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Rightwing group pays, church crosses thrown in dumpsters
By Bruce WilsonFri Sep 29, 2006 at 08:47:03 AM EST
topic: All Topics section:____Archive printable version print this story
[ 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"....

this was - and still might be - good material for a counterattack. [ see here for Frederick Clarkson's rundown of the wider context of this story ]

Where am I going with this ?

Why should you care ?  

Well, to illustrate and build towards my point, here's another quiet bombshell, little publicized and in its own way enormous : the influence of the Chalcedon Foundation, and what that foundation actually advocates and what it's founder, R.J. Rushdoony, actually wrote, including his views on the Holocaust:

For one thing, R.J. Rushdoony was a "Holocaust minimizer" : he thought the mainstream cited death toll was a lie and that the actual death count was far less - hundreds of thousands rather than millions. Rushdoony's view has recently come into the spotlight following a recent Mother Jones magazine special edition :

focusing solely on the Christian theocratic right - and which acknowledges the central role played by the Chalcedon Foundation

 

Here's a plug on that, also, by R.J. Rushdoony's son Mark ( who - essentially -  inherited the family business, or project ) :

After the Reagan landslide, Newsweek published a feature article on "Who's Who" in the Religious Right. Under "think tanks" only one group was listed -- Chalcedon. [ emphasis mine, quote from "Engaging the Enemy: R.J. Rushdoony's Role in the Culture Wars", by Mark Rushdoony ]

Yes indeed - the small group of dedicated researchers who have for decades been tracking the rise of the Christian right movement  ( usually described also as "theocratic" and also "supremacist" - both accurate descriptors ) would on the whole very much agree with Mark Rushdoony : Chalcedon HAS been central.

Mark Rushdoony also makes no attempt to deny journalist John Sugg's characterization of R.J. Rushdoony's statements on the Holocaust:

"Rushdoony opined about what he calls the "false witness" of Germany's responsibility for the Holocaust. He dismissed the accuracy of 6 million Jews being slain, suggesting it was likely only a fraction of that number,

and he shrugs off Josef Mengele's hideous human experiments as "a few sterilized women and a few castrated men.
" [ by John Sugg. Emphasis mine ]

What's not being debated here is the veracity of Rushdoony's beliefs regarding the holocaust. [ Mark Rushdoony - see here for full context, M. Rushdoony's rebuttal to John Sugg, on the Chalcedon Foundation blog ]

_

Now this is explosive stuff.  First, if you'd been a follower of John Gorenfeld, you'd already have known - long ago - about the "Dumpstered church cross" story ( or scandal ).

And very recently ( yesterday, in fact), if you'd been reading Talk To Action you might have caught the unusual, and possibly unprecedented, exchange - between dueling blogs, Chalcedon's and Talk To Action - that occured in the aftermath of John Suggs' calling-out of R.J. Rushdoony's writing on the Holocaust.  R.J. Rushdoony is considered by many the ideological and theological patriarch of the Christian Theocratic movement, and this may well be the first time a sustained spotlight has been trained on his views concerning the Holocaust.




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(image: detail from Francoise Dubois' rendition of the Bartholomew's Day Massacre reveals the actual nature of religious warfare)

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