[video, abover: Senator Tom Coburn calls upon Americans to pray to God to prevent a US Democratic Party Senator from making the health care vote]
It is striking to see a leading GOP senator walk up to the edge (and some would say over the edge) of rhetorical practices that were used in the 1990's to incite a wave of domestic terrorism. Senator Coburn's call to imprecacory prayer was not the first case in which leading Republicans have associated with rhetoric or leaders of an American religious movement that demonizing its opponents and calls for violence to advance its agenda.
As I've observed in a recent story, Third Nationally-Recognized Pastor Declares Anti-Obama Death-Prayer, right wing ringleaders of imprecatory prayer have become emboldened to the point they are targeting the sitting US president. [for multiple examples of "imprecatory prayer" in action, see this list of stories on the subject on the website which I co-founded with Frederick Clarkson in 2005, Talk To Action]
How does imprecatory prayer relate to real, on-the-ground violence ? Here's how it works:
As Frederick Clarkson observes in Inflammatory Rhetoric as the Context of Assassination,
inflammatory antiabortion rhetoric that contributes to the threat and climate of violence is not limited to professional sound bite provocateurs like Randall Terry. Such rhetoric and the underlying ideology it expresses is so ingrained in the culture of the antiabortion movement, that someone like Rick Warren busily packaging himself as a moderate thinks nothing of calling abortion a Holocaust and prochoice pols as holocaust deniers. And hardly a media ripple results.
Enter Lou Engle
In the early 1980's, KKK and Aryan Nations strategist Louis Beam helped popularize a tactic known as "leaderless resistance" in which high profile propagandists would incite terrorist acts carried out by autonomous individuals and cell groups. During the 1990's leaders of the Army of God, wielding militant anti-abortion rhetoric, helped inspire terrorist bombings of abortion clinics and the assassination of doctors who provided abortions. Now, a decade later, one can hear such incitement coming from the stage at Lou Engle's TheCall events. As California journalist Karen Ocamb writes,
members of the Army of God were out in force at Lou Engle’s TheCall antigay Prop 8 rally in San Diego, along with Jim Garlow and James Dobson, three of the guests on Perkin’s webcast about abortion and healthcare...
Lou Engle of TheCall was the prayer leader for the Family Research Council's December 16, 2009 "Prayercast to stop health care reform" which had the participation of two GOP senators and two Republican house representatives.
Who is Lou Engle ?
As I wrote in Anti-Gay Marriage Pro-Prop 8 Leader Called For Antiabortion Martyrs
On Sunday May 31, 2009 Kansas City late-term abortion doctor George Tiller was gunned down in the lobby of his church allegedly by a man, Scott Roeder, who had ties to the racist wing of the militia movement. The next morning CBS's Jeff Glor reported, "We did speak with the accused shooters' ex-wife yesterday. She said she was not surprised this happened and that she believed Roeder wanted to be a martyr for the cause." The antiabortion, pro-Christian martyrdom of TheCall founder Lou Engle, whose personal website still features a post attacking Tiller, has up until now received little scrutiny.
At Lou Engle's November 1, 2008 pro-Proposition 8 anti-gay marriage TheCall San Diego event Engle and his disciples called for acts of Christian martyrdom against legalized abortion... Lou Engle's inflammatory TheCall antiabortion rhetoric conforms with Beam's tactic; Engle merely incites.
Lou Engle appeared in the Heidi Ewing / Rachel Grady runaway hit documentary Jesus Camp. The Official documentary website states that at Becky Fischer's "Jesus Camp" summer camp, "kids are taught to become dedicated soldiers in God's army and are schooled in how to take America back for Christ." In the film, Fischer states her desire to indoctrinate the children at her camp so that they have the same level of dedication as Hamas suicide bombers. When Fischer's "Jesus Camp" children become young adults, they will gravitate toward Lou Engle's slickly marketed TheCall events, which draw between 20 and 80 thousand people per event and are held in the US and also internationally, in Kansas, San Diego, and Washington DC but also in Australia, Germany, the Philippines, Norway, England, Jerusalem and Brazil
In my story Will Lou Engle take his mega-antigay TheCall to Uganda? I write,
MSNBC's Rachel Maddow introduced religious right-wing evangelical pastor Lou Engle to the political nation last Wednesday, cutting into the Family Research Council's live "Prayercast." She described Engle as:
"the pastor calling for a second American civil war, for American Christians to be martyred against abortion - headlining tonight's anti-health care reform event, with two serving US Republican senators and two serving Republican members of Congress."
Lou Engle is the founder of TheCall, organizer of the mega antigay marriage event held last year at Qualcomm Stadium in San Diego to urge passage of Proposition 8 in California....
The most dangerous terrorist, according to Lou Engle, is God. It's a point that might warm Osama Bin Laden's heart. In a document titled "Doctrine of the Shedding of Innocent Blood," [PDF of document], Engle writes,
"Where there is shedding of innocent blood, there is no atonement for the land. There is a blood pollution problem on America’s soil. The most "dangerous terrorist" is not Islam but God. One of God’s names is the avenger of blood. Have you worshipped [sic] that God yet."
