Writing for the Religion News Service, journalist Daniel Burke's new article Obama's spiritual cabinet: Seven people who shape policy, tend the presidents soul, published in the National Catholic Reporter and elsewhere, indirectly raises some rather troubling questions. One of the seven alleged "spiritual advisers" to Barack Obama Burke's article lists is Lt. Carey Cash, who has openly advocated the use of America's military to impose a Christian theocracy.
According to Hawaii pastor Cal Chinen's church newsletter, on the first Wednesday of every month leaders from Transformation Hawaii join Hawaii's Lt. Governor James "Duke" Aiona in his official conference room and pray. Aiona is running for the Hawaii governor's seat in the 2010 election.
Transformation Hawaii is a local chapter of a sprawling international ministry called the International Transformation Network. Based in Minneapolis, the ITN has been linked to the effort behind Uganda's notorious Bill #18 before the Ugandan Parliament that gay rights activists have dubbed the "kill the gays bill."
Duke Aiona has participated in Transformation Hawaii rallies against a Hawaii civil unions bill and in December 2004 Aiona, speaking from a Hawaii public school in a telecast statewide prayer event, declared that "Hawaii belongs to Jesus."
But the Transformation Hawaii interpretation of Christianity, as evidenced in the following excerpt of an interview with one of the founders of the effort, Cal Chinen, is somewhat less than mainstream. In the interview, Chinen gleefully describes how Christmas and Santa Claus have been banished from a suburb of Buenos Aires.
As TheCall founder Lou Engle told a Boston church in 2006, "I became the roomate of Senator Brownback - for seven months!" The most dangerous terrorist, according to Sam Brownback's friend Engle, is God: a point to warm Osama Bin Laden's heart. Video from the 2006 church sermon links the Kansas Republican Senator directly to rising, radical pastor Engle, who appears to advocate domestic terrorism and civil war and has publicly declared homosexuals are possessed by demons.
TheCall founder Lou Engle has a long historically of rhetorically encouraging domestic terrorism.
On November 16th, 2009, as noted by the Rachel Maddow Show, Lou Engle led Republican senators Sam Brownback and Jim DeMint, and Congressional representatives Michelle Bachmann and Randy Forbes, in a nationally televised November 16 religious event, organized by the Family Research Council, a "Prayercast to stop Health Care Reform."
For national-level politicians such as Brownback, DeMint, Bachmann and Forbes to appear with Engle in such a forum constitutes endorsement, especially because Lou Engle is a religious leader and the event was overtly religious.
For all practical purposes, for the duration of the FRC's "Prayercast against health care reform" Lou Engle functioned as a pastor to Brownback, DeMint, Bachmann and Forbes.
But Engle has an especially close relationship with Senator Brownback. As I've described in a new story, Will Lou Engle take his mega-antigay TheCall to Uganda?, Lou Engle and Sam Brownback were condo-mates for the better part of a year. Did Brownback pay any rent to Engle ? Curious minds want to know.
Video [link to exact time signature in footage of Engle speech] shown in this story features footage from a September 25, 2006 Lou Engle speech, at a Boston, MA church, in which Engle describes how Kansas Senator Sam Brownback came to live in Engle's Washington DC condominium for seven months.
"The most `dangerous terrorist' is not Islam but God."
The US is still home base for Christian fanaticism and many of the new leaders of the religious right believe they either have a direct line to God - or hint they might be semi-Divine. Lou Engle unabashedly claims he has Holy water running in his veins: "Wherever I go I spit, but it's holy water."
With nationally known old lions of the Christian right such as Jerry Falwell dying off or retiring, this younger leadership group is coming to the fore. And politicians know it - though they may not know exactly what they're buying into.
[image, left: Lou Engle leads rally]
The most dangerous terrorist, according to Lou Engle, is God. It's a point that might warm Osama Bin Laden's heart. In a document titled "Doctrine of the Shedding of Innocent Blood," [PDF of document], Engle writes,
"Where there is shedding of innocent blood, there is no atonement for the land. There is a blood pollution problem on America's soil. The most "dangerous terrorist" is not Islam but God. One of God's names is the avenger of blood. Have you worshipped [sic] that God yet."
In his book Sons To Glory, Paul Jablonoskwi, who is sympathetic to Engle's cause, described a 2002 Lou Engle/TheCall event in Kansas City:
"What I witnessed in Bartle Hall on December 31st 2002 was the antithesis of radical Islam. Instead of people wanting to blow themselves up to kill others, I saw young adults who were so radically in love with Jesus that they were willing to become martyrs for the sake of saving other people's lives. Someone from the stage asked, 'who here feels like they are called to die as a martyr for the sake of the gospel of Jesus Christ?' Many hands went up throughout the stadium."
[image, right: Lou Engle anoints Mike Huckabee]
Last summer, Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee traveled to a Virginia Beach megachurch where an evangelist unknown to most of secular, mainstream America anointed and blessed the two GOP presidential hopefuls.
Only days before Huckabee and Gingrich received Lou Engle's endorsement at Rock Church, on Sunday, May 31, 2009, Dr. George Tiller, one of the few medical professionals who would perform late term abortions, was gunned down in the lobby of his Wichita, Kansas church. The next morning CBS's Jeff Glor reported:
"We did speak with the accused shooters' ex-wife yesterday. She said she was not surprised this happened and that she believed Roeder wanted to be a martyr for the cause."
Lou Engle's personal website and his organization websites still feature extreme rhetorical attacks [1, 2] posted prior to George Tiller's assassination.
In one of those posts, Engle wrote:
When at an abortion clinic in Miami, a living-breathing baby is born during an abortion procedure and the baby is thrown away - alive into a plastic bag, the nation is appalled and the doctor is charged with two felonies and faces prison time.
If that very same abortion had not been botched, the doctor would have gone home in peace having put to death a viable human being before it was born. What white-washed insanity!
Today, the country faces another instance of insanity as President Obama has nominated Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius to the highest healthcare post in America, the Secretary of Health & Human Services.
As governor of Kansas, MS. Sebelius has consistently vetoed restrictions against late-term and partial birth abortions that are performed on babies from 6th-9th months. She has also protected one of the most prolific abortion doctors in America, Dr. George Tiller from Wichita. His renowned 30-year practice has overseen the death of nearly 60,000 babies.
In the early 1980's, KKK and Aryan Nations strategist Louis Beam helped popularize a tactic known as "leaderless resistance" in which high profile propagandists would incite terrorist acts carried out by autonomous individuals and cell groups. During the 1990's leaders of the Army of God, wielding militant anti-abortion rhetoric, helped inspire terrorist bombings of abortion clinics and the assassination of doctors who provided abortions. Now, a decade later, one can hear such incitement coming from the stage at Lou Engle's TheCall events. As California journalist Karen Ocamb writes,
members of the Army of God were out in force at Lou Engle's TheCall antigay Prop 8 rally in San Diego, along with Jim Garlow and James Dobson, three of the guests on Perkin's webcast about abortion and healthcare...
Lou Engle and "Senator Brownback": roommates in martyrdom?
One pertinent question is whether Lou Engle's ideological extremity has been quietly adopted by America's GOP power elite. In fact, such a question should be posed to Republican Sen. Sam Brownback, Lou Engle's roommate for seven months, according to Engle. As Engle told congregants at a Hispanic church in Boston, Mass, on February 19, 2006,
"I was mobilizing young people to go to Boston in 2001. The gathering ..... came 11 days after 9/11. Many people from New England called and they said `we can't come. It's not safe.' It ticked me off. Why could Muslims die better for their faith than we can? We're able to die better than Muslims. We're living for self-preservation rather than bringing the Kingdom. We cannot live for self preservation.
Esther was brought into a moment of time when she had to choose between living for self- preservation or say `if I die, I die'. And right now I've got young people right there in DC, who will say, `We're not going to leave this house of prayer until that heinous decree of abortion has ended and if I die, I die.' Alleluia!
As I was mobilizing for Boston, I said to kids in California `we need to dig the dwells of revival in Harvard and close the door of false ideologies that have come through Boston'. Amazingly a week later, I received a phone call from the US Senator from Kansas, Senator Sam Brownback, he's a godly man. He calls me up, he says `Lou, I'm in England, New England. You need to dig the dwells of revival in Harvard and close the door of false ideologies that have come through Boston'. Almost word for word. A Senator was prophesying to me, glory to God.
In fact, it was prophesized to me that I would be connected with a man named Senator Sam Brownback from Kansas. But I forgot about the prophecy, so when I rented a condo in DC to mobilize for TheCall, a week later I received a phone call from the owner of the condo and he said `There's a man named Senator Sam Brownback. His condo just burnt down. He wants to know if he could stay in your condo'. I became the roommate of Senator Brownback for seven months.
We began to get dreams he would be the president of the United States."
[note: above transcript, provided by The Lion Of Judah Church in Boston, MA, of Lou Engle's Sept. 25, 2006 speech at the church, was slightly inaccurate and has been amended to correspond with audio and video of Engle's speech. See end of story for more details.]
Nazirites
On December 16th, Lou Engle, flanked by bearded young male disciples pledged to sexual purity whom Engle calls nazirites, led Senators Sam Brownback and Jim DeMint and House Representatives Michelle Bachmann and Randy Forbes in a telecast group prayer service against the health care reform bill now before Congress. The same day, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Show picked up the event and broadcast footage from Engle's November 1st, 2008 pro-Proposition 8 stadium rally in San Diego, during which Engle declared that legal gay marriage would unleash "sexual insanity" upon America and made calls, from onstage, for acts of Christian martyrdom to stop legal abortion and gay marriage. On December 6th, 2008, Engle's TheCall staged it's first African event, in Kenya. Uganda may be next.
So, who is Lou Engle ?
[image,right: Lou Engle's young followers at an antiabortion protest. The red tape over their mouths, with the word "life" has been perhaps Lou Engle's most successful viral marketing success. The symbolic gimmick is promoted by Engle's Bound 4 Life ministry.]
Lou Engle's organization TheCall was in the forefront of the fall 2008 pro-Proposition 8 campaign against legal gay marriage in California and set up 8 field offices in the state. Leaders in the campaign claim they fielded as many as 70,000 volunteers. Engle's son, Jesse, performs exorcisms to cast out "homosexual spirits" and has established a ministry in San Francisco's Castro District which, says Lou Engle, is "where the homosexuals boast the dominion of darkness."
