Spiritual Warriors with an Antigay Mission: The New Apostolic Reformation

Posted on March 22, 2013 by Rachel Tabachnick

The New Apostolic Reformation, an aggressively political movement within Christianity, blames literal demonic beings for the world’s ills and stresses the power of “spiritual warfare” to deliver people and nations from their power. It is rapidly gaining influence in the United States and around the globe, and it aims to advance a right-wing social and economic agenda—all while reinventing the structure of Christianity.

An August 2007 TheCall gathering in Nashville, TN
Photo: thoughtquotient.com

In the late summer of 2000, Rev. Lou Engle, a political activist and Charismatic religious leader, organized an all-day prayer rally in Washington, D.C. As Engle explained later, the event originated in a pressing question that he couldn’t shake: “How can I turn America back to God?” In a dream, Engle “felt overwhelmed by the impossibility” of achieving that goal, but then he saw a vision of a verse from the Bible: “And he will go on before the Lord in the spirit and power of Elijah to turn the hearts of the fathers to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous.”¹ From that dream, and a subsequent “supernatural series of events,” a giant prayer rally was born. Engle named it TheCall.

By Engle’s account, TheCall drew 400,000 people to the Mall in Washington, D.C., and changed the course of the 2000 election. The prayers of the faithful were answered when the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its Bush v. Gore decision, giving the election to George W. Bush. On the heels of that success, “the inward voice of the Lord . . . reverberated strongly in his spirit,” and Engle decided to organize a similar event in another city in 2001. At the suggestion of Sam Brownback, now the governor of Kansas and then a Republican U.S. senator, he chose Boston. Brownback had told him that “you need to dig the wells of revival in New England and close the doors to false ideologies that have found entrance through Boston.”²

Since then, Engle has staged more than 20 similar rallies, and each has attracted tens of thousands of participants to stadiums across the U.S. He and his organization have also become deeply involved in U.S. politics, especially in antichoice and antigay organizing. Engle staged TheCall San Diego, for example, the week before the 2008 election, with the explicit purpose of bolstering support for Proposition 8, the California ballot initiative and constitutional amendment that limited the definition of marriage to a union between a man and a woman. Engle’s organization mounted a radio campaign and sent out email and phone blasts in support of Proposition 8, and he urged attendees to be martyrs for the cause.³ James Dobson, founder of the Christian Right organization Focus on the Family, later cited TheCall San Diego as the reason for Proposition 8’s success. ⁴ In 2010, an estimated 10,000 people attended TheCall Houston, whose purpose was “to contend for the ending of abortion and to spark an adoption revolution.” Antichoice activism was a major focus, as well, of TheCall Detroit in November 2011.^{5 Read More →}

Profile: The Becket Fund

Posted on March 21, 2013 by Political Research Associates

Named for the martyred Archbishop of Canterbury, the Becket Fund was founded in 1994 by attorney Kevin ‘Seamus’ Hasson. Originally nonpartisan and an advocate on behalf of many religious interests, the Becket Fund has become more conservative under the leadership of William Mumma. It is the intellectual leader of the right-wing “religious liberty” campaign—it recently litigated and won the landmark Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC case in 2012, allowing religious groups to hire and fire clergy without regard to employment discrimination law. In 2010, it drew in a revenue of $2,692,006.

Notwithstanding Becket’s intellectual orientation, it has advanced the specious claim that marriage equality laws will force Roman Catholic churches to perform marriage for gay or lesbian couples. Becket is also at the forefront of the spate of adoption cases in Massachusetts and Illinois, where Catholic Charities pulled out of adoption networks rather than place children with gay or lesbian couples. The Becket Fund names the Affordable Care Act as one of the top religious freedom issues facing the United States, and has filed seven suits against it. Not all its projects, however, are culture-war related. For example, the Becket Fund has prosecuted cases in international fora, including representing Muslims before the European Court of Human Rights.

