The past few days have seen a remarkable level of spin--actually, downright waffling--from John McCain regarding his relationship with two neopentecostal dominionist pastors and actually soliciting his dominionist "bona fides" from them.
Not two weeks ago, John McCain was heralding both John Hagee and Rod Parsley as "spiritual advisors"; this is quite the change from today, where he has rejected John Hagee's endorsement as well as Rod Parsley's (in what is a beautiful example of 20 Mule Team DKos (and Talk to Action) action).
Parsley, whilst less publicised than Hagee, wasn't exactly an improvement--and today we go into just why McCain likely dropped Parsley like a hot potato.
McCain's second "Joel's Army" connection
John Hagee was not the only one of McCain's "spiritual advisors" to be a Joel's Army neopente megachurch leader.
Rod Parsley--head of World Harvest Church in Columbus, OH--is not only a major "kingmaker" in what is apparently the third generation of modern dominionist movements, but is by no means an improvement on Hagee.
As strange as it may sound to anyone who read about the coercive, chunder-inducing (occasionally literally chunder-inducing) statements by Hagee and crew, Parsley may actually be the more dangerous of the two.
Parsley's church--one of the largest megachurches in the US with a claimed membership of 12,000 people--is, much like Hagee's church and New Life Church in Colorado Springs, an "Assemblies daughter" with a close enough relationship it can be argued that these "Assemblies daughters" are still budding from their "parent". And--just like all the other churches mentioned--there's quite the heavy emphasis on "name it and claim it", "deliverance ministry", cell-churches, the whole nine yards. The church is huge on televangelism, having quite the broadcast network; the church even at one point had an "affinity" Mastercard that automatically deposited money to the church, and a direct-deposit account which automatically deducts tithes as well.
Of particular note, Rod Parsley is also apparently very good friends with fellow "Joel's Army" promoter John Hagee--Parsley is a leader in Hagee's "Christians United for Israel", itself a proven "Joel's Army" group who would like to see the scenario fictionalised in the "Left Behind" novels played out in Real Life.
Like most Joel's Army churches, there's a love of military imagery. Chris Hedges' "American Fascists", a recent work on the militarisation of the dominionist movement, has noted the following quote from one of Parsley's sermons:
The secular media never likes it when I say this, so let me say it twice. Man your battle stations! Ready your weapons! They say this rhetoric is so inciting. I came to incite a riot. ... Man your battle stations. Ready your weapons. Lock and load--for the thirty, forty liberal pastors who filed against our ministry with the Internal Revenue Service. ... Let the struggle begin. Let it begin in your heart today with a shout unto him who has called us to war--not only that, he has empowered you and I to win.
(We'll be getting into that little incident with the 40 pastors--which comprised most of the mainstream Christian and Jewish congregations in Columbus--in a bit.)
Mother Jones magazine was one of the first groups (outside of places like Talk to Action and Theocracy Watch) to reveal Parsley's embracement of God Warrior theology. One of the more decidedly bizarre claims by Parsley is that Christopher Columbus (you know, the Italian guy hired to find Indonesia by the Spanish who found Cuba and Puerto Rico instead) was apparently sailing in an attempt at a crusade against the Moslem population of the Malay peninsula--oh, and that the 11 September terror attacks were God's kindly way of saying "launch a crusade":
In a chapter titled "Islam: The Deception of Allah," Parsley warns there is a "war between Islam and Christian civilization." He continues:
I cannot tell you how important it is that we understand the true nature of Islam, that we see it for what it really is. In fact, I will tell you this: I do not believe our country can truly fulfill its divine purpose until we understand our historical conflict with Islam. I know that this statement sounds extreme, but I do not shrink from its implications. The fact is that America was founded, in part, with the intention of seeing this false religion destroyed, and I believe September 11, 2001, was a generational call to arms that we can no longer ignore.
Parsley is not shy about his desire to obliterate Islam. In Silent No More, he notes—approvingly—that Christopher Columbus shared the same goal:
It was to defeat Islam, among other dreams, that Christopher Columbus sailed to the New World in 1492...Columbus dreamed of defeating the armies of Islam with the armies of Europe made mighty by the wealth of the New World. It was this dream that, in part, began America." He urges his readers to realize that a confrontation between Christianity and Islam is unavoidable: "We find now we have no choice. The time has come." And he has bad news: "We may already be losing the battle. As I scan the world, I find that Islam is responsible for more pain, more bloodshed, and more devastation than nearly any other force on earth at this moment.