In a September 25, 2007 Las Vegas rally, Lou Engle told a crowd of his followers,
[excerpt from 2007 Engle Los Vegas speech. see here for extended transcript. right: audio excerpt from Engle sermon]
"My son Jesse, he's nineteen years old. God has given him dreams, to go to San Francisco to launch a house of prayer, one block from the Castro District - where the homosexuals boast the dominion of darkness. He's going there with weeping in his heart. With the dream that prayer is stronger than the dominion of that spirit.
...He said to me, "dad," he said, "as long as I'm there I don't think the Lord will judge San Francisco." [boos, angry murmur from Engle's audience]...
He's 19 years old. He's starting to cast out homosexual spirits out of our new converts. It's scary as hell. The whole thing's scary. But fathers are to send their sons into the darkest places."
Engle has suggested and also predicted that legalized abortion will lead to a second American civil war. Engle appeared, in the documentary "Jesus Camp," alongside Becky Fischer - who specializes in evangelizing children and has stated she would like Christian children to learn to be as dedicated as young Islamic militants ready to lay down their lives for their cause.
[Top, Left: Becky Fischer admires the dedication of Hamas' young suicide bombers ? Top, Right: Lou Engle predicts legalized abortion will lead to a second American civil war, TheCall Kansas City, December 31, 2007. Bottom, Left: Lou Engle calls for martyrs, at TheCall San Diego, November 1, 2008. Bottom, Right: Lou Engle, at Jesus Camp, indoctrinates children as future antiabortion movement warriors.].
Lou Engle's fevered rallies often betray a disturbing militancy. During Engle's November 1, 2008 Qualcomm Stadium TheCall event, which served as the capstone event to a massive anti-gay marriage push spearheaded by Engle's activists in California during summer and fall 2008, one of Engle's young acolytes called out to thousands filling the stadium,
"So God right now I ask, father, we celebrate the martyrs right now, God, and we ask, God, for a great martyr movement to go out of Qualcomm. I believe God is going to mark many of us with a spirit of martyrdom. And that is a glorious thing."
Lou Engle followed up with, "Even under martyrdom, God, give me the grace - fasting twelve hours, with prayer: these are seeds are martyrdom. Days are coming when we're going to have to risk our lives to stand for truth in this society. Say, lift your voices and say, 'God, mark me now! Mark me - as a man or women of the cross and of Jesus Christ.' Say, 'mark me!'
[below: Lou Engle's November 1, 2008 TheCall event, featuring calls for acts of Christian martyrdom to stop gay marriage and legal abortion]
Avengers of blood for Proposition 8
Over the last two decades, the American Christian right has gone truly global and established power centers in the developing world which now lend support to the long march in the United States towards extending Christian dominion over key sectors of society such as government, business and finance, education, media, and religion.
Engle's role as leader of TheCall has now received some mainstream media notice - but the source of his influence is still largely unknown. Lou Engle is one of Peter Wagner's "prophetic elders" who, along with Sarah Palin's prayer group leader Mary Glazier, sits on Wagner's prestigious Apostolic Council of Prophetic Elders, one of the key leadership groups wielding influence over a sprawling, global new incarnation of the religious right known as the New Apostolic Reformation.
It's a religious tendency, rapidly becoming the new face of the religious right, which welcomes women and minorities but features an ideology just extreme as that of the bigoted, nativist branch of the Christian right that Engle's movement will soon overshadow.
Engle has described his movement as an "underground church" and he has stated, in an interview for a documentary video about his movement,
"Right now they haven't seen the true church. There's an underground church that the world has no idea that exists. Once they get the stage, it's over with."
While the American left has heavily focused on the Tea Party movement, leaders in Engle's arising tendency, which I've described as the The Rainbow Right, wield major electoral influence with minority groups and can infiltrate Washington-based Democrat "centrist," "common ground" efforts with ease. National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference President Samuel Rodriguez, one of Peter Wagner's apostles, has been listed on the TheCall's advisory board (recently wiped from TheCall's website, link is to Internet Archive version of page) which is almost a who's-who of Wagner's movement.
[video, below: Lou Engle, in February 19, 2006, at a Boston Hispanic church, talks about his relationship with his former condo-mate Senator Sam Brownback]
Four of the Christian leaders appearing in the "PrayerCast" event alongside Brownback and DeMint played dominant roles in a two and a half hour key motivational and planning conference call held July 30th, 2008 for leaders of the Christian right who organized the successful campaign to block gay marriage in Arizona, Florida, and California. Those leaders are: Jim Garlow, Bishop Harry Jackson, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, and Lou Engle of TheCall.
Engle's operation was so central to the California pro-Prop 8 drive that one of the four campaign timeline maps, distributed to members of that July 30th, 2008 conference call detailing major elements and events for the anti-gay marriage campaigns in AZ, FL, and CA, was dedicated solely to TheCall's effort in California.
[ below: map/timeline for TheCall's pro-Prop 8 effort in CA ]
Pepsi is to be commended for rapidly disavowing what appeared to be Pepsi sponsorship of a virulently anti-gay rap concert in Uganda during which, according to a news report, a popular Jamaican performer sang about wanting to slit the throats of gay men.
The Ugandan branch of an evangelical group called "College of Prayer" played, as a new talk To Action report details, a major and little noticed role organizing and inspiring legislators behind the pending Anti Homosexuality Bill due to come before Uganda's parliament early in 2010. Homosexuality is already legally a crime in Uganda that can lead to lifetime prison sentences, but the new bill would mandate the death penalty for homosexual acts and critics have called it "genocidal" and charged that the bill could require the execution of HIV positive Ugandan citizens.
College of Prayer members in Uganda's parliament have spearheaded the push for the new anti-gay bill and, as a story posted on the main College of Prayer website quotes College of Prayer Canada head Rev. David Chotka,
"I have three-twelve members of the Canadian Parliament who have heard about what God is doing in Uganda and would like to attend the Parliamentary COP in Uganda next year. They are interested in bringing the College of Prayer to the Canadian Parliament."
The article concludes, "It seems that God continues to expand our spheres of influence. The extraordinary favor of God is resting upon us. All glory to His name!
As the Talk To Action report, Rick Warren's Dissertation Advisor Leads Network Promoting Uganda Anti-Gay Bill details, the president of Uganda's College of Prayer, Julius Oyet, has extensive ties to networks associated with C. Peter Wagner's New Apostolic Reformation. Peter Wagner is perhaps the world's leading expert on church growth, and he is an unabashed Christian supremacist. Wagner was also advisor for Rick Warren's 1993 dissertation... on church growth. The report traces ties and parallels between Rick Warren's and Peter Wagner's ideologies and global networks.
"The wealth of the wicked is stored up for the righteous," says Thomas Muthee - before he anointed and blessed Sarah Palin, as a political leader, on October 16, 2008.
Muthee is a top leader and inspirational figure in a movement, closely tied to Sarah Palin, whose top leader proposed his followers "plunder" the wealth of "atheists" and "pagans".
Top leaders in Palin's Spiritual Warfare network hold conferences on the idea of the great, coming wealth transfer, from the "Godless" to the "Godly".
A new 36 page report [read online / PDF file], from an independent research team that has specialized in studying Sarah Palin's faith, contains ground breaking information on a religious movement Sarah Palin is closely and intimately tied to. ( see ful report, online or PDF )
A new 36 page report [read online / PDF file], from an independent research team that has specialized in studying Sarah Palin's faith, contains ground breaking information on a religious movement Sarah Palin is closely and intimately tied to.
A new 36 page report [read online / PDF file], from an independent research team that has specialized in studying Sarah Palin's faith, contains ground breaking information on a religious movement Sarah Palin is closely and intimately tied to.
A video starring Thomas Muthee as a prayer warrior and witch hunter was released in 1999. "Transformations" was the first in a series of videos that would soon become the heart of the Transformations franchise, a network of prayer warriors, ministries, organizations, and businesses, brought together for the purpose of promoting Christian theocracies.They share the goal of bringing their own communities and nations into the "Kingdom." These videos would play a major role in the teaching and promotion of spiritual mapping and spiritual warfare. Following is the story of those videos and how the Transformations brand has propelled the development of an emerging international belief system, the New Apostolic Reformation, and how it is bringing that movement into your community and your government.
Part One
Overview
The Transformations videos are advertised as having been viewed by 200 million people in 70 languages. A star of the videos is none other than Thomas Muthee - the same man whose anointing of Sarah Palin has become an issue in the 2008 presidential campaign. But the videos are important for far more reasons than Palin and Muthee. Muthee's words, just prior to anointing Palin, on invading and infiltrating society and government are not aberrations. They reveal the disturbing ideology of a growing and powerful religio-political movement in the U.S. and around the world.
An international explosion in "taking communities" through spiritual warfare and expulsion of demons, from individuals and from entire geographic areas, has impacted denominations around the globe. The popularizing of these methods is sourced in the massive effort to evangelize the world in the decades prior to the year 2000. Much of the dissemination of these ideas was through parachurch organizations (religious organizations not associated with a particular denomination), that emerged from Pentecostalism and developed networks around the globe. In the 1990s, a missions and church growth expert named C. Peter Wagner found a way to coalesce these activities into an organized structure now called the New Apostolic Reformation. His colleague, George Otis, Jr. simultaneously developed the Sentinel Group which has produced the series of Transformation videos and resulting Transformations organizations promoting these spiritual warfare ideas. The videos have been a major factor in the global promotion of "prayer warrior" networks specifically linked to these efforts.
The franchise has been so successful that the "Transformations brand" has a distinct meaning to many worldwide. The videos, which have been used as the central teaching tool of the movement for nearly a decade, reveal not just another grandiose program of global evangelizing -- but an explicitly theocratic political movement of consequence in a number of countries - including the United States. There are Transformation-related groups in almost every state and every major city.
The New Apostolic Reformation and the associated Transformations "franchises" aim to unify the church around the globe and take control of the world for the "Kingdom of God." This movement has evolved into its own distinct structure with networks of Apostles and Prophets around the globe who believe that that Christendom should be restructured under their authority to accomplish the task of bringing together a unified end time church that will help to usher in the Kingdom of God.
