Category: The Religious Right

An informed conversation about the religious right, politics and dominionism

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By Alan Bean

Sarah Posner and Anthea Butler understand the religious right because they attend actual religious gatherings and talk to people.  When they sit down for a conversation about dominionism, the New Apostolic Reformation and politicians like Rick Perry and Michelle Bachmann you get the straight goods.

Dominionists aren’t poised to take over America.  The religious right is an exceedingly complex social phenomenon.  Most of the folks in Houston’s Reliant Stadium for Rick Perry’s The Response had never heard of dominionism.  All of this is true, but that doesn’t mean something big isn’t afoot in the world of conservative evangelicalism.  Something big is afoot and it is already impacting the political process and the way social issues are debated in the public arena.

When I was attending university in the mid-1970s, my parents, Gordon and Muriel Bean, were suddenly wrapped up in the charismatic movement.  They continued to attend McLaurin Baptist Church (then a very non-demonstrative congregation), but they were much more excited about groups like the Full Gospel Business Men International and Women Aglow (of which my mother eventually became Alberta president).  Like the dutiful son I am, I attended these meetings but was never tempted to get involved.  I saw the usual “signs and wonders”:  folks speak in tongues as if it was the most natural thing in the world, worshipers healed of chronic ailments (usually having one leg longer than the other), worshippers  “slain in the spirit” (that is, lying in ecstasy on the floor as their bodies twitched with Holy Spirit electricity).

Like I say, it wasn’t my cup of tea.  But I learned that this kind of religion can be extraordinarily powerful for those on the inside.  As Posner and Butler point out below, it is the ordinary people who attend religious conferences and buy books and DVDs that drive the movement.  The names of the preachers change from generation to generation; the spiritual hunger driving the movement abides forever.

The GOP has learned to tap into that hunger; Democrats lose elections, especially in the South, because they haven’t.

This is a long piece, but I offer this little clip as an indication of the fresh insight you will discover throughout a fascinating conversation.  This is Anthea Butler:

For the last 30 years, journalists have had an easy time reporting on the religious right, because all they did was pay attention to to white male leaders of big organizations like Focus on the Family, National Association of Evangelicals, or Family Research Council. The days when a nice soundbite from Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, or Ted Haggard would suffice are over. If journalists and others want to understand the last 10 years of the religious right movement, they will need to pay attention to the theological, religious, and ethnic diversity among evangelicals, Pentecostals, and non-denominational churches. They will at least need to recognize the old and new leaders of the religious right, and the complex network of leaders, conferences, and teachings if they want a reductionist argument they can spin out in 800 words. As someone who has studied and written about Pentecostalism for over 15 years, their lack of basic knowledge is staggering, and although I don’t expect people to get it like I do, I do expect reporters and journalists to do their homework! (more…)

Texas offers Bible classes while vocational training is slashed

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By Alan Bean

According to stories published this weekend in the Texas press, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice will soon be offering a four-year course in biblical studies to forty inmates.

The training isn’t intended to prepare inmates for pastoral ministry in the outside world–most of the students are serving long sentences and will be locked up for many years.  Prison officials know that gangs and God are the most popular survival mechanisms for inmates.  Gangs create grief; a focus on God encourages compliance and reduces violent behavior.  By enhancing the God-option, state officials hope to create more disciplined and less violent prisons.

If you have been reading my recent posts on Burl Cain, the evangelical warden of Louisiana’s Angola prison, you will be wondering if the fledgling Texas program is a Louisiana import.  Yes, it is.  State Senators Dan Patrick (R-Houston) and John Whitmire (D-Houston) were recently introduced to the Angola program and came away impressed.

Part of me thinks likes this idea.  Having preached, sang and prayed with prisoners in the past, I know how important faith can become for people who have been stripped of everything but God.

But there are problems.  Lots of problems.

