Religion

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As we have been noting over the last few weeks, all of these people who have spent the last several years calling on Christians to take dominion over the Seven Mountains have suddenly started downplaying their Dominionist agenda.

New Apostolic Reformation guru C. Peter Wagner has been especially active in trying to downplay the Dominionist aspect of his movement and just yesterday spent twenty minutes telling Voice of America that they were merely seeking to "influence" society and have no interest in establishing any sort of theocratic society.

The problem for Wagner is that there are all sorts of writings and videos of him openly advocating such things produced back before he became so cautious about his choice of language.

For instance, there is this letter he wrote in 2007 in which he cited Lance Wallnau's teachings on the Seven Mountains as the foundation for his work and declared that Christians were mandated by God to "do whatever is necessary" to institute their Dominion Theology: 

Lance's trademark teaching relates to what he calls the seven "mind molders" or the "seven mountains." These have now become a permanent fixture in my personal teaching on taking dominion, and I have referenced Wallnau in The Church in the Workplace as well as in my forthcoming book Dominion! In my view it is not possible to get an operational handle on how to initiate corporate action toward social transformation without taking into account the seven mountains or what I like to call "molders of culture." The seven are religion, family, business, arts & entertainment, government, education, and media.

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Our theological bedrock is what has been known as Dominion Theology. This means that our divine mandate is to do whatever is necessary, by the power of the Holy Spirit, to retake the dominion of God's creation which Adam forfeited to Satan in the Garden of Eden. It is nothing less than seeing God's kingdom coming and His will being done here on earth as it is in heaven. This includes the need to govern apolitically, as well as to embrace spiritual warfare techniques that neutralize the control of our adversary within the functional and territorial spheres of authority to which we have been assigned. To do this, we know that we must be in communion, we must receive revelation, and we must apostolically and prophetically proclaim that revelation.

Jerry Boykin appeared on Bryan Fischer’s show Focal Point yesterday where the two anti-Muslim activists found common ground in their belief that mosques should be banned in the United States. Boykin, who has appeared with Rick Perry, Sarah Palin, and Mike Huckabee, has launched some of the most sordid attacks against Muslim-Americans since he left the military, following an investigation that he violated rules due to his partisan and anti-Muslim rhetoric. He has argued that “Islam itself is not just a religion” and “should not be protected under the First Amendment,” so it is no surprise that he appeared with Fischer, who advocates banning the construction of mosques and barring First Amendment protections for Muslims.

While speaking with Fischer, Boykin declared, “no mosques in America.” He later added that Muslims do not have First Amendment rights because Islam “is not just a religion, it is a totalitarian way of life.”

Watch:

Fischer: What do you think we ought to do with regard to our immigration policies and with regard to issuing permits to build mosques in order to build mosques in order to deal with this threat, immigration and mosque building, what do you think we should do?

Boykin: Seal the borders and eliminate sanctuary cities and they’ll go home. No mosques in America. Islam is a totalitarian way of life; it’s not just a religion.

Fischer: Now how do you respond to the First Amendment? Now I believe the same thing that you do, we should not allow the building of any more mosques in America, everyone is a potential recruiting or training ground for terrorist activity. They will bring the First Amendment up, your response when people say they have a First Amendment right to build their mosque anywhere they want.

Boykin: If it’s a religion that’s the truth. But Islam, we need to think Sharia, it is not just a religion it is a totalitarian way of life. A mosque is an embassy for Islam and they recognize only a global caliphate, not the sanctity or sovereignty of the United States.

Rick Joyner has recently been collaborating closely with Frank Gaffney, one of the country’s leading anti-Muslim activists who called Joyner one of his heroes, and the two discussed the need for a House Anti-American Activities Committee, warned of the rise of “Chrislam,” and feared that Muslims are taking control over the “seven mountains” of influence.

Yesterday on “Prophetic Perspectives,” Joyner, who heads MorningStar Ministries and the Oak Initiative, said that “the Lord is using Islam” to send judgment on America and other countries “for their perversions and for their abortions” in the form of terrorist attacks and creeping Sharia. Joyner, who previously claimed that Hurricane Katrina was a “judgment from God” against homosexuality, asserted that Europe’s secular society has opened the continent up to God’s judgment in the form of oppression under Islamic rule.

Watch:

Sometimes God’s judgment, His discipline does come to us through other people, even through our enemies. And as I’ve shared and I will boldly say, I believe radical, extremist Islam is God’s judgment upon the nations for their perversions and for their abortions. I’m going to establish this, I know not many people are saying anything like that. But just as the Lord used the heathen nations around Israel to bring judgment upon Israel whenever they fell into apostasy, the Lord is using Islam in that way today. You don’t want Jesus? You don’t want Christianity? As many nations in Europe has said. We don’t want any semblance of religion or Christianity? Guess what they’re getting? They’re gonna get religion, they’re gonna get one they don’t want, and they’re gonna be oppressed by it. If they turn to the Lord this doesn’t have to happen.

