Submitted by Kyle Mantyla on November 1, 2010 - 9:34am
When we first learned of the "Pray and ACT" effort which sought to link 7 Mountains Dominionism with election-oriented prayer and fasting, we were pretty surprised by the number of high profile Religious Right leaders who had signed on to the effort, like Chuck Colson, Mike Huckabee, Harry Jackson, Richard Land, Maggie Gallagher and various others.
In addition to orchestrating forty days of prayer and fasting in an effort to save this nation by electing "candidates who affirm the sanctity of life in all stages and conditions, the integrity of marriage as the union of one man and one woman, and religious liberty and respect for conscience," Pray and ACT organizers also hosted a series of events that became less and less ambitious with every successive outing.
The first of these events was a two-hour live webcast that featured Jim Garlow, James Robison, Samuel Rodriquez, Jordan Lorence., Lance Wallnau, Tony Perkins, and Richard Land speaking before a tiny crowd at a church in Washington, DC.
The second event was another webcast, but this one featured little more than pre-recorded interviews with various activists who were attending the Family Research Council's Values Voter Summit.
And the forty days of prayer and fasting was supposed to culminate with an event held at "the steps of the Lincoln Memorial" on October 30 ... but instead if turned out to be nothing more than a forty-five minute webchat between Jim Garlow and Chuck Colson:
I don't know about you, but when Pray and ACT organizers rolled out their agenda earlier this year, I was expecting a bit more.
Submitted by Kyle Mantyla on October 8, 2010 - 11:24am
I have been covering the various election-oriented prayer efforts that are currently being carried out by Religious Right groups, including Pray and ACT which consists of not only 40 days of prayer, but also 40 days of fasting.
And to make this grueling process somewhat easier, Pray and ACT and the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission have produced a day-by-day prayer guide [PDF] for participants. For instance, on October 17 they are to pray for the "Sanctity of Human Life":
Ask God to...
• Convict public officials to protect and serve every member of our society including the most marginalized, voiceless, and vulnerable
• Raise up leaders to end our nation’s culture of death and recognize the equal value of all people
• Give our nation the compassion it needs to assist women struggling with problem pregnancies
• Raise up leaders to protect the weak and the vulnerable from violent attack with no favoritism, partiality, or discrimination
• Help our world leaders develop a consistent ethic of love and life for all people and all circumstances
• Convict the scientific community to end the barbaric practice of embryo destructive stem-cell research
• Help you put an end to our nation’s abortion-on-demand policies
And the next day they are to pray for "God's Design for Marriage":
Ask God to…
• Raise up leaders who will protect God’s design for marriage as the union of one man and one woman
• Convict Christians to uphold the institution of marriage and model its true meaning
• Help the church instill in young people a sound understanding of the importance of marriage
• Cause our nation to understand the destructive effects of redefining marriage
• Help the church engage in compassionate redemptive ministry to those struggling with same-sex attraction
• Help the church minister to those struggling in their marriages
• Cause our nation’s leaders to enact laws and policies that encourage and strengthen marriage
And then, as we get closer and closer to Election Day, the prayer targets become more focused on getting Christians elected to office, with prayers to "prevent Satan from blinding the judgment of our public officials," and "give Christians who run for public office favor in the eyes of the electorate," and "confound the counsel of candidates who don’t support biblical values," and "discourage ungodly people from running for public office."
And finally, just before Election Day, activists are enouraged to pray for the "wisdom to elect the
best officials" and realize that "God’s judgment or blessing on a nation is related directly to the morality of its citizens":
Ask God to...
• Send the strong convicting presence of His Spirit throughout the nation
• Raise up leaders who will advance and support God-honoring policies, especially policies protecting life
• Help you know who He wants you to vote for in the upcoming election
• Expose to public scrutiny people who are working to undermine God-honoring laws and morality, like efforts to undermine God’s design for marriage
• Convince Christians that they need to be involved in the life of the nation both politically and socially
• Confound the plans of the enemies of the United States.
• Help the United States continue to be the world’s leader in promoting freedom for all people, especially religious freedom.
Submitted by Kyle Mantyla on September 22, 2010 - 4:40pm
On Sunday evening, Jim Garlow held the second of three scheduled Pray and Act webcasts heading into the mid-term election. Unlike the first event, which was broadcast live by GodTV, this webcast contained footage that was shot ahead of time, mostly at the Values Voter Summit, and webcast by the American Family Association.