(Never mind that, oh, the fact Columbus thought he was sailing to Indonesia and China. Never mind the fact that if they really wanted to "kick Moslem arse" there had just been a reconquista and the country of Spain was now working on forcing Jewish people to convert or run for their lives, having thoroughly run out of Moors to run through.)
Oh, and in case you missed that above--Parsley literally claims that the 11 September attacks happened as an explicit call from God to commit genocide.
In a stand shared by (among others) Fred "God Hates Fags" Phelps, Parsley has accused Sweden of being anti-Christian due to not giving neopentecostal dominionists an out in their hate-crimes laws covering LGBT people (notably Ake Green, whose case ended up being acquitted on appeal despite a sermon which literally compared LGBT people to cancerous tumours).
There's actually a reason why Parsley may be a bit concerned on that. As it is, Parsley--along with many, many other pastors of Assemblies and "Assemblies daughter" churches--uses the thoroughly debunked claims of Paul Cameron to claim that LGBT people are inherently diseased and criminal. Cameron's group, the bogus "Family Research Institute", is considered a hate group by Southern Poverty Law Center--in part because Cameron has literally advocated rounding up LGBT people in concentration camps and ultimately hanged:
In 1987, Cameron moved to Washington, D.C., and changed the name of his organization to the Family Research Institute. Later that year, his institute set up a booth in the exhibit hall at the Third International Conference on AIDS featuring banners that read, "Stop the pipeline: Cut homosexual travel" and "Problem: A worldwide homosexual network. Solution: Destroy the homosexual infrastructure. Punish homosexual acts."
The booth was swarmed with angry AIDS victims and gay rights activists, some of whom repeatedly sneezed on him before being arrested and dragged from the hall. An Associated Press journalist recorded a confrontation between Cameron and a reporter for the Gay Cable News Network.
"All we're saying is, screen and quarantine until we come up with a cure," Cameron said. "Rights have run amok in our society, particularly sexual ones. Homosexuals were hung 300 years ago in our society."
"Is that what you're advocating today, that gay people be hung?" the gay journalist replied.
Cameron continued, "Homosexuals were castrated 200 years ago."
"So things are getting better then?"
"Homosexuals were imprisoned 100 years ago."
"What sort of concentration camps do you have in mind, Dr. Cameron?"
It would also appear that Parsley's church has connections with a particularly disturbing Assemblies frontgroup. The group "Youth With A Mission"--consistently regarded by exit counselors as one of the more abusive "Bible-based" groups formally documented, and definitively linked to what may have been the final mental breakdown that led to Matthew Murray's murder-suicide--actively partnered with Parsley's "Reformation Ohio" group, and in fact extensively funded it at a period where a YWAM frontgroup was producing the "Path to 9/11" shlockumentary for ABC.
And if that's not disturbing enough...Parsley's church may in fact be one of the most politically organised--and blatantly political--churches in the United States.
Ban on electioneering? What ban on electioneering?
Parsley's church is the home of no less than two separate national, and increasingly influential, dominionist organisations--both of which are explicitly designed to encourage churches to violate federal laws against electioneering.
The first group, Center for Moral Clarity, is a major lobbying group founded in 2002--and is likely to be the ultimate successor to Focus on the Family and the American Family Association, or eventually as influential as those orgs. CMC can legitimately be seen as a front organisation of World Harvest, and engages in explicit electioneering for specific bills; it also includes an entire section on spin doctoring and tries to claim it's allowed to do so under an alternative section of the tax code relating to 501(c)3 orgs that does not in fact apply to churches. (World Harvest, like other large neopentecostal churches, uses the "form 990 loophole" that exempts churches from filing a form 990 and thus documenting their income stream; Center for Moral Clarity is apparently not registered as a nonprofit at all, and may be operating as a for-profit (as there's also none of the required statements for PACs and lobbying groups).)
