Posts on Chuck Colson

The American Family Association has unveiled a new, half-hour video on the necessity of passing the Proposition 8 marriage amendment in California. Featuring people like Chuck Colson, Hadley Arkes, and Ron Prentice, Chairman of the "Yes on 8" effort, along with various representatives of right-wing groups like the Pacific Justice Institute and the California Family Council - along with lots and lots of footage of gays and lesbians getting married and showing affection - the video explains the various ways in which failure to pass Prop. 8 will destroy America.

As they say, straight, married sex is "unique" because the two are designed to "fit together, like pieces of a puzzle" and the best that gay couples can do is imitate it. But Bridget Melson raises an even more ominous point: if gays and lesbians can get married, who's going to teach the children of the future how to change the oil?

And on and on it goes, until Colson finally declares that failure to stop the "gay-marriage juggernaut ... is Armageddon" and the end to freedom of religion, after which the others call upon pastors and activists to get involved in the fight to pass Prop. 8 or risk losing their right to spread the Gospel:

For two hours earlier this week, pastors gathered at more than 200 sites throughout California, Arizona, and Florida to be exhorted by national Religious Right leaders like Tony Perkins, Harry Jackson, Maggie Gallagher, and Chuck Colson and others to hold nothing back in their efforts to fight against marriage equality.  The People For the American Way Foundation today released a memo [PDF] chronicling the call and outlining the Right’s plans for the weeks ahead:

The primary focus of the call was Proposition 8 in California, described by Colson as “the Armageddon of the culture war.” Many speakers invoked the language of warfare, raising up an army of believers, putting soldiers in the streets, being on the front lines of a battle. Lou Engle actually described a massive rally planned in Qualcomm stadium on November 1 as a “blitzkrieg moment.”

While speaker after speaker spoke of the dire threats same-sex married couples pose to “traditional” marriage, religious freedom, and civilization itself, the overall tone of the call was confidence that victory would be won with God’s help, 40 days of prayer and fasting before the election, teams of intercessors and prayer warriors around the country, and a massive highly organized deployment of volunteers in a systematic voter identification and turnout campaign.

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Ron Luce from Teen Mania ministries and other organizers talked about plans to organize 300,000 youth and their families for an October 1 simulcast, and using them to reach 2.4 million. A representative of the Church Communication Network, a satellite network that has downlink equipment in 500 churches in California, 95 in Arizona, and 321 in Florida, said it would simulcast the youth event free of charge, and would make a satellite dish available “at cost” to churches who don’t yet have one. Said one speaker of the youth organizing, “if we don’t use them, Satan will.”

Another speaker, Rev. Dudley Rutherford, predicted that if Prop. 8 fails, the God-ordained institution of marriage would be destroyed; the engine of hate crimes legislation would be fueled, ultimately leading to it being illegal to read some sections of the Bible; the floodgates would be open to gay couples suing to force churches to marry them; and the polygamists would be next.

The Saturday gala honoring Focus on the Family founder James Dobson started with a hint at the controversy over the announcement of Mitt Romney as the straw poll’s winner. Only the overall results had been announced to attendees earlier in the day. It was at a subsequent news conference that FRC distributed documents making clear that Huckabee won by a large margin among people who voted in person, and in the hours since Huckabee partisans were grumbling. FRC’s Chuck Donovan promised that everyone would get a detailed vote accounting as they left the event.

When Dobson took the stage he claimed that the media had been telling everybody that the pro-family and pro-life movements are dying, and to the media still in attendance, said, “Welcome to the morgue.” Dobson also complained about media reports of a closed-door meeting of conservative religious leaders at which Dobson and more than 40 others pledged that if neither party nominated a pro-life candidate they would vote for a minor party candidate, kicking off weeks of controversy and infighting. Dobson said reports that the group would try to create a third party were wrong, saying he agrees with Gary Bauer that a third-party would be political suicide and would limit the ability to influence the GOP.

After men were arrested for plotting to attack the Fort Dix army base, right-wing activist and former presidential candidate Gary Bauer called for an investigation into U.S. mosques, warning that Saudi money was fomenting extremism across the country. “Let the ACLU howl about ‘religious freedom,’” wrote Bauer. Now Bauer is applauding a Justice Department order that cleared out prison chapel libraries of books ranging from “When Bad Things Happen to Good People” to Christian tracts to Islamic texts. The Bureau of Prisons also called for audio and video monitoring of prison worship areas.