Among the participants in this second webcast were the AFA Don Wildmon, Maggie Gallagher, Richard Land, Ken Blackwell, Lance Wallnau, and Lou Engle ... and I have to say that it was shockingly dull.
In fact, the only exchange worth highlighting from the entire hour and a half was this one between Garlow and Mat Staver of the Liberty Counsel discussing how the fight against gay marriage is really a fight against an "Antichrist Spirit":
Garlow: If in reality the homosexual portion of the population is only 3-5%, then it seems to me they have linked up in a profound way with many others who are not homosexual. And I'm not referring to the homosexual who may be the nice one who lives next door; I'm talking about people who are committed to a radical homosexual agenda, they have been able to link up with a number of other groups and the result is that it's almost like an Antichrist spirit, almost a capacity to silence the Gospel from being proclaimed. Is that an overstatement?
Staver: It's not an overstatement. You're having a confluence of different people who don't necessarily have the same ideas. They may not be homosexual but it is an anti-Christian viewpoint; it's a very militaristic anti-Christian viewpoint. Atheists are becoming more militaristic, the National Organization for Women, the pro-abortion organizations, and others as well are combing together because they have a common cause and that common cause is anti-Christian.
Submitted by Kyle Mantyla on September 13, 2010 - 12:05pm
On Friday I posted clips from a conference call hosted early last week by Jim Garlow, Chairman of Newt Gingrich's Renewing American Leadership, and organizer of the Pray and Act campaign, which featured the likes of Chuck Colson, Lou Engle, Maggie Gallagher, and Harry Jackson all discussing the importance of the Pray and Act effort heading into the mid-term elections.
Last night, these same leaders once again join Garlow, this time for a live webcast from Washington DC that also featured Walter Hoyle, Chuck Stetson, James Robison, Samuel Rodriquez, Jordan Lorence of the Alliance Defense Fund, Lance Wallnau, Tony Perkins, and Richard Land.
The event itself had just a few handfuls of people in attendance, but it was broadcast by GodTV and I spent my Sunday evening watching it so I could bring you the highlights.
Most of event was standard Religious Right fare, with leaders discussing the paramount importance of fighting abortion and saving marriage as people like Colson marveled at that we are now celebrating homosexuality which, just a few decades ago, was "shameful and embarrassing":
Thirty years ago now, I was running the 1972 presidential political campaign and we were accused, those of you who remember the history of the Nixon era, we were accused of lots of dirty tricks. And one of them was that I had planted gays in the campaign of the President's opponent, Senator George McGovern. I didn't, but I was accused of it because that would have been a dirty trick.
Today, we're celebrating what just 35 years ago was considered something shameful and embarrassing. We're not only celebrating it, we're taking an institution which has been the foundation building block of society and civilized societies going back as far in history as we can go back - a man and a woman joined together as God says as one flesh - and we're saying we want to re-define that.
I don't know about you guys, but you'll never hear me say "gay marriage" again because there is no such thing. There can't be gay marriage. Marriage is a man and a woman. The fact of the matter is you can't have anything called gay marriage. From now on to me it's "so-called gay marriage" or its "civil union" or whatever you want to call it, but it's not marriage.
And then, of course, there was Lou Engle just being Lou Engle as he got revved up about how fasting and prayer can finally reverse the forty year rebellion set off in 1969 with the release of "the Stonewall homosexual movement":
I feel like this is a defining moment in American history. I feel like we're in a moment when epochs have got to turn. In the Scriptures you see the power of the forty day fast to change spiritual eras.
Moses fasted forty days and the law of God was released into the Earth.
Elijah fasted forty days at a time when they had legalized child sacrifice and homosexual and heterosexual prostitution in the days of Ahab and Jezebel. But it was in that darkest hour that God raised up its greatest prophetic movement as well.
God is not done with America. and when that spell of Jezebel ruled over the land, promoting sexual immorality all over the place, God releases a forty day fast through Elijah. With the spell of Jezebel and the discouragement of those who were reformers, God breaks that thing with a forty day fast and releases a whole new era with a movement to release the next religious leaders, spiritual leaders, and political leaders as God ripped through that land and purged Baal worship at that time.
God's the same yesterday, today, and forever. I believe we're at the end of the forty year rebellion of the Sixties. 1969: the Stonewall homosexual movement was released. 69: Woodstock. Forty years from that point, I dare to believe that if they church will take this time seriously in fasting and prayer, we can actually begin to fulfill what a generation has failed in for forty years.
