I am updating and reprising this post because the issue of John McCain's professed Christian nationalism is a real question that goes to his core beliefs as well as his ongoing relationship with the religious right.

In an interview with BeliefNet, last year, John McCain came out as a Christian nationalist. This is a disturbing development from a man who has been profoundly critical of the religious right in the past, but has courted movement leaders, and received the endorsement of some (and was forced to renounce some too) while seeking the GOP nomination for president over the past year.

In this interview, he comes out more strongly as a Christian nationalist and critic of separation of church and state than any nominee for either party in modern American history.

The notion that America once was, and should be once again, a Christian Nation, is one of the  definitive characteristics of the ideology of the religious right.

That's the rhetorical question Welton Gaddy who heads the Interfaith Alliance posed in an e-blast today.  He makes a good point.

Sunday night's Compassion Forum on CNN provided an opportunity to get some relevant answers about the respective stances of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama on the role of religion in government. Instead, the moderators asked some clearly inappropriate questions about the candidates' religious beliefs, and failed to ask others that would have given the voting public insight into the candidates' positions on these important issues.

 Here is the money quote:

If a potential employer asked you questions about your religious beliefs in a job interview, it wouldn't only be offensive, it would be illegal. The media needs to stop imposing a de facto religious test on the candidates.

The Compassion Forum was essentially a public interview for the job of President of the United States. And if it had been an interview for any other job in America, a good number of the questions asked would have been downright illegal.

John McCain -- who last year declared that America was founded as a Christian nation, and refused to retract his claim even after being called on it by the Anti-Defamation League -- will no doubt be thrilled to hear the news that the Alabama House of Representatives agrees with him.  

The blog Jed Report has made a You Tube video from an interview conducted by Dan Gilgoff at Beliefnet last year. It is a compelling two and a half minute bit of vid, but Jed Report does not identify the source. The link to the original is below in this revised and updated post from a few months ago, which also provides a fuller context.

In an interview with BeliefNet, last year, John McCain came out as a Christian nationalist.  This is a disturbing development from a man who has been profoundly critical of the religious right in the past (as has at least one top advisor), but has courted movement leaders, and received the endorsement of some while seeking the GOP nomination for president over the past year.

In this interview, he comes out more strongly as a Christian nationalist* and critic of separation of church and state than any nominee for either party in modern American history.

We hear over and over the meme of "Huckabee is just a nice, folksy guy" and that he's fairly tolerable as evangelicals go.

How true is that impression?

When the religious right made religious supremacism and Christian nationalism articles of political faith -- our constitutional doctrines (and the broader culture) supportive of religious pluralism became subject of increasingly aggressive attacks, and society has become deeply divided.  Inevitably in such an environment, faith has become a political football, and the way that has played out reflects deeper trends. We will be surfacing and trying to understand and come to grips with these deeper trends for awhile.

Having followed David Horowitz & Company throughout Islamofascism Wareness Week, and--with the generous assistance of Daily KOS contributors--having endeavored to undermine its premises with reason and fact, I would now like to offer some summary observations about how IFAW went--and didn't, and what it was all really about--predictably.

Thanks again to all those who helped me complie a list of feminist scholars. Speaking truth to power--my aim is to do this worthy goal at least a moment's worth of justice.

polling data show Christian nationalist beliefs rising among American public

"Neither party should be defined by pandering to the outer reaches of American politics and the agents of intolerance, whether they be Louis Farrakhan or [Rev.] Al Sharpton on the left or Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell on the right." - US Senator John McCain, during the 2000 GOP primary race

During the 2000 election, John McCain Jr. lambasted Jerry Falwell and other leaders of the American Christian right as "agents of intolerance".

By 2007, McCain was scurrying to make amends, adopt the Christian right's positions  and pandering to those very leaders, whose positions and rhetoric had changed little or not at all. But, McCain's positions had, and by the time of his push to gain the 2008 GOP presidential nomination, McCain had gone over the edge and was playing footsie with fundamentalist dispensationalist lobbyists for the Apocalypse.

image, right: leading US politicians clap for falsified "Christian nation" history at the 2007 "National Prayer Breakfast" ? Barack Obama, Steny Hoyer, and other leading Democrats were there too, and you can bet they were applauding as well. The Democrats can't recognize the Christian right's fake history, that propells Christian nationalism, even when that fake history is staring them, literally, in the face.

In this post I document the citation, in the US Senate, Congress, and at the "National Prayer Breakfast" and with numerous Democrats in attendance,  of falsified "founding father" quotes, held up as evidence by those who claim the US was founded as a "Christian Nation".