No word from prison evangelist and religious-right commentator Charles Colson – he’s been busy warning that “Islam is a vicious, evil … Islamo-fascism is evil incarnate.”

Seeming to echo those sentiments, Bauer’s praise for the crackdown on inmate religion is limited to its effects on Muslims, and he goes further, warning of “the extremists who are not behind bars” and calling for the government to monitor mosques. To justify spying on houses of worship, Bauer asserts that this is something Christians aren’t bothered by:

Bauer says he and most Christians do not fear someone from the federal government sitting in their church and listening to a typical sermon, so mosques should not be bothered by it either.

“It’s about outlawing peaceful speech.” Dobson goes further, warns reading the Bible would be illegal. More: Eagle Forum, TVC, Bill Federer.

The movie “Amazing Grace” is opening this weekend and aims to, according to the New York Times, tell “the story of how William Wilberforce and a handful of other Quaker activists persuaded a reluctant British Parliament to abolish the slave trade.”

The Right has wasted no time in claiming the film as its own and has been actively promoting it.  

The Traditional Values Coalition says its “staff attended a private screening of ‘Amazing Grace’ this week and encourages all Christians and concerned citizens to see this inspiring film,” and Chuck Colson writes that “we would do well to rekindle [the spirit of Wilberforce] our day.”

Vision America’s Rick Scarborough also recommends the film, saying “It isn’t often that I can recommend a movie wholeheartedly. ‘Amazing Grace: The Epic Story of William Wilberforce’ is such a film … I urge you to see ‘Amazing Grace’ when it opens in theaters nationwide the weekend of February 23.”  And Focus on the Family’s James Dobson is dedicating two days of his radio program to Wilberforce and his efforts to “turn the world upside down in his campaign to respect life.”

As USA Today notes of the film, “evangelicals in America are recasting their hero's faith for a 21st-century audience” – and nowhere is that more obvious then with GOP presidential hopeful Sam Brownback, who has been busy claiming the Wilberforce mantle for himself. 

Brownback recently introduced a Senate resolution honoring Wilberforce and has not been shy about tying his own political agenda to Wilberforce’s anti-abolition efforts, saying in his presidential announcement :

Two hundred years ago this year, a little known British Parliamentarian by the name of William Wilberforce finally achieved success after a lifetime of effort to end the slave trade in the British Empire. A committed Christian who believed his faith should be a force for good in Britain and around the world, Wilberforce had two great passions: ending the slave trade and renewing the culture. Although his goals appeared impossibly lofty, both were achieved. 

He used Britain's greatness for goodness.

Our mandate today has a similar feel. If William Wilberforce were alive today, I believe he would be passionately fighting for the dignity of every human life everywhere, without regard to race, wealth, or status. He would also feel compelled to take up the vital cause of renewing the family and the culture.

It is no surprise that the Right is hailing the film, considering that the movie’s marketers have been actively courting churches and managed to get 5,000 to join together in declaring February 18 as “Amazing Grace Sunday.” As for Brownback, he was invited to a screening of the film in Los Angeles and to participate in a panel discussion with the film's producers.  

By Church Report. More: Bush, Brownback, Parsley, Falwell, Land, and D. James Kennedy.

Appearing in Wednesday’s edition of the Washington Post was an op-ed by Joseph Loconte and Michael Cromartie, both affiliated with the right-wing Ethics and Public Policy Center, entitled “Let's Stop Stereotyping Evangelicals.”

The gist of the piece was that the culture’s conception of evangelicals “is a gross caricature” because it ignores “evangelicalism's deepening social conscience.” 

There can be no doubt that certain segments of the evangelical community have long been committed to social and justice issues beyond the Right’s standard anti-abortion and anti-gay agenda. In fact, as we noted in a post the other day, the National Association of Evangelicals is attempting to broaden its agenda to include everything from global warming to the crisis in Darfur, Sudan. Of course, such efforts have not been welcomed by some right-wing pundits and Religious Right leaders, some of whom are attempting to discredit this effort by tying it directly to the NAE’s disgraced former president, Ted Haggard. 