These believers are not waiting for the Rapture but believe they must combat evil themselves through aggressively taking control of society and government. The Transformations videos have been used as a major promotional tool for the advancement of the methods for taking control - spiritual mapping and spiritual warfare. The videos demonstrate the taking control of communities and nations through large networks of "prayer warriors." whose spiritual warfare is used to expel and destroy the demons that cause societal ills. Once the territorial demons, witches, and generational curses are removed, the "born again" Christians in the videos take control of society. The videos then claim that these communities experience an "alignment with God" which allows for miraculous curing of poverty, disease, environmental degradations, and other societal ills.
The video series glorifies the movement towards theocratic governance, real or imagined, in Uganda, Fiji, Colombia, and Guatemala, as well as the U.S. They are used as a tool for building "Transformations" brand organizations that in turn glorify the concept of authoritarian religious social engineering. The "stars" of these videos have already played a role in promoting witch hunts in Africa, endorsing death squads in Guatemala, the de-Catholicizing of Brazil, and the mythology of miraculous curing of AIDS in Uganda. The Transformations promote a complete merger of church and state and offer a glimpse of the "Kingdom" to come, when the world is purged of all other religion, and "Spirit-filled, born again" Christians take control of the leadership of all societal and government institutions.
In case this sounds esoteric and far away, it is important to underscore that this movement is influential and powerful enough to have encompassed not only the Governor of Alaska, but also Ted Haggard, the now disgraced but once nationally renowned head of the National Association of Evangelicals. These leaders are not the exceptions, but the rule, as the movement comprises hundreds of organizations and thousands of churches across the country. Their activities fly under the radar of popular media by operating through hundreds of stealth evangelizing programs, with the goal of fulfilling this dream. However, the movement is currently receiving more scrutiny due to the revelation of the anointing ceremony of Sarah Palin by Thomas Muthee and other ties between Palin and the New Apostolic Reformation.
This article is an overview of the history and activities of the Transformations brand and the use of spiritual mapping and spiritual warfare as a part of the New Apostolic Reformation. It is an illustration of the extent to which "Transformations," both the video series and the associated ministries and organizations, are impacting policy and government in the United States and around the globe. It includes a section on the significance of Palin's anointing ceremony in context of the Transformations phenomenon. The report is approximately 15,000 words and separated into Part One and Part Two with the following subsections.
Part One:
contents
-The Unique Evangelizing System of the Transformation Videos and the New Apostolic Warriors
-The Videos of the Transformation Series
--Transformations I
--Transformations II
--Transformations IV (Let the Sea Resound)
-Source of the Transformations: Sentinel Group, and the New Apostolic Reformation
-The Significance of Muthee's Anointing of Sarah Palin
-Statistics
Part Two:
contents
-Militant Anti-pluralism: Who is the Enemy?
-The Queen of Heaven: the Demon of Religious Corruption
-The Prince of Greece: the Demon of Humanistic Thinking
-Militancy
-Use of Reconciliation Events
-Apostolic Messianic Judaism and Hebrew Roots
-Taking Control of the Kingdom: Business
-The Lonely Resisters: Objecting Fundamentalists and Walkaways
-Transformations Activities in the United States and the World: A Few Examples
The Transformations phenomenon has played a significant and underreported role in policy decisions in the US and in other nations, worldwide. These videos and the organizations they have spawned have been used to promote social and charitable programs with the underlying goal of eradicating all other religious expression other than their own, and enforcing government based on their specific religious beliefs. The idea that society can be transformed through the expulsion of demons and generational curses is becoming deeply entrenched in social and government policy in the areas of emergency response, physical and mental health, crime prevention, and others.
The Unique Evangelizing System of the Transformations Videos and the New Apostolic Warriors
The New Apostolic Reformation is the name of an emerging international phenomenon that has sources in Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity, but has now become a distinct entity. The movement and its precedents are also referred to as the "Third Wave" or "Joel's Army." The Transformations videos serve as a media tool to market the worldview of the New Apostolic Reformation.
The New Apostolic Reformation was formed as an institution through the efforts of C. Peter Wagner. More details on the history of this movement are in the section "Sources of the Transformations." Wagner has developed a network of 500 Apostles, most with Apostolic networks of their own over which they have authority. In addition to this structure there is a national and international structure of "prayer warriors" overseen by Apostles. Initially named the Spiritual Warfare Network, this structure has been renamed twice, first to the United States Strategic Prayer Network (USSPN), and again recently to the United States Global Apostolic Prayer Network (USGAPN). There is also an international network under the authority of Wagner. Additionally other "prayer warrior" groups have been formed for specific purposes such as the Governmental Apostolic Prayer Alliance, under Apostle Chuck Pierce, and the Reformation Prayer Network under the authority of Apostle Cindy Jacobs. These groups along with the Transform Nations, Transform World, and other "transforming" franchises, have organized the "prayer warriors" to pursue the agenda demonstrated in the Transformations videos.
The video series has introduced an international audience to the unique evangelizing tools of the New Apostolic Reformation such as spiritual mapping and the expulsion of "strategic level territorial demons." The leaders of the movement have departed from traditional evangelism, turning it into a pseudo-science and developing detailed systems for targeting the demons which they believe prevent Roman Catholics, Jews, Mormons, Muslims, and other Protestants from embracing their particular belief system. The main message of the video series is clear - social transformation can only be achieved through correct belief, and overcoming resistance is accomplished through the destruction of the enemy - whomever or whatever is the obstacle. This includes not only other faiths, but other Protestant churches also. Another well-developed idea that is prophesied throughout the movement is a civil war in the church in order to purify it for the end times.
The videos and related books have introduced an entire vocabulary based on spiritual warfare. Some of the terms are familiar but they take on new meaning in this context, and are concepts that would have been unthinkable in most conservative evangelical denominations thirty years ago. There are different levels of spiritual warfare including ground level, occult level, and strategic level. There are names and categories for the territorial spirits. Strategic level territorial warfare is the encounter of demons whose power controls entire cities or cultures. The enemy to be bound is the demonic stronghold or strongman. Spiritual mapping is the scouting and detailed mapping of the territory to document the sources of demons and generational curses. This exercise is conducted on foot, block by block, through communities. Gates and portals through which demons gain access are of particular significance. The participants are anointed by God for different assignments such as Watchmen and Intercessors, and the ability to see the location of demons. The outpouring of these spiritual gifts or powers provides the recipient with the tools used to accomplish the mission of conquest.
The Transformations series presents vignettes of cities and nations that they claim have already been impacted by the takeover process of the Transformations brand of "born again and Spirit-filled" Christians. In each vignette a geographic area is presented in the "before" and "after" stages. The before stage is plagued with horrendous social ills, environmental degradation, crime, poverty, and illness. Then, the "Spirit-filled" Christians from across the denominational divides come together in intercessory prayer and fasting to bring miraculous transformation: empty jails, healing of AIDS, the rebirth of coral reefs and repopulation of wildlife, booming agriculture with extra harvests of giant vegetables, improved public schools, and communities of religious unity.
The process is outlined with crystal clarity in the videos:
The first video introduces the concept of spiritual mapping to locate the demons which are to be expelled. The areas are then purged of these demons and generational curses, as well as witchcraft of all types. Demonic influence is destroyed through intensive group prayer, as in the case of the supposedly related burning of a Transcendental Meditation Center in Hemet, California, seen in Transformations I, as well as numerous accounts of the expulsion or death of witches and witchdoctors. This allows the "Spirit-filled" Christians to take control of government and societal leadership, and bring about miraculous transformations to the community. These communities are then filled with smiling people celebrating their freedom from the bondage of the previous social ills. The message is clear -- a world controlled by "Spirit-filled" Christians and purged of everything else will be transformed; a utopia, free of sickness, poverty, and crime. It is the ultimate faith-based program.
The Videos of the Transformations Series
The "Transformations" are a series of videos and DVDs produced by The Sentinel Group, the media arm of the New Apostolic Reformation. The videos are marketed and presented through churches and ministries as documentaries despite the fictional nature and inaccurate material in the productions. The first video featuring Thomas Muthee was produced in 1999. Since its debut there have been eight more videos in the series. This report includes some of the major leaders and significant issues in three of the first eight videos.
Transformations I (1999)- Cali, Colombia; Kiambu, Kenya; Almolonga, Guatemala; and Hemet, CA
Tranformations II (2001)- First Nations in Canadian Arctic, Outer Hebrides, and Uganda
Entering into the Firestorm of God's Grace, described as training for transformation of church, statehouse, and marketplace and including Thomas Muthee, George Barna, Jack Hayford, John Mulinde, Harold Caballeros, and others.
Approaching Fire - First in a new series under a new media line called Different Angle Films, which is advertised as part of a series of tours called Fire Quest.
As part of the movement franchise, the Sentinel Group website also features a list of Transformation Associates and Ministries under the name Transform Nations. However, the related ministries worldwide far outnumber the groups listed on their website.
The following section is an examination of the major themes as well as major figures in Transformations I, II and IV (Let the Sea Resound). In each of these videos, George Otis, Jr. is featured interviewing and interacting with the community and government leaders, including police chiefs, mayors, legislators, cabinet members, and prime ministers, along with the evangelists leading the spiritual warfare efforts.
The story of Muthee's witch hunting featured on the Transformations I video has been widely publicized - and debunked. The video presents the story of Muthee and his prayer warriors transforming Kiambu, a village in Kenya, from a crime ridden horror to an oasis of peacefulness.This is done through the expulsion of Mama Jane, who Muthee accuses as the "source of witchcraft hovering over the place." Like most of the Transformations stories, this one can easily be disproved. Mama Jane Ngemba is alive and well in Kiambu, a large and densely populated suburb of Nairobi. Link to "Mama Jane Speaks.
However, in Kenya mobs recently have killed elderly people accused of witchcraft and, this past May, eleven elderly Kenyan men and women were burned and lynched in Kisii, a provincial town in Kenya."The Raiders" according to one news account, "claimed the burning of the suspects would bring peace to the area."
Muthee's fame has helped him to build his own Apostolic network in East Africa as well as a megachurch in Kiambu. His website reports a network of over 400 churches in Kenya. Ed Kalnins, pastor of Wasilla Assembly of God (Sarah Palin's church in Alaska for over twenty years), stated in a recent sermon that he has traveled to Africa to visit Muthee three times.
The other vignettes on Transformations I feature a number of major figures, both religious and political, in the New Apostolic movement. One of the most influential in both of these areas is Harold Caballeros, recent candidate for president of Guatemala, and founder of El Shaddai, a 9000 member church in Guatemala City.