In the very first post I wrote about Pray and Act, I noted how 7 Mountains Dominionism was at the heart of the organization's agenda and pointed to a clip of the leading 7 Mountains advocate, Lance Wallnau, explaining how Christians must take control of these specific areas in order to lay the groundwork for the return of Christ.
In case that wasn't clear enough, last night Garlow actually included Wallnau in the webcast and Wallnau made the case that Christians are in a war for control of these 7 Mountains and the object of this war is permanent occupation:
While we've been trying to preach, secular forces have been educating America. We didn't lose the homosexual argument over night. Twenty-five years, from Chuck Colson's testimony 'til now, tells me that it wasn't because of something we did, it's because of something we failed to do: we didn't influence media and arts. When you've got media and arts, you've got a pulpit going twenty-four hours a day educating your children on values. We didn't educate ourselves regarding the judiciary and so political appointments were made - and we always focus on politicians, we got ga ga at election time, forgetting politicians are the spoil of a different battle; it's the battle of influence.
We have superior weapons, a superior message, and superior power. When it comes to being able to move forward in this, we've got evidence all over the place of how transformation can happen, but it starts with this: clarity is power.
If Christians don't understand that power isn't just in us in the church, there is an authority that is in government, there is an authority in arts and media, there's an authority in family - I look at those as seven spheres where God has to raise up champions.
Napoleon's maxim is "the object of war is victory." You know what we do, we get so dumb - we're supposed to be wise as a serpent and as harmless as doves but we end up being as dumb as a doorknob in lacking the shrewdness we need. When we have elections, when we have victories, short-term victories, we go back and celebrate it like that's it. Well, here's what Napoleon says about warfare: the object of war is victory, but the objective of victory is occupation. We don't win until we occupy high places.
The way that governments and nations are formed is that minorities of people occupy strategic places of influence and they leverage that influence through leverage within networks that are closely, tightly knit together. The church has to become a Kingdom Force, leveraging its influence within greater spheres than just evangelism and then linking shields together. I believe, with prayer and fasting, we will see a freshly invigorated move of God in the United States.
Finally, I want to highlight something that Garlow has been pushing for some time now, which is to intimately link "biblical economics" to the social issues that normally motivate the Religious Right. Garlow is impassioned about the book "Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism Is the Solution and Not the Problem" by Jay W. Richards and has been telling anyone who will listen to buy multiple copies of the book for themselves and their friends. So it was no surprise that Garlow brought the subject up during the webcast:
If we have 535 people in Washington, DC - House and Senate - who are voting through laws that cause grandchildren and great-grandchildren of yours yet unborn to be saddled with a debt they cannot handle, that is called thievery.
There's a law against stealing: Thou shalt not steal. We have no right to steal from future generations. So the whole economic issue is a biblical issue.
Debt like we have in America is immoral. It is wrong. There should be a screaming up. This could cause a suffocation and a complete destruction of all we hold dear. The taxation is becoming oppressive.
The reason that we have these kind of bad laws passing in our Congress is very simple: what percentage of the people making the laws are attending a church where the Bible is being taught? Let me go further though: if it's a small percentage that are there, let's just pick an arbitrary number - 10%, 15%, 20% - are attending a church where the Bible is being taught, let me ask you a question, how many of them are going to a church where biblical economics is being taught so the person who goes to make the laws has the moral foundation, the biblical background, to be able to vote through the right kind of laws? We have been silent and I believe the spirit of God is stirring something at a deep level.
When I find people who don't morally get it on the issue of abortion, I appeal that way you just appealed. When you consider when abortion started, how many years have passed, the people who were originally killed now would have been having children who were up to the age fifteen. So we have lost massive numbers of people [and] when I'm with unemployed people who believe in abortion, I say "one of the reasons you're unemployed is because there are no houses being bought, there are not cars being purchased, there are no schools being built for people who've been killed. You don't have a job today, in part, because of the massive slaughter of humanity."
People don't understand, it's an economic issue. There's a reason God said be fruitful and multiply. He was serious about that.
Among those participating were Ron Luce, James Robison, Chuck Colson, Vonette Bright, Lou Engle, Maggie Gallagher, and Harry Jackson.
