James Robison

It has been reported that James Robison has been gathering Religious Right leaders and mobilizing them to defeat President Obama in 2012.  While some reports that have suggested that Robison is seeking to rally them behind Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Robison himself is making it clear that he is less interested in "who" the candidate is than he is in laying out "what" needs to be done to save America:

I am declaring to everyone with ears to hear: Now is the time to return to God. Stand up like a mighty army! Pierce the darkness, storm the gates of hell, set captives free, correct our course, reclaim the land, make God the “who” in our personal and national life, and point people to the “what.” We will never find the right “who” until we know the right “what.” When the population understands the “what to do,” we can find the “who” to help lead and insist that every “who” does the right “what.” 

To that end, Robison is laying out just "what" needs to be done so that Christians can decide on "who" will be the best candidate to support: 

• As the Pledge of Allegiance states, we are a nation under God; and as our currency proclaims, our trust is in God—not “gov.” If national leaders do not acknowledge what America’s founders understood concerning the importance of divine providence, there will be no recovery.
• All life must be protected and seen as precious with unlimited potential however unexpected or planned for. Remember, we can clearly learn from Nazi Germany that something can be legal but also very evil (i.e., the horrific extermination of the Jews and others considered less than perfect or unimportant).
• America must stand in the best interests of Israel against the evil forces calling for its destruction.
• Marriage is between a man and a woman and must be viewed as sacred. The strength of our nation depends on strong families, and national policy must protect marriage.
• There are moral absolutes. No person’s failure reduces or redefines the standards carved in stone by the finger of God and revealed in His Word. We must find a way to stop judges and courts from misinterpreting the Constitution and writing their own laws.
• Success and prosperity may be mishandled by some, but the potential for success that produces opportunity for all and prosperity at different levels is not the problem. Those we elect must keep the free market free, healthy and under the influence of people who understand the importance of personal responsibility.
• There are forces of good and evil, and they must be wisely and rightly defined, discerned and resisted. A strong national defense is critical. Radical Islam and terrorism are serious threats. Extreme environmental activism is, also.
• Depending on the federal government as our source is idolatry. We must control it, or it will control us. Stop the madness! Hitler believed that Germany needed a government over the people, not of the people. God deliver us from this kind of insanity.
• Out-of-control spending, mismanagement of the people’s money and excessive, intrusive regulation is as wrong and immoral as stealing. Spending must be brought under control now, at whatever sacrifice. This does not include foolishly giving the government more of the people’s money to waste or mismanage.
• “We the people” must be understood to mean that we all have a “dog in the show.” We are all responsible. We can’t just lay the load and responsibility on others, no matter how many twisted thinkers try to play the blame game. The opportunities and possibilities to succeed is not the problem. Don’t blame opportunity, begin inspiring and teaching responsibility. We must find a way for every citizen to help in some way shoulder the load. This can be accomplished without being unfair and riding on anyone’s back.
• Deal with excessive, foolish taxation and revamp the tax code along with the IRS so we can rejoice together because it will stimulate economic growth. This would create jobs and ultimately enable us to better assist the suffering, the weak, helpless and poor—not with just a handout, but with compassionate hands extended. The church can and must set the example.
• Let the people go. Turn them loose and behold the miracle made possible when people are truly free to be productive while assuming personal responsibility. Nehemiah rebuilt the wall in 52 days. Impossible? Not with God!
• The church must be delivered from the spirit of religion and filled with the Holy Spirit, leading us to the supernatural unity that produces holy harmony. National leaders must rise above partisanship and reason together, seeking effective solutions to serious challenges.

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:

Family Research Center president Tony Perkins joined James Robison on Life Today to discuss the dire consequences of the separation of Church and State that has allowed the “unrighteous” to rule. Perkins and Robison, who was Mike Huckabee’s mentor and recently addressed FRC’s Watchmen on the Wall summit, both agreed that God will judge America for not voting for politicians aligned with the Religious Right.

Watch:

In 1976, Mike Huckabee dropped out of seminary school so that he could go to work for James Robison:

In 1976, after college, Huckabee was enrolled at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, in Texas, when he came into contact with the televangelist James Robison. It was Robison who famously declared that he was “sick and tired of hearing about all of the radicals and the perverts and the liberals and the leftists and the Communists coming out of the closet,” and was ready “for God’s people to come out of the closet” and take back the nation. Despite Huckabee’s inclination toward a forgiving Christianity, Robison’s passion drew him in. He dropped out of seminary after one year to take a job as Robison’s director of communications.

Back in the early days of the Religious Right, Robison was a key player and one who, even today, admits that he made the likes of Jerry Falwell and Bob Jones seem downright liberal. 