In his book Sons To Glory, Paul Jablonoskwi, who is sympathetic to Engle's cause, described a 2002 Lou Engle/TheCall event in Kansas City:
"What I witnessed in Bartle Hall on December 31st 2002 was the antithesis of radical Islam. Instead of people wanting to blow themselves up to kill others, I saw young adults who were so radically in love with Jesus that they were willing to become martyrs for the sake of saving other people's lives. Someone from the stage asked, 'who here feels like they are called to die as a martyr for the sake of the gospel of Jesus Christ?' Many hands went up throughout the stadium."
[image, right: Lou Engle anoints Mike Huckabee]
Last summer, Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee traveled to a Virginia Beach megachurch where an evangelist unknown to most of secular, mainstream America anointed and blessed the two GOP presidential hopefuls.
Only days before Huckabee and Gingrich received Lou Engle's endorsement at Rock Church, on Sunday, May 31, 2009, Dr. George Tiller, one of the few medical professionals who would perform late term abortions, was gunned down in the lobby of his Wichita, Kansas church. The next morning CBS's Jeff Glor reported:
"We did speak with the accused shooters' ex-wife yesterday. She said she was not surprised this happened and that she believed Roeder wanted to be a martyr for the cause."
Lou Engle's personal website and his organization websites still feature extreme rhetorical attacks [1, 2] posted prior to George Tiller's assassination.
In one of those posts, Engle wrote:
When at an abortion clinic in Miami, a living-breathing baby is born during an abortion procedure and the baby is thrown away – alive into a plastic bag, the nation is appalled and the doctor is charged with two felonies and faces prison time.
If that very same abortion had not been botched, the doctor would have gone home in peace having put to death a viable human being before it was born. What white-washed insanity!
Today, the country faces another instance of insanity as President Obama has nominated Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius to the highest healthcare post in America, the Secretary of Health & Human Services.
As governor of Kansas, MS. Sebelius has consistently vetoed restrictions against late-term and partial birth abortions that are performed on babies from 6th-9th months. She has also protected one of the most prolific abortion doctors in America, Dr. George Tiller from Wichita. His renowned 30-year practice has overseen the death of nearly 60,000 babies....
Lou Engle's fevered rallies often betray a disturbing militancy. During Engle's November 1, 2008 Qualcomm Stadium TheCall event, which served as the capstone event to a massive anti-gay marriage push spearheaded by Engle's activists in California during summer and fall 2008, one of Engle's young acolytes called out to thousands filling the stadium,
"So God right now I ask, father, we celebrate the martyrs right now, God, and we ask, God, for a great martyr movement to go out of Qualcomm. I believe God is going to mark many of us with a spirit of martyrdom. And that is a glorious thing."
Lou Engle followed up with, "Even under martyrdom, God, give me the grace - fasting twelve hours, with prayer: these are seeds are martyrdom. Days are coming when we're going to have to risk our lives to stand for truth in this society. Say, lift your voices and say, 'God, mark me now! Mark me - as a man or women of the cross and of Jesus Christ.' Say, 'mark me!'
[below: Lou Engle's November 1, 2008 TheCall event, featuring calls for acts of Christian martyrdom to stop gay marriage and legal abortion]
Lou Engle operates outside of the spheres of the militia movement and traditional antiabortion movement, which journalist Frederick Clarkson described in a Southern Poverty Law Center special report, from 1998, as in the process of merging.
Through TheCall, and the studied "rainbow" New Apostolic movement embrace of most ethnic and societal groups except Jews, gays, and non-Apostolic Christians, Lou Engle is broadening the appeal of a core, non-negotiable raft of fundamentalist bigotries. This broad-tent approach to Christian supremacy is often mistaken as moderate or even progressive.
But Lou Engle is quietly mainstreaming language that was, during the 1990's and up through 2001, to be found mainly coming from the militant wing of the antiabortion movement associated with the antiabortion terrorist movement known as the Army Of God. Engle's rhetoric closely tracks that of Army of God members who, like Engle, have declared that a second American civil war will be necessary to atone for a blood-debt curse they claim God has placed on America because of legalized abortion.
[below: a YouTube video, accusing pro-Prop 8 churches of antiabortion violence, shows footage from 2001 HBO documentary about the Army of God]
Less than a year and a half ago Lou Engle, at a December 31, 2007 TheCall event held in Kansas City, announced his new doctrine, "The Doctrine of The Shedding of Innocent Blood",
"Surely blood requires blood in God's judgment. God so highly values humanity that He protects it with His severe judgment. A day of reckoning is set if man does not obey Him...
Where there is shedding of innocent blood, there is no atonement for the land. There is a blood pollution problem on America's soil. The most "dangerous terrorist" is not Islam, but God. One of God's names is "the Avenger of Blood." Have you worshipped [sic] that God yet?"