As the finale of our extended celebration of Religious Freedom Day, we are honored to welcome George Washington as a guest front pager.  

Mr. Washington was, among many things, the Commander in Chief of the Continental Army, the President of the Constitutional Convention, and the first President of the United States.  In the second year of his presidency,  he received a letter from Moses Sexias, Warden of the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island,  (now called Touro Synagogue) in which Sexias noted his people's previous second class citizenship and praised the new era of equality:  

Deprived as we heretofore have been of the invaluable rights of free Citizens...  behold a Government, erected by the Majesty of the People -- a Government, which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance -- but generously affording to all Liberty of conscience, and immunities of Citizenship...

 Washington's famous reply echoed Sexias' words in an unambiguous and memorable fashion of which the contemporary Religious Right and the pols who pander to them are incapable, and would rather that we forget.  -- FC

Given the secretive nature of the movement, documenting the involvement of public figures in C. Peter Wagner's New Apostolic Reformation can be a time-consuming project. Over the last two years I've been piecing together evangelical pollster and author George Barna's considerable involvement in the NAR. Now, as with many such projects long in the gestation, it's become suddenly politically relevant - because Barna is one of three New Apostolic Reformation figures in Newt Gingrich's recently created Faith Leaders Coalition.

Gingrich's claims about an Alinsky-Obama-socialist conspiracy against Christianity and freedom echo conspiracy theories from the Tea Parties, Glenn Beck, the John Birch Society, and the 1990s Militia Movement.

To an alarming extent the frame of Obama bringing socialism to America includes allegations that Obama and his allies are part of a vast left-wing conspiracy. Whether this conspiracy tracks back to Marx or Satan is open to debate. Further to the Right are recruiters for White supremacist groups suggesting the conspirators are Jews or Muslims using Obama as a puppet. This is not a healthy dynamic for civil society--and we have seen it before.

I have just confirmed with the Newt 2012 headquarters that Apostle Dutch Sheets has endorsed Newt Gingrich and will join the campaign's national Faith Leaders Coalition. (Link to copy of press release.)

Sheets is an internationally known leader of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) and one of the apostolic authorities over the 50-state prayer networks. Other NAR apostles, including Lance Wallnau, promoted Gingrich through these networks prior to the South Carolina primaries. Participants were encouraged to read an 18-page letter from Jim Garlow citing reasons for his support of Gingrich and the validity of his spiritual "restoration," and also directed participants to a link to audio of a January 12 conference call with Gingrich and South Carolina pastors.

It's impossible to measure the impact of the NAR's support on the outcome in South Carolina, but it is becoming clear that NAR leadership is getting in line behind Gingrich despite the endorsement of Rick Santorum by James Dobson and other "old guard" of the Religious Right.

It has been a long time since Randall Terry, the founder of the notorious anti-abortion group, Operation Rescue, has been anything more than a gnat on the political landscape. Where once he commanded an army of anti-abortion activists, a series of financial missteps, and personal indiscretions, including his being censured by his church, the Landmark Church of Binghamton, New York, "for a pattern of sinful relationships and conversations with both single and married women," according to a Washington Post report nearly twelve years ago, had relegated him to the outer Mongolia of the radical right.

These days, however, Terry is planning to change all that by playing an active, and he knows disturbingly provocative, role in this year's Super Bowl festivities.

While Terry won't be singing with Madonna at halftime, he intends to raise his voice, and profile, by paying for graphic anti-abortion commercials that must be shown in a number of television markets airing the Super Bowl.

Want to see and hear what the current leading Republican Presidential candidates say when they speak to the leading Christian Right activists?

Held annually in Washington, DC, the Values Voter Summits are the most important public meeting of the organized Christian Right in the  United States. It is also a place where Presidential hopefuls try out different frames and memes.

In this T2A post we have a long segment where Gingrich field tests his attack dog rhetoric against liberal elites in 2010; Ron Paul declares that the Federal Reserve creates "counterfeit" currency and that Obama is not King, but God is King in 2011; and Mitt Romney is, well, Mitt Romney in 2009.

The links in the next section are huge, raw, unedited mpg video files that I videoed for notes and fact-checking quotes for my journalistic and scholarly articles on the Christian Right.

This essay, (part of our continuing celebration of Religious Freedom Day) which draws on material I have previously posted here at Talk to Action, appears today at Truthout, a national news site which "provides an independent platform for  in-depth investigative reporting and critical analysis, to reveal systemic injustice and offer transformative ideas to strengthen democracy."

