crafted under the media radar for almost 40 years now.

Bachamnn Is an Extremist Anti-Feminist

This is the movement Bachmann signed on to when she fell for the hard evangelical anti-feminist line. The other people Bachmann lists as her theological mentors are all even harder line anti-feminist activists than was my father.

As the New Yorker noted, among the professors were Herbert W. Titus, a vice-presidential candidate of the far-right U.S. Taxpayers Party (now called the Constitution Party), and John Whitehead, who started the Rutherford Institute, a conservative legal-advocacy group. Titus was a longtime student of my father's. And Dad was a founding board member of Whitehead's "Christian civil liberties" Rutherford Institute, as I was.

The law review published essays by my father and Rousas John Rushdoony, the leading Reconstructionist/ prominent Dominionist who has called for a pure Christian theocracy in which Old Testament law—execution for adulterers and homosexuals, for example—would be instituted.

At Oral Roberts, Bachmann worked for a professor named John Eidsmoe, who got her interested in the burgeoning homeschool movement. She helped him build a database of state homeschooling statutes, assisting his crusade to reverse laws that prevented parents from homeschooling their children. After that, Bachmann worked as Eidsmoe's research assistant on his book "Christianity and the Constitution," published in 1987.

The Real Bachmann on Women

As we've seen, Michele Bachmann told an audience in 2006 that she followed her husband's education path because, "The Lord says be submissive. Wives, you are to be submissive to your husbands." Her mentor, John Eidsmoe, makes a similar case throughout God & Caesar, his book on how Christians should engage in politics and government.

For Eidsmoe, the role of a woman is chiefly second class to her husband: "God's Word gives women respect and respectability which they had never enjoyed in any other culture, and we must do what we can to preserve biblical standards. But it establishes the man as the head of the house" (p. 125). He writes:

Humans cannot function without leadership, at least not when they must live and work together. And the basic unit of authority in human society is the family. The husband is the head of the wife (1 Corinthians 11:3; Ephesians 5:23), and children are to obey their parents (Exodus 20:12; Ephesians 6:1; Colossians 3:2).

Husbands are to instruct their wives in things of the Lord (1 Corinthians 14:35), and parents are to instruct their children (ps. 115-116).

He goes on to condemn the rise of feminism and criticize feminist scholars, saying they "violate the normal order" God put in place:

Many had planned all their lives to become housewives and mothers, believing such a calling would bring meaning and fulfillment to their lives. Now they are told by the feminists that it is 'demeaning' and 'unfulfilling' to be a housewife, and they don't know what to believe. They are frustrated as housewives and feel guilty for not being 'more,' but don't feel any inclination for anything else. And the husband, who planned all this life to be a traditional husband and father and thought he was marrying a traditional wife, feels threatened, insecure, and resentful about these changes in his wife. If the wife goes to work, he may resent sharing housework; that wasn't what he bargained for when he entered the marriage (p. 124).

Right, Ms. President?

Frank Schaeffer is a writer. His new book is Sex, Mom and God.