Organizationally, the Becket Fund is a public interest law firm that represents states, municipalities, and members of many different religious faiths with the goal of defending the constitutional right to free expression of religion. The Becket Fund is at the center of a small, Roman Catholic-dominated group of “religious liberty” activists. Its entire leadership and funder base is made up of conservative Roman Catholics: current executive director William Mumma, founder Kevin Hasson, general counsel Anthony Picarello (who joined the the Knights of Columbus and USCCB in 2007 as its general counsel to work against marriage equality, and who recently led the bishops’ campaign regarding “religious liberty”), board members Robert P. George (coauthor of the Manhattan Declaration) and Mary Ann Glendon (former U.S. ambassador to the Holy See and a leading antichoice theorist). Read More →

As New Pope Inaugurated, New Report Exposes Catholic Church’s and Right’s “Religious Liberty” Campaign

Posted on March 18, 2013 by Political Research Associates

As a new pope with hardline stances against reproductive and LGBTQ rights is inaugurated, a new report documents how a network of conservative Christian organizations, beginning with a group of ultra-conservative Catholic organizations, has successfully fought pro-choice and LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) civil rights legislation by claiming that such policies infringe on religious liberty. The report, by Dr. Jay Michaelson, Religious Liberty Fellow at Political Research Associates (PRA), is entitled Redefining Religious Liberty: The Covert Campaign Against Civil Rights.

PRA’s report asserts that “religious conservatives have succeeded in reframing the debate, inverting victim and oppressor, and broadening support for their agenda.” The report traces the funding of the “religious liberty” campaign to a small group of ultra-conservative Roman Catholic organizations allied with conservative evangelicals, and shows how it is part of a coordinated effort to roll back civil rights laws that protect women and LGBTQ people. In particular, Dr. Michaelson shows how a small cadre of academics has legitimized this campaign to exempt a wide range of corporations and individuals from civil rights laws.

Said Francis DeBernardo, Executive Director of New Ways Ministry: “With fairness and precision, Michaelson documents how the principle of religious liberty has been manipulated to play on the fears and values of both conservatives and progressives, as well as people of faith and secularists. This report boldly makes the case that the civil rights of individuals and our heritage of religious liberty do not have to be opposed, but can live in harmony and mutual respect.”

Among the findings:

Religious liberty arguments have long been used to defend discrimination. As late as the 1970s and 1980s, they were used to defend racial segregation. Today, the same arguments are being used against women and LGBTQ individuals.
The religious liberty campaign has successfully obtained religious exemptions to a variety of civil rights laws and regulations implemented under the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”). The campaign’s rhetoric was adopted verbatim by Congressman and vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan.
“Religious liberty” is a code phrase intended to clothe the conservative religious agenda of so-called “culture warriors” in liberal, constitutional garb.
Key players in reframing the debate include the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). According to the report, these organizations, supported by Catholic organizations such as the Knights of Columbus, aim “not simply to win religious exemptions to the law, but to contest the authority of secular law itself.” They are allied with such conservative evangelical organizations as Family Research Council and Alliance Defending Freedom.
The religious liberty campaign consistently distorts the facts. Conservative Christians appeal to the public by confusing them with knowingly false statements like “Ministers would be forced to marry gay couples if a state legalized gay marriage.” One of the campaign’s most popular anecdotes – of a New Jersey church allegedly compelled to host a same-sex wedding – in fact concerned a church merely losing a tax exemption for a boardwalk pavilion that violated antidiscrimination law by refusing to host a same-sex couple’s ceremony.
This pattern of painting Christians as victims of antidiscrimination laws has steadily grown in right-wing media and legislative lobbying efforts.

The report is available here.