Loconte and Cromartie insist

Even the Moral Majority in its most belligerent form amounted to nothing more terrifying than churchgoers flocking peacefully to the polls on Election Day. The only people who want a biblical theocracy in America are completely outside the evangelical mainstream, their influence negligible.

So as Jerry Falwell and other ministers were jumping into politics, leaders such as Charles Colson -- former Nixon aide turned born-again Christian -- were charting another path. In 1976 Colson launched Prison Fellowship, a ministry to inmates, to address the soaring crime problem. Today it ranks as the largest prison ministry in the world, active in most U.S. prisons and in 112 countries. "Crime and violence frustrate every political answer," he has said, "because there can be no solution apart from character and creed." No organization has done more to bring redemption and hope to inmates and their families.

Colson’s organization has indeed been very effective reaching out to inmates.  Unfortunately, it hasn’t always been doing so in a manner that is constitutional

Calls David Kuo a “nice guy”; says claims not too surprising; urges viewers to participate in politics but keep eyes on Jesus, not “temporal parties.” Watch: Broadband or Dial-Up. Other Religious Right leaders dismiss Kuo’s book and “political timing.”

So says Watergate figure Chuck Colson, whose ministry recently lost funding on church-state grounds.

Chuck Colson’s Prison Fellowship Ministries denied funds. Robertson’s ACLJ, Dobson’s ADF, and Ten Commandments Judge Roy Moore join in outrage.

Creationism advocates are furious about the recent loss of an anti-evolution majority on the Kansas school board. Watergate figure and high-profile Religious Right operative Chuck Colson bemoaned the “censorship” of not mandating the instruction of “Intelligent Design” creationism in public schools. Wichita pastor Terry Fox (who quit his church shortly after the election to be a full-time activist against same-sex marriage, abortion, and evolution) called evolution a “cult” and “the mother of all liberalism” and cited the “homosexual agenda[]” and “taking Christ out of Christmas” as related reasons to elect right-wing school board members. Board member Connie Morris, who called evolution a “fairytale” and lost her bid for re-election to a moderate, blamed the “lying liberal media” for her defeat, and Kansas “Intelligent Design” advocate John Calvert complained of a “propaganda” campaign of “systematic misinformation” that Kansas might have trouble competing for science-related business if it maintained a standard of science education opposed by almost all scientific societies.

Now right-wing stalwart Phyllis Schlafly weighs in, claiming that those who take their cues on public-school science curricula from scientists are out to stifle children’s laughter and quash their dreams:

Liberals see the political value to teaching evolution in school, as it makes teachers and children think they are no more special than animals. Childhood joy and ambition can turn into depression as children learn to reject that they were created in the image of God.

Schlafly claims that “The issue in the Kansas controversy was not intelligent design and certainly not creationism,” preferring to refer to “the movement to allow criticism of evolution.” She notes that the Kansas standards point to a non-binding statement that came out of the congressional conference committee negotiating the No Child Left Behind Act that singles out evolution as a “controversy” and calls on schools to teach the “full range of scientific views that exist.”

But as the National Center for Science Education details, the so-called Santorum Amendment – partially designed by “Intelligent Design” advocates as part of a long-term strategy to undermine scientific instruction – was never passed into law.

Who are “censoring” dubious “Intelligent Design” creationism in schools.

The Right seems to have developed a new political tactic: attempting to appear reasonable by pretending they care about things they obviously don’t.  

For instance, last week the Family Research Council announced that it was opposing the nomination of Dr. Andrew C. von Eschenbach to be Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration out of a concern about “women’s health”

Dr. von Eschenbach has shown a history of ignoring any concern for women's health in exchange for political expediency. Because of actions prior to, and as acting FDA Commissioner, FRC opposes his confirmation and reserves the right to score any vote in favor of his nomination negatively in our annual scorecard.

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"Recognizing the importance of the health of women and the role the FDA plays in protecting that health, Family Research Council cannot in good conscience support the confirmation of Dr. von Eschenbach as FDA Commissioner.

Considering that one of FRC’s “core principles” is to oppose a woman’s right to make decisions about her own reproductive health, it is safe to assume that the organization’s opposition to von Eschenbach has little to do with actual concerns about “women’s health.”