Less than ten days after taking office in January 2001, President George W. Bush gathered a host of religious folks at the White House and announced his faith-based initiative, the cornerstone of his compassionate conservative agenda.

It became, as The Christian Science Monitor's G. Jeffrey MacDonald recently termed it, "one of the flash points of the culture wars that raged as he came to office in 2001."

However, the clashes of Bush era culture wars pale in comparison to the enmity of Religious Right activists who denounce President Barack Obama's all-out "War On Religion." This flies in the face of reality, since less than a month into his presidency, President Obama signed an executive order creating the White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships.

[NAR leaders have ties to major U.S. politicians including Sarah Palin, Rick Perry, and Newt Gingrich and have led politicized prayer events attended by Senators Sam Brownback and Jim DeMint. To underscore the political nature of the NAR, Wagner Leadership Institute faculty member Julius Oyet claims to have helped conceive of Uganda's Anti Homosexuality Bill, and WLI teacher Mary Glazier, a longtime friend to Sarah Palin according to Charisma magazine, claims to have in 1995 hounded out of Alaska a women accused of witchcraft.]  

For any religious tradition with a heavily political bent, the ability to receive from God new teachings that have the force of scripture is powerful - for example, enemies can be targeted and demonized with ease. On February 3, 2008, C. Peter Wagner, perhaps the most significant leader in the movement he has named and played a key role in organizing, the New Apostolic Reformation, led a ceremony at the Everett, WA-based Sonrise Chapel near Seattle, for the commissioning of ICA apostle Dan Hammer as the chancellor of the newly-founded Wagner Leadership Institute Seattle. Prior to commissioning Hammer, Wagner declared that "the Holy Spirit still speaks to us today and we can hear from the Lord, and He gives us information, actually, that you can't find in any of the 66 books of the Bible--even though none of it contradicts the Bible."

A couple weeks ago, many people were introduced to Christian nationalist pseudo-historian David Barton when Jon Stewart had him on The Daily Show to interview him about his New York Times bestseller The Jefferson Lies. People were apparently quite curious about who this Barton guy was -- so much so, in fact, that he became the #1 Google trend the next day.

Right now, I'm scrambling to quickly write a little book specifically debunking all the lies in Barton's new book. I hadn't planned to post any excerpts of what I'm writing until my book was closer to being done, but yesterday I came across one particular lie from Barton that is so incredible that I just have to share it. For anyone who's ever wondered just how far Barton will go, I think this one answers that question.

Part Two

It was a pivotal moment in American evangelicalism when Christianity Today featured a New Apostolic leader on its May cover.  More shocking is that this historic development included claims by Heidi Baker that her only tie to the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) has been annual attendance at a conference.  The author and editorial staff failed to challenge this assertion or to include information about Baker's significant role in the NAR or her role in Revival Alliance, a partnership that brought together the six major New Apostolic ministries of Baker, Che Ahn, John Arnott, Randy Clark, Bill Johnson, and Georgian Banov. It was an incomplete view of one of the most powerful women in the apostolic and prophetic movement and promoted Baker's ministry without providing readers any information about the dramatic changes in structure and ideology that New Apostolics have introduced into the evangelical world.

Over the past few months, there have been hunks of bad news about Groupon, the original "Deal of the Day" web site, which currently has 16 million users. According to Reuters, the once innovative company "has lost more than half its market value this year on concern about waning demand for its daily deals and the company's accounting troubles."

Now, Morality in Media, a longtime Christian conservative organization is adding to Groupon's woes by launching a nationwide boycott of the company, claiming that Groupon is shamelessly offering discounts to businesses involved in hardcore pornography.

The religious right, with Billy Graham himself weighing in, has just convinced North Carolina voters to undermine their own economic well-being. I doubt many North Carolina residents asked, in the abstract, whether they would vote to sabotage their own state's economy would answer "yes!" But that's what 61% of Tar Heel state voters have probably just done.