US history is being overwritten by a flood of falsified Christian nationalist propaganda asserting, with falsified "founding father" quotes and other types of fabrication, that the founding fathers intended the US to be a Christian, "Biblical nation".

Do you want to live in a "Biblical nation", in which the separation of church and state has been, through popular opinion, abolished ? That's where we're currently headed.

As I mentioned the other day (for those of you who missed it), over at Talk to Action we avoid writing too hard on the news cycle (although we sometimes break stories ourselves) and tend to take longer views on things. But we also miss a lot of stuff, so in the interests of filling the gap a bit, I decided to do  some news & blog round-ups. Here is another one.

[Speaking of news, don't miss Jonathan Hutson's Talk to Action post: Pentagon Adopts Missionary Position on Homoerotic Art]

When prospective GOP presidential candidate Fred Thompson auditioned at a meeting of the secretive, far right Council for National Policy, he didn't have to wonder which buttons to push. The CNP has, since 1981, been a key conservative movement leadership network, dominated by the religious right. As a man who entered electoral politics as moderate, he has been at some pains to establish his conservative bona fides. Just today, as a matter of fact, Richard Viguerie, one of the founders of the CNP issued a press release denouncing Thompson, warning:

...Thompson may be a lot like Bush. Remember when Bush was running, a lot of good people thought he was a conservative.

Boy, were they taken in!

We’ve got to make sure we don’t go down that road again--not with Thompson or anyone else.

When prospective GOP presidential candidate Fred Thompson auditioned at a recent meeting of the secretive, far right Council for National Policy, he probably did not have to wonder which buttons to push.  The CNP has, since 1981, been a key conservative movement leadership network, dominated by the religious right.  As a man who entered electoral politics as moderate, has been at some pains to establish his conservatie bona fides. And these days if you want to show the religious right that you are one of them, one of the things you do is to let them know you share their Christian nationalism. Thompson, whose unofficial campaign is on a fast track, was quick to make a transcript of his remarks available to The National Review Online.  

There is a Christian nationalist extravaganza going on this weekend in Virginia Beach, Virginia. It's a radical effort to capture American history in a way in which Christian rightists cast themselves as the protagonists of America's story. And people like you and me are but interlopers in God's grand scheme.  

The occasion is the 400th anniversary of Capt. John Smith's landing at Jamestown. While the state of Virginia is hosting its own party, televangelist Pat Robertson will lead an alternative for those who, like its stage manager John Blanchard, say:  "We want to reaffirm our Christian roots - we are a Christian country."

 

From Krugman(This is behind a New York Times subscription, here is the meat of it):

In 1981, Gary North, a leader of the Christian Reconstructionist movement — the openly theocratic wing of the Christian right — suggested that the movement could achieve power by stealth. “Christians must begin to organize politically within the present party structure,” he wrote, “and they must begin to infiltrate the existing institutional order.”

The Public Eye magazine has just posted my most recent article online.  I am posting a few excertps below (and more than the usual excerpts, since umm, its my article) but you will have to click over to The Public Eye to read the whole thing.

I take the view that it is important that we have a sufficient understanding of our own history, and an ability to articulate it (and its not as hard as it sounds, once you have a well-framed narrative -- four suggested books in the article) so that we can recapture the narrative of American history from the Christian nationalists whose views are seeping into public life and play a surprising role in electoral politics.

I address these points in the excerpts below, but there is much more in the whole article.

Yesterday, the Institute for Progressive Christianity issued a press release challenging several of James Dobson's crackpot assertions made during a recent hour-long interview on Larry King Live on CNN.  The effort is already getting some traction. The conservative Cybercast News Service, picking up on the release notes:

The Institute for Progressive Christianity -- a new group -- accused Dobson of making "highly inaccurate statements" and "crackpot assertions" during his conversation with Larry King.

In a lengthy news release on Wednesday, the IPC rebutted Dobson's comments one by one. But it's not so much what the liberal Christians are saying -- it's that they're saying it at all.

Indeed.  Progressive Christians are running back onto the playing field of American public life. They are regaining their voices, and are directly addressing the excesses of the religious right.

Blog posts on the rightwing groups opposing the ballot initiative to repeal South Dakota's notorious ban on abortion are the featured posts in this week's round-up.

A few days ago, I outlined the first two parts of author Russ Bellant's profile on Michigan GOP gubernatorial candidate, Dick DeVos. In them we learned about DeVos' long history of involvement with key elements of the  far political and Religious Right. Bellant focuses on DeVos involvement in the Council for National Policy, a national strategy group of righist leaders; and on what the philanthropic priorities of the Dick and Betsy DeVos Foundation tell us about his ideology and what he might do as governor.

Bellant also sounds the alarm that DeVos might be planning a run for president.