Samuel Rodriguez

Last week we noted that, after being confronted about The Oak Initiative and its anti-Muslim activities, Samuel Rodriguez admitted that his role as a board member and supporter of the group did not square with his reputation as a moderate evangelical leader.

As such, Rodriquez promised that he was going to resign from the group:

He knew instinctively as I read to him the Oak Initiative's views about Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood that this was an affront to what he wished to stand for. While he pleaded ignorance with regards to the details of the Oak Initiative's agenda and website (he claimed he had barely been involved), he assured me that by the end of the day he would resign from the Board and make clear his regret. Five hours later I received an email with his letter to the Executive Board of NHCLC responding to Tabachnik's article and detailing the steps he was taking to denounce extremism, steps that include his resignation from the board of the Oak Initiative. 

Today Rachel Tabachnick, whose recent article on Rodriguez set this chain of events in motion, reports that Oak Initiative founder Rick Joyner has confirmed that Rodriguez has in fact resigned ... but only because he is too busy with other projects:

Dear Rachel Tabachnick,

Thanks for your inquiry. Sam Rodriguez did recently resign from the board of The Oak Initiative citing as the reason being that his increased responsibilities with editing a new Spanish version of Charisma Magazine would prohibit him having time to give a meaningful contribution to The Oak. We have a deep appreciation for Sam Rodriguez and will miss his contribution to The Oak, but congratulate him for this new endeavor.

This change should be reflected on our website soon. Thanks again for the inquiry.

Rick Joyner

Rodriguez promised that he would do three things: resign, voice his regret for associating with this group and denounce their extremism. 

He appears to have accomplished the first step, but we have seen no evidence that he has done either of the latter two.  And if Rodriquez was compelled to resign from the organization because of its anti-Muslim extremism, why is his resignation is now being attributed to his "increased responsibilities" elsewhere?

In a story first reported by Brian Kaylor of EthicsDaily.com, James Robison has been bringing social conservative activists and televangelists from across the country together to strategize on how to prevent President Barack Obama from winning reelection. A who’s who of Religious Right leaders, including Don Wildmon, Tony Perkins, Richard Land, Rod Parsley, Jerry Boykin, Jim Garlow, Daniel Lapin, Kenneth Copeland, Harry Jackson and Sam Rodriguez attended the gathering hosted by Robison.

According to Kaylor’s report, Robison called the meetings an “absolute necessity and one of the ways the people of God’s Kingdom can leave His footprints on planet Earth, impacting our own great nation.” Robison, who was Mike Huckabee’s mentor and host of Life Today, recently spoke with Texas Gov. Rick Perry about how the economic crisis was needed to turn America back to God. Wildmon and Garlow are both closely involved in organizing Perry’s The Response prayer rally and Kaylor reports that the “group is connected to Republican Texas Gov. Rick Perry's plan for a large prayer rally in August.” He writes:

According to a list obtained by EthicsDaily.com, among the attendees at the meeting were several Southern Baptist leaders: Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas who recently suggested on Fox News that Obama was a Muslim; Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission; Richard Lee, pastor and the editor of the controversial The American Patriot's Bible; and former North American Mission Board head Bob Reccord, who now heads the semi-secretive group the Council for National Policy, founded by Tim LaHaye. Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University and son of the late founder of the Moral Majority, was scheduled to attend but couldn't make it.

Also attending the meeting were: Jacob Aranza, a minister who in the 1980s helped popularize the theory that rock ’n’ roll music included backmasked messages promoting drug use and sex; Vonette Bright, widow of Campus Crusade for Christ founder Bill Bright, who played a key role in conservative religious-political efforts that birthed the so-called "Religious Right"; Jerry Boykin, a former Pentagon official rebuked for violating policies by speaking in churches in uniform; Jim Garlow, chairman of Newt Gingrich's organization, Renewing American Leadership; Ruth Graham, daughter of evangelist Billy Graham; Harry Jackson, a politically active conservative pastor; David Lane, who has led several efforts to politically mobilize pastors; Ron Luce of Teen Mania Ministries; former Republican U.S. Rep. Bob McEwen; Rod Parsley, a controversial megachurch pastor who endorsed John McCain in 2008 before being rejected by McCain; Samuel Rodriguez of the National Hispanic Christian Leaders Conference; and Don Wildmon of the American Family Association.

…

Tony Perkins, president of the James Dobson-founded Family Research Council, similarly praised Robison during the June 2 broadcast. Perkins attended both the September and June meetings.

"I sensed a new leadership that the Lord has called you to, in that there is a clear recognition that America needs to turn to God," Perkins said. "But I think what you're able to do as kind of a senior statesman of the church is to call together those leaders today that are emerging, and those that are present, to bring them together because unity is the key. I know one of the conversations we had is that you prayed for that unity among us. I think if we could ever be unified and we could walk together as a body of believers in this country that we could profoundly impact this nation."