He was on his school's tennis team and the student-athlete honor roll, but now Kevin Forts, rather than preparing for his college graduation, is banned from his college campus for the foreseeable future. Forts' banning is due to either his arrest for assaulting his girlfriend on campus, and/or his recent acknowledgement that he an admirer of Anders Behring Breivik, the self-confessed Norwegian mass murderer. Breivik is now on trial in Norway for last July's bombing in central Oslo that killed eight people, and a shooting rampage at a political youth camp on the island of Utoya that killed 69 others, most of whom were teenagers.

Forts, a student at Assumption College, a Catholic college in Worcester, Massachusetts, recently garnered a huge chunk of his fifteen-minutes by claiming, in an interview with a Norwegian tabloid, that Breivik is a patriot and that his action "demonstrates a sense of nationalism and a moral conscience."

Last month I wrote about Religious Right pseudo-historian David Barton's new book The Jefferson Lies, which attempts to prove that Thomas Jefferson was an orthodox Christian and not really a strong advocate of church-state separation.

Reading that thing just about drove me bonkers. Barton wrenches material from context, tells half of the story and sometimes just makes things up. It's an appalling example of what I call "historical creationism."

The cover story of the May issue of Christianity Today features Heidi Baker, a significant leader in the "apostolic and prophetic" movement or New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), who misleads readers about her role in the movement. What is worse is that the author and editorial staff of Christianity Today failed to question the claim that Baker's only ties to the NAR are through her loyalty to leaders of the Toronto Blessing and participation in their annual Catch the Fire conference.

Amidst all the noise, there are some quietly dramatic developments unfolding in Washington, DC that may change the course of the battle over access to reproductive health care.  There is an organization that recognizes that what they and allied groups have been doing has not been working, or at least not well enough.  They also recognize that the Religious Right has gained the upper hand in the states where antiabortion regulations and legislation are being proposed, and sometimes passed, at an extraordinary rate.  And to take these realities head on, they are changing what they do, and how they do it.

As North Carolina voters prepare to vote on an amendment that would constitutionally prohibit recognition of same-sex marriages (along with civil unions and domestic partnerships), I am reminded of a similar battle that took place in the state of Oregon exactly twenty years ago.

On May 8, a group called Come Pray With Me plans to hold a prayer service in Statuary Hall at the U.S. Capitol.

This is kind of a big deal. Statuary Hall isn't some sort of public facility that anyone can use. Groups have to get permission from the congressional leadership to hold events there, and it's not often granted.

He is a billionaire several times over, a supporter of conservative causes, candidates, and organizations, including campaigns of the anti-immigrant former Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo and the Intelligent Design-peddling Discovery Institute, and he's been a backer of anti-gay rights initiatives. He owns The Weekly Standard, a highly partisan conservative magazine, recently sold the conservative Examiner newspapers, but rarely will speak to the press.

After devoting years of building a massive Disneyesque entertainment complex in Los Angeles called L.A. Live - which tapped into tens of millions of government dollars -- he now has his eyes on building a $1 billion stadium in L.A. and securing a National Football League team for the city. He's also been putting the finishing touches on a deal that would have his company running the Coliseum complex in Oakland, California.

He is a native Kansan, and although he's not related to the multi-billionaire Kansas Koch Brothers, he certainly shares many of their interests.

We're talking Philip Anschutz, who, in 1999, was labeled the nation's "greediest executive" by Fortune magazine.

Anyone who saw Jon Stewart's interview of Christian nationalist pseudo-historian David Barton on The Daily Show last night probably noticed something missing -- there was almost no discussion about what's actually in Barton's new book, The Jefferson Lies. Instead of talking about the book, Stewart opted for talking about more general topics, and Barton was able to walk away completely unscathed.

When I first got Barton's book a little over a month ago, I decided to do what I usually do with Barton's crap, and made a video debunking some of the book's many lies. This was when I did not anticipate that Barton's book would become a bestseller and make the leap into the mainstream, climbing to #11 on Amazon and #25 on the New York Times bestsellers list.

Yesterday Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council (FRC), issued a rather hysterical email appeal for funds. No news there. Perkins does that all of the time.

This particular message, headlined "Help stop secular tyranny," took a line that's increasingly popular with the Religious Right these days: "Woe is me! We're being persecuted."