Caballeros is featured in the vignette on the transformation of Almolonga, Guatemala and is a Transformation Associate Partner. (Link here for more detail on Almolonga, a city that was supposedly transformed with 92% of the population "born again." This transformation is reported in the video as closing all the jails, producing three harvest yearly of gigantic vegetables, and miraculous healings.)
Caballeros is a long time colleague of the leader of the New Apostolic Reformation, C. Peter Wagner, and is head of his own extensive Apostolic network in Central and South America. In July 2007, in an interview with Christian Broadcast Network, Caballeros was credited with a major role in the transformation of Guatemala from a "once exclusively Catholic country to one where 30 percent are now Protestants and six out of 10 Catholics label themselves Charismatics."
These glowing reports, such as the above interview and the Transformation video vignette are used to advertise the evangelizing of Guatemala as a miraculous improvement of society. Historical accounts tell a different story of the role these religious activities have played in the political nightmare of the last several decades of Guatemalan history. This struggle continues.
Harold Caballeros has had connections to many of the controversial figures in Guatemala's political struggles. Erwin Sperisen, former Director of Guatemala's Policia Nacional Civil (PNC) belongs to Caballeros El Shaddai church. According to the New York Times, several officers in the PNC were dismissed in 2007 after a series of extra judicial killings.
"The officers in these squads belong to evangelical churches, the official said, and see the extrajudicial killings of gang members, known here as `social cleansing,' as holy work. But they also have begun to commit crimes for their own profit." New York Times, March 5, 2007
Dennis A. Smith, a Presbyterian USA missionary in Guatemala wrote an article on Caballeros which was published by the Latin American Studies Association, and PCUSA. Sperisen, of the Policia Nacional Civil (PNC) used a weekly television show to provide police officers with the "spiritual resources they needed to combat the forces of evil." Dennis A. Smith translates Sperisen's statement,
"The prophet and Apostle of Christ, Brother Harold Cabelleros and his wife, the prophetess, of whom I am a humble servant, instrument and means for taking them to Power in Guatemala and having a Government of God, were charged with the moral and spiritual motivation..."
Smith also quotes Caballeros,
"The death squads that still function within the PNC and the Ministry of Government, are a holy enterprise that is organized by agents and personnel from Evangelical churches that know our obligations to society...I must recognize that the story published in the New York Times on March 5 of this year is true; the "social cleansing" that, together with Carlos Vielman as Minister of Government we carried out in the institution, had to be done and must continue, as I understand has been ordered to the new authorities..."
In May 2007, Caballeros decision to run for President of Guatemala was applauded by Apostolic networks worldwide. He and his wife created Vision con Valores (Vi Va - Vision with Values) a political vehicle which "promises to be ready for the next elections."
"Christians in the global South are way ahead of us in this area," C. Peter Wagner, founder of Global Harvest Ministries and head of the International Coalition [of Apostles], told Charisma magazine. "The values of the kingdom of God should penetrate every level of society, and they understand that....[Caballeros is] doing it right, going right to the top and taking dominion.
The article on Caballeros bid for the Presidency. The article points out that the office had previously been held by two Pentecostals, Efrain Rios Montt from the Verbo Church, and Jorge Serranos Elias from the Elim Church.
Transform World Brazil 2008 credits Caballeros, C. Peter Wagner, George Otis, Jr. and Chuck Pierce (Wagner's second in command) with the transformation of this "unshakable Catholic stronghold for centuries" to one of the largest New Apostolic populations on the globe. "By May of 2005 seventy apostles from Brazil had been appointed." They have helped to form the Evangelical Parliamentary Front whose goal is to ensure that public policy falls "in line with God's purposes, and according to his Word."
"Largely as a result of Templeton grants, some 90 American medical schools now offer courses on links between health and spirituality." Another scientist claims that "the entire purpose of the Templeton Foundation is to blur the line between straightforward science and explicitly religious activity, making it seem like the two enterprises are part of one big undertaking."
Transformations II
While the Transformations I video focuses on four city transformations, the Transformations II video focuses on the miraculous healings and transformations of villages of the First Nations of the Canadian Arctic, and a recounting of "the descent of the "Shekinah glory of God" on the Hebrides in the revival of the 1940s.
The last segment of this video is a rewriting of Ugandan history as a Manichean battle between "born again" Christianity and devil worship. Again, the story includes a witch doctor, and this one dies after the prayers of the intercessors. The battle ends in the triumphant New Year's event on December 31, 1999, at which a covenant, signed by President and First Lady Museveni, dedicated the nation to God for 1000 years. The revival portrayed in the movie is claimed to have resulted in instantaneous healing of thousand of AIDS patients. Narrator George Otis claims these miracles were confirmed by astounded doctors. This video played a significant role in the American Religious Right's propaganda efforts to portray Uganda's abstinence-oriented AIDS program as a great success, despite the statistics showing that Uganda's previous success in combating AIDS has since been reversed. This reversal parallels the elimination of sex education and condom distribution, and the increased emphasis on abstinence only efforts mandated by PEPFAR, including events like Janet Museveni's "virgin parties."
Apostle John Mulinde who is featured on the video, serves on Janet Museveni's Uganda Youth Forum, and is also a "Transformation Associate" for the Sentinel Group, (Mulinde is also on the Board of Elders for the Jerusalem House of Prayer for All Nations, led by Tom Hess, another of Wagner's Apostles.) Since the filming of the movie there has been a pronounced split between many of the traditional Ugandan churches and the National Fellowship of Born-Again Churches, which supported the amendment to the Ugandan constitution to allow Yoweri Museveni a third term. Ugandan papers decried the impact of Apostle John Mulinde and the U.S. based "American prosperity gospel moguls."
In fact the First Lady, Mrs. Janet Museveni and her daughters have joined this movement...
The American dream philosophy espoused by the Ugandan born-again is indigenized by the prevalent beliefs in spirits, ancestral worship, and witchcraft. Many of their members are superstitious and live in fear of evil spirits and bad people who can cast spells on them. The born-again leaders claim to have powers over witchcraft, bad luck and special anointing from God for performing miracles. Many in need of miracles flock to them, give generously and claim to get better.
Ugandan Christians who resent Otis and Wagner's interference in their country label the Transformations activities "Political Christianity." From a Ugandan Christian website,
"Transformations II Video/DVD series is a joint venture of Peter Wagner and George Otis. The two men are heavy believers in Dominionism Theology that Christians can take over World Nations and Governments and exert change through political offices and usher in the Kingdom of God on this earth. This is nothing but a front for Political Christianity, which is eating much of Ugandan Christianity today... "
And referring to the Born-Again support for Museveni's third term,
"...What made even matters worse was the meeting in which the thousands of Born-Again innocent Christians came to pray as they entered the year 2006. The National Stadium was filled to capacity and the "Overseer" and other Christian leaders hoodwinked the undiscerning Christians into crying out for "forgiveness" for a local opposition candidate who has been imprisoned by the incumbent while at the same time the "Christian" leaders pushed Christians towards a Christian Dominionist Political agenda."
Transformations IV
"Let the Sea Resound" is a 2003/2004 DVD Transformations production covering the "godly invasion of government" in Fiji after the coup in 2000. The nation is split between indigenous Fijians who are mostly Christian and Indo-Fijians who are mostly Hindu, and make up over a third of the population. In 2000 the democratically elected Indo-Fijian Prime Minister and members of his multi-ethnic cabinet were overthrown and kidnapped in coup by ethnic Fijians. After the military restored order, an ethnic Fijian government regained power with support of a unity effort by the Christian population. The Sentinel Group advertising for the video states:
"In one of the most remarkable success stories of the modern era, the Fijian experience offers a potent reminder of what is possible when church and state come together for the well-being of society.
This 79-minute documentary covers the astonishing revival that is currently sweeping through the nation of Fiji. It is a moving and instructive testament of unprecedented Christian unity, contemporary signs and wonders, rapid church growth and genuine socio-political transformation. The breath of God has revived even the land and the sea."
Cabinet Minister, Epeli Kanaimawi claimed on the video that the takeover of the country by God-fearing leaders led to revivals and miraculous physical healing of both the people and the economy. Kanaimawi became the vice president of the unified church organization, Association of Christian Churches in Fiji, which would unite to support the reelection of a "born again" Christian government.
The claims made in the movie include a miraculous healing and renewal of the country after the Christian population joined in "Spirit-filled" revival. The video supposedly documents both physical healing and environmental healing, such as re-growth of coral reefs. Claims are made that prosperity returned to the island including unprecedented fish catches. The joyful revival culminates in a massive Crusade led by Reinhard Bonnke, a German evangelist who is known for healing and raising people from the dead and has had revival events with over a million people in Nigeria (link to Bonnke's ministry, "Christ For All Nations".)
However, the story moves on to one island area that remained blighted despite the miracles. This is an island on which the indigenous populations' ancestors had killed a missionary in 1867. The video shows the process through which the community prayed, fasted, and repented of this generational curse. Like other vignettes in the Transformation videos, native artifacts and ritual items like carved masks were thrown into bonfires. The descendants of the murdered (and eaten) missionary traveled to the island to attend a ceremony of repentance by the inhabitants and release them from the generational curse. The island was also miraculously renewed after the event, including the immediate cleansing of a poisonous polluted stream.
After the above event, Otis recounts the normal process for "eco-miracles" on the islands. He says that after prayer and fasting, residents make an offering of soil and water which is followed by a sign from God such as an instant rainstorm.
Leaders of this temporary period of church/state unity like Kaniamawa and Asenaca Caucau were featured on the video and are still listed as Associate Partners on the Transform Nations site. Caucau who was featured throughout the segment was the Minister for Social Welfare and Poverty Alleviation. She was shown numerous times during the segment celebrating the new bounty and prosperity of Fiji after the revival. Happy Fijians are shown dancing and singing.
Transformation ministries around the world praised Caucau and her Fijian colleagues as representing a nation "where God is glorified on the floor of Parliament" and where the "national government has declared a year of forgiveness and reconciliation, even forming a new government department focused on reconciliation.... Where government officials travel to other nations not in their official capacity but as "missionaries" carrying the torch of revival and sharing what God has done in their land."
Again, the historic reality is very different from what is portrayed in the movie, which almost completely ignores the Indo-Fijians except for a brief clip where hundreds of them are supposedly converted to Christianity, and in accounts that imply that they will be better cared for under the new government and through the charity of their "Spirit-filled" neighbors. Other accounts of the era between 2000 and the subsequent coup in 2006 present a very different version of events.
