A progress report of a different kind, however, came to light in late April, when a handful of Florida-based newspapers reported that the Center for Reclaiming America for Christ, the high-profile political organization founded by Kennedy about 10 years ago, was closing its doors (as of April 30 there was no announcement of the shutdown on the Center's website).

The Associated Press pointed out that the Center had "laid off an undisclosed number of workers Thursday at its headquarters here [in Florida] and at an office in Washington in what was called 'streamlining.'"

Kennedy's Center for Christian Statesmanship, "will also shut down," according to Rob Boston, staff person with Americans United for Separation of Church and State (Americans United).
While it wasn't clear how many Center workers were affected by the layoffs, CRM, which produces TV and radio programs and publishes books, still has more than 120 employees. A spokesman told AP that Coral Ridge had a budget of $37 million in 2005.

"We're getting back to our core competency, the production of media," said Brian Fisher, executive vice president at Coral Ridge. "Our heart and soul is the teaching of Dr. Kennedy, and getting it to more people than those who come to church."

The Center "worked hard to court influential far-right Republicans," Rob Boston wrote recently at Americans United's blog. "In July of 2001, then House Majority Leader Tom DeLay addressed a Capitol Hill gathering sponsored by the Center for Christian Statesmanship and attacked the separation of church and state. DeLay praised President George W. Bush's 'faith-based' initiative, asserting it is a good way of 'standing up and rebuking this notion of separation of church and state that has been imposed upon us over the last 40 or 50 years.'

"He added, 'You see, I don't believe there is a separation of church and state. I think the Constitution is very clear. We have the right and the freedom to exercise our religion no matter what it is anywhere we choose to do it. We have an opportunity to once again get back into the public arena.'"

The Center for Reclaiming America for Christ appears to have flamed out quite suddenly. In late March, organization spokespersons were still stoking the fires of the culture wars. Gary Cass, executive director of the Center, wrote that those who opposed General Peter Pace's remarks that homosexual acts are immoral are "neo-pagan atheistic radicals" ["Gen. Pace expressed the wisdom of the ages," March 30].

The last Reclaiming America conference?

The demise of the Center does not mean the end of Coral Ridge Ministries' engagement in the political and culture wars. "We're still evaluating," whether such high-profile events as the Center's annual Reclaiming America for Christ conference, which began in 1994 and trained people to work for conservative change, will continue, Fisher said. "I think we'll have something, but the name or purpose or format hasn't been determined."

The 1,300 or so "participants" at the final Reclaiming America conference held in early March, "heard from a range of speakers, by turns inward-looking, triumphalist or bellicose," Adele M. Stan reported in the April 2007 edition of Americans United's Church & State magazine.

The roster ... was filled with speakers who made frequent use of the buzzwords reflective of Kennedy's ministry, particularly the use of the terms 'salt' and 'light,' derived from the Gospel of Matthew, to denote the two ways in which Kennedy asserts Christians must act in the world: as 'salt' -- to arrest the decay of society -- and 'light' -- to reveal the path to everlasting life through the born-again Christian experience.

Featured speakers included Ann Coulter, best-selling author / entrepreneur / provocateur; Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council and a former GOP representative in the state legislature of Louisiana; Richard Land, chair of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission; Phyllis Schlafly, the founding godmother of the Republican right; Brad Bright, who worked as an aide to GOP Senator William Armstrong (Colorado); Rick Green of Wallbuilders, who served as a Republican representative in the Texas legislature; and Barbara Collier, national field director for the Center for Reclaiming America, who was the Broward County co-chair for the 2004 Bush-Cheney ticket.

While Perkins cautioned against complacency within the movement, Coulter took the stage and proceeded "to describe ... Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards as 'a faggot,' a remark that did not go over as well at Coral Ridge as it had the day before at a meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, D.C.," Stan reported.

Both stirred the pot against Muslims, as well, with Coulter repeating her post-9/11 remark that the leaders of Muslim countries should be forcibly converted to Christianity, and Perkins complaining that the Muslim call to prayer is 'now broadcast over American cities.'

This wasn't Coulter's maiden voyage with CRM; she is featured as an expert in the organization's anti-evolution "documentary," "Darwin's Deadly Legacy." The film "demonstrates" that Darwinian theory "is scientifically bankrupt, [and] has probably been responsible for more bloodshed than anything else in the history of humanity," Jerry Newcomb, one of the program's two co-producers, told WorldNetDaily. Coulter argues that Hitler took Darwinism and applied it: "He thought the Aryans were the fittest and he was just hurrying natural selection along."

The FRC's Perkins focused his wrath on Muslims in the U.S.:

...Noting that the call to prayer is "broadcast" five times a day while 'Christians have a hard time getting a manger scene put up one time a year,' Perkins asked, 'How is it that in our nation where Muslims account for about 6 million of the 300 million living in this country, and Christians comprise 100 million, that Muslims can control the public policy and we cannot? I suggest to you that it is because Christians have become apathetic to our role in shaping the policy in our nation, and it could have deadly consequences, not only for the unborn, but for the living as well'...

CRM's brave new world

Several new CRM projects are in the works the Sun-Sentinel reported: "New projects will include e-mailed video clips and digitizing Kennedy's 30,000 video hours. The organization aims to reach 30 million by 2012." Fisher also told the newspaper that the shutdown had nothing to do with the long convalescence of Kennedy or financial problems.

Observers differed on the implications of the Center's demise. Historian Randall Balmer of Barnard College, New York, and author of "Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America," told Florida's Sun-Sentinel that the closure may be "evidence of a shifting of priorities by society," which may be part of a realignment that is going on.
According to the Sun-Sentinel, Balmer "noted that most conservative Christian leaders -- like Kennedy, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and James Dobson -- are in their 70s. 'I've found issues like sexual identity are not that important to younger evangelicals.'"

The shutdown of the Center is only one of a number of changes that are taking place in conservative evangelical circles. "Something's unsettled in the whole [Christian conservative] movement," Mark Silk, of the Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life in Hartford, Connecticut, told the Sun-Sentinel. "Its leaders show an inclination to hide their light under a bushel after shining brightly for the Bush administration."

Others commentators, including Gary DeMar, who heads up American Vision, was confident that other groups would take up the slack left by the Fort Lauderdale organization. "The conservative movement has permeated churches, families and Christian schools," said DeMar, editor of Biblical Worldview magazine in Atlanta. "The movement is more diverse than the groups."