The second--and potentially the more dangerous--group that Rod Parsley is head of is what amounts to a political engine within churches. Parsley founded the Ohio Restoration Movement--a group also popularly known as the "Patriot Pastor" movement--and the "Joel's Army" imagery even filters down here, including literal imagery from "Christian Patriot" militia groups:
These questions take on even greater meaning, when we consider the alternative. Rising from the vacuum of prophetic witness, is the ultra-right wing politics of intimidation and hate. A movement calling itself "Patriot Pastors" is now mobilizing (mostly rural Christians) to gather thousands of " Ohio for Jesus" pastors and tens of thousands of lay people calling themselves "Christian Minutemen."
Called the Ohio Restoration Project, this group intends to take over the Republican Party in Ohio . Once they have done this through electoral primaries, they will also run all Democrats off the state map.
Their plan is to run good people out of office if they are pro-choice or supportive of equal rights for gays. In their website, these so-called Patriot Pastors will "shoot down" any politicians or candidates who they deem "vague or noncommittal on issues of abortion and gay rights."
They have transportation set up for the elderly and child care for the young to attend their "God Rallies." Rod Parsley of World Harvest Church in Canal Winchester is their leader. In his book Silent No More, Parsley outlines which issues will either drive people from office or put them in office. Republicans who were once considered right-wing radicals in Ohio , like Sen. Jim Jordan of Champaign County , are moving into key leadership positions in our statehouse five blocks west of First Church . These "Patriot Pastors" are a scary lot. Issue #1, which they say restored "Biblical marriage" to Ohio , was step one in their politics of fear and (so-called) "Family values." Issue #2 says Parsley is to take back the state.
Ohio is by far not the only state that Parsley has been promoting "Patriot Pastors" and "Restoration Movements". Texas and South Carolina, among other states, have "Restoration Movements" tied to World Harvest Church, and it has been claimed that such movements may be active in 11 states; the group in Texas has been the subject of legal challenges, and it would appear the "Restoration Movements" largely switched support from Huckabee to McCain. The ultimate goal is to take the movement national...and people who aren't sufficiently zealous are, again, compared to "Good Germans" by the movement's leaders:
In their for-or-against-us worldview, there is no room for honest disagreement, even among fellow Christians: Russell Johnson, the leader of Ohio’s "restoration" project compares people who sit out his political crusade to Christians in Nazi Germany who sang hymns louder to drown out the wailing of Jews being led to their deaths.
As it is, the Ohio group has been disturbingly effective. Parsley's network of pastoral-lobbyists were a major force in assisting former Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell--who, notably, was very closely associated with the attempted "Gothardisation" of the entire state of Ohio. In fact, they were quite heavily involved with the attempt to get Kenneth Blackwell elected as governor of Ohio (an effort that fortunately failed). In fact, our very own Markos did a bit on the "Patriot Pastors" that is required reading, as does Theocracy Watch.
In fact, this was such an egregrious violation of 501(c)3 laws that--in something that I have never seen before, but hope to see much more of in future--nearly every pastor of mainstream churches and congregations in Columbus, OH filed a joint complaint with the IRS against World Harvest and Fairfield Baptist. This was a protest that went from a core of 31 pastors, to 33, to ultimately 40. (This is the thing Rod was ranting about in his sermon demonising other pastors who dared to report him to the IRS.)
Parsley's recruitment effort ended up being a bizarre mix of a GOTV drive and a religious recruitment campaign--with a stated goal of 400,000 people registered to vote and 100,000 converted "to a life in Christ"--and 2000 pastors recruited to deliberately violate tax laws in recruiting 300 new "faithful voters".
Much of why Kenneth Blackwell lost was because of counter-organising by mainstream faith groups. (Hence why I say, and will continue to say, that mainstream Christian groups are vital to the effort to stop dominionism's march.)
In fact, the original movement largely had to go underground thanks to the hairy eyeball the IRS started giving, but by 2007 had reorganised and was actively promoting Huckabee for President (and, after Huckabee lost the nomination, went to backing McCain).
We can see in that light why McCain may be doing his best impersonation of a ship rat right now (no offense to Norway rats, of course, who are smart and cute and useful).
The interesting thing, IMHO, is going to be how dominionists react to McCain abandoning their ship.