As Scott Henson points out in Grits for Breakfast, vocational programs for Texas inmates were slashed during the recent legislative session.  In effect, prison officials have diverted resources from a program geared to assist with post-release employment for a program promising to instill obedience and reduce violence.

Why can’t we have both?

Henson is also concerned that TDCJ is giving preferential treatment to the fundamentalist wing of the religious community.  It isn’t just that the new program amounts to state sanction of a single religion; it awards all the marbles to sectarian Baptists who, in recent years, have ruthlessly disenfranchised moderate churches and pastors.

Between 1980 and the mid-nineties, Southern Baptists across the South mounted a brutal purge against the denomination’s “moderate” element (there were few real “liberals” in the SBC).  I was working on a doctorate at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky between 1989 and 1994. When I arrived, the faculty was little changed from the folks who taught my wife, Nancy, and me back in the 1970s.  Two years later, all four professors in the church history department had been forced out and the same dismal pattern was being replicated throughout the seminary. Then many of the conservative replacements suffered the same fate (most commonly because they believed women were worthy of ordination).

The General Baptist Convention of Texas, a conservative organization if ever there was one, was deeply troubled with these developments, especially as they played out in Fort Worth’s Southwestern Baptist Seminary.  The ouster of the irenic Russell Dilday as seminary president created an ideological cleavage among Texas Baptists that will take at least a generation to heal.

As a result, Southwestern Seminary is no longer affiliated with the General Baptist Convention of Texas, having thrown in its lot with the fundamentalist (and highly politicized) Southern Baptists of Texas.

By throwing in its lot with radical fundamentalists without creating opportunities for other faith groups, the TDCJ is favoring folks aligned with the pro-Republican religious right. (more…)

Rachel Tabachnick talks dominionism on Fresh Air (and why you should be paying attention)

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By Alan Bean

Are Rick Perry and Michelle Bachmann part of a movement determined to forcibly Christianize every aspect of American culture?

If so, why does a blog dedicated to ending mass incarceration care one way or the other?

If Rachel Tabachnick is anything to go by, the answer to the first question is ‘yes’.  Tabachnick knows more about the dominionist strain within contemporary evangelicalism than just about anybody and you simply must check out her recent interview with Terry Gross of Fresh Air.)

I am still thinking through my answer to the “so what” question (and will have more to say on the subject as my thinking clarifies); but the rough outline of an answer came to me yesterday when a reporter asked me why Louisiana (unlike Texas and Mississippi) has done nothing to reform its criminal justice system.

The avuncular visage of Burl Cain sprang to mind.  Cain is slowly transforming the Angola prison plantation into a spiritual rehabilitation center.  Inmates (90% of them in for life) are repeatedly invited to get right with Jesus.  Life becomes a whole lot easier if they take the offer.

Then I thought of Ann Richards, the progressive Texas Governor who, during her ill-fated re-election campaign against George W. Bush, told the voters that she wanted to build more prisons so folks with addiction issues could get rehabilitated.

Burl Cain and his Louisiana fan club want to lock up more people every year so earnest evangelists can have a captive audience.

Friends of Justice works in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, three states that are gradually backing away from the punitive consensus that has controlled the American judicial system for more than three decades.  Texas was embarrassed into rethinking mass incarceration through a series of scandals: Tulia (the bizarre drug bust that gave birth to Friends of Justice), Hearne (the American Violet story), the Dallas Sheetrock scandal, the Houston crime lab, the Texas Youth Commission fiasco, an incredible string of DNA exonerations in Dallas County and Governor Perry’s botched attempt to silence the Texas Forensic Science Commission.  Thanks to a series of modest reforms, the Texas prison population has now plateaued in the 160,000 range (it was 40,000 in 1980) and will likely stay there for the foreseeable future.

Mississippi experienced a 3.5% drop in its prison population in a single year by deciding that inmates must only serve 25% of sentences before being eligible for parole (it had been 85%).

