"Gov Perry initiated the Response event for the sole purpose of bringing our nation together for the common cause of praying about the challenges confronting us. Those participating did so because of that common cause, and the issue you refer to has nothing to do with the goal and purpose of that event."

Texas Governor Rick Perry was billed as having originated The Response prayer event. As I reported last week, two of the featured pastors who played prominent roles as speakers at the event have each publicly claimed that Hitler was a divine agent, sent by God to chase Europe's Jews towards the Middle East.

Here's some relevant history:

In May 2008, I posted a Youtube video with an audio excerpt from a sermon, by Texas megachurch pastor and Christians United For Israel head John Hagee, in which Hagee declared, "Then God sent a hunter. Hitler was a hunter."

The video was picked up by the Huffington Post, then by Keith Olbermann's Countdown, and within two days of that increased media exposure, presidential candidate McCain decisively rejected the political endorsement he had received from Hagee only a few months before, calling John Hagee's statements "crazy".

As shown in the video below, International House of Prayer head Mike Bickle, who spoke along with Hagee at Rick Perry's The Response prayer event, makes the same claim - Bickle has stated that "the most famous [heaven-sent] hunter in recent history is a man named Adolf Hitler", and he also has repeatedly forecast, in sermons from 2005 through 2009, coming "prison camps" for Jews who, asserts Bickle, are under God's judgment for "sin and perversion".

Writing in an October 21, 2011 St. Louis Beacon op-ed, Former U.S. Senator John C. Danforth declared that McCarthyism "lives on in the efforts of both right and left to connect politicians to the most outrageous statements of religious personages. This was so in the 2008 presidential campaign as Republicans tied Barack Obama to the excessive rhetoric of his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. It is true today, as critics try to identify Republican candidates with religious extremists."

However, Rick Perry chose to directly associate himself with Mike Bickle and John Hagee, by opting to speak with them at Perry's controversial The Response prayer rally. In business and marketing, this is called co-branding.

Bickle and Hagee were not the only religious leaders with controversial views associated with Perry's event. As People For The American Way's Right Wing Watch has extensively documented, many listed endorsers and speakers at Perry's prayer event have espoused positions that are very far from the American mainstream political consensus.

Dominating Perry's The Response event were the apostles and prophets of C. Peter Wagner's New Apostolic Reformation. As I described in a September 14, 2011 story,

"Top NAR leaders, including C. Peter Wagner, Cindy Jacobs, Ed Silvoso and, Chuck Pierce, have repeatedly emphasized in their writings the need for believers to destroy or neutralize, by burning, smashing, or flushing down toilets, objects deemed to be unholy, including profane books and "idolatrous" religious texts (such as Books of Mormon), religious relics (such as statues of Catholic saints, the Buddha, or Hindu gods), and native art (such as African masks, Hopi Indian Kachina dolls, and totem poles.)"