Colson used his time to explain that he created the Manhattan Declaration because he realized that America is just like Germany was under Hitler:
We wrote the Manhattan Declaration because we had read The Barmen Declaration and we'd read the history of Germany during the Thirties; I'm reading a book on [Dietrich] Bonhoeffer right now - my wife and I are reading it together - it is incredibly instructive. He went though all the same issues we're dealing with today. As James Robison just said so beautifully, let's all be one, let's stand together. Well, the church couldn't stand together in the face of Hitler, that's why they wrote the Barmen Declaration, to get the true believers separated from the non-believers. But the true believers made a strong stand and it cost them dearly. And I think the time has come in America where we don't have any choice but to take this stand.
For his part, Engle assured those on the call that they are the Elijah, Moses, and Jesus of today:
I believe we are in a critical moment. Forty years since the Sixties began, a rebellion has come, but forty days of fasting, historically, is an epoch changing fast that God has given to us. Elijah fasted forty days and shifted the whole tide of the worst government and moral climate in Israel's history. Moses fasted and delivered the law of God in forty days. And then Jesus fasted forty days and launched the Apostolic Era. I believe we are in such a moment right now that if we will seize this day we can see great victories. I want to encourage us with the supernatural power of fasting.
And finally Harry Jackson declared that Christians are being called by God to "pick a fight" so that God can "wipe out" and silence his enemies once and for all:
God is saying to us "I want to pick a fight in which I can wipe out my enemies and cause them to be silenced once and for all." This is where America is; if we do not recognize and repent, we are going to see our way of life destroyed as we now know it.
Submitted by Kyle Mantyla on September 9, 2010 - 1:37pm
Jim Garlow was invited on to CBN this morning to pitch his Pray and ACT effort, where he warned that "our nation is in serious trouble" and that we may have "a short window of time to see this nation to turn and return to a spiritual renewal it once knew." As such, it is imperative that people pray and fast heading into the election so that God will supernaturally touch America and save it from destruction:
Submitted by Kyle Mantyla on August 18, 2010 - 10:53am
For the last few weeks, we've been chronicling Chuck Colson's plan to raise up a nationwide opposition to gay marriage in an attempt to sway the Supreme Court by demonstrating that Americans will not tolerate any decision that recognizes marriage equality.
And he is still at it, again making it the focus of his newest "Two Minute Warning" video. In this one, Colson says that Republicans have taken social conservatives for granted for too long and this year are trying to downplay social issues in order to focus on economic issues as a winning election strategy. That is obviously unacceptable, so it is up to Christians to tell them "they are full of prunes, our consciences cannot sit on the back burner" (skip ahead to the 2:40 mark):
Alan Colmes had Garlow on his program on Friday night to discuss that claim and Garlow stood by it, claiming that the language in the decision could ultimately be used to defend polygamy though he seemed to back off from the bestiality language a bit, claiming that Colmes had taken half of a quote and presented it out of context (of course, Colmes did nothing of the sort, as Garlow made the same bestiality comparison on more than one occasion.)
Eventually, the debate turned to the topic of religious freedom, with Garlow insisting that gay marriage would mean that doctors, businesses, and everyone else would have to recognize them under penalty of law, which prompted Colmes to ask Garlow if he was saying that people ought to be able to freely discriminate, which is exactly the view that recently got Rand Paul in trouble, to which Garlow replied "racism is wrong, and marriage is a good thing" and insisted that he has every right to take his religious views into the voting booth and "vote from a Biblical standpoint the same way that you have a right to vote from an anti-Biblical standpoint":
Submitted by Kyle Mantyla on July 28, 2010 - 9:23am
Last week, when Newt Gingrich came out in opposition to the "Ground Zero Mosque," I noted that his position seemed rather hypocritical considering that he had recently founded an organization called Renewing American Leadership that has, as its mission, the protection and encouragement of the free exercise of religion in America.
But the hypocrisy at the root of that piece pales in comparison to the hypocrisy at the root of his latest piece:
Radical Islamism is more than simply a religious belief. It is a comprehensive political, economic, and religious movement that seeks to impose sharia—Islamic law—upon all aspects of global society.
Many Muslims see sharia as simply a reference point for their personal code of conduct. They recognize the distinction between their personal beliefs and the laws that govern all people of all faiths.
For the radical Islamist, however, this distinction does not exist. Radical Islamists see politics and religion as inseparable in a way it is difficult for Americans to understand. Radical Islamists assert sharia’s supremacy over the freely legislated laws and values of the countries they live in and see it as their sacred duty to achieve this totalitarian supremacy in practice.
Some radical Islamists use terrorism as a tactic to impose sharia but others use non-violent methods—a cultural, political, and legal jihad that seeks the same totalitarian goal even while claiming to repudiate violence.
