As Joe Conn writes, at the Americans United For Separation of Church and States blog,
It’s a classic “kill the messenger” scenario.
Today, several writers who report on the Religious Right are issuing an open letter to Jim Wallis, a moderate evangelical leader who runs the group Sojourners. Wallis has criticized the Religious Right in the past, but for some reason suddenly has a problem with those of us who write about the openly theocratic wing of the Religious Right – the Christian Reconstructionists, the Dominionists, those involved in the New Apostolic Reformation.
I urge you to read the open letter, below, and to pass it on to your colleagues and friends. Why?
The answer is that the open letter to Jim Wallis, head of Sojourners, is a collective response to what is, apparently, an orchestrated campaign to silence, with smears, innuendo, and personal attacks walking up to the line of character defamation, writers whose painstaking research documents the political issue of dominionism in America today.
I have posted the open letter here first. For context, please see my post, below the letter.
October 6th, 2011
An Open Letter to Jim Wallis from Writers about American Religion and Politics
Dear Jim Wallis,
We are writing in response to your e-mail to the Sojourners list on September 29th, and your similar piece on The Huffington Post, in which you claim that "some liberal writers" -- whom you do not name -- are broad brushing evangelical Christians as "intellectually-flawed right-wing crazies with dangerous plans for the country." You characterize unnamed writers -- writers like us -- as people who are "all too eager to discredit religion as part of their perennial habit and practice." This charge is as unfair as it is unsubstantiated.
You may recognize some of us as people who have written in recent years about such tendencies in modern Christian evangelicalism as dominionism, apocalyptic demonization, Christian Reconstructionism, and the New Apostolic Reformation. We see these forces as playing a significant role in our religious and political lives.
We are concerned about your recent attacks for three main reasons.
Our first concern is your claim that writers who are critical of these tendencies are making broad, unfair claims about "most or all evangelicals." This is just not so. We understand and try to reflect in our work the idea that some, but certainly far from all, evangelical Christians embrace or are influenced by these important movements.
We agree with you that evangelicals are highly varied; are not all politically conservative; and that certainly not all are Republicans. None of us has ever thought or written that they are. Indeed, some of us are evangelicals ourselves. We know that former Democratic presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton are evangelical Christians. And some of us have written about how elements of the above-mentioned movements and tendencies are also involved in the Democratic Party.
We understand that there are complexities in life, religion, and politics. We take seriously the need for and the extraordinary privilege of constantly learning. As writers, we are quite varied among ourselves. We are religious and non-religious; Christian and non-Christian. We have different histories and emphases in writing about religion, theology, and politics. We do not always agree with one another. But we all do agree on this much: These exclusionary Christian movements and tendencies are real, overlapping, and significant in evangelicalism specifically and in our political and electoral culture at large. We invite our readers to consider that there are aspects to these movements and tendencies that are profoundly problematic, and we invite you to consider that as well.
Second, we are concerned that you have endorsed the essay by Mark I. Pinsky that appeared recently in USA Today. That piece attacked some of us by name and all of us by implication. Pinsky's is but the latest in a series of prominently published smears against those of us who write about these subjects and their ties to powerful political interests. We are disturbed that you would cheer on these ad hominem attacks.
Finally, Pinsky tries to blame much of the published criticism of these elements of evangelicalism on left-wing Jews. We, including the majority of us who are not Jews, view this as a transparent effort to intimidate Jewish writers. We are shocked that you are endorsing and promoting Pinsky's attack on these writers, whose work is well-sourced and painstakingly researched.
We are also shocked that you equate these Jewish writers with “secular fundamentalists” whom you say “want to prove that evangelicals are stupid and dangerous extremists.” You do this by immediately following this claim by stating that Pinsky’s essay is one of “the best responses to the recent articles about evangelicals.”
We want to remind you that in his essay Pinsky goes so far as to compare the work of those four Jewish writers to some of the worst anti-Semitic smears in history, including false claims that Jews had "horns and tails, ate the blood of Christian children and poisoned the wells of Europe with plague.. [and] conspired to rule the world through our Protocols."
Whatever one may think of any of our published work, the fact is that none of it is remotely analogous to the false claims in the various notorious anti-Semitic forgeries known as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Pinsky 's equation of the work of the writers he names with the Protocols is despicable.
We would like to believe that despite our differences with you, you share with us a common desire for a just and peaceful world. We value honest disagreement and debate, and hope that you value these as well. Indeed, as writers we know how essential they are to clarifying and even resolving differences, correcting errors of fact -- and dare we say, perspective. These are necessary ingredients for democracy itself. We invite you take issue with any specific facts or characterizations in our work. Then we will have something to talk about. But we will not be silent in the face of smears and intimidation tactics -- which are so very far from the values of the faith traditions from which many of us hail, and the civic values of free speech and respect for religious pluralism that we all share.
We call on you to stop making false characterizations of our work and stop promoting the false characterizations of others. We also specifically ask that you rethink your support for Pinsky's smear and withdraw it.
Richard Bartholomew
Blogger, Bartholomew's Notes on Religion
Russ Bellant
Journalist and author of The Religious Right in Michigan Politics
Chip Berlet
Journalist, blogger, co-author of Right–Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort
Bill Berkowitz
Independent journalist. Contributor to BuzzFlash, AlterNet, and Z Magazine
Rob Boston
Assistant Editor, Church & State Magazine
Columnist, The Humanist Magazine
Frederick Clarkson
Journalist, blogger, author of Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy; editor of Dispatches from the Religious Left: The Future of Faith and Politics in America
Joe Conn
Editor, Church & State Magazine
Barry W. Lynn
Publisher and Columnist, Church & State Magazine
Host, CultureShocks Radio Show
Greg Metzger
Independent journalist. Contributor to Christian Century, Commonweal, Books & Culture and Touchstone.