Others have described this supposedly utopian period between the 2000 and 2006 coups as a time of growth in poverty, squatters, and religious-based attacks on Hindu temples. Aseneca Caucau is quoted as likening the non-Christian Indo-Fijians to "wild weeds which take up too much space in the country."
"Adi Asenaca Caucau likened squatters to "thieves because they lived illegally on someone else's land." Caucau, who was the State Minister for Housing at the time, said that police should make "every effort to round up and remove squatters."
(Caucau was arrested earlier this year in the San Francisco Airport for attacking a woman with the heel of her shoe.) All three of the videos described above show communities or entire nations in which supernatural religious revival and the expulsion of demons and generational curses supposedly healed the people, land, and communities. These examples are being shown to others around the world in an effort to enlist them in similar conquest for the "Kingdom."
Source of the Transformations Phenomenon: The Sentinel Group and the New Apostolic Reformation
These methods of spiritual mapping and warfare are being applied to communities across the United States by the same leaders who developed the Transformations videos. The development of the current wave of spiritual warfare can be attributed to George Otis, Jr. of Sentinel Group and C. Peter Wagner, Convening Apostle of the International Coalition of Apostles.
George Otis, Jr. is the son of the late George Otis, the former head of Christian Broadcast Network in the Middle East. George Otis, Sr. was credited by many, including an account in Charisma Magazine, for prophesying Reagan's rise to the White House during a visit to Reagan by Otis, Pat Boone, and Harald Bredesen. Otis established the Sentinel Group in 1990.
Wagner heads the International Coalition of Apostles with approximately 500 Apostles from the US and 42 other countries. These Apostles have their own networks, some with hundreds or thousands of ministries. They provide "apostolic covering" or authority, accountability and discipling to those in their network. Wagner also oversees several other groups of Apostles and Prophets including two inner circles, the Apostolic Council of Prophetic Elders (ACPE) and the Eagles Vision Apostolic Team (EVAT).
The spiritual warfare movement was an outgrowth of the massive efforts at evangelism in the decades leading up to the year 2000. Wagner did not come from a Pentecostal background, but became interested in supernatural manifestations of the Spirit through his colleagues at Fuller Seminary, including the "Signs and Wonders" of John Wimber, founder of the Vineyard Movement, and the teachings about deliverance ministry and generational curses of Charles H. Kraft. During the 1980s the movement was supported by a network of leaders connected through neo-Pentecostal organizations including Ed Silvoso of Argentina , Harold Caballeros of Guatemala, Alistair Petrie of Canada, Ana Mendez of Mexico (now Florida), as well as Cindy Jacobs, Dick Eastman, John Dawson, and Ted Haggard, to name only a few.
Collaborating with leaders of other "neo-Pentecostal" groups like Youth With a Mission (YWAM) and Women's Aglow, Wagner and Otis developed spiritual warfare as if it were a new science. The international proliferation of these parachurch groups, along with extensive church planting efforts of Pentecostals such as Paul/David Yonggi Cho of South Korea's Assembly of God network, helped to spread these ideas.
Peter Wagner and George Otis wrote numerous books including instructions and glossaries of new terminology. Wagner featured Muthee's witch hunting story in his 1997 book Praying with Power, along with two other witch hunting stories from Argentina, the location of the first large scale spiritual warfare success.
Through their work with AD2000 and Beyond, an evangelizing program under the auspices of the Lausanne Committee, Wagner and Otis worked with Luis Bush to systematically map the "lost people groups" of the world by ethnicity, language, location, level of poverty, etc. A decision was made to concentrate on the 10/40 window, or the area between the tenth and fortieth parallel, where it was believed that 97% of the "unsaved" could be found. Otis and Wagner broke away from some of the more orthodox concepts of evangelizing to apply their spiritual warfare ideas on an international scale.
In 1990, George Otis founded Sentinel Group and Wagner became the lead Apostle of the International Spiritual Warfare Network. By 1993 they held the first publicly announced convention on spiritual warfare in Seoul Korea, calling it the Gideon's Army Meeting. By the late 1990s leaders were going on major excursions to battle territorial demons. In 1996 Wagner left his position as head of Church Growth at Fuller Theological Seminary and, on the invitation of Ted Haggard, moved his Global Harvest Ministry to Colorado Springs. Haggard and Wagner developed the World Prayer Center as the nerve center of the developing international operation.
The movement was reported as losing momentum in the United States after the year 2000, with the dismantling of AD2000 and Beyond as an evangelization vehicle, and a break between Haggard and Wagner in 2002. The remnants of the AD2000 operation were divided with Otis taking the helm of spiritual mapping, Wagner leading the spiritual warfare network, and John Dawson heading the International Reconciliation Coalition. Despite the ending of AD2000, these operations have continued to grow in influence. Wagner announced that the beginning of the New Apostolic Age took place in 2001. Much of the success can be attributed to the overwhelming international success of the Transformations videos and the popularity of the both the stories and featured stars as recognizable flag bearers of the movement. The Transformations brand has given the movement renewed life and it has now spawned literally hundreds of organizations for the "franchise."
These organizations serve the purpose of drawing in Christians of numerous denominations into the spiritual warfare activities of the Transformations and the New Apostolic Reformation. In some cases, the movement has essentially enveloped large portions of denominations. The Australian Assemblies of God has been completely absorbed and has been renamed the Australian Christian Churches. Increasingly churches across the spectrum of Christianity are being confronted with the ideas of New Apostolic style spiritual warfare through the participation of their members in "city-wide" activities or charities.
The organizations developed in the "Transformations" model often present a benign front as a "pastor prayer network" or Christian reconciliation and unity groups. At the local level they are billed as charitable organizations or intercessory prayer networks and comfortably mingle with those of other faiths, including Roman Catholics, often engaging them in their charitable efforts. But at the top level of leadership the message is very clear. All other religious systems are evil, under the control of specific demons, and must be converted or defeated.
The Significance of Muthee's Anointing of Sarah Palin
In New Apostolic practice, anointing is the "impartation" of supernatural powers to prepare the believer for their mission of transformation through evangelism and conquest. This can be validated through the many references to anointings by the movement. This dynamic of imparting the anointing is also seen in the trip that Ed Kalnins, Senior Pastor of Wasilla Assembly of God, took this past May. After traveling hundreds of miles to visit two revivals that drew thousands from around the world, the Lakeland Outpouring and MorningStar Ministries, Kalnins returned to his Wasilla congregation and on May 25 performed an anointing ceremony. In this ceremony he passed on to his congregants the anointing which had been imparted to him. On June 8, he again anointed Palin, one of several public anointings of Palin by pastors involved in the New Apostolic Reformation. One of the pictures from that event was posted on the official State of Alaska website.
Widely distributed video from a Wasilla Assembly of God service in 2005 shows the anointing ceremony of Sarah Palin by Thomas Muthee. At that time Muthee had already made his name as a star of the Transformations movies, including Transformations I and "The Quickening," and had been propelled by his Transformations fame into major leadership positions in both the U.S. and Africa. Palin also knew of Thomas Muthee's fame and purpose since, according to an Associated Press article, she had viewed the video long prior to her anointing ceremony.
Before Palin is called forward for her anointing by Muthee and the other two pastors, Ed Kalnins, and Phil Markwardt, Muthee refers to her by name and then says,
"When we talk about transformation of a community, we are talking about God invading seven areas of society."
Muthee then repeats this again,
"When we talk about transformation of a community, it is where we seek God's Kingdom and infiltrate and influence seven areas of our society."
Muthee goes on to discuss the seven "Kingdoms" or areas. He includes spiritual, economic, political, education, media, and then politics again. While Muthee jumbles the categories a bit in this introduction to Palin's anointing, he is clearly referring to the seven "Kingdoms" or mountains of the New Apostolic Reformation's "Seven Mountain Strategy" for taking control of American society and government. (link to the official video on the Seven Mountains Strategy.)
In addition to his Transformations fame, Muthee has served as a board member of the World Prayer Center International and as the East African director of the International Spiritual Warfare Network. (His counterpart, Mary Glazier, Alaska head of the United States Spiritual Warfare Network, has claimed Palin made a decision to pursue politics as a member of her network. link to "Palin and the Apostles".
Muthee's anointing of Palin has been defended as an expression of his own cultural background. However, a number of researchers who have written on the current wave of witch hunting and demonology among Christian groups in Africa and on other continents have found that the revival of the obsession is often sourced in the spread of American-introduced theology and through American authors. Paul Gifford's addresses this issue in his book "African Christianity." The books of leading New Apostolics and other Third Wave figures are widely available in Africa, and these concepts are being taught in thousands of planted churches. American and other Western evangelists hold massive Crusades in Africa where they claim to heal or even raise people from the dead.
Some prosperity doctrine evangelicals have incorporated the exorcising of demons for profit into their ministries. Families are told that misfortunes, such as illness, are caused by one of their children being possessed by a demon and offer to exorcise the demon for a price. Link to Guardian, UK article. There are currently many accounts of killing and maiming of these children by family members who are unable to pay the price for the exorcism. (link to video about children maimed in Nigeria because they are believed to be possessed.) Rene Holvast has written one of the few academic works on spiritual mapping for his Doctoral Thesis at Universeit Utrecht, "Spiritual Mapping, The Turbulent Career of a Contested American Missionary Paradigm," later published. He also draws the conclusion that spiritual mapping originated with leadership from the United States despite it's early use in Argentina.
Beliefs that were considered superstitious and old fashioned have received new life as they have been reintroduced in the guise of spiritual warfare and popularized as a part of a new and modern American style Christianity.
Statistics
All of the following statistics are from "World Christian Trends, AD 30 - AD 2200: Interpreting the Annual Christian Megacensus." Note: these are the statistics produced from a massive database collected by evangelical missions organizations and that this particular volume is from the publisher for the United States World Mission, Pasadena. It is authored by the team that produces the World Christian Encyclopedia set.
In World Christian Trends, the Third Wave is explained and categorized as follows: a First wave, classical Pentecostals; a Second Wave, Charismatics outside of Pentecostalism; and a Third Wave, Independents outside of both the second and third waves. The authors describe the Third Wave with this statement.
"By the 1990s the Third Wave has thus within its own sphere completely swept aside, ignored, and replaced the entire historic nomenclature of twentieth century denominationalism."