Does Gingrich not realize that the man he hired to run Renewing American Leadership, Jim Garlow, is a full-bore advocate of the 7 Mountains Mandate, which is a Dominionist theology that seeks get Christians in control of the levers of power and influence the world over so as to create God's kingdom on Earth and bring about the return of Jesus Christ?
Jim Garlow, Skyline Church & Renewing American Leadership
Chuck Colson, Founder Prison Fellowship & BreakPoint
Che Ahn, Harvest International Ministry
Vonette Bright, Co-Founder, Campus Crusade for Christ, International
Bishop Keith Butler, Founding Pastor, Word of Faith International Christian Center
Jim Daly, President & CEO, Focus on the Family
Lou Engle, TheCall to Conscience, TheCall
Father Joseph Fessio, Editor in Chief, Ignatius Press, San Francisco
Maggie Gallagher, National Organization for Marriage
Professor Robert George, Princeton University
Professor Timothy George, Dean, Beeson Divinity School
Jack Hayford, Founder and Chancellor, The King's College and Seminary
Mike Huckabee, Former Governor of Arkansas & Host, The Mike Huckabee Show
Bishop Harry Jackson, Jr., High Impact Church Coalition
Alveda King, Silent No More Awareness Campaign
Richard Land, The Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission
Ron Luce, Founder, Teen Mania & Battle Cry
Bishop Richard Malone, Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland (Maine)
Eva Muntean & Dolores Meehan, Co-Founders, West Coast Walk for Life, San Francisco
Penny Nance, Concerned Women for America
Tony Perkins, Family Research Council
James Robison, Life Outreach, International
Samuel Rodriguez, National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference
Alan Sears, Alliance Defense Fund
Chuck Stetson, Let’s Strengthen Marriage Campaign
Obviously, these leaders and this Dominionist theology do not advocate the use of violence to achieve their goals, but you have to marvel at Gingrich's willingness to warn that "Islamists" are seeking to impose their religious views on all cultural, political, and legal matters while his very own organization is seeking to do the exact same thing.
Submitted by Kyle Mantyla on July 8, 2010 - 3:32pm
When I wrote the post the other day about Lou Engle's new political organization, Pray and A.C.T, I focused primarily on the Seven Mountains Dominion theology that serves as its foundation and the fact that leading Religious Right leaders were, for the first time, openly embracing an agenda that seeks to take over every aspect of our culture in order to bring about the return of Jesus Christ.
But what I failed to properly highlight was how Pray and A.C.T is explicitly seeking to implement this Dominionist agenda through the electoral system.
As Lance Wallnau, a leading proponent of Seven Mountains theology, explained nations are not taken through "evangelism harvests" but rather by having Christians "take over spheres and administer them for the glory of God." And one of the best ways to do that is to start by targeting the government, which is why Engle, Chuck Colson, Jim Garlow, Mike Huckabee, Samuel Rodriguez, Harry Jackson, Tony Perkins, James Dobson, and others are calling for 40-days of prayer and fasting ... but, more importantly, they seeking to mobilize voters who will pledge never to vote for any candidate who does not share their views on abortion, marriage, and religion:
But it is not enough to pray. We must vote and act according to God’s heart and mandates ... In the light of this we are declaring that we will not vote for any Republican or Democrat that in any way supports any measure that aides or sustains the killing of the unborn.
In similar fashion because of God’s foundational marriage blueprint from creation we declare that we can never vote for any candidate that does not stand for a federal amendment that holds that marriage is only between a man and a woman.
...
We refuse to align ourselves with governmental systems that legalize evil in order to be marked as those who have compassion for the poor and the needy. We can do it all without compromising biblical truth as our so-called “social justice brothers” would try to make us believe.
The parade of history has brought us into a profound generational landmark, and a great vacuum has opened again. If the church does not seize this moment Muslims will! Antichrist rage will! Sexual perversion will! Anarchy will! But now is the time for key men and women, even an entire generation to risk everything to become the hinge of history, the pivotal point which determines which way the door will swing in America and in the nations of the earth. Its 40 Days or 40 Years! Seize the Day!
For Life, Marriage, and Religious Liberty.
So while one half of the Pray and A.C.T mission is prayer, the other is action ... and by action, they mean voting:
Being consistent by voting in all elections only for candidates who affirm the sanctity of life in all stages and conditions, the integrity of marriage as the union of one man and one woman, and religious liberty and respect for conscience.