Profile: American Family Association

Posted on March 7, 2013 by Political Research Associates

The purported goals of the American Family Association (AFA) are to protect “traditional moral values” and to combat “the radical homosexual agenda,” with considerable emphasis on the latter in recent years. It was formed in 1977 by evangelical pastor Donald E. Wildmon as the National Federation for Decency, based in Tupelo, Mississippi. Initially, the group focused on lobbying against indecency on television, but soon developed broader goals and changed its name in 1988. AFA’s leaders target media outlets, corporations, and public officials who they believe are promoting the homosexual agenda contrary to conservative Christian views. After Donald Wildmon’s retirement in 2010, his son Tim took over the group, which today boasts a sizable base of support comprised of 3.5 million online supporters and 180,000 subscribers to its AFA Journal. AFA also reaches an even wider audience through broadcasts on nearly 200 radio stations. Through its news division One News Now, which purports to be non-partisan and objective, AFA gives a platform to anti-gay activists.

In 2009, AFA hired Bryan Fischer, former executive director of the Idaho Values Alliance, as director of issues analysis for government and policy. Known for his extreme anti-LGBTQ views and controversial statements, Fischer has advocated for the criminalization of homosexuality and forcible “reparative therapy” for homosexuals. But perhaps the most inflammatory was his claim that “Homosexuality gave us Adolph Hitler, and homosexuals in the military gave us the Brown Shirts, the Nazi war machine and 6 million dead Jews.” Furthermore, Fischer claimed that Hitler was an “active homosexual” who recruited gays “because he could not get straight soldiers to be savage and brutal and vicious enough.”

Over the years, AFA has perpetuated many other myths and dubious claims regarding homosexuality, associating it with pedophilia, incest, polygamy, bestiality, and other taboo sexual practices. For instance, the group has alleged that homosexuals are more promiscuous, are more likely to have sexually transmitted diseases, and often transmit these diseases to children. According to AFA of Kentucky’s Dr. Frank Simon, “There are hundreds of children in America who are dying of AIDS because they were sexually abused by homosexuals.” In addition, AFA champions the conspiracy theory that an insidious “homosexual movement” is obsessed with “infiltrating the public school system” to strategically recruit children. In the early 2000s, a direct mailing from Don Wildmon argued, “For the sake of our children and society, we must OPPOSE the spread of homosexual activity! Just as we must oppose murder, stealing, and adultery! Since homosexuals cannot reproduce, the only way for them to ‘breed’ is to RECRUIT! And who are their targets for recruitment? Children!” [emphasis in the original] The AFA spreads anti-gay propaganda to arouse fear and disapproval of homosexuality in the American public, and for this reason, the Southern Poverty Law Center included the AFA on its 2010 list of anti-gay “hate groups.” Read More →

Sundance Film Features PRA Researcher

Posted on January 17, 2013 by Alex DiBranco

kapya-in-action Tomorrow in Park City, Utah, will be the world debut of God Loves Uganda, a documentary on the U.S. Christian Right spreading homophobia abroad that builds on Political Research Associates’ research.

PRA religion and sexuality researcher Rev. Dr. Kapya Kaoma is a prominent expert voice in the film. He is the author of two PRA investigative reports on Africa, our 2012 Colonizing African Values and 2009 Globalizing the Culture Wars, which exposed Scott Lively and Rick Warren’s role in the creation of Uganda’s “Kill the Gays” bill.

Rev. Kaoma will be attending the week of Sundance screenings along with Director Roger Ross Williams and Bishop Christopher Senyonjo.

From the festival website:

A battle rages in East Africa, where crosses replace guns and shouts of prayer roar louder than missiles. American evangelical Christians have chosen Uganda, with Africa’s youngest and most vulnerable population, as their ground zero in a battle for the soul of a continent. American missionaries and religious leaders are working with African pastors in a radical campaign to eradicate sin through the most extreme measures. The stakes are nothing less than life and death.

Rev. Kaoma will also share his experiences as a social justice researcher and Episcopal priest on Sunday’s “Taking a Stand” panel with changemakers from two other documentaries.

Visit the documentary’s website for more information, and look out for continuing PRA research on the exportation of antigay ideology to Africa and Latin America. Faith leaders are particularly encouraged to request to host a film screening.

If you agree this is important work, consider a donation to PRA to help us continue investigating the U.S. right-wing exporting homophobia abroad.