Rev. Dr. Bruce Prescott
Blogger at Mainstream Baptist
Host of Religious Talk radio show
Sara Robinson
Journalist, blogger, Senior Fellow at the Campaign for America's Future
Adele M. Stan
Washington Bureau Chief, AlterNet.
Rachel Tabachnick
Researcher and featured writer, Talk to Action
Bruce Wilson
Co-founder and featured writer, Talk to Action
Background to the open letter
One major, well entrenched mainstream narrative about the impact of politicized religion in politics, advanced both by liberals and conservatives, is this:
"Americans need not be concerned with the political power and influence wielded by the politicized, supremacist Christian right, because the movement never delivers anything substantial to its base.".
Typically, those presenting the claim offer little to no supporting factual material, and there is a torrent of contradictory evidence--the pullout of abortion services from a majority of counties in the US; hundreds of millions of dollars of federal funding now helping students attend Jerry Falwell's Liberty University; George Bush's Faith Based Initiative (still chugging along under Obama), which under Bush funneled several billion dollars to religious entities, most of them on the evangelical right; the funneling of corporate state taxes to schools teaching "Young Earth" creationism. On and on.
But this summer, presidential hopeful Rick Perry inadvertently delivered a powerful blow against the claim that Americans need not be concerned about dominionism, in the form of Perry's The Response prayer rally--which was overwhelmingly dominated by the apostles and prophets of C. Peter Wagner's New Apostolic Reformation.
It was not surprising that the event raised the issue of dominionism, especially because Peter Wagner himself published a book, in 2008, titled Dominion! - How Kingdom Action Can Change The World; in his book, Wagner states that the Dominion (or "Kingdom Now") theology of his movement traces to R.J. Rushdoony, intellectual father of Christian Reconstructionism.
In turn, it was unsurprising that a few voices in media chose to then raise the issue of dominionism. In a widely noticed August 24th, 2011 Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross, my colleague Rachel Tabachnick described the movement behind Rick Perry's The Response event, C. Peter Wagner's New Apostolic Reformation.
A few days earlier, in an August 14, 2011 column for the Daily Beast, Michele Goldberg raised the issue of Michele Bachmann's and Rick Perry's "deep ties to a fringe fundamentalist movement known as Dominionism, which says Christians should rule the world".
Goldberg's post raised alarm at CNN; in an August 17, 2011 live broadcast, CNN's Jack Cafferty and Wolf Blitzer admitted they had never heard about dominionism but acknowledged being troubled about the issue. In the CNN broadcast, Cafferty also posed the question to his audience, "How much does it worry you if both Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry have ties to Dominionism?"
Perhaps the definitive statement came with New York Times editor Bill Keller's eloquent August 28, 2011 NYT Magazine column, which got to the heart of the issue,
I honestly don’t care if Mitt Romney wears Mormon undergarments beneath his Gap skinny jeans, or if he believes that the stories of ancient American prophets were engraved on gold tablets and buried in upstate New York...
But I do want to know if a candidate places fealty to the Bible, the Book of Mormon (the text, not the Broadway musical) or some other authority higher than the Constitution and laws of this country. It matters to me whether a president respects serious science and verifiable history — in short, belongs to what an official in a previous administration once scornfully described as “the reality-based community.” I do care if religious doctrine becomes an excuse to exclude my fellow citizens from the rights and protections our country promises.
And I care a lot if a candidate is going to be a Trojan horse for a sect that believes it has divine instructions on how we should be governed
The reaction has been fast and furious.
A chorus of mainstream media pundits--who have presented little to no evidence for their claims and demonstrated a shocking level of ignorance about C. Peter Wagner's New Apostolic Reformation--have sought to dismiss the influence of Wagner's movement, and of dominionism generally, in contemporary American politics.
Examples of such typically fact-free, opinion-driven dismissals can be found in the writings of Michael Gerson (August 22, 2011, Washington Post), Ross Douthat (August 29, 2011, New York Times), and Lisa Miller (August 17, 2011, Washington Post).
Then came the personal attacks.
On September 18, 2011, an op-ed by former Orlando Sentinel religion writer Mark I. Pinsky ran in USA Today. Pinsky's op-ed suggested, without substantiating the allegation, that concern about dominionism amounted to a "hysteric" obsession on the part of urban East Coast Jewish writers. Pinsky warned, darkly, that Jews risk demonizing evangelical Christians in the manner that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion has been used to demonize Jews.
Then, Sojourners founder Jim Wallis entered the fray, with a Sojourners column (also published in the Huffington Post) which suggested that unnamed "secular fundamentalists" were unfairly and broadly smearing evangelicals.
Wallis' column specifically praised, as a supposed example of a "responsible" approach, Pinsky's USA Today op-ed, which attacked by name several Jewish authors who have written on dominionism (Michele Goldberg and Rabbi James Rubin), and went on to specifically single out (with an embedded link) writing by Rachel Tabachnick, who has blazed a trail in writing on the New Apostolic Reformation.
Hence the open letter, published here. Please pass it along. It is important--some might even venture--for the health of our democracy which, without open discourse, cannot and will not survive.
footnotes:
Mark Pinsky's op-ed also made the bizarre assertion that evangelicals John Hagee and David Barton were "splinter", "marginal" figures within American evangelicalism.
In a Buzzflash.net op-ed, journalist Bill Berkowitz examines the The Not So Stealth Campaign to Silence Critics of Religious Extremism