The term Neocharismatics is used in this volume to describe a combination of Third Wavers, Independents, Post-Denominationalists, and Neo-Apostolics. This category claims 295,405,240 members worldwide, which does not include those who identify as Pentecostal or Charismatic.
The combined Pentecostal/Charismatic/Neocharismatic Renewal Groups growth figures from 1970 to 2000 are as follows:
North America
1970 - 24,151,910
2000 - 79,600,150
Latin America
1970 - 12,621,450
2000 - 141,432,880
Africa
1970 - 17,049,020
2000 - 126,010,200
Asia
1970 - 10,144,120
2000 - 134,889,530
Europe
1970 - 8,018,180
2000 - 37,568,700
Oceania
1970 - 238,240
2000 - 4,265,520
World Christian Trends also list 280 features which differentiate Denominationalism from Postdenominationalism including a section on Apostles and Prophets and the latter is presented as the trend of the future. The New Apostolic Reformation is a subset of the Neocharismatic Renewal Group category above which has over 295 million adherents. However, the New Apostolic Reformation is increasingly drawing from other denominations.
Part Two - Muthee and the "Transformations" Franchise
Palin's Churches and the Third Wave Series
subject sections:
Militant Anti-pluralism - Who is the Enemy?
-The Queen of Heaven, Religious Corruption and the Roman Catholic Church
-The Prince of Greece, Humanistic Thinking
-Militancy
-Use of Reconciliation Events
-Apostolic Messianic Judaism and Hebrew Roots
-Taking Control of the Kingdom: Economics
-The Lonely Resisters: Objecting Fundamentalists and Walkaways
-Transformations Activities in the United States and the World: A Few Examples
Militant Anti-Pluralism - Who is the Enemy?
Part One provided an overview of the development of the phenomenon of spiritual mapping and spiritual warfare as demonstrated in the Transformations videos. Spiritual mapping provides the scouting and charting of demons that must be confronted and expelled from a geographic area. The major figures in this movement include George Otis, Jr. who heads the Sentinel Group and also appears in the Tranformations series. C. Peter Wagner is the founder of the New Apostolic Reformation and Convening Apostle of the Apostolic Network and the numerous "prayer warrior" networks that fall under this authority. Otis claimed in a recent New York Times article, that "the weapons of this warfare are not of this world, we don't respond with guns and violence."
As demonstrated in Part One, spiritual warfare can and does impact the lives of those in the affected communities and not necessarily in the positive way demonstrated in the videos. The videos view the world strictly through a filter of the benefits to certain "born again" Christians, and even the validity of much of that information is easily challenged. Furthermore the movies completely ignore the effects on those who do not choose to join the movement. This includes those of other faiths which the New Apostolics believe remain unevangelized due to demonic control over their belief systems. This goes far beyond a general belief that others are unsaved and therefore doomed to hell. The process through which demons have supposedly taken control of other religions is spelled out in graphic detail.
The Queen of Heaven - Demon of Religious Corruption
C. Peter Wagner has written extensively about the "Queen of Heaven", a major demon in Satan's hierarchy that they believe prevents Roman Catholics and Muslims from accepting the gospel. Top Apostles and Prophets of the movement go on international spiritual warfare excursions like "Operation Ice Castle" in 1997, to confront this demon. Results of Operation Ice Castle were reported by the chief of strategic operations, Ana Mendez, as including the death of Mother Theresa (as well as Princess Diana, for other demon-related reasons.) This testimony, as well as the Transformations videos accounts, is featured prominently on the website of a Transforming Melbourne, a Christian unity and charitable organization that is supported by a variety of churches, including at least one area Catholic congregation. Their website masthead reads, "Transforming our city through the Unity, Servanthood and Prayer of the Whole Church."
Another spiritual warfare assault against the Queen of Heaven took place at the Santiago de Compostela cathedral in Spain. This was in 2004, a pilgrimage year for the famous cathedral. Apostle Chuck Pierce claims after the excursion that their efforts at disruption had been successful and God had sent many signs including the fraying of the rope by which the giant incense burner swings from the ceiling.
The Prince of Greece - Demon of Humanistic Thinking
The New Apostolic Reformation, and its related networks, is an international movement. Teams of leaders have traveled throughout the continent mapping the spiritual geography and conducting spiritual warfare events. They have concluded that Europe is controlled by not only the Queen of Heaven but by the Prince(s) of Greece. This is the demon that is the source of humanistic thinking and rationalism. Additionally, spiritual mapping by the group is focused on the presence of Masonic activity, which they view as a major source of demonic control in both Europe and the United States.
In 2002 an Apostolic Summit was held by Wagner and other major Apostles and leaders of the Target Europe prayer initiative. In 2003, a Gatekeepers of Europe Convention was held to further unite the efforts of the European network. Apostle George Markakis of Defend Europe, in Athens, Greece, was the host of the event. The conference outline includes the goals of the event. Page 22 outlines the need to stop the Olympic Games,
"In the spirit realm the land of Europe is spiritually one entity. Let us look at the map drawing, which Franz Lippi, Pastor of Exousia Church in Graz, Austria sent me.
Following the map and explanation of the demonic influence of the games, Markakis continues,
To stop that demonic scheme from happening we need to with stop the Olympic games from taking place, or by dismantling the (spiritual) so-called "Euro-temple," or both. However, both are practically impossible. Having sought the Lord about the Olympics in Athens in 2004, the Lord has not responded with any particular direction for me."
Projects overseen by Markakis and other European Apostolic leaders have included intercessory prayer movements to impact the European Union Constitutional proceedings and against the 2004 Olympics in Greece. In a newsletter titled "Gatekeepers of Europe" and dated August 2007, Markakis overview plans for gathering an intercessory team in Brussels for spiritual mapping.
"Democracy with its implied absence of author and the inherent need for debate and intrigue is the environment where the Hellenic mindset (i.e. the fruit of the Prince of Greece) thrives and uses to induce anarchy, division and the spirit of the Antichrist within the Church."
Markakis continues under the heading "Who the enemy is,"
"We already know that the "Ruler of Europe" is either the "Prince of Greece" or, some local demonic authority under him (more likely). His presence is apparent; it is mainly manifested through the architecture of public buildings, the powerful Masonic Lodge which rules over most of the political rulers of Europe as well as those of Belgium, and the prevailing humanistic sprit which has shaped the politics and culture of the Benelux area even prior to the unification of Europe." Link to pdf of Gatekeepers of Europe.
Markakis then gives an overview of specific problematic buildings and statuary in Brussels. Numerous articles posted at the Defend Europe website explain the battle that they perceive exists between the "Sons of Zion" and the "Sons of Greece." They view themselves, the fighters for Zion, as a return to a more pure early church before it was defiled by the demon of the Queen of Heaven, who corrupted the early church, and the Prince of Greece, source of the Enlightenment, rationalism, and Freemasonry.
In another Defend Europe Conference report Markakis states:
"Anti-religious socialist government of the 80s brought such a drought over Hellas, that lack of rain caused water rations in some places, and destroyed vast expanses of forest areas turning the land almost into desert. That was but a physical manifestation of the unrighteousness, injustice and waste of public finances that prevailed in the country."
Militancy
These evangelizing efforts are not only aggressive but increasingly militant. The New Apostolic movement uses military terminology and openly speaks of revolution. Palin's anointers Thomas Muthee and Ed Kalnins frequently make use of the verse "the violent take it by force." Muthee has gone even further in his sermons such as during a 2004 sermon at KingsGate Community Church in the U.K during which Muthee stated, "the more violent you become, the more committed you become, the quicker you will see things happen in this region."
Mary Glazier is a member of the inner circle of the Apostolic Council of Prophetic Elders, and the top Apostle in Alaska as head of the state's Strategic Spiritual Prayer Network, (formerly called the Spiritual Warfare Network, and recently renamed again as the US Global Apostolic Prayer Network.) She claimed in a June 2008 speech at a conference in Everett, WA, that Sarah Palin was called by God to politics while in Glazier's Wasilla network when she (Palin) was twenty-four years old. In this same speech Glazier explains that "God is preparing a people to displace the ones whose sin is rising so that then they tip over and the church goes in - one is removed and the church moves in and takes the territory." Link to article and link to transcript. In a published interview Glazier described her own witch-hunting, and the efforts of her spiritual warfare network to chase a witch from the Alaska prison chaplaincy program. In the linked interview she claims that the network's prayer efforts resulted in success as the woman became ill, maimed, and left Alaska.
Glazier's Florida counterpart, state and Southeastern leader of the United States Global Apostolic Network, Diane Buker, has a ministry named theBattle Axe Brigade. Her website features an animated graphic of an arm swinging a mace and features the verse,
"Thou art My battle axe and weapons of war: for with thee will I break in pieces the nations, and with thee will I destroy kingdoms; and with thee will I break in pieces the horse and his rider; and with thee will I break in pieces the chariot and his rider."
Also on her website, Apostle Buker also makes the following statement:
"The Lord told me that He hates the false religious structure of Catholicism and in His mercy He wants the people delivered."
Use of Reconciliation Events
Glazier is on the board of the International Reconciliation Coalitionfounded by John Dawson, International President of YWAM (Youth With a Mission). The reconciliation approach, including reconciliation walks, has been used to gain access to Native American groups in the U.S and Canada, and also to African Americans, Amish, Turkish Muslims, and other groups around the world. Linkto Palin and the Apostles for an account of New Apostolics in a prophetic ceremony representing the shielding of Native Alaskans from interference from other churches and social services. Reconciliation is designed to remove the generational curses and other demons which are preventing the target group from being open to evangelization. For instance, a reconciliation walk in Turkey in 1999 was advertised as apologizing for the Crusades to the Muslim population. However, following the reconciliation walk, the New Apostolics embarked on an aggressive proselytizing campaign which included a ceremony in the Ephesus amphitheater. Organized by Ted Haggard and others and with participation of groups from Korea, they chanted Jesus is Lord for four hours in the amphitheater.
"The Centre for International Reconciliation and Peace" is an apostolic ministry in Cairns, Australia. The front page of their website informs the reader that this husband and wife team have been ordained Apostles and Prophets by Bishop Bill Hamon of Christian International, USA, who provides their "Apostolic covering." In the New Apostolic structure, ministries work under the "apostolic covering" or authority and discipleship of leaders above them. The front page of Bill Hamon's website provides a download option for "Releasing the King's Decree." From the decree,
I, Jesus Christ, issue this decree to all prinicipalities and powers which have worked to hinder CI [Christian International] from its work of restoration. The records in Heaven have been researched and found that King Jesus did commission Bill Hamon/CI to re-lay the Foundation of the Church which is Apostles and Prophets and continue building the Temple until it is finished. Therefore, I command you, Satan, to stay away from CI and hinder them not more. Moreover, I command you to start releasing all the resources CI needs to complete their commission from God. If anyone tries to alter or hinder this decree, they are to be destroyed....