Robison eventually dropped out of the movement, but has made a reappearance over the last year or so, which explains why he was the featured speaker at last night's Watchmen on the Wall conference where he demonstrated how he got the nickname "God's Hit Man" thanks to his ability to "give 'em so much Hell nobody will ever want to go there":

• Is anyone surprised that Janet Porter used Jerry Boykin's crazy conspiracy video about Obama as the basis for her latest WND column?
• James Robison continues to work to re-establish himself as a Religious Right leader.
• Rick Scarborough really, really wants pastors to get involved in politics.
• I suspect this has more to do with poor technology than high demand because nobody has cared about the Christian Coalition in years.
• Did you know Liberty University has a nationally ranked paintball team?  Weird.
• Finally, what are the chances that any Religious Right group will actually criticize Lisa Miller for kidnapping her daughter and fleeing the law?  Try zero.

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.

Finally, to get a sense of just how Garlow sees the interconnection between economic and social issues, he explains how legal abortion is causing today's unemployment problems:

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.

I don't really have anything insightful to say about this, but I just wanted to mention how odd it is that I keep hearing this same line from Religious Right leaders claiming to have been in some meeting or other gathering at which leaders where trying to create a plan of political action when one (always unnamed) pastor said they just cannot participate because they "would lose half their congregation."

I have heard this several times in recent weeks and months, but only noticed how odd it was today when I heard both Glenn Beck and Chuck Colson say it.

Beck claims that someone said it during a meeting he attended with James Dobson and James Robison and others where they all decided to come together and take a stand with Beck to defend religious liberty with the exception of "one person [who] said 'I can't, I'll lose half my congregation" (scroll ahead to around the 55 second mark):

Chuck Colson uses the exact same line in this recent video urging people to sign the Manhattan Declaration, claiming "a megachurch pastor in a major American city was asked by a colleague to sign the Manhattan Declaration, his answer was 'I can't, I'll lose half my congregation" (scroll ahead to the one minute mark):

Now what are the chances that two different religious leaders in two completely different situations gave exactly the same explanation as to why they couldn't support these separate political efforts?

And does Beck really expect us to believe that there was one religious leader attending a meeting with the likes of himself, Robison, and Dobson who declared himself unable to take a political stand out of fear of alienating half his congregation? What exactly is a person like that doing at a meeting with professional Religious Right activists in the first place? 

I am sure that by now you have seen posts about the profile on Mike Huckabee in the New Yorker in which he admits that his opposition to gay marriage stems, at least in part, to "the ick factor" while also joking that he'd be fully in support of gay marriage if his only choices were Nancy Pelos or Helen Thomas. Typical Huckabee.

Anyway, I want to focus on some of the other interesting nuggest contained in the piece, like this:

In her kitchen is a watercolor painting of a house surrounded by trees, with the words “To Janet Huckabee, 1995 full-time homemaker of the year, presented by the Eagle Forum and Phyllis Schlafly.”

The profile also looks at how Huckabee got his start back in 1970s working for right-wing evangelist James Robison:

In 1976, after college, Huckabee was enrolled at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, in Texas, when he came into contact with the televangelist James Robison. It was Robison who famously declared that he was “sick and tired of hearing about all of the radicals and the perverts and the liberals and the leftists and the Communists coming out of the closet,” and was ready “for God’s people to come out of the closet” and take back the nation. Despite Huckabee’s inclination toward a forgiving Christianity, Robison’s passion drew him in. He dropped out of seminary after one year to take a job as Robison’s director of communications.

“The way the Moral Majority movement was actually started was there was a rally that James Robison did in 1979 that I helped coördinate,” Huckabee said. “It was all because of the local television station in Dallas throwing him off the air, because, in a sermon that he preached on television, Robison said homosexuality is a sin. Think: 1979, it wasn’t really an outrageous statement. Anyway, they got some complaints and they told him he couldn’t be on television. Well, Texas? Are you kidding me?” More than ten thousand Christians came to a “Freedom Rally” at the Reunion Arena, in Dallas, to protest Robison’s expulsion. “There was this amazing energy coming up from these evangelical Christians,” Huckabee said. “I remember almost being frightened by it. If someone had gotten to the microphone and said, ‘Let’s go four blocks from here and take Channel 8 apart,’ that audience would’ve taken the last brick off the building.”

Today, the name Robison is almost unknown, but he is still around and active - in fact, the video I posted of Jim Garlow just last week was taken from an interview he did with Robison earlier this year.