…

Robison and his group seem united in their opposition to Obama and their desire to see Obama defeated in 2012, but it remains to be seen if they can find a candidate who unites and activates them like Ronald Reagan did in 1980.

Watch Robison and Perkins explain America’s dire need for Godly leaders:

I spent several hours on Saturday watching Lou Engle's "The Call" rally in Sacramento, California and was struck by two things: 1) how boring it was (at one point, the band played a song consisting of nothing by the lyrics "holy, holy, Lord God Almighty" for more than twenty straight minutes) and 2) how small the crowd appeared to be.

When Engle started The Call ten years ago, he claims to have brought 400,000 activists to the National Mall in Washington, DC, but this time the crowd was reportedly much smaller:

The Sacramento event began with a four-hour religious concert Friday night at Raley Field. On Saturday, organizers planned for a crowd of 50,000, lining up portable toilets alongside Capitol Mall and installing video screens several blocks from the stage.

But while the area immediately adjacent to the stage was packed, the mall remained largely empty.

Among the speakers at this event were Brad Bright, the son of Campus Crusade for Christ founder Bill Bright, and Samuel Rodriguez, president of the evangelical National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, as well as Harry Jackson who "prayed for President Obama to have a 'Damascus' experience, referring to the conversion Apostle Paul experienced on his way to Damascus to persecute Christians."

And, of course, Tony Perkins:

Among the speakers was Tony Perkins, a leader of the religious right and head of the Washington lobbying group the Family Research Council.

Perkins railed against U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker for overturning Proposition 8, California's ban on same-sex marriage. He said Walker's ruling diminished the legal rights of religious people opposed to gay marriage.

"If (the ruling) stands, in one generation we will have gone from banning the Bible in public schools to banning religious beliefs in society," Perkins said.

Keep in mind that this The Call event is only one part of dominionist "Pray and ACT" effort aimed at the upcoming elections, with at least three more gatherings and webcasts scheduled in the coming weeks which have now officially received the support of Mike Huckabee.

A few weeks back, I wrote a post about Rick Joyner and The Oak Initiative, one of the "prophetic intercessor" groups that, like Lou Engle and The Call and Cindy Jacobs and General International, are becoming increasingly active within the more "mainstream" Religious Right.

Like The Call and Generals International, The Oak Initative is a member of the Religious Right "supergroup" known as The Freedom Federation and Joyner, along with Engle and Jacobs, participated in the group's "Awakening" conference earlier this year, sitting on a panel on "Pastors and Political Activity" with Rick Scarborough and Richard Land.

Later this month, The Oak Initiative will be hosting its first ever Oak Convention in South Carolina which is scheduled to include Joyner, Samuel Rodriguez, Lance Wallnau, Jerry Boykin, Cindy Jacob, and others where they will discuss methods for gaining influence over their version of the 7 Mountains: 

At this time it is important to establish a leadership forum that focuses on the current major areas of dominant influence and crisis, including:

1. Spiritual and moral
2. Government and politics
3. Media
4. Economic
5. Social Issues
6. Environmental
7. Education

To do this we want to establish a leader and a council to address each of these spheres. Organizing this will be one of the major goals of the August Oak Convention. We will be establishing each of these with a Chairman, Asst. Chairman, and a staff devoted to both Research and Communications. The purpose of these councils will be to provide an accurate assessment of the great issues of the times, and to propose answers and solutions to them.

And among the ways they hope to do this is by creating their own "Christian Intelligence Service" and building their own media empires [PDF]: 

The formation of a Christian Intelligence Service

This is for training an army of “watchmen” who are skilled in discerning important issues or events as they unfold, and can gather basic information about it that is accurate and trustworthy.

One of the number one issues that seems uniform across nations and cultures at this time is a deteriorating trust in the media for accurate reporting and information. Most of the people on earth have never had government information sources that they trusted to be accurate, but in recent times even the most trusted governments have had a significant collapse of integrity and trust. If this void is not filled with truth and accurate information, the level of deception of the people will continue to grow. We believe this is a basic call of Christians who are supposed to be a light in their times, which is more than just preaching the gospel, but it is also exposing what is hidden in darkness with the truth that will set people free. We believe fundamentally that all men were created to be free, and that the basis of all freedom is truth.

The formation of media outlets with the highest standards of integrity and accuracy

We intend to build a world-class media outlet that is built more on trust and integrity than just style and technology, though we intend to be good at these too. The body of Christ has the people resources to quickly become a great light that shines in this darkness with truth. We have the ability to almost immediately reach virtually every major nation, and most of the world’s population with news and information for less than the cost that is now paid to a single executive at present media outlets.

And of course the aim of all of this is decidely political, as demonstrated by this new ad The Oak Initiative has posted on its YouTube page which declares that America regrets electing President Obama and the Democrats because they are a threat to this nation and so "we're coming after you" and "now you will pay" in 2010: 

Update: Apparently this video has been around for a while and is not an original Oak Initiative ad.