Bill Hamon is a long term leader in the movement, one of the few left from the original New Order of Latter Rain of the 1940s and 1950s, a forerunner of the New Apostolic Reformation that was condemned as heresy by some Pentecostal denominations of that time. These "legal proclamations" are becoming increasingly popular and other examples are included in the last section.
Another associate in Bill Hamon's Christian International is Martha Lucia, head of Watchmen's Network. Lucia is well known throughout the movement for her spiritual mapping skills and has gone on numerous worldwide expeditions to map important locations such as Washington D.C. and Israel. Like others in the movement, Lucia stresses the presence of Masonic buildings and influen
IN 2004, The Texas Republican Party platform declared the United States to be a "Christian nation". Christian nationalism is probably the driving ideology of the Christian right, and that ideology rests on a falsified version of history that tens of millions of Americans believe to be true. This post concerns that problem and introduces readers to one historian, Chris Rodda, who rightfully deserves to be called a hero for writing Liars For Jesus: The Religious Right's Alternate Version Of American History, and for her ongoing 15 part series at Talk To Action debunking falsified American history from the Christian right. For free, so far. I've organized this fundraiser so she can keep her electricity and utilities on.
Some things are said enough times that they become facts in some quarters. One Example is "American law is based on the Ten Commandments". Close behind that is "America was founded on religious principles", which is a clear revision of "America was founded on religious tolerance". Another good example is "The Constitution was written by Christians so it is based on Christian principles".
After his bizarre commandments debacle, Alabama's Judge Roy Moore claimed that "It was never about the monument, or the Ten Commandments... It was always about the recognition of God as the sovereign source of our laws, liberty, and government!"
The religious right lives in a legal worldview that existed before the US Constitution. Their church-state ideas are right out of the legal orders of Medieval Europe, Great Britain, and the British colonies prior to the US Constitution. It is the world they want to return us to.
"The Switch" is set in the context of a teacher discussing with his students what an inarguable nightmare Bush and his enabling Republicans are. Most of the students are portrayed by people of notoriety so it has a lot of humor despite how infuriating it is. I'm sending it out to like-minded people to help get the buzz going. Hopefully the following samples of praise I've received for it, along with an excerpt, will intrigue you enough to put this on the top of your to-do list. You can access it from my yahoo group UndoBush where the preface and corresponding political cartoon are: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/UndoBush/http://www.geocities.com/hail111mary/The_Switch.doc
"I was blown away by how brilliant it is." --Dell Long, B.B. King's former PR manager
"Found the message worth the time it took to read. Its references are most impressive. And the teacher and use of well known folk as students worked. [This is coming from a reader who] is a 79+ year old vet of WWII and a former college journalism and political science teacher. I was a senior staffer and speech writer to a governor, research assistant to a U.S. Senator and personal staff consultant to state-wide office holder. You made me feel guilty for not paying closer attention to Clark in 04!" --Jim E. Gregg
"Absolutely astounding! YOU ROCK!" --a Daily Kos blogger.
[ note: this story was originally posted in 2004 on the Daily Kos website ]
Given the recent campaign by the American Christian right to allege a vast liberal conspiracy against Christmas [ which - as Michelle Goldberg, senior writer for Salon, suggests - has ugly resonances with anti-semitic conspiracy theory ], this should be breaking news...
During the American Clergy Leadership Conference tour that the president hailed last week, pastor John Kingara of Massachussetts puts a cross out with the garbage, April 18, 2003 (Source: Moon's Web site FamilyFed.org, as reported on by John Gorenfeld )
....just look at the picture. It's real. However, it's almost three years old. You've never heard of it. Why ?
Well, I didn't catch this either, and we all should have known it, because the Christian Right is knocking the stuffing out of the left on the "War Against Christmas" issue and on the faux-religion/morality playing field in general...
Girthful Yuletide gift bringing elf, beloved by Christian children, of Germanic mythology, avoids trumped up political controversy
...and in most areas in the so-called "culture wars"....
Talk To Action contributor Jonathan Hutson's two part series on the new "Left Behind : Eternal Forces" video game "The Purpose Driven Life Takers" series ( read the series : part 1, part 2 ) has provoked widespread controversy and discussion as well as approaching 100,000 visits to this website. Here is the spoken narratives, and images, from the promotional trailer for the game ( note : trailer is accompanied by an ominious, dramatic symphonic score )
Click on thumbnail images below for larger, mid-resolution .jpg versions. I am in the process of adding more images : please refresh or reload your browser page to check if more have been added.
Narrative and Images From "Left Behind: Eternal Forces"
"Throughout history, men and women have chosen one of three paths :
Those who daily seek a personal relationship with God,
unbelievers and believers who don't seek after God and those who choose to ignore God. And as the prophets foretold, God will come to take his people home...No one knows the day or the hour. Without any warning, all infants, children, and many people myseriously disappear....Terror and confusion reign the world over. For those left behind, the apocalypse has just begun..."
Note the jarring contrast between frame #1, which seem to claim divine mandate for the narrative, and the final two frames - promotional images from the game being played, released by "Left Behind Games" - in which New Yorkers are gunned down in the streets and corpses pile up. Frame #2 seems to invoke revisionist claims of the Christian right that the United States was founded as a Christian nation rather than a secular nation. The top right frame - a busy New York City street - is accompanied by the narrative "unbelievers and believers who don't seek after God". Frame number four : "No one knows the day or the hour" ( of the "Rapture" ). One notable point about the images is that the trailer does not show any of the images from the game as it being played ( the last two frames). According to the Left Behind Games website the company seeks to offer "a less graphic experience to the sexual themes and gratuitous violence currently found in many titles." and hopes that its games will receive an "E" rating ( suitable for ages 6 and up )
Prolific Talk To Action member dogemperor showcases a number of the many excellent posts, from the Talk To Action member post section, on the Christian right's war on reproductive rights:
Life and Death: Just Don't Think About It (good summary, includes discussion of the HPV vaccine controversy as well as details of anti-abortion laws in El Salvador that are so strict that they force women to carry ectopic pregnancies till their fallopian tubes rupture (which pretty much kills any future chances at having kids); I discuss in comments a precursor controversy (dominionists' prior and present objections to the hepatitis-B vaccine on similar grounds) and discusses how one little noted reason for objection is that it eliminates a possible anti-gay talking point)
More on "moral refusal" and women (talking on "moral refusal" clauses and how the application is expanding now to refusing even post-abortion antibiotics and any medications prescribed by women's clinics; I will not be surprised to see, should the HPV vaccine be approved, pushes to expand "moral refusal" clauses to giving the jab)
TruLuv: Faith-Based Embryos (notes on dominionist "moral refusal" clauses, notes my speculation (sadly, confirmed in El Salvador) that women may be forced to carry ectopic pregnancies and "molar pregnancies" to term (the latter being a type of uterine cancer that develops from either placental tissue or an embryo whose development goes horribly wrong--in other words, these are essentially cancers of the embryo, and can only occur during pregnancies))
Dominionism: Pro-cancer, pro-birth-defects, pro-domestic-abuse (discusses in detail the HPV vaccine controversy, also in context discusses general war on birth control, dead-agenting of the March of Dimes (in claiming--falsely--the March of Dimes is a pro-abortionist group simply because the March of Dimes hasn't issued a formal statement saying Abortion Is Evil), and even working to create new forms of marriage that would make it next to impossible for an abused spouse (or a spouse who discovers the other spouse is abusing the children) to leave an abusive spouse)
"Every Zygote Is Sacred", or "Can I have my birth control, already?" (discusses HPV vaccine controversy in context of general war on reproductive health by dominionists, notes that other drugs that can be used against STD infections (specifically Zovirax, an antiherpetic which can be used for non-STD indications and frequently is) are being denied people under "moral refusal" clauses and under similar claims by dominionists; unfortunately, such reports are becoming more common (see in "More on 'moral refusal' and women", detailing refusals of post-abortion antibiotics and all prescriptions from a women's clinic by some pharmacists))
NCC PRESIDENT URGES COMMUNICATORS, TAKE ON `FALSE RELIGION'
New York, March 30, 2006--The president of the National Council of Churches, the Rev. Michael Livingston, strongly urged church communicators to, "Tell our story. By any means necessary." [ see full story for entire press release ]
. Why would the IRD want to attack the mainline Protestant Denominations ? Andrew Weaver, in his review of Hardball on Holy Ground, by Stephen Swecker, explains:"Think about this: While the members of churches affiliated with the National Council of Churches account for about a quarter of the population, approximately half of the members of the U.S. Congress say they are members of these communions. NCC church members' influence is disproportionate to their numbers and include remarkably high numbers of leaders in politics, business, and culture.... Moreover, these churches are some of the largest land owners in the U.S., with hundreds of billions of dollars collectively in assets, including real estate and pension funds. A hostile takeover of these churches would represent a massive shift in American culture, power and wealth for a relatively small investment. "
Excerpt: "Six months ago, we reviewed in these pages an unsettling book titled United Methodism @ Risk: A Wake Up Call by Leon Howell (see Zion's Herald, July/August 2003). The book exposes an orchestrated attack by the American political and religious right on The United Methodist Church (UMC) and other mainline Protestant denominations that have been sufficiently vigorous, socially involved and politically effective to garner its wrath (Howell, 2003).
In response to the ensuing criticism of the book and our review, we organized a group of researchers to check the facts and found the volume to be well documented and reliable. In the process, we also reviewed hundreds of documents published by the key organization involved in the assault on the church, namely, the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD). Our findings as outlined below are very disturbing.
The IRD is affiliated with no denomination and is only accountable to its own self-appointed, self-perpetuating board of directors. According to public sources, the IRD focuses its principal expenditures and most of its efforts on The United Methodist Church.....
By Andrew J. Weaver, Nicole R. Seibert, and Fred W. Kandeler
[ excerpt ] The January/February 2004 issue of Zion's Herald published a special report on the activities of the Washington "think tank," the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD). It documented that The United Methodist Church (UMC), other mainline Protestant denominations, as well as the National Council of Churches of Christ have been the targets of an orchestrated attack by determined right-wing ideologues since 1981 (Weaver and Seibert, 2004a).