Earlier this month, Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy accused New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie of “misprision of treason” for appointing lawyer Sohail Mohammed, who is Muslim, to the state’s Superior Court. While speaking with Rick Joyner of MorningStar Ministries and The Oak Initiative yesterday, Gaffney said that more people need to be investigated for misprision of treason - the failure to report treasonous activity to a federal official - a federal offense punishable by up to seven years in prison.

After lauding the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was notorious for using ‘red scare’ tactics in government and the entertainment industry in the 1950’s, Gaffney called for the establishment of a “House Anti-American Activities Committee” that would investigate people involved in treasonous activities or their concealment.

Joyner, who Gaffney called one of his “personal heroes,” is also an anti-Muslim conspiracy theorist who previously argued that educators are replacing the Founding Fathers with Muslims in history textbooks and that Christianity and Islam are on the verge of merging into a religion called Chrislam.

Watch:

Joyner: Yet we have people who are part of an organization whose mission statement is to destroy America and we’re putting them in top level government positions, I mean this is at best, it is shocking incompetence on the part of those who have taken a vow to defend us from these very ones. So we want to be bold about that, you know some people when they see this they’re starting to call it, this treason on an unbelievable level, it could be treason, it could be incompetence, both could be deadly.

Gaffney: There is evidence of at best incompetence and at worst, you could argue, it’s treasonous. There’s something else that I would like to introduce as a concept I didn’t frankly know of it myself until fairly recently, also a felony offense in the U.S. code, it’s called misprision of treason. And that is a crime in which an individual, doesn’t have to be a government official but it would apply there but also to private citizens, who knows or has reason to know that seditious activity is under way and does nothing about it. I think we need to include that in the possibilities here because what our friend and co-author Andy McCarthy has called willful blindness may actually be a criminal offense under our statutes and people need to be held accountable.

I’ve called in a column I wrote a couple of weeks ago in the Washington Times for a new congressional oversight committee. Back in the Cold War as we talked about in our first program we wrestled with another totalitarian ideology that was determined to destroy us back when the McCarren Act was enacted, we had what was then called the House Un-American Activities Committee to explore what was going on, who was doing it, who was helping them do it, what the implications would be if it weren’t stopped. I think at the very least a new House Anti-American Activities Committee.

• Julie Ingersoll @ Religion Dispatches: Dominion Theology, Christian Reconstructionism, and the New Apostolic Reformation.
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• Kate Sheppard @ Mother Jones: Are Virginia's New Abortion Rules the Worst Yet?

For the last several weeks, the Religious Right has been hyping allegations from Kelly Shackleford and his Liberty Institute claiming that the Department of Veterans Affairs has instituted a ban on "the use of Christian words or phrases at veterans’ funerals."

Liberty Institute has even launched a website called "Don't Tear Us Down" which claims that "Jesus is not welcome at gravesides" and the campaign is receiving support from other Religious Right groups like the Family Research Council and the American Family Association.

Today the New York Times took a look at the controversy and discovered - shockingly - that the claims being made by the Religious Right are totally misleading.  As the NYT explains, the Bush administration instituted a policy in 2007 that "prohibits volunteer honor guards from reading recitations — including religious ones — in their funeral rituals, unless families specifically request them." 

In essence, the policy states that volunteer groups are not allowed to attend military funerals and inject their religion in to it unless their presence is requested by the family.  Conversely, if a family does want to included such prayers in the service, they have that right as well.

But to the Religious Right, preventing outside groups from attending funerals and offering prayers at services where they are not wanted or requested is a violation of the religious freedom of the volunteers:

The plaintiffs, aided by a conservative legal group, the Liberty Institute, contend they should be allowed to use a Veterans of Foreign Wars script dating from World War I that refers to the deceased as “a brave man” with an “abiding faith in God” and that seeks comfort from an “almighty and merciful God.” The institute has broadcast the dispute nationwide with slick videos and a Web site declaring that “Jesus is not welcome at gravesides.”

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The lawsuit, which alleges religious discrimination by the government, and videos have generated angry letters and Internet commentary against the Department of Veterans Affairs, as well as demands from members of the Texas Congressional delegation, mostly Republicans, that the Obama administration fire the Houston cemetery director, Arleen Ocasio.

Department of Veterans Affairs officials say that the original policy, enacted under President George W. Bush, resulted from complaints about religious words or icons being inserted unrequested into veterans’ funerals. They noted that active duty military honor guards, including the teams that do funerals at Arlington National Cemetery, say almost nothing during their ceremonies.

“We do what the families wish,” said Steve L. Muro, the under secretary for memorial affairs. “I always tell my employees we have just one chance to get it right.”