Separation of church and state, a defining issue in our history, is also a defining issue for Republican presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum. The emergence of Romney as the GOP frontrunner and the rallying of top religious right leaders to Santorum at a meeting in Texas over the Martin Luther King Day weekend casts the two politicians' views in sharp relief.

Both candidates have staged high-profile speeches to define themselves in relation to John F. Kennedy's famous 1960 campaign speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association - a speech that has served as the model for how politicians balance religion and public life for a generation. But when they stepped up to the podium to define themselves in the bright light of history, each pandered to the religious right.

The Ocean City Mayor's Prayer Breakfast on January 26 will feature Lt. Gen. (Ret.) William "Jerry" Boykin, a regular on the end times prophecy and Islamophobia speaking circuit.  Boykin is a board member of the Oak Initiative, a religio-political organization that produces and disseminates video of Boykin claiming that the nation is in the grips of a Marxist insurgency. In November, the Mayor's Prayer Breakfast in Independence, Missouri hosted Kamal Saleem, also featured in the Oak Initiative videos and media. Both Boykin and Saleem were part of the preparations for TheCall Detroit in Michigan in 2011, including claims by Saleem that President Obama is trying to impose Shariah law.  Boykin spoke to audiences in Michigan about applying military principles of warfare to "spiritual warfare" against Islam.

Of the three billionaires - Sheldon Adelson, Jon Huntsman, Sr. and Foster Friess -- that Politico's Ken Vogel wrote about recently in a piece titled "3 billionaires who'll drag out the race," we probably know the least about Rick Santorum's pal, Foster Friess, who by all accounts has nothing to do with the ice-cream franchise, but had a lot to do with keeping the former Pennsylvania Senator's campaign afloat as the Republican Party's presidential sweepstakes played out in South Carolina.

Foster Friess is "a major financial backer of a super PAC supporting Rick Santorum called the Red, White and Blue Fund," Politico reported. "'I guess if Newt's got $5 million, it makes sense that ... [Santorum] should have a little bit,' said Friess, who has known Santorum since the 1990s and shares his conservative views on social and foreign policy issues."

One of the great ironies of American society is that most abortions in the U.S. are caused by conservative Christians. Read the statistics: Forty nine percent of pregnancies in this country are unintended, a rate that has been painfully stable for almost 30 years. Almost half of those pregnancies end in abortion. Or, to turn it around, over 90% of U.S. abortions are the result of accidental pregnancy. U.S. rates of unwanted pregnancy and abortion far exceed any other country with similar economic development.  So does our rate of religiosity.  The fact that we are outliers on both is not a coincidence.

As part of our continuing celebration of Religious Freedom Day, we are honored to welcome George Mason as a guest front pager.  Mason is the principal author of the The Virginia Declaration of Rights, which was unanimously ratified by a Virginia revolutionary congress in 1776 just prior to the American Revolution.  The Virginia Declaration was influential in the thinking and the language of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, as well as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the First Amendment. -- FC

It appeared that the contest for anybody-but-Romney might swing Rick Santorum's way following support of major Religious Right leaders at the Texas conclave last weekend. But news quickly leaked out of the continuing division among the attendees of the Texas gathering, including charges that the published results did not accurately reflect the strength of Ginrich's support.  Following are seven reasons why the thrice-married Newt Gingrich has much more support among the Religious Right than might be expected.

The 60th annual National Prayer Breakfast will take place Feb. 2 here in Washington, D.C.

This event is privately sponsored by a shadowy fundamentalist Christian group called "The Family" (also known as the Fellowship Foundation). You might remember them from a few years ago, when a nasty sex scandal erupted over their infamous "C Street House" and the rowdy escapades of some of its residents.

The New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) was temporarily in the spotlight following the endorsement and participation of leading apostles and prophets in Rick Perry's Houston prayer event in August. Interest in the NAR dwindled as Perry's campaign failed, but the movement is still making significant inroads with apostles and prophets touted as emerging leaders in a Religious Right increasingly dominated by the Pentecostal/Charismatic sector. It is inside the larger evangelical and Charismatic world that NAR leadership has been working aggressively to defend their movement, not to a general public mostly unaware of its existence.  Attempts to prove that the NAR adheres to "classic Christian creeds," has included publishing a statement of belief.

Many of us thought that Rick Santorum's (R-PA) political career was over when he lost his seat to to Democrat Bob Casey, Jr. in 2006.   But recent events suggest Santorum is enjoying an historic comeback.  His second place finish in the Iowa caucuses and the backing of 150 national Religious Right leaders seeking to unify behind a single candidate may make him the main conservative alternative to Mitt Romney.

But all this may signal not only a revival of Santorum's political career, but the neoconservative philosophy.