Youth With a Mission, the Christian Right organization said to have helped fund "Path to 9/11," has long been interested in terrorism. In the past, they've supported it.
Sara Diamond, an established and respected Christian Right researcher, documented in her 1989 book "Spiritual Warfare: The Politics of the Christian Right" that YWAM was a key player in the Reagan administration's campaign to organize Christian Right support for a murderous regime in Guatemala...
Some of you may recall a minor recent scandal when Illinois Republican Congressman Jerry Weller, deeply involved with U.S. relations with Latin America, married the daugher of Efrain Rios Montt, the former and would-be future dictator of Guatemala.
a Kos diary about it.) Rios Montt is generally credited with the murder of some
70,000 Mayan peasants, but all through the killing he maintained a love affair with the American Christian Right, which was delighted by the fact that he's an evangelical Protestant in a deeply Catholic country, converted in 1976 by American self-declared "Jesus Freaks," fundamentalist hippies.
Here's where YWAM comes in:
Rios Montt's ascension to power [by coup in 1982] was celebrated by thge U.S. Christian Right as a sign of divine intervention in Central America.... In May, 1982, [Pat] Robertson told the New York Times that his Christian Broadcasting Network would send missionaries and more than a billion dollars in aid to help Rios Montt rule the country. While Robertson's offer never came to fruition, it enabled Rios Montt to convince the U.S. Congress that he would not seek massive sums of U.S. aid. Instead, he would rely on "private aid from U.S. evangelicals.
Toward that end, Rios Montt's aide... came to the United States for a meeting with... [Reagan consigliore] Edwin Meese, Interior Secretary James Watt... and Christian Right leaders Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and Loren Cunningham (head of Youth With a Mission).
Cunningham, of course, is the father of David Cunningham, director of Path to 9/11. Shortly after the senior Cunningham's meeting with Rios Montt's man, a larger group of Christian Right leaders met with the State Department to discuss the organization of private fundamentalist aid for Rios Montt's murderous regime. An Americas Watch human rights report described the approach taken by Rios Montt's Christian soldiers:
The army does not waste its bullets on women and children. We were repeatedly told of women being raped before being killed, and of children being picked up by the feet and having their heads smashed against walls...
Perhaps such behavior resonated with Cunningham and other Christian Right supporters of Rios Montt; after all, they take Psalm 137 literally:
O Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction,
happy is he who repays you
for what you have done to us-
he who seizes your infants
and dashes them against the rocks.
As one Guatemalan evangelical supporter explained to a group of curious North Americans,
The army doesn't massacre the Indians. It massacres demons and the Indians are demon possessed; they are communists.
Apparently, that kind of behavior struck YWAM's Loren Cunningham as too soft. In 1988, reports Diamond, he began studying the work of Gary North, the most notorious of "Reconstuctionist" (aka "Dominionist") theologians, "with the intent of incorporating 'dominion' or 'kingdom' theology into the ideological training given to YWAM missionaries. YWAM sees its role as an on-the-ground combat force against liberation theology."
Gary North's main passion is "biblical capitalism" but he also stands at the outer limits of Christian Right thinking with regard to issues such as homosexuality and unmarried sex: North recommends the death penalty. But that's not all: he suggests stoning, as biblical, economical, and as a means of community building.
North would surely approve of YWAM's new media initiative, now bearing fruit in The Path to 9/11: As Michelle Goldberg reports in her recent book "Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism," North has written
...of the need of activists to penetrate secular institutions to 'smooth the transition to Christian political leadership.... Christians must begin to organize politically within the present party structure, and they must begin to infiltrate the existing order.'
I can personally testify to the existence of this intention. In 2002, I spent nearly a month living with a group of young men in Arlington, Virginia, being trained for Christian conservative leadership by a network of politicians and businessmen. Once a week, we had some notable guest speaker. One of them was Cal Thomas, the syndicated columnist and longtime Christian Right activist. Cal's message: "Infiltrate." Learn to speak the language of secularism. Get yourself well-placed in the secular media establishment (Cal is one of the most popular syndicated columnists in the country). Mute your message when needed. Keep your powder dry. Most importantly, build the story slowly -- that is, don't just go pounding your Bible at the first opportunity, but use the language of secularism to develop it piece by piece until it seems "natural." Cal opened and closed his talk -- which, I should add, was attended not just by the dozen men I trained with but by about three dozen young congressional aides -- with that word: "Infiltrate."
That's what YWAM is trying to do with The Path to 9/11. I think it's worth stressing that this is not a conspiracy, nor is it illegal. It's what the old communist party used to call "cultural work." It's what smart movements do: They try to tell a persuasive story, and they try to broadcast it as widely as possible. YWAM's old connections to Central American terrorism (they're tied to the Contras, too), are not part of the story they want to tell anymore. We should not let them forget.
But more importantly, maybe progressives need to think more about the historical narration of 9/11. Not exposes like "Fahrenheit 9/11" or the conspiracy theories that abound, but actual narration of the events that day, contextualized by a realistic understanding of the events that led to them. This shouldn't be a story that simply reverses "Path to 9/11" by blaming Bush instead of Clinton -- obviously, 9/11 has roots deeper than the first 8 months of the Bush administration. I don't know how the story should be told, but I know it must be -- or else we'll cede history to the providential imagination of American fundamentalism.