Since closing its Center for Reclaiming America for Christ in April, Coral Ridge Ministries has adopted an audacious five-year media outreach strategy to increase its current audience from three to thirty million by 2012. CRM set out to achieve this goal with the release of two “documentaries”: Hate Crimes Laws: Censoring the Church and Silencing Christians, in which CRM joins Tony Perkin’s Family Research Council to portray hate crimes prevention legislation as anti-Christian, and Global Warming: The Science and the Solutions, in which CRM seeks to downplay the serious warnings of scientists and trivialize global climate change.
The propaganda in “Censoring the Church and Silencing Christians” is both factually inaccurate and offensive, as demonstrated by the insistence of Dr. Frank Wright of the National Religious Broadcasters that the hate crimes law would silent churches by outlawing anti-gay sermons. The truth is that speech is explicitly protected in the proposed law. Not only does the video try to scare people through its false claims about “thought police,” it also resorts to personal attacks by, for example, suggesting that Matthew Shepard, the young college student whose brutal murder in 1998 brought hate crimes to the political forefront, was beaten and left to die for making unwanted sexual advances toward his murderers during an illegal drug deal.
“Censoring the Church and Silencing Christians” – Matthew Shepard
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Dr. Richard Land, President of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, who appears in both Coral Ridge documentaries, refers to the hate crimes prevention legislation as a “bad idea on steroids” and attacks the proposed legislation for supposedly allowing the government to limit free speech and promote “acceptable” speech. But when it comes to the Federal Communications Commission regulating speech he considers “filth and indecency,” Land is all for it, judging by this press release issued by his office on July 10th.
“Censoring the Church and Silencing Christians” – Richard Land
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For its part, Coral Ridge’s anti-global warming documentary claims that human activity is not the cause of an overstated global warming problem. Once again, Richard Land weighs in to lash out at Al Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, calling it a “crocumentary” and insisting that God has given humans ‘dominion’ over the Earth to use as they wish. Dr. Calvin Beisner, Associate Professor of Historical Theology at the conservative Knox Theological Seminary, disputes claims by many experts in the scientific community by asserting that taking steps to reduce green house gases will fail to significantly reverse climate trends.
Interestingly, many of the conservative leaders that helped produce the anti-global warming documentary are closely associated with the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance (ISA), which played a leading role in trying to derail efforts within the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) to take a public stand against global warming. This documentary is a direct challenge to the growing popularity of “Creation Care,” the environmental movement within the evangelical church, and the release of this documentary reveals the growing chasm between evangelical leaders.
The release of these documentaries suggests that CRM, following the closure of its Center for Reclaiming America, is moving full-speed ahead with its efforts to build influence through a strategy of straight-to-video activism. Based on these two productions, though, CRM may need to change its motto from “Proclaiming Truths that Transform” to “Transforming the ‘Truth.’”