The old “lock ’em up” mentality is beginning to soften even in the state that boasts the highest incarceration rate in the free world.  Folks in Louisiana want to lock up as many people as possible out of a misdirected sense of compassion.  After all, isn’t it better to find Jesus in jail than to live an unregenerate life in the free world?  We don’t hate criminals in Louisiana; we just want what’s best for them.

This is precisely the kind of theocratic logic that politicians like Rick Perry and Michelle Bachmann have embraced.  They want to Christianize the nation (by force if necessary) the way Burl Cain has Christianized the Angola plantation.  And if the liberals presently controlling Hollywood, the recording industry, the public school system, the evening news and the political life of the nation don’t want to be Christianized, that’s just too bad.  Michelle, Sarah, Rick et al are God’s anointed apostles.  At Angola, to oppose Burl Cain is to oppose God; the New Apostolic Reformation wants to extend this kind of thinking to every aspect of our national life.

Do the politicians currently feeding at the trough of radical religion really believe that the eclectic vitality of a diverse nation can be homogenized by the blood of the Lamb?  Maybe not.  But they want to push the political envelope as far in that direction as the public will allow.  In these strange times, it’s smart politics.

If you think I’m overstating the case, please read Ms. Tabachnick’s conversation with Terry Gross.

The Evangelicals Engaged In Spiritual Warfare

August 24, 2011 – TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I’m Terry Gross. (more…)

Should we be afraid of evangelicals?

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article imageBy Alan Bean

Lisa Miller is right to be concerned about anti-evangelical bigotry.  Most evangelical Christians, she notes, aren’t “dominionists” and very know anything about the New Apostolic Reformation, a movement with close ties to presidential hopeful Rick Perry.

Even if Rick Perry or Michelle Bachmann make it to the White House, they won’t be trying to replace the US Constitution with the Bible or setting up the 10 Commandments in the courthouses of America.  The separation of church and state isn’t going to disappear simply because America elects a president who doesn’t care for the concept.

But why, if it is such an esoteric and eccentric philosophy, are Rick and Michelle hitching their wagons to the dominionist star? (more…)

Burl Cain and the Trans-Mississippi God

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By Alan Bean

Liliana Segura’s article on Louisiana’s Angola prison provides a guided tour of the punitive consensus that, with states like Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas leading the way, now controls America.  Consider this:

“Lifers in Louisiana were once eligible for parole in as little as five years. In 1926 the state legislature installed the “10-6 rule”: prisoners sentenced to life were eligible for release after 10 years and six months. This held true until the 1970s, which saw a precipitous decline in parole recommendations and the rise of “tough on crime” reforms that would soon dominate nationwide.

After the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1972 ruling in Furman v. Georgia, which briefly suspended the death penalty, Louisiana abolished parole for a range of violent crimes. “Within less than a decade Louisiana went from turning all lifers loose in ten-and-a-half years or less to keeping virtually all of them in prison for their natural lives,” writes historian Burk Foster. As former head of the Louisiana Department of Corrections C. Paul Phelps once warned, “the State of Louisiana is posturing itself to run probably the largest male old-folks home in the country.”

 Like most journalists who write about Angola, Segura is fascinated, perplexed, and a little creeped-out by warden Burl Cain, a man with a gift for baptizing the brutal.  On the one hand, Angola inmates were much less likely to die a violent death before Mr. Cain assumed the reins.  But America’s most famous warden presides over one of the least forgiving corrections regimes in the world.  His easy willingness to identify American meanness with the immutable will of God is disturbing.  (more…)

A crash course on the New Apostolic Reformation

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Last Saturday, Texas Governor Rick Perry addressed 30,000 unusual worshippers at a Houston rally; a week later, in South Carolina, Perry will announce that he is seeking the nation’s highest office.  The mainstream media has associated some of Governor Perry’s religious buddies with some very strange comments about demons, Democrats, a Sun goddess and the ancient Queen Jezebel; but few realize that this odd assortment of prophets and preachers are part of the New Apostolic Reformation, a unified religious movement driven by a “dominionist” theology.