Update 1/19/13: Watch the newly released trailer–including Rev. Kaoma’s narrative commentary.

Major Christian Right Actors Seek to Criminalize Homosexuality in Africa

Posted on November 5, 2012 by Kapya Kaoma

On Friday, Andy Kroll at Mother Jones reported that Jay Sekulow and Jordan Sekulow, the father-son team leading the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) — high-profile social conservatives and advisers and supporters of Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, are working to overcome the candidate’s enthusiasm gap within the right-wing evangelical community. The article highlights findings from my recent Colonizing African Values report, exposing that ACLJ is leading the drive to enshrine U.S. Christian Right principles in African law through its offices in Zimbabwe and Kenya, including barring abortion even when the woman’s life is at risk, and ensuring gay sex (a “pervasion” equated with bestiality) is criminalized. These appalling actions abroad have too long gone without condemnation.

The ACLJ’s stated goal in Africa is to “lobby parliament[s] to take the Christian’s views into consideration as they draft legislation and policies.”¹ In Zimbabwe, where a constitutional reform process is underway as the nation waits for a vote to be scheduled, ACLJ-Zimbabwe is partnering with that country’s evangelicals and Pentecostals as a political force and a potential base for the Mugabe government’s homophobic policies, with the goal of making it a “Christian nation.” In 2010, Sarah Posner reported that with its ally the Evangelical Fellowship of Zimbabwe, the ACLJ distributed pamphlets that called “for constitutional prohibitions on both abortion, by defining life as ‘beginning at conception,’” and on attempts to reform the country’s laws criminalizing homosexuality. Read More →

Rev. Samuel Rodriguez: Not So Moderate

Posted on October 2, 2012 by Frederick Clarkson

Rev. Samuel Rodriguez joined members of national trade, faith, and labor organizations to speak at the “Reform Immigration For America” Campaign Summit at the National Press Club in 2009. – Photo by David Sachs / SEIU

Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, executive director of the Sacramento-based National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference (NHCLC) is regularly tapped by national media outlets like CNN and The New York Times as the leading voice of Latino evangelicals and has been treated accordingly by both major political parties.¹ From 2007 to 2009, he was a columnist for the Washington Post’s On Faith section online, and he frequently appears on NPR’s “Tell Me More.” He is a member of the boards of some of the leading organizations of evangelicalism–Christianity Today magazine, Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary, and the National Association of Evangelicals.

But he is not nearly the evangelical moderate that he is presented as being.

The 42-year-old Puerto Rican evangelist often describes himself as a cross between Billy Graham and Martin Luther King, Jr. “with a little salsa tossed in.” He describes Latino evangelicals the same way, with the same joke, and has for years.² The humor takes the edge off of the grandiosity, but leaves little doubt about his sense of destiny for himself and the people he seeks to lead towards a distinctly conservative Christian America. He is, in fact, a leader of the Christian Right who says he is not. He is a partisan Republican who claims not to be. And he is conservative on just about everything but immigration policy.

Yet when the Democrats and the Obama White House woo him, for instance to back the Supreme Court candidacy of Sonia Sotomayor or serve on the President’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, they elevate his influence, his power to oppose LGBT marriage, and even Obama’s own reelection.³

Who is Samuel Rodriguez? Read More →

The Culture Wars Come to Zambia
Intercepting the International Human Rights Agenda

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Kapya Kaoma

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon with Zambian first President Kenneth Kaunda on February 25, 2012 in Lusaka, Zambia. During the visit, Ban urged African countries to respect gay rights. Joseph Mwenda/AFP/Getty Images

On a visit to Zambia in February 2012, the United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called on African countries to stop treating LGBT people as less than human or as second class citizens. He explicitly asked Zambian lawmakers to stop discriminating against people on the basis of sexual orientation.