Back in the Religious Right's heyday in the 1980s, Robison was a key leader and so this seems like a good time to repost this video we put together back in 2007 to provide a sense of just who Huckabee dropped out of seminary to follow: 

Last week, there was speculation swirling that John McCain was considering choosing one-time presidential rival Mike Huckabee as his vice-presidential running mate and over the weekend, Huckabee himself made it abundantly clear that he really, really wants this job:

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said yesterday he’d like to be John McCain’s running mate.

“There’s no one I would rather be on a ticket with than John McCain,” said Huckabee, who was a stronger than expected challenger against McCain for the Republican presidential nomination.

“All during the campaign when I was his rival, not a running mate, there was no one who was more complimentary of him publicly and privately. . . . I still wanted to win, but if I couldn’t, John McCain was always the guy I would have supported and have now supported.”

The conventional wisdom is that picking Huckabee would go a long way toward helping McCain shore up the right-wing base that has been somewhat reluctant to support him, given that McCain’s own outreach to that community has little to show so far beyond the controversy generated by the endorsements of John Hagee and Rod Parsely.   

Considering that McCain’s own efforts to woo the Right have been such a disaster, it might behoove his campaign to think long and hard about bringing Huckabee on board because if he climbs aboard the Straight Talk Express, he’ll be bringing his own right-wing baggage along for the ride. 

By now, everyone is familiar with Huckabee’s 1992 statement that the government should have been quarantining those infected with HIV or his statement on the campaign trail that the US Constitution should be amended to meet “God's standards,” or his view that the role of government was to promote Jesus Christ,  so McCain ought to expect to be asked whether he agrees with those views.  He can probably also expect to get lots of grief from former supporters of Mitt Romney, who did not particularly appreciate Huckabee’s attempts to use his own Christian faith as a means of highlighting Romney’s Mormonism and thereby undermine his campaign efforts to reach out to right-wing voters.  

While the McCain camp might consider itself prepared to deal with these sorts of issues, it’ll have its work cut out when it tries to explain away the people who endorsed Huckabee … people like Janet Folger, for instance, who think that the marriage ruling in California is a sign of the End Times.   

Folger was an avid Huckabee supporter from the moment he won the Values Voter Debate which she organized and for which she hand-picked the choir that sang “Why Should God Bless America?,” after which she anointed him the "David among Jesse’s sons."  She went on to pen columns claiming that only Huckabee could prevent Hillary Clinton from throwing all Christians into prison and save her fantasy world from “evil queen and her dragon of slaughter.”  

For her efforts, she was tapped by Huckabee to serve as co-chair of his Faith and Values Coalition, so McCain can look forward to answering questions about whether he agree with her efforts to pray for bad weather to keep voter turnout down, her statements that supporting Barack Obama is like supporting Nazis, and the front-group she launched to attack both Mitt Romney and McCain himself.

And McCain can also look forward to answering questions about Rick Scarborough who, like Folger, served on Huckabee’s Faith and Family Values Coalition.  Scarborough, a self-described “Christocrat” heads Vision America and, when he’s not out palling around with Alan Keys, has a penchant for suggesting that evangelical leaders are dying off because the nation has turned its back on God, suggesting that Christians will have "the blood of martyrs on [their] hands"if they don't oppose hate crimes legislation, blaming "the church" for just standing by and allowing the election of "unrighteous leaders" in 2006, saying that opponents of the War in Iraq are committing treason, organizing conferences designed to highlight the “War on Christians and Values Voters,” and penning books entitled “Liberalism Kills Kids” among other things.

In fact, McCain and Huckabee would have a difficult time explaining away pretty much the entirely of Huckabee’s Faith and Family Values Coalition, which included dozens of right-wing activists like of Don Wildmon, Mike Farris, Mat Staver, Kelly Shackelford, and Phil Burress; not to mention Huckabee’s consorting with the likes of Tim and Beverly LaHaye and Steve Hotze, who once signed a manifesto declaring:

    • A wife may work outside the home only with her husband's consent

    • "Biblical spanking" that results in "temporary or superficial bruises or welts" should not be considered a crime

    • No doctor shall provide medical service on the Sabbath

    • All disease and disability is caused by the sin of Adam and Eve

    • Medical problems are frequently caused by personal sin

And let’s not forget Huckabee’s first job working with James Robison:

Considering that the McCain campaign chalks up the Hagee and Parsley controversy to poor vetting, presumably they intend to do a better job in the future; but if they pick Huckabee, it’ll be obvious that they haven’t learned their lesson at all.  While they may think that Huckabee’s primary contribution to the McCain effort will be his ability to bring along a rabid following of extreme right-wing supporters, allowing McCain to focus on courting the general electorate, it is possible that they will instead end up spending a lot of time trying to distance themselves from controversy such blatant pandering will inevitably generate.