This isn’t just the latest incarnation of the religious right we’re dealing with, folks.  If you want to know more about the New Apostolic Reformation you couldn’t ask for a better tour guide than Rachel Tabachnick, a speaker, writer and researcher with the wonderful people at Talk2Action.  This introductory essay was first posted five months ago, but Rick Perry’s enthusiastic embrace of the movement described below makes it must reading.  AGB (more…)

Is Rick Perry having second thoughts about The Response?

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You may be wondering what happened to The Response, Texas Governor Rick Perry’s Christians-only pray-for-America extravaganza.  This article in the Texas Observer should bring you up to date.

One word of caution.  Although the Observer piece gives the impression that The Response has been an unmitigated disaster for Governor Good Hair (as Molly Ivans called him), Mr. Perry’s political fortunes have risen considerably since The Response hit the airwaves.  The folks associated with the event may sound silly to worldly sophisticates like Rachel Maddow, but it sends all the right signals to the conservative wing of the Republican Party.  In other words, the Texas Governor’s stock is rising with the most powerful political and social movement in recent American history.

Meanwhile, Perry has been balancing the political ledger by supporting New York’s support for gay marriage on states’ rights grounds.  AGB

Is Rick Perry Getting Cold Feet Over the Response? 

 

Forrest Wilder

You’ve gotta wonder if Rick Perry may come to regret “initiating” The
Response, his Christians-only prayer rally. As I documented in a cover
story for the Observer, Perry has thrown in with a strange band of
fundamentalists from the bleeding edge of American Christianity. (more…)

The slow death of the 14th amendment

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Richard Beeman

On May 4, amateur historian David Barton appeared on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show.  Barton’s central argument was that, constitutionally, the first amendment applies to the federal government but not to the states.  Therefore, if individual states and municipalities see fit to make the Bible the sole standard for criminal and civil law, to reinstate chattel slavery or to make Christianity an official and protected religion, the federal government can do nothing about it.

Barton didn’t suggest that non-federal governments should do these things, merely that they can if they want to.

On May 14th, Jon Stewart invited Richard Beeman, an actual constitutional scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, to respond to Barton’s theory. (more…)

What is Mission Mississippi?

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I just came across this review of “Mission Mississippi” in the Christian Century.  Mission Mississippi was founded in the early 1990s to facilitate conversation between black and white Christians in the Magnolia State.  But there’s a problem: social justice and other systemic issues are off the table.  Mission Mississippi is a book-length evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of this approach written by Peter Slade, an Englishman.  Why, you may wonder, can’t black and white Mississippians discuss social issues?  If you even ask that question, you haven’t spent much time in Mississippi; it remains, as the title of Slade’s book suggests, a closed society.  The good news is that people are conversing across racial lines; the bad news is that they can’t discuss the stuff that really matters. (more…)

Campolo: Why the Christian Right will Dominate

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As an evangelical Christian with a progressive social agenda, Tony Campolo has occupied and defended an uncomfortable patch of territory in the American religious world.

I’m not sure how much of the horror story Tony relates in this article is autobiographical, but we can be sure the Eastern University sociologist and American Baptist preacher knows whereof he speaks.  This frank discussion of a painful subject was written for Christian Ethics Today, a publication sponsored by moderate evangelicals seeking to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with their God.

Have you ever wondered why there are so few progressive religious voices in the popular media?  Dr. Campolo tells us exactly why that is, leaving little to the imagination.  As we seek to forge a new moral consensus for ending mass incarceration, we need to know what we’re up against.  Alan Bean

Why The Religious Right Will Dominate

By Tony Campolo

Eastern University

There are reasons why Religious Right Evangelicals will continue to dominate religious discourse, not only in their own sector of the Christian community, but also in what transpires in mainline denominations. Moderate voices, for the most part, are being sidelined and those with liberal views will find fewer and fewer means to express their opinions or gain an audience for their convictions. (more…)