Zambia had just emerged from a heated election where politicians promoting anti-LGBT laws were defeated at the polls. But Ban’s words backfired and the speech fanned the anti-gay embers back into flame. Politicians and religious leaders rose up with anti-gay invective. The U.S. Christian Right-trained pastor and opposition leader Nevers Mumba challenged the newly elected Patriotic Front government to make clear its position on homosexuality. Member of Parliament Felix Mutati argued in the Lusaka Times that “the country must be allowed to be guided by biblical principles and the existing law against homosexuality…. Zambia is a Christian nation and Christianity is against homosexuality.” Elias Chipimo, Jr., the president of Zambia’s National Restoration Party, blamed Western countries and called on them to stop promoting homosexuality. “The insistence of foreign nations donating aid conditioned upon the active promotion of gay rights is nothing other than the battle for the soul of our nation and our way of life,” he said.¹

Who’s Colonialist?
African Anti-Gay Politics In The Global Discourse

Posted on November 1, 2010 by Kapya Kaoma

Uganda’s Rolling Stone newspaper printed photos and personal information about what it called “Top Homos.” Subheadings read, “We Shall Recruit 1,000,000 Innocent Kids by 2012,” and, “Parents Now Face Heart-Breaks as Homos Raid Schools.” Photo Credit: AP/© AP

In August 2010, more than 400 African Anglican Bishops gathered in Entebbe, Uganda, for their second All-Africa Bishops Conference, which attracted global media attention because of the debates on LGBT rights. Bishops from Rwanda, Nigeria, Uganda, and Kenya used the conference as an opportunity to speak out in favor of criminalizing homosexuality. Their anti-gay statements gave new life to Uganda’s notorious Anti-Homosexuality Bill, which would mandate the imprisoning and in some cases the execution of homosexuals. The bill was introduced into the Ugandan Parliament in 2009 after a seminar in March of that year in Kampala called Exposing the Homosexual Agenda, led by U.S. religious conservatives such as Scott Lively, a Holocaust revisionist who argues that LGBT-rights movements are inherently fascistic, and Don Schmierer, the director of the Exodus Institute, which claims to convert lesbians and gay men to heterosexuality. Henry Orombi, a friend of Rick Warren, the well-known pastor of the Saddleback megachurch in Orange County, California, is reported to have told the conference, “Homosexuality is evil, abnormal, and unnatural as per the Bible. It is a culturally unacceptable practice. Although there is a lot of pressure [from the West], we cannot turn our hands to support it.”¹ Nevertheless, two African provinces, or districts, at the conference distanced themselves from such attacks: the Anglican Church of Southern Africa and the Church of the Province of Central Africa. They issued a counterstatement saying, “The majority of the provinces at this conference are being ambushed by an agenda that is contrary to the beliefs and practices of our various provinces.”² Downplaying the counterstatement, the Ugandan media, which often presents Africans as united in their denunciation of LGBT people, predicted that the bishops’ voices would help pass the Anti-Homosexuality Bill.³

The U.S. Christian Right and the Attack on Gays in Africa

Posted on December 1, 2009 by Kapya Kaoma

The Uganda Story

Kapya Kaoma

For two days in early March 2009, Ugandans flocked to the Kampala Triangle Hotel for the Family Life Network’s “Seminar on Exposing the Homosexuals’ Agenda.” The seminar’s very title revealed its claim: LGBT people and activists are engaged in a well thought-out plan to take over the world. The U.S. culture wars had come to Africa with a vengeance.

To put on the conference, the Uganda-based Family Life Network – led by Stephen Langa with the goal of “restoring” traditional family values and morals in Uganda – teamed with two U.S. hatemongers from the Christian Right, Holocaust revisionist Scott Lively and Dan Schmierer of the ex-gay group Exodus International.¹ Vocal opposition in international circles did not stop the country’s high profile religious leaders, parliamentarians, police officers, teachers, and concerned parents from attending. Indeed, parliamentary action to wage war on gays was on the conference agenda. It was not enough that homosexuality is illegal in Uganda. As someone stated from the podium,

[The parliament] feels it is necessary to draft a new law that deals comprehensively with the issue of homosexuality and …takes into account the international gay agenda….Right now there is a proposal that a new law be drafted.²