IRD has relentlessly used unethical propaganda methods to carry out the radical political agenda of a handful of secular benefactors opposed to the churches' historic social witness (Weaver and Seibert, 2004b).This is particularly true of Mark Tooley, director of its UMAction arm, who worked for the CIA for 8 years immediately preceding being hired by IRD (UMACTION, 2003).
In 1996, in a characteristically misleading fundraising letter, Tooley claimed that the UMC was supporting "Marxist guerrilla movements in Central America, violent revolution in southern Africa, halting U.S. defense programs, government-funded abortion, expanding the role of the federal government in the lives of ordinary Americans." He then asked, "Did membership in the United Methodist Church require loyalty to a political program of the far left?" Dr. John M. Swomley, Emeritus Professor of Social Ethics at St. Paul School of Theology in Kansas City, Missouri, observes that "Tooley, did not -- and could not -- document any of these assertions" (Swomley, 1996).
According to California-based investigative reporter Matt Smith,
IRD and its allies' use of right-wing nonreligious foundation money to smear liberal church leaders through mailings, articles in IRD-aligned publications, press releases, and stories in secular newspapers and magazines has more in common with a CIA Third World destabilization campaign than ordinary civilized debate (Smith, 2004).
Excerpt: "The United Methodist and other mainline Protestant churches are the targets of a continuing, orchestrated attack by determined right-wing ideologues who use CIA-style propaganda methods to sow dissention and distrust, all in pursuit of a radical political agenda.
[ image above maps IRD assocations with media and religious organizations. click on image for the full version, courtesy of Media Transparency ]
The leader of this attack is an organization called the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD), a pseudo-religious think-tank that carries out the goals of its secular funders that are opposed to the churches' historic social witness.
The IRD works in concert with other self-styled "renewal" groups like Good News and the Confessing Movement. IRD answers only to its own self-perpetuating board of directors, most of whom are embedded in the secular political right (Howell, 1995)."
Excerpt:"For the past two years, Media Transparency and the Boston Wesleyan Association have published research on a steady stream of attacks against the United Methodist Church (UMC) and other mainline American denominations carried out by conservative philanthropy sponsored institutions and people (Weaver, and Seibert, 2004 a, b; Weaver, Seibert and Kandeler 2005).
[ above: "Hardball on Holy Ground" , by Stephen Swecker. Andrew Weaver writes, in his review of the book : "why would Richard Melon Scaife, Adolf Coors, Howard Ahmanson, the Bradley Foundation, the Olin Foundation, and other secular political operatives care about funding a multi-million dollar crusade against mainline churches and the National Council of Churches(NCC)?
Think about this: While the members of churches affiliated with the National Council of Churches account for about a quarter of the population, approximately half of the members of the U.S. Congress say they are members of these communions. NCC church members' influence is disproportionate to their numbers and include remarkably high numbers of leaders in politics, business, and culture. The prevailing ethos of American culture is and has been shaped by the leadership and membership of theses churches. Moreover, these churches are some of the largest land owners in the U.S., with hundreds of billions of dollars collectively in assets, including real estate and pension funds. A hostile takeover of these churches would represent a massive shift in American culture, power and wealth for a relatively small investment. If this sounds far-fetched, one need only consider how right-wing groups during recent decades have taken over and now wholly control the Southern Baptist Convention." ]
The primary actor in this unethical and mendacious attack is the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD), a political "think tank" that operates more like a shark in a fish tank as it attempts to undermine mainline Protestant ministries to form an unholy alliance with far-right politics (Swecker, 2005).
IRD has received millions of dollars from right-wing secular benefactors such as Richard Mellon Scaife, Adolf Coors and the Bradley and Olin foundations in an effort to muffle the prophetic voice of the church (Weaver and Seibert, 2004a, b; Weaver, Ellison, Kandeler, Binggeli and Clark, 2005; Media Transparency, 2003).
Methodist Ministers Andrew J. Weaver and Fred W. Kandeler recently wrote the following Talk To Action piece on one of the IRD's opening red-baiting salvos, in 1983, against the National Council of Churches
Sixty minutes executive producer Don Hewitt appeared on the December 2, 2002, edition of Larry King Live (CNN) and was asked whether he regretted any shows that he had done in his 36-year career. Hewitt named only one, the 1983 60 Minutes double segment on the National Council of Churches and World Council of Churches. Hewitt told King that;
"We once took off on the National Council of Churches as being left wing and radical and a lot of nonsense. And the next morning I got a congratulatory phone call from every redneck bishop in America and I thought, oh, my God, we must have done something wrong last night, and I think we probably did."
The broadcast on CBS's 60 Minutes entitled "The Gospel According to Whom" began with Roman Catholic priest, Richard John Neuhaus, saying, "I am worried - I am outraged when the church lies to its own people." The camera moved from an offering plate in a United Methodist church in the Midwest to images of the Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and then to marchers in Communist Red Square. The lengthy segment over and over suggested that the National Council of Churches (NCC) was using Sunday offerings to promote Marxist revolution.
Andrew Weaver: "...although the United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church USA, and the Episcopal Church total only about 14 million in membership, they have been and remain a powerful and influential voice for moderate and progressive social values in American society. Almost 30 percent of the members of the U.S. Congress belong to one of these three denominations as well as disproportionate numbers of well-educated and progressive leaders who advocate for the poor, civil and human rights, environmental protection, and a responsible foreign policy. The activities and leadership of mainline Protestant churches are linked to the social conscience of the nation and contribute to civil discourse.
The political right seeks to gain top leadership positions in the church by spreading misleading information and incendiary allegations against organizations and individuals. These groups employ the propaganda method of "wedge issues" like abortion and homosexuality to cause confusion, dissension, and division. Irving Kristol, father of William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard and one of the "godfathers" of the political right, summed up this strategy in the Wall Street Journal: "Attack the integrity, not the words, of those with whom you disagree." More recently, Grover Norquist, a conservative activist and long-time friend of top presidential aide Karl Rove, was even more blunt when he told the Denver Post that civility is out and nastiness is in among conservative activists. According to Mr. Norquist, "bipartisanship is another name for date rape."
By contrast, Methodists and other mainstream Protestants have held proudly to the "extreme middle" during most of their history, recognizing that self-righteousness is the bane of religion, be it the ideology of the left or right. Unless progressive and moderate members in the mainline churches muster the will to organize and battle for what they believe is fair and just, they are in danger of losing the historical values of these traditions to a determined cadre of ideological advocacy groups. It is time, in other words, for "fighting Methodists" to make a comeback lest their tolerance and Christian charity be turned against them and used to undermine their churches and further the social ends of the right wing's radical ideology.
"Organizations leading an ultra-conservative effort to control and reshape The United Methodist Church to fit their agenda are the focus of a book released today by active United Methodist lay and clergy leaders. United Methodism at RISK: A Wake-Up Call shares extensive research to show who is behind the campaign to force the denomination into a narrow political and theological framework.
The book was published by the Information Project for United Methodists, co-chaired by Bishop C. Dale White, widely known for his leadership on peace issues, and New York attorney and well-known United Methodist lay leader Beth Capen. Veteran Christian journalist Leon Howell is the author. The books close to 200 pages detail the rise of conservative renewal groupswithin United Methodism and sister denominations, and link their activity to right-wing activity in society.
"All United Methodists need to read this book to be fully informed on the tactics, ideological bias and theological restrictions evidenced in the life and work of the conservative renewal groups," Bishop White said in announcing the books release. The direction they would take our church demeans clergy and laity, he said."
We all need to spend some time considering how best to defend liberty and freedom, and what unites us as a nation concerned with democratic values. In doing so, we need to commit to a process that respects civil liberties, and civil rights, and civil discourse.
The rhetoric used by some sincere and well-meaning human relations groups--"extremists of the left and right," "religious political extremists," "radical religious right," etc. -- can actually unintentionally undermine civil liberties, civil rights, and civil discourse by demonizing dissent and veiling the complicity we all share in institutionalized forms of oppression in our society: racism, sexism, heterosexism, antisemitism, Arabophobia, and Islamophobia.
When we lump together all political candidates and movements outside the "mainstream" as "extremists" of the left and right we are not only stifling a potentially valuable debate, but also using a theoretical model that has been seriously challenged in academia during the last 20 years. After World War II a number of scholars looked at the popular appeal of fascism and communism and concluded that mass movements threatened the stability of society. Shocked by the acquiescence of most Germans to the Nazi genocide of Jews and liquidation of other groups, these scholars saw warning signs in the Red Scare of the McCarthy Period, the Presidential campaign of ultraconservative Republican Barry Goldwater, Jr., and the Populist Party movement of the late 1800s. The scholars concluded that people swept along by social movements were psychologically-dysfunctional grumblers who couldn't play by the rules of democracy, and instead turned to irrational behavior to make their voices heard. The idea that extremists of the left and right threatened society was a dominant frame in sociology and the other social sciences until the mid 1970s.
More than a decade ago I sat in a conference room in Washington D.C. and was told I had to start using the phrase "religious political extremist." This was the new way for people on the political left to frame our opponents on the political right. It made me unhappy. I already had problems with language such as "radical religious right," "lunatic fringe," and "wing-nut." This new phrase just seemed wrong to me.
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[image, left: Lou Engle leads rally]
Last summer, Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee traveled to a Virginia Beach megachurch where an evangelist unknown to most of secular, mainstream America 
One pertinent question is whether Lou Engle's ideological extremity has been quietly adopted by America's GOP power elite. In fact, such a question should be posed to Republican Sen. Sam Brownback, Lou Engle's roommate for seven months, according to Engle. As Engle 
[image,right: Lou Engle's young followers at an antiabortion protest. The red tape over their mouths, with the word "life" has been perhaps Lou Engle's most successful viral marketing success. The symbolic gimmick is promoted by Engle's 
During the American Clergy Leadership Conference tour that the president hailed last week, pastor John Kingara of Massachussetts puts a cross out with the garbage, April 18, 2003 (Source: Moon's Web site FamilyFed.org, as reported on by 
Methodist Ministers Andrew J. Weaver and Fred W. Kandeler recently wrote the following Talk To Action piece on one of the IRD's opening red-baiting salvos, in 1983, against the National Council of Churches
