Christianity Today recently interviewed Billy Graham and asked him, "If you could, would you go back and do anything differently?"  Graham responded:

I also would have steered clear of politics. I'm grateful for the opportunities God gave me to minister to people in high places; people in power have spiritual and personal needs like everyone else, and often they have no one to talk to. But looking back I know I sometimes crossed the line, and I wouldn't do that now.

Few people realize the significant role that Graham has played in the rise of the Religious Right in America.

Ethics Daily is reporting that about two months ago around 40 Conservative Christian leaders gathered near the airport in Dallas to plot the political overthrow of President Obama. The meeting was convened by Evangelist James Robison.

Joseph Farah, editor-in-chief at WorldNetDaily, writes a column entitled "Between the Lines." On at least one occasion he has filled the blank space between lines of dialogue with his own prejudice against this Mainstream Baptist. He does that in a diatribe today against me and the documentary about Baptists and Muslims entitled "Different Books, Common Word" that is currently airing on ABC-TV affiliate stations.

Christine Wicker's new book, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, tells two stories very well.  First, it explains how Americans have been duped into believing that evangelicals comprise a significant and growing percentage of the population.  She demonstrates, using evangelicals' own statistics and reports, that committed evangelicals comprise only about 7% of the U.S. population and the percentage is declining, not growing.  Here's a quote:

For the past thirty years, 7 percent of the population has swayed elections and positioned itself as the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong.  By puffing its numbers and its authority, it has gotten legislation passed that opposes the popular will and has divided the country into acrimonious camps.  It has monopolized the media so effectively that other religious voices have been all but silenced.  It has been feared and loathed, revered and loved.  It has been impossible to ignore.  But underneath its image of power and pomp, the evangelical nation is falling apart.  Every day the percentage of evangelicals in America decreases, a loss that began more than one hundred years ago.

A Southern Baptist educator once described the takeover of the SBC as "the revenge of the 'C' students."  Ethics Daily has posted an illustration of that educator's lament.  Johnny Hunt, the new president of the Southern Baptist Convention has padded his resume with "doctorates" from diploma mills.

A group of evangelical scholars has issued "An Evangelical Manifesto" in an attempt to redefine and restore a good name to the evangelical movement within Christianity.

There is much to commend in their statement.  Most of it would have been of much more value had it been said years ago -- no, decades ago.  It is much too little and way too late.

It is not hard to find evidence of the influence of "Dominion Theology" in Southern Baptist circles in Oklahoma -- if you are familiar with this form of theocratic Christianity.  Rarely is it so openly on display as in the current issue of Oklahoma's Baptist Messenger.  In an article entltled "Rite of Passage:  Dominion versus duties,"  Walker Moore is so bold as to insert it into his own idiosyncratic interpretation of scripture:

Mainstream Baptists have been sounding a "hue and cry" about the duplicity of fundamentalist preachers for more than two decades.  Fundamentalists know that their authoritarian beliefs are outside the mainstream.  If they made their real beliefs clear and explicit, fewer of them would succeed in becoming pastors of our churches - much less the President of our nation.   With unrelenting regularity I am contacted by members of churches who are deeply grieved to discover that the man their church called as pastor lied to them when their church was interviewing him for their position.   They've learned the hard way that a rule of thumb for many fundamentalist Baptist ministers is to "Tell the people what they want to hear -- then do what you want when you get the position."

At a recent debate in Myrtle Beach, Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee disclosed an intimate familiarity with the fundamentalist Baptist minister's rule of thumb.  He knows that the patriarchal and sexist family statement that the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) adopted in 1998 is well outside the mainstream -- even for Baptists.  

I didn't see tonight's presidential debate, but if news reports are accurate, then Mike Huckabee deliberately lied about the interpretation of the SBC's family statement at a debate in South Carolina this evening.  

The SBC's family statement calls for a one-sided submission by the wife to the rule of her husband.  Huckabee gave the impression that Southern Baptists believe in "mutual submission" between husbands and wives.  Here's a quote from the AP coverage of Huckabee's statement at tonight's debate:

In 1636, when Roger Williams founded Providence Plantations (now Rhode Island) he created the first purely civil state formed by social contract.  It granted religious liberty to every inhabitant, guaranteed that no one "should be molested for his conscience," and ascribed power to the magistrate "only in civil things."  

The first case to test Williams' new principle of civil government came in the spring of 1638 when Joshua Verin was disenfranchised at a town meeting "for restraining of liberty of conscience."   Williams and others had organized the first Baptist church in America.  Attendance at its services was entirely voluntary.  Joshua Verin didn't care to attend the settlement's church services.  His wife did.   She exercised her liberty to attend a preaching service without his permission and, according to town records, "He hath trodden her underfoot tyrannically and brutally . . . with his furious blows she went in danger of her life."