Though two of the largest veterans organizations, the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars, have criticized the Houston National Cemetery, some veterans’ advocates have risen to the department’s support. Those advocates say that families who want prayers can have them and assert that the Liberty Institute has blown the dispute out of proportion to embarrass the Obama administration.

Lawyers with the Liberty Institute deny that ... The Department of Veterans Affairs said that funeral directors, rather than the veterans themselves, should tell families the details of the V.F.W. or other rituals, to give those families room to make their own decisions on what is recited.

“If the family wants prayers, the family will get them,” said John R. Gingrich, the department’s chief of staff.

Unsurprisingly, Bryan Fischer is not happy that religious leaders won’t be addressing a ceremony marking the ten year anniversary of the September 11th attacks in New York. A spokesman for Mayor Michael Bloomberg said that they wanted to keep the focus “on the families of the thousands who died on Sept. 11,” and the Wall Street Journal noted that previous events marking the anniversary similarly did not include religious speakers and that there “will be an interfaith event recognizing first responders on Sept. 6.”

But Fischer believes that Bloomberg is up to something more sinister. By failing to include religious speakers, Fischer insists that Bloomberg is “playing favorites, and his favoritism is heavily stacked toward Muslims.”

According to Fischer, such public prayers should “be reserved for Christians and Jews,” (although he goes on to leave out the latter when he calls for prayer to be restricted to “the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ.”) Fischer explains that the Founding Fathers would have wanted it that way because Muslims “pray to a different god.” Of course, as we pointed out on Friday, the AFA made clear that Christians and Jews “do not worship the same God” and that Christians should build friendships with their Jewish neighbors to convert them.

No word if Fischer had fault with the Prayer for America service that shortly followed the September 11 attacks, which included Jewish, Protestant, Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Hindu, Muslim and Sikh prayers.

Multiculturalism has so infected Mayor Bloomberg’s view of America that if he allowed anybody to pray he would feel compelled to include a Muslim imam on the platform, praying a Muslim prayer and invoking the Muslim god at whose direction the 9/11 hijackers killed 3000 Americans in cold blood.

He knows the American people would never stand for that. But if he held the ceremony and allowed only Christian pastors and Jewish rabbis to pray, he’d get hammered by secular fundamentalists, muliticulturalists and Muslim advocates for playing favorites.

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As an aside, the mayor’s bloviation about the government not playing favorites when it comes to religion is just bilge. He’s clearly playing favorites, and his favoritism is heavily stacked toward Muslims. He is vigorously defending the building of the offensive Ground Zero mosque while his administration at the same time is doing everything in its power to keep the Orthodox church that was destroyed on 9/11 from being rebuilt.

But there is no cultural, historical or constitutional reason why clergy participation on 9/11 should not be reserved for Christians and Jews. This is for one simple reason: this nation was founded on the Judeo-Christian tradition and on faith in the God revealed in the Old and New Testaments. It has always been this God to whom Americans have turned in times of danger, and there is no reason why this God should not be the God to whom prayers are offered on 9/11.

Muslims, meanwhile, pray to a different god. Their god, they insist, has no son. The God of Christians, of course, does have a Son. Paul frequently opens his epistles by making it clear that the God to whom he prays is the “God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 1:3), to distinguish the God of the Scriptures, the true and living God, from all the Roman gods.

This God, the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, is the God to whom the Founders prayed. It is this God who is the source of “the Laws of Nature” and is in fact “Nature’s God.” This God is the “Creator” who is the source of our “unalienable rights.” They even dated the Declaration of Independence from the year of Christ’s birth, and referred to him in so doing as “our Lord.”

So can public officials restrict public prayers to prayers directed to the God of the Founders? Absolutely. In fact, you can’t get any more American than praying to the same God to which they appealed as the “Supreme Judge of the World.”

As we've been noting, it sure is amazing how all of these journalists and Religious Right activists are suddenly telling everything that dominionism doesn't exist and that, even if it does, it is really just a left-wing scare tactic.

Just last week, Lisa Miller wrote a piece in the Washington Post where, as our colleague Peter Montgomery noted, she dismissed any concerns about dominionism as little more than an attempt to raise "fears on the left about 'crazy Christians" in order to "paint them as freaky and dangerous."

Miller admitted that "extremist dominionists do exist," but said she views are relegated to fringe figures like Pat Robertson:

Christian conservatives in America are not more militant than ever. Pat Robertson, a Christian minister, ran for president in 1988. Robertson was, actually, a dominionist. “There will never be world peace until God’s house and God’s people are given their rightful place of leadership at the top of the world,” he wrote.

On today's broadcast of "The 700 Club," Robertson was asked if he was a dominionist and, like seemingly everyone else these days, claimed that he had never even heard of it and asserted that, whatever it was, he most certainly wasn't one:

It is rather remarkable how we seem to know so much about the tenets of dominionism while the Religious Right claims to be universially ignorant about it ... especially given that pretty much everything we have learned about it has come from studying them.